Help with discussion participation[edit]

I propose in the talk page we have an area where users can sign their name to show they are major supporter of an article. This could be beneficial so people in disputes can have editors too easily ping for discussion regarding the article. This will help with participation in the consensus making process. Iamreallygoodatcheckers (talk) 04:09, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Don't we have the article's page history for that? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:32, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Meh… Any “major supporter” of an article will probably have it on their watchlist. Thus, it is likely that they already know about any disputes that have arisen. Blueboar (talk) 14:32, 6 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A list of people to WP:CANVAS? CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 19:09, 7 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

WP:AALERTS more or less covers this. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:01, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Let the community decide about major new features?[edit]

Now maybe I'm wrong and I just always miss it, but my impression is that the WMF would often develop features with minimal community input, minimal community testing, doesn't give the community any real chance to consider possible alternatives and proceeds to roll out the new feature. For example mw:Flow which was quite the faceplant, cross-wiki uploads plague Commons with numerous copyvios to this day due to a flawed design, DiscussionTools which takes up bandwidth even if you've disabled it, the VisualEditor which isn't universally loved and I don't expect a poll before the Vector 2022 skin which (in its current state at least) has upsides and downsides over Vector classic. Damn, almost forgot about IP masking! (are we still in the dark about what that's actually going to be like?) What I'm thinking is that the community should be informed well in advance and there should be some mechanism to ensure major new features will be backed by the community, or at least not hated. The community should have a chance to prepare for it (like updating tools/bots/help pages) and suggest changes or alternatives. For example with Flow, the community could have rejected it before it made a faceplant. While IP masking can't be rejected as the motive for that is legal, the community could propose implementation details/alternatives which do exist. And brace for its introduction, of course. I'm just brainstorming here, am I making any sense? — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 15:41, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To shoot from the hip, whatever my thoughts on the rest of it, DiscussionTools is one of the single biggest improvements to the editor experience in the history of the project and the associated community outreach has been superb. Anyway, there's some information on ongoing projects on mediawikiwiki. I would say it could be updated/communicated more frequently, but perhaps it's already current. Enterprisey (talk!) 18:03, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know.. maybe like apply to work for the foundation ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 20:58, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

also, which part of the community ? different parts always show up to different steps and different projects and always have different opinoins and generally ppl leave out those without 'community' voice —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:01, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

TheDJ, work for the foundation, that sounds like wonderful idea. As for which part, well I was just brainstorming. I suppose if the WMF was more responsive to questions that community members are already asking and if developers didn't spend 90% of their community time on Phabricator (which is largely disconnected from the community at large) and in Flow discussions, we'd be halfway already. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 03:46, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As TheDJ alludes to, the community doesn't speak with one voice, plus design by large group conversation is often ineffective. On user-interface related features such as skins, there needs to be some liberty for new designs to be tried and tested, as learning from failure is important. I agree there ought to be a feedback loop, and in some cases, trials are appropriate. (I've not followed the progress, but I do know that suggestions were sought from the onset regarding IP masking, and most recently feedback was requested on different approaches.) Although focus groups shouldn't be the ultimate last word on design choices, as they're a small sample of opinion, it could be helpful for the WMF and the community to work together, at the start of the design cycle of a feature, on getting a suitable set of volunteers who could provide prolonged engagement during the development process. isaacl (talk) 21:36, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Great idea. Like FRS but for WMF tech. Enterprisey (talk!) 00:40, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I wasn't thinking of a notification service. I think for a given feature, the developers and community should agree upon types of users who could give useful feedback, and find volunteers who are willing to have ongoing discussions throughout the development process. This would allow the development team to have fast feedback cycles, enabling them to go through different options more rapidly. isaacl (talk) 00:49, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The problem is that these people and more so their availability is highly unreliable. You can't plan around it, they don't answer fast enough, and they too are heavily biased. There have been plenty of WMF projects where WMF was nudged into a certain direction only to be recalled later by other volunteers. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:09, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I was going to say more on that aspect but omitted it for conciseness. There is of course no guarantee that any selected group would remain engaged; it can only be hoped that at any given opportunity, someone in the group will respond. As I mentioned, the received feedback should be considered carefully as one source of comments and not treated as absolute truth. isaacl (talk) 15:25, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

To echo what Enterprisey said, at least for DiscussionTools, the WMF has been soliciting feedback on the tool here on the various Village Pumps, at mw:Talk pages project/Replying, and in Tech News since early 2020. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 22:34, 10 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Ahecht, if DiscussionTools is the result of working closely with the community I may have been wrong. DiscussionTools is nice on the surface, if you don't care about features, customizability or resources. It's more convenient than source editing, but in some ways (philosophically, no idea if any code is shared) it's Flow in disguise, just not exposing the "structured" part of "structured discussions" to the end users (us), which some may actually consider to be a good thing. My main concerns with recent developments: DiscussionTools can't be disabled. (you can hide the links but not actually get rid of them) For IP masking several users asked on Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 4#How we will see unregistered users what we will see instead of IPs and similar and related questions on Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)/Archive 4#New IP Masking implementation updates available also remained unanswered. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 03:24, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"you can hide the links but not actually get rid of them" This has more to do with the fact that we are going to more consistent Parser output for all users (less variance, hopefully one day, no variance) that with DiscussionTools. "what we will see instead of IPs" As far as I know that's exactly what they are figuring out right now, right ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:19, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

TheDJ, the kind of features that DiscussionTools adds can be accomplished with some very tiny extra HTML parser output instead of the massive bloat they implemented. From DiscussionTools that would be the data-mw-comment-end span tag. Their IDs are suboptimal but that's another matter, an ID is all you need in the HTML. IMHO the better solution is to actually fix signatures to become more machine readable, both in wikitext and when parsed, which would cause all required data to become part of the wikitext, and no parser adjustments would be needed. Somehow either nobody suggested this or they were ignored, either way, seems like a communication problem to me. And about IP masking, well, I don't know because the WMF developers don't have 2 minutes to state something like "the exact form of IDs for anons is not yet set in stone, the leading contender is X, we are also considering Y and Z" in a relevant WP:VPWMF discussion. @Certes: you keep better track of this than I do I think, please prove me wrong and tell me the WMF made a more informative statement since I last checked. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 15:50, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I've seen nothing but only really watch Wikipedia; there may be updates on Meta or MediaWiki. Masking doesn't seem to be happening quickly, so I'm hoping that it will prove infeasible and go away. Certes (talk) 18:31, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Certes, you have (possibly unintentionally) demonstrated my point about the disconnect: I [...] only really watch Wikipedia. You are invested in Wikimedia, even knowledgeable about technical details and clearly interested in them, you're just not tuned into the channels the developers primarily use. You made three posts on Phabricator this year. Friction between developers and community would be expected when communication channels are not effective. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 19:50, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Alexis Jazz: As you may have read in Tech News, the WMF just announced its intention to impose a session-based system. I suspect that it will be trivial to discard session information and start again with a clean slate, forcing us to ban unregistered editors and cut off our source of new contributors. Certes (talk) 22:44, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I see they say "We do acknowledge that deleting a cookie is easier than switching an IP, of course, and do respect the effects it would have." I'd like to know how they respect the problems this will cause. Doug Weller talk 12:50, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

you can hide the links but not actually get rid of them – afaik, that's because at Wikipedia scale, "don't split the cache" is like "don't cross the streams". ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 06:38, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pelagic, why is this crap in the cache to begin with? It shouldn't be! (I'm not saying the links shouldn't exist, but they shouldn't exist in cache) — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 23:40, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think you'll find that it's more complicated than that. AIUI anything and everything that is supposed to be in the HTML sent to an IP editor is supposed to exist in the cache. Having just one copy of each page in the cache is one of the reasons that the WMF does not have to hire thousands of engineers just to let people read. Running a site with this much traffic is not like running a little website, only with bigger numbers. Some rules of thumb just don't work when you extrapolate them to the level of half a billion page views every day.

(Anyone who really wants to know more might want to start reading at mw:Manual:Cache and wikitech:Caching overview.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:01, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The reply tool is fantastic and was designed with lots of feedback from the community, I think it's a really good way of improving talk pages without changing the underlying wikitext structure. "It increases the size of the page slightly" is probably the most nit-picky feedback possible, anyone here could make a much larger change to the page size by adding a few images.

I don't think that the issue here is exclusively "the WMF doesn't get feedback", "the WMF gets the wrong feedback" is just as big of an issue. If you go and look at the original flow prototyping pages on meta/mediawiki I think the original focus group used to create the overall design consisted of 5 people who had never used a wiki before. Asking people who are (for want of a better word) completely ignorant about how consensus based wiki projects work to design one of it's most essential features is a recipe for disaster. The WMF seems to be so obsessed with recruiting new editors that they are willing to completely ignore the people who run the site on a day to day basis.

Final thought - they do seem to have gotten a lot better over the last few years (at least in terms of software development) and do seem to be making efforts to listen to the community, most of the big disasters were 5+ years ago. 192.76.8.70 (talk) 09:49, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Images one could disable or load on click/hover/whatever. I know many people here probably don't care, but shouldn't we take those who don't have unlimited data and 10mbps+ broadband into consideration? Some people are still stuck on 1mbit/s ADSL (or worse) or pay per megabyte, even in developed countries. (granted there are people who have no access to the internet at all, some not even to clean drinking water, but that's another issue) Now if the additional HTML was actually necessary to achieve the goal, that would be a fair argument. But it isn't. The HTML (just the HTML, don't get me started on the API call) that gets added currently is about 95% bloat. Actually I'm rounding down from 95.3%, this is not a number I'm pulling out of thin air. (if anyone has doubts I can share my homework) So if this is the result of close collaboration with the community, I was dead wrong thinking community involvement would improve things. (either that or it would have been even worse without the community involvement) And while I don't know about all the disasters from 5+ years ago, I know that structured data and crosswiki uploads are an ongoing train wreck. And here's another thing that worries me: mw:Talk pages project states Some features may involve introducing new wikitext. Although, any changes to wikitext will be limited to those that enable new features that benefit contributors. Features like replying to specific comments or watchlisting particular discussions. This could align with what I'm doing, but given the current state and direction of DiscussionTools I'm sure they'll find a way to mess it up, maybe even break my efforts in the process. And this Google doc from phab:T273341#7539540 worries me even more. There's the wikitext, which is easily publicly accessible and can easily be copied/forked/analyzed/etc and there'll be a shadow ledger which won't be so easy to copy/fork but the dependency on it will just keep increasing. The WMF developers still want wikitext to be something it's not. They still want Flow. Maybe that's what the community told them during the collab sessions, in which case I guess I'd have to eat my humble pie. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 19:33, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

"It increases the size of the page slightly" is probably the most nit-picky feedback possible, It certainly does. Examining the HTML that is served, I find that every single post has gained several hundred extra bytes, in the form of five extra <span>...</span> elements (one at the start of the post, the rest after the timestamp) and one <a>...</a> element (the reply link itself). This is present even if you have disabled the feature. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:10, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As a point of fact, the [reply] tool was created as the result of the mw:Talk pages consultation 2019. During that five-month, multilingual, multi-wiki consultation, hundreds of editors shared their opinions about what should be built (and not built). @Alexis Jazz, I believe you were mostly editing at Commons then: c:Commons:Talk pages project 2019 was not especially well-attended despite multiple announcements and people linking to it in other discussions (e.g., [1][2][3]). Commons contributors mostly seemed to post at the central discussion rather than the project-specific page. The English Wikipedia's local page is at Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 1 and Wikipedia:Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 2. Between the two discussions here at the English Wikipedia, I think we had something like 150 editors posting 900 comments – just in this one community. Overall, there were thousands of comments from at least 600 editors in at least 20 languages at more than 20 wikis. Since then, there have been dozens of discussions about specific details, at this wiki and also at other wikis. Multiple features inside the [reply] tool exist because volunteers asked for them after the project started, including the ability to add a custom edit summary and an extra button for adding the page to your watchlist. As for its success, I notice that SineBot has made fewer edits since this tool was deployed last Monday.

The visual editor, too, was requested by volunteers. The first request that I'm personally aware of was made in 2004 (i.e., before most of us here created our accounts). The decision to create a visual editor was taken during the original 2009–2010 strategy: process, which lasted more than one year and involved editors from around the globe. The idea of creating a visual editor was one of the most strongly supported proposals during those discussions. The visual editor was IMO deployed too soon, and they did not take my advice to deploy it at another wiki first (the English Wikipedia's articles have the most complex formatting, and therefore is IMO not the right place to begin deployment of any new article-editing tools), but these subsequent mistakes do not change the fact that this idea originated from volunteers. At this point, the visual editor is relatively popular, with half of newly registered editors choosing the visual editor for their first edits at this wiki (there's a far higher percentage at some other Wikipedias) and the visual editor being used approximately once for every two edits made in the 2010 wikitext editor here at the English Wikipedia. Even people who dislike the concept of a visual editor on principle would rather add, delete, or rearrange columns in a table by clicking three times in the visual editor than manually typing the wikitext code on each line of the table.

The original name for Flow was "LiquidThreads version 3". LiquidThreads was originally proposed by a volunteer, in response to the English Wikipedia's WikiProject Aircraft voting to hold their discussions off wiki. At that time, the WMF had zero staff. The first version was written by a volunteer. The conceptual shift from LiquidThreads version 2 (which is still used at Wikinews) to "Flow" (so named because it was meant to support a Workflow pattern built by local admins and tech volunteers, rather than being restricted to simple discussions) was the request to make it capable of handling Wikipedia:Articles for deletion and Wikipedia:Arbitration/Current (imagine a world in which ArbCom clerks didn't need to manually count the votes). IMO it never got far enough to show its real promise for managing workflows, but the goal was to extend existing, volunteer-conceived software to meet the needs of existing volunteers. Even in its limited discussion-only state, Flow has been popular in some communities (not, however, this one).

I would like to particularly encourage everyone here to offer the kind of "practical" feedback that Alexis suggests above. Yes, we're apparently stuck with some things, and other things are built because other communities requests them (or other parts of this community – the newcomers at the Teahouse probably benefits more from the auto-signing and auto-indenting [reply] tool than the regulars at VPT, after all). But I'm certain that, no matter which product is being discussed, that a clear articulation of needs and goals would be helpful and very much appreciated.

If you have any experience with writing a User story, then I've found that to be an effective model when talking to product managers. The idea is to say what you want to accomplish rather than how you want to accomplish it. To give an extreme, but hopefully illustrative, example, you want to write something like As a RecentChanges patroller, I want to know whether this new person is likely to speak English well, so I can share relevant advice (e.g., a link to WP:EMBASSY or a link to a help page written in the dominant language of their country) or As an admin calculating a block range, I need to know what IP range this vandal is using, so that I can block the correct range. What's not useful is As a RecentChanges patroller, I need to know the editor's IP address because that's how we've always done it. Goal-oriented stories sometimes result in magic buttons that say things like "☑︎ Block the nearby IPs, too". Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 14 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Whatamidoing, I respect this deeper look into things. Some interesting stuff. As for the success of VE, in numbers I don't doubt it (and whatever is the default will gain market share anyway) but phab:T304303 should have never existed. Due to outstanding bugs that went unfixed for years (what's new?), Wikisource is saying "goodbye VE". Your text deserves a more useful response, but I'm still pondering where it all went (and goes) wrong. I think I'm slowly starting to see and getting some ideas. But that conversation can't be initiated by me (you'll have to ask for it), and VP idea lab might not be the ideal place for it, and it wouldn't be an easy conversation.. to put it mildly. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 00:09, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The Editing team never deployed the visual editor to any of the Wikisources precisely because of the difficulty of integrating it into ProofreadPage. It's still in Beta Features, opt-in only, for everyone. The integration was always going to be a volunteer-led project. If the volunteers there aren't keen on it, that's okay, too. The visual editor was designed for Wikipedia articles, not to be all things to all people. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:52, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I think the IP-masking reps have been making significant efforts to engage, but the change they're tasked with is fundamentally more distasteful to the communities than DiscussionTools, so they are stuck pushing it uphill. ⁓ Pelagic ( messages ) 06:49, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Pelagic, they tried to engage, but when questions are asked (like "what's it gonna look like?") in response to that the WMF goes quiet. Even if they have no answers yet, just saying that would help a lot. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 22:23, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I hear that the team is trying to set up a working version on one of the test wikis. My guess is that you can take a look at the first version in a few weeks. Since you'd need admin rights on the test wiki to see what the admins see, there'll probably be some sort of sign-up process. Watching their project page is probably the best way to keep track of when that happens. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 21:30, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Whatamidoing, I'm more interested in what I'll see as a user anyways. One of my scripts will need to be adjusted, but I can't do anything until I know what it'll be like. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 23:44, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine the interface will be similar for both. You might want to sign up. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 01:44, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Whatamidoing, no interface. I separate users from IPs with a regular expression. This will no doubt break. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 18:24, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Community statement[edit]

I've drafted a potential community statement on the arrest of a Ukrainian Wikimedian and the Russian government's threats to censor Wikipedia at meta:2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine/Community statement. Before opening it up to signatories and promoting it widely, I'd appreciate feedback. Should anything about it be changed? {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 00:54, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

If you want to add a little extra to it, it could mention Wikipedia as being a source of credible info for the Ukrainian and Russian people.North8000 (talk) 02:55, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Article we talk about today at WikiCanada chat Wikimedia says it ‘will not back down’ after Russia threatens Wikipedia block.Moxy- 03:08, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Good article; already linked! And yeah, that could be a nice thing to mention if we can find a place to put it. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 03:25, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Sdkb: - I really like the letter content. Perhaps the only thing that comes to mind is that the header (currently "Russian invasion of Ukraine") suggests a more "support Ukraine against the Russian invaders" focus, whereas the letter is (rightly (for Wikimedia)) more on the censorship by Russia & Belarus. Without the title becoming too long, perhaps a rewording to make the title more directly clear to meaning? Nosebagbear (talk) 15:33, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Give WMF feedback on model cards[edit]

The WMF Privacy and Machine Learning Platform teams are developing model cards to increase visibility, transparency, and accountability of algorithmic decision-making on WMF platforms. The broad goal is for every ML model hosted by WMF to have a model card for the community and public to understand, discuss, and govern that model. As part of rolling this out to more models, we want to get feedback from as many people as possible.

To that end, we would love for you to give some feedback on the talk page of our prototype! Of course, please feel free to ask any questions/give any general comments as a thread to this conversation.

Thanks :)

- Htriedman (talk) 19:00, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

What is a "model card"? Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 19:03, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I'm sure you are trying your best, but the only feedback that I can give is that the WMF should sack the 90%+ of its staff who work on such irrelevant projects, stop trying to raise more money than it needs, and concentrate on providing the hardware and software infrastructure that we need. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:08, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Harsh words, but fair. Certes (talk) 20:32, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You shouldn't really hijack any thread made by WMF staff with off topic comments about this sort of thing. I'm sure you have valid concerns but it seems quite rude, especially as this *is* software related and just because you might not understand it doesn't mean its not useful to other members of the community. ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 20:53, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Agree completely. It's almost disruptive to reply to any WMF thread as if it's a WMF soapbox. A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 21:02, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

These model cards seem very useful! Machine learning can get quite mysterious, especially when the data starts getting and I feel like this openness definitely helps.

Whist a push, deeper accessibility to run the models through APIs, similar to what ORES has, would be great too for userscript and tool makers, but I'd strongly recommend some sort of authentication check be done unlike ORES to make sure quotas are adhered to. Maybe if this content was merged onto the new API Wiki (api.wikimedia.org, I know it isn't quite an API but a central spot for all technical docs would be helpful) or Wikitech that would be nice. ✨ Ed talk! ✨ 20:58, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Jo-Jo asked a pertinent question above… please do not assume that people know what “model cards” are and what they are supposed to do. Explain! Blueboar (talk) 21:26, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, all, for the helpful comments. Model cards are a kind of standardized documentation about machine learning models — something akin to a nutritional label. Ideally, they should be standardized in their look and content, understandable by people who aren't domain experts, and provide clear answers to basic questions (who, what, why, how, etc.). Although the paper I've linked provides a specific schema for model cards, I've been figuring out what that kind of documentation should look like on various wikipedias. If we are going to host models that have a very large impact on what wikipedia looks like (e.g. the ML models that power various patrolling tools), and scale up their utility in the future, this kind of documentation is useful — and in the medium term it may be required by law in the EU for models that have an impact on basic human rights, like online speech. Htriedman (talk) 22:50, 17 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

LOL... I still have no clue what you are talking about... but thanks for at least trying to explain. Blueboar (talk) 18:39, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I'm with you, no idea what these are supposed to be. Which seems a bit ironic if their purpose is to make things understandable to non-experts. – Reidgreg (talk) 22:39, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Htriedman I noticed on meta:User:HTriedman_(WMF)/Language_Agnostic_Link-Based_Article_Topic_Model_Card that the training data came primarily came from English Wikipedia (11.4%) and then Cebuano (8.8%). I don't know if you were aware that Cebuano Wikipedia is written by a bot, Lsjbot. If you're going to train a machine-leaning algorithm, using bot-generated content is probably not going to give you the results you were hoping for. Spanish might be a better candidate.

I'm not sure if this is the same thing or just something similar to what's used to generate the suggestions in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special%3AHomepage, but if so, that's not working. That I'm interested in visual arts doesn't mean I want to work on comics, interior design, comics, manga, photography, landscape architecture, interior design or manga (those are my current recommendations). The assumption that one's interests can be reduce to something so simplistic is flawed, I'm afraid. A much better method, that works for me, is to look at what other people who work on things that I care about do. Vexations (talk) 20:18, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Vexations' idea seems much closer to my experience. I for example have a close overlap with JBchrch and Fintor's edits in finance and economics, but me being interested in the broad business, finance, and economics field doesn't mean I'd be interested in some random company's page or an obscure economics article. A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 20:26, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Most attempts to apply machine learning to anything seem to come at things from the wrong end. Rather than say "here's this wonderful idea about machine learning so what can we apply it to?" the question should be "here's something that doesn't work well so how do we make it better?". If the answer to the latter is by applying machine learning (as it will be in a very small percentage of cases) then the appropriate model should be looked at. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:13, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Give page movers the right to move past move protection?[edit]

I want to know how people feel about this.. So, there's this right called Page mover, and it allows users to do stuff related to moving pages (suppressing redirects, overriding title blacklist.) Separately, there's also this thing called move protection, which makes it so only administrators can move the protected pages.

So, uh, if there's a right that specifically makes it so one can move more pages, then why is there a protection on moving pages that doesn't let them, the people trusted to move pages correctly, through?

(I've never really done a proposal before so I wanted to hit by here first to check if I'll get snowed out in an actual proposal of this) casualdejekyll 01:39, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Casualdejekyll please first read through similar discussions from August 2018 and April 2021. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:48, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Well, @Xaosflux, the April 2021 proposal appears to have a lot of votes that oppose but would be neutral on PMR-level move protection existing. That doesn't make much sense to me - the proposal is to replace admin move protection with PMR-level move protection, so they're saying the oppose and are neutral at the same time? casualdejekyll 01:59, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Casualdejekyll I think one of the technical challenges is that to move a page you have to be able to edit the page, so this would require a lot of technical work for something that doesn't occur that often: pages that are full-protected against "move", but not full-protected against "edit" - that actually need to be moved - and that the best solution isn't to reduce the protection. You would need to come up with some good statistics to show that the scope of the problem is large enough to build a new technical system. — xaosflux ^Talk 09:25, 18 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

A quick glance through Special:ProtectedPages shows that about 80% of the first 1,000 move-protected non-redirect articles are also full-protected. @Casualdejekyll, it looks like you don't have this user right. How often has this situation affected your own editing? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Comment section after citations[edit]

It should be possible to add a little snippet of text after a citation that says what the source is/what it says. This would be especially helpful for long sources like PDFs where people could say what page they found the info in question on or just put a quote of what it says. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ranicher (talk • contribs) 17:24, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That is possible. If using free-form citations then anything you like can be entered, and when using citation templates such as {{cite book}} or {{cite web}} the page= and quote= parameters can be used. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:06, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

For works without page numbers, you can use the parameter "at=" (instead of "page=" or "pages=") (see Template:Citation#In-source locations) in cite templates to indicate section/chapter headings or other identifiable markers in the document. - Donald Albury 21:01, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Even when using a citation template instead of free-form text, if one of its parameters doesn't quite fit your need, you can add a snippet of text after it. isaacl (talk) 21:13, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed additions to the Main Page[edit]

The purpose of this RFC is determine what sections should be added and removed from the Main Page. I have identified a few features missing from the main page which would make Wikipedia more interactive. Other editors are welcome to add proposals here. Interstellarity (talk) 20:57, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal 1: Add links to the level 1 vital articles to replace portal links on the top right[edit]

This change would show that the purpose of the vital articles project is for readers and not editors.

Support

1. Interstellarity (talk) 20:57, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

1. Oppose the WP:VA is more of a WikiProject than anything else. Whilst they are some of the most important articles, the VA list shouldn't be commented on from the main page. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:25, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
2. Oppose. Not so quick. Community awareness is too low on WP:VA, there are oddities and niche perspectives. But consider. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:25, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

Discussion

Proposal 2: Add a list of the most popular articles of the week[edit]

I'm always interested in what articles are popular every week and it might incentivize experienced editors to improve the articles.

Support

1. Interstellarity (talk) 20:57, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

1. This sounds like a "trending" feature. Self-referential rankings like this don't belong in the mainspace. If you have it on the Main Page, I fear it will attract inexperienced editors, a spectrum of inept AGF edits and vandalism to the articles, and a lot more work for the experienced editors on presumably heavily-edited articles. – Reidgreg (talk) 22:50, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
2. Oppose. Instead add a small discreet link to Wikipedia:Top 25 Report at the bottom of the In the news section. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:23, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

   had no idea this existed. Thank you for linking it. Star Mississippi 00:31, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

   Like with all things, the person who does it louder and later gets all the credit. ^[FBDB] casualdejekyll 07:47, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

Discussion

• I believe the mobile/app version of Wikipedia has this already, or something similar; it gets discussed occasionally at WP:ITNC by some who want to see the In The News box be more like a most-read article list. 331dot (talk) 00:06, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• I'm not sure about this one. Don't articles linked from the Main Page get a large increase in page views? If so, then anything on the Main Page would then tend to end up in the "most popular" box, leading to those articles getting more page views and staying as the "most popular". Can you clarify more what would count as "most popular" and how it would account for increased page views from the Main Page? RudolfRed (talk) 20:26, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  What about the most popular pages last week? Enterprisey (talk!) 22:23, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  @RudolfRed and Enterprisey: To be clear, I am talking about the most viewed articles in a given week. We could possibly list the ten most viewed articles this week as well as the ten most viewed articles of last week. Interstellarity (talk) 22:50, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Won't that cause a positive feedback? I believe it would tend to keep an article high on the list for the next week. Donald Albury 01:07, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Not in any significant number. The amount of people who read the main page and click the links on it pales in comparison to the amount of people who simply find pages through search engines on and off-wiki. Pinguinn 🐧 20:09, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• You guys are aware of the existence of the Top 25 Report, right? casualdejekyll 18:49, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal 3: Add quizzes throughout the Main page[edit]

I think creating quizzes on Today's featured article, In the news, as well as Today's featured picture would be great because I like to test my knowledge to see what I know about the article.

Support

1. Interstellarity (talk) 20:57, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
2. YTKJ (talk) 18:45, 20 March 2022 (UTC) Yes, this sounds like a fun addition to Wikipedia.[reply]

Oppose

1. User:力 (powera, π, ν) 23:18, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
2. completely against the point of Wikipedia. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:21, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
3. Oppose, per Lee. RudolfRed (talk) 20:24, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
4. Oppose, per Lee.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:34, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
5. Nah, but why nah? One, this would require some software work, and software developers are in short supply. If someone really wants to write a quiz extension lets see what it looks like first. If someone wants to write this as a javascript - lets see the example again. This would require volunteers to write and maintain questions and answers. Now, if some wikiproject really really wants to do this, and do it as a script, then maybe I'd be ok with it being an opt-in / onclick load gadget. But would want to see some proof of concepts on both the software and the process first. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:17, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

   A first iteration doesn't even need to be interactive: just have the questions and answers on separate pages. I agree before considering it for the main page, there should be a track record of the quiz creation process running regularly and smoothly. (I don't know if the Signpost is interested in a column like this; it could be a place to try it out.) isaacl (talk) 21:34, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

   The software already exists; see mw:Extension:Quiz. It's used at both Wikibooks and Wikiversity, and maybe other places. For the record, just because the software exists does not mean that it can be used on the largest wiki in the world. But if you wanted it (for any reason, not necessarily for this proposal), we could ask. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:43, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

   Good to know there is an applicable extension. Personally I'd like see a consistent record of producing non-interactive quizzes and that there is an interested audience before requesting that an extension be installed. isaacl (talk) 23:20, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

1. I like the idea in general. Quizzes are fun, and add interest. Even the NY Times has a weekly news quiz. But before we can consider putting it on the front page, the idea should be tested somewhere else to see how well it works. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:54, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
2. Quizes, yes. On the Main page, no. Link from the main page? Yes, trial it. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 21:27, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Proposal 4: Add Browse by category at the bottom of the Main Page so readers can look for a specific article without using the search engine[edit]

There will always be readers that are not quite sure what article they are looking for. Having basic categories like People, Science, Technology, and Society would make the user interface more usable rather than using the old-fashioned categories.

Support

1. Interstellarity (talk) 21:02, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

1. I don't think throwing a reader at Category:People is going to be very useful. The category system is decent for finding related low-level topics, but not so much for browsing such broad categories such as those proposed. — xaosflux ^Talk 21:20, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral

Discussion

• Wikipedia already has this, they are called Portals, but they have kind of diminished in visibility and importance over the years. I'm also not really sure it is easier than simply typing in the article or subject one is looking for in the search bar. 331dot (talk) 00:01, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• In addition to the portal links (which oddly enough you suggested removing), for desktop readers there is a "Contents" link in the sidebar that provides some navigational guidance. Perhaps this link should duplicated in a more prominent location. isaacl (talk) 21:28, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

General discussion[edit]

• Interstellarity There are countless attempts to change the main page, but never consensus for them. I would urge you to better hash out ideas at the Village Pump first. I would say that quizzes are probably a nonstarter, this is an encyclopedia, not a gaming site. 331dot (talk) 23:18, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't mean to shoot down your ideas. But changing the Main Page of one of the top used websites in the world requires a lot of time and effort, usually from multiple people and more than an RFC. I would gently suggest that you withdraw these proposals from this page and discuss them at the Village Pump. 331dot (talk) 23:30, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  @331dot I have moved the proposals from the main page talk to the idea lab so that they can be developed further. I have converted them to informal proposals so that they can be discussed. BTW, the reason why I suggested quizzes on Wikipedia is because Britannica, another encyclopedia has quizzes on the site. Why would people be against quizzes? Interstellarity (talk) 23:51, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Interstellarity Wikipedia is a user-built collection of human knowledge. It is not a place to test the knowledge of its users. I would not be surprised if there were outside websites that use Wikipedia information as a basis for quizzes. Built-in quizzes are a distraction and outside our mission. 331dot (talk) 23:57, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  OK, I see now. It seems like Wikipedia leans toward providing the information and just an encyclopedia while Britannica is more of a multi-purpose website that's more than an encylopedia. Interstellarity (talk) 00:00, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Yes, and that works for Britannica, because their mission is broader than Wikipedia's. One is not worse than the other, it's just different. 331dot (talk) 00:04, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  And maybe Britannica has to do those other things to survive because we have outcompeted them in the niche of online encyclopedia.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:55, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  I don't think anyone would stop you from creating quizzes in your own user space, if that's what you're interested in doing. Before it can be even considered for a prominent spot for readers, though, there should be a strong track record of new quizzes being regularly created, and a few people regularly assuming this duty. isaacl (talk) 21:24, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• We aren't an "interactive" website though. It would have been more prudent to get some input before creating an RfC. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 23:23, 19 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• Why does this have Support, Oppose and Neutral sections? Per the box at the top, this page is not for consensus polling. Stalwart "Oppose" and "Support" comments generally have no place here. Instead, discuss ideas and suggest variations on them. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 07:56, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  Probably because it was originally on talk:main page and got moved here.Nigel Ish (talk) 10:11, 20 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• We already have a Browse by category function. It appears top right but is labelled All portals. It is currently proposed for removal. Certes (talk) 12:11, 21 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  If Portal energy were put into Category page headers, that might be a good idea. SmokeyJoe (talk) 20:16, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Stubs and notability[edit]

Future discussion on improving our management of geostubs[edit]

Hi! Repeatedly in discussions people raise the issue that the amount of permastubs about villages due to NGEO is not being handled in the best way possible. While WP is not a paper wikipedia, there are various concerns that having a large minority of articles be villages in third-world countries where our own sourcing bias (see Geographical bias on Wikipedia) prevents us from improving many of these articles or preventing misinformation due to very high ratios of articles to geo content patrollers (the Iranian Well issue comes to mind, for example, and I expect there to be other less absurdly flagrant content mistakes). On the other hand, there is no policy against the existence of stubs even in a permanent state. Additionally, I think we can all agree that having information on developing world villages is beneficial both to our readers and companies that use Wikipedia for their services. With the increased success of Wikidata (as much as we might not admit that very often here), this "loss of information" fear from altering how we manage these stubs seems less reasonable (but still valid). I wonder as well if redirecting impacts the accessibility of this information.

With all this in mind, I was wondering if y'all could help by giving your thoughts on the issue, including past discussions I am not aware of or ideas on how to fix the problem. A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 11:23, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• If you don't think there is a problem, you're opinion is welcome too! I'm trying to gather a wide range of opinions and ideas on the subject, as I think there's a lot we can do to improve these articles. Sadly these discussions tend to happen in highly contentious AfDs or partisan venues so we tend to lose a lot of the nuance I hope can surface in this discussion. BTW I don't think there's a problem with NGEO. Perhaps it could be highly different opinions on how WP:NOPAGE applies to geo stubs? Not sure. A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 11:40, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • The median length of a page view is maybe long enough to read one sentence. This suggests that very brief articles are not a problem for at least half of our readers ("Oh, the Iranian Well is in Iran. That's all I needed to know. *click*"). WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:00, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I wish there were stats on specifically the average length of a pageview on articles about locations - that would back up this argument more strongly. However, I do agree with you on this. casualdejekyll 19:20, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• I don't see a specific question to comment on. North8000 (talk) 11:49, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • North8000 it's more of a vague brainstorm I guess? Perhaps the question would be "Are there issues with having so many geo permastubs on wiki?" with a follow-up question "If so, how can we fix them?" A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 11:57, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • We could redirect the stubs to lists, either a stand-alone list article ("Villages of Foo") or a list within the parent entity article ("Foo#Villages"), giving the same information as the stub. But that does not improve the quality of the information and may slightly discourage addition of content. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:10, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
• The problem isn't information loss. There isn't valid information to be lost. It's about huge amounts of outright information error. Merging erroneous information doesn't correct or remove it, and we are still, this year, this month, this week, finding and researching and dealing with articles where the database dumpers gave us boilerplate "X is an unincorporated community" for things that were never communities. This is in the United States, where the aforementioned sourcing bias would have one believe that sourcing is strong. Some of the recent highlights have been "communities" that were actually toxic material handling sites in Utah that were deliberately sited many miles away from populated areas; "communities" that the source used outright said were railway stops and maintenance camps; "communities" that in fact were mines; and a "community" based upon solely the information in GNIS record #1742680 (see https://www.topoquest.com/place-detail.php?id=1742680). I rewrote Bullfrog, Utah (AfD discussion) roughly 3 weeks ago. Bob, West Virginia came up yesterday.

  If there's a problem with villages that cannot be expanded upon because there isn't much to say, which I am not sure there is, it is positively swamped by the massive problem of geographic articles that can never be expanded because they are outright falsehoods. Are there issues? Yes. This is the issue. Still.

  Uncle G (talk) 20:44, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

  • If the issue is that the article fails WP:V and thereby produces falsehoods, then that isn't an issue with the current policy. WP:DEL-REASON#7 is pretty clear that articles that fail WP:V can be deleted. The very issue you're describing is one of cleanup owing to sloppy uses of unreliable database sources by Wikipedians over many years who were largely acting in good faith.

    The purpose of Wikipedia is, in short, to provide a free, neutrally written, accessible encyclopedia to the world. Removing unverifiable information is part of that. But arguing that no good information would be lost by nuking all geostubs seems naïve; surely it's the case that we're going to wind up deleting valid entries. Much like copyright cleanup investigations, undoing these sorts of mistakes is going to be hard, labor-intensive work. Perhaps a WikiProject, a noticeboard, or a task force of WikiProject Cities could be created to patrol weakly sourced geostubs and to add reliable sources to them. Gamification akin to NPP/AFC drives could also serve as a model to get people invested in cleanup, with barnstars being awarded to participants based upon their actions. We might need a script to do this sort of "geostub patrolling", but it doesn't seem like this is going to be too technically challenging to get started on. — Mhawk10 (talk) 05:22, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

    • The issue is a huge amount of false information. Systematic false information. A. C. Santacruz's question was "Are there issues with having so many geo permastubs on wiki?", and this is the answer. There are, and it's this. It wasn't a question about policy, or about whether things like whether Wikipedia:WikiProject California/GNIS cleanup task force exist. It was a request for what the issues are, and this is the answer. And it's going to be the answer for a long time. Given the number of long-term participants in GNIS cleanup, versus the number of "unincorporated community" cop-out articles, there's decades of work here. Uncle G (talk) 12:17, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Uncle G, is your concern less about whether the place existed (e.g., a toxic waste area, a mine, a railway stop), but instead that you think it false to call these places "communities"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:40, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • It's a concern shared by a lot of people, and it's also about whether the place existed, because we've come across many that actually did not, such as the survey corners in Virginia. Independence, Uintah County, Utah (AfD discussion) is an even more extreme example, as not only did the place never exist we even have a history book saying that it never existed. Wikipedia has been proclaiming it an "unincorporated community" for over 4 years.

      "unincorporated community" is an information-free cop-out. Because the GNIS never made distinctions amongst "populated place"s, the database dumpers gave us everything as "unincorporated community". Some even went so far to give us "unincorporated community" for things that the GNIS did not call "populated place", such as "Bone Lick Post Office (historical)" which a database dumper gave to us as an "unincorporated community" of Bone Lick, West Virginia (AfD discussion) 10 years ago, and which Wikipedia has been proclaiming ever since. The consequence of all this is that "unincorporated community" is completely debased now. Every "unincorporated community" could be a database dumper giving us post offices, mines, springs, railway junctions, survey corners, or 3 roads near Salem as "unincorporated community".

      And, worse, people see all this and copy it, thinking that that's normal, even to the extent of countries that don't have the GNIS to mislead them. So Bridgend, Perth and Kinross becomes an "area" instead of the village and burgh of barony that it actually is, for example. Columbia, Tyne and Wear was just "in Washington" for 16 years, without any clue as to what it even was (Shoe shop? Statue? Roundabout?), to the extent that one editor couldn't find it at all.

      We have hundreds of thousands of stub articles that systematically do not give correct factual information about what their subject is, or indeed was, that do not give proper context enabling expansion by editors, and that egregiously mislead readers in many cases. And this is going to be the case for many years.

      Uncle G (talk) 12:17, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      There is a perennial problem of some early user fundamentally misunderstanding a particular concept, which then gets propagated out as other users then assume that it's correct - often well beyond English Wikipedia.

      One example that springs to mind is Unitary authorities of England, which is an article that uses the term "unitary authority" to both refer to a kind of local authority (which is correct), as well as the area which it controls (which isn't, but is a common shorthand for "unitary authority area"). This is a bit like using "council" every time you mean "county", and makes for extremely confusing reading. Worse, this has been wrongly repeated on numerous other Wikis - something that I only became aware of due to stumbling across a totally incoherent Wikidata item that was trying to represent both concepts at once. Theknightwho (talk) 16:31, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      Looking at the Bone Lick example, how do you know that a US post office was placed in a location that wasn't – according to one or more of the reasonably typical definitions you would find in a dictionary – a community? Rural communities are real things. They might not be the kind of real thing that needs a separate Wikipedia article, but I don't think we should treat post offices and communities as exclusive entities. It seems more likely to me that if a place had enough people there to get a post office, there probably was a community there. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:48, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      It depends on your definition of community, but I think some collection of dwellings is required to designate a populated place. Post offices were often sited in isolated stores that were not near a populated place, as at Dudley Farm, or even in a farmhouse. Without some source telling us that the post office was sited in a populated place, I don't think we can assume notability. "Railroad stations" have a similar problem, as they were often just a shed or an open platform on a siding with no other buildings. Donald Albury 22:59, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      Some railway stations were a fair distance from the community that they were named after. This often happened in sparely-populated areas such as northern Scotland, but it happened in England also - for instance Micheldever railway station, two and a half miles away from Micheldever. After the station opened, a new community grew up around the station - named Micheldever Station. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 11:44, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      That reminds me of a (possibly apocryphal) story that I heard. Someone asked why Tring station was so far from the town, and the answer was that it made more sense to put it on the railway line. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:39, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      That's also told of one of the stations on the Settle and Carlisle line, possibly Dent or Garsdale. But in the case of Micheldever, the village is half a mile from the railway. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 13:50, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      I was thinking of names that appeared on maps along rail-lines that were freight-loading points, and served local farmers rather than any populated place, of which there were many in the US before motor transports and improved roads came along. Donald Albury 13:43, 26 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      Right. In much of the US's "breadbasket", the post office would have been near the Co-op grain elevator, and the grain elevator was always next to the rail line. This might or might not be near an officially recognized town. You could still have "a community" (e.g., "the people with common interests living in a particular area") in that location even if you didn't have the kind of "homes placed close by each other" appearance that a city dweller would expect. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:17, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      No grain elevators around here. I have a list of 37 post offices that once existed in this county that I cannot verify were part of a community. I can find many of them on old maps, and a few even have GNIS entries. What I do not have is any other source for any community that may have been associated with a post office. Even if there was a community, it may not have been known by the same name as the post office. The U.S. Post Office would not allow more than one post office with a given name in a state. Many times someone would petition for a post office, only to have their preferred name rejected because another post office using that name already existed in the state. There are even a couple of post offices on that list that changed their names during the few years they existed, for which I haven't found anything about a community under either of the names. I have another 22 places (not P.O.s) that are/were listed in GNIS as populated places, some of which show on old maps, but for which I haven't found anything else. Without other sources, I think it would be wrong to assume that those places are notable enough to have articles in Wikipedia. Donald Albury 22:09, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• I don't see it as a significant problem, although it would be good to raise the bar a bit. A 1/2 million geo articles is fine, 5 million wouldn't be. Geographic places are highly encyclopedic topics and also given extra emphasis in the Five Pillars and informally giving some allowance for that per Wikipedia:How Wikipedia notability works is IMO fine. I didn't separate these in my study User:North8000/Display but of the 27% of all articles being "geographic places,broadly construed" there were probably as many less notable things like tiny train stations and tiny bridges as there were small villages.North8000 (talk) 20:52, 23 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Considering that most of our geostubs cover a limited number of regions, I think this suggests that there is an issue; if we created the same density of articles for Asia, Africa, and South America as we do for the United States, we would have at least those five million geo-articles, most of them similar to the current average geo-article - an under sourced microstub. BilledMammal (talk) 04:48, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Geostubs break[edit]

• Personally, I don't think we should have articles on places that are sourced only to a single database or list. If nobody has been able to find anything other than a database or list entry for a place, then, in my opinion, it has not been demonstrated to be notable enough to be included in Wikipedia. I have a lot of names on a subpage (User:Donald Albury/Notes/Alachua County communities) under my account of place names in the county I live in, that appear in a list of post offices, or on old maps, or in the GNIS, or mentioned in some otherwise unrelated source, for which I have not yet been able to find any other usable sources, and for which I therefore will not create articles. - Donald Albury 23:35, 24 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • If nobody has been able to find: One of the things that we don't have is a way to say "I tried to find sources, and I didn't succeed." WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:42, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • I've been saying that quite easily at AFD for many years. The best thing that one can do is double-check and look; and if the result is negative that's what one gets to say. And it's demonstrably easy to say it on worklists like User:Hog Farm/Missouri attention needed. Uncle G (talk) 12:17, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    • You, WhatamIdoing, just said it, so where is the problem? A statement like that can just as easily be made on an article talk page or in an AfD discussion or wherever it needs to be said. The real issue seems to be that there is no template for saying it and that it is not part of an automated procedure, which seem to be the only ways in which many editors communicate. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:43, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      That's it. There's no structured workflow for that. So you see an article whose current version is below average, but you have no insight into whether anyone else looked at it. This starts with the Special:NewPagesFeed, which is set up so that dozens of NPPers can silently duplicate each others' work, until someone finally clicks a button to mark it as patrolled. (Oh, look, some IP caused Tasmania – yes, the island/state – to appear in the NPP queue. It's now the "oldest article" in the queue, despite having actually been in the queue for 29 minutes as of now.)

      But the problem extends beyond that: Nobody knows how many NPPers looked at an article in the queue and decided that it wasn't worthy of deletion, but for years afterwards, we have no way to know whether anyone tried to find sources, whether anyone tried to expand an article, etc. When Template:Orphan was a thing, we tried to reduce unproductive duplication of effort by marking them as "attempted" with |att=. I don't remember seeing any similar system for any other maintenance tag. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:38, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      I would have thought that anyone remotely competent in editing an English language encyclopedia, and especially anyone qualified to do new page "patrol" (that's a horrible word that should be replaced by "review"), would be able to put together a sentence in English without there being a template or automated procedure to do it for them. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:56, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

      Unfortunately, "is able to" and "will actually" are two separate considerations. And even if you do, who says that all (or even any) of the subsequent reviewers will notice that you put something on the talk page? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:20, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

• Could we say that all geostubs that meet certain criteria should be flagged for speedy deletion by a bot? Criteria could include some combination of
  • Has not been edited for two years
  • Has only one sentence
  • Does not include coordinates
  • Has no source, or only one database-type source

A fair number of valid entries would be removed, but very little information would be lost. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:30, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion without manual review is basically never accepted. Also, how many articles do you think would be in such a list? I took at look at half a dozen articles about unincorporated communities (all in the US) just now, and all of them had been edited in the last 9 months. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:24, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suppose the gnomish edits tend to obscure real activity. So how about we dropped the "last edit" criterion and PROD the articles? The idea is to clear away stubs that say only "Foo is a place in Finland". Don't know how many of those there are. Aymatth2 (talk) 12:04, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps add "Is more than five year old". Aymatth2 (talk) 13:27, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal[edit]

Thank you all for your comments, they have been very instructive. I'll work on a proposal for the next few days to see if there is consensus to change some guidelines to deal with some of the problems identified in this thread. A. C. Santacruz ⁂ Please ping me! 12:24, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

?![edit]

?! has no meaning behind it. or at least not for most people, for some people it means waiting for the end. what there waiting for the end of is unkown for now. should anyone find another meaning then that i would like to know what it is so please feel free to make changes or add to it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jevin clarin (talk • contribs) 03:48, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect you have posted this on the wrong page, and/or on the wrong website entirely. Whatever you are trying to say, it seems to have no relevance whatsoever to the stated purpose explained above. This is not a forum for vague comments about random punctuation marks, it's sole purpose is the discussion of ideas directly related to how Wikipedia creates and maintains content. AndyTheGrump (talk) 04:05, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

@Jevin clarin: Looks like your comments are possibly intended for Talk:Interrobang? ––FormalDude talk 04:43, 25 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Template for Old Style and New Style dates[edit]

There are many articles that use old style (O.S.) dates as opposed to new style (N.S.). I'm working on a few articles that use O.S., and I noticed that reliable sources often used one of the styles, or both. If exact dates are necessary, both O.S. and N.S. should be displayed using Template:OldStyleDate. However, if the dates aren't exact (years and months only), we enter a dilemma: months are also different with O.S./N.S. dates. For instance, if a certain event happened in October 27 (O.S.) but only "October" is displayed, readers and editors will be unsure as to whether the month is N.S. or O.S.; the date mentioned would be November 9 in new style, but, if an event happened in, say, October 10 (O.S.), it would still be October in N.S. (October 24). Using Template:OldStyleDate on each date only introduces clutter, and so is using explanatory footnotes of O.S./N.S. on each date, which WP:OSNS seems to allude to inciting in these circumstances. To resolve this issue, I thought of creating two templates akin to how "Template:Use dmy/mdy" works. My idea is "Template: Use O.S./N.S.". The latter templates, just like the former, should guarantee uniformity in articles that use either O.S. or N.S. instead of relying on messy explanatory footnotes and extensive use of the OldStyleDate template in events that occur prior to a calendar change. This idea is still in an embryonic state, and scrutiny is welcomed. Wretchskull (talk) 20:06, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

IPA Help passthrough[edit]

The (perceived) problem: Despite my best efforts, my brain refuses to memorize the IPA pronunciation symbols, so I often need to click through to the Help:IPA/English page (in a new tab) to figure out pronunciation. Flipping back and forth to decipher each symbol is both time-consuming and frustrating, especially with long or complex names.

Proposed solution: I propose that when clicking on an IPA pronunciation in an article, the original IPA from the article page should appear with the IPA help page, either as a highlighted static element near the top of the page, or a non-scrolling element that hovers above the page. This way, the symbols can be deciphered without having to jump back and forth between pages.

More technically, the original IPA could be passed as a urlencoded HTTP GET argument in the target URL, and the Help:IPA page could decide how best to display the source IPA (including any relevant localizations or user preferences). Although I've never looked at Wikipedia's code, it seems like it should be straightforward to automate the process of updating existing IPA->Help:IPA links to include the source IPA as an argument. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Quiescat (talk • contribs) 15:11, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

On desktop you can hover your mouse cursor over the transcription to see tooltips like "/ə/: 'a' in 'about'". You may also use Þjarkur's IPA popups script, which seems similar to what you suggest. Nardog (talk) 15:34, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I didn't know about the hover text! However, on a 4K monitor, trying to hover over a specific symbol is tricky at best (and, of course, it doesn't work on a touchscreen), I'm having some trouble getting the IPA popups script to work; I'll continue messing with it later. Thanks for the pointers. Quiescat (talk) 16:04, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

When I'm stuck, I copy and paste it to an external website that "speaks" the word for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:26, 28 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There's a script that assists you in doing that as well FWIW (the site it relies on is pretty good too). Nardog (talk) 12:49, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Leadership Development Working Group: Reminder to apply by 10 April 2022[edit]

You can find this message translated into additional languages on Meta-wiki.

Hello everyone,

The Community Development team at the Wikimedia Foundation is supporting the creation of a global, community-driven Leadership Development Working Group. The purpose of the working group is to advise leadership development work. Feedback was collected in February 2022 and a summary of the feedback is on Meta-wiki. The application period to join the Working Group is now open and is closing soon on April 10, 2022. Please review the information about the working group, share with community members who might be interested, and apply if you are interested.

Thank you,

From the Community Development team

Posting here following the original VPM announcement. I can see this working group functioning as a sustained idea lab of sorts.

The working group would benefit from the membership and participation of users who help generate and move ideas forward here. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 20:18, 29 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]