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Before creating a new section, please note:
- Discussions of technical issues belong at Village pump (technical).
- Discussions of policy belong at Village pump (policy).
- If you're ready to make a concrete proposal and determine whether it has consensus, go to the Village pump (proposals). Proposals worked out here can be brought there.
Before commenting, note:
- 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.
- Wondering whether someone already had this idea? Search the archives below, and look through Wikipedia:Perennial proposals.
Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for two weeks.
Trial a different Idea Labs process
Ideas seem to have a low chance of becoming successful proposals, even though experienced editors are proposing them. Maybe the reason is due to our process, especially that we jump to a solution before understanding the problem totally, I suggest we trial a few small to medium size problems using a problem solving process with the following steps:
- Define the problem,
- Generate Alternative Solutions ,
- Evaluate and select an Alternative
- Implement and follow up Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:17, 29 July 2022 (UTC)
- Wakelamp, super strong agree. See also: Iterative and incremental development. We need this. We have stagnated for so long because we are being too bureaucratic, too un-WP:IARy, and love stuff to not change. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 13:19, 30 July 2022 (UTC)
- I don't think our editors are accustomed to separating these steps. We jump to proposed solutions rapidly, and we tend to insist upon our proposed solutions even if we're told that it won't work. Consider, e.g., the decision to spam {{unref}} into articles in 2009. That was supposed to result in editors adding sources to the articles. Nobody ever checked to see whether that worked, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:45, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
- Yes, I agree that using this Wikipedia for testing is a bad idea and that's why we have Test Wikipedia for such purposes. As for ideas that does not involve the main namespace or require A/B testing, it may be done here in a temporary Wikipedia namespace page. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 10:02, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
- @CactiStaccingCrane With Editor behaviour you need live. An A/B on would have been easy, although you would have had to wait 12 months or in our case 13 years :-)
- @WhatamIdoing Maybe finding whether our whether the 2009 change worked could be the first we run through a problem solving process? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 23:29, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
- I'm not sure how you would find out if it worked. There'd be no way to know whether the tag produced efforts vs citations would have been added anyway.
- I suspect that these tags are useful in the first days/weeks, when someone is actively working on an article. If there were some sort of magic way to hide half the banners, we could see if the banner has an effect. I don't know of a way to truly randomize it, but we could probably do something like flip a coin 12 times (one per month) and then tell the banner to appear if the article is in a "heads" month and disappear if it's in a "tails" month. If we did this for, e.g., all articles in 2010, 2015, and 2020, and waited a year to see how many are still unsourced, we'd probably learn something. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- " tag produced efforts vs citations would have been added anyway." I think we can if 2009 was theonly mass unref
- We can compare 2009 unrefs, 2010 unrefs, 2010 should be unrefs but werent,
- Questions that might be of interest
- Does the unref tag encurage first time editors?_
- What % of unref tags ares still in place, even though it has 3 cites..
- I will ask on technical, about whather "If there were some sort of magic way to hide half the banners, we could see if the banner has an effect. " Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 15:01, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- There is a way to do so, using #switch and {{Random number}}, or just {{Random item}}. It can be done – what worries me is the storm of editors that will reject this radical proposal. We have to nail the proposal right the first time. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 15:04, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- @CactiStaccingCrane I agree with you that 'a storm of Editors' may reject this as they perceive it as radical. I now think unref has three issues
- Some editors have a strongly held belief that unref attracts new editors, that might not be challengeable based on day
- The concept of testing a hypothesis is new to many WP editors.
- That it's not worth doing anything unless we fix everything (See reply on my question tech ( which has been archived )
- So, as I don't think we will "nail the proposal right the first time" though, but maybe we should concentrate on something not as controversial ( such as making the citation process from google books easier), or just create a list of problems tied to Village pump, or we wait for a more auspicious time in 5 to 10 years Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:43, 13 August 2022 (UTC) .
- Agreed. Wikipedia community sucks in this regard. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 11:46, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
- @CactiStaccingCrane I agree with you that 'a storm of Editors' may reject this as they perceive it as radical. I now think unref has three issues
- There is a way to do so, using #switch and {{Random number}}, or just {{Random item}}. It can be done – what worries me is the storm of editors that will reject this radical proposal. We have to nail the proposal right the first time. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 15:04, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- https//2006:488A:7899://vers 2001:448A:2071:342:A95F:1ECB:EF19:206F (talk) 16:32, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- OK - a reference that google search shows as being from the now sadly repealed Minnesota Statutes 1971, Section 393.07, Subdivision 3 (page A 1871) (Federal Social Security is obscure even by WP standards) :-) But it did make my day! Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 05:44, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- " tag produced efforts vs citations would have been added anyway." I think we can if 2009 was theonly mass unref
- I don't think our editors are accustomed to separating these steps. We jump to proposed solutions rapidly, and we tend to insist upon our proposed solutions even if we're told that it won't work. Consider, e.g., the decision to spam {{unref}} into articles in 2009. That was supposed to result in editors adding sources to the articles. Nobody ever checked to see whether that worked, though. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:45, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
- What about if we just created each WP proposal as a page? A talk page is very confusing for working out what the actual consensus is, Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 09:20, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
- People do this already, either in one's user space, or in the Wikipedia namespace once the idea is mature enough. See, for example, Wikipedia:Making editing easier or Wikipedia:Workflow improvements (neither of which I've had much time for since, but that's another story ). For the broader discussion, I've found this page (VPI) acceptable enough. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thank-you for both links, but I am not certain what VPI is. I am wondering whetherr WIki is ready for a Busiestype process. After each step report back to Proposal. Constrain comments to 5 word summary, and 30 words.
- Create a SWOT
- Create List of common editors processes
- Find main Stakeholders/potentional team members for each process espcially a few business analysts, and volunteer programmers
- Do brainstorming to create a list of issues with importance,
- Perform Root cause analysis( Five Whys, amd fish bmone) for high priority issues,
- Use queries to confirm Issues/Challenge assumptions,
- [[https://www.modernanalyst.com/Resources/Articles/tabid/115/ID/2067/Use-the-Brainstorming-Technique-in-Business-Analysis.aspx Brainstorming to create high level solutions with predicted benefits. Group decides feasability, costraints, soluton guestimate of size,
- Team a solution to work on based on risk, guestimate of size, priority of issue, ease of measurement of results, and benefits,
- Do use casesof the solution, 'AS IS' 'TO BE'
- WMF-IT sign off and doscheduling
- WMF do detailed spec, with roadmap milestones
- Development
- Test
- Go liveWakelamp d[@-@]b (talk)`
- Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 06:15, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- I am going to try a SWOT process for WMF on this page and see what happens Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 06:14, 8 September 2022 (UTC)
- Thank-you for both links, but I am not certain what VPI is. I am wondering whetherr WIki is ready for a Busiestype process. After each step report back to Proposal. Constrain comments to 5 word summary, and 30 words.
- People do this already, either in one's user space, or in the Wikipedia namespace once the idea is mature enough. See, for example, Wikipedia:Making editing easier or Wikipedia:Workflow improvements (neither of which I've had much time for since, but that's another story ). For the broader discussion, I've found this page (VPI) acceptable enough. Enterprisey (talk!) 21:39, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Core Content Wikipedia
Why don't we create a new Wikimedia project, perhaps called 'Core Content Wikipedia' or 'Corewiki' or 'Wiki Essentials', that forks en-wiki entirely as is, with only one initial difference: WP:GNG reads A topic is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article when it has received significant and enduring coverage in high-quality academic sources
? All good things about en-wiki (CC license; pseudonymity; everyone can edit; consensus-based decision making; strongly elaborated system of PAG; i.e., all Wikipedia principles and practices as they currently exist) would be retained, but it would be a project dedicated solely to 'traditional' encyclopedic subjects, those which have received enduring attention from academia.
An example notability requirement could be, 'there need to be at least three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias dedicated to the subject'. In other words, really strict: it wouldn't just be no popular culture or no sports articles, but also no articles on recent events (or any other than truly pivotal historical events actually), no articles on politicians or journalists or academics or other potentially controversial figures (in fact, no articles on any other than the most prominent historical figures), no articles on counties, cities or schools, no articles on government agencies or minor/local political parties, no list articles, no name articles, no articles on every last obscure plant or animal (sub)species, no articles on every type of incomprehensible mathematical permutation, no articles on each cast member of Plato's dialogues, no articles on every supposed concept in Paracelsian alchemy –no articles, essentially, on most or all of the things of which it would not so long ago have been unthinkable that a serious encyclopedia would devote an entry to them.
This is not because it's not great to have articles on all of these things. That is great, it truly is. But it would be even greater to also have articles on core content that are of an altogether different level of quality.
The idea is that, because the sheer amount of articles would be reduced by such a huge factor (anyone hazard a guess as to the percentage?), the articles that would make the cut would benefit from an enormous increase in editorial and administrative attention. From recent changes to SPI, from AIV to ANI, the resources available would multiply. Imagine a project practically without BLPs, a seriously reduced rate of drama related to AP2 and other DS areas, and perhaps most enticingly to some, neither any form of cruft nor the endless disputes about it.
And if we're really lucky, maybe that's only where it starts. The quality of the core encyclopedic content will improve, attracting more readers. Google will prefer to display cc-wiki content where possible. The toxicity among editors will decrease (if only ever so slightly), leading more readers to start editing the thing and actually stay. Surely there will also be among those readers a lot of academics who got attracted to a new (but still pseudonymous, freewheeling, etc.) Wikipedia solely focusing on prominent academic topics. Maybe, just maybe, experts will finally come to regard the Wikipedia articles on 'their' subject as one of the things most worthy of their time and attention (in fact they already are, but for some reason academics just don't realize this yet). The general quality of cc-wiki might skyrocket to such an extent as to be incomparable to today's Wikipedia.
This is all of course assuming that a significant percentage of current en-wiki editors will make the move to cc-wiki. They will by no means all have to jump ship to make the editor/content ratio increase by a large factor, but a critical mass will still be needed. Once cc-wiki starts rolling, however, a lot of new editors will come in whom en-wiki would never have retained. I also think that a lot of us are already here for something like cc-wiki, but just have to deal with the reality that there's only en-wiki. Many will take the opportunity in a heartbeat.
A potential downside of the whole plan could be that en-wiki would initially be left with a smaller editor/content ratio, and perhaps an even smaller yet skilled editor/content ratio. But I think that this would only be very temporary, given the fact that interest in non-academic subjects will always remain high. It's in fact what made Wikipedia big in the first place, so I don't think it can really go wrong there. Initially there will be a lot of duplicate effort (perhaps the biggest drawback), but if all goes well we might gradually start redirecting en-wiki articles to their cc-wiki forks. It would eventually change the nature of en-wiki itself, which to an extent would also be relieved from some of the problems that come with core encyclopedic content (e.g., many content disputes could be resolved much quicker or even be avoided entirely if more experts were editing and patrolling the articles, and in any case en-wiki would be rid of these disputes together with the articles).
Sure, the whole point of forking core content articles to another project is to direct more attention and resources on them, which will always come at a cost for other types of articles. But I think there is good reason to believe that in the long term it could increase the general reputation of Wikimedia projects to such an extent that all projects would benefit: a rising tide lifts all boats. Having an online user-generated encyclopedia that is of truly high quality and a standard reference works for academics could be a real game changer, also for the WMF as a whole. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:17, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- We already do that within this project, at least in principle, via Wikipedia:Vital articles which lists the most important topics. And at a global level on meta:List of articles every Wikipedia should have. Created largely to incentivise article improvement for these core topics, but it doesn't attract too many editors. I would expect the new project to suffer from lack of dedicated editors. Any point in working for a stagnant project, with no growth? Further, academicians are always welcome to contribute here, and of course they work not only on very popular subjects but also on not-popular subjects. So, anyone wanting to improve articles on what they know would have to come to this project anyway. —CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 17:45, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- No. WP:VA is simply a selection of important topics. It's not a separate wiki that only contains articles on academic subjects and that actively excludes everything else. It's completely different both from a technical and from a community standpoint. Also note that even WP:VA5 with its 50,000 entries is a much more narrow list than the list of subjects for which three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias can be found; rather expect something like the 228,274 topics covered by Britannica. Inclusion would be based on notability rather than on a curated list like VA. But the essential problem with VA is that people look at WP:VA1 or WP:VA2 and get utterly discouraged by the sheer difficulty of improving even just one of these 100 articles. The proposal above has nothing to do with that at all: there is no intent whatsoever to 'rank' topics, and it's in fact primarily about the 228,174 non-VA2 articles. The goal here is to create a project where a broad range of encyclopedically minded editors would for the most part be editing the exact same articles as they are editing now, but without the gigantic overload created by the (6,561,351 - 228,274 =) 6,333,077 articles of little or no academic interest. It's all about eliminating that overload. Think just about what patrolling recent changes would look like. I believe it would enormously stimulate growth. Of course, you may personally not be interested to participate (many here won't), and that's totally fine. But perhaps others would. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:39, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- Apaugasma tends to have very thoughtful ideas so I'll read the proposal above once I'm home, but just to comment on the VA thing: It's an absolute mess in dire need of reform but without much interest from the community in maintaining it and thus without much drive to reform it.— Ixtal ( T / C ) ⁂ Join WP:FINANCE! 19:50, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- Ixtal is absolutely correct about VA. Doug Weller talk 10:42, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Couldn't agree more. Improving Vital article isn't hard because the broad topic are inherently 1000x harder than other topics, it's because there's a lack of will to do so in the first place. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:13, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have not read this proposal, but Vital Articles needs to die the death it should have died many years ago; it's hopeless. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- I disagree. Just because User:TCO made a stupid "debate" in 2011 (Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/Newsroom/Opinion desk/Vital articles debate/Archive) or that people spending hours and hours debating choices does not mean that the underlying concept of it is useless. I agree though that the Vital Article project as it is 2 month ago is borderingly close to inactivity and in the last 15 years nothing is really done about the Vital Articles other than just assessment level changes and such. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 23:35, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have not read this proposal, but Vital Articles needs to die the death it should have died many years ago; it's hopeless. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 19:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- Couldn't agree more. Improving Vital article isn't hard because the broad topic are inherently 1000x harder than other topics, it's because there's a lack of will to do so in the first place. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:13, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Ixtal is absolutely correct about VA. Doug Weller talk 10:42, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Apaugasma tends to have very thoughtful ideas so I'll read the proposal above once I'm home, but just to comment on the VA thing: It's an absolute mess in dire need of reform but without much interest from the community in maintaining it and thus without much drive to reform it.— Ixtal ( T / C ) ⁂ Join WP:FINANCE! 19:50, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- No. WP:VA is simply a selection of important topics. It's not a separate wiki that only contains articles on academic subjects and that actively excludes everything else. It's completely different both from a technical and from a community standpoint. Also note that even WP:VA5 with its 50,000 entries is a much more narrow list than the list of subjects for which three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias can be found; rather expect something like the 228,274 topics covered by Britannica. Inclusion would be based on notability rather than on a curated list like VA. But the essential problem with VA is that people look at WP:VA1 or WP:VA2 and get utterly discouraged by the sheer difficulty of improving even just one of these 100 articles. The proposal above has nothing to do with that at all: there is no intent whatsoever to 'rank' topics, and it's in fact primarily about the 228,174 non-VA2 articles. The goal here is to create a project where a broad range of encyclopedically minded editors would for the most part be editing the exact same articles as they are editing now, but without the gigantic overload created by the (6,561,351 - 228,274 =) 6,333,077 articles of little or no academic interest. It's all about eliminating that overload. Think just about what patrolling recent changes would look like. I believe it would enormously stimulate growth. Of course, you may personally not be interested to participate (many here won't), and that's totally fine. But perhaps others would. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:39, 6 August 2022 (UTC)
- How would this work? Where would the Admins etc come from? Doug Weller talk 10:43, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- From en-wiki. It would copy everything, including a large set of the editor base. Initially en-wiki admins would get sysop on simple request. Obviously it would need very broad enthusiasm, especially from users with much more experience and know-how than me, to even just get to a test phase. I'm just airing an idea. At this point I guess I'm mainly interested to know, why would this not be a good idea? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 12:33, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Because it wouldn't work at all. Your arguments all seem to be from the point of view of editors, rather than readers. In fact such a project would fail to attract either, and would be very low on search engine results. Who would even know about it? Insofar as some articles are improved on the new version, the existing WP article would not (if I've got the idea right) benefit from this. Both editors and readers look at the parts of WP that interest them, and never see the ones that don't (ok, if people choose to review "recent changes", that's their look-out). I suspect most readers look at both articles that would qualify for this scheme, and those that don't. I entirely agree that we are failing to improve our "core" content enough, but really there's no great difficulty for editors in finding the weak spots and working on them an article at a time (which is essentially what I do much of the time). As well as the "Vital articles", which I must say I never look at, there are also the wikiproject ratings, where a combination of high importance and low quality is a useful quide to weak spots. Really, even editors who exclusively edit "core" encyclopaedic stuff should be grateful for all the sports & popular culture, which vastly boosts WP's hits, & keeps us at the top of search engine results, ensuring our work is read. Johnbod (talk) 13:59, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Let me clarify. En-wiki articles would (gradually) be blanked-and-redirected to their cc-wiki forks. Readers would constantly be sent back and forth between the two. There would be a high level of integration, both from a technical and a community point of view. The interface would be almost identical, just enough to mark out you're looking at a cc-wiki article. Reader's familiarity with the site would be instant from the moment we want it to be (by redirecting a large number of articles).The purpose of having a separate wiki is to enable editors and admins who would like this to only spend time (patrolling, dealing with vandals and disruptive editors, community discussions, SPI, etc. etc.) on core content articles. This is not about incentivizing content editors to work more on (the weak spots in) core content, it's about allowing an entire project's resources (including editors who, say, spend all of their time doing anti-vandalism) to be solely focused on it. Yes, en-wiki will always attract more traffic and will continue to form the backbone of the WMF, but cc-wiki will also profit from that traffic by design. In the long term, en-wiki would in turn benefit from the enhanced reputation for reliability and quality brought on by cc-wiki. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:19, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Anyone who wants to work this way is already doing it. Cheers, · · · Peter Southwood (talk): 16:47, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Let me clarify. En-wiki articles would (gradually) be blanked-and-redirected to their cc-wiki forks. Readers would constantly be sent back and forth between the two. There would be a high level of integration, both from a technical and a community point of view. The interface would be almost identical, just enough to mark out you're looking at a cc-wiki article. Reader's familiarity with the site would be instant from the moment we want it to be (by redirecting a large number of articles).The purpose of having a separate wiki is to enable editors and admins who would like this to only spend time (patrolling, dealing with vandals and disruptive editors, community discussions, SPI, etc. etc.) on core content articles. This is not about incentivizing content editors to work more on (the weak spots in) core content, it's about allowing an entire project's resources (including editors who, say, spend all of their time doing anti-vandalism) to be solely focused on it. Yes, en-wiki will always attract more traffic and will continue to form the backbone of the WMF, but cc-wiki will also profit from that traffic by design. In the long term, en-wiki would in turn benefit from the enhanced reputation for reliability and quality brought on by cc-wiki. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:19, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Because it wouldn't work at all. Your arguments all seem to be from the point of view of editors, rather than readers. In fact such a project would fail to attract either, and would be very low on search engine results. Who would even know about it? Insofar as some articles are improved on the new version, the existing WP article would not (if I've got the idea right) benefit from this. Both editors and readers look at the parts of WP that interest them, and never see the ones that don't (ok, if people choose to review "recent changes", that's their look-out). I suspect most readers look at both articles that would qualify for this scheme, and those that don't. I entirely agree that we are failing to improve our "core" content enough, but really there's no great difficulty for editors in finding the weak spots and working on them an article at a time (which is essentially what I do much of the time). As well as the "Vital articles", which I must say I never look at, there are also the wikiproject ratings, where a combination of high importance and low quality is a useful quide to weak spots. Really, even editors who exclusively edit "core" encyclopaedic stuff should be grateful for all the sports & popular culture, which vastly boosts WP's hits, & keeps us at the top of search engine results, ensuring our work is read. Johnbod (talk) 13:59, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- From en-wiki. It would copy everything, including a large set of the editor base. Initially en-wiki admins would get sysop on simple request. Obviously it would need very broad enthusiasm, especially from users with much more experience and know-how than me, to even just get to a test phase. I'm just airing an idea. At this point I guess I'm mainly interested to know, why would this not be a good idea? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 12:33, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have a number of questions.
- Who would decide which are to be the "core content" (CC) articles?
- If an article is selected as a CC article, and copied over, it would contain a cumber of links to articles not yet (or which will never be) selected for CC, which would then become redlinks. Would the persin copying the article to CC then be responsible for making redirects back to main Wikipedia?
- Would there be a period where the same article existed in two places (normal Wikipedia and CC Wikipedia)?
- How would updates to one be mirrored back to the other?
- Who would decide that it was time for one copy to be redirected to the other, wnd which of the two would be retained?
- Would counter-vandalism volunteers (all the way from casuals spotting random additions of "poop" right up to admins able to block and/or protect) be willing to patrol in two places at once?
- If a user is blocked on one, would they also need to be separately blocked on the other?
- If the CC regulars resolve some policy change, would that need to be separately proposed on normal Wikipedia?
- I really do not think that this suggestion has any chance of being accepted, even if put to a full WP:RFC at WP:VPR. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:26, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Redrose64, here are some answers to your questions:
- 1. Notability guidelines (
significant and enduring coverage in high-quality academic sources
, see above) and editorial consensus. For edge cases we might create processes like Afi ('Articles for inclusion') and Afe ('Articles for exclusion'), somewhat analogous to AfC and AfD. - 2. Yes, editors would have to redirect links back to en-wiki. Probably a bot could help us with that.
- 3. Yes. All of these things would be decided by local consensus. As long as there are two articles, anyone could copy between them provided there's consensus for the edits and attribution is given. However, I imagine that editors who would fork an article would also put some work in it, so redirecting the en-wiki page to the cc-wiki fork should in most cases be a fairly straightforward decision. We would probably have to create a guideline which would outline legitimate reasons not to redirect (e.g., redirecting to POV forks should be avoided; in general the CC article would have to be actually better as measured by compliance with core content policy).
- 4. I hope so. Some might find it refreshing to be able to shift from one project to the other every now and then.
- 5. That's a tough call. It depends on the general level of integration between the two projects. I would favor that accounts are blocked in both, but there's room for disagreement there.
- 6. Likewise a question of how far we take the integration between the two projects. I would favor that at least initially, cc-wiki would not have its own policies but follow those of en-wiki (except for the modified WP:GNG obviously, as well as some other necessarily differing guidelines). In time it would perhaps be natural for the two projects to develop their own policies, though it would probably be wise to keep core content policy as well as basic conduct policy the same.
- 1. Notability guidelines (
- Before even proposing there would need to be a lot more enthusiasm for it than currently seen in this thread. On the other hand, at this time I'm not only polling whether such enthusiasm exists, but also looking to actively disprove the idea as not workable. The above has mainly been clarification. Once it's clear what's meant (BD2412 nicely summarizes it below), it will perhaps be easier to tell precisely why it won't work. From your questions I gather that your main concern is duplicate effort, is that right? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 22:14, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- Not just duplication of effort, but there would apparently be a requirement for extra effort. As things stand, once I have finished with watchlist checking and general housekeeping, I don't have enough time to add all the fresh content that I would like. I've already had to largely give up on Commons. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:22, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- I'm slightly confused as to what the point of this is. If we're envisaging having some subset of the most core en.wiki articles hived off into a new core.wiki, but have this wiki written by the same people and virtually seamlessly integrated with en.wiki, how is that not just en.wiki with extra steps? If there are different policies and guidelines, why would en.wiki accept some other wiki's ideas of what our most core articles should look like? And why would I as an editor want to check two separate watchlists, and learn two different sets of policies? Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 11:39, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Caeciliusinhorto, I seem to have some trouble communicating both precisely what it is supposed to be and what it would be good for. See my answer to GhostInTheMachine below. For those wishing to focus solely on supporting the maintenance of core content, it wouldn't be extra steps, but a lot less steps. If 1/10th of current editors and admins would work (patrol, help resolve conflicts, etc.) a wiki with 1/25th the amount of articles, the resources per article would more than double. With 1/5th of editors, the amount of available resources would be up to five times higher. Yes, for those wishing to work the two wikis equally there would be no immediate advantage, and some possible annoyances like having two separate watchlists –though more work on m:Special:GlobalWatchlist might well eliminate this particular nuisance; some might also like having separate watchlists for different kinds of content. Some more wp:rules to get familiar with too, though as I indicated above policy would be largely the same and therefore only cause minimal extra trouble.But it's a big thing, really, to split out core academic content from other content into two different wikis. En.wiki would become a different animal entirely. It wouldn't need to accept another wiki's ideas of how core articles should look like, because it wouldn't have core articles. Each project would have its own editors, with their own preferred focus. The beautiful thing is that even with a lot less editors on cc.wiki, core articles would still hugely benefit from this split. Unsourced or poorly sourced additions, POV-pushing, all these things which are not clear-cut vandalism and that tend to slip through the nets of RC-patrol, would actually be caught and reverted. Content disputes around core content would actually get mediated. Those working on core content would less easily be distracted by non-core content, the different wiki forming a psychological barrier. It's a technical and psychological way to direct resources to the most important articles. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:46, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Redrose64, here are some answers to your questions:
- I see exactly what this editor is aiming for, and I think it is actually a brilliant idea. Have a separate wiki for the topics that are actually the most important topics, but integrated into the existing English Wikipedia so that the transition from one to the other is barely distinguishable. The criteria for inclusion for the new wiki would be "serious academic coverage", which would include a few hundred-thousand current Wikipedia topics, and excludes millions, along a defensible line of division. BD2412 T 19:42, 7 August 2022 (UTC)
- An interesting thought, but we already have Vital articles, Featured articles, Good articles,
A-Class articles, B-Class articles and C-Class articles. I suspect that these different classifications already confuse many of the readers. I am not sure that it would help to also have Core articles as a further type of classification, even if the articles were to stay within the same wiki — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 07:27, 8 August 2022 (UTC)- Yes, if they would not be on a separate wiki they would just be another confusing class. But the proposal is for a separate wiki, not a classification as such. The goal is not at all to make some kind of selection of articles like VA, FA, GA etc. The goal is to split out core content articles to a different wiki with its own recent changes feed, administrative noticeboards, technical resources, and –to certain extent– community. The goal is to allow editors and admins who wish this to exclusively support (not only work on!) core content. This is not possible at this time: anyone who would like to support this online encyclopedia has no choice but to also deal with the 6 million+ articles of little or no academic interest. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:46, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Projects like the OP's suggestion already exist. Wikipedia's immediate predecessor was Nupedia which had lots of cautious and careful curation but failed to produce much. And there's Scholarpedia which is so exclusive that I suppose most of us would not be allowed to touch it. I just checked and they have created one new article this year. Last year, they created nothing. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:13, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- None of the projects you name even remotely resemble the proposed project. Inclusion would be based on modified notability guidelines, and everything else would be exactly the same as en.wiki. No cautious and careful curation, no exclusivity as to who can edit or not. Just classic wp:bold and wp:consensus based editing. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:46, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think one problem is that although articles like 5α-Androst-2-ene-17-one would clearly not be core content, it is usually rather hard to decide which articles are core and which aren't; and one virtue of wikipedia is that we have articles on, for example, every King of England, not just the important ones, as most conventional encylopedias usually do. Sm8900 (talk) 14:45, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- There is no universal definition of what makes something a core article. For all I know, an endocrinologist might consider 5α-Androst-2-ene-17-one to be a core article. In theory, it would make sense to curate which articles are the most important for a particular subject. But that quickly leads one to reinventing the portal system; I don't know if I would call portals a failure, but they're certainly less popular than they used to be, and many (most?) have not been maintained. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:10, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- @RoySmith: you seem to misunderstand the nature of the proposal. There also is no universal definition of what makes something a Wikipedia article. It's based on notability requirements which are discussed by editors on a case-to-case basis. Core.wiki would work in the exact same way, simply having different notability requirements (
significant and enduring coverage in high-quality academic sources
, perhaps translating to the existence of three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias). Articles that meet them would not form some kind of curated list, but be split to an entirely separate wiki, with its own technical resources, noticeboards, and community. - @Sm8900: yes, precisely what does and what does not meet core.wiki notability requirements would undoubtedly be contentious, just like it is for the current en.wiki. En.wiki would still exist though. All kings of England, and so many other things which it is great to have coverage on, would still find their natural place on en.wiki. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:46, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- @RoySmith: you seem to misunderstand the nature of the proposal. There also is no universal definition of what makes something a Wikipedia article. It's based on notability requirements which are discussed by editors on a case-to-case basis. Core.wiki would work in the exact same way, simply having different notability requirements (
- There is no universal definition of what makes something a core article. For all I know, an endocrinologist might consider 5α-Androst-2-ene-17-one to be a core article. In theory, it would make sense to curate which articles are the most important for a particular subject. But that quickly leads one to reinventing the portal system; I don't know if I would call portals a failure, but they're certainly less popular than they used to be, and many (most?) have not been maintained. -- RoySmith (talk) 15:10, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- To add, there's also Simple English Wikipedia, for which being essentially a separate WP focused on core articles may be part of its founding principles. Instead of jumping right to a separate WM branch as the solution, maybe the VA reform thread below is the place to incubate some of these ideas. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:18, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Editors choose the topics they want to spend their time on, even when doing technical or administrative work, and for many of us that choice is governed by our views of what constitutes the core of the encyclopedia. So, I think in a way the two projects (core content, and regular) already exist, virtually and in parallel. Also, I think the strength of Wikipedia isn't in this "core content" (after all, these are topics on which good-quality, accessible overviews already exist), but in the "inner periphery": topics with a dozen papers published, where Wikipedia is the first reference work that provides a summary. Uanfala (talk) 15:27, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Good points. In so far as core content is worth improving though, it would be greatly facilitated by also having a real rather than only a virtual split. Both technically and psychologically, there are many advantages. What are the disadvantages? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:46, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Apaugasma: To clarify, for an obvious example of an article that would meet the "core content" criteria, in your proposal would articles like Oxygen and History of Spain and Appendicitis have both a cc-pedia and a wikipedia article, developing in parallel and possibly copying improvements from each other? Or would all core content articles ultimately be removed from Wikipedia to the new site? Would the new site have an AfD-like process where articles on notable topics failing the required level of academic coverage would be sent back to Wikipedia? I assume it would have disambiguation pages and indices and those sorts of structural tools? BD2412 T 18:27, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- There would be two articles as long as and from the moment that there would be no consensus to redirect the en.wiki page to the core.wiki fork. Such redirects could be boldly done, reverted, and discussed. Generally I would expect redirects to go through, in most cases probably without there ever being two articles. Not redirecting or undoing a redirect would be appropriate only when there's no consensus that the fork is an improvement. Yes, in the long term the goal would be that all core content articles would be forked and redirected, in effect removing them from en.wiki. Yes, the new site would have an AfD-like process exactly as you describe (perhaps it's important to note though that the amount of articles needing discussion would be much lower, and negative outcomes much less embittering since it 'only' involves going back to en.wiki, not the cancellation of any work done). Yes, it would have its own dab pages and categories, probably often linking to and containing pages on en.wiki. Since it is essentially a content fork of en.wiki, it would be highly integrated with it at all levels. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 21:14, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Apaugasma: To clarify, for an obvious example of an article that would meet the "core content" criteria, in your proposal would articles like Oxygen and History of Spain and Appendicitis have both a cc-pedia and a wikipedia article, developing in parallel and possibly copying improvements from each other? Or would all core content articles ultimately be removed from Wikipedia to the new site? Would the new site have an AfD-like process where articles on notable topics failing the required level of academic coverage would be sent back to Wikipedia? I assume it would have disambiguation pages and indices and those sorts of structural tools? BD2412 T 18:27, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- Good points. In so far as core content is worth improving though, it would be greatly facilitated by also having a real rather than only a virtual split. Both technically and psychologically, there are many advantages. What are the disadvantages? ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:46, 8 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have questions regarding notability. What do you mean by recent and what would meet the chopping block? Chronologically speaking, 9/11 is recent, as are the resulting wars. I think virtually all of us, regardless of political leanings, can regard these - along with the likes of the 2008 stock crash and COVID - as monumental. Furthermore, I am curious about the proportion of scholarship and its importance. Regarding biographies, Kierkegaard has had a good deal of scholarship written - probably upwards of 100 monographs - and yet in the grand notice of human history - or even his century - he is less than a footnote. I wouldn't even consider him "core" to philosophy. What, then, is his place - and others of similar status? DMT Biscuit (talk) 00:32, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- With 'recent events' above I was thinking more about the Killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri or the July 2022 United States floods than about your examples, which probably are of historical import. But just ask the question, can you find three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias? 9/11 or the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, probably. COVID-19, if not now then likely in a very short time? Kierkegaard, without a single doubt. But think of the difference between Plato and Simmias of Thebes. I very much doubt you would find three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias about the latter, although you would find such on the Phaedo, in which he appears as a character. So we would drop a lot of historical figures (also, e.g., Lubaba bint Ubayd Allah, and probably her husband Abbas ibn Ali too, though obviously not her father-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib), just not someone like Kierkegaard, who despite being a minor figure still is part of the Western canon (question: would the latter article make the cut?). Surely there will be a lot of edge cases, but it probably is a bit broader than you first assumed. Above all, it is possible to draw a practical line on what constitutes WP:SIGCOV in academic sources. The objective existence of such coverage is what makes discussions around inclusion on Wikipedia reasonable. It would be no different for CC wiki. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 01:19, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- "can you find three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias" But that's not what Wikipedia is.. if anything were are exactly the opposite. We are an editable encyclopedia by amateurs (or rather "open to anyone" amateur or not) and a work in progress. It is exactly what makes us distinct and thus successful. If we adhered to a standard of "scholarly encyclopedias" (whatever that might be), we would not be needed at all. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:17, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- Citizendium is what you are looking for. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 12:19, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:We aren't Citizendium. Core.wiki would not be Citizendium. There would be no
use of real names
, no (authorized)expert editors
, nodivision of power
, nocitable articles
, noadvisory group
, nopolicy decisions by representatives
, no abandoning the requirement ofciting sources
, no article inclusion based onmaintainability
rather than notability, no"family friendly"
policy, nozero tolerance for problem users
, noavoiding acronyms
. Core.wiki would differ from Citizendium in all relevant ways in which en.wiki differs from it. Core.wiki would be editable by amateurs, and would in fact be highly welcoming of amateurs: there are many things to do apart from writing specialized content, and all help is appreciated. Obviously, core.wiki would be just as much a work in progress. It wouldn't adhere to the standards of scholarly encyclopedias, it would take the existence of entries in them as a sign of academic notability. This is no different from en.wiki taking the existence of RS as a sign of general notability: it doesn't mean that en.wiki adheres to the same standards as these RS, or indeed itself is a RS. Core.wiki would not be a scholarly encyclopedia. - Core.wiki may be a bad name. It may remind of all kinds of failed projects, even though it doesn't resemble them in the slightest. But please try to look past that, and evaluate the proposal for what it is. At its core (pun intended), it would be a part of en.wiki, and would share all the same values. The separate wiki is not to try and build an encyclopedia with completely different values (like Nupedia, Citizendium, Scholarpedia and what not), it is simply to enable a technical and psychological means to direct more resources to those en.wiki articles which meet a certain level of academic notability. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:29, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- Apaugasma, I think here's an alternative: improving Wikipedia's core articles on Wikipedia :) Anyways, I do agree that the Core wiki would be and will be different from Citizendium in many ways, but I think that both of them are similar in that they are forking Wikipedia. This is a very, very bad idea, due to the CC BY-SA license and that all the contributions to the Core wiki can be simply copied or paraphrased back to Wikipedia, effectively rendering the Core wiki useless. The Core wiki would also be a poor wiki to work as a staging ground as well, as we already have the Draft: namespace for that. A lot of what you are proposing is quite the same as what I'm doing at WikiProject Vital Articles, and I think it would be far more interesting and effective if you apply this proposal to our WikiProject instead. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 13:39, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- In fact, I think the Vital articles WikiProject is the place for your proposal to flourish. I couldn't think of a better place to test your philosophy out.
The general quality of cc-wiki might skyrocket to such an extent as to be incomparable to today's Wikipedia
, yes, that's what we are aiming for with the 1000 Vital GA goal! CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 13:41, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- In fact, I think the Vital articles WikiProject is the place for your proposal to flourish. I couldn't think of a better place to test your philosophy out.
- Apaugasma, I think here's an alternative: improving Wikipedia's core articles on Wikipedia :) Anyways, I do agree that the Core wiki would be and will be different from Citizendium in many ways, but I think that both of them are similar in that they are forking Wikipedia. This is a very, very bad idea, due to the CC BY-SA license and that all the contributions to the Core wiki can be simply copied or paraphrased back to Wikipedia, effectively rendering the Core wiki useless. The Core wiki would also be a poor wiki to work as a staging ground as well, as we already have the Draft: namespace for that. A lot of what you are proposing is quite the same as what I'm doing at WikiProject Vital Articles, and I think it would be far more interesting and effective if you apply this proposal to our WikiProject instead. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 13:39, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- Wikipedia:We aren't Citizendium. Core.wiki would not be Citizendium. There would be no
- Citizendium is what you are looking for. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 12:19, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- "can you find three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias" But that's not what Wikipedia is.. if anything were are exactly the opposite. We are an editable encyclopedia by amateurs (or rather "open to anyone" amateur or not) and a work in progress. It is exactly what makes us distinct and thus successful. If we adhered to a standard of "scholarly encyclopedias" (whatever that might be), we would not be needed at all. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:17, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- @DMT Biscuit, ouch dude! And I thought I was catty about philosophy! As a non-Dane, non-Christian Existentialist, that non-hurts me somewhere deep! SamuelRiv (talk) 02:28, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- With 'recent events' above I was thinking more about the Killing of Ayman al-Zawahiri or the July 2022 United States floods than about your examples, which probably are of historical import. But just ask the question, can you find three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias? 9/11 or the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, probably. COVID-19, if not now then likely in a very short time? Kierkegaard, without a single doubt. But think of the difference between Plato and Simmias of Thebes. I very much doubt you would find three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias about the latter, although you would find such on the Phaedo, in which he appears as a character. So we would drop a lot of historical figures (also, e.g., Lubaba bint Ubayd Allah, and probably her husband Abbas ibn Ali too, though obviously not her father-in-law Ali ibn Abi Talib), just not someone like Kierkegaard, who despite being a minor figure still is part of the Western canon (question: would the latter article make the cut?). Surely there will be a lot of edge cases, but it probably is a bit broader than you first assumed. Above all, it is possible to draw a practical line on what constitutes WP:SIGCOV in academic sources. The objective existence of such coverage is what makes discussions around inclusion on Wikipedia reasonable. It would be no different for CC wiki. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 01:19, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
- Apaugasma's idea is interesting and on the right track. I agree with those who are saying it's better to do this within this existing wiki rather than on a separate wiki. "Core Content" could be like a stamp or status that is given to an article, just like FA or VA. Whatever the different/better rules/practices that would be on a hypothetical ccwiki, we could apply those rules/practices to CC articles on enwiki. For example -- just thinking out loud here -- the community could choose to create a "Core Content" General Sanctions area, with a process for selecting CC articles, and then apply "special rules" to those articles, like 1RR or Consensus Required or Enforced BRD or -- my favorite -- sourcing expectations (like we do now for certain articles with WP:MEDRS or WP:APLRS). One way to do this might be to reform VA into this: maybe get rid of the levels, and create a "VA" GS. Or, a new WikiProject could be created alongside VA/FA -- I see the appeal in CC being a combination of VA and FA, where articles become CC both based on an evaluation of the importance of the topic, and the quality of the article. Current VA/FAs could be the initial CC articles. And then let our readers know with some prominent marker when they're reading a "CC" article. It would be no issue to create a special recent changes feed just for CC articles (I had one for VA articles because I only wanted to patrol "important" articles), the WikiProject talk page (or subpage) can be the noticeboard for such articles and can be monitored by interested admins/editors, people can make bots that only work on those articles, we can have AFD/RM/etc. feeds just for those articles... basically everything a fork can do can be done inside the existing wiki, and then we don't have to worry about splitting readership, page views, branding, search ranking, and the other disadvantages of a separate wiki. I think it's very much worth doing: particularly so that editors who only want to focus on "important" articles can have the tools to do so. Levivich 19:33, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
- I came upon this idea while patrolling recent changes (RC), being struck by how little of what appears on this feed is core encyclopedic content. The sheer amount of changes there renders it impossible to review them all, so if there were some way to only monitor changes made to core content, that would already be a significant improvement. I was thinking of something more radical, where other community efforts geared towards maintaining articles (AIV, RPP, ANEW, ANI, SPI, etc.) would also be split out, but you're probably right that some of this can also be realized without the many disadvantages of creating a separate wiki, and RC is likely the most important anyway.
- I very much like your idea of simply creating a separate status for Core Content (CC), which may then be used on this wiki to create a different technical and –to a certain extent– community approach. I would still base CC status on an academic notability guideline though (with AfD-like discussions over inclusion/exclusion), and not link it up either with FA or VA (CC status should be much broader than both). Special GS-like restrictions also sound like a bad idea: the goal is not to create special expectations for CC articles, but to be able to focus patrollers' and admins' attention on them so they better adhere to existing expectations (yes, RS! we should revert on sight what doesn't adhere to it, being very nice & friendly and avoiding biting of course; but both determining whether a source is RS and educating new editors about RS takes much time, and will be significantly easier with a reduced RC feed). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:48, 13 August 2022 (UTC)
- If WP:WikiProject Core Content were blue, it'd be a good place to discuss the criteria for {{hidden category}} Category:Core Content, which could be used to make an RC feed (for starters). Levivich 05:05, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- Seems like a good idea to me. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 05:20, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- As OP, I think Apaugasma should have the honor of page creation if they want it. Please ping me if you create it Apa, I'd be happy to help get it set up. Levivich 19:16, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Levivich, thanks for the offer, but I'm not planning to spend much time on this. If you really think it's a good idea and/or find some other editors who would like to work on it, please do go ahead and create the page (I've put it on my watchlist). I've read somewhere that it's okay to only propose a solution to a problem without actually solving it, and since most ideas are bad, if it truly turns out to be a good one maybe I've already done my part. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- I would suggest otherwise. Do follow with the proposal from the beginning for a while. Most people except you won't be interested at making your vision a reality, and that's why most proposals are dead from the start. It isn't because the proposals are genuinely bad, it is more that the ideas don't have anyone to be nurtured. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 00:19, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Levivich, thanks for the offer, but I'm not planning to spend much time on this. If you really think it's a good idea and/or find some other editors who would like to work on it, please do go ahead and create the page (I've put it on my watchlist). I've read somewhere that it's okay to only propose a solution to a problem without actually solving it, and since most ideas are bad, if it truly turns out to be a good one maybe I've already done my part. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- As OP, I think Apaugasma should have the honor of page creation if they want it. Please ping me if you create it Apa, I'd be happy to help get it set up. Levivich 19:16, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Seems like a good idea to me. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 05:20, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- If WP:WikiProject Core Content were blue, it'd be a good place to discuss the criteria for {{hidden category}} Category:Core Content, which could be used to make an RC feed (for starters). Levivich 05:05, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- I disagree that this is a good idea. Creating a separate encyclopedia that lacks articles about Jerusalem, Paris and Rome (just cities after all), and no articles about Abraham Lincoln and Adolph Hitler (just politicians after all, and one is highly controversial) and no articles about the Beatles or Elvis Presley or Charlie Chaplin or Merlyl Streep (just pop culture figures after all) and no articles about the KGB or the CIA (just government agencies after all), is actually a very bad idea. This project could be called BoringPedia or UnpopularPedia or Snob-o-Pedia, and I would never edit it. Cullen328 (talk) 05:45, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Cullen328: most or all of the subjects that you name would be included. Why do you think that there would be no three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias, not to mention tons of papers in academic journals, on Jerusalem, Paris, Rome, Abraham Lincoln, Charlie Chaplin, or Hitler? I'm sure there are more than three –probably more than ten– monographs on the KGB and the CIA. Nor is it a coincidence that all the subjects you name would actually be included in 'BoringPedia': what catches the interest of academics often is quite interesting in and of itself, if only because of its long-term significance. To be honest, I had never expected so much anti-intellectualism on Wikipedia as I've encountered in this thread. Anyway, the proposal has since shifted to the idea of creating a 'Core Content' status rather than a separate encyclopedia (see Levivich's post just above). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 06:51, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- The problem isn't about a perceived "intellectualism" of the Core Content suggestion, but that it comes across as an attempt to duplicate or split what we presently have. Over the thirteen years that I've been around, I recall that there have been a number of suggestions to create parallel Wikipedias for different audiences. One of them - from less than a year ago - was to create pages in multiple languages but still be within English Wikipedia, which totally ignored the existence of Wikipedia in other languages. Most recently was a suggestion that there should be different Wikipedias for American English and British English (as if they were the only two forms of the language). The only proposal that seriously made it was before my time, Simple English Wikipedia, way back in 2003. Basically: we see the proposal outlined in this thread as an unnecessary waste of effort when the encyclopedia as it stands has so much more work yet to do on it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:37, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- Yes, negative experience with past ideas that were superficially similar is another major reason for some of the knee jerk reactions here. Nothing is going to happen if editors can't look beyond that. You're right about the duplication of effort, but I think Levivich's suggestion to create a 'Core Content' status rather than a separate encyclopedia might address that. Because the AfD-like discussions over inclusion would still produce considerable extra effort I remain hesitant. But I also still think that editors, provided they have the time and energy and provided they understand the idea for what it is, should ponder it a bit. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:17, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- The problem isn't about a perceived "intellectualism" of the Core Content suggestion, but that it comes across as an attempt to duplicate or split what we presently have. Over the thirteen years that I've been around, I recall that there have been a number of suggestions to create parallel Wikipedias for different audiences. One of them - from less than a year ago - was to create pages in multiple languages but still be within English Wikipedia, which totally ignored the existence of Wikipedia in other languages. Most recently was a suggestion that there should be different Wikipedias for American English and British English (as if they were the only two forms of the language). The only proposal that seriously made it was before my time, Simple English Wikipedia, way back in 2003. Basically: we see the proposal outlined in this thread as an unnecessary waste of effort when the encyclopedia as it stands has so much more work yet to do on it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:37, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Cullen328: most or all of the subjects that you name would be included. Why do you think that there would be no three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias, not to mention tons of papers in academic journals, on Jerusalem, Paris, Rome, Abraham Lincoln, Charlie Chaplin, or Hitler? I'm sure there are more than three –probably more than ten– monographs on the KGB and the CIA. Nor is it a coincidence that all the subjects you name would actually be included in 'BoringPedia': what catches the interest of academics often is quite interesting in and of itself, if only because of its long-term significance. To be honest, I had never expected so much anti-intellectualism on Wikipedia as I've encountered in this thread. Anyway, the proposal has since shifted to the idea of creating a 'Core Content' status rather than a separate encyclopedia (see Levivich's post just above). ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 06:51, 14 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Apaugasma, I think it would help if you spent more time articulating the problem. I think I understand your proposed solution pretty well, but I don't understand what the real problem is. For example, is it:
- When I go to pages like Special:RecentChanges, it's full of so much stuff I don't care about that I can't even find the few edits that I would care about.
- Everybody's distracted by subjects about things I don't care about, and the articles I care about being neglected.
- or something else? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:11, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- The problem is simply that there's no way for editors who would like this to focus maintenance efforts like patrolling RC on core encyclopedic content (note that this is not 'what I personally care about': there are objective criteria for determining what belongs to it, and these same criteria guarantee that is corresponds to what is traditionally considered 'encyclopedic'). Anyone who's ever patrolled RC knows that there are way too many changes flagged as potentially problematic to spend much time at thoroughly checking each one of them. Most of the time only obvious vandalism gets reverted, and even that sometimes slips through the net. This lack of time also regularly causes patrollers to unintentionally wp:bite new editors. Nor is RC the only place where editors have no choice but to also deal with the maintenance load of 6,000,000+ articles of little or no academic interest.Listen, if I'm the only one to see this as a problem, that's fine. I just wished to air an idea, but I'm not the type of editor to implement this kind of thing anyway. I'll continue contributing in the ways that I can. Watch al-Mufaddal ibn Umar al-Ju'fi, I'm writing something up to blue-link that. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:09, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- There is Special:Watchlist and Special:Recentchangeslinked, and I use both to patrol the articles I personally consider important. I have not done RC patrol for more than a decade, and usually just ignore most of the other six million articles. Anyone is free to watch only core articles. A category would make it easier to do, but there is no need for your proposed fork. —Kusma (talk) 19:43, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- I of course use Special:Watchlist too, but that's unrelated. It's about RC patrol and other general maintenance areas. You don't do RC patrol anymore, but surely you regularly see RC patrollers coming by at the articles you watch? Imagine that they would revert all bad edits rather than only obvious vandalism, with accurate, helpful and polite edsums, and patient explanations at the reverted editor's talk. Sure, that's utopian, but there are ways to get closer to that ideal. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:04, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- WikiProject Medicine has used Special:Recentchangeslinked for years. Make yourself page that links to all the articles you think would be interesting to yourself (or another group), and then use RCLinked on the page. Volunteer-me looks at this focused version most days. It's usually just a quick glance to make sure that nothing unusual is happening, but it's easy to do, and it's a way of focusing maintenance efforts on the encyclopedic content that I am most interested in. (Also, since my preferred version shows only editors with a bit of experience, then I wouldn't see much highlighted. Being logged out is the biggest factor in in the "potentially problematic" calculation.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- Again, it's not about what you or I are personally interested in, it's about objectively encyclopedic content. It's not about the 5,000 articles that relate to my topic of interest, but about c. 500,000 articles which need continuous monitoring from all patrollers. It's about allowing these patrollers to be more efficient by giving them the choice to cut out 6,000,000 articles. If only a third of them choose to do this, the patrolling of core content will still be four times as efficient. It's about the numbers. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:05, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- So make the list of 500,000 articles instead of 5,000? Then the patrollers who want to check those selected articles can do so, and you'll also get help from the patrollers who want to do everything. I'm not seeing the downside. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:15, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
- Again, it's not about what you or I are personally interested in, it's about objectively encyclopedic content. It's not about the 5,000 articles that relate to my topic of interest, but about c. 500,000 articles which need continuous monitoring from all patrollers. It's about allowing these patrollers to be more efficient by giving them the choice to cut out 6,000,000 articles. If only a third of them choose to do this, the patrolling of core content will still be four times as efficient. It's about the numbers. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:05, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- WikiProject Medicine has used Special:Recentchangeslinked for years. Make yourself page that links to all the articles you think would be interesting to yourself (or another group), and then use RCLinked on the page. Volunteer-me looks at this focused version most days. It's usually just a quick glance to make sure that nothing unusual is happening, but it's easy to do, and it's a way of focusing maintenance efforts on the encyclopedic content that I am most interested in. (Also, since my preferred version shows only editors with a bit of experience, then I wouldn't see much highlighted. Being logged out is the biggest factor in in the "potentially problematic" calculation.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:37, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- I of course use Special:Watchlist too, but that's unrelated. It's about RC patrol and other general maintenance areas. You don't do RC patrol anymore, but surely you regularly see RC patrollers coming by at the articles you watch? Imagine that they would revert all bad edits rather than only obvious vandalism, with accurate, helpful and polite edsums, and patient explanations at the reverted editor's talk. Sure, that's utopian, but there are ways to get closer to that ideal. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 20:04, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- There is Special:Watchlist and Special:Recentchangeslinked, and I use both to patrol the articles I personally consider important. I have not done RC patrol for more than a decade, and usually just ignore most of the other six million articles. Anyone is free to watch only core articles. A category would make it easier to do, but there is no need for your proposed fork. —Kusma (talk) 19:43, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- The problem is simply that there's no way for editors who would like this to focus maintenance efforts like patrolling RC on core encyclopedic content (note that this is not 'what I personally care about': there are objective criteria for determining what belongs to it, and these same criteria guarantee that is corresponds to what is traditionally considered 'encyclopedic'). Anyone who's ever patrolled RC knows that there are way too many changes flagged as potentially problematic to spend much time at thoroughly checking each one of them. Most of the time only obvious vandalism gets reverted, and even that sometimes slips through the net. This lack of time also regularly causes patrollers to unintentionally wp:bite new editors. Nor is RC the only place where editors have no choice but to also deal with the maintenance load of 6,000,000+ articles of little or no academic interest.Listen, if I'm the only one to see this as a problem, that's fine. I just wished to air an idea, but I'm not the type of editor to implement this kind of thing anyway. I'll continue contributing in the ways that I can. Watch al-Mufaddal ibn Umar al-Ju'fi, I'm writing something up to blue-link that. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 19:09, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
I have a couple of questions. First, based on the criteria "there need to be at least three monographs or entries in scholarly encyclopedias dedicated to the subject" wouldn't the core content be biased towards Western culture, white people and males? I'm sure that there are plenty of works allowing for the inclusion of Bob Dylan (pop culture) and W. G. Grace (sports) but rejecting Rachel Hamilton and Eva Aariak. One of Wikipedia's strengths is that by not being traditional, it allows for subjects that are less well covered. Second question, what is your intended audience for the core content? Here's the top 100 viewed articles for July and Wikipedia:Popular pages. Both show a lot of articles that would not be in the core content. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 07:24, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
- 1. Yes, it would inherit that bias. Academia is slowly catching up too though. Also remember that as an encyclopedia we aren't supposed to be trailblazers.
- 2. None in particular. Literature on important subjects always gets small readerships. Generally speaking, the more important (measured by long-term significance) a subject is, the less readers it gets. That's simply because most of the time, people like to read light. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not make the subjects of light reading more important than the subjects of academic literature. I find it remarkable, by the way, that our second most viewed article is Cleopatra, which obviously is core content. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 13:36, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Core Content created
The idea has now evolved to creating a 'Core Content' status on the English Wikipedia, which would be tracked with a hidden category Category:Core content, and may be used in various yet to be determined ways (starting with an adapted RC feed). Those interested in developing the idea can do so at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Core Content. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:05, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- What's the difference between "core content" and WP:Vital Articles? casualdejekyll 17:21, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
"Sources" namespace
Not sure how in-demand something like this would be, hence the discussion here before potentially making it an actual proposal: the general idea is a tertiary namespace to article-space (with Talk: being the secondary namespace) that would basically just be a page for collecting sources relevant to the article-space page the Sources: page is connected to. Ideally a sortable table, potentially broken into categories (for topics that need it), but additions would use the standard citation templates ({{cite_web}}, et al.) Obviously the quote
field for the cite template would provide some context for each individual source listed, but there would also be a comment column for giving any additional notes/ideas for using the source in the article.
The sources listed could be duplicative of sources already used in the article (it would not be an error to have a article-space source listed on the Sources: page; it would also not be an error to have a source that says fundamentally the same thing, say CNN vs. The New York Times). The sources could also be ones that support statements not already made in the article (i.e. someone knows a source would be useful in article X, but doesn't have the time to write prose to use it, but wants to leave it for any editor who might happen upon the article and be looking for ways to improve it). Currently sources can be discussed on the talk page, but they are often spread out, and can get lost to the archives for truly busy topics. As this namespace would be just data basically (and sortable by source date/addition date/source/etc) it should be useful.
The fully realized implementation of this idea would add another tab next to Article and Talk in the desktop UI: Sources. This page would not have its own talk page, presumably discussion of the sources would still continue on the normal Talk page. Thoughts/ideas? (Apologies if this has been discussed before, I checked the perennial proposals and did a search). —Locke Cole • t • c 04:04, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- This is needlessly complicated and would cause a huge amount of issues for no real benefits. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:00, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Agreed. Doug Weller talk 08:35, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Can you elaborate on the "huge amount of issues"? The benefits were explained above, I can try to give a better explanation if you didn't understand that one. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Sources could (already) be included in Wikidata. If you want to add a dump of sources as an external links section in an article, or just add to talk page. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- As I indicated
[c]urrently sources can be discussed on the talk page, but they are often spread out, and can get lost to the archives for truly busy topics
. Wikidata might be an option, but the idea is to put something front and center that is easily accessible as a repository for sources for each article. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- As I indicated
- If we move sources out of the article, it should not be to a page serving only that article, but to a BibTeX-style database for all articles. Keeping the sources in the article wikitext is probably superior in practice, though, so this isn't worth the massive effort. —Kusma (talk) 10:49, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole Can you explain more what you would do with a list of sources? To give you some ideas 10 research tools every PhD student needs (studyinternational.com)
- @Kusma I like the idea of a BibTex database, but I agree the article is where refs should be. Is there any way of finding out where a reference is used in Wikipedia? I have posted on Wikidata help about "Sources could (already) be included in Wikidata." as I couldn't find the sources there.Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 16:06, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
Can you explain more what you would do with a list of sources?
Use it as a starting point for looking for things not currently covered by an article, since another editor would have to have been aware of the source and either read it or skimmed it enough to summarize it. When I was working on an article recently, I came across dozens of sources that would be relevant to the article, but for the writing I was doing, I didn't need them. If I could have a place to save those sources for future editors so they're easily accessible (from the article' Sources: page this idea suggests) then future editors may quickly find what they're looking for when they want to expand the article in the future. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)- @Locke Cole: That sounds like the problem {{Refideas}} is meant to solve? –MJL ‐Talk‐☖ 20:41, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- My idea was just for an area for collecting sources in general, not necessarily just the ones in the article (though I like the idea you're talking about as a bonus). The idea is to make article research simpler by allowing editors to note unused sources (with citation templates/quotes/notes) for future editors to have available. —Locke Cole • t • c 16:30, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- What I do often is just to add relevant but unused sources to the article itself, in the 'Further reading'/'Sources'/'Bibliography' section (depending on what's the most relevant designator; if there is no such section I create one). One of the major uses that I myself made of Wikipedia long before I started editing it is as the go-to place for finding reliable sources on a subject. Very often this is far more useful than the article itself. Readers should readily find such unused sources on the page itself, so it sounds like a bad idea to relegate them to a separate namespace. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 17:06, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- See WP:OVERCITE (which I have seen used to "declutter" articles of sources) and {{Excessive citations}}. I agree that ideally we should be able to have as many sources as possible in the article proper, but clearly there is some resistance to that, hence this idea. And yes, I agree that having sources available is not just good for editors, but also readers. —Locke Cole • t • c 17:16, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole Your comment "good for readers" made me wonder how a reader uses WIkipedia, What is rather than a Tab, we put a link at top of the page Student. The Student page would need a logon and would take them to a user page. We would need a copy reference tool which would add references the way you wanted to a table
- Trying to address problems "How do we get more editors?". "How do get them to do more Edits?" "How do we divert Vandals" "How we make it easier to share references?" Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:24, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- See WP:OVERCITE (which I have seen used to "declutter" articles of sources) and {{Excessive citations}}. I agree that ideally we should be able to have as many sources as possible in the article proper, but clearly there is some resistance to that, hence this idea. And yes, I agree that having sources available is not just good for editors, but also readers. —Locke Cole • t • c 17:16, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- I believe this is done at the English Wiktionary. See, e.g., the three tabs at the top of wikt:en:random. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 18:37, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Ahhh, that's likely where I got the idea from. =) I knew I'd seen something like it somewhere, thanks for the pointer! —Locke Cole • t • c 21:38, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- wikt do it not by means of a tertiary namespace to article-space, but an additional primary namespace - Citations:, no. 114. There is probably some software configutation that links e.g wikt:Citations:random to wikt:random. The namespace isn't just used for what we understand by citations (i.e. references), but for a phrase or sentence giving context to the word concerned, just as at a spelling bee the contender is asked not just to spell the word but give a valid example of its usage, and it is that phrase or sentence that is referenced.
- As is normal, the namespace has its associated Citations talk: namespace, no. 115, which seems to be used solely for the placement of archived deletion discussions which closed as "keep". --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 08:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- Ahhh, that's likely where I got the idea from. =) I knew I'd seen something like it somewhere, thanks for the pointer! —Locke Cole • t • c 21:38, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- You might be interested in the proposal at meta:WikiCite/Shared Citations. the wub "?!" 22:17, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you for that, it would definitely fit the bill, especially if it supported adding unused/proposed sources. =) —Locke Cole • t • c 05:54, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Does {{refideas}} do what you want? It goes at the top of talk pages along with wikiproject banners and {{article history}} so it shouldn't get archived, but it's a simpler solution than creating a whole new namespace. It's only used on about 14,000 pages, which suggests to me that there isn't enough demand to justify a whole new namespace Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:24, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- @MJL and Caeciliusinhorto-public: {{refideas}} is definitely in the spirit of what I had in mind, though it does seem limited at apparently just 21 references, and it doesn't appear to support fully formed {{cite web}}/etc., just bare links/text. I'll definitely use it now that I'm aware of it. =)
It's only used on about 14,000 pages, which suggests to me that there isn't enough demand to justify a whole new namespace
Or, alternatively, people aren't aware it exists (like myself) and a "Sources" tab front and center with the "Talk" and "Article" would make it much harder to miss. It also stands to reason we should be encouraging people to come forward with sources, which this would do. —Locke Cole • t • c 05:46, 17 August 2022 (UTC)- If you need more than 21, use it twice; see its talk page. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 05:52, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Locke Cole: You can use {{cite}} templates with {{refideas}}; see Talk:CIL 4.5296 for an example where I have done exactly that. The trick is to explicitly name the unnamed parameters:
{{refideas | 1={{cite book|title=Example|author=John Doe}} | 2={{cite journal|title=Another Example|journal=Journal of Examples|author=Jane Smith}} }}
. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 09:23, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- @MJL and Caeciliusinhorto-public: {{refideas}} is definitely in the spirit of what I had in mind, though it does seem limited at apparently just 21 references, and it doesn't appear to support fully formed {{cite web}}/etc., just bare links/text. I'll definitely use it now that I'm aware of it. =)
- I tend to agree with earlier commenters that this proposal would be structurally difficult to create (and more difficult to get consistent community adoption for it) but also I would add that, precisely because it is tied to a single article by being a 'third tab', it would have under-powered utility. If you weren't aware, the French wikipedia already has a "references" namespace of its own: See the documentation at Fr:Aide:Espace référence, the purpose of which is to be able to easily reference works across the whole language edition of the Encyclopedia. This is not dissimilar to the "Specific-source templates" here on En.wp but more consistent and powerful. However, as far as I am aware it is not widely used these days. You can see an example for how a reference to an edition of Ovid's Metamorphosis is structured in that namespace here: w:fr:Référence:Métamorphoses (Ovide). On a wider note, I thank the wub for linking to the Shared Citations proposal which I wrote a couple of years ago in my staff-time (as user:LWyatt (WMF)), which proposes a central repository of structure data of sources used on/by any Wikimedia project (including Wikidata). This would not deprecate or override any local editorial policies of any Wiki (including but not limited to preferred display format (CITEVAR), policies on reliable/deprecated sources). But it would allow for the consolidation of much of the duplicated work (and code) that is currently maintained over and over and over again for references across all our wikis. Sincerely, Wittylama 20:38, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- As with my post of 08:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC) this is an additional namespace pair, in this case Référence:, no. 104. These pages give bibliographic info for one or more editions of a work, structured using the Édition template - this gives a choice of five formats, but none of them are a copyable cite template. Unlike Wiktionary, these don't appear as an extra tab on articles - for example, the article fr:Bicycle has no link to fr:Référence:Bicycle that I can find; and whilst fr:Référence:Basic Ship Theory exists, fr:Basic Ship Theory doesn't.
- Again, there is Discussion Référence, no. 105 and there are somewhat more pages here than Citations talk pages at wikt, but many of those that do exist are completely blank. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 23:09, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
- I see that {{Refideas}} has been proposed here as an alternative and simpler solution, but in fact it has the great disadvantage of being nearly invisible for your average reader or editor. People don't tend to look at things like talk page headers anyway (see banner blindness), but in this case most applications of {{Refideas}} will be in a collapsed state, more often than not as one of many collapsed parts of the talk header, and thus become utterly undiscoverable. The fact that so few editors use it or even know about it also seems to be prima facie evidence of that. For academic subjects I would generally encourage creating large bibliographies in the article itself, where they will doubtlessly be most visible to readers (examples here or here; I see that Wikipedia:Citation overkill doesn't even contain the word 'bibliography', so something about that may be added there). However, in cases where this would be inappropriate (e.g., popular subjects with large amounts of relatively low-quality journalistic sources), having a separate 'Sources' tab next to 'Article' and 'Talk' would seem to be a great idea to me. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 15:24, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hermetica is an absolutely terrible example, & non-compliant with various policies I'd imagine. From the vast lists of sources, mostly not used for references, it took me far too long to locate two that are frequently cited (Bull and Copenhaven). Generally WP should not attempt comprehensive bibliographies of works not actually used - we don't do it well, & won't keep them up to date. They are a bad habit of German WP which we should not (and usually do not) copy. If someone really feels the need, they should be carefully distinguished from works used in the article. Johnbod (talk) 15:42, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Why would you have to look for a source that is frequently cited, if you can just click on it to lead you right to it? Even just hovering over it will show the full bibliographic reference in desktop mode (I believe there's an equivalent on mobile, but I'm not familiar with that). I'm also very much keeping that bibliography up to date (e.g., [1] [2] [3]). I agree that sources cited in the article but not strictly belonging in a bibliography on the subject should ideally be in a separate section. It would also be ideal to have an entirely separate 'Further reading' section only listing sources that truly constitute good introductory reading.
- But that's all helpful to the reader. If it's non-compliant with various policies, I will most certainly IAR. Seriously John, I can't emphasize enough how incredibly useful that is to anyone looking to do research on the subject. Wikipedia very often is the best place to start for that, not rarely even better than places like Oxford Bibliographies Online. It's very discouraging to receive this kind of feedback. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 16:28, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry you feel that way, but try running it at FAC like that. Johnbod (talk) 23:21, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Exactly what I was thinking. Probably will never run for FAC then. But that is a depressing thought. I'd wish there were some more room for diversity in that process. Too much focus on style over substance. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:55, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- I'm not convinced that it's helpful to the reader (maybe helpful to a very tiny percentage of readers), but if you like doing that kind of thing, then some subjects have separate bibliography articles. See Bibliography of World War I, Bibliography of jazz, or other pages in the Category:Bibliographies by subject. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:28, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
- Exactly what I was thinking. Probably will never run for FAC then. But that is a depressing thought. I'd wish there were some more room for diversity in that process. Too much focus on style over substance. ☿ Apaugasma (talk ☉) 23:55, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry you feel that way, but try running it at FAC like that. Johnbod (talk) 23:21, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hermetica is an absolutely terrible example, & non-compliant with various policies I'd imagine. From the vast lists of sources, mostly not used for references, it took me far too long to locate two that are frequently cited (Bull and Copenhaven). Generally WP should not attempt comprehensive bibliographies of works not actually used - we don't do it well, & won't keep them up to date. They are a bad habit of German WP which we should not (and usually do not) copy. If someone really feels the need, they should be carefully distinguished from works used in the article. Johnbod (talk) 15:42, 17 August 2022 (UTC)
- I've seen people using Templates that contain for cite template for what you are proposing. I think at some point where are going to have to find a better system. A well-referenced article has source code that is difficult to read, and that's a barrier to newcomers. I haven't fully read this thread and am in a rush at the momemnt but thank you for raising this issue and I look forward to reading what others have said. Jason Quinn (talk) 23:00, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
Files, Templates, and Categories
I just realised that this is going to get confusing fast, so I have split this topics into sections, and moved the comments to match,
Hi, I was wondering about the number of edits being an incentive. We seem to have many pages in various namespaces that serve little purpose.
1. Templates
- 740317 Templates of which 593177 have no redirects
- 475061 Templates of which 366069 have no redirects Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- The standard has always been that if you see a need for a template, make a template. As a result there is some amount of duplication and redundancy. Over time templates can also be superseded or lose their original purpose. Superfluous templates are mostly harmless, there are editors who work on merging, redirecting, or deleting templates where beneficial. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
- I'll note as I have recently started working on creating and consolidating certain templates, it's a difficult process without a bot to run with you. I haven't put in a request yet per just the scope of my project, but in the meantime the consolidation has required supporting aliases and features that I then deprecate with plans to quickly drop. (And these are low-use templates, but I'm not manually converting 100, 50, or even 12 page usages just to consolidate, especially when I know I'll need a bot later anyway). Also, there's a matter of the dormant template creators you may risk offending. An essay of recommendations of good behavioral/deletion/consolidation practices in template space might be worthwhile (I can't find one on quick search, but I should search harder to not contribute to essay bloat (you forgot complain about that one, OP!) SamuelRiv (talk) 15:56, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
- Well done! 100 K templates definitely needs a bot, and that's one edit count increase I would be very happy with. :-) Essay bloat now added, although I expect the numbers are small, and I do like reading them as they give hints to past issues.Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:27, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
2. Files
- If they are a copy of Wikimedia commons, why do we have 705271 talk pages?? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- Categorization, most of these have one or more templates that add them to tracking categories. This may not be all that helpful, but it's not harmful either so is mostly ignored. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
3. User Talk has 6 time as many pages as User
- User 3,852,785 and User talk 17,976,469 Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- Not surprising at all. I don't have a link to the research handy but the vast majority of accounts never make a single edit on any wiki; the second most common number of edits per account is one, after that two, etc. If an account reaches autoconfirmed it's already part of a tiny elite. While it doesn't make sense to track IPs with zero edits a similar pattern emerges; IPs with one edit are most common followed by two etc. This was true even before the introduction of IPv6. Hence most of those user talk pages are just template messages, often added by semi-automated tools, welcomes, warnings, deletion notices etc. For accounts or IPs that will never edit again. At one time it was common to delete temporary user and user talk pages for accounts after a set period, but this has long-since fallen by the wayside. Deletion of old IP user talk pages was also carried out under an alleged CSD that never actually had consensus, but that too was halted. Since there's no value to deletion this really isn't surprising, though a bot is now tasked with blanking old IP talk messages. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
- Yes, especially if these figures include archives & other sub-pages. I have 46 talk archives & at least 20 sub-pages for drafts etc. Johnbod (talk) 20:05, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
4. Categories
- In 2010 we had 638,834 Categories
- In 2022 we have 2,188,563 Categories
- Category talk is 1865015 pages
- I have raised a Quarry request for the breakdown by month. I would also like to find out how many times that readers actually click on a category Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- As with templates the idea is that if you see a need for a category you should go ahead and make it. Many categories are just for tracking or maintenance. The number of articles has more than doubled since then so the increase in categories isn't really that surprising. Category talk pages mostly function as file talk pages do (i.e. see above). 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
- Also is there any objection to me asking for the following changes to WIkimedia statistics or should I move it as a proposal
- Change Top Edits to Most Edits
- New Editor type semi-automated to pick up Hotcat etc. (They are currently part of user) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:56, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have updated my query request to ask for chars, as well as counts. I have been advised is not possible to get the number of times a reader clicks on categories. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:57, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
5. New Stubs
- A lot of stubs would seem better suited to Wiki species or wikidata, and may be being created semi-automatically *Many have 1 ref to amateur web sites. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- There's a lot of history and controversy here. Suffice it to say that the communities views on notability have shifted over time, and many current articles exist as a legacy of earlier times. Semi and even fully automated article creation was tolerated in the past, Rambot created a large number of American county and municipality articles. Wikispecies has a different purpose than Wikipedia, and some of the information here would not be suitable there. Wikidata didn't even exist until 2012 long post-dating many of the mass database style stub creations. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
- Are these past/current discussions consolidated/linked somewhere? It looks like all the minor asteroid and sky survey object bot-created stubs have been cleaned up into lists since the last time I checked many many years ago. Municipalities are somewhat different because people live there (though arguably it may be a greater incentive to try editing Wikipedia if your municipality had no page than if your municipality had a terrible bot stub, although the barrier to entry is far greater (the Draft/AfC structure did not appear to affect retention, though I'd like to see a well-designed comparative study on retaining new editors whose first experience is editing existing articles versus creating new ones -- and now I'm off-topic). SamuelRiv (talk) 15:38, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think the asteroids have been added to,
- Going off topic is always allowed :-) My User_talk:Wakelamp#IP_editing_research has a list of the Portuguese/Farsi trial of no IP edits and I think the results of edit vs create. I think the faiure rate on new articles is more then 95% for new editors. Most are killed off by speedy. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:49, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
6. Why Recent Changes are so big?
- Apart from the above, we also have some editors constantly doing multiple edits on the same page within seconds Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- I seem to remember a proposal in the past to combine multiple edits made by the same user to an article over a short period of time which was shot down for both technical and practical reasons. Anyway unfiltered recentchanges has moved too fast to be a useful tool since at least when Rambot got up and running; filtered versions are still quite useful. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
7. Weird Stuff on User
- I think it might have to do with Bots, but I found weird pages that just update the time Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:51, 19 August 2022 (UTC) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- There's a lot of weird stuff in userspace, for the most part it's best ignored. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
8. Articles
Ok - Namespace 0 (articles0 looks weird Wikipedia:StatisticsThe numbers on Namespace 0 (articles) do not match those on Wikipedia:Statistics Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 12:38, 19 August 2022 (UTC) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- Zero-indexing is the norm in the world of computation.74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
- Apologies - It wasn't the zero index that confused me, it was the mismatch between the numbers. I have corrected it. I now realise that the official number is the one without redirects Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- Correct. Separately, try to remember to add an additional line break or use a template to create paragraphs for unindenteded text (see previous rendering here). Finally when revising your own comments after they've been responded to try to adhere to Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines#Editing own comments, I've fixed it for you in this instance, but some people may get irritated when those are not followed. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 06:09, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thank-you for that information. After 13 years I am still learning how to do things, and I appreciate others tolerance. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 09:43, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- Correct. Separately, try to remember to add an additional line break or use a template to create paragraphs for unindenteded text (see previous rendering here). Finally when revising your own comments after they've been responded to try to adhere to Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines#Editing own comments, I've fixed it for you in this instance, but some people may get irritated when those are not followed. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 06:09, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
9 Other
- Taking a stab at this 74.73.224.126 (talk) 14:52, 19 August
- I have moved your comments to match the new topics, although I have 2sections in categories. Please feel free to correct. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- Done; probably should've copyedited earlier for concision and ease of reading, but it is what it is. 74.73.224.126 (talk) 06:09, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have moved your comments to match the new topics, although I have 2sections in categories. Please feel free to correct. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:11, 20 August 2022 (UTC)
9 Other
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 157#Hiatus on mass creation of Portals Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 08:45, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
10 Essays
Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 08:45, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
11 Comparison with other WPs
The enWP ratio of article to other seems high.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias]]
Wiki | Articles | Total | Ratio | Readers | Admins | Edits |
Vietnamese | 1,275,834 | 19,379,100 | 15.189 | 69,010,746 | 20 | 878,846 |
English | 6,547,077 | 56,453,893 | 8.623 | 1,103,443,021 | 1,033 | 44,103,225 |
Arabic | 1,184,731 | 7,823,043 | 6.603 | 59,044,611 | 26 | 2,296,556 |
Chinese | 1,301,037 | 7,136,541 | 5.485 | 73,182,372 | 66 | 3,257,536 |
French | 2,451,972 | 12,172,803 | 4.964 | 196,184,858 | 158 | 4,456,210 |
Portuguese | 1,094,746 | 5,409,706 | 4.942 | 64,143,753 | 55 | 2,799,931 |
Spanish | 1,799,230 | 7,720,543 | 4.291 | 145,274,893 | 63 | 6,628,458 |
Italian | 1,770,143 | 7,504,894 | 4.240 | 128,815,061 | 122 | 2,288,917 |
Russian | 1,850,168 | 7,425,382 | 4.013 | 124,938,187 | 76 | 3,239,213 |
Ukrainian | 1,191,225 | 4,134,757 | 3.471 | 36,916,450 | 45 | 641,531 |
Japanese | 1,340,684 | 3,961,526 | 2.955 | 91,074,155 | 41 | 1,973,889 |
German | 2,720,855 | 7,513,224 | 2.761 | 224,347,581 | 190 | 3,986,231 |
Swedish | 2,552,658 | 6,123,318 | 2.399 | 51,047,790 | 66 | 833,574 |
Polish | 1,534,468 | 3,560,050 | 2.320 | 67,762,113 | 101 | 1,189,135 |
Waray-Waray | 1,265,944 | 2,881,790 | 2.276 | 6,287,722 | 3 | 53,040 |
Dutch | 2,100,091 | 4,470,660 | 2.129 | 62,554,195 | 36 | 1,227,293 |
Cebuano | 6,125,805 | 11,232,244 | 1.834 | 34,883,660 | 6 | 93,899 |
Egyptian Arabic | 1,597,655 | 2,013,586 | 1.260 | 7,347,014 | 7 | 189,801 |
Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:09, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- Your list says "readers" and "edits", but the table you've copied from says "edits" and "editors" for those fields. ;) AddWittyNameHere 19:40, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Change Edit Count
What about if we change the edit count to exclude edits on the above? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 09:23, 23 August 2022 (UTC)Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 08:45, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- I'm not sure if OP was implying they took issue with raw edit count being particularly problematic in the list by edit counts (I've never seen anybody comparing score except in RfA and to criticize new accounts (let's address the latter elsewhere), though I admit when I see those requests I start to consider whether I should run a bot), although I'm sure we all agree (as does the list preface) that the list is inherently a very coarse low-accuracy metric of editor contribution. It would seem an already-solved technical matter to extend the code to offer a second and/or third column to list articlespace-only edits (Template editors may object, but c'mon, can't please everyone) and/or edits by bytes rather than counts (XTools Edit Counter implements this fine it seems -- I don't know if the list uses their algorithm), so I suspect it would be welcome. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:20, 23 August 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv I don't think you have to have discussion to drive behaviour, as competinng to be on top of the list is enough. My main concerns are that we are creating unnecessary work for others now and in the future, and provides camoflage for bad faith. The extra work is for example that Wikipedia:HotCat has to be run on exisitmg articles to check if they now fit new categories. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:15, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
Unedit/Unsend And Incognito mode - Anonymous experienced editors, and UnEdit
If there was a way for an editor to choose to post, add watch, or edit incognito using their exisitng account would you use it? (Checkuser could see the link, but not Admins)?
Sort of related. Sometimes I see people regretting their edit or email. If you could unedit/unsend (so it was deleted off your history) would you use it? (Subject to no one editing after you, and the User not opening the message? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 02:04, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- It's perfectly fine to use an alternate account to go "incognito", as long as you don't do so in a deceptive or disruptive way. – Joe (talk) 09:07, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- True. But isn't that inconvenient to log in and out? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:20, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- As regards your second question, I'm sure that anyone who has regularly edited Wikipedia is embarrassed by something they have done, but such a feature would just make us less careful in the first place. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:34, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- I was mainly thinking about editors being angry rather than careless Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:09, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- Simple rule… don’t post when angry. Problem solved. Blueboar (talk) 13:27, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- Possibly not quite so simple. Unfortunately, there are things that can make one angry or frustrated in any collaborative workplace, whether online such as on Wikipedia, or in the office or in the factory, voluntary or salaried and feelings get blurted out. Wikipedia is however the least tolerant of places and where the slightest lapse can have devastating consequences; mean spirited, governance obsessive people will gang up and get productive editors sanctioned, blocked, or even banned. It's easy when everyone is just a user name. It's harder for those however who were known personally for their highly motivated work for Wikipedia in real life such as organisers and leaders of editathons, for example. Understandably, after years of service they just give up and don't come back. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:36, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Kudpung That was exactly the situation was I was concerned about. There was some research I can't find that disucsses that experienced productive editors often leave after an angry email or comment on their talk page. I think @Blueboar sadly may be unique in never having regret.
- I just through of another use - Both people in a conflict could agree to withdraw (rather than delete) their comments. It was normal in duelling :-), but I think it is a good process,
- With the people highly regarded for editathons etc, maybe a modification of the anonymous idea would help. The Editor name would stay the same, but there would be an option to link a second private Editor name. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:02, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- In RL Blueboar has an admirable career and pursuits which call for people management and a calm disposition, and on Wikipedia he appears to eschew the contentious areas which we often refer to as 'the coal face' or 'working in the trenches'. He may therefore not be familiar with the challenges of maintenance work or the Wiki kind of dispute resolution. Those who choose to be active in the contentious areas here have a Sword of Damocles hanging over them and their position is often precarious - even acting in the very best of good faith in the interest of Wikipedia can get them scolded or sanctioned to the extent they will just walk away and end their years of excellent contributions. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:39, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for the kind words… FYI, I’ve done my time “in the Wikipedia trenches”, and have faced all the aggravating situations you are talking about. I have learned from experience that, when angry or frustrated, the best thing to do is… not type. I take a break and address the issue later, once I have calmed down. Blueboar (talk) 02:19, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- In RL Blueboar has an admirable career and pursuits which call for people management and a calm disposition, and on Wikipedia he appears to eschew the contentious areas which we often refer to as 'the coal face' or 'working in the trenches'. He may therefore not be familiar with the challenges of maintenance work or the Wiki kind of dispute resolution. Those who choose to be active in the contentious areas here have a Sword of Damocles hanging over them and their position is often precarious - even acting in the very best of good faith in the interest of Wikipedia can get them scolded or sanctioned to the extent they will just walk away and end their years of excellent contributions. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 01:39, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- Possibly not quite so simple. Unfortunately, there are things that can make one angry or frustrated in any collaborative workplace, whether online such as on Wikipedia, or in the office or in the factory, voluntary or salaried and feelings get blurted out. Wikipedia is however the least tolerant of places and where the slightest lapse can have devastating consequences; mean spirited, governance obsessive people will gang up and get productive editors sanctioned, blocked, or even banned. It's easy when everyone is just a user name. It's harder for those however who were known personally for their highly motivated work for Wikipedia in real life such as organisers and leaders of editathons, for example. Understandably, after years of service they just give up and don't come back. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 13:36, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- Simple rule… don’t post when angry. Problem solved. Blueboar (talk) 13:27, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- I was mainly thinking about editors being angry rather than careless Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:09, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- People seem to also use IP accounts to go ingonito< I owonder what Portugal did after they turned off [|IP Editing.
- I have looked through Wiki and their seems to be 4 case with a few cases why IP is used
- Can't be bothered, don't think it is needed,
- Privacy (even though they are private with an account)
- Permanent IP editors
- Editors going anonymous to avoid controversy. I imagined an incognoto made mode that still added to history, and both Ip and normal (or even alternate id) would still come to the main account Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 04:49, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- There are many reasons to edit without logging in. To your list, off the top of my head, I'd add "don't want to type my password on this shared computer", and I'd split your last into two. There's the "don't want controversy (I really shouldn't be editing this, but I know enough to know that nobody will object to this edit as long as they don't know who's making the edit)" case and the separate "don't want this controversial content associated with my real account".
- More broadly, almost everything listed under Wikipedia:Sockpuppetry#Legitimate uses is also an expected use case for people editing while logged out.
- I don't know what work is being done on the Portuguese Wikipedia, but I have of two other Wikipedias that considered requiring registration: The Persian Wikipedia was following in ptwiki's footsteps until they figured out that what they really wanted was an anti-vandal bot, so they voted to keep IP editors. The French Wikipedia recently had a big RFC that ended with a decision to keep IP editors (I don't happen to know the main themes of the discussion, just the outcomes).
- I also ran across an interesting, if old, bit of research that determined the most productive editors were the people who first made an edit as an IP, and then (within an hour) decided to create an account. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:03, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
Overthrow the Administrators & form a Communist State
This is just an idea, but it would be great for Wikipedia to become a Communist State.
Here’s why:
-Article edits evenly distributed -Secret police eliminate vandalism -No classes aside from titular “leaders” -Featured articles all about communism -National pride through flags & anthems -All articles can be edited — Preceding unsigned comment added by Hanojak (talk • contribs) 14:19, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think you'll find that North Korea has a bigger proportion of its population involved in administration than any liberal state. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:34, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- Unlike some sites, administrators are just that: they work tirelessly to do our admin, including tasks that we can't trust to just anyone such as deleting articles. Wikipedia is probably as close as you'll get to the communist ideal of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. Certes (talk) 15:15, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
This idea has been scrapped due to already existing. Hanojak (talk) 15:51, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- It is already policy that Wikipedia is neither an anarchy nor a democracy and there is no free speech. This doesn't leave many possibilities but the trouble with the communism idea is that it's also policy that it's not a bureaucracy either. Andrew🐉(talk) 20:36, 25 August 2022 (UTC)
- I like this idea. Levivich 19:38, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
Are WMF and WP too different to ever get along ?
WMF (non developers) and WP are very very different Using Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory#Dimensions of national cultures just as a model for discussion to show how different they are
- Power distance index (PDI): WP -medium (new editors), WMF low
- Individualism vs. Collectivism : WP 50/50 , WMF - Very Collective
- Uncertainty avoidance : WP - High, WMF - Low
- Masculinity vs. Femininity : WP : More Masculine , WMF Very Feminine (see article for explanation)
- Short (tradition) vs Long (Change) ; WP S, WMF L
- Indulgence vs. restraint ; WP : High R, WMF HIgh I
And bonus DIversity : WP em/en dash preference; WMF people not like WP editors Wikipedia is : for WP it's the editors, for WMF it's the readers whose desires are only known to WMF Countries : WP is Samurai Japan plus California hippies, WMF is Sweden :-) Wikipedia exists to ; WP - create Wikipedia,free speech, an NPOV WMF -as a cash cow
I think we suck on a few things (mercilessly, no long term planning, ..), but based on this I suggest we need a divorce. WMF can have the $100 M, but we want tbe Kids (WMF developers, IT, organisers, and the person from fundraising who was brave enough to ask about the emails 13:02, 27 August 2022 (UTC) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:02, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- It's difficult. Wikipedia, especially enwp, is the WMF's cash cow. In return, WMF provides useful functions such as legal and administrative services, a hardware platform, maintaining the software and (slowly and reluctantly) adding a few requested features. On the other hand, the vast majority of the money goes elsewhere with no direct benefit to editors or readers: interference in government, global diversity workshops, unwanted technical changes, financial trusts with no clear aim. Splitting could benefit Wikipedia in the long run, with a lower level of income spent in a more focused way, but is hampered by the stupid decision to give Wikpedia's domain names and trademarks to a WMF which has a strong incentive to withhold them. Certes (talk) 13:41, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think the Wikimedia foundation is a bit like NASA: slow, bureaucratic, resistant to change, with its reputation primary provided by its early glory years. I don't have the solution here, but it is imperative that the WMF must become nimble if it wants to survive for the next 10 years. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:22, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- Also, technologies have improved, and it is not out of a question for an individual or group of individuals to fork Wikipedia for the community, like the second reincarnation. To me, this is absolutely not an ideal situation, but will eventually happen if the WMF continues to be aloof with important issues and toying with random things. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:24, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- Splitting worked for LibreOffice and others but it's very much a last resort, because we'd leave behind integration with other WMF projects and the excellent reputation of the Wikipedia brand. The best option is for the WMF to revert to its previous narrow role which has community consensus. However, that would put a lot of people who out of a comfortable job, and we can't expect turkeys to vote for Christmas. Certes (talk) 18:50, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- A fork is a bad idea, but you also can't put the cat back in the bag. The only way out is through, and continuing to move forward. Andre🚐 19:57, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- A fork of Spanish Wikipedia happened in 2002, you can read about it in meta:Spanish Fork. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:53, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- A fork is a bad idea, but you also can't put the cat back in the bag. The only way out is through, and continuing to move forward. Andre🚐 19:57, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- Splitting worked for LibreOffice and others but it's very much a last resort, because we'd leave behind integration with other WMF projects and the excellent reputation of the Wikipedia brand. The best option is for the WMF to revert to its previous narrow role which has community consensus. However, that would put a lot of people who out of a comfortable job, and we can't expect turkeys to vote for Christmas. Certes (talk) 18:50, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- Also, technologies have improved, and it is not out of a question for an individual or group of individuals to fork Wikipedia for the community, like the second reincarnation. To me, this is absolutely not an ideal situation, but will eventually happen if the WMF continues to be aloof with important issues and toying with random things. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:24, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think the Wikimedia foundation is a bit like NASA: slow, bureaucratic, resistant to change, with its reputation primary provided by its early glory years. I don't have the solution here, but it is imperative that the WMF must become nimble if it wants to survive for the next 10 years. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:22, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I wouldn't count the developers as on the community's side rather than the WMF. I don't dispute there are exceptions, but consider how many clashes between the WMF and the volunteer community have been IT focussed (the premature release of V/E, that viewer experiment, the reader comments box etc etc). Mixing volunteer and paid staff on the same project is not easy, especially if you want to maintain volunteer motivation and self respect. There are models that can succeed longterm such as "staff are employed to do the things that volunteers want to happen but aren't volunteering to do". However I don't see the WMF agreeing to adopt any of the viable models that could lead to a stable and successful movement for the longterm. Less than a decade ago part of the tension between the community and the WMF was over civility and harassment issues, but with the WMF as the less "woke" side of the equation. One reading of the UCOC dispute is that the WMF has gone from taking such issues less seriously than the community to taking them more seriously. Another reading, and one I find more convincing, is that the WMF's commitment to wokeness is barely skin deep and ill thought out. The UCOC is more about an old fashioned power grab, a secretive and centralised solution by people who neither respect nor understand the way the community works. If the WMF was really as "woke" as the community they wouldn't have been so resistant to the Portuguese language community ending IP editing, and they'd be using their real world influence to get IP companies and Police forces to deal with the people who make death threats against members of our community. To me the divide between the WMF and the volunteer community is cultural, but I don't see it through the lens of Hofstede's theory. I see one side of the divide looking at the Movement in silicon valley terms as one of the top ten internet sites, where the volunteers and the product is all subject to a "move fast and break things" mindset and standardisation and centralisation are key, And the other side of the divide a group of people who have taken the dream of "making the world's knowledge freely available to all" or "making the internet not suck", and found a way to make that a reality in a radically decentralised wiki way... I agree that the two groups are close to needing a divorce, I'm not 100% convinced it is inevitable or unavoidable. ϢereSpielChequers 19:49, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- This is very insightful. My thoughts, inspired by this comment: Volunteers give their blood, tears, and sweat equity as early stakeholders in open-source projects. Governance is tricky when it becomes top-down. To the extent the foundation can listen to community feedback and be on the side of the "workers," it will be less of a scab to "management." The startup mentality has always been a part of Wikipedia, the trouble is when control and predictability become more important than spontaneity and creativity in problem-solving. The foundation may not understand the community ad hoc self-organizing systems, and instead try to use a regular hierarchical corporate directive, which won't work. It's about servant leadership, retrospectives, being open-minded on the details but focusing on principles, values, and making sure the specifics remain negotiable and you don't over-plan. Andre🚐 19:56, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. I agree that top down v bottom up is a major faultline in the divide between the WMF and the community. I don't accept that it is inevitable that governance moves from a bottom up philosophy to a top down one. ϢereSpielChequers 20:04, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I agree. There are certain objectives and key results that may come from the top-down, but the solutions and the approaches should be determined by the community. Andre🚐 20:08, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I am certain that NPP will get their developer, that WMF will tone down their donation approach, and that there will be a community outreach with lots of t-shirts. But I can't see that WP Meta or WMF are prepared to move on root issues for another few years until the lobster heats up a bit more, so I think the best thing is to create our own interWIki council. It's diversity, so it must be good. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 02:40, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- I agree. There are certain objectives and key results that may come from the top-down, but the solutions and the approaches should be determined by the community. Andre🚐 20:08, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks. I agree that top down v bottom up is a major faultline in the divide between the WMF and the community. I don't accept that it is inevitable that governance moves from a bottom up philosophy to a top down one. ϢereSpielChequers 20:04, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I think the developers are very much like us based on what they write. It has all the same issues we have been discussing Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 08:05, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- @WereSpielChequers: a clarification, if I may: "
Mixing volunteer and paid staff on the same project is not easy
" (agreed wholeheartedly, but...) "especially if you want to maintain volunteer motivation and self respect.
" — I'm not sure I follow here? — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 03:12, 29 August 2022 (UTC) - As a volunteer on software development for the project, I, like TNT, would also appreciate some clarification on this sentence. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:11, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- This is very insightful. My thoughts, inspired by this comment: Volunteers give their blood, tears, and sweat equity as early stakeholders in open-source projects. Governance is tricky when it becomes top-down. To the extent the foundation can listen to community feedback and be on the side of the "workers," it will be less of a scab to "management." The startup mentality has always been a part of Wikipedia, the trouble is when control and predictability become more important than spontaneity and creativity in problem-solving. The foundation may not understand the community ad hoc self-organizing systems, and instead try to use a regular hierarchical corporate directive, which won't work. It's about servant leadership, retrospectives, being open-minded on the details but focusing on principles, values, and making sure the specifics remain negotiable and you don't over-plan. Andre🚐 19:56, 27 August 2022 (UTC)
- I'm reasonably sure either this post is satire, or one or several of the replies are satire, or all of the above. Otherwise, I'd be significantly more fearful of the future of the project, but of course the posters on meta pages are not really a representative sample of editors. SamuelRiv (talk) 01:16, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv In any satire there is some truth. I don't think a divorce is inevitable (But didn't eswp do that?) With whether it is representative, I suggest you look at the discussion on Wikimedia donations emails on Proposal, Then hav search for #wikipediascam, google trends, google news for wikipedia and donation, quora, reddit, and it is worth getting a login for this ycombinator thread Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 02:24, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- There was another, bigger ycombinator thread before that one. Andreas JN466 10:16, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- At least there's a few good points raised. I did comb the donation threads. I refuse to touch q***a on all principles -- if WMF-WP has integrity problems, q'a is satan incarnate. It would be good to collect links to key threads and points in one essay so that we don't have to refer people to all corners of the internet for this grand controversy. I don't know what substantial issue I should look for in particular through the noise, but I do find it funny that most of these threads begin with complaints about the endowment and management bloat, when the 2007 whistleblower thread (also brought up in complaints) was about financial mismanagement which was, as described, due in large part to lack of logistical staff. The logical remedy is to hire competent logistical staff, whose overhead increases with the size and scope of projects and their finances.
- I don't know how WMF decided on their endowment goal, but as WMF operates globally and often has to deal with government legal threats directly I imagine a substantial hedge is justifiable. I also don't know how they are perceived as an investment in terms of risk, should they need to leverage funds, which would also substantially influence their endowment goals. Maybe there's some new grand project being planned that hasn't been revealed, who knows, but for an org of this size and scope I fail to see how a $100m endowment is inappropriate. It's also common in reaction threads that commenters will list expenditures that are a waste of money, then immediately follow with an alternative wishlist that is comparably or far more expensive yet always objectively more prudent.
- Orgs aren't perfect, and nonprofits and NGOs in particular are notorious for inefficiencies that expand with size (independent audits and open donation ratings help mitigate this, but it seems there will always be at least some baseline inefficiency that is in part intrinsic to the nonprofit and/or donation incentive model). None of this is to suggest there is something wrong with vocally complaining -- it is essential to an open audit system -- but can we at least separate the realistic substance from the cruft from the plain ridiculous? SamuelRiv (talk) 15:28, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- The key issue is quite different from the money amounts per se – it's about how the money is brought in. It's about making people think you are struggling to keep Wikipedia online when in fact you have $400 million in assets and reserves, have reached your $100 million endowment target in half the time planned, enjoy huge annual surpluses and have steeply rising executive salaries.
- Add to that the fact that the Endowment has never to date published audited accounts or disclosed any of its expenditure. Andreas JN466 22:39, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- ??/ Where does the 400 Million come from?/ (I couldn;t work out a definite number :-)). I have no problems in paying staff. If they help WP, and make editors life easier then go for it. And Strongly agree about the [4]], It has some clever people on it, but I think it has one editor on it, and I didn't realize that their were no reports. I would prefer that there was an editor appointed audit expertWakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:03, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- It's an estimate of financial status at the end of the third quarter of the 2021/2022 fiscal year (i.e. status at the end of March 2022). It is based on the following:
- – Net assets in June 2021: $231.2 million ($51 million up on year prior)
- – Endowment in June 2021: $100 million ($37.1 million up on year prior)
- – Increase in net assets as of 31 March 2022: $51.9 million
- – Increase in Endowment as of January 2022, the most recent figure available: $13.4 million
- So, adding together, we have $231.2 million + $100 million + $51.9 million + 13.4 million = $396.5 million. There are another $3.2 million left in the m:Knowledge Equity Fund, earmarked to go to non-WMF organizations.
- Note that the WMF had a total surplus of $88 million in 2020/2021 (Endowment growth included). (For more on Endowment transparency, see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2022-05-29/Opinion.) Andreas JN466 06:38, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- I was wondering who WMF funds. Please look at page 69 of their IRS 990, i don't understand why we are getting other organisations to do WMFs charity work.
- Tides $5.5 M
- yale $260 K (but the last mention is 2017)
- Peace Development Fund 150 K - no mention
- Black Lunch Table $168K but i can't find a mention that we donate
- * We also seem to give grants to a Wikipedia DC, which I assume is to get around the non-profit lobbying rules
- Also have a look at the breakdown by country for funding and spending and staff, page 41 Schedule F part 1 and 2 11:03, 29 August 2022 (UTC) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:03, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- Pretending that money is needed to keep the servers running then diverting it to political pressure groups is a gross breach of trust, however noble the causes being advocated. It leaves me with a serious ethical conflict: I want to continue helping our readers, but each article I improve makes me feel like an accessory to fraud. It seems that every time I log in, there's a new proposal to hijack another part of our encyclopedia's governance. I want to continue contributing, but we're very close to the last straw. Certes (talk) 12:20, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- Sorry, which political pressure groups are being funded? I don't see any listed above. I'm not sure how the Yale grant is any more controversial than any other major WMF grant. The reason you partner with outside institutions is because outside institutions are more established and experienced with the infrastructure to do it better and cheaper than if you did every little thing in house. Should we establish the "WMF office of janitor development" to fund our own office cleaning staff, or just pay a company to do it? For comparison, Google and other companies donate to WMF, a nonprofit, not because they're being nice, but because WMF projects are extremely important to their own R&D and business development, and it makes far more sense to support WMF than to start a "WikiGooglePedia" clone that is identical in every way -- donation based, etc. -- for the sole purpose of being an in-house operation, just to satisfy a handful employees who don't like the idea of outsourced interests.
- Tides Advocacy according to the FAQ is distributing the Equity Fund, not simply being given money to spend on their own lobbying. I'm not quite sure I understand the model of Tides Advocacy still, as OpenSecrets isn't really open about its data -- Tides Advocacy is responsible for lobbying money, but that's part of what it's explicit purpose is -- to spend lobbying money on behalf of other nonprofits. It's hard to gather how much, if any, lobbying it does on behalf of its own interests. Regardless, this isn't about Tides lobbying, as WMF's explanation suggests. I don't know what Sched. F is supposed to indicate -- are you surprised $11m is spent in the entirety Europe in this breakdown? If the amount is what surprises you, why is it not the total -- why Europe specifically?
- Finally, I've seen it argued in these same threads that WMF should do more government lobbying on behalf of, say, IP (and typically open source advocacy slips in there too -- some people also voice concerns about China and Russia policy). Would it make more sense for Google to hire, in-house, the dozen or so expensive people needed who specialize in high-level IP lobbying (IP lawyers are not a sufficient substitute), something that would only be really needed to be working on all engines a handful of times every decade when major legislation comes up, or just outsource to a lobbying firm? SamuelRiv (talk) 15:37, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv Lobbying removes our tax exemption. I agree Tides is very confusing (note only the 2019 990 returns are available
- The [[Tides Foundation] companies include Tide Advocacy, and is interlinked with many WMF projects
- There are many issues (See signpost for more information).
- “The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization which manages Wikipedia, is closely tied to the Tides Foundation."
- "The general counsel of Wikimedia, Amanda Keton, is the former general counsel of the Tides Network, the former head of Tides Foundation, and the former CEO of Tides Advocacy."
- “The multimillion-dollar Wikimedia Endowment, created in 2016, is managed by the Tides Foundation and has an advisory board appointed by Tides. In 2020, Wikimedia established the multimillion-dollar Wikimedia Foundation Knowledge Fund to be run by Tides Advocacy”
- There is no mention of Tides on Wikimedia Endowment
- I found a few other people that overlapped with both companies.
- There is no conflict of interest is not broke as the WMF counsel is a past employee.
- The Tides Foundation are not involved with education
- They support only Democratic candidates, but | not that much directly, and instead via PACs and small organizations
- tides makes no mention of wikipedia or wikimedia or education
- Tides Advocacy is not involved with education
- [| IRS 990] states "TIDES ADVOCACY MAKES CONTRIBUTIONS TO ORGANIZATIONS THAT SUPPORT POLITICAL ACTIVITY, CONDUCTS INDEPENDENT EXPENDITURES, AND MAKES PARTISAN COMMUNICATION TO EXPRESSLY ADVOCATE FOR THE ELECTION OR DEFEAT OF A CANDIDATE."
- They funded a Democratic candidate and did 800 K of lobbying
- There is one mention of education on their 990 – A grant of 10 K to North Carolina A Philip Randolf Educational Fund Inc for the purpose of environmentalism.
- No grants have a purpose of education.
- Their [[The Advocacy Fund - Tides website make no mention of education - but specifies their purpose as "civic participation, Healthy Individuals and Communities"
- Some of their consultants actual work seems to differs from that on the IRS form (company, IRS stated work, their website, $)
- KIVVIT, Consulting Services (Issues Campaigning) $505,022
- BASE BUILDER Payroll Services (Mailing lists) $386,373
- THREE POINT STRATEGIES Staffing services (US Electoral Strategy),
- | Natasha MINSKER Consulting Services (Actually "Skilled in Public Policy, Politics, Lobbying, Non-profit Management, Community Organizing, and Criminal Law. Graduated from Stanford University Law School.")
- Certain accounts on Tide Advocacy seem very high - especially per employee - bracketed amounts below. ( I think they have 20 employees (p/t and f/t ) but they also hire temps).
- Travel $1.76 Million (90 k)
- Other Employee expenses $1.6 million (80K)
- Office Expenses $1 million (50 K per employee -which does not include occupancy of $534)
- Conferences 900 K (wow)
- IT is 260 K (13 K) But they only have 7.3 K of equipment??? ( See P 51 of 990}
- Political Donations 800 K
- Tides Network is mentioned on the Tide Advocacy 990 (p 72), but as unrelated. On the Tides Network 990 it supports Tide Foundation, Tides Centre, Tides inc. It pays $13 M of network fees and “Tides Network supports the operating Organizations and appoints board members for Tides Foundation, Tides Center, Tides Two Rivers Fund and Tides, Inc. Tides Network sets the direction and policy orientation for and has economic interest in all of Tides organizations.” Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 06:47, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- The [[Tides Foundation] companies include Tide Advocacy, and is interlinked with many WMF projects
- Giving money to Yale, funding the Black Lunch Table in Chicago, earmarking $4.5 million for non-Wikimedia organizations (more than half the grant money so far going to US orgs) etc. is all very well, but then you shouldn't tell people in India and South Africa that you urgently need their money to keep Wikipedia online. Andreas JN466 10:19, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- And Agreed we are telling whoppers
- ??? Does anyone know which months the banner ads have run. I would be interested to know whether they have increased up the number of times the ads appear,
- I turned off the don't show banner ads a few dsays...But they didn't appear :-( But when I logged out, I got an awesome message of doom that took up the whole screen. It hasn't happened again.
- Asides
- Hmmm. ,,,It would be quite amusing to copy all their banner ads to one page, and have the editors descend to tag it :-) The media would find that amusing :-) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:59, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- The ads appear in different regions at different times. There's a list at m:Special:CentralNotice – filter on Campaign type = Fundraising – but it seems incomplete: I recall a campaign last December. At least the perpetrators recognise that Users already hate these banners. Certes (talk) 14:00, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- m:Fundraising has an overview of current_fundraising_activities. In addition to the scheduled campaigns listed on that page there are sometimes low-volume campaigns run for testing purposes, where banners only appear for a small subset of users. That's why people sometimes see a fundraising banner appearing "out of season". Andreas JN466 14:26, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- Thanks for that I wanted to find out if WMf had increased the frequency, because one of the fundraising staff wrote [this] saying it was a bad ideaWakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:36, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- m:Fundraising has an overview of current_fundraising_activities. In addition to the scheduled campaigns listed on that page there are sometimes low-volume campaigns run for testing purposes, where banners only appear for a small subset of users. That's why people sometimes see a fundraising banner appearing "out of season". Andreas JN466 14:26, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- The ads appear in different regions at different times. There's a list at m:Special:CentralNotice – filter on Campaign type = Fundraising – but it seems incomplete: I recall a campaign last December. At least the perpetrators recognise that Users already hate these banners. Certes (talk) 14:00, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv Lobbying removes our tax exemption. I agree Tides is very confusing (note only the 2019 990 returns are available
- @Wakelamp: The $5.5 million to Tides are the annual $5 million paid into the Endowment (and included in WMF "expenses"), plus planned gifts, all of which have been diverted from the WMF and redirected into the Endowment since the February 25, 2021 board resolution. So any money people have left to Wikimedia in their wills in the past today goes into the Endowment. Andreas JN466 08:33, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- They are the 2019 numbers, but it still means that we are funding a Democratic Party fund raiser???
- As far as I can see Tide (which was co-created in '72 by the heir to a cigarette fortune has taken us over),the trustees are toothless, and the WMF will keep on increasing up its staff :-(
- Vivat Tidepedia! Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 09:27, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- Pretending that money is needed to keep the servers running then diverting it to political pressure groups is a gross breach of trust, however noble the causes being advocated. It leaves me with a serious ethical conflict: I want to continue helping our readers, but each article I improve makes me feel like an accessory to fraud. It seems that every time I log in, there's a new proposal to hijack another part of our encyclopedia's governance. I want to continue contributing, but we're very close to the last straw. Certes (talk) 12:20, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- ??/ Where does the 400 Million come from?/ (I couldn;t work out a definite number :-)). I have no problems in paying staff. If they help WP, and make editors life easier then go for it. And Strongly agree about the [4]], It has some clever people on it, but I think it has one editor on it, and I didn't realize that their were no reports. I would prefer that there was an editor appointed audit expertWakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:03, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- There was another, bigger ycombinator thread before that one. Andreas JN466 10:16, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- @SamuelRiv In any satire there is some truth. I don't think a divorce is inevitable (But didn't eswp do that?) With whether it is representative, I suggest you look at the discussion on Wikimedia donations emails on Proposal, Then hav search for #wikipediascam, google trends, google news for wikipedia and donation, quora, reddit, and it is worth getting a login for this ycombinator thread Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 02:24, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- It's amazing to me the WMF doesn't fund more software projects. When a proposal was made to create a citation database it was rejected. Just one example. I understand they tried this with VE and got kind of burned, but that was a white whale project from the start. Smaller more doable projects that have a big impact. For example let's get a really good version of what reFill does to get our citations standardized. And make the tools cross-language. -- GreenC 04:46, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- I agree keeping it small and attainable, with frequent iterative deliveries, and user testing and feedback, is the way to go. The visual editor citation toolbar works pretty well, if you're citing a standard URL or a DOI or ISBN, I mostly use that now instead of reFill and CitationBot, and you can enable it in the beta settings for the wikitext editor as well. Andre🚐 05:04, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Andrevan @CactiStaccingCrane I would like a way of reducing down the time/friction to find and cite articles. Reading references is fun, but it's multi step, so it's a pain for new editors
- A curated reference (NPP reputation tools) search engine similar to the film project's. ability to exclude self published, google books without preview, check for AKA names from articles.
- JSTOR is mentioned in the missing ref for cites is restricted to 500 edits, so excludes new users that know citations
- Google Book cite is not context sensitive (so manual entry of chapter name, page, chapter author, we don't use Google books API google site is missing data references ), and no image ocr to text tool, Ideally, it would be nice to get special approval from Authors' Guild & Google to have full or at least text access to the snips.Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:49, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Andrevan @CactiStaccingCrane I would like a way of reducing down the time/friction to find and cite articles. Reading references is fun, but it's multi step, so it's a pain for new editors
- @GreenC WMF doesn't fund things because there is no upside for them.I asked for the road-map the other day, and got pointed to this, and it makes sense because we have no roadmap ourselves:-( Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:20, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- So, let's make a goal for ourselves. What specific goal would we want to achieve by 2023? CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 07:22, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- Change the proposal process. All proposal are created as an article. Editors comment on the article talk, and write an evidence based article. Results are fed back to the proposal page. 07:59, 28 August 2022 (UTC) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:59, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- Changed my mind again :-) Create a WP Development board. Have elections. - all active editors vote. They can work out what their job is, but they have to report to ALL active editors Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 08:17, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- Change the proposal process. All proposal are created as an article. Editors comment on the article talk, and write an evidence based article. Results are fed back to the proposal page. 07:59, 28 August 2022 (UTC) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:59, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- So, let's make a goal for ourselves. What specific goal would we want to achieve by 2023? CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 07:22, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- I agree keeping it small and attainable, with frequent iterative deliveries, and user testing and feedback, is the way to go. The visual editor citation toolbar works pretty well, if you're citing a standard URL or a DOI or ISBN, I mostly use that now instead of reFill and CitationBot, and you can enable it in the beta settings for the wikitext editor as well. Andre🚐 05:04, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
@Guy had a similar better expressed [[5]] "the idea is basically to give a wider group of stakeholders a voice in setting development priorities and approving feature changes. In business this would typically include development leadership and business stakeholders, and the idea is to make sure that effort is spent where it will have the most impact on organisational priorities. Normally we'd handle this through RfCs at Meta and the like, or by meetings between WMF and devs I guess, but the meta discussions tend to attract only people with detailed interest in things like microformatting, much of the discussion is arcaqne and they run on geological timescales."
- "They can work out what their job is": Is this satire again?
- If there's already proposal pages that editors can amend and discuss, and the proposer can submit grant applications and would do/coordinate the implementation, and WMF reviews the grants... what's a board for? (aside from whacking ideas for bloating the WP bureaucracy over the head, Stooges-style.) SamuelRiv (talk) 15:42, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- Not Satire -All the committees started with vague responsibilities, which we then coloured in as we went.
- I disagree that the proposal/grant process works well.
- After the proposal is approved, then it falls down. No one is respsonsible for testing, reporting back, supporting the chage, and testing, Our process at the moment is proposal approved, WMF start work, ask for comment directly, install, RfC complaining, testing, modifications, complaints about defaulting it to all.
- Gold Plating. The pareto principle applies to software in that 80 % of the cost is the last 20 % of work. Our current process causes large expensive projects, with many features that are unused, becuase multiple voices demand without triage
- Planning. We have no forward plan for how we think WP will work, which means WMF have no roadmap. We have no risk reduction or proacive planning. For instance, what do we do if
- We have a Denial of service attack type attack on the NPP, through an AI creating thousands of articles.
- Google/Facebook creates an AI generated 'pedia
- Our tired UI encourages Generational change - The continuing decline in admins, 100 K editors leavihg per year
- $ Proposals and System changes are papering over conflict and editor resource issues,
- Proposals are solutions, but there is no list of problems, and there is no data analysis to verify opinions.
- Benefits of Change. There is no checking of whether the proposal acheived it's goal.
- The Content creators (mostly new editors) are not involved. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:12, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- These are great points. If development on WM software is not currently managed well, how would proposing changes through a WP bureaucracy be different from proposing changes through a WMF bureaucracy? You still have to go through the participation of the entrenched volunteer WM programmers, which through divorce of projects you have suddenly fragmented. I don't know how the addition of additional input of WP editors into the process (there's phabricator, WMF project pages, emailing WMF people directly, proposals through WP, and more currently that you can do to raise these concerns or search for whether they are already being addressed) is supposed to help anything except possibly an editor's self-esteem, briefly, until they are ignored. It reminds me of the story Richard Feynman talks about of receiving messages from the public, even after filtering for those who aren't cranks -- he's busy trying to decode the combination lock on a safe, using some tools to make the process more methodical, and comments come in like "did you try 21-3-49? How about the bank manager's birthday?" There's a good case to be made that WM coding should have a better management structure, but in the end that will probably require hiring at least a project manager and principal coder, which means yet more $200k+ salaries to shell out. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:56, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- I believe I am correct in stating that most WMF staff (employees + contractors) work remotely, i.e. from home. So why do they have to be in the US? There are many parts of the world outside the US where competent coders can be hired for a fraction of the cost. Andreas JN466 14:56, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- WMF funds some grant requests and not others, and they give reasons why. I have wondered about some of their rejections, whether it is due to being beaten out with a limited grants budget (all departments anywhere have limited budgets) or if they lost on merits or prospects for completion. Could you link the specific proposal you are referring to? SamuelRiv (talk) 15:35, 28 August 2022 (UTC)
- When did WMF and WP start to diverge? Was it after the 2015 Harassment Survey? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Wakelamp (talk • contribs) 07:00, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- I have been editing for 14 years and have been an administrator for five years. I have always tried to develop friendly relationships with WMF staffers and still have some friendships though far less so than in the past. I used to live about 32 miles from WMF headquarters in San Francisco, and was always willing to drive there, pay for bridge tolls and parking, and meet with the staffers to share the perspectives of highly productive volunteer editors who are essential to the success of the encyclopedia. As the years have gone by, the staffers that I knew and who paid attention to what I had to say as a highly active encyclopedia editor have moved on, presumably to even better jobs in the software industry. A few remain who I interact with, but it seems that the WMF is determined to throw its cash resources at "pie in the sky" efforts to draw in editors from poor countries without fixing the fundamental flaws with the mobile sites and apps that such potential editors are most likely to use. The WMF takes in the massive amounts of cash that poor people worldwide donate, and instead of spending that to allow people to truly collaborate on smartphones used by billions of people worldwide, they squander the money to keep overpaid and unproductive code monkeys prosperous for more and more years to come, to the detriment of the encyclopedia. The desktop site works just fine on modern smartphones. Why not shut down all mobile sites and apps, and lay off all of the developers who have utterly failed to make these mobile sites and apps fully functional for over a decade? Why should people who have failed for so long stay on the payroll? I hate to be mean but no profit making business would tolerate a dozen years of complete and utter incompetence from a project team, when the free alternative works just fine as I have proved over and over and over over the years. It is nest feathering behavior by human beings who should know better. Their excuse boils down to "it's hard". Not acceptable when the cash donations of poor people are at stake. Cullen328 (talk) 07:48, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- User talk:Jimbo Wales/Archive 241#Newbie and IP edits should be vetted delayed before they go live " But we have a situation ongoing for a very very long time now that there is a disconnect between the community and the developers... a lack of trust is part of it... so that experimentation and rollback (something that we as Wikipedians should be super comfortable with) isn't allowed to happen. Any change to software is much much harder than it needs to be.-" Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:36, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- Like you, I always switch to desktop view on mobiles and tablets; it's perfectly fine unless you have a 3-inch iPhone screen. It would be nice if the desktop view option were more prominent, or indeed the default setting.
- Fundraising squeezing money out of poor people: See the current discussion/RfC over on the Proposals Village Pump, reviewing the Wikimedia fundraising emails about to go out. It touches on that.
- As for throwing money at the developing world: While I think there may be some problems with spending decisions (see Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF)#Should the WMF have rules or policies for when banned users apply for or are part of the team that administers grants?), I looked at the Form 990 a while back and found that claims the WMF is spending large amounts of money in the developing world are merely a convenient PR meme. In reality, the amounts have been absolutely minuscule to date – less than 2.5% of revenue. See Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2022-06-26/News and notes#Where does the Wikimedia Foundation spend its_money? for a breakdown. Andreas JN466 08:25, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Kudpung , @Cullen328 Your posts made me wonder where the WMF developers spend their time
- Exhibit 1 - fund raising Full board- 5 members
- Exhibit 2 - Community Wishlist All in backlog
- @WereSpielChequers You are correct - they aren't on our side - They can have the kids as well
- ??? Can we ask the trustees for the breakdown of costs by project ??? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:03, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- Your "
Exhibit 2 - Community Wishlist
" link doesn't seem to work — I think you may have meant phab:tag/Community-Wishlist-Survey-2022? If so, that board appears to be a little misleading, and you might find phab:tag/community-tech a little more helpful in gaining an insight into how this specific team is spending their time In the interest of transparency, I work on the Community Tech team as a software engineer, though I consider myself a volunteer first and foremost. — TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 16:38, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- Your "
- I have been editing for 14 years and have been an administrator for five years. I have always tried to develop friendly relationships with WMF staffers and still have some friendships though far less so than in the past. I used to live about 32 miles from WMF headquarters in San Francisco, and was always willing to drive there, pay for bridge tolls and parking, and meet with the staffers to share the perspectives of highly productive volunteer editors who are essential to the success of the encyclopedia. As the years have gone by, the staffers that I knew and who paid attention to what I had to say as a highly active encyclopedia editor have moved on, presumably to even better jobs in the software industry. A few remain who I interact with, but it seems that the WMF is determined to throw its cash resources at "pie in the sky" efforts to draw in editors from poor countries without fixing the fundamental flaws with the mobile sites and apps that such potential editors are most likely to use. The WMF takes in the massive amounts of cash that poor people worldwide donate, and instead of spending that to allow people to truly collaborate on smartphones used by billions of people worldwide, they squander the money to keep overpaid and unproductive code monkeys prosperous for more and more years to come, to the detriment of the encyclopedia. The desktop site works just fine on modern smartphones. Why not shut down all mobile sites and apps, and lay off all of the developers who have utterly failed to make these mobile sites and apps fully functional for over a decade? Why should people who have failed for so long stay on the payroll? I hate to be mean but no profit making business would tolerate a dozen years of complete and utter incompetence from a project team, when the free alternative works just fine as I have proved over and over and over over the years. It is nest feathering behavior by human beings who should know better. Their excuse boils down to "it's hard". Not acceptable when the cash donations of poor people are at stake. Cullen328 (talk) 07:48, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
@WereSpielChequers, Cullen328, and TheresNoTime: Some people are conspicuous by their absence from this list, maybe it's because they are concerned about landing in the Foundation's bad books. Not that it would matter, the WMF doesn't appear to give a hoot because the SF cabal, or at least its management class, is a classic example of groupthink. I've often wondered what it's like to split one's personality between being a volunteer and accepting pay at the same time. Personally I don't think it's possible but I do admire the tiny handful of those who straddle the Great Divide and who are able to remain on the side of the volunteers. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 18:49, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi Kudpung, I've been a volunteer since 2007, and was a WMUK part time staff member from 2013 to 2015. I can remember leaving the room for one WMUK AGM (I didn't have to be in the room as either a volunteer a member or an employee, and would have been in an odd situation if I'd been in the room for a particular item). Mostly though I thought it worked, and I think my history of being a volunteer for six years before I joined the staff was a big advantage in my GLAM role. As for your letter, I suspect I'm not the only Inclusionist who was put off by the sewer analogy. If I'd agreed with the letter a bit more I would have signed it, as we both learned many years ago when we and ScottyWong looked into the block logs of the most active editors, discreet and diplomatic approaches are not the best way to influence the WMF. ϢereSpielChequers 19:05, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- @WereSpielChequers:, I wasn't alluding for a moment to your salaried role in a Wikipedia chapter. I will also never forget the one-to-one meeting we had in Oxford a great many years ago that inspired and encouraged me to become so active on NPP issues for over a decade. NPP has been without any coordination for a couple of years until MB stepped in recently. He and Novem Linguae are doing a grand job which partly includes doing some of the paid WMF's work for them for free. I thouroghly agree that
discreet and diplomatic approaches are not the best way to influence the WMF.
The new NPP oodinators' initiative with their letter is urgent and admirable although there might be some very minor turns of phrase that in hindsight could just possibly have been differently worded. I don't think they are a deal breaker though, and NPP certainly needs a lucky break soon. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:56, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- @WereSpielChequers:, I wasn't alluding for a moment to your salaried role in a Wikipedia chapter. I will also never forget the one-to-one meeting we had in Oxford a great many years ago that inspired and encouraged me to become so active on NPP issues for over a decade. NPP has been without any coordination for a couple of years until MB stepped in recently. He and Novem Linguae are doing a grand job which partly includes doing some of the paid WMF's work for them for free. I thouroghly agree that
- There are clear culture-clashes between Wikipedia (enwiki in particular) and the WMF; and I definitely agree that some of the stuff they've spent the money enwiki (largely) generates on could have been more productive. But at the end of the day operating a site with the size and prominence of Wikipedia is going to require a sort of legal, financial, and bureaucratic overhead that cannot (currently) be done through enwiki's methods. I think we can and should push for better communication between the two and more input and influence from Wikipedia in the WMF's decision-making process, but I don't think it's realistic to suggest separating the two; we'd just need another WMF eventually. And at the end of the day, while I disagree with some of what the WMF has done, they've done better than the people who run any other high-profile website I can name - would you want to replace the WMF with the people who run Twitter? Google? Facebook? At the end of the day, outside of a tiny number of clashes that ended up having little impact in the grand scheme of things, the WMF has mostly allowed enwiki to do its thing, and enwiki has largely done all right by that arrangement. --Aquillion (talk) 03:14, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- Aquillion, the difference between the WMF and 'big tech' is that Twitter, Google, Facebook, etc., pay salaries to the people whose work generates the huge corporate profits. This sets the paygrades for the staff at the WMF, several of whom are on celebrity salaries. This is what causes miscontent. The WMF expects, yea, demands, that not only do we accept their wasteful, unrequested software 'enhancements', but that our volunteers who have enough to do also do the engineering on projects that the paid devs don't find sexy enough.
- The case of the NPP tools is rather essential and without the new articles being promptly and accurately patrolled, Wikipedia will loose the very reputation for clean articles that the Foundation boasts about. Indeed , it's already happening.
- We are down to barely 10% of the supposed 750 reviewers, and of that 10% only a tiny handful are doing 90% of the work, and backlog drives are proving largely ineffectual. In the worst case scenario, the reviewers will simply down tools. I wouldn't exactly call ACTRIAL, for example, a clash that ended up having little impact in the grand scheme of things. It had an immediate effect that worked wellmfor a while, but its usefulness has since expired. It was extremely useful in one respect however: it proved loudly and clearly just how totally wrong the WMF can be. They may have forgotten it in the grand scheme of things, but we haven't. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:00, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- As Kudpung says, staff at Twitter etc. work for the company and can be expected to follow all reasonable orders in exchange for a salary. At Wikipedia, money flows the other way: unpaid editors create and curate content, which attracts donations, which WMF takes from Wikipedia. Effectively, Wikipedia is buying services such as hosting and legal from the WMF. Even though the transfer of Wikipedia's brand made the WMF a monopolist, it should still act more like a supplier than an employer. Certes (talk) 10:15, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- Actually, "unpaid editors create and curate content" exactly describes the business model at Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Why do you think those companies give away their services for free? Because then their users generate content for free. Which those companies monetize by selling ads. If you're not the customer, you're the product. -- RoySmith (talk) 21:47, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Aquillion: Are you aware by just how much WMF revenue has increased over the years?
- As for WMF salaries, compare some of the entries here to the corresponding entries two years prior. You've got the CEO's compensation increasing by 7%, the DGC's and GC's by 10%, the CFO's by 11%, the CAO's by 22%, the CCO's by 25%, the CT/CO's by 28%, and the CPO's by 32% over a two-year period when US inflation was at 2%.
- Meanwhile, WMF fundraising messages ask donors – including in places like India and South Africa – for money "to keep Wikipedia online". Andreas JN466 11:12, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- @Aquillion I don't really wish a seperation, but a rebalancing of the relationship. I do think that WMF has changed it's philosophy Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 22:57, 31 August 2022 (UTC)
- Has there ever been a proposal to message Spotlight to all active editors? I ask becuase it might correct the WMF and WP imbalance because most editors will never go near pump, For instance the discussion on the WMF emails only involved 20 editors (plus lurkers) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk)
Arbitrary break
What a tangled web the WMF weaves: A recent, long comment from a senior Foundation employee, goes to demonstrate once again the reasons for the community's long-ingrained distrust of the Foundation's use of the huge surplus money generated by the free work of volunteers, and the claims the Foundation makes of supporting the volunteers with the required software. The comment comes across as a rather poorly worded hurried attempt by the WMF to justify itself but it clearly contradicts that department's own mission statement.
The community has previously been told quite clearly that the maintenance of the essential PageTriage software is not within the remit of the WMF's Growth Team (although it was a WMF creation). At the same time they are telling us that there will be no action until a request is submitted through their annual Wishlist Survey. Maintaining the features and addressing the bugs in the various elements of the NPP tools is clearly beyond the scope and purpose of Community Tech as described on their own web page. Even if the community were to assume a huge dose of good faith, what is it supposed to believe?
The appeal addresses precisely that question. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:25, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- Well, what else can we do? I predict that once the letter is sent, a similar response to the above will be made. I suppose we need some other big idea if we are to improve the program. Perhaps something for me to mull over for a while. Even if the letter does succeed, it wouldn't hurt to devise an alternative solution to the problem. CollectiveSolidarity (talk) 03:23, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- @CollectiveSolidarity Your user name is very appropriate for a possible solution; have The Spotlight sent to all active editors with editorials explaining the issues, or at least emcouraging connectivity/editor retention/community/article improvement. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:50, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- I have an Option 4 which would solve your NPP issue.
- Define what changes you want,
- Ask for a ball park quote from an external Wiki developer,
- Do a press release. But require they do the interview in a way not to reveal your identity - the Secret Wikipedia.
- Get Ask EFF agreement to help , and to use one of thier bank accounts.
- Get agreement from Gutenberg, Open ID, Apaches, Free Software foundation, celebrity to put up banners for us
- Get a | quote
- Have the developer do a detailed quote
- Create a kickstarter (after asking EFF to verify whether statements are legal) explaining our plight. and advise that x % will go to Support EFF and to review our management documents. Any over will go to the supporting charities.EFF will disburse the cash at development milestones. Kickstarters can also get t-shirts with 2005 Wikipedia Slogans @Jayen466. This was my Option 4). Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 06:44, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- Option 4.1 Is similar, but we sell the T-shirts on wikipediocracy. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:06, 1 September 2022 (UTC)
- Send a notice that 'The Spotlight' is available to all editors that have logged on in the last 12 months. If we want change then we need to organise, otherwise they will continue to increase in size, and ignore us.Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:46, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- Wakelamp, let no one doubt for a moment that the required changes to NPP have not been thoroughly researched, discussed and defined by the NPP team. It's a lot of ongoing, dedicated work here and on its sub page. The scope of the work is such that paradixically, some of the Growth Team's members are telling us it's too big for the current pool of WMF developers, while other members are insisting the changes should be appealed for at their Wishlist. This obviously casts further doubts as to the professionalism and seriousness of those in charge of the Foundation's technology, and puts their sincerity in question. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:37, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- On the Org chart they show 4 developers assigned to the project - have they been assigned elsewhere?
- Chris Albon Director of Machine Learning
- Kevin Bazira Software Engineer III
- Aiko Chou Software Engineer III (Contractor)
- Tobias Klausmann Senior Site Reliability Engineer (contractor)
- Luca Toscano Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Contractor) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 23:55, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors is famously out of date, if that's where you got the above from — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 06:21, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- Yes - that's where I got it. Is there a better one? I thought of scraping Meta user, but only IT staff seem to have user pages. The web estimates 900 staff and growth rate of 35 %
- WMF is incredibly opaque compared to others Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 08:51, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- I'm not aware of a more up-to-date global list like that (and I believe that one is slated for removal) — for the Growth team, their team listing on MediaWiki.org may be more helpful? — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 12:37, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- With Growth, the page states it is only for mid-sized wiki.
- Thank-you for the tip about the possible upcoming deletion, and. I have now downloaded it just in case
- There is nothing elsem so i have already converted it to Excel for the other analysis I am doing,
- As an aside,Glassdoor (employee reviews) has been an eye-opener, as it indicates that the WMF internal structure is fiefdom/divisional silos (each has it's own section, often a profit centre linked to a porject), with absent central control, unquantified goals, and with every dfficulty factor turned to 11
- Conway's law states that organisations create computer systems that reflect their internal communication,which explains a lot about the WP and WMF systems,
- Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:50, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- I'm not aware of a more up-to-date global list like that (and I believe that one is slated for removal) — for the Growth team, their team listing on MediaWiki.org may be more helpful? — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 12:37, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- https://wikimediafoundation.org/role/staff-contractors is famously out of date, if that's where you got the above from — TheresNoTime (talk • she/her) 06:21, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- Wakelamp, let no one doubt for a moment that the required changes to NPP have not been thoroughly researched, discussed and defined by the NPP team. It's a lot of ongoing, dedicated work here and on its sub page. The scope of the work is such that paradixically, some of the Growth Team's members are telling us it's too big for the current pool of WMF developers, while other members are insisting the changes should be appealed for at their Wishlist. This obviously casts further doubts as to the professionalism and seriousness of those in charge of the Foundation's technology, and puts their sincerity in question. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:37, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
"Demoting" patent nonsense to an info page
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Patent nonsense#Super crazy idea: demote to info page. HouseBlastertalk 02:29, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
Check out the View it! prototype & join us for a demo + discussion on Aug. 31st 16:00GMT
We have a new project that has been funded by the Wikimedia Foundation as part of the Structured Data Across Wikimedia Work to create a tool called View it!. The tool aims to increase the discoverability of images on Commons, give readers and editors access to more images, and encourage contributors to utilize Commons & structured data. Please visit the Meta page if you are interested in trying out the prototype. We are having a demo and feedback session on August 31st at 16:00 UTC, please join us if you wish!
Please feel free to ask any questions you may have! Thanks! JamieF (talk) 17:04, 29 August 2022 (UTC)
- Hi,
- thank-you for engaging. I understand that it is a prototype, but Can you explain a bit more about how you think it might retrieves data in the future?. My knowledge of Wikidata is low, but the tool forge link mentions a wikidata q number So how will the wikiddata Q number, wikimedia commons, and Wikipedia interlink? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 07:37, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
- Wakelamp A q number is an unique identifier for every single subject. All wikipedia article has an unique q number. Each q number also connect all languages of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 11:55, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
How did the WMF-WP taskforce work for US 2020 elections??
How did the Taskforce work? Is it something we can learn from? Or did it not exist?
"An example of this was the task force the Foundation prepared ahead of the 2020 US presidential election. Foundation staff worked for hand in hand with volunteers to establish clearer lines of communication between volunteers and staff to surface and address disinformation attempts, conducted research to better understand how disinformation could spread on Wikimedia projects and built new tools for volunteers to evaluate potentially malicious edits and behaviour on the site. "
How Wikipedia Is Preparing For The 2020 U.S. Election – Wikimedia Foundation
What Wikipedia saw during election week in the U.S., and what we’re doing next – Wikimedia Foundation Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 14:54, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
- I propose you ask Jimmy Wales on Monday. (Questions asked on his talk page close to the weekend tend to get archived unanswered.) He must know; he talked about it. Andreas JN466 22:02, 2 September 2022 (UTC)
- Ahhh,,,,so it's marketing copy :-( Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 00:39, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- You might be interested in m:Research:Patrolling on Wikipedia and m:Research:Disinformation Literature Review. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 22:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- Ahhh,,,,so it's marketing copy :-( Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 00:39, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
Source links in new article creation boilerplate?
How difficult would it be to add {{find sources|newpagename}} to the boilerplate when navigating to a red link/not-currently-existing article? Jclemens (talk) 02:17, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- I would ask in WP:VPT how to edit it, but adding something like {{find sources|{{PAGENAME}}}} would be the way to achieve it. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:49, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Extending the amount of time an RFA is opened
Hi, I would like to know if there have been any proposals calling for extending the time RFAs are opened. I checked the archives to see if there was and I couldn't find any. I would be interested if anyone would support extending the time RFAs are opened from 1 week to 2 weeks. I think that the longer amount of time that the RFA is open will give less stress to the candidate when answering questions. We've had many discussions on Wikipedia that have been open for more than 1 week, so why should RFA be so short? Interstellarity (talk) 21:30, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- Many editors would just be maximally stressed for 14 days instead of 7. —Kusma (talk) 21:38, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
- My understanding is that the rationale for seven days was that some editors only log on once or twice a week (say on weekends) so we maximise the chance of editors being able notice the discussion and participate. Allowing for longer would allow for more participation, but there would be a diminishing rate of return, and as Kusma pointed out, this must be balanced against the stress on the candidate. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:06, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- AFAIK there haven't been any such proposals, and IMO such a suggestion would fall on deaf ears. Admins (and some former admins) speak for themselves here on the thrill of going through the process. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:06, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- IMHO, the problem with RFAs nowadays is too many questions, especially complex hypotheticals about certain edge cases. Years ago it was common to pass RFA/RFB with only the 3 standard questions and maybe 4-5 additional questions. Now it seems even effectively unanimous passes with almost/over WP:200 supports still answer almost 20 questions. Adminship is a toolkit for trusted users, and was always intended not to be a big deal, they aren't supreme court justices. Andre🚐 02:18, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- I don't think this is a good idea. Full disclosure; my own experience at RfA has prejudiced my opinion rather strongly. -Ad Orientem (talk) 02:25, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- (Having gone through the process recently...) I agree with the statements above in that this would probaby increase stress, and additionally we may get fewer willing candidates as they may feel like they have to wait until they have a two-week window where they are able to be constantly available and responsive to questions, rather than one week. DanCherek (talk) 05:12, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- (I also just went through this process) In my opinion, longer RfAs will lead to more optional questions, thus increasing the candidate's stress. I would not want to go through a two-week RfA. Z1720 (talk) 18:38, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- Disagree. In most cases, consensus is achieved rather quickly over 1-2 days even, sometimes newer vital information comes shortly after. But generally, one week is abundant. In cases, where it is borderline, adding 7 days won't help much. From a stress point of view, the longer, the more stressful. I recently self-nominated myself unsuccessfully for an RfA and do think there are other ways to reduce the stress, namely having more people run simultaneously. ~ 🦝 Shushugah (he/him • talk) 18:42, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Incentivize WP:Vital article improvement
It's been a few week since a series of threads popped up about this issue, and it's pretty clear in these discussions that improving Vital articles is important. I tried to apply that to practice with the WikiProject Vital Articles, but it seems to me that we can do more than that. Should a contest like WikiCup be set up? (like WP:The Core Contest but year-long) CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 14:33, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
Expanding the partial blocks policy?
When partial blocks were enabled by the community in a 2019 RfC, many commentators expressed that they wanted followup discussions around their implementation and use. In my RfA in August, I was asked about partial blocks and discovered that the policy on using p-blocks is two paragraphs long and, in my opinion, does not provide much guidance to admin on when to use a p-block. There is also an essay about p-blocks located at Wikipedia:Partial blocks but essays contain opinions from individual editors and have not been vetted by the community.
Are editors interested in developing a policy of guideline to give more information about p-blocks? Do editors want to update the p-blocks essay to a guideline, after community vetting of the essay's prose? Z1720 (talk) 17:38, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- I think the current situation works just fine. It's just another tool to control disruption while reducing collateral damage. I don't see what additional policy changes it needs. -- RoySmith (talk) 17:49, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- I agree. I don’t see a need for anything more. Doug Weller talk 18:01, 4 September 2022 (UTC)
- I concur with RoySmith. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 22:21, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
Running SecurePoll on enwiki
Is there a reason SecurePoll isn't implemented locally on enwiki, rather than leaving us dependent on the WMF opening polls on votewiki when we request them?
As far as I can tell, there is no technical limitation that prevents it from being implemented here. I would note that the GUI for SecurePoll isn't complete, and there are some "nice to have" features that can only be configured through the raw XML file that requires server access to use, but it does function fine without it, and in circumstances where the poll we want to run needs those features we can ask the WMF to push the XML file we create.
On the topic of SecurePoll, I would note that the perceived limitation identified in the 2021 Review of RFA does not appear to exist; in my test implementation I have half a dozen polls running simultaneously without issue. It is possible that these limitations are a matter of scale, and that when there are hundreds or thousands of editors voting only one can function, but this limitation is not documented anywhere I can see. BilledMammal (talk) 01:46, 5 September 2022 (UTC)
- I share with your mistrust, and I would be heartily in favour of the move,But even if it was on enwiki, the WMF bloc is enough to decide the outcome .
- Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 00:14, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- There are currently a few backlogged items about how to manage and log access to private information that is collected by SecurePoll. — xaosflux Talk 01:19, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- @BilledMammal as far as I was aware, the restriction wasn't "only one poll in play at once" but "polls in different languages can't co-exist" - at least, that was the issue named to me when MCDC elections ran into the fa-wiki arbcom-equivalent election. Nosebagbear (talk) 12:17, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Nosebagbear: The real suggestion is to run the SecurePoll extension locally on enwiki. The problem was that both the MCDC and the fawiki elections were on votewiki and they had to change the language to Farsi. See [6][7][8][9]. 0xDeadbeef 13:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- Oh sure, but I'm not qualified to judge on the technical aspects of that, I was just intrigued as to the potential capacity of the main platform/BM's tests, Nosebagbear (talk) 13:41, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Nosebagbear: The real suggestion is to run the SecurePoll extension locally on enwiki. The problem was that both the MCDC and the fawiki elections were on votewiki and they had to change the language to Farsi. See [6][7][8][9]. 0xDeadbeef 13:12, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- Looking back at the 2021 review it looks like about half of the opposes were based on the supposed technical limitations. Other than that there were concerns that elections are easily gamed (which is speculation, and also RFAs can be gamed to have sockpuppets promoted) and that the time gap between elections is too long (can be adjusted according to consensus). I would like to see this proposal revived some day. 0xDeadbeef 13:50, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- There's a task for this here: phab:T301180. Xeno (WMF) (talk) 16:20, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
Notice for new issue of Signpost to all
Each new edition of 'The Signpost' to be sent out as a notice to all editors active in the last 12 momth, with a project of the month ((Apaugasma 's Core Content,CactiStaccingCrane's VA incentivisation), a new editor topic of the month,and discussions of enwiki concerns with WMF.
Why?
We have a shortage of editors, there are many reasons,but a big one is that editors don't feel connection, or feel overwhelmed. The Signpost counters this by fostering community
With WMF, the more editors that we have involved, the more strength we have for change, Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 01:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Wakelamp and Publication manager, JPxG please elaborate on the specific technical change you are proposing here; especially if it will involve delivering mass notifications to people that didn't subscribe. — xaosflux Talk 01:18, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- Conversely, can we add a css class to the watchlist message so I don't have to dismiss it from the top of my watchlist it every month in addition to seeing it there on MediaWiki:Watchlist-messages and a dozen talk pages for users who've explicitly subscribed? —Cryptic 01:23, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Cryptic not impossible, but a couple pieces of work is needed for that to be consistent. (1) Template:Display/watchlist needs to be updated to accept an additional class parameter (anyone can work on that, it is needed in advance). (2) Pick a class to use (e.g.
wln-signpost
) (3) Get the publication managers (User:JPxG) to ensure that when they request WLN's for signpost to include the entire message they want, formatted, with the new class parameter involved. (4)That should solve it, as the actual updates to WLN for SP come from admins, who are usually triggered to do so based on the publication request at WT:WL. — xaosflux Talk 13:34, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- @Cryptic not impossible, but a couple pieces of work is needed for that to be consistent. (1) Template:Display/watchlist needs to be updated to accept an additional class parameter (anyone can work on that, it is needed in advance). (2) Pick a class to use (e.g.
- Changes to Idea
- Rather than 'The Sign Post' , a New Editor news letter. And an alert rather than a notice (no modification to user pages)
- Tech changes.
- User creation to have a new flag for opt in for newsletters, defaulted to yes
- An alert (see suggestion here) would be preferred to a notice,
- The editor would have the option to opt out, if they opted out a message would be sent to thier notice page thanking them and giving them the option to resubscribe
- Only one alert until an editor reads it.
- Implementaion
- Some new editors. see how many opt out, and see whether it helps retention .
- In the future extend it to all, except current subscribers,or even all experienced editors
- Precedent/Justification
- WMF already do a series of surveys on new editors (detail is not available to us)
- It is ethical to insure that voter/participants are informed;It is one of our major complaints about WMF
- We send notices to people to people who have not opted in. For instance, new article creation does not specify that you must agree to receive a notice from NPP or speedy. Our terms of use states "You agree that we may provide you with notices, including those regarding changes to the Terms of Use, by email, regular mail, or postings on Project websites"
- Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 02:27, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- Conversely, can we add a css class to the watchlist message so I don't have to dismiss it from the top of my watchlist it every month in addition to seeing it there on MediaWiki:Watchlist-messages and a dozen talk pages for users who've explicitly subscribed? —Cryptic 01:23, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- "Each new edition of 'The Signpost' to be sent out as a notice to all editors active in the last 12 momth"
- There's already a watchlist reminder. We don't need more. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 02:30, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- The suggested implementation is only for new editors - you will not receive any more Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:37, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- New editors also have a watchlist. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:52, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- True - but they have to choose to know the newsletter is available , and choose to add pages to the watchlist, Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 10:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- I understand that The Signpost is announced at the top of your watchlist, and not only if you add pages to your watchlist. Thus the choices involved are (1) go to Special:Watchlist and (2) look at what's changed in the banner area on that page instead of focusing straightaway on the list of recently edited articles.. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:18, 7 September 2022 (UTC)
- True - but they have to choose to know the newsletter is available , and choose to add pages to the watchlist, Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 10:10, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- New editors also have a watchlist. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 08:52, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
- The suggested implementation is only for new editors - you will not receive any more Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 03:37, 6 September 2022 (UTC)
Biology articles and human focus
There's currently no standard for how to divide humans, other animals, and other living organisms in biology articles (especially in anatomy and medicine articles). A few examples:
- Articles such as Heart are nominally about the entire topic, but the vast majority of the content is about how they occur in humans and an "Other animals" or "Other organisms" section covers all other examples.
- Articles such as Brain and Human brain have both a general article about the topic and a specific article about the human version.
- Articles such as Digestion and Human digestive system similarly split the article, but they follow WP:SUMMARIZE and have a section in the parent article summarizing the child article.
- Articles such as Sleep and Sleep in animals treat the human aspect as the default with a separate article for all other occurrences.
- Articles such as Anatomy#Human anatomy and Human body#Anatomy intersect and talk about the same subject relative to two different ideas.
- Articles such as Tissue (biology) discuss all forms without making any distinction between different types of animals.
- Articles such as Health lack information on the subject in the context of any living thing— animal, plant, or otherwise— except for humans.
Each of these formats seems to have different drawbacks. How can we come up with a method to determine which formats to use and when they should be applied? Should there be a codified standard that's used? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 06:00, 8 September 2022 (UTC)