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

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

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

I do t see a practical way to enforce that. I also dont think that peoples skill level with AI can transfer to an assessment of their skill level in wikipedia. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 11:31, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding enforcement, I would suggest:
1. Looking at whatever process ClueBot uses to detect and evaluate new edits, and add a "extended confirmed/non-ec" clause.
1.1. I will admit I'm not entirely sure of how this would work on a technical level, which is why I posted this idea in the idea lab.
2. Look to word frequency as in User:Gnomingstuff/AI experiment to distinguish AI from non-AI edits. Koopinator (talk) 15:32, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
please don't use this in any kind of blocking enforcement capacity, it is not remotely ready for anything like that Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:41, 20 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
A person's willingness to use AI on Wikipedia is an immediate and absolute WP:NOTHERE, in my opinion. TooManyFingers (talk) 05:50, 4 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Too sweeping an opinion in my opinion. First you would have to be talking about specifically using unsupervised AI to write articles. Secondly I think it would be "insistance" rather than "willingness". And thirdly it could well be a WP:CIR or user education issue rather than a NOTHERE one. All the best: Rich Farmbrough 18:03, 6 November 2025 (UTC).[reply]
Do you have any evidence that extended confirmed users create any better edits with AI than users who are not extended confirmed? Phil Bridger (talk) 14:33, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would say it's a reasonable inference. Here's what I can say:
  • We can expect that extended-confirmed users are more likely to be familiar with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, by virtue of having been here longer.
  • Some anecdotal evidence:
    • [1] LLM edit with no sources, survived for almost 2 months. Was created by an editor who was neither confirmed nor extended confirmed.
    • [2] Personal project by yours truly, AI assistance was used, careful review of text-source integrity of every sentence as I constructed the page in my sandbox over the course of 59 days before airing it.
  • I admit none of this is hard evidence.
I do feel LLM has its place on the site (otherwise I wouldn't have used ChatGPT assistance in constructing a page), but if it's allowed, the barrier for usage really should be heightened. Wikipedia's content translation tool is also restricted to extended-confirmed users.
Koopinator (talk) 15:25, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The issue is raising the bar to prevent bots from editing Wikipedia using LLMs. LDW5432 (talk) 19:57, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
LLM detection for text is very hard and has far, far too many false positives, especially for non-native speakers and certain wavelengths of autism. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:41, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
^ This is my experience. Also, a lot of edits are too brief for the already-dodgy AI "detectors" to be reliable for.
@Koopinator, you've made around 2,000 mainspace edits in the last ~2 years. Here's a complete list of all your edits that the visual editor could detect as being more than a handful of words added.[3] It's 78 edits (4% of your edits) – less than once a week on average. And I'd guess that half of your content additions are too short to have any chance of using an anti-AI tool on, so the anti-AI tool would check your edits two or three times a month. Why build something, if it could only be useful so rarely? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:58, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, how would that tool's frequency scale across the entire Wikipedia community? I'd imagine it'd be used at least a little bit more often then. (or, I imagine, multiple orders of magnitude) Koopinator (talk) 05:55, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For brand-new editors, it might capture something on the order of half of mainspace edits. High-volume editors are much more likely to edit without adding any content, so it'd be much less useful for that group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
We could at least use a flagging system for vandalism review. LDW5432 (talk) 14:05, 6 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It should be possible to detect low hanging fruit AI text, based on certain common features. Raw AI inference cut and pasted from a chat bot is going to be easier to detect. I agree that the type of user doing this probably has no reputation at stake, doesn't care very much, more likely to be newbie and/or a non-native speaker from another Wiki. I don't know about policy, but a bot that sends a talk page notice, or flags the edit summary with a "[possible ai]" tag. No one is already working on this? -- GreenC 17:10, 18 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
mw:Edit check/Tone Check uses a Small language model to detect promotionalism. (See tagged edits.) I'd guess that it would be possible to add an AI detector to that, though the volume involved would mean the WMF would need to host their own or pay for a corporate license and address the privacy problems.
mw:Edit check/Paste Check is probably more efficient, though, as anyone copying from a chatbot is going to be pasting it into the article, and detecting a big paste is easier than checking the words that were pasted in. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:04, 19 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think AI edits should be mandatory for everyone to disclose, both in articles and talk pages. There could be a box where you check it if your content comes from AI or is mostly AI, similar to how you can check minor edits. Bogazicili (talk) 18:40, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Having a UI element like that would work towards legitimizing LLM use in creating text for Wikipedia. Merko (talk) 00:41, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree: Either it will allow the material to be posted and thus legitimize LLM use, or it won't allow the material to be posted and cause people to tell lies so they can get it posted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:18, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Do we currently have a policy on LLM usage? This one seems failed Wikipedia:Large language model policy
My position is that if it's not banned, it should be declared. Bogazicili (talk) 10:45, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I thought the failed policy proposal was supposed to require people to declare it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:00, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Almost 2 years ago. Merko (talk) 22:09, 23 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
LLM-generated content is a cancer on Wikipedia, and it will only get worse. "AI detectors" have many false positives, as do checks made by editors themselves, but just because we can't reliably detect something today doesn't mean we shouldn't implement a policy against it. I support mandating the disclosure of LLM-generated contributions by all users. We don't treat WP:GNG differently on articles created by extended-confirmed users or others, we shouldn't do it here either. Merko (talk) 22:21, 21 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you think original content generated by a program is a negative to that extent, then I don't think requiring disclosure is the appropriate approach, since that would only be a prelude to removal. We should skip straight to requiring editors not to use programs to generate original content. isaacl (talk) 04:38, 22 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia should first address LLM content from anonymous IPs. LDW5432 (talk) 19:56, 27 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
IP editing actually isn't that much of a problem here -- in my experience almost all AI text I find came from someone with a registered account. Off the top of my head I'd say less than 10% of it comes from IPs.
This may change with temporary accounts in a few days though, who knows. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:56, 30 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I came here to propose pretty much the same thing (policy, not bot). Having a blanket rule would be hugely helpful in dealing with editors, since it can get very tedious explaining why each AI edit they claim to have checked is in fact problematic. I might even go so far as to propose a separate user right (or pseudo-right?) called something like LLM user, for editors who can demonstrate they are sufficiently competent with content policies and have a legitimate use case. I don't think such a right should convey any actual abilities, but users found to be using LLMs without it could then be much more easily censured and guided towards other forms of editing. Applying exactly the same system but tying it to extended confirmation seems like it minimizes potential rule creep, but it's a blunter filter which might not be as effective, since I'm sure there are plenty of extended confirmed users who lack the requisite understanding of policy. lp0 on fire () 21:03, 10 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That is probably a good idea, but I don't see any way to enforce it automatically and also do it well, as it would not be good if someone got flagged for using AI when they did not, and Wikipedia is so large it would happen a lot. I believe that AI should be used extremely rarely on Wikipedia, as it is known to hallucinate mis-information and drag on and on about things that don't matter (see: Grokapedia, or search up AI hallucinations). It has many chances to cause things to go awry, and should not be made main-stream as a way to enhance/speed up editing. I suggest it is done by humans. If a new user joins Wikipedia and is flagged or seen on talk pages, maybe give there edits a look, just to make sure there doing good. Some ways to spot AI writing is looking for constant pairs of 3's (like, LOTS, basically every sentence), un-usual use of Em dashes,(looks like a bigger hyphen, — Vs. -) as they are not on a normal keyboard and either take a copy and paste or a very unique keyboard shortcut to type, repeating info or full paragraphs that don't really say/mean anything. A lot of these are hard to give examples for and you just have to see them for the first time to start noticing. Overall, I agree that there should be restrictions on AI edits. Oak lod (talk) 15:49, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly support the suggestion and would even go as far as suggesting a new flag. The AI as a tool is similar to WP:AWB: in unskilled or malicious hands it can do a lot of damage in a short amount of time. Correspondingly, use of AWB is not allowed for drive-by accounts. Similar logic applies to AI, IMHO. For the avoidance of doubt, I think that proper use of AI improves articles, so I think that we should regulate the use of AI, and not prohibit it. Fear of outright hallucination is overblown, as far I can tell: as long as the input was explicitly restricted to correct sources (either a foreign-language Wikipedia article or manually-selected WP:RS), there were no hallucinations. Note that texts of RS you are planning to use for the article should be fed to the engine first in their entirety, as for some reason the AI engines are really shy when it comes to actually fetching information off the Web (I suspect there are legal reasons in play here), so if you just point to the sources, AI will start generating ideas of its own, not summarizing the WP:RS as it should. Викидим (talk) 00:14, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Renaming indefinite blocks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

know how to look it up in a dictionary

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

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

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

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

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

Consistent display of coordinates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something else I'll mention, but which probably deserves its own discussion, is that WikiMiniAtlas now seems redundant to Wikimedia Maps. WikiMiniAtlas was great for its time but its design now feels outdated. The aesthetic recalls the early days of Web 2.0, there's no support for pinch to zoom, etc. The one area where WikiMiniAtlas shines is that it does provide links to other nearby articles. I'll admit that's a pretty major feature, arguably even the main feature.
(Also, is it just my imagination or is WMA's projection extremely distorted? WMA always seems to be stretched out along the east-west axis. Compare Iceland on WMA vs. OSM.) ~2025-32085-07 (talk) 07:10, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Coordinates do change over time if you give it enough time. 😀 Anomie⚔ 12:57, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
also wondering myself how people even find coordinates. I had to remove some from a page recently for being totally wrong. ← Metallurgist (talk) 04:51, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've also occasionally come across incorrect coordinates in Wikipedia articles. At least in the cases I've seen, the mixups sometimes arise when multiple nearby localities have similar names. ~2025-32085-07 (talk) 07:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've pointed this out on a few talk pages, but generally when it comes to coordinates, maps, and stuff like that all Wikipedia MOS goes out the window. Having coordinates without a source is original research. Having a locator map without a source for the boundaries is original research. There is almost no quality control, and rather rather then removing inaccurate or poorly sourced maps/geographic information, people argue they should be left until someone offers a better one. Really a huge issue, as a cartographer I'm a bit appalled. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 07:49, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:No original research defines original research as material for which the real word doesn't have a source saying that, which is importantly different from material for which the Wikipedia article doesn't cite an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Having a boundary file without a citation is like a direct quote without attribution. There are several maps where the boundaries are user generated, or appear to be, and people grab coordinates for places from a map but don't have a source verifying that those are the actual coordinates. Going onto Google Earth, grabbing a bunch of points, and making a map that says those points are the locations of _______ is OR. Boundaries are often challenged by official organizations, stating "This is where the border for ____ is" without stating where we got that information would not be acceptable in text. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 02:55, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Idea for International Mentoring Day '26 & beyond

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

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

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

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

The problem with days of X is that anyone can declare any day the day of X and these things die after a year or two when a few people forget about them.
Also I haven't really seen much active mentoring on Wikipedia, but that can be my fault because it is not the kinda thing I would notice. Polygnotus (talk) 03:42, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There really is an International Mentoring Day on 17 January. It was started as an extension of the US National Mentoring Month (held throughout the month of January), but is now encouraged worldwide.
Because mentorship is an important part of Wikipedia for many editors, it just seems like promoting the day would be a wonderful way to honor those who serve in this way.
Do you have any idea where else in the world of Wikipedia that this suggestion could be raised with greater likelihood of taking it further? ~2025-36716-26 (talk) 10:13, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No clue, sorry. Polygnotus (talk) 10:32, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think I have just found what seems a good step to move forward with this idea: to make a "Central Notice banner request." ~2025-37075-42 (talk) 16:54, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Central Notice banners are rarely used and for fully fleshed out ideas with consensus behind them that have been implemented already.
So far you reached one person, and they were not enthusiastic about the idea.
Is there a reason you would like to push this, which could include but is not limited to being involved with the people/an organization who/which decided to give that day that label or who/which joined the initiative? Polygnotus (talk) 17:07, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

History Viewer User group?

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

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

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

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

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

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

How is this compatible with the views expressed by our overloads the WMF at Wikipedia:Viewing deleted content? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 22:54, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See Wikipedia_talk:Requests_for_adminship/Archive_269#WMF_reply_about_userrights, particularly the response from Joe there, I think the general consensus is that the issue is trust. An RfA process with community votes implicitly proves that the user has this trust from the community. While the risk of deleted content containing extremely private information is low, it is not zero, and as such we'd not be comfortable allowing users access to this without first proving they have the trust of the community. I believe this process would be adequate to ensure trust of the community. EggRoll97 (talk) 23:31, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you want to view deleted content then you need to either pass RFA, pass an equivalent process (e.g. an admin election) or be granted the permission by arbcom. So a request for this new right would require the support of a majority of those commenting and at least 25 supporters. I don't see the benefit in creating a new process when we already have RFA and AELECT. Thryduulf (talk) 23:30, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Over the last few years, we have made relatively large strides in making adminship more accessible to more members of the community. I suspect that many of the people who could pass an RfA-like process which would be required to gain access to a permission like this could just go straight for RfA or AELECT and get the full toolset anyway. We want to encourage that too: I fear a permission like this could negatively affect admin recruitment if people feel like they need to go through this intermediate hoop first. Mz7 (talk) 23:48, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree, your argument could be applied to any user right because an admin has it. Most admin candidates have some form of advanced permissions anyway. Tenshi! (Talk page) 16:18, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, and this is mostly before my time, but I believe that there is a correlation between removing rollback from the admin bundle and an increase in RfA standards. I believe rollback was removed from the admin bundle in early 2008? Compare that to the chart at Wikipedia:Requests for adminship by year. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 21:16, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly, but at that time we had more editors than we do now, which has also been dropping since 2007. Tenshi! (Talk page) 21:36, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, don't think you can deny the correlation- but yes, that in an equally valid hypothesis as well. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🦋 22:44, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You made an excellent observation, and I think it is the correct response to Tenshi’s argument: indeed every user right that we have unbundled from the admin toolset over the years, from rollback to template editor to page mover, has made adminship a little less desirable for the people who would have benefited from the rights we unbundled. If we unbundle the ability to view deleted page histories too, then that too will also negatively impact admin recruitment efforts. Mz7 (talk) 19:06, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This permission is a core sensitive spot for why adminship is turning into a big deal. A while back, I tried to unbundle everything except this userright to make a patroller permission - IIRC the primary objection was that it wasn't technically possible. Tazerdadog (talk) 23:58, 12 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
deletedhistory is security through obscurity. It's available to anyone through the API. (Example.) —Cryptic 00:12, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Without deletedhistory you can't add drvprop=comment to that query. deletedhistory also lets you see revision-deleted user names and comments. Anomie⚔ 01:02, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a reason why edit summaries are hidden but the rest of the metadata (including the sha1 of the wikitext) is shown? Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 00:38, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Comments in T51088 indicate that WMF Legal wanted them omitted because sometimes admins don't bother to revision-delete RD-able material if the page is being deleted anyway, since historically both had the same end result of hiding the content from non-admins. The sha1 doesn't tell you much unless you already have the content to compare to. Anomie⚔ 01:20, 16 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
... and that's a bug, right? I didn't know this was a thing. I would be surprised if that were intentional. Otherwise why not write a user script to make deletedhistory trivially available to everyone? Mz7 (talk) 13:45, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There are already user scripts, User:SD0001/deleted-metadata-link and User:DreamRimmer/DeletedMetaData. Tenshi! (Talk page) 13:49, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No, it's not a bug. This goes back to 2019, bringing parity with access available in Toolforge since 2013. And as I noted above, you need deletedhistory to see comments (edit summaries) of deleted revisions and to see revision-deleted usernames and comments. Anomie⚔ 20:26, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, huh. TIL, I guess. Mz7 (talk) 01:01, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've been monitoring this section for a while. I for one don't think information about how to access metadata on deleted edits should be so obscure simply because it's so counter-intuitive as noted above). I knew that the limited info was accessible via Toolforge but not the other methods. To this end, I've made this edit to Wikipedia:Viewing and restoring deleted pages, incorporating comments mostly from this discussion by Cryptic, Anomie, and Tenshi Hinanawi. Any tweaks would be greatly appreciated, of course. As for the proposal at hand, I'm generally supportive of unbundling ideas, but I think more concrete examples of how this new right would assist affected users' workflows would be helpful, especially situations where the available metadata about deleted edits wouldn't be enough. Speaking strictly for myself, in my unique situation on enwiki as a non-admin importer who does wiki-archaeology, the usefulness of a usergroup like this would be greatly enhanced by adding the ability to delete/undelete edits (which I know is off-limits in this proposal because it touches on the "core" admin rights of block/protect/delete. For me 90% of my questions about deleted edits can be answered using available tools (or at least I can make educated guesses based on the information I have) and a very small percentage (maybe 1%?) of requests related to deletion/undeletion can be resolved by just checking deleted text. Graham87 (talk) 10:16, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why the requirement to advertise at VPR? I don't think any other permission has required that. Tenshi! (Talk page) 12:33, 13 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't particularly sure where to put advertisement requirements, since it would need to be widely advertised to satisfy the WMF. I guess maybe a watchlist notice would suffice, similarly to RfA? EggRoll97 (talk) 06:10, 14 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't really seem clear about that part what the WMF wants, though it might be better to advertise at WP:AN and WP:VPM instead? Tenshi! (Talk page) 11:21, 15 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think that would suffice, yeah. EggRoll97 (talk) 02:07, 18 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Whom do you envision needing this ability, and whom the community says is trustworthy enough to have this ability, and yet is unable to pass WP:AELECT? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:13, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For example, those working in copyright, edit filters, SPI, and many other areas dealing with content likely to be deleted due to disruption or other reasons would benefit immensely from having direct access to deleted revisions. EggRoll97 (talk) 14:09, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If those people need access to deleted revisions they should stand for adminship. A demonstrated good track record that they would need for this new right will be exactly as good at demonstrating suitability as an admin. Note that being an SPI clerk, edit filter helper/manager, etc. doesn't require adminship and also aid chances when standing at RFA (and presumably AELECT but I don't recall whether anyone in those groups has stood using that process yet). Thryduulf (talk) 14:19, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Then you would have a single-purpose admin who only looks at deleted revisions? Tenshi! (Talk page) 15:28, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See also Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Carrite. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 15:42, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As for your comment about anyone in those groups standing in AELECT, I have. EggRoll97 (talk) 15:51, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Someone working in copyvio needs the delete button, too, so they really should be admins. I don't understand why someone "working in" Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations would need access to deleted materials (more than any other editor who encounters a suspicious editor).
viewdeleted is an incredibly sensitive user right. It allows people to see not just copyvios and vandalism, but sometimes things that should be oversighted (e.g., personally identifying information). We need to be able to trust people who have this user right to not spread what they see elsewhere. The real world struggles with this,[4][5][6] so we have to be careful here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:56, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@WhatamIdoing: Some people need access only to the content of deleted revisions of copyright-violating content (e.g., VRT agents). Someone who wants viewdeleted access to help with copyvios on English Wikipedia would not be suited for this right. JJPMaster (she/they) 21:24, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Time to mark "Vital Articles" as historical?

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

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

Table showing the average value for each variable by level:

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

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

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

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

or 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@Joy@Zackmann08 Hi again. I implemented the idea at Template:MergedMap/sandbox and if you place that template at for example Tehran article in preview mode, OSM would be an item of radio button. This template still needs more work, but because I am student, I would complete that at my free time. If someone likes to contribute in this project, I would appreciate him.
This proves the possibility of implementation of such idea. In fact, radio-buttons accept div element no matter it is OSM, Pushpin, image etc. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 05:23, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Template:MergedMap is ready!

@Joy and Zackmann08: Hi, and really sorry for pinging. I created Template:MergedMap and early tests were successful. Just call {{MergedMap}} in a city or place and set its mapQuery argument to something like: 

{{MergedMap|OSM#Iran#Asia}}

And OSM and pushpin maps will be merged in one radio button.

Additional arguments like customMap1 to customMap10 and OSM1 to OSM10 can be set for other images map and mapframes. Like by setting these arguments: 

{{MergedMap
|mapQuery = OSM#customMap1#Iran#Asia#customMap2#OSM1#OSM2
|customMap1 =Tehran 51.41504E 35.69272N.jpg
|customMap2 = Tehran_district_map_(blank).svg
|OSM1 = {{Infobox mapframe|id=Q3616|zoom = 8}}
|OSM2 = {{Infobox mapframe|id=Q84|zoom = 8}}
}}

Certaingly it is full of bugs now and I am ready for correcting them. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 19:28, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have also merged maps of Tehran article for test. Please inspect that. Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 19:28, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Joy@Zackmann08@Hike395 Hi and really sorry again for pinging. Please inspect these test cases:
  1. London
  2. Dubai
  3. Madrid
  4. Tehran
  5. Shiraz
  6. Bushehr
I think this template is now in the stable version. This method reduces the number of maps in Infobox, making it more readable and useful. If these it is Ok, please do something to make «Template:MergedMap» the preferred map of Infoboxes over Template:Mapframe and Template:Pushpin map and normal maps. Thanks again. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 15:57, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Hooman Mallahzadeh: I don't have time to dive into this right now. I looked at London and Dubai. Have to say this shows a TON of potential and thus far I am very impressed.
That being said, I would strongly advise against adding it to any more articles. Instead I would make a list of testcases at Template:MergedMap/testcases. I would also post on the talk page for {{Infobox settlement}} and give people at least a week (it is a holiday week here in the US) to really look this over.
As I said I'm thus far very impressed, but this has the potential to changes literally hundreds of thousands of pages. Let's make sure we iron out any issues before you put it in any more articles.
Good work! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 16:07, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My final proposal is that because this template is general-purpose, Infoboxes should customize that. At the end, users should work only with "mapQuery" and all other settings like mapframe-marker and pushpin-marker should be set automatically. Even satellite maps can be extracted form Wikidata. For example, I propose Template:Infobox Airport creates a new argument named "mapQuery", that takes values like "mapQuery = Iran#OSM#Satellite#Asia" and produces maps in its order while all setting except "mapQuery" should be done automatically. Thanks again. Hooman Mallahzadeh (talk) 07:10, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For that to be equivalent to current functionality, we need it to support passing in all the various parameters of location maps and mapframes, so there's no regression from switching.
Also, while we're at it, before moving this to production, we should also review these tags between the hashtags, as well as the naming style (camel case). I'll bring this up in new threads at Template talk:MergedMap. --Joy (talk) 12:19, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Replacing "Requested articles"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

I can definitely say that there seems to frequently be little follow-through on these classes. I've seen a number of students put the WikiEd template on the talk page of articles I've made, worked on, or watchlisted and then...nothing. I've checked back in on their userpages and on the class pages for some a year or so later and it seems like the class started setting up to do things and then just...never did? No idea what happened with the Wikipedia part of those classes. Did the teacher give up before even having them do much of anything other than making accounts and choosing articles to work on, work that then never happened? SilverserenC 02:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd imagine a fair amount of these cases stem from students signing up for a class, doing the first few homework assignments, and then dropping it right before the drop deadline a few weeks into the semester. signed, Rosguill talk 02:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Except it's not just the one student. Unless everyone in the class dropped it? SilverserenC 02:43, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Is there enough material for how to edit on wikipedia for folks? Especially students? The UI does take a bit to learn. User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 19:06, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I had the same experience recently. They made a few small changes on Feminist views on transgender topics, put a template on the talk page, and then never responded to my questions. I wonder if there are some students who are just coasting through it or not doing the work. Katzrockso (talk) 02:42, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, if I was a student in one of these projects, I probably would view it as something to get through for the sake of the assignment and not something I actually cared about. Dronebogus (talk) 02:43, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, but if the programs are encouraging/permitting students to exert such minimal effort, there is your original question of whether the program is worth it. I looked through the course [7] that was involved on that page and it raised more questions than it answered.
I think this whole question is a non-starter, though, from what I understand the WMF pushes this very hard and would not take kindly to community efforts to interrupt it, but that could be an incorrect perception on my part. Katzrockso (talk) 02:50, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Why is WMF pushing this so hard? Are they getting paid or something? Dronebogus (talk) 02:51, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think one of the ideas is that with more knowledge/experience of Wikipedia, the students might become editors later on. Katzrockso (talk) 03:01, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’d like just one example of that ever actually happening Dronebogus (talk) 03:16, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm one! I originally created my account for a WikiEd course back in 2018. I didn't do much editing for a couple of years after the course ended, but then I dusted off the same account when I started getting interested in editing more seriously in 2021. I'd had some interest in Wikipedia even before taking the course in question, but I think going through WikiEd helped give me a baseline level of Wikipedia confidence that empowered me to come back later and start editing independently. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 18:22, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think another goal is also better understanding of Wikipedia by students. My gut feeling is that bad courses will produce (generally) bad results, good courses will produce (generally) good results. Designing/running a good course requires, among other things, the instructor (and course designer if different) understand what a Wikipedia article is, how it gets written, what talk pages are and how to use them, and at least a basic understanding of Wikipedia culture and basic policies. My experience as a trainer for Wikimedia UK has taught me that these things are not intuitive to everybody (possibly even most people), and also that (strange as it may seem to those of us here) not everybody is interested in being a Wikipedia editor - they don't care how the sausage is made.
I expect a lot of the poor outcomes are a combination of disinterested students, disinterested and/or clueless teachers and clueless course designers. We do need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, so (to mix a metaphor) we need to somehow separate the wheat from chaff. Unfortunately I don't have any good ideas how to do that off the top of my head. Thryduulf (talk) 03:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
[…] these things are not intuitive to everybody (possibly even most people) […] not everybody is interested in being a Wikipedia editor exactly. That’s why student editors seem to me a lose-lose for everyone since they don’t produce good work or become regular editors and I highly doubt they actually learn anything from these assignments. Dronebogus (talk) 05:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think the WMF "pushes" this at all. They're not really involved in it, except to the extent of funding some of it (Wiki Education Foundation for the US, and chapters for almost everywhere else). WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:31, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This question strikes me as a bit odd, because I don’t see WikiEd as the source of student editors; I see it as an attempted solution to student editors. (Rather like AfC is not a source of COI editing, but an attempt to contain and address it.) I personally do think student editors writ large are a net benefit (if nothing else, we have to convince the next generation they can edit if we want some to discover they like to edit), but we don’t really control whether student editors exist. Since they do, I think the net positive of WikiEd is clear. Given the many ways a completely well-intentioned class could get themselves into trouble, it is much better to have specialized resources and staff to guide and monitor their efforts. I see it as a sign of WikiEd’s success that most student editors are harmless to the encyclopedia, and a real triumph that some make genuinely valuable contributions. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 05:11, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Most student editors are harmless to the encyclopedia um, citation needed? My evidence that student editors are generally damaging to the encyclopedia may be purely anecdotal, but you can’t refute it by saying “actually they’re generally harmless and even useful” with zero examples of constructive work done by student editors. Dronebogus (talk) 05:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly, I agree. The idea of student editors is great, but most don't know how to write in Wikipedia's style and their teachers don't encourage them to because they have their own requirements. Shocksingularity (talk) 05:41, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Does any newbie know how to write in Wikipedia's style? Were all of your first edits perfect? Mine weren't. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:23, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but student editors rarely if ever advance beyond newbie, and on top of that are tasked with making massive edits to articles immediately, with tight deadline, instead of starting slow and doing things at their own pace. Dronebogus (talk) 06:27, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Have you looked at the numbers in Template:Registered editors by edit count? All new editors rarely advance beyond newbie. This is why I've estimated that we need 100,000 people to go through Special:CreateAccount to replace me when I die. Student editors get further than most, but 70% new accounts don't make even the first edit, and half of the ones who do make any edit don't come back to edit on a second day.
Student editors are rarely tasked with "massive edits", and never "immediately" or with a "tight deadline". Most of them create an account in September, do WP:The Wikipedia Adventure in October, pick an article in October, write a draft in November, and (if they get that far) post it in December. The Wiki Ed Foundation has a step-by-step curriculum.
Another area in which we see a big difference is blocks:
  • Typical newbie: 15% chance of block in the year after their first edit.
  • Typical student: 0.2% chance of block in the year after their first edit.
I think the bottom line is that all newbies struggle, but student editors actually struggle less than the typical non-student newbie. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:43, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
1: How many of those new editors are trolls and people here just to goof around, vs. serious good faith editors? 2: of course students rarely get blocked, they’re here for a single purpose that doesn’t fall into any frequently blocked category (aforementioned trolls/goof-offs, POV warriors, spammers, etc.) Dronebogus (talk) 07:18, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and that's part of what makes them better newbies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:00, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is a situation where confirmation bias is hard to resist, since of course you never see the harmless student editors. (Note that "harmless" is different from "positive".) The default curriculum for WikiEd guides students away from ever editing in mainspace at all (using draftspace instead), for example. Compared to the volume of programs being run, the traffic at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard is quite low, and it's a virtue that volunteer editors don't have to be on the hook to resolve the problems that do arise. As for positive examples, well, if you poke into one of the most recent problems on that noticeboard (a UC Davis class on fish), a previous student in that class went on to create multiple GAs. But confirmation bias also means that you're unlikely to know that a successful editor was originally a student, since that won't exactly be advertised alongside their good edits. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 16:07, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Cosigning @LEvalyn's comment above. There are hundreds upon hundreds of classes using Wikipedia every term. The fact that only a scant handful of them ever end up on your radar is all the evidence you need that most are not problematic. -- asilvering (talk) 11:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is my view as well. Unless we have indications that WMF is expending massive amounts of resources on this, it seems appropriate to provide a channel for educators to use Wikipedia for courses in a way that is easily monitored and which gently steers people towards less problematic activity. Anecdotally, outside this program I’ve seen professors with less than 100 edits think that they’re “experienced” and ready to teach a Wikipedia course, and then react poorly when their methods are challenged by the community. In general, they seem to respond much better to steering and guidance from the WMF than volunteer editors. signed, Rosguill talk 16:25, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The Wikimedia Foundation does not run education programs. That's mostly the completely separate Wiki Education Foundation. WikiEdu gets some grant money (as of a few years ago, less than half their budget and declining) from the WMF, but I don't think they're even technically an m:affiliate. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:03, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Notified: Wikipedia:Education noticeboard. Thryduulf (talk) 03:22, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/Davidson College/Bio320 Plant Adaptations (Fall 2025): 52.5k words added and in a quick skim the quality seems legit. Aaron Liu (talk) 12:35, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi all, I'm LiAnna -- I am responsible for edits coming from m:Wiki Education Foundation's Wikipedia Student Program, in which we support college and university instructors in the United States and Canada to assign students to edit Wikipedia as a class assignment. There are student projects here on English Wikipedia that aren't under our auspices (instructors who don't know our support exists, instructors in other countries supported mostly by Wikimedia affiliates in those countries, some secondary/high school classes), but most are part of our program. As a few of you have noted (thanks!), our program brings about 12,000 new editors to Wikipedia each year, so while there are definitely some students who we all agree aren't producing good content, the vast majority in fact are adding value to Wikipedia. Most of us supporting this program on the Wiki Education staff are Wikipedians, and none of us would do this if we felt like it was a net-negative (or even anywhere close to that) for Wikipedia.
Let me specifically address a few points in this discussion:
  1. Each term, we onboard around 300-400 courses who are planning to teach with Wikipedia see this term's here. About 20% of these will not actually do or finish the assignment, and there's myriad reasons for this. Sometimes a class is canceled by the university; sometimes once they get into editing they realize it's more work than they have time to give, so they stop; sometimes the students are unenthusiastic and the instructor doesn't want to force students who aren't going to do good work to edit; etc. Most of the classes that do complete the assignment also have one or two students who just don't finish the assignment (this is true in most college classes for all assignments, not just the Wikipedia assignment).
  2. We provide extensive training modules for student editors to complete; the specific ones are tailored to the assignment they're given. We also offer a variety of support for instructors, in assignment design, office hours, etc., such that we do our best to ensure their plan for the course will produce the right kind of content for Wikipedia. Instructors and student editors in our program get extensive guidance and support; we've been doing this for 15 years and have a very good sense of what works and what doesn't in terms of producing good content for Wikipedia, and we steer away anyone who is not following our best practices.
  3. Of course, not every student follows directions, and some will produce bad content. While you as a Wikipedian are of course welcome to interact with student editors as you would any other new editor, we do not expect any volunteer to clean up any bad work added through our program. Instead, please feel free to leave a talk page message for or ping User:Ian (Wiki Ed) or User:Brianda (Wiki Ed), our two Wiki Experts. Ian and Brianda are both experienced editors who will jump in and make the edits necessary while communicating with the student and instructor as needed. If there's a more class-wide problem, feel free to bring it to the WP:ENB, and we will intervene with the instructor.
  4. Our organization's focus is not on retaining student editors as long-term contributors (although a handful do stick around on their own). Instead, we focus on retaining good instructors, who then bring another group of students each year. For example, review this instructor, whose behavioral ecology students have made a huge impact on species articles for a decade. But given declining youth brand awareness of Wikipedia, I do think our work is a helpful effort to (as Thryduulf says) have students better understand Wikipedia, when to use it, and when not to use it.
  5. In terms of the specific article referenced above (I Am Not Your Negro), the instructor reached out to us yesterday about this case. The instructor agreed the student editor's work had some problems, including with tone, but felt like there was some good content in there. Both the student editor and instructor were taken aback that the edit was reverted without any comment on a talk page or indication in the edit summary of what was wrong. We recommended the student post on the talk page, and then add back in more fact-based and less essay-like information in smaller edits. If there is additional problems with their contributions, please engage with the student on the talk page about specifics of what they need to do to fix it.
As always, I'm happy to answer any questions about our work. --LiAnna (Wiki Ed) (talk) 18:42, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t really think “declining brand awareness” is a problem; if the top reason provided (“other sources are better”) is accurate, then that’s exactly what we want, because it’s true. Wikipedia (and all encyclopedias) are inherently inferior to other sources due to their tertiary nature. Obviously we should still improve content, but people should also be going to other, better sources anyway. We don’t need to maximize the number readers like a for-profit needs to maximize the number of customers. Dronebogus (talk) 19:09, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Tertiary sources aren't inherently inferior. They are worse for some purposes and better for others. If you want to get a quick summary of a subject is, then an encyclopedia is a better option than, e.g., original scientific journal articles.
We don't need to maximize the number of readers, but there are consequences to losing readers. One of those is that readers are the primary source of future editors. If the next generation doesn't read here, then they won't edit here either, and then Wikipedia will eventually die for lack of editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:03, 19 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Most students editors don't understand WP:NOTESSAY (for fairly obvious reasons) and WP:NPOV (most humanities courses explicitly teach people not to be neutral with regards to injustice, etc.) Also keep in mind that most students are incentivized to pass the course, not actually contribute to the encyclopedia, which results in AI use and copyright violations.
As for getting younger people to interact with Wikipedia, social media promotion should help, especially short-form video content in platforms like TikTok or Instagram. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 17:27, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Some random WikiEdu contributions:
Juvenile incarceration in the United States: Fails WP:NOTESSAY, fork of Youth incarceration in the United States, WP:UNDUE content in lede (though this is mostly because it's written as an essay), broad generalizations (e.g. see #Daily life while incarcerated with https://worldschildrensprize.org/adayinthelifelockedup), unreliable sourcing (refs 2, 3). Better to delete this entirely since we already have an existing article about this topic.
Incarcerated firefighters: Has questions in lede What Do Incarcerated Firefighters Do?, cites a YouTube video. This article is mostly fine and can be fixed with some copyedits.
NoFilter: This hashtag is often misused, so it has been abandoned in recent years... fails verification, International Journal of Virtual Communities and Social Networking is a predatory journal, However, now it is used as a trick. Many people do not believe the posts that use this hashtag; research shows that this hashtag is nothing but a lie because of being heavily misused. violates WP:NPOV and not supported by sources. It is no longer as impactful as it used to be in the 2010s and #NoFilter was used as a form of resistance. The goal was to encourage people to show their true selves and get rid of the pressure to be perfect. are not sourced at all. NoFilter started as a positive thing, inspiring people to be who they are. However, people started misusing the hashtag. They still used the hashtag on images that were tweaked and deceive others. [...] As a result, #NoFilter has become a gimmick and has lost its credibility. is the last straw: since nearly all the additions fail verification, this edit should be reverted.
Wenatchee High School: Adds promotional material about the school (providing long term benefits that will help students before they graduate, ...where they help students get a jumpstart by providing many opportunities in giving them a career pathway and academic journey... while citing primary sources or none at all. The encyclopedic value of this information is low to nonexistent. Their previous edit adds stuff like The College Mentor Program is also looking for Volunteer Mentors to help serve Seniors in Wenatchee High School to help them guide towards their future paths. The program is looking students who can volunteer as Virtual Mentors, Writing Editors, Guest Speakers, or Networkers and have forms for students to fill out. Overall, these edits are a net negative and should be reverted (and I fail to understand how this article relates to "Online Communities.")
Starbucks Reserve Roastery (Seattle): Most of their edits are fine, but they have edit-warred to add a "Sustainability" section when repeatedly told it was promotional. However, I think their contributions are a net positive here. Their report makes me think they may have used some AI help for this assignment, but the resulting content looks fine.
Women in the Middle Ages: No concerns, net improvement to the article.
Victoria Spivey: The majority of the content is unsourced (e.g. Scholars also note that she helped define the themes and vocal approach of classic female blues, and her recordings continue to be discussed in studies of African American music and women's history, The Black Perspective in Music notes that her lyrics reflected everyday life and the experiences of African American women, showing both independence and emotional depth.), duplicated (Victoria Spivey was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1986.) or fails WP:NOTESSAY. Some of the content is fine (e.g. most at #Recording Career (1920s-1940s)). The unsourced sections should be selectively removed from the article.
Lemonade (2016 film): Consists entirely of plot summary changes. Plot summaries don't need sources, but content like Being underwater is a crucial environmental factor of this portion of the video, for she is attempting to get rid of the weight that now lies on her because of her relationship, hinting as the transition from denial into greater feelings of anger, the ring of fire, more specifically the image of her sitting directly in the center of it, gives watchers a sense of the trapped feelings that she experiences being stuck within the fire of her rage., shifting the attention from solely on Beyoncé to other black women and girls., etc. veers into analysis. Transitions like Off into the next chapter of healing. are unencyclopedic. I've reverted this. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 19:22, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is the big problem I see in student edits: they frequently use Wikipedia as an essay host for their obviously very amateur essays and then almost inevitably abandon this essay-cruft in articles once the assignment is done, to the detriment of readers and other editors. If I have one constructive recommendation to give for WikiEd it’s that instructors need to teach students how to write Wikipedia articles or partner with people who actually can, and grade the results accordingly. Dronebogus (talk) 22:13, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Dronebogus, there's nothing any teacher can do to prevent the existence of poor students. Teachers can grade accordingly all they like, but that doesn't make a C-level student's work any better than C-level work. Part of teaching is that sometimes students fail. No amount of training, sternness, or support will eliminate C-level output. -- asilvering (talk) 01:49, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering: Agreed, but C-level output doesn't reach the outside world in most courses. The WikiEdu program is definitely improving some articles; perhaps automatically blocking anyone whose grades drop below an 80 would help refine this (they can do alternative non-Wikipedia assignments instead.) I also suspect that electives, especially ones in the humanities, are more vulnerable to having such students, but I currently don't have the data to substantiate this claim. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 03:22, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
perhaps automatically blocking anyone whose grades drop below an 80 would help refine this what. how on earth do you expect this to be enforced? Please remember that this is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, not the encyclopedia that only students with good grades can edit. People who aren't very good at building the encyclopedia are nevertheless part of our whole process. If any student is creating work so deranged that they need a WP:CIR block, we can simply CIR block them. -- asilvering (talk) 05:16, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Asilvering: The problem is that most regular people won't really be making these big edits for fairly obvious reasons. Let's take me for instance, I have limited experience with content work (I'm currently working away at Grammatical tense), so I were to create a 4000 word article about something, it probably won't look good, and of course, this will change with experience. However, these student editors have to write these articles and make these edits to get class credit, and while they generally do some great work here, there are always some who do not want to put in the effort and resort to using LLMs or plagiarizing minutes before the assignment deadline. And this is not unique to the Wikipedia Education program, this happens in every education institution everywhere around the world and I'm sure we've all seen (or been) people who engage in academic misconduct at some point in our lives.
As for WP:CIR blocking, that's not possible since most of them only edit a single article, and blocking someone requires chronic/persistent behavioral issues. The damage done by these types of students is inconsequential on its own, but may eventually add up. Even the people who run the education program revert some bad edits, and volunteers revert many more (see my analysis above). Incidentally, a similar initiative did get most of its participants blocked due to excessive gaming and sockpuppetry, so I think WikiEdu is doing a much better job vetting instructors in this regard.
In hindsight, I agree that automatically blocking anyone whose grades drop below an 80 would help refine this is not a good statement to make and was a bit of a knee-jerk idea to try to minimize the negative impacts of this program. I think we all should audit student editors' contributions and see which variables affect output quality the most (institution? course? instructor? subject area? training status?) and perhaps take it from there. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 06:09, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That report seems to be a student assignment, I've run into at least one course where all the students had to write/"write" something on that topic. Gnomingstuff (talk) 03:48, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Surely these reports fail WP:NOTWEBHOST. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 04:03, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See also User talk:Salinafiaz § Reliable sourcing, Manual of Style, and more for another example. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 17:53, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The user has proceeded to revert back to their version and add yet another vague sentence. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 21:42, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@ChildrenWillListen: Reverted. You should probably just report them at this point. WP:IDHT and WP:CIR apply. Dronebogus (talk) 21:46, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I did think of leaving them alone for a bit and seeing if they come back to fix the issues, but they seemed to have abandoned the article after reverting it. They may, however, show up right before the assignment deadline like many people do with their coursework. As for WP:CIR, as I mentioned above, ANI and the like only deal with chronic behavioral problems, not student editors failing to do a good job on their first few tries.
Interestingly, Salinafaiz has completed all the Wikipedia exercises, unlike most other student editors in their class. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 22:01, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd argue that this isn't an issue exclusive to student editors; as a generalisation, all new editors are going to need guidance on MOS and tone, and the problem is just as great (or even greater) with non-student editors. Nil🥝 19:37, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I’ve said this already, but student editors have to jump into major edits relatively quickly whereas general newbies can take as much time as they need doing incremental work or learning rules. They’re also doing it because they have to, not because they want to. Dronebogus (talk) 22:08, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you haven't previously looked at it, you might find it interesting to examine the WikiEd trainings for yourself, or the assignments in one of the currently running courses. Personally, I think the program is appropriately incremental. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 22:47, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]


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

@Gråbergs Gråa Sång: Well, yes, one of WikiEdu's stated goals is to fix our systemic bias problem, which the Media Research Center mislabels as "activism." However, it is obvious that courses like these tend to be the most problematic, since they invite essay-like social critique and undue content in articles unrelated to social theory. Children Will Listen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 03:38, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Effective at what? Owning the righties? Or building an encyclopedia? Because a bunch of anti-intellectual conspiracy theorists hating a collaboration between colleges and Wikipedia because they already hate collages and Wikipedia separately isn’t useful nor relevant analysis. Dronebogus (talk) 10:53, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Per source "building an army of activists" apparently. If you can do that with whatever Wiki Education gets in funding, it does sound pretty impressive. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:57, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
“Building an army of activists” per a bunch of anti-intellectual conspiracy theorists. These are the sort of people who think gonzo in a dress is woke indoctrination turning kids trans. It’s nothing but scaremongering to fuel the conservative hate on Wikipedia/higher education. Provide an actual reliable source that shows Wiki Ed is doing something useful and I’ll be more receptive. Dronebogus (talk) 11:04, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you were under the impression I was receptive to this... view of reality, that's wrong. But I think it's interesting and Wikipedians should know it exists, MRC writes this because they want people to believe it. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:55, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I never was under any such assumption, but MRC thinking it’s true/wanting people to believe it doesn’t mean anything. Anti-vaxxers want people to believe them and can cherry pick and exaggerate all they like, but that doesn’t somehow make vaccines as dangerous as they claim. Dronebogus (talk) 12:34, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • It really depends on how many become editors down the line. In my experience the immediate effects on articles is usually negative. It might be better if they had to pick a stub and work on it, but a lot of them pick high level articles that are already well developed and just add stuff to be removed later. GMGtalk 18:41, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, having students develop stubs would probably solve a lot of problems. At best we get a genuine improvement; at worst the poor content is sequestered in an obscure part of the encyclopedia that wasn’t in great condition anyway. Dronebogus (talk) 21:28, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Using Education Noticeboard as evidence screams negativity bias. You don't hear much if the class goes smoothly. But you sure hear about them on EN, ANI, CP (copyright problems) or some other place if the class goes poorly. OhanaUnitedTalk page 19:12, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    At a certain point I think something can just create enough and serious enough problems that the benefits don’t matter. Dronebogus (talk) 06:16, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    It seems like we may just have incompatible views of WikiEd, but I do want to reiterate that WikiEd does not create undergraduates. WikiEd just creates the noticeboard where you can ask staff to deal with undergraduates for you. ~ L 🌸 (talk) 06:53, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

A policy on 'Awards and recognition' sections

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

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

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

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

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

Rejuvenating WP:Current events noticeboard

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

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

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

Proposal language

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

If you mean starting a Wikipedia in those languages, that's not something that the English Wikipedia can say yes or no to - see meta:Proposals for new projects. If you mean adding translations of names into those languages, that's something you should discuss on the talk page of the article you want to add it to. If neither of those are what you are asking, then I haven't understood you. Thryduulf (talk) 20:33, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict). Where? Phil Bridger (talk) 20:35, 20 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
One of the lamgauges in lamguage button Noam Elyada alt (talk) 17:03, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I just did some cleanup of Index of Belgium-related articles, but it seems to be that this is almost by definition a very incomplete, random "index" of some of the many, many articles that could be included, and as such has no real use. Making (and keeping) it complete is a Sisypus-task and would lead to a much longer page in any case. The same applies to all articles in Category:Indexes of topics by country I think. Presumably the same applies to indexes for other topics as well, but perhaps stick for now to the country ones as a first point of discussion?

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

I think these should be redundant to outlines (which highlight the most important articles) or categories (which list all articles). Indices seem to lie somewhere in between and are presumably less useful than either to readers. For instance, Belgium at the 2004 Summer Olympics is listed in the Belgium index, but it doesn't list any of the many, many similar pages for other years, for no reason I can discern. Toadspike [Talk] 10:38, 21 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Most of them are now up for discussion at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Index of Algeria-related articles. Fram (talk) 11:01, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm trying to depopulate Category:All articles with bare URLs for citations. As all experienced editors know, if you encounter a citation as a bare link in an article, You can use the visual editor, click on the citation number and a pop-up will appear with an option stating You can use the "Convert" button below to generate a properly formatted reference from the external link. That often works wonderfully, but sometimes fails. It's my observation that one of the most common reasons for failure is that the link is to a PDF. While the tool occasionally can handle a PDF it almost always fails.

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

Some background

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

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

There is a better approach.

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

Why do we format citations the way we do?

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

The guideline gives an example of a properly formatted citation:

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

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

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

Pre-internet use of citations

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

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

Internet use of citations

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

All of this is leading to the following suggestion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MAGA civil war article

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's not actually a "conflict" in the sense they're using the term; it's just hyperbole. Back in my day the Democrats were the ones having a "civil war". Unfortunately for your idea, sensationalist headlines don't make it a real and definite "thing" that can be the subject of an article. That's even after you can say that you're writing about something other than the fickle passings of the news cycle. GMGtalk 19:38, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 19:40, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But the sources state that this isn't just a passing headline, but that it's a major, longstanding event.
The Guardian states The result of that interview has been a bitter and widening civil war within the American right that has exposed longstanding fissures – between conservatives and populists, Zionists and Israel skeptics, mainstream Maga right and far right – as well as revealed the extent to which a Republican party that has been flooded in recent years by extremists now seems unable to contain them, or even agree if it should. A power struggle already under way inside many rightwing organizations, people familiar told me, has now spilled into the open.
According to Ms now, They [a pro-Hitler wing of MAGA] are, in fact, rapidly defining what MAGA will mean in the years after the nearly octogenarian Trump leaves the stage.
These sources, which, again, are deemed as reliable state that is having enormous impact, that it represents long standing issues, and will quite likely affect what happens even 10 years from now. Wikieditor662 (talk) 20:00, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it will. It's happened before. But we can't really predict that based on a burst of news coverage. Don't get me wrong. You don't need anybody's permission to write an article, but the chances are probably better than even that it get's deleted, at least for the moment. GMGtalk 20:21, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
How longstanding or grand does it have to be? This goes years back.
Over two years ago, Newsweek reported MAGA Divides Grow as Israel War Intensifies - Newsweek (newsweek isnt considered fully reliable but you get the point)
For a more specific example, Politico reported all the way back in January, nearly a year ago: The MAGA split over Israel - POLITICO
Wikieditor662 (talk) 20:50, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It would be more productive to improve the Republican article. None of this is happening in a vacuum; these newer developments require the context of what the party is and has done over the past fifty (at least) years. Schazjmd (talk) 21:06, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Which kindof gets to the issue of the definite "thing" you're aiming for. If the underlying topic boils down to "people in x-group disagreeing about Israel" then welcome to the club. That pretty much describes every group down to families, friends, and marriages. When the Federalists got into their spat, it materially shaped the broad trajectory of the US government. In our story today, the left is supposed to be the pro-Palestinian character, and they still don't really move the needle on actual law/policy beyond the daily headlines. GMGtalk 21:14, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, I suppose you're right about Israel-Palestine. Perhaps instead of sensationalist headlines like "civil war", it could be titled something like internal divisions within MAGA, or internal divisions within the Republican party, and then contain all of this material?
@Schazjmd the Republican article is over 12K words; there won't be room to add all of this to that article.
Wikieditor662 (talk) 21:23, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Meh… What would be surprising is if there weren’t any internal divisions within MAGA. All political parties and (factions within parties) have them. The question is whether they have a lasting impact… and in this case it is too soon to know. Blueboar (talk) 22:03, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe, but then you have a different issue all together. Are you now looking at an article topic which is so stupendously broad that it amounts to an indiscriminate list of information? What about those who support the ICE crackdown and those who see it as government overreach? What about isolationists and those who support foreign intervention? How do we even treat definite group membership as "a MAGA", instead of a loose coalition of conservatives more-or-less supportive of Trump and/or a particular slogan? Don't want to make the same mistake people do with ANTIFA and act like it comes with a membership card and monthly dues.
It's all silly hypothetical until folks show up to add content that was never intended, but technically meets the inclusion criteria. GMGtalk 22:39, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Rather than indiscriminate, the sources seem to suggest that there are two clear sides on this. The Guardian says Conservative institutions [...] are now squeezed between a strident Maga mainstream and a naked far right.
And it seems that how the two sides react to issues is also clear.
For the examples you gave, the groypers and the far right would be more approving of ICE crackdowns (and even wanting more crackdowns) and isolationism, while the mainstream right would be more cautious about these. But of course, we'd only use issues that the sources state are important to this.
As for MAGA, I see your point, perhaps this could center about something more specific, such as the GOP, right-wingism, or conservatism.
@GeogSage But again, there's no room in the bigger articles, many of them are too long already.
Wikieditor662 (talk) 23:50, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The MAGA article is only 4,777 words. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 03:11, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
True, but now I'm thinking MAGA might be a problematic area to center this around, as GMG said: How do we even treat definite group membership as "a MAGA", instead of a loose coalition of conservatives more-or-less supportive of Trump and/or a particular slogan? Don't want to make the same mistake people do with ANTIFA and act like it comes with a membership card and monthly dues. Wikieditor662 (talk) 03:17, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It sounds like you're really set on making an article on this. Looking at your page statistics, it doesn't look like you have a lot of experience making them, which is fine. You don't need permission to try to put a page together. If you think it will pass Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Notability, then you can just make a page for it. In this case, I would be surprised if it passed Wikipedia:New pages patrol, and even if it did, suspect someone would come and merge it with something. I won't step in to stop you, don't care enough about this topic to try and execute a merge, and wouldn't be the one reviewing it, so you don't need to convince me. Just be sure to explore all options, have a pile of sources, and don't be surprised if people are not convinced. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 03:49, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, this isn't really about convincing you, as much as it is to figure out the best way to go forward. Are you sure it's worth it to try and make a big article, with many sources, which can take hours, just for it to get deleted? Wikieditor662 (talk) 05:12, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, that is a question to ask yourself. I'm not convinced, honestly I think this warrants maybe a sentence somewhere on one of the the pages in the Timeline of the Donald Trump presidencies, and would start looking for how I could use these sources to improve existing articles before creating a whole new one. However, if you think it will pass, go for it. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 05:29, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I mean, I think that perhaps it should pass, but whether it will, or if it's worth it even though it might be deleted, that I have no idea. But yeah, perhaps it is best to take on your suggestion, and only turn it into an article if it becomes big enough. Although I'm still on the fence over what article/s to add it to. Wikieditor662 (talk) 05:33, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Help:How to mine a source might help. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 05:42, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, I was about to start considering adding it to the MAGA article, but the beginning said This article is about the political slogan. For the political movement associated with the slogan, see Trumpism., and the Trumpism article is over 13K words... and I don't think this would fit well in a timeline article, as it's one major event rather than multiple small events which can be put in bullet points.
Any other suggestions for article/s which this can be added to?
Wikieditor662 (talk) 15:07, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As stated, with this, I'd find another article and see if you can make a section on this topic using the sources. If that section gets big enough, then consider a split. It isn't a race. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 22:59, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See wP:10YT User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 19:40, 22 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to above advice, it is in general a good idea to ignore headlines as sources of information (sometimes they help with common names etc.), as they have different editorial processes to article content. CMD (talk) 04:07, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Of course. If you look deeper into the conversation, you can also see I have specific quotes from these articles as well. Wikieditor662 (talk) 05:13, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

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

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

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

I support stopping the bot. It has served its purpose. Toadspike [Talk] 09:42, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I do too. Thryduulf (talk) 11:00, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
+1 ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 12:25, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'd support stopping this. I looked quickly but maybe is faster (I'm not sure the best way to find this) to just ask if any non-blocked bot is currently performing this task? Skynxnex (talk) 12:33, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The task was inherited by User:VulpesBot (run sporadically by Dr vulpes, but they've said they plan to run it again I believe?) but I know some editors do large AWB runs to indiscriminately blank the old IP talk pages. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 20:34, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, thanks. Still agree we should stop blanking them at this point. (And earlier maybe would have been better.) Skynxnex (talk) 21:36, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Just to clarify, are we talking about stopping the bot with respect to temporary accounts? Because the bot is set to only blank pages for IPs who have not edited in over five years, there are still tens of thousands of IP talk pages identifying IP addresses. If you look at, for example, User talk pages that link to "Blueberry", there are dozens of them just on that list. BD2412 T 18:50, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, it is for IP talk pages only, per what I understood from GLL's example above. ~/Bunnypranav:<ping> 18:53, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    No, it's stopping it for the talk pages of IP's. There are benefits to not blanking these IP talk pages (detailed in GLL's first post), and given that no new editors will be assigned these talk pages in the future there remain almost no benefits to blanking them.
    Whether talk pages of temporary accounts should be blanked after the account expires is not something I can recall seeing anywhere and is not part of this proposal, but given that they will not be reused I can't immediately see any benefits to doing so. Thryduulf (talk) 19:41, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree with Thryduulf that I see no benefit to blanking them. I do see potentially harm, however, for much the same reason. I often use the What Links Here tool to investigate, and if TA talkpages get blanked, then just like with old IPs, I am no longer able to do that. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 20:42, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I would think your use of "What Links Here" is hampered by an excess of links to IP talk pages from which no edits have come in many years, even decades. Wikipedia's purpose is not to serve as a permanent host for long-irrelevant IP talk page messages. That should be even less so when the IP talk pages no longer reflect any current account usage due to the changeover. BD2412 T 20:57, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    Interesting enough, it is not - generally if there's enough links to IP talk pages to become unusable, then there's enough links to registered account talkpages to be unusable. Removing IP talk pages just hampers my ability to look for historic disruption on lower trafficked pages, and also stops me from being able to use the search tool as effectively. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 21:03, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    To be perfectly clear, the typical ancient IP talk page message has been where the IP did something like randomly add "poop" to an article once or twice in, say, 2012, got reverted with a warning, and no other edits ever came from that IP address (although I grant that most of those have already been blanked). I think we can refine the model to maintain pages where there is a possibility of copyvio involvement or the like, but I am at least dubious about the long term value of maintaining those pages. BD2412 T 21:47, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    A lot of these old accounts don't always get reverted for copyvio, they get reverted with anti-spam, anti-unsourced content, page hijacking, and really pretty every warning under the sun. Knowing at a glance that an account was editing disruptively in a topic area is still very useful. See User talk:70.49.196.202 or User talk:62.28.161.202 for examples - I just reverted a bot blanking on the first, and the other was saved because the IP got notified of an AfD late last year. Both of these editors have still open CCIs which either have been or will need to be expanded to include IP edits.
    If somebody sees an IP where the IP only made one vandal edit, got warned, and would rather blank the talkpage than fix whatever lint error they found, they could still do so manually. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 22:04, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    @BD2412 VulpesBot is exclusion compliant so you can just stick {{nobots}} on User talk:70.49.196.202 if you want. Polygnotus (talk) 00:00, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    That was for me. I do a lot of IP talk page blanking outside of VulpesBot's strictures. BD2412 T 00:02, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I agree that there's no need to hide the content of these pages, and since temp accounts only last for 90 days (under the current configuration), there's no need to ever blank those. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:18, 23 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Instead of showing UTC time, show the time the user is in

On edits, diffs, and posts, the timestamp is always in UTC. Discord has a feature where, when you copy/view a timestamp, it displays the time according to the viewer’s local timezone. For example, if you report a post that occurred at a specific time in your timezone, another user will see the corresponding time in their own timezone, which helps avoid confusion. I believe adopting a similar feature would support the modernization of Wikipedia. Rc2barrington (talk) 02:46, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

You can have that with User:Mxn/CommentsInLocalTime or WP:LOCO.
This somewhat used to be a built-in feature (m:Help:Date formatting and linking): every date was linked everywhere to automatically convert the timezone according to the user's preference at Special:Preferences#ooui-23. However, various things resulted in the feature being disabled and then removed: Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#cite_ref-5. Aaron Liu (talk) 03:22, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That feature converted the format, but not the time zone. Also, if we wanted, there's a #dateformat parser function that could be used to format dates according to the user preference. But we've never wanted. Anomie⚔ 04:05, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I know this is the idea lab and we're not supposed to just support or oppose, but I can't really find a "yes and" here. I'm generally skeptical of attempts to make users see something different from what was written, even with an opt-in. Fonts and dark mode, OK, I guess, but not actually changing the text. I think that was a mistake from the beginning. --Trovatore (talk) 03:39, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The perks of living in England are that UTC is just the current time for me. (outside of summer) GarethBaloney (talk) 11:37, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
For myself, I have my preferences set so that everything is set to my time zone automatically. The only thing that doesn't get converted is dates and time when I am editing the source.
Converting the time and date when I need to is a bit of a pain, but it is better for me as I can see at a glance on talk pages how long ago the last replies were, which is the most common thing I see related to time on Wikipedia.
In short, I think that what we have works. --Super Goku V (talk) 05:50, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
DiscussionTools puts "Latest comment: 41 minutes ago" at the top of every talk page and each ==Section==, so you should be able to see at a glance on talk pages how long ago the last replies were no matter what your timezone settings are.
I used to set my local time at Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering-timeoffset but eventually it became too much of a hassle to keep straight which timestamp on the talk page corresponded to which edit in the page history. I find it much simpler to have the whole thing in UTC. The UTC clock gadget in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets-gadget-section-appearance may be helpful, if you are trying to figure out what time it is in UTC right now. (I turned that off with Vector 2022, though.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 07:18, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So as seen in this image I just really think it would be better to show the time I AM IN. Not the standardized UTC time. Rc2barrington (talk) 01:26, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Try the scripts I linked above. Aaron Liu (talk) 01:38, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently I don't use DiscussionTools on Wikipedia, but I recall seeing something like that on other Wikis. Still I feel more comfortable seeing the exact time people made their replies rather than seeing the UTC time of when they made their comments. Besides, I don't need to convert the date and time enough to where that would be the bigger hassle. (And yes, I have the UTC clock in the upper-right corner just to keep myself aware of it.) --Super Goku V (talk) 05:56, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Potential expansion of CSD G15

Hello all. In order to align CSD G15 with the newly-accepted guideline WP:NEWLLM, I've created a topic on the CSD talk page as a place for RFCBEFORE workshopping of a potential broadening of G15 to encompass all primarily AI-generated articles, whether or not they've been reviewed by a human. See Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion#Broaden G15 to align with new guideline and please weigh in if you're interested. First and foremost whether you think it should be expanded to align with the new guideline at all, and if so any suggestions you might have for what should be changed or added to the wording of G15. Athanelar (talk) 16:14, 24 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

User Configured Content Warnings

I know that Wikipedia is not censored and we don't force content warnings, but maybe some people don't want to suddenly see things like gore/nudity without a clear warning. Maybe people can choose what they do or do not want to see in their settings? VicAsksWhy (talk) 17:02, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Even if that was feasible (are we going to have a setting for spiders? I don't want to see spiders), most readers don't have accounts so they can't set any preferences. Schazjmd (talk) 18:19, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, the thing about the accounts is a good point. I was thinking fairly broad catagories; it's definitely impossible to cover every phobia to ever exist. VicAsksWhy (talk) 23:06, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's been brought up before, sorry I don't have a link to the most recent discussion but as I recall, the idea was to default-hide that type of image so the reader would have to select to show them. There was no consensus for the suggestion. Schazjmd (talk) 23:40, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If someone does track down major discussions on the topic, they should add them to WP:PEREN#Censor offensive images. Anomie⚔ 23:44, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, got it. Just a little idea I had. VicAsksWhy (talk) 23:45, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@VicAsksWhy, you couldn't know that it's been brought up before. Check out Anomie's link to WP:PEREN, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there. Schazjmd (talk) 23:53, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Alright, I'll be sure to check that out. Thanks! VicAsksWhy (talk) 23:56, 25 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In 2010, the recommended categories were sex/nudity, violence, religious, and gore/disgusting content. In 2011, the Image filter referendum resulted in the project being cancelled. Examples of the four categories that were mentioned during the discussion included stills from notable porn movies, a photo of a professional fighter gouging out his opponent's eye with his thumb, drawings of Muhammad, and various illustrations in medical articles (e.g., the lead image of Smallpox). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:24, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
this had me thinking, why doesn't wikipedia have any settings for non logged in users, most other sites have settings for people who are not logged in and those who don't usually don't even allow for access of they're site unless your logged in, many settings don't seem like they inherently require or should require a account to use like appearance and search, is there something im missing? if not maybe we should start a discussion on this. Misterpotatoman (talk) 07:23, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The general approach used by websites to save settings for users without accounts is to save the settings in the user's browser (either in a cookie or in local storage), and then either return the cookie information for the server to process, or use Javascript in the browser to change the page accordingly. A cookie-based approach isn't cache-friendly, so more servers are needed to handle the workload. At the scale of Wikipedia's readership, the required resources add up quickly. Using Javascript either causes visible changes to a page after loading, or requires the page to wait to finish its Javascript processing before rendering the page, reducing responsiveness to the reader. There are tradeoffs with each approach, and so far, the community and development team prefer the tradeoff of mostly not having settings for non-logged in users. (Vector 2022 introduced some settings related to its layout.) Specifically for content filtering, since this would generally be something a user would want for all websites, it would be more effective to manage within the user's viewing device or personal network. isaacl (talk) 08:31, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
thanks! i didn't know that. Misterpotatoman (talk) 08:36, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Wait five years; some AI company will come out with automated content filters to hide nudity, spiders, or whatever you want. Of course, all at the expense of privacy... Anne drew (talk · contribs) 01:57, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@VicAsksWhy: There's always Help:Options to hide an image. JJPMaster (she/they) 02:06, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Mass-reverting AI serial abusers

If someone has repeatedly used an LLM without adequate verification of its output, I think we should be able to mass-revert their edits. I envisage a system whereby we only have to glance over each edit and check it is AI-generated, rather than the much higher bar of reverting the cases where the AI has caused a definite problem. My rationale is that if someone has repeatedly failed to use AI responsibly, then their other uses can be assumed to be irresponsible as well. Roughly speaking, I imagine the level of abuse required being roughly the current threshold for a dedicated subpage of the AI cleanup noticeboard. It has been remarked on numerous occasions that checking whether AI output is inclusion-worthy is about as hard as writing the material from scratch, so I think requiring other users to perform this level of checking before reverting AI edits is not reasonable. What do people think? lp0 on fire () 22:03, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Are we talking about a blocked user? Was there a discussion about their behavior? I could imagine forming a consensus to Wikipedia:Rollback all of an individual's edits, but I'm not sure that I'd recommend that an individual editor unilaterally declare that everything you did in the mainspace is definitely AI and should all be reverted.
Also, outside the mainspace, it's a bit more complicated. If an AI-generated comment on a talk page received a reply, it probably shouldn't be reverted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:42, 26 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
IDK if a tool like this is a good idea, but if it did exist I'd envision it being used for blocked editors (look up the user whirlingmerc for an example that wasted hours of my time). For editors who have not been blocked, it's appropriate to ask them to clean up their own mess by self-reverting all the problematic contributions. -- LWG talk 01:09, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think it certainly applies to talk pages, per wall of text issues. All AI edits should be deleted, per my comment below. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 14:54, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that if an editor has been blocked for using AI, reverting any of their edits that look like AI output should be allowed. This sounds like presumptive deletion in copyright cleanup. I don't think we need a special tool for this though. Toadspike [Talk] 07:23, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That presumptive deletion is exactly the idea I was going for. I wasn't suggesting a special tool, but I think mirroring the wording there pretty much exactly could save a lot of time (i.e. not requiring that the user be blocked). If someone does a long spree of AI additions but leaves the project before anyone notices, there's no need to block them, but being allowed to mass-revert their mainspace edits would still be helpful. lp0 on fire () 07:45, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, and think to succeed you need to invent a name for it, say "vagabond AI editor" reverts. I think this is important because the trend is the increase in AI edits. And I think it should also apply to talk pages given wall of text issues. AI edits are the termite that can ruin Wikipedia. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 14:50, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see why we can't just call it presumptive deletion. For talk pages, we have {{aitop}}/{{aibottom}} already and I think that's enough. lp0 on fire () 15:12, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Or we could make something similar to Template:Single-purpose account, except instead of saying:

— Example (talk • contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.

for AI use, it could say something like:

— WhatamIdoing believes that this comment was written by generative AI instead of by Example (talk • contribs).

WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:49, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Yesterday, I'm not convinced with your view. In fact, you're rapidly making me less supportive of this whole idea. It begins to feel like this:
  • We should revert everything.
    • Maybe not talk page comments, if someone's already replied.
  • No, really, everything, because it's a Wikipedia:Wall of text.
    • Even if it's just a short reply?
  • Really, everything, because everything is a Wikipedia:Wall of text.
You obviously loathe AI use, which is fine. But what if the comment is not a wall of text? Would you seriously recommend reverting a one-word reply because a single word is "a wall of text"? How would you even know whether such a short comment used AI?
Would reverting a talk-page comment actually help anyone? WP:REDACT says usually no, particularly if someone's already replied. Would it be better than alternatives such as striking (like we do with socks), hatting (e.g., aitop/aibottom), labeling (like we do for WP:SPAs), or archiving? I doubt it.
I wonder whether your ham-fisted recommendation signals that you're getting burned out. If editing feels like a sisphyean struggle against the forces of spam and stupidity, then you might try to find a way to contribute that feels fun and/or effective. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:45, 27 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, you know that our agreement rate is pretty low. But that is the nature of free speech. As for "forces of spam and stupidity" being in full swing on many pages, we actually agree on that. And I assume you are also thinking of my talk comment on fuzzy concept. On that page OR and stupidity are in full swing indeed. We can not have a "respectable" encyclopedia with that type of content. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 00:44, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have spent no time looking at your comments on talk pages, so no, I had no idea that you posted a comment there (that says nothing about AI use). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've been thinking about this sort of thing as well. Regardless of the approach we end up taking, we do need to be more proactive in removing unverified AI content and quickly putting a stop to people who add it. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 04:57, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. A quick look at the AI cleanup noticeboard will make it abundantly clear how serious a problem this is. As I see it, there are three levels of assuming good faith we could exercise when doing the cleanup (clarifying what I mean here because I think there was some confusion above; sorry in advance for the wall of text).
  1. If someone has repeatedly misused LLMs, we go through their contributions and delete anything that violates policy (weasel/peacock words, OR, hallucinations, &c.) but we can't revert anything until we've identified the problem. This might involve verifying sources and/or translations, might require specialised knowledge, and is about as difficult as writing the content from scratch. This is the current standard, and it makes cleaning up after LLM use unreasonably difficult, leading to a growing backlog of additions to Wikipedia that might be nonsense.
  2. Like copyright violations, any mainspace edits by an AI abuser can be reverted indiscriminately. This would make cleaning up after AI misuse very easy (although, given how easy it is to write content with AI, this might still not be enough).
  3. What I was originally suggesting was a middle ground: if someone has repeatedly misused LLMs, then any edit of theirs that looks AI-generated can be reverted without proof that the AI has hallucinated or otherwise violated policy, because they are presumed incompetent. This would still make cleanup much easier than in currently is, with reduced risk of undoing good contributions.
lp0 on fire () 07:41, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sockpuppet cleanup allows other users to restore sock edits if they are positive (every now and then some are, or partially are), without putting that burden on the cleanup. CMD (talk) 09:13, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I don’t think it’s a matter of LLM or not LLM; it’s a matter of good editors and bad ones. There were plenty of bad editors who tried to push bad articles before LLM. The fairest way to approach low-quality articles is the same way it has always been done: with tags that can only be removed if an editor has done the necessary work to justify their removal.
We can’t allow LLM to become a reason for people to ban whoever they want, for whatever reason. Take a contentious subject, for example: an editor could be falsely accused of using an LLM in order to censor their vote on articles. Orlando Davis (talk) 15:53, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Instead of deleting the articles, we can have a 3 strike policy where you get banned for 24 hours if you have 3 strikes, and are banned permanently after enough strikes without an attempt to change your behavior. Orlando Davis (talk) 16:29, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The difference is that LLMs allow people to churn out huge amounts of bad content extremely quickly without first having to learn how Wikipedia works, which makes it significantly more disruptive than just "bad editors".
I don't think your worries about false accusations make sense. If anyone tried to censor someone by accusing them of using AI, then much like accusing someone of being a sock, that would be highly problematic and likely lead to the accuser being blocked (especially in a contentious topic); however, it's much easier to spot a bad-faith accusation of AI than a bad-faith accusation of sockpuppetry.
Your suggestion of "get banned if you have enough strikes" (I assume you mean blocked not banned) doesn't sound substantially different from the standard system of "you get blocked if you keep doing stuff wrong after being warned" and indeed the template {{uw-ai1}} through {{uw-ai4}} exist for this very purpose.
I think you may have misunderstood the purpose of this proposal: it's not for dealing with people who disrupt the project using AI but rather for cleaning up their edits, which otherwise demands an unreasonable amount of time from the users doing the cleanup. lp0 on fire () 16:43, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Couldn’t a way to reduce backlog be to put a cap on how many articles and edits a user can perform per day, to give reviewers enough time to keep up? For example, a 1–2 article per day limit and a 100–200 edits per day limit. What do other editors think? Orlando Davis (talk) 17:09, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds way out of scope for this issue. Bear in mind most a lot of AI cleanup involves cleaning up after editors who stopped before (or when) they were noticed, so such a filter would have to apply to all users. I also note that 100 edits a day isn't very much for normal editing, but it's a huge amount of work to clean up after 100 edits of AI drivel. For example, see Wikipedia:WikiProject AI Cleanup/Noticeboard/2025-09-17 Thefallguy2025 which is from early September and still less than half done. lp0 on fire () 17:25, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What about the cap on edits being applied more strictly to flagged users? Orlando Davis (talk) 17:41, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Or to newbies. Very few brand-new accounts make even five edits on the first day. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:24, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To the extent that new accounts do, they're usually people who have made accounts before (sockpuppets, WP:CLEANSTART) Katzrockso (talk) 01:28, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
So, #3 is what we've been doing at WP:AINB since around August and it has been working just fine, albeit without any PAG to justify... we typically leave an edit summary like "LLM cleanup, as discussed at AINB and/or ANI". I personally have cleaned ~500 articles in this way and only on one of those articles did someone else complain, and I just reverted my deletion and asked that user to verify/fix the article, which they did. Also agreed with Toadspike that it would be a rare case where a tool would be helpful. In almost all cases this has to be done manually. NicheSports (talk) 19:45, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, that's encouraging I suppose. It would still be nice to formalize it in a guideline (or at minimum a WikiProject advice page), for the combination of legitimacy and clarity that we get from explicitly writing stuff down. lp0 on fire () 23:05, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I feel like we can just use the general provisions of WP:CHALLENGE etc if it's the usual AI stuff and the sources don't verify. Alpha3031 (t • c) 23:50, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Also, WP:5P3 exists. I don't really know why this is even a discussion to be honest. Text can be added, changed, or removed at any time, that's the fundamental point of a wiki. Gnomingstuff (talk) 01:15, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Good idea, any chance you want to give it a whirl? Maybe makes sense to start as an advice page at WP:AIC. Also pointing you to this, which is an idea I had with some support at AIC: WT:WikiProject AI Cleanup/Archive 4 § Guidance on handling article with mostly minor edits subsequent to LLM-rewrite. Maybe this could be incorporated? NicheSports (talk) 21:16, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm inclined to agree that the community is currently fairly vigorously contesting LLM-slop. There are even false positives, at least one case of something from 2010 getting tagged. Remember that LLMs are trained on Wikipedia. Nobody tagged me for this but I recently saw text I had written where I used "fostered" and "surpassed," two tagged vocab words, but on double-checking both of which were used by the sources, so I was being faithful by also using them. Shlomo Lambroza [Wikidata] and Diana Dumitru probably didn't use an LLM, they used that vocab because they with precise diction decided that "surpassed" and "fostered" were the best way to express themselves at that moment. Not saying that the slop isn't a big problem but right now I think there is adequate control of it - thanks to a lot of volunteer work, time, energy. See, I did 3 things. But I remember someone telling me about the rule of 3 at least 5 years ago and it had nothing to do with LLMs. Andre🚐 02:08, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, I'm not proposing that anyone can delete anything they personally think might have been written by an LLM, but in cases where a user has a long history of LLM misuse, it feels unlikely that they also just happen to write like an LLM. I don't necessarily agree with you that enough is being done to clean up after LLMs to avoid needing a measure like this, but rven if that's true, such cleanup still wastes a huge amount of community time. The current wording of WP:ONUS means that if a source has been provided, it's the responsibility of the person removing information to check that verification fails. The thing about AI is it's very easy to make something that looks convincing, meaning one often can't tell at a glance whether the sources are okay. This creates a WP:TNT situation where it's easier to blow it up and start over than to fix the problems by manually checking each source, which can take a very long time. lp0 on fire () 13:01, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That makes sense. But isn't it pretty easy to make something look convincing without AI? Shouldn't we use a system of cleaning up that isn't so confrontational? Couldn't erasing pages start edit wars? There have been very good alternative suggestions here. Orlando Davis (talk) 20:31, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's not true that WP:ONUS means that if a source has been provided, it's the responsibility of the person removing information to check that verification fails. WP:BURDEN means the other editor has to provide one source (but only one; you can't make them WP:FETCH and endless supply of sources). WP:ONUS says only that it's the other guy who has to organize a consensus to include the information.
One of the footnotes in BURDEN gives a partial list of reasons why one might be justified in removing cited content: removing editors "must articulate specific problems that would justify its exclusion from Wikipedia (e.g., why the source is unreliable; the source does not support the claim; undue emphasis; unencyclopedic content; etc.)". In practice, I suspect that an edit summary along the lines of "Presumptive removal of text from an editor since blocked for abusing AI tools" would be considered an entirely sufficient articulation of a specific problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:46, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That was my failure to read the footnote; thanks for clarifying. I still think it'd be helpful to formalize allowing such presumptive deletions. lp0 on fire () 22:09, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It might be useful to have a short page on when and why a Wikipedia:Presumptive removal would be warranted. If it gets used and doesn't create a lot of problems, it would probably be easy to get an "Oh BTW there's this WP:PRESRM thing..." added to a guideline or policy somewhere. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To be clear, are you suggesting a single page that collates all the common kinds of presumptive removal (AI, socks, copyvios, banrevert, arbecp, maybe something else I haven't thought of)? lp0 on fire () 09:11, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia app

In the Wikipedia app, the English Wikipedia doesn't show whether an article is Good or Featured. For example, in the German Wikipedia—like this good article—this information appears at the bottom of the article in the app, and it even shows the date when the article was selected as Featured. I strongly suggest adding this feature—and the date of selection—to the English Wikipedia app as well. Vastmajority20025 (talk) 19:37, 28 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Last I heard, readers don't notice or care about those little icons, so why should we bother? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia as a human-written encyclopedia

I'm opening this as a more general idea lab discussion since I don't have a specific proposal, but we've reached the point now where we really need to be looking into how we frame Wikipedia's relationship with AI, especially in public-facing areas. There's currently nothing public-facing, not even on the main page, emphasizing that Wikipedia is a human-written encyclopedia (or whatever term you want to use). As LLM content only becomes more common, the fact that Wikipedia is written by humans is going to become one of its defining characteristics and a major reason why it's a better alternative to other sites. Has anyone given thought to how we might incorporate this? Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 02:57, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I do think Wikipedia has always had a human and humanistic aspect, and I support the proposal in the abstract. Maybe we could have a contest for someone to design a banner or an interactive display to promote Wikipedia: The Free as in Libre, Human Encyclopedia. Like we used to do in the old days. Andre🚐 03:02, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Awful suggestion. 1. Being human-written is not an important pillar of Wikipedia, it is rather the bare minimum for any respectable encyclopedia, book or news article. Hence it's a bad idea to emphasive this fact so prominently. 2. Wikipedia is not "human". That particular phrasing is confusing.
I don't object to including the fact that Wikipedia is human-written in some guidelines, essays or promotions. But it's not the central selling-point of Wikipedia – lots of other outlets are human-written too but inferior to Wikipedia in many ways (e.g. less reliable). Joe vom Titan (talk) 13:17, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I have some bad news for you about the internet of the 2020s. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸 15:41, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What are those bad news? Has AI slop appeared on nytimes.com or home.cern yet? AI is neither the biggest problem in the world nor the biggest problem on the internet. For one, misinformation spread by oil companies, oligarchs and petrostates to serve their own interests is much more insidious. Joe vom Titan (talk) 13:44, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
'Language-independent articles'? How has the world become so dystopic? Each language has its own mode of communication, its own mode of thinking. There is no one-to-one relationship between a concept in one language and a concept in any other. Even if we could modify language to allow for such things, this would destroy the organic diversity that is the body of human language. God knows I don't want to read an article that is written in a manner inconsistent with the thought process that is associated with the language in which it is written. I can only imagine the horrible damage this will do to languages other than English. Haven't we done enough harm with the likes of the Scots Wikipedia? Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 06:05, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
On the other hand, there are quite a few articles that exist in fr, de, etc and nobody has created in en. Google Translate does ok, but affects ease of discovering information and browseability. So if we had a way to conceptualize a layer between factoids and prose, it could be useful to aid in translation or spreading knowledge further and sooner. At any rate, this is only theoretical. If and when it is accomplished, it may or may not even achieve critical mass. Andre🚐 06:12, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Our goal is not to have more articles for the sake of more articles, but to have articles that meet our quality standards. Usually, there is a reason why an article may exist on a non-English Wikipedia, but not on the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia has much higher standards in terms of referencing. Very often, articles found on other Wikipedias lack sources at all, or rely heavily on niche sources that would be insufficient to establish notability here. Additionally, they are frequently written from a perspective that is insufficiently global for the English Wikipedia. I have many times endeavoured to translate an article from one Wikipedia to another, in the languages that I know, only to be stymied by the poor quality of the content. It is often easier to start a new English Wikipedia article from scratch, using some of the sources from the other Wikipedia as a foundation. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 06:19, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily always the case. There are many good quality articles on fr or de that if I could snap my fingers to port over with an idiom-proof translation would be worthwhile in edifying readers, and have appropriate references. Andre🚐 06:28, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ask a translator for assistance, there are plenty of volunteers willing to help. No translation can be 'idiom-proof', unless the fundamentals of language itself are to be destroyed. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 07:21, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
(I wouldn't use the German-language Wikipedia as an example of appropriately cited articles, as their standards are very different from ours.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:49, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Your claim that There is no one-to-one relationship between a concept in one language and a concept in any other sounds a bit overstated. Simple facts (Angela Merkel was Chancellor of Germany; calculus is a type of mathematics; carrots are edible) seem to translate quite well between most languages. There are individual instances of non-translation (家は青い – the house is, um, blue or green or thereabouts; ), but it's not true that there are no concepts that map to the same concept in any other language. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:10, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I said that there is no 'one-to-one' relationship, not that there was no relationship. The process of translation is a delicate one. What you call a 'simple fact' could potentially be translated tens of different ways. The meaning of 'edible' can be rendered many ways in English, and it is likewise true in most other languages. I could say 'can be eaten', 'able to be consumed', 'safe to eat', 'comestible', depending on context, register, &c. By creating an artificial one-to-one relationship between words, whereby 'edible' can only be rendered as one specific term in another language, you destroy the organic diversity of that language, and the naturalness of the text produced. It is very likely that whatever term is chosen may end up being inappropriate in the relevant context, because the person creating this artificial one-to-one relationship will not have a full grasp of the relevant language, and will rely on horrible dictionaries or computer code. The end result will be Scots or Greenlandic Wikipedia, redux. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 07:51, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Chipmunkdavis, please see m:Abstract Wikipedia/Abstract Wikipedia naming contest. I gather that the team would very much like to have a different name (though I don't have any insight into why). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:52, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I was pretty sure that I had proposed Wikigenerator, but I guess great minds think alike. Andre🚐 21:58, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • It is fair to exclude LLM written content from Wikipedia on the grounds that they're currently not very competent at the task of writing an encyclopedia article, but I am opposed to any display of human or "humanistic" chauvinism, specially anywhere as prominent as the front page. It is also not practical to uphold this claim/promise, as it basically impossible to be certain whether any text is "really human" or has had a partial/full LLM contribution behind it. TryKid [dubious – discuss] 14:48, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Seconded. The LLM text is more prevalent than some people realize, and certainly more than laypeople realize. Making such a claim after 2 years of having no AI policy or guidelines would be telling our readers a lie. Gnomingstuff (talk) 05:16, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions for new features in Wikipedia

With how popular explanatory footnotes are, a feature in the section of the visual editor citation button for creating footnotes could be pretty useful. A section to the visual editor link button for reusing previous links could be useful considering how many times I find myself linking to the same article. A more secondary visual feature is that instead of citations next to each other being distinct like [1][2], they could be merged like [1,2]. Misterpotatoman (talk) 07:07, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Like the idea on footnotes.
For reusing previous links, you just need to type '<ref' where you want to put your source in the Visual Editor, and then a pop-up would automatically appear where you would get 3 options 'Automatic', 'Manual' and 'Re-use'.
Merged citations [1,2] would be too close for comfort, and could result in mis-taps on smaller handheld devices, also WP:AINT. Cdr. Erwin Smith (talk) 12:46, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If you'd like to see merged footnote markers, then see w:fr:Moineau mélanure#Description. The proposal is similar to the style used at the French Wikipedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:13, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That requires manually inserting fr:Template:, between each <ref>. jlwoodwa (talk) 04:15, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
no, i mean reusing links as the wikipedia feature that let's you link to links, in not talking about citations, also i think if it was merged, it should pull up a screen where all the citation links appear, i think it will actually make it easier on smaller devices. Misterpotatoman (talk) 22:32, 29 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

revamp to section system

navigating a wikipage can be a slow, so what if we had tabs to each section below the main and talk tabs or maybe in the same place as the article pages tab, this would not replace regular tabs and would add to them, there should be a setting to disable them in the settings. Misterpotatoman (talk) 04:54, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Are you talking about WP:TOC?
If so, then it's disabled by default in Wiki (Web) Mobile (the version you're currently using). I did raise a ticket regarding it 2 months ago, and they recently said they're working on it.[1]
You can use a Desktop/PC if you want to access this feature as of now. Cdr. Erwin Smith (talk) 08:05, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ "Make 'Table of Contents' available in Wikipedia (Web) Mobile".
yes, imagine that but mobile. Misterpotatoman (talk) 08:36, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You can support the wish here. Cdr. Erwin Smith (talk) 12:19, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Policy on userpages for unregistered users

Hi there, I think that the policy on userpages for temporary accounts should be developed and suggest across Wikipedia. ~2025-37397-24 (talk) 13:19, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why is a policy needed? To my understanding is not technically possible for a TA to create their own userpage. CMD (talk) 16:43, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
@Chipmunkdavis Well to ensure that TAs would have fair amount of information described on their userpages. It is definitely possible for Temporary Accounts to have a userpage, if a registered user created for them to edit and add information about themselves. ~2025-37397-24 (talk) 18:03, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thoughts on standardized policy around GPTZero or other AIDetect software?

It would be nice to have some essay or guideline or such for WP:GPTZERO/WP:AIDETECT software. As is, there is a good understanding that such software is highly error-prone and subject to an unacceptably high false positive rate, and yet they are also regularly used as additional evidence, often with other signs. I myself have used it as evidence sometimes, though interpretation of such output remains highly subjective.

There seems to be an exponential rise in AI conduct reports at ANI [12], so having more guidance seems useful.
I saw we still lack a useful metric for definitively determining AI usage, but this seems like an easier question to solve, and I think one the community may already have a good idea on. In what circumstances are AI detectors useful, and when should they not be allowed? User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 16:55, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I've been thinking about it a bit since this comment from a report I filed a bit ago here:but i think determining AI is like diagnosing a rare disease, the probability of AI given any one sign is low, but the conjunction of multiple signs, previous use of AI, hallucinated URLs, and human judgement is important to determine AI usage. even gptzero is useful here, though its high FPR should be understood User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 16:59, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
GPTZero is actually a very good indicator when percentage is high. You can't really "disallow" it. I think people who dismiss it out of hand are missing the boat. Of course it can make false positives, but I've never seen it not detect AI that was in fact AI: a high percentage is a significant data point. Also they keep improving the algorithm it only keeps getting better. -- GreenC 17:24, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Given the error rate of most of the checkers they should pretty much never be used on their own and when they are used taken with a huge grain of salt, while keeping WP:AGF in mind. So with that I wouldn't be opposed to that being banned as a main resource on the topic. PackMecEng (talk) 17:48, 30 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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