Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia policies and guidelines
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Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
Should WikiProject Belgium/Brussels naming conventions be:
- A – Moved to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Brussels) and confirmed as a community-wide naming convention guideline?
- B – Moved to Wikipedia:Naming conventions (Brussels) and made a supplemental information page of Wikipedia:Naming conventions (geographic names), commonly known as 'NCPLACE'?
- C – Kept at its current title and marked as a Wikiproject advice page?
- D – Marked historical as unneeded, unenforced or lacking consensus?
- If C or D are adopted, the following guidance at WP:NCPLACE#Belgium would be removed:
The Brussels naming conventions should be used for articles related to Brussels.- If C or D are adopted, a discussion would be opened to determine the status of the Brusselsname talk page template. Yours, &c. RGloucester — ☎ 06:43, 31 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion
It has been over a year since the temporary criterion WP:X3 was enacted. At present, it looks as though the backlog of titles which this criterion applies have now been deleted. (Further details in the following comment.) At this point, should we make this criterion "Obsolete", promote this criterion to a permanent criterion (would be "R5"), do nothing to the criterion at the present time, or take some other action? Steel1943 (talk) 19:05, 29 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ireland/Ireland Category Norms
This page was tagged as a sitewide {{guideline}} after an RFC in 2013. The RFC was not a WP:PROPOSAL for guideline status; instead, it was about a dispute over a CFD. A couple of participants in the RFC casually referred to this page as a "guideline", and on the basis of their comments, the page was later tagged as a {{Guideline}} instead of as a {{WikiProject advice page}}.
The WP:PROJPAGE guideline says: Some important site-wide topical guidelines, such as Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine), and Wikipedia:Notability (books), originally began as advice pages written by WikiProjects. However, after being adopted by the community, they are no longer WikiProject advice pages and have the same status as any other guideline. When this happens, the WikiProject's participants cede any notion of control over the page, and everyone in the community participates equally in further development of the guidelines. Such pages move out from under their original "Wikipedia:WikiProject Something/" path.
I therefore propose that editors choose one of two options:
- Mark this page as a {{WikiProject advice page}}, and leave it at the present page title, or
- Leave this page marked as a {{guideline}}, and move the page to a title that does not refer to WikiProject Ireland.
WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:47, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
I propose to amend Wikipedia:Administrator recall, specifically the first paragraph of the section on requests for re-adminship, as follows:
Addition:
"Administrators may choose to further delay running in an RRFA or administrator election by up to 6 months after the recall petition is closed: they will be temporarily desysopped in the interim upon declaring such an intention. The temporary desysop will be reversed if they retain adminship within 6 months by the means described below: otherwise it is made permanent."Removal:
"; they may grant slight extensions on a case-by-case basis"Sandbox diff for clarity.
19:55, 25 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Writing articles with large language models
Should this proposal be accepted as a guideline? (Please consider reading the FAQ above before commenting.) Cremastra (talk · contribs) 20:56, 24 October 2025 (UTC)
Template talk:Infobox tennis biography
At an RFC in 2019, there was overwhelming support to remove
|residence=from {{Infobox person}} and from {{Infobox sportsperson}}.In 2024, at a second RFC that decision was affirmed and overwhelming agreed to for a second time.
Given that {{Infobox person}} and {{Infobox sportsperson}} both had this parameter removed, should {{Infobox tennis biography}} do the same.
For the record and for full disclosure, I initially went ahead and removed it as I felt that the 2 RFCs made it clear that this change was to be made. That removal was objected to fiercely by another editor who felt I had overstepped. I have reverted my change and here we are.
- A few arguments
- Per MOS:IBXPURPOSE:
The less information it contains, the more effectively it serves that purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance- The "residence" is almost never sourced and is not really relevant to the player's biography
- To quote one editor at the previous RFC, "
Completely non-educational unless you're some sort of celebrity stalker".Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 06:09, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Speedy deletion
Should T5 be updated to include the following language:
- This applies to any and all unused subtemplates of a template that has been merged as a result of WP:TFD
Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 00:26, 23 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)
Should the community harmonize the rules that govern community-designated contentious topics (which are general sanctions authorized by the community) with WP:CTOP? If so, how? 19:55, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Deletion review
The introductory language of Deletion Review includes DRV Purpose point 3, which states:
Deletion Review may be used … if significant new information has come to light since a deletion that would justify recreating the deleted page;
Should DRV Purpose point 3 be:
- A. Deleted as not necessary or inconsistent with current practice?
- B. Retained as is?
- C Rewritten with alternate language? Please provide the proposed language.
Robert McClenon (talk) 05:21, 22 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)
With the implementation of Module:Person date, all
|birth_date=and|death_date=values in Infoboxes (except for deities and fictional characters) are now parsed and age automatically calculated when possible.With this implementation, it was found that there are a large number of cases (currently 4438) where the birth/death date is set to
Unk,Unknown,?or##??(such as 19??). Full disclosure, Module:Person date was created by me and because of an issue early on I added a number of instances of|death_date=Unknownin articles a few weeks ago. (I had not yet been informed about the MOS I link to below, that's my bad).Per MOS:INFOBOX:
If a parameter is not applicable, or no information is available, it should be left blank, and the template coded to selectively hide information or provide default values for parameters that are not defined..There is also the essay WP:UNKNOWN which says, in short,
Don't say something is unknown just because you don't know.So the question is what to do about these values? Currently Module:Person date is simply tracking them and placing those pages in Category:Pages with invalid birth or death dates (4,438). It has been growing by the minute since I added that tracking. Now I am NOT proposing that this sort of tracking be done for every parameter in every infobox... There are plenty of cases of
|some_param=Unknown, but with this module we have a unique opportunity to address one of them.I tried to find a good case where the
|death_date=truly is Unknown, but all the cases I could think of use|disappeared_date=instead. (See Amelia Earhart for example).
- The way I see it there are a few options
- Option A - Essentially do nothing. Keep the tracking category but make no actual changes to the pages.
- Option B - Implement a {{preview warning}} that would say This value "VALUE" is invalid per MOS:INFOBOX & WP:UNKNOWN. (Obviously open to suggestions on better language).
- Option C - Take B one step further and actually suppress the value. Display a preview warning that says This value "VALUE" is invalid per MOS:INFOBOX & WP:UNKNOWN. It will not be displayed when saved. then display nothing on the page. In other words treat
|death_date=Unknownthe same as|death_date=. (Again open to suggestions on better language for the preview warning).- Option D - Some other solution, please explain.
Thanks in advance! --Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 23:43, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)
English Wikipedia's recall process was largely based on German Wikipedia's recall process, but it has played out differently here than it did on German Wikipedia. Now that we've had 10 recall petitions it seems like a good time to examine the process. Support 1 or more of the following:
- Process is working well, no changes needed
- There should be some way of enabling support for the admin during the petition phase
- There should be fewer signatures needed
- There should be more signatures needed
- 30 days is too long, the petition process should be shorter
- 30 days is too short, the petition process should be longer
- Keep recall, but develop a different process than petition leading to a re-RFA
- Keep recall, but do some other change to how re-RFA works
- Keep recall, but do some other change to how the petition works
- Recall should be abolished
- Prohibit admins from !voting in RFCs to amend recall
When closing the closer is encouraged to think about overall support relative to participation in the RfA (e.g. if 5 people support Foo, 10 people support the opposite of Foo, and 30 people didn't support either but participate elsewhere, the consensus may be no change rather than opposite of Foo) and where a bartender's close may be appropriate. Barkeep49 (talk) 14:31, 21 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Restructuring RSP
Which option should be used to fix the technical limitations that will prevent us from expanding Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources (RSP)?
RSP currently lists about 500 sources, with a growth rate of about 50 new entries per year. With the current format, the page has reached the WP:PEIS template limits. Only templates within the limits are displayed; templates (and their contents) past that point on the page are not displayed. We need to restructure RSP to reduce the PEIS problem and accommodate more entries.
Editors have identified three main approaches to solving this problem. We are calling these three options "One giant table", "List of subpages", and "Row-building module". All options have advantages and disadvantages. Before we invest more hours in developing the options, we want to know which option is most appealing to the community. 22:45, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)
There have been some perennial discussions about removal of
|slogan=from various infoboxes, but I could not find a case that discussed making WP:SLOGAN essentially policy.In recent years, the slogan parameter has been removed from {{Infobox bus company}}, {{Infobox airline}} and the widely used {{Infobox company}} (see the MANY discussions about removing it from Infobox company).
Now WP:SLOGAN is just an essay which I know many people object to, but hence the reason for this RFC. I encourage everyone to read the essay but here are the key points (This is copied from WP:SLOGAN)
Mission statements generally suffer from some fundamental problems that are incompatible with Wikipedia style guidelines:
Even though mission statements are verifiable, they are written by the company itself, which makes them a primary source. They contain boastful words and puffed-up, flowery language. They contain vague unsubstantiated claims such as We are the industry leaders in commitment to <insert industry here> excellence. They focus on the speculation about the future of the company: becoming the industry leader, or the top producer, or the most reliable manufacturer. They are promotional in both tone and purpose. They are not usually verifiable in third party sources.Per this search there are at least 37 infoboxes that have some form of slogan in them. The question is should all of those be removed? This does not mean that slogans cannot be mentioned in the body of an article, that is another conversation about whether they meet notability and are encyclopedic. My question is purely do they belong in the infobox?
In addition to this, what about mottos? It seems as though they are used rather interchangeably in Infoboxes... This search shows at least 72 infoboxes with a
mottotype parameter. Should some of those be removed? Personally I'd say keep it for settlement type infoboxes, but the way it is used on {{Infobox laboratory}} or {{Infobox ambulance company}}, it is performing the same functionality as a slogan and has the same issues.Look forward to everyone's thoughts! - Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 22:29, 20 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Notability (geographic features)
The WP:GEOLAND guideline states
"Populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable". Do you agree or disagree with the statement:"the "Populated, legally recognized places" standard is not fit for purpose"? FOARP (talk) 13:29, 15 October 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines
Should there be a recommended limit on a talk page size? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 08:59, 14 October 2025 (UTC)
Should a "Wait and See" option be added to the Articles for Deletion guidelines, to be used as needed for breaking news? -- Beland (talk) 18:15, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Should DYK prohibit or restrict superlative hooks, such as those that revolve around a "first X" hook fact?
- Option 1 - Ban all superlative hooks
- Option 2 - Restrict superlative hooks to certain "airtight" cases, where established lists of subject members exist (for example, list of all US presidents)
- Option 3 - Only allow superlative hooks to be approved on a case-by-case basis after a WT:DYK discussion
- Option 4 - Status quo (bringing superlative hooks to WT:DYK is optional but encouraged, not mandatory, hooks do not need a WT:DYK discussion to be approved by a reviewer)
Narutolovehinata5 (talk · contributions) 13:18, 6 October 2025 (UTC)