MyWiki:Village pump (policy)/Archive 205

NoYear events naming RfC

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (events) § NoYear. Aaron Liu (talk) 16:31, 20 September 2025 (UTC)

RFC discussion at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy § Revised proposal to improve extended confirmed grants

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy § Revised proposal to improve extended confirmed grants. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 21:12, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

RfC on BLPCRIME

There is currently an RfC on WP:BLPCRIME at Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons § RFC: Amount of coverage in reliable primary news sources. voorts (talk/contributions) 00:13, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

RfC: Party affiliation in BLP infoboxes

User:ClueBot III/DoNotArchiveUntil I am an AMPOL editor and I often see articles with party affiliation assumed in the infobox. For instance, Adriana Kugler's infobox states that she is a Democrat, but no inline citation is provided. On the other hand, Todd Blanche does provide a citation for having registered as a Republican. I am questioning the purpose of this parameter for individuals who are not directly associated with politics—in other words, their profession does not pertain to being a politician or political consultant. "If relevant" in the {{Infobox person}} documentation is rather vague. The misuse of this parameter warrants some action.

The rationale for removing the party affiliation parameter is similar to the RfC over the religion parameter. As was stated then, "This would be consistent with our treatment of sexual orientation and various other things we don't include in infoboxes that are matters which may be nuanced, complex, and frequently controversial. The availability of a parameter encourages editors to fill it, whether they have consensus to do so or not, regardless of instructions in template documentation to gain consensus first; new and anon IP editors generally do not read documentation, they simply see a "missing" parameter at article B that they saw at article A and add it." elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 16:38, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

Survey (party affiliation in BLP infoboxes)

Question presented: Should the party parameter in infoboxes be deprecated for non-political BLPs?

Support — As nominator. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 01:43, 12 August 2025 (UTC)
Oppose, and I note that both of the examples given in the original RFC question are "political" BLPs (both of them were political appointees in a system that expects appointees to come from the president's own political party) – people who very much are "directly associated with politics". Whether an inline citation is needed directly in the infobox depends on the usual Wikipedia:When to cite rules, namely whether the information is also present and cited elsewhere in the article. While political party affiliation can be "nuanced, complex, and frequently controversial", it is usually not, especially for people, such as political appointees, for whom this is actually relevant. "If relevant" appears in the documentation for {{infobox person}} more than a dozen times. If you can figure out whether to add |employer= or |height= or amateur radio |callsign= "if relevant", then you can probably figure out whether to add |party= "if relevant", too. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:12, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
Oppose - Whether the use of the field meets MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE varies by article. Graham11 (talk) 04:56, 19 August 2025 (UTC)
Oppose - per Graham11 — Charles Stewart (talk) 15:10, 20 August 2025 (UTC)
Oppose - per above. >^CreativeLibrary460 /^{access the library} ^revision\ 08:38, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
Oppose per WAID. "Non-policitcal" requires exactly as much nuance as "if relevant" and so doesn't actually bring any benefits. Thryduulf (talk) 08:46, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
Oppose - mostly per Thryduulf. If it's used to signify some sort of political engagement (such as Kugler and Blanche being appointees in a political appointments system), I think it's 100% relevant and should be included. For other biographies it's probably relevant if it's matched by relevant text in prose (i.e. a celebrity who is also openly a member of and advocates for a political party). AlexandraAVX (talk) 09:53, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose. This can change repeatedly over time, and unlike the party/parties with which you're affiliated when holding office (which also can change), there's often no firm data for this. How do you know if someone's affiliated with a party? Does the person have to be a dues-paying member, or is this option available to anyone who sympathises with a party, or is it somewhere in between? Nyttend (talk) 08:58, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Discussion (party affiliation in BLP infoboxes)

I would say that unless they are running/elected in a position that requires a political affiliation to be made as part of the election process so that we have a clear basis to document it, this should be left out of the infobox and explained in the prose. Masem (t) 16:41, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

I think that if they are explicitly running as a candidate for/in affiliation with a given party, and this is cited in the pose, then it should be in the infobox. Otherwise it should not be. Thryduulf (talk) 16:56, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

Agree. Talk:Sydney Sweeney § RfC: Sydney Sweeney's political party affiliation was recently WP:SNOW closed with consensus against inclusion, for instance, and editors should not have to waste time dealing with similar disputes on other BLPs whose subjects are not directly associated with politics. Some1 (talk) 17:16, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

I agree too. Too often I see a supposed party affiliation being added to judge infoboxes (Scalia, for example), based not on party registration or self-declaration but by some third party claiming it, and that opinion being claimed as a RS. Wehwalt (talk) 17:23, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

I am thinking of many local elections that are intended as non-partisan positions, though candidates often assert their position in their campaign materials, in comparison to partisan offices that usually require party primaries to be elected to. In the latter case, the political affiliation is part of the election process and can't be disputed (making it fair to include the infobox). Masem (t) 17:33, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

If someone is explicitly running on a partisan position then that position should be in the infobox. Even if the position is intended to be non-partisan if someone is running on a partisan platform then it is de facto partisan. The job of Wikipedia is to represent what the reality is, not what it is/was intended to be. Thryduulf (talk) 17:57, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

I would be more clear in this comment and state that the infobox should be following what sources say. Brad Schimel was nonpartisan in the Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this year, but he was described as a Republican across various outlets. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 18:27, 10 August 2025 (UTC)

That's exactly a situation that I would *not* include the political affiliation in the infobox, because that's not a requirement for running in that election. In prose, absolutely. Its the same reason we restrict calling out religion in the infobox for only those people who's careers are specifically tied to the church/equivalent body of their religion, though we are free to include any stated religious beliefs in the prose of the article. Masem (t) 04:11, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

Schimel is in an interesting position because he ran as a Republican in the Wisconsin attorney general elections he was involved in. Most of the cases where a politician running for a non-partisan office is clearly affiliated with a party involve prior elections. I was reading a local news report from Wisconsin that made it clear that Schimel was de jure non-partisan. In cases where a candidate explicitly says they are of a certain party but they are running for office in a non-partisan role and they have not run in any other elections where they would be a candidate for that party, then that should not be in the infobox. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 19:32, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

For a given individual, in some cases it's clear that they're "directly associated with politics," in some cases it's clear they aren't, but there are some people/positions where it's unclear. Todd Blanche is someone I'd put in the third group. He is a political appointee in an ostensibly non-political position, but in this administration, it seems that the position is political as well. I don't think political party is a "nuanced, complex" issue. I also don't think people should be adding this info without an RS. FactOrOpinion (talk) 02:24, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

I would argue that Blanche should not have "Republican" in his infobox. He is not a politician nor a political advisor. The argument that the "position is political" is a reach from what is being suggested here. Wikipedia shouldn't make its own conclusions. In reliable sources, Blanche might be described as a Trump loyalist, but not a Republican, a rather vague term that doesn't encompass Blanche's fealty to the president. The prose can handle describing Blanche properly. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 04:10, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

I think we should limit listings of party affiliation to people who ran for office as a candidate for the party or people who served as officials of the party. I have seen party affiliation listed for people who served in political office in a position that was elected on a non-partisan basis, I do not think that is justified. There are of course people who have had multiple party affiliations. If they served in office for multiple parties that can be listed. One thing to keep in mind is on occasion a member of one party has appointed people from a different party to their cabinet, so even cabinet members we cannot assume they share the party of the president. This is even more clear in cases or any sub-cabinet position, for judges many times so. The same probably applies even more so to people who serve on the cabinet of governors. Many mayors and other local officials in the US are elected on a non-partisan basis.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:57, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
I don't think there is a one-size fits all solution. There are the obvious cases, candidate runs as a partisan in a partisan election. And on the other side, there are non-partisans who run in non-partisan elections. But, there are many people who may be known (either in independent sources or verifiable non-independent sources) as a partisan. And, there are individuals who run as a partisan in a partisan election who change parties or disaffiliate at some point after that election. And, for many subjects, there are BLP considerations to account for. --Enos733 (talk) 16:07, 11 August 2025 (UTC)
Political party is a voluntary act, not something that can be otherwise discerned, even by RSs. Unless there is evidence of voluntary affiliation, through registration to vote or entering a party primary that requires party membership, or being a party official of some kind, I would exclude. RSs without evidence of this are just partisan name callers. Wehwalt (talk) 17:22, 11 August 2025 (UTC)

If this is an RfC then it needs to be formatted and advertised as such. If it's just a discussion, perhaps in advance of a potential RfC, it needs to be relabeled. ElKevbo (talk) 00:30, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

I have done that now. elijahpepe@wikipedia (he/him) 01:43, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

You still haven't formatted it so it will be advertised as an RfC at WP:RFC/A. FactOrOpinion (talk) 02:08, 12 August 2025 (UTC)

The two examples provided are political BLPs and the infobox used is {{Infobox officeholder}}, not the generic {{Infobox person}}. Party affiliation is a basic and often uncontroversial piece of information for office holders. I appreciate that there may be more complexity with non-partisan state and local races and political appointees whose personal party affiliation may differ from that of the leader or body who appointed them. I agree with the comments above that someone like Sydney Sweeney should not have their party affiliation listed; if relevant and appropriate per WP:DUE and other applicable standards it can be discussed in the article body. If this is meant to be an WP:RFCBEFORE discussion, which would be helpful, it should be clarified that this does not apply to {{Infobox officeholder}}. I'm not yet convinced party affiliation should be completely deprecated from {{Infobox person}} but I may get there. It is inappropriate for most public figures who are not/have not been office holders who are not primarily known for political, partisan work. For folks known primarily for and associated with politics but who are not office holders, like commentators and strategists, it may be case-by-case. --MYCETEAE 🍄‍🟫—talk 18:32, 13 August 2025 (UTC)
It really seems like this is a field that belongs in office holder infoboxes or modules with a start/end, and not for a generic person. I'm really struggling to think of situations where party seems appropriate for a person. Even for non-office holders who are clearly very partisan, it seems like the better way to do it would be to have it in the occupation or known for fields. Something like "occupation: <party> strategist", or "known for: <party> political writings" or similar. That strikes me as more neutral and verifiable for a potentially nuanced fact like affiliation. Driftingdrifting (talk) 17:07, 21 August 2025 (UTC)
I think for info boxes we should only ever list party affiliation for people who held public or political office, and not list it for people whose primary office was a non-partisan elected office.John Pack Lambert (talk) 13:36, 15 August 2025 (UTC)
If we did want to partisan affiliation to a non-political person's infobox, we'd have to weed through what to make of people who are registered with one political party, but have given significant donations to candidates of a different party; or who are registered as (say) a Democrat but who ran for political office on the Green Party ticket 15 years ago; and other combinations like that. I think it gets complicated quickly and it would be better to avoid it altogether. Just askin' for trouble. Novellasyes (talk) 18:06, 19 August 2025 (UTC)

Are semi-automated edits to improve MOS:CURLY compliance okay with the community?

I'm working on a tool called WikiClicky that performs various single-character edits to improve Wikipedia articles. I have established community consensus that the grammar-correction features I've added are okay. What would the community say about edits from this tool that only serve to improve an article's compliance with MOS:CURLY? GrinningIodize (talk) 21:42, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Nevermind; I'm removing that feature from WikiClicky. GrinningIodize (talk) 16:49, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

I always make these corrections manually when I see them. It would be nice to have a tool to do it. ~Anachronist (talk) 01:47, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

I see no reason to not add it to something like AWB's general fixes, but as a standalone edit it's just cosmetic and so shouldn't be done by automation. Thryduulf (talk) 03:27, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

No, it's not just cosmetic. WP:COSMETIC says An edit that has no effect on how a page is actually structured or how it appears (visually or aurally) to readers—that is, changes that are only apparent to editors looking at the wikitext. By contrast, a substantive edit is one that does alter the resulting page. See also WP:SUBSTANTIVE. Curly quotes look different from straight quotes, and in some software they're treated differently by search tools — Chrome treats I'm and I’m the same, but Notepad doesn't, and remember that editors may save files offline — so this is a substantive edit that's definitely worth doing if it can be done easily and well. Nyttend (talk) 08:01, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

There is no shortcut to user page

Not a matter of policy or for this noticeboard. Star Mississippi 01:51, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

On the top-right, there is a button where you can quickly go to your homepage, talk, sandbox, and others. Why is there no option for a user page? ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 23:07, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

For accounts that were created before the deployment of the newcomer home page, the target destination when clicking on your user name on the top right is your user page. The WMF decided that to repurpose the link to access the newcomer home page, and your user page can be accessed from there. The behaviour can be configured on the preferences page: Preferences → User profile → ⧼prefs-homepage⧽ →

Display newcomer homepage. However disabling it also disables your homepage. isaacl (talk) 00:08, 16 September 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Is the WMF being paid to come up with stupid things to do? Because something this idiotic should have gotten someone fired.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 17:21, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

@Khajidha: what? I don't understand... ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 23:07, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

@Khajidha: you don't want a useful feature that actively helps newcomers join this website? —Matrix _{ping me}^{when u reply} (t? - c) 17:28, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

Help joining the website should not introduce differences from how the site is experienced by established users. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 10:44, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Agreed on both points. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 12:55, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@Mandruss and @Khajidha so uh... are we going to do something? ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 12:56, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Like what? Try to get WMF to reverse the change? Not I. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 12:58, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

@Mandruss i don't know! It seems you were going to do something... ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 13:00, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

It does? Because I said Agreed on both points? The only thing I'm planning to do is return to causing trouble at Donald Trump lol. If someone wants to spearhead a move for reversal, and I'm aware of that, I'll be there to support them. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 13:03, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Yeah... oh wait you once reverted my edit at Donald Trump lol... ~Rafael (He, him) • talk • guestbook • projects 13:05, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

Directing new users to essays on the top of policy and guideline pages

I see Template:Simple has recently been placed at the top of some policy and guideline pages. Are we sure we want to direct new users to unvetted info pages off the bat like this.... that in my view are leading them to the wrong type of pages in some cases. For example at Wikipedia:Content assessment we link a readers' FAQ page Help:Assessing article quality that is designed for non-editing readers. At Wikipedia:Deletion policy a page about rationale and how to go about the process we link Wikipedia:Why was the page I created deleted? a page about what you can do about a deleted page. Not sure if these links have been well thought out. Wondering if we should have a chat before this is added to more policy and guideline pages? Linking simpler help pages from long-winded help pages make sense... I'm just not sure linking these types of pages from policies and guidelines are appropriate in the fashion that they're presented at the top of the page as if these linked pages have been vetted by the community makes sense. Moxy🍁 22:31, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

These simplified pages should be merged into the real pages. If the real page is too steep, change it. Johnjbarton (talk) 23:04, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

Not sure merging simplified essays into policies and guidelines pages would be beneficial or pass muster. My main concern is are we and should we direct new users to loosely related essay pages from policy and guideline pages off the bat that currently stand out in big bold letters.Moxy🍁 23:09, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I've not looked at any of the examples yet, but really nobody should be adding prominent links to the top of (especially fundamental) policy pages without at least discussing it first. I don't know that it needs to be a full-on consensus discussion unless there are substantive objections, but there needs to be at least some agreement from talk page watchers that the other page is relevant, appropriate and helpful. Thryduulf (talk) 23:32, 13 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't love this, but I think this is probably not a bad thing, overall.

First, before anyone panics, this is only on about two dozen pages, and I think that it's only on two official policies:

Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines, where the template points to Help:Introduction to policies and guidelines – hardly some backwater, unvetted page, since it gets 4K page views a month, is in a couple of welcoming templates, and is part of the Wikipedia:Tutorial.
Wikipedia:Deletion policy, where the template points to Wikipedia:Why was the page I created deleted?

Second, most of the uses point towards popular pages. For example, at Wikipedia:Inline citation, it points to the ever-popular WP:REFB. At Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines, it points to Help:Introduction to talk pages. At Wikipedia:Conflict of interest, it points to WP:PSCOI.

The pages it points to are generally community favorites, and there is no reason to believe that any of these links were snuck on to the pages without anybody noticing. And frankly, in the case of pages like Help:Table (5754 words "readable prose size", except most of it is not readable by ordinary humans), most editors actually should be looking at a much simplified page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:11, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

I read your argument as "these linked pages are de-facto approved pages". Under that condition, of course it is fine. Maybe these simple pages should be the main pages and the current main pages need converted to specialized instructions? Johnjbarton (talk) 02:30, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

We can't really "replace" the pages. They aren't interchangeable. For example, Wikipedia:Inline citation exists to explain what an inline citation is and isn't. WP:REFB exists to help newbies figure out how to format the most popular kind. If you moved REFB at the name "Inline citation", we'd just have to create another page that explains that ref tags aren't the only kind of inline citation ...and a newbie would still end up at that page when they really just need something that says "copy and paste this wikitext", and we'd get another note at the top saying that if you're not really looking for details, then there's a simpler instruction page that you might want to look at instead. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:16, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Specifically regarding Help:Introduction to policies and guidelines, the message box added at the top of Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines is misleading: the help page is not a simplified version of the policies and guidelines page. I didn't raise it for discussion, though, as I felt it was probably useful to have a link to an introduction, and that most people wouldn't care that the description was inaccurate. isaacl (talk) 07:07, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

This is not a good template idea, agree with Johnjbarton. Our policies and guidelines are, when not simple, not so for a reason. We should not give alternative wording official sanction unless it has this. Simultaneously, if there is an obvious way to simplify the policies and guidelines, it should be done on the actual pages. Perhaps we might link to essays that oversimplify the relevant pages, which could have some use for new users who want the basics that won't land them in trouble, but these should clearly be marked as oversimplifications. CMD (talk) 02:51, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Do you think that it's inappropriate for Wikipedia:Inline citation (which is not a guideline or policy) to have a prominent link at the top to Help:Referencing for beginners (which is also not a policy or guideline)?

Relative to most newbies' needs, do you think that WP:REFB should be labeled "an oversimplified version" of anything? I think "a simplified version" is a fairer description, though "Are you new here? Start with WP:REFB" would work for me. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:20, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Yes, that's clearly inappropriate as Help:Referencing for beginners is not a simplified version of Wikipedia:Inline citation. It's a lie right at the top of the page. CMD (talk) 09:13, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

So you wouldn't want us to apply your advice that "these should clearly be marked as oversimplifications" to this instance. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:13, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Well no, because that would also be a misleading lie? What is the purpose of this question? CMD (talk) 02:36, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

You said these should clearly be marked as oversimplifications. But you don't want us to label a link to REFB as being an oversimplification, because calling REFB an oversimplification would be a misleading lie. These statements are superficially self-contradictory, but I think you're right.

I think we have two separate questions to answer:

Do we want to have links/hatnotes/banners/templates that direct inexperienced editors away from complicated pages, towards simpler/more relevant pages?
If so, how should we describe those links? You dislike the "simplified version" language (for understandable reasons). "Oversimplified" is IMO even worse. Maybe something like "If you're new to editing Wikipedia, you may want to start at _____" would be better.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:15, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

The statements are not contradictory. The first statement was a general one premised on the good faith assumption that the items under discussion being presented as simplified versions are simplified versions. The second statement relates to a specific example raised after that first statement where the item presented as a summary was not a summary but rather a general guide of a related topic. CMD (talk) 16:19, 15 September 2025 (UTC)

Would I be right in thinking that many of these were added by FaviFake? The one at Wikipedia:Content assessment certainly was. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:19, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

[1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9]. —Fortuna, imperatrix 16:36, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

See User talk:Redrose64#Time sink, which involved Primefac and Jonesey95. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 17:11, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Ah, and which links to that ANI. I see a WP-space TB somewhere around the corner, as they don't seem to have learned from it. —Fortuna, imperatrix 17:20, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

Just since I was pinged, yes, I do disagree with Favi doing this, but since I did not see much in the way of reverts, and they're not terrible additions, I have mostly left them be. Primefac (talk) 17:32, 14 September 2025 (UTC)

By the way, we do have a mechanism to differentiate between a random essay and a broadly accepted consensus supplement for policy/guideline pages - WP:SUPPLEMENTAL with the pages that are broadly agreed upon by the community being tagged with it and are part of Category:Wikipedia supplemental pages.

So maybe the question is whether any how-to pages that are linked at the very top of a policy guide using the {{Simple}} template should also mandatorily have been evaluated to qualify similarly for supplemental status (over just being a regular info/how-to page), since that seems to be kind of the bar for such articles that are tagged with {{Supplement}} and linked at the policy section, e.g. WP:LOWPROFILE supplement being the supplement to WP:BLP - WP:NPF - Non-public figure policy - the supplement has broad consensus and is de-facto policy on how we assess whether someone qualifies as public figure or not. Raladic (talk) 02:29, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

But surely anyone can anytime declare that a favoured essay is an info page? Peter Gulutzan (talk) 18:47, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but in practice, that isn't done often, and only 'sticks' if the page is low traffic. Otherwise, someone who disagrees will revert it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:05, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Also: Being 'an info page' or 'a how-to page' doesn't provide the page with any special status. It's supposed to signal that the page has practical value. Read some essays if you want to know some opinions about why we add sources; go to a how-to page if you need to know what wikitext code to type to get the little blue clicky numbers to show up in the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:12, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't know you know how often it's done, and don't see the point of reverting since the people who watch the essay will include people who think the essay is worthwhile, and will therefore be likely to revert the reverter. However, I missed that the argument is not that info pages have special status but that supplement pages do. I guess. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 16:11, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

Nominally, supplement pages have same status as an essay. In practice, many of them have "the same status as an essay such as WP:BRD", rather than "the same status as the average essay". WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:07, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

MOS: prescriptive, descriptive, or both?

User:ClueBot III/DoNotArchiveUntil

The Manual of Style varies in levels of consensus. In Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Article_titles_and_capitalisation_2 it was alleged for some parts of MOS: some of those guidelines have fewer watchers than my talk page, and are largely written by parties to this case (see discussion). Meanwhile, CONLEVELS states:

Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. For instance, unless they can convince the broader community that such action is right, participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope.

I don't think it's unreasonable to conclude that while some parts of MOS are the result of consensus with significant participation, there may be other parts that are indeed consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time.

Also of note are the proposals by L235 that did not make principles for that case. Specifically,

Policies and guidelines have a combination of prescriptive and descriptive characteristics. Policies and guidelines document community consensus as to "standards [that] all users should normally follow" (Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines), giving them some degree of prescriptive force. Simultaneously, policies and guidelines seek to describe "behaviors practiced by most editors" (Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines), and change with community practice, giving them a descriptive quality. Naturally, disagreements regarding the extent of a policy's consensus or prescriptive effect arise from this combination, and the text of a policy can sometimes diverge from or lag behind community consensus. These disagreements, like all disputes on Wikipedia, should be resolved by discussion and consensus.

Does MOS necessarily indicate community consensus on a wider scale? In other words, should closers examine the specific text for level of consensus before using it to overrule a (potentially larger) group of editors? Good day—RetroCosmos ^talk 01:45, 26 August 2025 (UTC)

Comment WP:MOS says at the top "Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply." Not sure anything constructive will come of this rfc, but time will tell. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:03, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
I would agree with L235, and add that, ideally, policies and guidelines describe community consensus and prescribe editors to follow this consensus. Regarding the MoS, as a set of guidelines with various ranges, it is expected that not all of its pages will have the same level of consensus – a very specific topic will attract less interested editors, and thus naturally have a lower CONLEVEL. That in itself is not necessarily problematic. However, if it goes against a wider consensus, or only reflects a subset of the views of editors interested in that topic, then there is indeed a CONLEVEL issue and a broader discussion should be held. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:31, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
As a closer, I would not feel justified in going on an independent fact-finding mission to determine the level of consensus that supports a specific policy or guideline. I would support overturning closures that were based on such an independent mission. If participants in the discussion gave valid arguments based on their own analysis of the level of consensus, I would consider that when making my decision.
To put it another way, I presume that guidelines and policies have a higher level of consensus than any local discussion. A mass of editors who disagree with a guideline should be directed toward venues where guideline change can happen, not a local discussion. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 15:53, 26 August 2025 (UTC)
Consensus isn't only found by discussion, but also by use. Maybe four editors discussed a particular piece of policy or guidance, but many editors may follow it because they also support what has been said. If editors disagree with any particular price of guidance then they should start a centralised discussion in whatever forum would be appropriate.
So the answer to the specific question is probably, maybe, but to start discussion on specifics as required. Certainly the MOS in it's entirety has some level of wide scale support, even if it's quite possible that not all of it does. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:42, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
ActivelyDisinterested is absolutely right. Many long-standing aspects of the MOS have strong consensus not because of the number of editors involved in the original drafting, perhaps decades ago, but because they have been widely followed without significant challenge ever since. It would be quite unworkable for closers to start undertaking historical investigations about the origin of about any particular rule in order to determine how seriously it is to be taken. All MOS rules should generally be followed per WP:MOS, and if a later group of editors think the rule is wrong they always have the option to open a centralised discussion suggesting that it be changed. MichaelMaggs (talk) 13:23, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
To answer the question Does MOS necessarily indicate community consensus on a wider scale?, I would say the answer is a clear yes. Closers should not try to deep dive the history of how certain parts of the MOS came to be in determining a local consensus on (for example) an article talk page. Instead, those concerned with MOS should go to the MOS talk page and open a discussion there to enact change. And I would say this for any policy/guideline (including notability guidelines, for example, where I've found discussions were limited to 2-3 people for some changes, but those changes have stood for over a decade). —Locke Cole • t • c 19:45, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
I think this RFC question would have benefited from some additional workshopping. There are two unrelated questions being asked:
1. Is the MOS prescriptive, descriptive, or both?
2. Does the MOS have consensus?
  - My answer to the first requires you to know what prescriptive and descriptive mean. The MOS is both, depending upon the level you analyze it at. It is descriptive in the sense that the community wants to follow the rules of good grammar, punctuation, and other elements of writing style that are relevant to an encyclopedia. We follow these; therefore, a style guideline saying to follow these accurately describes the community's practice. At a more specific level, the MOS is prescriptive: instead of saying 'the community uses good punctuation practices' (descriptive), it says 'the correct punctuation practice to use is this one' (prescriptive).
  - My answer to the second is that you should assume, unless and until you can prove otherwise, that any page with a {{guideline}} tag at the top is exactly that community consensus on a wider scale that is mentioned in CONLEVEL. RetroCosmos, since this was all before your time, let me tell you in very concrete terms what CONLEVEL is actually about: CONLEVEL means that when MOS:INFOBOXUSE says The use of infoboxes is neither required nor prohibited for any article, then a handful of editors at Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers are not allowed to say "Yeah, well, that might be what the official Wikipedia guideline says, but they're prohibited for our articles, because we had a private chat among just our little group of editors, and we decided that the official Wikipedia guidelines don't apply to us". Trying to apply the MOS (or any other policy or guideline) = not a CONLEVEL problem. Declaring "your" articles exempt from the MOS = possibly a CONLEVEL problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:30, 27 August 2025 (UTC)
This RfC is overly broad. Most of the MOS is supported by strong affirmative consensus. I encourage editors who take issue with a particular part of the MOS to start an RfC asking whether that particular part currently has the support of the community. Such narrow discussions would be far more productive than philosophizing on the nature of the MOS as a whole. Toadspike [Talk] 06:07, 30 August 2025 (UTC)
This RfC is not helpful because standard procedure acknowledges that no set of rules can apply in every circumstance. The Article_titles_and_capitalisation_2 Arbcom case concerned extreme disruption over an extended period. That can occur with any policy or guideline. A favorite that pops up from time to time is WP:V where people go around deleting chunks of correct and well-written material because no one has added citations. WP:V definitely applies everywhere but dumbly pushing it wll result in blocks. Johnuniq (talk) 06:42, 30 August 2025 (UTC)

Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the topic-interested in an MOS discussion might sometimes result in an MOS issue resulting in a local consensus, the solution certainly wouldn't be to defer to a local consensus, which is far more likely to represent a local consensus. If there are concerns that an MOS consensus was not agreed upon by a sufficiently wide cross-section of editors, then the solution would be to discuss that consensus in a place likely to be seen by a wide cross-section of editors.
CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 19:07, 30 August 2025 (UTC)
Right. All guidelines, including all MOS pages, are presumed to have full community (i.e., non-local) consensus. However, there are hundreds of guidelines with thousands of pieces of advice, and at any given point in time, some small fraction will be out of date, badly explained, not reflective of current community practices, etc. Whenever those problems are identified, editors should fix them. That can be done through bold editing, through ordinary discussions on the guideline's talk page, through RFCs, etc. And even if the advice is sound in general, there might be reasons to not apply it in a specific instance. But you should not start from a position of assuming the MOS to be a WP:LOCALCON. It might be wrong, and it might need to be changed, but it's not a local consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:59, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
I don't know what the status is now, but I remember when the MOS had large parts written by a small group who hung out on the MOS talk pages, fiercely arguing with anyone who came there with an opposing viewpoint to preserve their desired version. Anomie ⚔ 11:35, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
Sounds like Wikipedia. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 11:40, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
As a participant in the arbitration case referenced in the opening, I feel I should point out that the issue there wasn't disagreement with the MOS but disagreement over how a particular section (MOS:CAPS) is interpreted. ~~ Jessintime (talk) 11:53, 31 August 2025 (UTC)
That was a reckless charge during the arb case. If something, in fact, lacked WP:CONLEVEL, then it should have been changed by a larger consensus. The case failed on that point. —Bagumba (talk) 14:08, 31 August 2025 (UTC)

The answer to the question "Does MOS necessarily indicate community consensus on a wider scale?" is generally no. The MOS is by and large the result of WP:BOLD editing and even when there is a discussion it usually involves only a very small number of people. It therefore reflects local consensus. Much was written before guidelines became elevated to the status they hold today and at best has implied consensus owing to having been there for years without being changed. In cases where it has proven too burdensome, it has indeed been overridden by a larger consensus. Most editors cannot be bothered. Some parts have never been able to reach a consensus. Mainly, though, we have an ongoing iterative process of improvement. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 03:45, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
Do you think that any edit without an RFC is a "local consensus"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:08, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
I reject the notion that two editors on an MOS talk page represents community consensus better than fifty editors on Wikipedia:WikiProject Composers. Consensus among a limited group of editors, at one place and time, cannot override community consensus on a wider scale. That applies to the MOS talk pages every bit as much as project talk pages. Like most editors, I am happy to follow local consensus. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 23:01, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
I agree with Hawkeye, what matters is the visibility and scale (number of participants) of a discussion, not the venue. Obviously the venue is not irrelevant - a discussion at VPP is more likely to be accidentally discovered than one at e.g. Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Poetry, but if the latter is well-advertised and attracts 30 editors the consensus it establishes is more likely to reflect community consensus than an un-advertised discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Titles of works with only three participants. This is especially true if the subject of the discussion is specific to poetry and the consensus is to adopt the style that's been consistently used by a significant majority of relevant articles for many years. Obviously there are exceptions to this (e.g. if the de facto standard is inaccessible) but those exceptions need to be supported by evidence of an actual problem and an alternative must not be blindly and rigidly enforced without discussion to see if a compromise can be reached. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways/Archive 48#DLR colours for a semi-relevant example. Thryduulf (talk) 00:23, 4 September 2025 (UTC)

But do you also reject the notion that two editors on the guideline's page is better than two editors on any other page, when the purpose of the discussion is to improve the guideline?

Or imagine that it's not a guideline. If you and I have a chat on an article's talk page, is that better than you and I having the same chat on your talk page? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:58, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
do you also reject the notion that two editors on the guideline's page is better than two editors on any other page all other things being equal, the discussion on the guideline's talk page is slightly better, but its still a weak consensus. A discussion elsewhere that is advertised to multiple places, including the guideline's talk page, is stronger than one with approximately the same number of participants that was held on the guideline's talk page but was not advertised elsewhere. Also, where the elsewhere is can matter - a WikiProject talkpage is probably going to produce a stronger consensus than an article talk page, which in turn is probably' stronger than a discussion on your or my talk page.

Venue, number of participants, amount of advertising, significance of change (from both the de jure and de facto status quo), reason for the change, depth of discussion and degree of unanimity are all relevant considerations and you absolutely cannot look at one factor in isolation and arrive at a reliable answer. Thryduulf (talk) 10:30, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
Pretty much sums up my thoughts on the matter. Good day—RetroCosmos ^talk 23:38, 5 September 2025 (UTC)

A WikiProject's talk page is more likely to produce the appearance of unanimity. The people in that group are largely there because they like working with each other, after all, and we expect them to mostly agree with their chosen wiki-friends. It is also, for most subjects, likely to represent the views of editors who know something about the subject matter (e.g., if you have a question about a medical article, drop by Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Medicine, not a village pump).

It is, however, less likely to represent the broader community's POV, especially if the question is:
not a question in which the group's subject-matter expertise is relevant (e.g., WikiProject Composers on infoboxes; WikiProject Infoboxes on composers' genres) or

an interdisciplinary question (e.g., in which WikiProject Medicine and WikiProject History might have different perspectives on what's important to include in the article).

Consequently, occasionally, a discussion at a WikiProject's talk page produces more "appearance of" than "actual" consensus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't know if this is a good example, but I uploaded an image which (to my understanding) was allowed by policy/guideline. The image replaced an existing fair-use JPEG with a fair-use SVG of a videogame box cover. Upon getting the deletion notification for the old JPEG, the editor that uploaded the JPEG passed on talking to me directly, or opening a discussion at the article talk page, or just taking it through WP:FFD. Instead they opened a discussion at a WikiProject and "unanimously" decided to remove the image there.

In my view, the WikiProject definitely has knowledge about videogames, but the issues being raised by editors there are more technical and/or concern NFC questions, so surely the discussion would have made more sense at the article talk page with pointers at WP:VPT, WT:NFC and WT:VG to this centralized discussion. —Locke Cole • t • c 02:36, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
I think FFD might have made more sense, but I think the important thing to do right now is for you to post messages to relevant pages (e.g., WT:NFC) to bring in people who know less about what the group usually does, and more about what the Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria policy actually requires. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:02, 7 September 2025 (UTC)
So, as I see it, there are a couple of things going on here which could influence how much "binding" consensus we should ascribe to any particular section/verbiage within the MoS. And these absolutely should be given serious consideration when applying any particular rule of thumb found within the manual, but in practice, these considerations are rarely cited, let alone heavily considered in debates that center around particular application in given use cases in article space. It would be nice if we had a more formalistic system for establishing the weight and uniformity to be ascribed to any given style principle, but the ad-hoc nature of the evolution of the MoS, combined with the fact that it was at one time meant to be purely advisory, but over time has taken on a less permissive tone overall, and with particular sections being almost entirely mandatory, that it would be very difficult to reverse engineer the entire body of style recommendations and re-code them in conformity with new and more express scheme for different levels of absoluteness with regard to different provisions. Though goodness knows that would probably save the community a lot of time on disputes if such a clearer system were implemented, so maybe it will be worth the effort at some point.
That lengthy preamble made, here are the primary two factors that I think influence how much weight and certainty a given piece of style guidance should have:
- First, was the discussion which lead to that verbiage the result of a full and appropriately approached WP:PROPOSAL? How many individual discussions were held, and how many community members took part in those discussions? Were the held in the right venue for the proposal in question (the talk page of the MoS subsection itself or the village pump, typically) and were they well advertised in other fora if the resulting rule was likely to effect a non-trivial number of articles? For example, on a significant number of occasions, small cadres of editors operating out of WikiProjects have tried to create rules (some of which were added to MoS pages without further authorizing discussion among the larger community. This of course is expressly forbidden by WP:Advice pages and a number of ArbCom rulings. On the other end of the spectrum, we have something like MoS:GENDERID, which is the result of a lot of community negotiation in some of the most massively-attended and assiduously-argued discussions in the history of the project. Some of argued that the resulting rules should have been codified in WP:PAG as a result, but for good or ill, it was placed in the MoS.
  But while there is some wiggle-room for most provisions in the MoS, there is a fairly absolute consensus at this point that no part of GENDERID is optional--though we continue to have arguments about how to apply it in particular cases. However, most provisions of MoS exist in a grey area between these two extremes. And unfortunately, because there are no handy labels to easily distinguish which are the result of more trivial or robust previous consensus discussion, it is often incumbent upon those arguing over a particular piece of guidance and its application to a given article or set of uses to either accept that they have to make pragmatic arguments for that use case, or else demonstrate that the history of debate for that provision shows previous and broad consensus for a universal approach, or that the particular use case in question has already been addressed. Again, suboptimal, but the reality we are left with after the organic and non-formalized growth of this part of our rules ecosystem.
- Second, we can also look to the intrinsic text that was generated by the consensus process described above. Because traditionally (and less so as time went on, but still to some extent) we intentionally left a lot of flex in MoS wording itself, to account for previous disagreement and to allow editors to use their best sense of what was required for the needs of the individual article or other namespace. Rules creep has gobbled up the edges of much of that flexibility, but many sections of the MoS still have vague or expressly permissive language for those purposes. Personally, I think we benefit from keeping those provisions lean for those very pragmatic reasons, but it is a natural consequence of a bureaucratic apparatus such as we work with here that more and more rules will accrue over time. Especially as it has turned out that there is no principle of grammar, formatting, or presentation to trivial or inane that the Wikipedia community at large has proven unable to generate at least two camps of deeply committed proponents willing to regularly and disruptively go to war across hundreds or even thousands of articles/talk pages to enforce their preferred version.
All of which is to say, the MoS is clearly very prescriptive with respect to many considerations, but the degree to which a given prescription (or proscription) is permissive or mandatory is highly variable, and often nothing short of research into and reference back to substantially aged discussions can settle just how strong a given requirement is. And even then, everything is of course subject to WP:CCC. Only the most well known and at one time divisive subjects, like GENDERID, are so absolute that everyone is expected to comport with them in the vast majority of use cases, with failure to do so often being considered highly disruptive. But as time goes on, we have more and more of this body of uniform rules. A better system would re-categorize all style guidance into levels of permissibility in a system which roughly shadows the levels of weight seen as between information pages, guidelines, and policies, but such a re-conceptualization would be a herculean effort that I just doubt we even have the manpower for, even if we could get the broad community buy-in to support such a massive restructuring. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 21:56, 3 September 2025 (UTC)
One thing I think gets lost here is that the process (where was the discussion? Was there a discussion? How many editors? How many experienced editors who haven't been blocked in the intervening years?) is not really as important as whether the policy/guideline/help/whatever page matches what the community wants now. A perfect process, with dozens or hundreds of people, that arrived at the (now) wrong conclusion is not nearly as important as whether the community agrees with that decision today. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:02, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't disagree in principle, but even if there is a new established best practice or general unspoken consensus, it's infeasible to allow editors to just assert it as a given; there needs to be a new formal consensus discussion at some level, as otherwise we will just have people insisting upon their own idiosyncratic views about what the "obvious" or "accepted" rule is--assumptions which are subject to every cognitive bias under the sun.
In any event, you are touching upon another factor I had meant to list with the other two above: independent of the degree of formal consensus behind a given rule, or the certitude/universality of the wording of the rule itself, one can also point to the uniformity with which it has been applied. More than once I have seen wording in an MoS section, or even a guideline that it turns out was added despite no WP:PROPOSAL (or any substantial WP:CONSENSUS) process, but by the time this is caught years later, the community is willing to give it a free pass and basically endorse it despite these usual required checks. Either because it turned out to be the right utilitarian approach, or disentangling it from established best practice is more trouble than it's worth.
All that said, I think the "accepted custom" prong of legitimacy ought to be treated as absolutely the least compelling and reliable factor. Not wholly irrelevant, but definitely to be taken with a grain of salt as arguing for the presumption that a given rule is practical or represents community support, express or tacit. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 04:48, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
It's not feasible to have "a new formal consensus discussion" every time a policy or guideline is reworded.

Most policies and guidelines had no WP:PROPOSAL. I wrote PROPOSAL in 2008. Before then, exactly two (2) of the guidelines and zero of the policies had followed that process (WP:MEDRS and WP:MEDMOS). The original process was "slap a tag on it, and see if someone reverts you". After a while, the process usually became "have a small chat on the talk page, then slap a tag on it, and if someone reverts you, point them at the discussion on the talk page when you revert them back". And quite a lot of WP:Naming conventions, and some of the WP:MOS pages, achieved guideline status through the WP:MOVE button. But at this point, 17 years after the PROPOSAL process was adopted (its adoption being the third time that process was fully followed), and after the massive MOS cleanup project coordinated through Wikipedia:WikiProject Manual of Style (which delisted and rewrote a number of pages), I think we can safely say that anything that is still tagged as a policy or guideline is actually accepted as a policy or guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 4 September 2025 (UTC)
I think there's some conflation of concepts going on here. With regard to "a new formal consensus discussion", I personally do not see that as typically involving a full formal WP:PROPOSAL process, or anything remotely like it, as a per se matter. At least for inline changes to existing PAGs or MOS pages, in the vast, vast majority of cases, much less is called for. PROPOSAL is for creating new guidelines wholecloth, not for iterative additions or amendments to existing policies. Nevertheless, I consider it a bit of a tautology that no change to a PAG (nor any other express community guidance codified in MoS or an info page) which has proven contentious can be argued to have a clear "community consensus" unless a consensus discussion actually took place, at some level and in some way endorsing a particular proposition. I appreciate that things were quite a bit more free-wheeling once upon a time, and respect your role in codifying some of our early standards on formalizing consensus at the PAG level (I did not know you were the original author of PROPOSAL, which is quite the contribution to the project's mechanics), but as you yourself alluded, we've come quite a long way since those seeds were planted, and today we have a much higher burden for formally adopting a rule.
As such, the mere act of being able to point to a rule that just happens to not have been disturbed is never going to be the strongest form of evidence that the community has endorsed that principle (or would, if directly asked). Although I will grant you, the farther back the rule stretches without a formal challenge, or the more central the position of the rule in our most heavily relied-upon policies or processes, the more confident we can be in regarding it as a kind of consensus principle. That said, as to ". . . I think we can safely say that anything that is still tagged as a policy or guideline is actually accepted as a policy or guideline., I'm not sure I'd agree that is likely to be universally true, but let's put that to the side for present purposes. That's still a very different thing from saying "Every bit of verbiage placed within a guideline since it was adopted came about as the result of community consensus." And that's an important distinction when we are talking about the MoS in particular, since MoS changes tend to be for the purpose of ammending or adding to existing sections, rather than creating new ones. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 00:16, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
The elephant in the room is the large number of changes to the MOS. Look at the number of changes to the main MOS page over the last two weeks alone! Hawkeye7 (discuss) 20:44, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
My immediate coarse intuition is, of course, if an editor sees a substantive, questionable change to P&G without explicit consensus, they would be encouraged to yank that material from production at any time?

(If the initial RfC needs my own variation on this theme: I hope other editors are actively motivated to remove any material that can't be assumed to possess a clear prescriptive mandate – i.e. material possibly not reflective of consensus, explicit or otherwise.) Remsense 🌈 论 23:59, 5 September 2025 (UTC)
You should only revert changes that you personally disagree with. It's not exactly that we "encourage" people to revert changes, but if you personally believe that a change is harmful or even probably harmful, then yes, you should probably revert it. If you're only a bit uncertain, it's probably better to take it to the talk page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:22, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
That's what I meant to say—in my mind, one could only discern a change could be against consensus if one directly disagrees with it first. Remsense 🌈 论 02:24, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

I have been reducing my reverts for any editor with a track record of contributions and opting for Talk-first. For many editors reverting is very aggressive and Talk-first often leads to a better outcome. I try to explain reverts for editors who registered, usually "Sorry,...". IP editors with no edit summaries I just revert full stop. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:28, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
Often the very best move—though, in terms of policy, I would very much prefer and prioritize my disputed additions not being live parts of the document, and I think most experienced editors woudl agree with that too at least in theory. Remsense 🌈 论 03:05, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
Precisely. We're talking about two distinct subjects here. On the one hand, the more abstract question of whether an addition to a PAG or style section has community consensus, whether it is subject to being summarily reverted, and how much the benefit or problem caused by that change either militates for its retention or reversion. And then on the other hand, the more idiosyncratic question of how a given editor feels about how to address a problematic change that arguably could or should be reverted. When you layer the two over one another, you get a broad range of responses from different community members, but they are in principle discrete questions; the "What is this change, and can/should it be reverted?" and "Now that I've made that decision in principle, how do I really want to go about it to maximize the chance of the optimal outcome, not just with respect to the a priori issue, but also while being constructive and collaborative, and also while keeping other project priorities in mind.
Now, if we wrap back around to your initial question, and contemplate how much we want policy to encourage reversion in those circumstances, I would say we should at least be making the process relatively painless for them, if the change has proven at all contentious and there was no clear consensus. While WP:BRD is mostly conceptualized in the context of namespace contributions, I would say its even more essential when it comes to the language in guidelines: what is codified and memorialized in those pages should be more conservatively approached and should usually only happen with some degree of consensus discussion. Contributors should be discouraged from being WP:BOLD with PAGS or even the MoS. And if they aren't, we certainly want the standard to be that there is very little noise or drama from and objecting party exercising the R&D part of BRD. But I certainly don't fault anyone who would rather exercise a softer touch. Nobody should feel compelled to actively object if it wouldn't normally be their wont in that situation. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 07:57, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
In short, being prescriptive in principle, the state of a P&G page over time (clearly) has greater stakes than that of any one article, and it seems healthy for whatever quasi-WP:OWN feelings editors may have while working on an article (i suppose, in the sense of "let me cook, watchlist voyeurs") should by contrast be wholly absent when in P&G-space. That sounds super obvious, but whatever. Remsense 🌈 论 08:10, 6 September 2025 (UTC)
I agree with what SnowRise says above that it's important to distinguish between "Is this MOS page really a guideline?" (to which the answer is 'yes') and "Does this specific paragraph in this specific MOS page still have community consensus?" (to which the answer is variable, because there are a few bits that probably don't).

But @Remsense, it is possible to treat the policies and guidelines as too much like holy writ. If editors think they can improve them, whether that means making them clearer, less verbose, more reflective of daily practices, more in line with our values and principles, etc., then editors actually should try to do that, and be encouraged to do that. Bold editing of policies and guidelines is officially permitted by policy, and the fact is that a change made today and reverted tomorrow probably has no, or very little, effect on what editors actually do. (Though if you wait long enough, it can become a problem; I now wish I had reverted this dubious addition in 2012.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 6 September 2025 (UTC)

We often have consensus on the wording of policies and guidelines, and we often don't have consensus on applications (one of which applications being, ignore). That's just the nature of the work, and then we have to work it out, in the moment. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:24, 7 September 2025 (UTC)

I would say that for the most part the MOS should be followed unless there's a compelling reason otherwise; but it can be ignored when a stronger policy-based reason exists. Guidelines in general are not absolute (though they vary in how forcefully they're worded), but in particular even the most forcefully-worded parts of the MOS always lose to WP:NPOV / WP:RS / WP:V when those things come into conflict with it, because those things are core policy and the MOS just governs our, well, style; we're not going to sacrifice NPOV for mere stylistic issues. If there is a consensus on a particular article that we must do something that the MOS forbids in order to preserve NPOV or reflect the sources, then the core policies obviously win - there are very few "you absolutely must do XYZ without exception" from-above policies in Wikipedia, and none of them are part of the MOS. That said, I do think that overriding the MOS on anything of significance would normally be expected to require an argument like that, ie. you need some actual policy-based reason to do so - guidelines are followed unless someone can articulate a policy-based reason otherwise. But once someone has articulated a reasonable policy-based reason why they think other policies are in conflict with the MOS, it's a matter for consensus and discussion on that article, and generally speaking I would expect policies to win out. (Of course, people might disagree over whether there's an actual conflict, but that is something that local consensuses can cover, since it involves how we interpret and apply policies and guidelines in specific cases.) In situations where someone disagrees with following the MOS in a particular article but can't come up with a policy-based reason why (ie. it's basically just disagreement with that part of the MOS), they should probably challenge it directly - the point of the MOS is to give us a consistent style, so you need a better reason to override it than "I just like how this looks better." --Aquillion (talk) 15:58, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
Fun fact: The MOS uses words like "must" and "do not" more than any legal policy. If someone wanted me to show them an example of "you absolutely must do XYZ without exception", the MOS is the first place I'd look.

There is quite a lot about the MOS that cannot be overridden by a content policy. Whether you put the little blue clicky number before or after a sentence's terminal punctuation is not a matter for NPOV/NOR/WP:V. Additionally, if you get it wrong, a bot or a script-wielding editor will soon come along and "fix" it for you. You actually don't have a choice about whether to comply with most of the MOS. It's no good saying "Well, I think there's a compelling reason not to use proper grammar in this sentence, namely that the version approved by English teachers sounds bad to me"; as soon as someone notices the MOS error, MOS:GRAMMAR will be enforced. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:49, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
In general PAGs describe practice. It's a bit messier than that, and there are many internal tensions both within and among our PAGs not necessarily a bad thing IMO but that topic would need an essay unto itself. Even when you get one of those big CENT advertised RfCs that really is trying to change the way we do business the specifics of application will still be worked out in practice.
The first thing to keep in mind here is that the MoS is a guideline, so there is an expectation that it will not be implemented rigidly and that exceptions may apply. Local discussions can and sometimes do determine that an overall consensus should not apply in a specific case. The threshold for so doing is not insignificant, but not as difficult to surmount as when policies are in play. Even where policy is also concerned, PAGs are applied to specific situations in practice by contributors through discussion. If a discussion has been open and advertised for some time and there is insufficient support among the community to implement what you might perceive as the global consensus in a specific circumstance, that indicates there is not in fact consensus despite the PAG wording specifics. As always, an active consensus of editors is required to make changes when an action is controversial.
The above is general, but I'm not convinced this latest bout of MoS fracas is even a good-vehicle for reviewing the level of consensus that individual parts of the MoS may or may not have. My own experience is limited and peripheral, but it seems that much of the disputes centered on interpretation of existing verbiage rather than a desire for exceptions per se. How much is substantial? 70%? 80%? How much weight should sampling from various linguistic corpora carry? What about cases where the term usual is employed instead? All of those are cases where reasonable people can and often do disagree. And RMs, around which much of the acrimony was focused, aren't really local anyway but part of a sitewide process where pages are discussed for a week or more to ascertain how PAGs should apply in a specific circumstance. By no means do these discussions carry the same weight as a widely advertised CENT RfC, but they are broader in scope than most talk page discussion and usually include more points of view and participation from a wider swathe of the community.
There were many assertions mostly from since t-banned editors regarding strength of arguement, but as most are doubtless aware, that is normally merely wikilawyer for the outcome was not what I wanted, please change it to my preferred outcome after all we already know you think your argument was the better one, that's why you made it. Numbers also matter if they didn't supervoting would be the way we decided things closers should not be deciding between reasonable interpretations of and between various PAGs, but to summarize which view has the predominant number of responsible Wikipedians supporting it. If an argument fails to sway participants given reasonable time than maybe it isn't all that strong. So sure SPAs, socks, and yes much as I defend their participation clearly clueless newcomers can be ignored, but when good-faith users with an understanding of PAGs support applying them in one way given a specific circumstance or even not applying them in a specific circumstance the closer can't simply ignore them. I understand this made some people with a particular interest in MoS matters unhappy, discontents of this nature are if anything even more common in deletion discussions, but the project has always been a collaborative effort; we all have to work with people who hold different, sometimes even sharply different views.
To address one more point, guideline really is the best classification for the MoS because as a practical matter it is not applied rigidly or uniformly across the project much to the irritation of some I know, local consensus does have a stronger sway over outcomes and there's nothing really wrong with that.
By way of disclosure though I doubt I'm really unrecognized I never really liked the need for an MoS and have long been a WP:STYLEVAR proponent. I also admit that while I don't think there's any good evidence for Wikipedia's (de)capitalization choices having any non-trivial effect on the outside world, I would not lose the slightest amount of sleep over them even if they did. 184.152.65.118 (talk) 23:11, 21 September 2025 (UTC)

Recently deceased crime suspects

BLUF: What should be done when the perpetrator of a crime is killed and will never face trial?

I'm curious to know if there is established precedent on this, or if we maybe need a clearer policy. This has come to bear in a few recent cases like Annunciation Catholic Church shooting and Grand Blanc Township church attack, etc, where the suspect is killed or kills themself. Once the suspect is identified, there is a rush to add their name to the article, which can be seen to violate WP:BLPCRIME as it also applies to recently deceased persons. We do not generally name perpetrators if they have not been found guilty, so we find ourselves in a dilemma where the suspect will never be found guilty in a court of law.

And so my question is: when do you add the name of a dead suspect to an article? First news report? Preponderance of news reports? Once a final investigation has been released? Once the suspect is no longer recently deceased? Once consensus is reached at each individual article that the person has appropriate notoriety because of the news coverage? Something else?

And my second, tangential, question is: should this be spelled out more completely somewhere? ~Darth Stabro^{Talk • Contribs} 19:24, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

I think this needs to be decided on a case-by-case basis by consensus, rather than be spelt out more completely. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:37, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

There is a major difference between a perpetrator and a suspect; the Innocence Project has a long list of cases where not only were suspect and perpetrator not the same, but convict and perpetrator were not the same. Similarly, there have been cases where a suspect was shot but the perpetrator turned out to be somebody else. Confusing these terms violates NPOV. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 20:02, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

We do not generally name perpetrators if they have not been found guilty I think that's just incorrect. We name deceased perpetrators if they have been described as such in reliable sources. Jahaza (talk) 20:22, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

Indeed. What matters is that we do not name somebody who has not been named in reliable sources and do not imply they were convicted unless they were. Describing a person as the "alleged", "suspected", "apparent" or "believed" perpetrator (or similar wording) is one way of doing this. Also things like describing someone as having carried out a "killing" rather than a "murder" is relevant in many cases (even if it is incontrovertible that X was the person who killed Y there are many reasons why they might not have been tried for and/or convicted of murder had they lived). In all cases though, the individual circumstances and what reliable sources say matter so there cannot be a one-size-fits-all policy. Thryduulf (talk) 20:57, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

One should keep in mind that BLP not only concerns the individual but also their family and friends. We want to be sure a named individual, even if killed at the crime, is properly investigated and named before adding it to prevent doxxing and other outings involving their close associates. Masem (t) 20:30, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

I think that it's easier to figure out the right answer if we set aside most of our "rules" and think about this from the POV of common sense. Think about when you would not want to name a perpetrator: If you didn't have good sources. If there was some reasonable doubt about the facts. If it's a relatively minor crime (someone ran a red light, and hit Chris Celebrity's car). If there's an indication that it wasn't really an intentional crime (someone ran a red light because they unexpectedly had a stroke, and hit Chris Celebrity's car). If the crime is being used as an example, so the broader details aren't relevant ("Sometimes, when drivers run red lights, they unintentionally die"). In cases like these, don't name the perp. In cases the opposite of these, then you should name the perp. And in between, you should talk to other editors about it, and make a decision as a group. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:29, 29 September 2025 (UTC)

FWIW, a few of us had a similar discussion not that long ago at WT:BLP/Archive 62 § BLPCRIME, BLPCRIMINAL, and the recently dead who are alleged perpetrators. Even if Phil's response is the consensus, given that this is coming up regularly, I think it would be good to acknowledge in the policy that this question sometimes arises and should be decided on a case-by-case basis. FactOrOpinion (talk) 02:25, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

"At each article, editors should decide by consensus whether to include the names of alleged perpetrators, victims, or other affected people"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:45, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

I think that works, though I might add something like "including the name(s) of any recently dead person(s) involved." Perhaps there should also be a brief mention of some elements that might affect the consensus, such as how recently the crime (and possible death) occurred, how widespread the names are in reporting about it (though it's still essential to distinguish between "person of interest" and "alleged perpetrator") FactOrOpinion (talk) 00:04, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

There was a recent discussion about rewriting/modifying BLPCRIME, see Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons #Let's put this to rest.

The RfC: Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons#RFC: Amount of coverage in reliable primary news sources is still open. Some1 (talk) 02:51, 1 October 2025 (UTC)

FOO, the more we write, the more we have to wonder whether there's consensus for everything we're writing. I suggest starting small. "Folks, consensus is still a policy" is a pretty minimal thing to add. "Here are the factors I want to explicitly state that the consensus should prioritize" is a bigger lift. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:17, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

That makes sense. FactOrOpinion (talk) 03:50, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

User:Larry Sanger/Nine Theses

Discussion at talk. See also WP:Village pump (miscellaneous)#User:Larry Sanger/Nine Theses 122.57.226.92 (talk) 10:46, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

RFC: Alphabetical listing of all Olympians

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There was a clear consensus here that an alphabetical listing of all Olympic competitors does not meet the criteria for inclusion for a list and was contrary to the idea that Wikipedia isn't a directory. —Matrix _{ping me}^{when u reply} (t? - c) 16:38, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

According to the Olympstats blog, one possible estimate for the total number of people to have participated in the Olympics as of 2015 was 128,420, though as it notes other estimates could be created. It has been proposed to create a complete alphabetical listing of all participants of the Olympics, spread across a number of articles. An example of one of these lists can be seen here. FOARP (talk) 11:16, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Previous discussions

Discussion on the Olympics project.
AFD discussion (nb. this RFC was recommended in the close here).

Survey

Do you:

Oppose creation of these articles
Support creation of these articles

Responses

Oppose - The possible number of entrants makes this essentially a phonebook, something which Wikipedia is clearly WP:NOT. It would not be useful for navigation because of its length - a figure that is not even fixed but grows by thousands with each edition of the summer and winter games. FOARP (talk) 11:16, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose - It seems like the only logical choice is to oppose this RfC as written because the articles already exist, and any duplicates would have to be deleted under WP:CSD A10. This says "this RFC was recommended in the close here". Where was this RfC recommended in the admin's close? The only time an RfC was mentioned by the closing admin was as as an aside "...and I believe the intersection of lists of sportspeople with NOTDB is ripe for a community-wide RfC". Creating an RfC focused on one specific list to exist or not, as this is, feels like circumventing the AfD process just one day after an AfD on this list was closed.
I wouldn't oppose a broader RfC on "the intersection of lists of sportspeople with NOTDB", but it can't be phrased in this way about one specific list that both you and I were WP:INVOLVED in the AfD for. (also, why wouldn't you use the first page as an example of the list contents?) --Habst (talk) 12:07, 17 September 2025 (UTC), added !vote --Habst (talk) 15:14, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
So that this isn't just an exact re-hashing of the AfD closed one day ago, I proposed adding additional options:

Oppose lists:
Oppose having any list of Olympians

Oppose specifically an alphabetic list, open to others

Support having a list in some form:
Support keeping existing Olympic list (alphabetic)

Support a list in another format (e.g. by sport)

Support a list, neutral on format

Neutral

At least one editor then !voted on one of these new options. However, it was reverted in ~~Special:Diff/1311887797~~ Special:Diff/1311888941 and a message was posted on my talk page about it. If other RfC participants agree that more nuanced choices would be helpful so that this isn't narrowly re-hashing the AfD, I think they should be added to #Survey above. --Habst (talk) 13:55, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
@Habst the diff of the reversion is actually Special:Diff/1311888941. I think the additional nuance is useful and won't overwhelm the discussion - indeed I think it's likely to aid the finding of a consensus and avoid the need for more future discussions. Thryduulf (talk) 14:26, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Thanks, looks like I copied the wrong diff ID. Fixed. --Habst (talk) 14:31, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose A full alphabet listing of Olympians is not a natural sorting order for them, so it doesn't make sense to make such a list. (Olympians by country or by sport are far more natural). This is also where categorization is already set up to do that. Masem (t) 12:11, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Neutral. At AfD I said that these clearly meet NLIST, and they do. But whether they are worth having around is a separate question, hence why this RfC is a good idea. I think arguments on both sides are sensible, so I land at a neutral or weak support. These lists technically fall within policy, but I'm not fully convinced that they're useful to readers. Toadspike [Talk] 12:59, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Support a list of all Olympic competitors is very clearly useful and satisfies NLIST as they are discussed as a group and the inclusion criteria is not indiscriminate. Such a list would be impossible to navigate for size reasons though, so it needs to be split and alphabetic is self-evidently one logical method of doing so. Wikipedia is not paper so we don't need to worry about the number of articles, and the existence of these listings does not preclude the existence of other splits (e.g. by games or by nationality). Thryduulf (talk) 13:24, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
To clarify now additional nuance has been requested above, I support the existence of lists organised alphabetically, by nationality, by games and by sport. I'm presently neutral on other lists. Thryduulf (talk) 13:27, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
The maintenance burden for these lists would be pretty high. Every Olympics, someone would have to go add them all in alphabetical order, interspersed. Perhaps grouping by Summer/Winter Olympics Of Year XXXX would make more sense, instead of a massive alphabetical list? –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:00, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
(It's for things like this that I wish we could do Wikibase-generated listings in mainspace...) Perryprog (talk) 15:50, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
As Perryprog alludes to, there are so many different ways to organize the data and the data is constantly being updated, so a database sorting/filtering interface is more suitable than creating snapshot lists of all possible organization methods. Even if the snapshot process were automated, the length of the lists makes them unwieldy for convenient use. I think better search tools (either based on Wikipedia or Wikidata) would be a more extensible, manageable solution. isaacl (talk) 16:06, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
In my AfD closure I recommended that the community discuss the intersection of lists of sportspeople and WP:NOTDATABASE, or possibly the interpretation of NOTDB as it applies to large groups with well-defined inclusion criteria more broadly. There is a clear divide in the community as to the interpretation of NOTDB in this context. I didn't intend to recommend an RfC about this list specifically. I cannot preclude one, of course, and as I closed the discussion, and am genuinely undecided, I won't be commenting on the merits. Vanamonde93 (talk) 16:21, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose creating database-like lists in the mainspace. Sapphaline (talk) 17:15, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose As User:FOARP said this is essentially a phonebook, not something worth listing. Categorisation based on other parameters is fine, which, I'm guessing, already exists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Kingsacrificer (talk • contribs) 18:35, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose Also agree with User:FOARP that this is basically a phonebook given the sheer length. It's not useful for navigation particularly: who knows only the first letter of an olympians name, and nothing else, and needs to find them? What about "List of olympians in snowboarding" or topic-based lists? Those might be more useful. Mrfoogles (talk) 01:10, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose This list is fundamentally a bad idea for several reasons. WP:NOTEVERYTHING shows an existing consensus that databases and phone lists are not appopriate on Wikipedia. Secondly, discussion at AfD revealed that the collation was manuallyy sourced and created from wikidata. But if that is so, then we already have the collection in wikidata. This is just bad information management, to create two copies of the data that require manual intervention to prevent them falling out of step with each other. And thirdly, that workload is excessive and the reason that wikipedia lists, in general, are not useful if they claim to be exhaustive: because they are not. They rely on diligent and continual editor resource, that they cannot ever achieve. As FOARP points out, the enormous size of this list, and the speed at which it accrues new entries will guaranty that the list will be incomplete, and bad data is worse than no data. Fourthly, in this format, the data is unusable. If you know the name of someone you want, search is faster, as is querying wikidata. If you don't, then this list is not a suitable taxonomy. Fifthly, we already have the means for creating taxonomies, and those taxonomies already exist in the form of existing categories. So no, we shouldn't do this. We should use the existing wikidata and categories, and if anyone is interested in some kind of searchable list - dynamically generate it from wikidata. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 07:33, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose the creation of these lists. This information would be better sorted by year, nationality, and discipline rather than alphabetically, and the articles in Category:Nations at the Summer Olympics by year and Category:Nations at the Winter Olympics by year already include every Olympian that represented the nation at the Games in question. While making lists that contain the same information ~~are~~ is acceptable, and I do think these lists would pass WP:INDISCRIMINATE and WP:PHONEBOOK, it feels like the existing articles are a better way to organize the information. md m.b la 16:47, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
- Actually, those categories do not contain every Olympian. There is no other place (whether categories, wikidata, or even other websites) for anyone to find a complete listing of Olympians. BeanieFan11 (talk) 16:50, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
  Even if it did, a relevant editing guideline on this is Wikipedia:Categories, lists, and navigation templates#Overlapping categories, lists and navigation templates are not considered duplicative. --Habst (talk) Habst (talk) 16:59, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
  
  To clarify, I support having this information, I just think there is probably some better way of organizing the data that would make it more accessible to readers than an arbitrary number of alphabetized lists. md m.b la 17:18, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose These articles are too long and have too little information to be useful. They also clearly violate the spirit and probably the letter of the law that Wikipedia is not to be a directory. Some have argued that there is sourcing about Olympic competitors as a group. This sourcing is on the general trends of who has been Olympic competitors, but with an unclear number somewhere around 150,000 or 160,000, it is not possible to create a comprehensive list and sources do not do this, just cherry picking some sub-group, or what they find interesting or excited cases. We maybe could have an article Olympic competitors or the like that says things about Olympic competitors as a group, maybe subdivided in some ways, but sourcing does not justify creating a directory of every single Olympic competitor whose name we know, especially one that really does not tell us much about the individuals. I do not think creating such a massive directory of Olympic competitors is within the listed things Wikipedia is, and I do not think there are sufficient reliable sources to support such a directory in Wikipedia.John Pack Lambert (talk) 21:37, 18 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose creating these types of lists in mainspace, which are effectively databases. Considering that the cited AfD had many participants calling for a RFC on this subject, I see no issue with how this was brought up here, and I have no opposition to possibly having lists in a different format, with a very careful curation process, but this isn't it. Lists that exist now can be moved to draftspace or deleted. Let'srun (talk) 16:11, 21 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose. This is what category pages are for. ~Anachronist (talk) 01:49, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
- There's no categories listing everyone on these lists. BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:12, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
  But categories could be created with that in mind, perhaps by having one for each games or something similar. Let'srun (talk) 19:56, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
  Except that the categories will be missing those without articles, and currently those categories do not exist. It makes no sense to delete quality lists we have on the basis that "well, we could create a category that could have some of the entries on the list, though we almost certainly won't". BeanieFan11 (talk) 20:00, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
  Redirects are allowed to be in categories. Let'srun (talk) 17:56, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
  With great respect intended, you !voted against keeping such a redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 August 11#Ajit Singh (race walker). I think it's great to propose other solutions like this, but I don't think it's fair to then also be against your own proposed solution without noting that. --Habst (talk) 18:03, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
Soft Support I think I prefer Olympians by sport as more manageable lists, but I do think a list of Olympians clearly meet NLIST (per Toadspike and Thryduulf). --Enos733 (talk) 02:50, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Opposed - per WP:NOTDIRECTORY. I could certainly see a list of medalists (by year and sport), and perhaps this could be expanded to include those who were in serious contention for a medal (as indicated by sources)… but a list of everyone who participated in an Olympics is just too much. The simple fact is that many participants have no shot at winning a medal, and are there simply so their country can claim they participated. These are not noteworthy. Blueboar (talk) 11:57, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
I oppose creating such a list.—S Marshall T/C 13:36, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Why? Thryduulf (talk) 15:40, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Because these are biographies, and policy says I'm to be very firm about insisting on the most reliable sources for them. Unfortunately we don't have impeccable sources. What we have is online databases compiled by, err, who, exactly? Making a completionist list of everyone who's ever competed in the Olympics isn't a good move. If you asked me, "Shall we make a list of everyone who's ever won an Olympic medal?" then I would not object because I think the content would be so much easier to verify.—S Marshall T/C 17:24, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose per above. >^CreativeLibrary460 /^{access the library} ^revision\ 05:53, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Support a list of Olympians by country. It's subcategory being the 'Sports' they participated in.
Oppose a list encompassing all Olympians of all the countries. Hardly anyone would require such marathon of an extensive list, thus it would barely add any value to Wikipedia.
Cdr. Erwin Smith (talk) 12:13, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
I support having lots of Category:Olympics-related lists, including a variety of Category:Lists of Olympic competitors. I'm not sure about an enormous list of every single athlete's name, though. I'd rather have lists by year, by country, by sport, by number of medals, by number of games competed in, etc. It's not clear to me what the benefit of a huge list is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:20, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

Oppose. Such lists would be almost paradigmatic examples of what is advised against in WP:NOTDIR. While I wouldn't say that the information is completely WP:INDISCRIMINATE, the lists would have close to zero value for the typical reader, relative to huge editorial burdens in maintenance for verifiability, presentation, and vandalism. Yes, we can probably expect, from the mere existence of this discussion, that there is a cohort of editors willing to generate and organize the initial versions of these pages, but once created, the community as a whole accrues a certain degree of obligation to maintain accurate and up-to-date content therein. This compared against a utility for such an exhaustive list that I can only imagine would ever be leveraged in exceedingly rare use cases by athletics researchers and the highest levels of enthusiasts--groups which have other resources at their disposal. There have been some strong WP:NOTPAPER arguments made above, but at the end of the day, this kind of extensive database is just not really consistent with the high-level review purposes of a general encyclopedia, imo. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 06:38, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose, for the same reasons described in the initial discussion and the AfD, and per the many arguments above. Such a comprehensive list serves no useful purpose to readers, and indeed the original purpose of the extant lists was actually to shoehorn in biographical info from deleted non-notable multi-Olympians. This RfC is a reasonable followup to the AfD and of course should be interpreted as applying to existing lists. JoelleJay (talk) 15:33, 30 September 2025 (UTC)
Oppose creating a laundry list of all Olympic athletes ordered alphabetically, however split up: against WP:NOTDIRECTORY; pushing the boundaries of WP:INDISCRIMINATE; terrific maintenance burden; and, in my opinion, not especially useful for the majority of readers, who, if they are looking for a particular Olympian, are probably best off using search. Also, for clarity, I oppose the current lists of this ilk, which I think should be deleted. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:44, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Discussion

What is it we're looking to do here? The framing is odd -- It has been proposed to create, and a focus on supporting/opposing creation as though the articles don't already exist. It just went through AfD, which ended in no consensus, and an RfC on retroactive opinions on creation (?) isn't a substitute for that process. Opposition to creation doesn't necessarily mean support for deletion (and vice versa), and the choice here doesn't include deletion. If you're trying to establish a precedent about the scope of a list, this also doesn't do that, because it's too focused on a specific example. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:46, 17 September 2025 (UTC)
Thank you. To be honest, I'm feeling this RfC is a little bit of a hostile environment for me because, as it's written, I don't see how this isn't circumventing an AfD that received a sufficient amount of participation and was closed yesterday, started by an editor who I greatly respect but was heavily involved in that AfD (I was also involved as the list creator). It claims it was created at the behest of an admin, but then the admin came here and commented that wasn't what they said. (And if that's going to be the case, shouldn't all the AfD and WikiProject Olympics thread commenters be pinged...?) I desperately want to achieve consensus on having a list of Olympians, including making concessions if needed, but I want to do it the right way.

From a bigger picture it seems this list is being used as a 'proxy battle' among inclusionists and deletionists w.r.t. WP:NSPORTS2022 and its recent implementation this year, resulting in hundreds of Olympian articles being deleted and no suitable place to put that lost information. As someone who genuinely tries to look at each case on its merits, I don't know how to rectify that.

One of the biggest concerns I heard was editors saying they would prefer if lists were created by sport rather than alphabetically. I also thought that originally, but after actually compiling it I realized that anything other than an alphabetic list is guaranteed to create duplicate rows (e.g. for multi-sport athletes who would be listed in more than one of these articles) and thus introduce unforeseen complexities.

Nonetheless I did some of the legwork on this over the last few days to determine what that would look like. The largest Olympic list segment currently is 2,136 rows, a limit that was essentially decided by the community as others have split the original segments that were longer. Using that limit of about 2,100 rows per article, we would need more than one article for each sport, even if broken up further by gender. My best idea after that is to split by year and gender, so here's what that would look like in a ToC table with that approximate limit: Special:Diff/1311981102

This would result in duplicates both across sports and across years, but is the only way I can think of to split by sport. I'm not opposed to creating all those pages, just struggling to see how that would be better or more maintainable than the current list. --Habst (talk) 01:01, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for validating my confusion. The question seems to be "Should we create these articles?" but then the already-existing articles are linked to. The answer would then logically be "No, they already exist." 207.11.240.2 (talk) 12:29, 19 September 2025 (UTC)

The AFD close specifically included the line "I believe the intersection of lists of sportspeople with NOTDB is ripe for a community-wide RfC." As such, I don't think holding such an RfC could be seen as an end-run around the AFD result. Also, procedurally, I don't think the "retroactive" argument is strong when the mainspacing of these lists is comparatively recent. SnowFire (talk) 15:25, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
But this... isn't an RfC about the intersection of lists of sportspeople with NOTDB. It's about whether we should create these concrete lists that happen to already exist. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 15:28, 19 September 2025 (UTC)
It's about whether the community supports the creation of these lists, past, present, or future. This is the discussion that should have happened in the first place. It needed to be about something concrete because any other question is far too open-ended.

That'll give us a clear result: if it's against then the issues with these articles need to be addressed, if it's support then sure: "script goes brrrt!". FOARP (talk) 08:56, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
It plainly isn't, which is why I created the list but agree with the community in opposing the RfC question. The RfC doesn't say or imply anything about past, present, or future. The closing administrator you cited in #Previous discussions even chimed in above to say this isn't what they said to do.

The articles were also not created with a script, by the way; scripts were sometimes used for formatting but the list contents were compiled via a manual process. --Habst (talk) 10:46, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't think there's any mystery what the people !voting above are saying about these articles. I urge you to put it to them directly if you think otherwise, rather than try to use this as a pre-emptive rationale for ignoring the result once it arrives. FOARP (talk) 12:44, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
You're right that it's not a mystery; the RfC is very clear that it's about creating new articles and not about keeping or deleting existing ones. The only logical decision is to !vote oppose, which I did in part because any new articles would have to be deleted under CSD A10. --Habst (talk) 13:24, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Again, I urge you not to try to set up a pre-emptive rationale for ignoring the result if it's not the one you'd prefer. The discussion is ongoing, if you really think people don't know what they are !voting for, then you should put that to the people !voting. FOARP (talk) 13:34, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
I promise you I am not setting up any rationale, I am just reading the RfC as written. I do think editors know what they are voting for because it's plainly stated. That's why I !voted to agree with the consensus and most other !voters. --Habst (talk) 13:46, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
As one voter voting oppose, I can quite clearly assert for myself that FOARP is spot on here as far as how I interpreted this RFC, and I would encourage you to take the feedback from any result seriously rather than casting aspirations or doubt on this process. Let'srun (talk) 20:38, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
I think there is some misunderstanding here. I always have aspirations to achieve consensus; I agree with the process and the !voters' rationale for voting on this RfC. That's why I !voted similarly to you above. That's of course not incongruous with wanting to keep any existing list; the process for deciding that is generally AfD. The closing administrator, who commented above, was cited incorrectly in #Previous discussions. --Habst (talk) 20:42, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
Wikipedia is WP:NOTBUR. It is quite clear that this is about having these pages in mainspace at all, not just about future creations (otherwise this would be a pointless RFC, and besides that there isn't a grandfather clause in our P&G's). We disagree on this topic, and that's okay. Just please accept the consensus and take the feedback in stride, no matter what happens. Let'srun (talk) 20:45, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
I do agree with de-bureaucratizing Wikipedia. It's very clear from the RfC that this isn't about keeping any particular pages in mainspace, but whether or not we "oppose creation of these articles" or "support creation of these articles". That's why I !voted as I did. I don't even agree that's a pointless RfC, though the outcome is somewhat predictable. Opposing creation but not supporting deletion isn't the same thing as a grandfather clause; that's the entire reason why we have the "no consensus" close as an option.

I don't even see where our disagreement is on this topic? I have always accepted community consensus just as you have, have made dozens of changes to my editing behavior and the articles on account of community feedback, and I will do the same on the list of Olympic competitors. --Habst (talk) 20:53, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
You wish to have alphabetical based lists. I oppose having alphabetical based lists. Let'srun (talk) 21:09, 22 September 2025 (UTC)

I also oppose creating alphabetical lists of Olympians. I guess the difference is, now that we're here, whether we should delete existing lists -- that question wasn't asked in the RfC. --Habst (talk) 22:12, 22 September 2025 (UTC)
This RFC isn't about deletion because this isn't AFD. This is about whether these lists specifically should have been created in mainspace, and if the community is opposed to that then they either need to get out of mainspace (e.g., back to draftspace, though I guess transwikiing is also an option) or change to be acceptable to the community.

Of course if the community supports them having been created then they stay as they are.

Can I also point out that your attempt to pre-emptively dismiss the outcome of this RFC doesn't pass even a casual reading of what the people !voting above actually say? The !voters, support and oppose, are taking this as a discussion on the articles that presently exist in mainspace, which is the natural interpretation since there is a link to them (and discussions about them). FOARP (talk) 07:38, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
FOARP, I am affirming the outcome, not dismissing it as I would never dismiss any community consensus. As you yourself said, this AfD "isn't about" draftification or transwikifying -- it's about whether or not to create an alphabetic list of Olympians, which I happen to think, from where we are now, that it shouldn't be and !voted accordingly. Simultaneously, I don't think they should be draftified or transwikified. That rationale and thought process broadly agrees with the other editors above; even if you interpret it to be about the existing articles which in a very literal sense it isn't, the above editors aren't arguing in terms of draftification or transwikifying.

I think there is some misunderstanding because in #Previous discussions, a specific administrator was cited as the reason for creating this RfC, but then that administrator commented above that wasn't what they said. --Habst (talk) 11:11, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
This isn't an AFD. Your response is a pre-emptive WP:IDHT and I advise you strongly against it. FOARP (talk) 12:19, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
@FOARP, I'm speaking to you with an open mind, please tell me where I have erred. The question in the RfC was whether or not an alphabetic list of Olympians should be created. I don't think it should be created, so I !voted oppose. This isn't incongruous with not wanting the lists to be draftified or transwikified.

So that I can hear it or get the point very clearly, can you please state your disagreement in clear terms? Do you think I should have !voted support, even though I don't agree with the RfC statement? --Habst (talk) 12:32, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Simply so you cannot later claim that this was not explained to you: This is about the creation of the articles presently in mainspace, not theoretical future articles. FOARP (talk) 13:12, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
I will accept that and am still against their creation (to be clear, now I'm speaking about the existing articles, not any hypothetical future ones). I'm also against transwikifying or draftification of the existing articles. How is that IDHT, and what is our disagreement here then? --Habst (talk) 14:01, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
The disagreement here is that you appear to think that the outcome of this discussion will have no impact on the articles presently in mainspace. Read the !votes and see what they say about these articles.

I'm done here. FOARP (talk) 14:18, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't think the outcome will have no impact on the articles in mainspace; the outcome will decide whether or not to create an alphabetic list of Olympians.

You can disagree with that but still be against deletion, draftification, or transwikifying, which is why I don't think this discussion will result in those three outcomes but others are on the table. I am genuinely in good faith trying to come to a shared understanding here; please explain how this is IDHT. --Habst (talk) 14:30, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

I think FOARP believes that (almost?) everyone opposing the creation of these lists is inherently simultaneously also advocating for the deletion of those that currently exist and is not understanding why anyone could or would, in good faith, think otherwise.

You (Habst) obviously do think otherwise, and I have no reason to believe you are contributing here in anything other than good faith.
I've just read in detail some of the comments from those opposing, and while some are clearly in support of deleting the articles that currently exist, most do not express a clear opinion on that either way so there is no way that I could support any deletions of any content based on this discussion alone. Thryduulf (talk) 14:49, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
I see, thank you. The confusing part for me is that FOARP said above, "This RFC isn't about deletion because this isn't AFD". I honestly don't want to get bogged down in semantic debates, but I don't see how one can square that with a closing action of deletion, draftification, or transwikifying.

I do think that (because nobody WP:OWNs an RfC) the community can decide on a result even if it's against the RfC creator's original intentions or wishes, but I just don't see how that can happen here. --Habst (talk) 14:54, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Note that WP:OWN goes both ways here. Your failure to get the point here is growing tiresome. Let'srun (talk) 20:21, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
What point is Habst failing to get? Thryduulf (talk) 20:39, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
He does not control either his lists or this RFC. Let'srun (talk) 21:53, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
I've been saying that from the very beginning, including pointing out that the articles don't have any owner and thus opposition based on the personality or perceived motives of any one editor isn't justified. The majority of recent edits to the lists have been from other editors, and more than 30 of the list pages were created by someone other than me. For the pages I did create, let me say here I'll dual license the contents under CC0/the public domain because I will always encourage contributions from other editors and prefer them over my own. --Habst (talk) 22:17, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

I don't see any evidence of Habst attempting to own either the articles or this RFC. Thryduulf (talk) 23:43, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
@Thryduulf: Who in this discussion do you think supports keeping the existing lists but is opposed to creating new lists (besides Habst)? As I noted earlier, there is no grandfather clause here. Let'srun (talk) 20:23, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Opposes deletion: All those supporting the proposal

Unclear: Masem, Novem Linguae, Isaacl, Sapphaline, mdm.bla, Anachronist, Blueboar, CreateiveLibrary460, Cdr. Erwin Smith

Supports deletion and/or draftification: Mrfoogles (probably), Sirfirboy, John Pack Lambert, Let'srun, S Marshall (probably)

Note that the last category does not distinguish between those who oppose draftification and those who do not. Nobody in the unclear category has made any comment regarding draftification. Several commenters explicitly support lists in other formats and/or more focused (e.g. just medallists) and they would presumably not oppose editing the current lists so they fit that scope but nobody has explicitly commented either way regarding this other than Habst (who opposes). Thryduulf (talk) 20:37, 23 September 2025 (UTC)
Regardless of your position, I think leaving the nom completely out of this analysis shows that it is quite flawed. Feel free to ping the "unclear" voters, but I think they all are against any such articles being in mainspace. Let'srun (talk) 18:01, 27 September 2025 (UTC)
I don't intend to ping editors who have clearly responded to the question asked of them to complain that they haven't answered a different question to someone else's satisfaction. I think stating that they are against any such articles being in mainspace is projecting your own preferences onto others. Thryduulf (talk) 19:50, 27 September 2025 (UTC)

"Who in this discussion do you think supports keeping..." -- You don't have to support keeping a list to be not in favor of deletion. That's what no consensus can mean -- if people oppose deletion but don't support creation, which happpened to be the closing decision at the AfD closed one day before this RfC was started. That's not the same as a grandfather clause, which I also am against on Wikipedia. --Habst (talk) 20:45, 23 September 2025 (UTC)

The survey options didn't put a timeframe on when the articles in question were created. It doesn't make sense that the community would consider all of the articles listed at Template:List of Olympic competitors intro to be exempt from the general guidance it is creating. isaacl (talk) 17:16, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Agree. There's a lot of highly motivated reasoning going on here. This is about the pages an example of which is literally linked in the RFC intro, and which the question was clearly referring to. There is only one logical way to interpret the question. Saying "no, they were talking about theoretical pages that might be created in the future, not the pages that were linked to in the question" is just sophistry, sorry.

Also the answers were very clearly about the pages that had already been created. When @Anachronist said "This is what category pages are for" they clearly didn't mean that they were OK with the pages that had already been created listing every one of the 150,000 Olympians alphabetically and which are not category pages. When @Sapphaline said "Oppose creating database-like lists in the mainspace" they clearly meant the database-like lists that Habst created. When @Mdm.Bla said "Oppose the creation of these lists." they meant these lists. When @Blueboar said "a list of everyone who participated in an Olympics is just too much" they mean they opposed the lists of literally everyone who ever competed at the Olympics that Habst created. When @CreativeLibrary460 said "Oppose per above" underneath a load of other !votes opposing the creation of these articles, they weren't saying anything unclear at all. Similarly when @Cdr. Erwin Smith said "Oppose a list encompassing all Olympians of all the countries.", that clearly applies to the listing of all Olympians of all countries that now exists. FOARP (talk) 22:37, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. To clarify, I oppose creation of a page as proposed, and simple deduction would mean that I also would support deletion of such a page. Why someone wants to interpret what I wrote as something I didn't write is beyond my comprehension. As I said, that's what category pages are for. The objection that category pages don't list nonexistent articles is a red herring; that's what redirects are for. ~Anachronist (who / me) (talk) 23:19, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Just because someone does opposes creation does not necessarily imply that they also support deletion, especially when options other than deletion (such as draftification and converting to a category) have been explicitly brought up in the discussion. Many participants have also explicitly supported lists in other formats (e.g. by sport) and/or subsets (e.g. only medal winners) and especially with the latter it's highly plausible that at least some of those editors would support editing the existing lists to convert them to that form/scope - possibly directly in mainspace, possibly in draftspace. It is perfectly reasonable for you to oppose everything that isn't straight deletion, it is not reasonable to accuse other editors of "highly motivated reasoning" or of (deliberate) misinterpretation of comments because you didn't explicitly answer a question that was not explicitly asked. Thryduulf (talk) 23:46, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

When @Sapphaline said "Oppose creating database-like lists in the mainspace" they clearly meant the database-like lists that Habst created - yes, thank you for clarifying my words. Sapphaline (talk) 09:22, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

What happened to all the people at the AfD who !voted keep? Literally none of them have voted support here for some reason. I also note that JoelleJay was potentially canvassed. Her vote above is her only edit since she received FOARP's message. ~WikiOriginal-9~ (talk) 12:07, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Addition of abusefilter-modify-restricted right to EFMs

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Addition of abusefilter-modify-restricted right to EFMs. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 09:18, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography § Rewrite Subsequent Use last paragraph

You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography § Rewrite Subsequent Use last paragraph. Kingsacrificer (talk) 19:27, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Revival of Wikipedia:WikiProject Policies and Guidelines

The Wikiproject's current goal is to simplify our PAGs, without any attempts to change the meaning. Come join us to help newcomers and experienced editors alike understand PAGs better. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 08:31, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Copyrights: links to non-open access articles

I'm not sure if I posted at the right place, but anyways:

If I saved an academic research paper via institutional account, one that's otherwise unavailable on the internet,

uploaded the PDF to Internet Archive, then linked to it in an WP article's references, would that be copyright infringement and a really terrible/stupid/bad thing for me to do?

iris 6:54p (+8), edited 6:58p 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 10:58, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

That would very likely be an infringement, unless the article had a license that permitted reproduction. And so should not be put on archive.org, and not linked from Wikipedia. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:56, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Thank you, it's good to have a confirmation on my idea's terribleness. :) 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 12:17, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

But to add, you absolutely can still cite that as long as you yourself can view and confirm the article contents and know that even with PAYWALL issues, a reader should be able to as well, so do not back away from using those. Like, most papers have DOI information which helps to locate the source via the journal or publisher itself, so that should be in the reference. Also keep in mind that we have the Wikimedia Library Card that helps anyone with an WP account in standing to access numerous academic journal libraries. Masem (t) 12:47, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Yep. I came up with that idea when thinking about the accessibility of citations, because I've always wanted to verify / read in detail many of the MEDRS before my extended confirmation. Remembering that feeling, I try to make it easier for other readers to verify an article (especially for empirical sciences) whenever I'm reading the original text through the Library. I now settled on supplementing non-open citations with quotes and/or other open-access papers.

I think the Library is a truly marvelous ~~invention~~ thing to have in this world, especially for individuals / populations unable to access higher education. I always had a passionate love / appreciation of the WP/WM, for gifting me free access to high quality sources and papers I would otherwise never even dream of.

Cheers :) posted 15:07, edited 15:12 UTC 海盐沙冰 _{/ aka irisChronomia / Talk} 15:12, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Where might I find more info about this card? Rockfang (talk) 16:21, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Wikipedia Library Masem (t) 16:23, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Thank you. Rockfang (talk) 16:34, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Content merged and later removed

Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 September 19#Big gene involves a proposal to delete a redirect: Big gene had content that was merged into Gene, and it's still visible in the merger diff (which links big gene, so it's properly attributed), but at some point since then the content's apparently been deleted. Do we have to keep the merged page's history in some manner, because the content is still visible in the page history, or can we dispense with it, because it's not in the current version? I'm leaning toward the first option, but I'm uncertain. Nyttend (talk) 09:01, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

If there's consensus at RfD that a redirect should be deleted, I don't think it's appropriate to keep it in mainspace solely to preserve attribution. I would feel that way even if the merged content were still live somewhere. Maybe a move (while suppressing redirect creation) to a subpage of the merge target's article talk page? In this example, it'd be Big gene → Talk:Gene/Big gene. Too crazy?

Alternatively, our attribution requirements can be met with a list of authors in an article edit summary, with the summary linking to a longer list kept at the talk page (or subpage), if necessary. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 15:36, 24 September 2025 (UTC)

Both of those ideas were in my mind. But again: do we need to keep something because of the merger, although the merged content is now gone? Nyttend (talk) 07:51, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

I for one would say so, yes. It's visible in a page history somewhere. Graham87 (talk) 09:39, 25 September 2025 (UTC)

Legally I believe so. Otherwise it becomes a copyright violation. PARAKANYAA (talk) 02:59, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

My reading of WP:CWW is that yes, Big gene should be kept for copyright purposes. As an alternative, though I haven't checked the merged text word for word against the Big gene text: it looks to me like all of the content that was merged came from a single editor (the editor who created the article, where the content was present in this diff), so for copyright purposes, it might be acceptable to create a dummy edit that identifies that editor as the copyright holder of the material that was merged from Big gene, also noting the edit where the merge occurred. But I'm not positive that that's sufficient. FactOrOpinion (talk) 03:21, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

A permanent note on the talk page would be more usual than an edit summary at a place in the page history that's far removed from the actual content.

A much simpler solution is just to leave the redirect alone (or turn it into a dab page for content that we do have). WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:49, 26 September 2025 (UTC)

I agree that attribution is required in this case. As Graham87 wrote, the text is accessible to anyone. However, WP:Copying within Wikipedia (guideline, shortcuts WP:COPYWITHIN and WP:CWW) does not mandate keeping the redirect or its history. Retaining a merged article's history under a redirect is the easiest and most common method of providing attribution, but WP:Copying within Wikipedia#Reusing deleted material (shortcut WP:RUD) and WP:Merge and delete (essay, shortcut WP:MAD) describe alternatives that have been suggested above. Flatscan (talk) 04:24, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

Taken to its logical extreme, this would let anyone prevent the deletion of any article. Simply merge an article in danger of deletion anywhere (it doesn't even matter if it's related or not). Then someone would likely just revert the merge. But then, oh no!, content is visible in the history somewhere else, we can't actually delete it now. This would be silly. 35.139.154.158 (talk) 16:15, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

If it's truly unrelated, then it could be revdelled from the other page's history. jlwoodwa (talk) 16:17, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

If I remember correctly, I have seen WP:Revision deletion used to nullify a merge, but I don't have specifics. Flatscan (talk) 04:29, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

WP:Guide to deletion#You may edit the article during the discussion (how-to guide, shortcut WP:EDITATAFD) #5 advises against copying during an active AfD. I recall only a few occurrences in many years. Flatscan (talk) 04:29, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

Demote Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Reliable sources and weight to Wikiproject essay?

At Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Policies and Guidelines, we're trying to simplify our PAGs. HouseBlaster listed the Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Reliable sources and weight guideline as a potential one for demotion. It just repeats WP:weight and WP:reliable sources with some Wikiproject advice on how to apply it to economics. It was never discussed in an appropriate venue, but instead listed after a 2-person local consensus on the Wikiproject in 2015. Per WP:HISTORICAL, it's too late to simply revert the premature listing as guideline. So let's discuss: should this tagged as an essay again? —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:25, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

Support demotion It's not widely cited either, so no evidence it enjoys as much support as guidelines like WP:MEDRS. There's a lot of similar essays in other Wikiprojects that aren't guidelines either. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 18:25, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Support demotion. Classic WP:CREEP/File:Harvard Square turds.jpg example of what might be a good direction, but not necessary to have as an Official Rule. House Blaster (talk • he/they) 18:27, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Support demotion per nom. Two editors do not make consensus. Ca ^{talk to me!} 01:04, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
Do we want any pages in WikiProjects to be PAGs? Presumably WikiProjects can find ways to apply general PAGs to their specific focuses, but I'm not sure something can be a PAG if it is not discussed by the wider community. CMD (talk) 13:06, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
WP:PAG says new PAGs need an RfC to ensure it's discussed by the wider community. I imagine that when a WikiProject page gets consensus for promotion to guideline in a widely advertised RfC, it should be moved out of Wikiproject. That's where WP:MEDRS is found, as is Wikipedia:Artist's impressions of astronomical objects (which is also a guideline, surprisingly). There's one other content guideline that's a WikiProject subpage, Wikipedia:WikiProject Automobiles/Conventions. First impression is that it didn't get a project-wide RfC either, just a discussion on its talk page [10]. —Femke 🐦 (talk) 13:32, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
That is my read too. I would support 'demoting' both to essays, hopefully underlining a principle that WikiProjects follow PAGs, rather than the other way around. CMD (talk) 14:07, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
Support demotion per nom FaviFake (talk) 13:38, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

Propose that longstanding redirects made into articles be subject to draftification

I have on a number of occasions now come across longstanding redirects that have recently been made into 'new' articles, sometimes through my NPP activity, sometimes just at random. Where these are of questionable quality (ie: promotional, poorly sourced) and you'd normally send them to draft, this is prohibited by policy (you can't draftify an article over 3 months old). It would be helpful if we modified that policy to treat these redirects as 'new' articles as at the date of removal of the redirect. For clarity, I'm not suggesting ALL new articles from redirects be sent to WP:DRAFT but that they could be rather than be subject to the 90 day rule on sending poor articles to draft, if a patroller or other editor considered that the best course of action. What say we? Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 12:05, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

My initial reaction is not favourable but I can't immediately articulate why. If something like this is enacted though it is important that the redirect be restored pending approval of the draft rather than leaving a red link. Thryduulf (talk) 12:12, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

It's possible that a tool like MoveToDraft could fulfill this by reverting the intervening edits since the redirect was turned into an article and copying the text of the current article to a new draft page (with attribution), but this would run into issues if the author wanted to contest draftification (since they would be blocked from moving it over the redirect, which now has history) and makes later publishing more difficult for similar reasons. -- Recon rabbit 13:49, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

The page history is kept if you move the article to draft:article. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 15:06, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

What would be left behind at the mainspace title after such a draftification? A redirect to the original target, or a redirect to draftspace, a redlink, or something else? If the first option, should a WP:HISTSPLIT be done to separate the redirect's history from the attempt at making it an article? Anomie ⚔ 14:15, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Right now you get a message, "This page does not exist. The deletion, protection, and move log for the page are provided below for reference." and then you also get a link to the draft article. TBH, I haven't tried moving a draft back to a mainspace title that is a 'page does not exist', but assume it would then create the page? Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 15:06, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

This works since you have the page mover user right, but other NPP reviewers without that right would be creating a redirect that points to the draft, which would be deleted as R2. Ideally this action should leave behind a redirect that points to the original target before the "new article" was made. -- Recon rabbit 16:27, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

The problem to be solved here is:

On Monday, if I click on Rail terminus, I end up at Train station#Terminus.
On Tuesday, someone turns that redirect into a separate article.
On Wednesday, you move the page to the Draft: namespace, and if I click on Rail terminus, I end up nowhere, because you broke the redirect.

That particular redirect gets more uses than >80% of our articles. It gets used every couple of hours on average, which means multiple readers per day would be affected by this. If you don't like the content that was put on the page, and you for some reason think the Draft: namespace is a better choice than Wikipedia:Merging (or a Wikipedia:Blank and redirect), then please don't break things for the person who would be satisfied if they ended up at Train station#Terminus. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:29, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Right. So if whatever article was created at Rail terminus was decided to be better served as a draft, rather than the normal action of just reverting to redirect, the previous status quo would have to be immediately reinstated after that draft is created. Which is why I am wary about this proposal. You stated the problem I have in plainer terms than I can provide... -- Recon rabbit 20:56, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

I am against the draftification of all redirects turned into articles, but I am in favor of treating redirects turned into articles as new articles. Also, doesn't redirects turned into articles have to get rereviewed, or am I mistaken? Mikeycdiamond (talk) 15:49, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Yes, they do. And when you're reviewing them and they're clearly cruft, you can't send 'em to draft because the article may have been created in 2009, redirected in 2011 and have lain fallow since then only to pop up as a 'new' article now. Hence my cunning plan... Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 15:53, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

For clarification, are you just asking for articles created from redirects to be considered new articles or that all redirects turned into articles be draftified? Mikeycdiamond (talk) 18:07, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

The former - I thought that was fairly clear, sorry if it wasn't (I've added a, hopefully, clarifying sentence to the proposal). If a newly created article from a redirect would normally - as a new article - be sent to draft by NPP or other editors concerned at its quality but can't be because the original article before someone BLARed it was older than 90 days, then it makes sense to me that it be treated as a 'new' article from the date of its creation from a redirect. That doesn't preclude restoring the redirect as a course of action (for instance, in the case of Rail terminus above). Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 04:18, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

If they're clearly cruft, then shouldn't they be BLAR-ed, not sent to draft? The page creator can always manually move their own work to a sandbox if they'd like to improve it. GreenLipstickLesbian 💌🦋 02:04, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

Support this - I quite often have to boldly re-redirect stuff like this, but that may not be ideal. Johnbod (talk) 16:08, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
I note the subtleties discussed above, but support subject to them being addressed. An article and a redirect should be treated as two different entities. --Northernhenge (talk) 16:26, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Strong Support. Currently this is a loophole where what is really a new article can slip around much of WP:NPP. If the page needs adjustment then draftification should be an option. As stated by the nom, this is currently against policy. Of course if the new version is inappropriate then reverting or taking to AfD to enforce the redirect if the revert is contested remain as options.Ldm1954 (talk) 16:45, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Support provided that the earlier history are just redirects and/or edits with no real consequences like cut-and-paste moves or disruptive edits reverted quickly. – robertsky (talk) 17:16, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Support Aside from the sensibility of this proposal on its face, all editors that considered this issue in the 2022 thread agreed that article age should be measured by the number of days that a particular title has hosted an article. ViridianPenguin🐧 (💬) 17:38, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Support. I have often turned old redirects into articles, and when I do so I think of them as new articles. I think articles created in this way should be treated in the same way as any other new article. —David Eppstein (talk) 18:14, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Support subject to there being no substantive previous history at the redirect, and subject to a new "interim" redirect being created as discussed above.

Triptothecottage (talk) 21:17, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Support This sounds like a good way to help deal with flawed new articles that were previously redirects. Opm581^{(talk | he/him)} 21:58, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Support treating all newly created articles as newly created articles and thus subject to drafticiation at NPP. CNC (talk) 22:05, 8 October 2025 (UTC)
Oppose. WP:BLAR-ing is a better option for non-notable new articles that were recently redirects, in my opinion. If someone edit wars and keeps adding the article back, then WP:AFD. Draftification erases the entire redirect history, and also deletes the redirect without going through WP:RFD. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:21, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Puzzled, Novem. The article history is preserved if you move it to draft. The original article title becomes a 'this page does not exist' but does preserve a link to the draft. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 04:31, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Are you sure? Between WP:R2 moving the page without a redirect, and WP:G13 deleting the draft after 6 months, my impression is the chances of these drafts keeping a publicly viewable history that a non-administrator could find is pretty low. –Novem Linguae (talk) 11:44, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
The draft maintains the history but of course if it's not worked on for 6 months it's G13 toast. I'm not proposing it as an alternative to deletion - I guess my best 'use case' is a company is not notable, it's redirected to its notable founder or the holding company but then someone who's not even a confirmed user comes along and creates an article that is promotional and under-sourced: draft-worthy stuff. BLAR deletes their effort to create an article (which they have avoided AfC with), Draft gives them space to work on it. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 12:46, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
The proposal is not confined to companies. It could be used to break important redirects with possibilities that are notable and point to an important section of another article. Rail terminus was given as an example above, and I could think of many others. James500 (talk) 16:44, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
The proposal is not, indeed, confined to that. I used it as a use case example. Editors would clearly have to make a call - as we always do - but right now a completely useless redirect to a dead end subject can be recreated as an article and treated with kid gloves, as far as the option of draftification goes, because it's older than 90 days. I'm not advocating mass draftification here - but purely opening the option to draftify dodgy new articles created from old redirects. Editors and patrollers would clearly make a call re: Rail Terminus and BLAR an attempt at a new article that didn't pass muster. But @Rosguill below actually pins the solution - open up the possibility, clearly, to editors to draftify new articles with potential created from old redirects. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 16:59, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Comment. I can see that this would be bad if it has the effect of breaking redirects or of causing the history of redirects to be lost. But couldn't we get round that by making it the rule that, if someone wants to draftify a new article that was formerly a redirect (because for whatever reason that fits the case better than boldly BLARing the page or sending it to AfD), they have to restore the redirect and then C+P the new content into a newly created draft - rather than using the move function as with an article that isn't a redirect? I wouldn't have thought this would be too complicated for patrollers to manage, and could quite easily be added into WP:DRAFTIFY. Dionysodorus (talk) 00:41, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Oppose if the end result at the former redirect title is a redirect to draftspace or a "this page does not exist". Don't care if the end result is that the former redirect is restored. Slight preference for accomplishing that via WP:HISTSPLIT, but not enough of a preference to worry about it if people just create a fresh redirect instead. Anomie ⚔ 00:57, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
end result at the former redirect title is a redirect to draftspace. These get deleted because cross-namespace redirects are not allowed. WP:R2. –Novem Linguae (talk) 01:45, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
In which case it would turn into or a "this page does not exist", which is still a problem IMO. Anomie ⚔ 01:53, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Oppose, if it is obvious just WP:BLAR it back (that's what I personally lean towards I think) -- Sohom (talk) 02:17, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Oppose. The solution is a WP:BLAR. Draftifying the page would remove the redirect altogether. If the redirect is a valid one, that should not be happening. James500 (talk) 04:53, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
I'm in agreement with the folks citing BLAR, but also I think this is a misreading of the 90 day rule--article age should be determined based on time since the page was an article, not based on the age of the page as a whole. If need be, you can draftify the page and create a new redirect in its place, which is something I would do fairly frequently when I did lots of back-of-the-queue reviews as NPP. I would support incorporating language that clarifies this procedure more explicitly. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 13:45, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
That would work just fine and dandy for me - I've come across people citing the 90 day rule as a HARD rule regardless of its status as an article, so that clarification alone would suit my purpose and give a lot of NPP and other editors the leeway to take the Draftify route where that is the most appropriate thing to do! Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 14:28, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
Support even though BLAR should be what is normally used - I agree the 90 day rule should be based on when the article became an article, not when the redirect was created. I just think there's space to draftify and BLAR. SportingFlyer T·C 16:57, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
My only desire is to create a clear space for us to say 'this is essentially a new article, it's crap but has possibilities and someone who cares about it, so it needs to go to draft' for a new article created from an old article/redirect. I think @Rosguill nailed it - but the rewording of the '90 day' guideline remains a (minor, IMHO) task... Does it need consensus? Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 17:03, 9 October 2025 (UTC)
If it has possibilites, sending it to the draftspace will usually make sure that no one knows about it, no one improves it, and it gets deleted. James500 (talk) 17:24, 9 October 2025 (UTC)

Oppose per concerns about the history of the redirect expressed above by by Novem Linguae. It seems eminently likely that draftying an article that was previously a redirect will ultimately lead to the destruction of the edit history, which would ultimately prevent redirects from being used as an WP:ATD. The easy resolution is BLAR. If a good faith user is adding content, editors should explain to them why their article belongs in the draft space and explain how to recover it from the edit history. Katzrockso (talk) 03:58, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

Oppose We should be allowing less draftications, not more. Joe Roe provides an IMHO compelling justification at User:Joe_Roe/Seven_tips_for_new_page_patrolling#5:_Don't_draftify. – SD0001 (talk) 08:16, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

Strong support, I've partecipated in many merger discussions coming from a former redirect and it would be so much easier if we could just treat it as what it is; a new article. The 90 day rule should be based on when the article became an article, not when the redirect was created. FaviFake (talk) 13:43, 11 October 2025 (UTC)

How do you keep it from breaking the redirect?

If only admins were doing this, then we could leverage the Wikipedia:History merging abilities to 'split' the new edits off, leaving the old redirect in place, and later (assuming it's accepted, which it probably won't be, because the draft namespace is m:where articles go to die) merge the history back together. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:16, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I guess I support any proposal that is techincally feasable for any user. I strongly think overwritten redirects should be considered and treated as new articles, I don’t really care about how it's written in policies FaviFake (talk) 15:21, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Oppose per BLAH and others. It's not that I'm outright opposed to draftifying and restoring the redirect, but then it would require a HISTMERGE which sounds like more effort really, for admins specifically; this meaning more work for them and less independence for NPP. Hence why WP:NPPHOUR suggests BLAH as part of unofficial toolset. Additionally blank and redirect leaves the content in the history anyway, which can be restored later if needed and with good reason, so moving it doesn't really help that much. Generally the solution causes more problems than it solves. CNC (talk) 18:21, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Proposal to change WP:MOS

This has nothing to do with the Manual of Style and xonsensus for this will not develop. voorts (talk/contributions) 18:49, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Make it so "countries" not recognized by the United Nations, such as Taiwan and Kosovo, are not classified as countries on Wikipedia. CheeseGuy164 (talk) 18:44, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

clarity on WP:GEOLAND

I'm having a disagreement with another editor at AfD regarding the interpretation of WP:GEOLAND. The first sentence says that populated, legally recognized places are typically presumed to be notable. Does this mean that any populated and legally recognized place is automatically notable, regardless of population size or administrative level? For example, if a country has four levels of subdivision, is a settlement at the fourth level automatically considered notable, even if the only available sources are government-related, such as a local government website (a primary and non-independent source), legislation (which establishes legal recognition), or a report from the statistics bureau (which only provides population data)? Ckfasdf (talk) 07:56, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Without knowing what the dispute is, it is hard to give guidance.

But let's note that WP:GEOLAND has been controversial for a very long time. Particularly, the meaning of "legally recognised" is endlessly litigated. To give some examples:

GNIS was used to great many thousands of articles about "villages" in the United States. The basis for this was the claim that the US-government-operated GNIS system was a form of legal recogition. The problem is that GNIS lists many places as populated that clearly aren't populated and never have been. A discussion at RSN eventually decided that GNIS just wasn't a reliable source for which places are populated, and isn't a form of legal recognition. Tens of thousands of GNIS-created articles have since been deleted but many remain.
GEOnet Names Server (GNS) is a source similar to GNIS, but for the names of locations outside the United State, that is also operated by the US government, that was also used as the basis for the mass-creation of a very large number of articles about "villages". The problem here is that GNS is an even less reliable source than GNIS, since it is based primarily on military maps from the 1950's and 60's. This was also deprecated as a source for which places are/are not populated in an RSN discussion.
Abadi are a class of rural location in Iran which are used as the basis of the collection of the Iranian census. An editor went through the entire 2006 Iranian census and created an entry for every single Abadi thinking that these were the same as villages. The problem is that the Iranian census is not gathered according to villages, but instead by counting-locations (called Abadi) that do not correspond one-for-one with villages, and can include farms, pumps, factories, bridges, shops, counting places for nomads (etc. etc. etc.). Roughly a third of these locations have no population at all. The editor (who was an admin) ended up retiring under a cloud after being desysopped by Arbcom. Tens of thousands were deleted, but thousands still remain.

This is why, for example, if you go to Google Maps and look in random parts of the Iranian desert, you can find empty spots miles from anywhere that are labelled with village-names and are linked to Wikipedia articles about supposedly-existing "villages" (e.g., this one this one, this one). Wikipedia has fully trashed the information environment around Iranian villages through pure carelessness and completely misplaced idealism.

Same thing happened in Azerbaijan.
Something similar happened with Filipino Barangays: there are 897 of these in Manila alone and it is clearly ridiculous to create an article for every single one.
Something similar also happened with rural localities in Poland: very often these are simply named houses (e.g., former forester's lodges), farms (particularly former state farms), railway sidings, railway stations etc. However, a whole load of articles were mass-created on the misunderstanding that these were "villages", using a bot, at a rate of hundreds or thousands a day, without any checking.
Something similar also happened with rural localities in Russia, particularly points on Russia's immense long railways with names like "Kilometre 2779", the population of which are just the station-master and his/her spouse.
Another example is Turkish Mahallahs. Same story really. FOARP (talk) 09:45, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

An admin called John Carter went through an old Gazetteer of the Emirates and created hundreds of articles for places that don't exist - some never existed, some have been subsumed by expanding towns, many were water wells or bedouin encampments or just places. During those extensive deletion discussions, it was felt that the bar is intentionally low for GEOLAND and if, for instance, a place has a place name sign it is 'legally recognised'. A village with three houses and a shop in it would pass GEOLAND, if it has a name. An interesting side note from the Emirates example is that many food delivery and other apps 'scraped' Wikipedia, creating a whole virtual Emirates filled with places that simply don't exist. Much fun. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 10:38, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP and Alexandermcnabb: This the link to the AfD discussion, The subject in question is a fourth-level subdivision in Indonesia. I don't see any issue with its legally recognized status, as it has its own website, is mentioned in official regulation (the appointment of a village head by a Regent, head of second-level subdivision), and appears in data from the statistics bureau. The issue is that it is just one of 84,048 fourth-level subdivisions. If we allow this article to exist merely because it is populated and legally recognized, without any further demonstration of notability, then what would stop editors from creating articles for the remaining thousands of fourth-level subdivisions? IMO, there should be a minimum threshold of notability or coverage before such articles can stand alone. Ckfasdf (talk) 03:30, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Per policy, AFAICS, those 84,048 villages would indeed pass GEOLAND. What would have to change is GEOLAND itself, although the 'presumption of notability' argument is a little shaky and open to a certain degree of intepretation (and consequently argument). And we do, of course, have WP:OTHERSTUFF as an rationale against creating the other 84,047 articles on the precedent of Desa Gladang but that's just an essay... I do like @BD2412's solution of a redirect to District of Rogojampi, BTW, if that article were created. The argument that the village can't be notable if its district itself isn't notable enough for an article is of course a nono, per OTHERSTUFF. Sadly, the mythical repose of the non-bluelinked Sulung Agung doesn't help, either! Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 05:07, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

This is similar to the Barangay level of the Philippines FOARP mentions above, which are also fourth-level subdivisions. After many discussions and AfDs the Philippines WikiProject decided they aren't merited by GEOLAND. Generally the solution is a redirect to the third-level article, which usually has a list of barangays. (Some barangays do meet GNG on their own merits, but that is a separate matter.) CMD (talk) 05:22, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Ckfasdf thanks for putting the notification of this discussion in the AfD. Your argument seems to me to be a kind of delete argument under WP:OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Most of the problems highlighted by User:FOARP were with verification because editors used sources subsequently found not to be reliable. It could be some of this level of Indonesian subdivisions have their own article, others are perhaps better presented in a list format, others mentioned in the next subdivision up. Depends. In the current AfD there's no appropriate existing article to redirect/merge content to so the choice at present is between keep or delete. If subsequently, an appropriate target article is created one can always open a redirect/merge discussion. Rupples (talk) 05:29, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

"Most of the problems highlighted by User:FOARP were with verification because editors used sources subsequently found not to be reliable" - Hard disagree here. The primary issue is not accuracy or reliability. In fact, with the exception of GNIS/GNS, all of these sources are basically reliable for what they actually record. The issue is that we have created our own editor-generated standard on Wikipedia without any reference to the real world.

There is no specific "legally recognised populated place". That is not a concept that exists in the law of any country, still less every country in the world. There are levels of local authority for different purposes established by various laws. There are also registers of places. There are also censuses that record population by differing methodology.

An Abadi is a "legally-recognised place" (in the sense that they are listed in the census and have a legal definition) and most of them are populated, it's just that when we tried to create articles based on them that turned out to be preposterous because it meant that in reality many of them were about shops/factories/farms/pumps/bridges. The Iranian census is not unreliable for what it is recording, but what it is recording is not what Wikipedia tried to use it for.

A Barangay is a "legally-recognised populated place". The lists of them are accurate. It's just that when we try to create articles about them they turn out to be about micro-neighbourhoods. Again, that's just a mis-match between our unrealistic editor-generated standard and the real world.

Polish rural localities are legally recognised (there's a regulation establishing the name of every single one of them) and many are populated, but again, when you try to create articles about them you end up creating article about individual houses/farms, or parts of small villages, because that is what, in reality, they correspond to.

The problem is and always has been that "legal recognition" is just a bad standard. FOARP (talk) 08:51, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Based on the discussion above, WP:GEOLAND implies that as long as an area is populated and legally recognized, it is generally considered notable. However, as CMD mentioned, a similar situation occurred with barangay-level subdivisions in the Philippines, where WikiProject Philippines decided that barangays aren't merited by GEOLAND, although exceptions do exist. I agree with that approach, so I plan to raise a proposal at WikiProject Indonesia to establish a country-specific consensus stating that fourth-level subdivisions in Indonesia should not automatically qualify for notability under GEOLAND, similar to the practice in the WikiProject Philippines. Ckfasdf (talk) 14:00, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

That's the way to go, for sure. However, I do note (per my own vote at the AfD) that IMHO Desa Gladag IS notable, even if we agree that all 84,047 other villages aren't inherently so! Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 14:25, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

@FOARP. I get what you're saying, but if "legal recognition" is just a bad standard and has caused so many problems, how come it's been accepted as a notability guideline for so long? Rupples (talk) 15:54, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Same reason other bad standards (e.g., WP:NOLY until WP:NSPORTS2022) remained the same for years/decades until they were changed: inertia. FOARP (talk) 16:03, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

There are Wikipedians who feel that every known entity in their favorite topic area is notable, and will strongly advocate for an SNG that recognizes that. Donald Albury 16:51, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

And they can advocate for that in an appropriate discussion... But if they're using AfD as a venue to advocate for it (for example by attempting to establish precendence and then argue circularly from that precedence) thats a problem. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:57, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Lets just take a step back and look at the words we're using... Presumed to be notable does not mean automatically notable. Anyone telling you that presumed to be notable means automatically notable is mistaken or lying. Note that adding "typically" makes it even less automatic... Even if you give the interpretation every benefit of the doubt its lacking in competence or something else. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 15:03, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

The issue with this is becomes a kind of motte-and-bailey argument. E.g., saying "We don't mean *EVERY* place in e.g., an official document is notable" versus arguing "KEEP - it's in an official document so it's notable" in every AFD. I'm not saying *YOU* do this, but it's just how things end up. FOARP (talk) 16:07, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

I would say that "presumed notable" is not enough different from "is notable" to matter. Having to overturn the presumption in argument after argument is exhausting, and people argue all the time that "since it is presumed notable, the article most be kept." And it is argument after argument, because every single one of these issues has come to the fore in the course of finding a dubious place that was part of a mass creation effort, and then we go through a huge laborious process to sift through all the stubs of the same ilk. Mangoe (talk) 16:46, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Theres also the element that presuming is inherently easier/lower effort than establishing, it does kind of skew the argument in favor of the lazy in the context you're describing there and in general AfD is supposed to be the opposite... Its supposed to be the keep side which has to do the legwork. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:53, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

Why is the keep side supposed "to do the legwork." If an article was originally created and passed verification, shouldn't the burden be placed on the delete side to overturn that initial consensus? I've had at least one article I created nominated for deletion, and it ended up being kept. This took hours of my day to hunt down additional sources (which I don't believe were actually necessary), with almost no effort on part of the nominator. While the article is now better because of this, I really think we should side with "keep" to avoid lazy nominations for deletion that essentially demand attention from editors who may not have time to argue in defense of it. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 23:42, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

That just seems like user error or willful misinterpretation... I think it would still happen no matter what the wording was... That does sound exceptionally exhausting though. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:51, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't think you can look at the careers of some of the negligent mass-creators in this field and not see that they haven't been massively enabled by WP:GEOLAND. Particularly this comment from the one who created the Iranian stubs when confronted about them by Iranian editors. FOARP (talk) 17:39, 14 October 2025 (UTC)

To be fair I don't think that most editors are looking at those careers... I personally haven't conducted an extensive study of them so I will refrain from offering further opinion in that regard. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:03, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

I've started an RFC on this here: Wikipedia talk:Notability (geographic features)#RFC on the "Populated, legally recognized places" standard. FOARP (talk) 13:55, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

We gots to know the context bro! Woodisgoodnotbad (talk) 22:43, 15 October 2025 (UTC)

Policies need to state explicitly that texts about early Christianity (and other religions) must be NPOV and that the unproven beliefs of Christians (and other believers) must not be presented as fact.

While editing James the Less and James, brother of Jesus, and when reading other articles such as Saint Peter, I have noticed a serious problem, which undermines the credibility of Wikipedia: the editing of these articles is largely dominated by Christians, who present their beliefs as fact.

This discussion post suggests clarifying policies to make it easier to prevent unreasonable believers from presenting their beliefs as fact.

The problem is so large so that it is not sufficient to have general guidelines such as Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Religion. That short section states that ”Some adherents of a religion might [my emphasis] object to a critical historical treatment of their own faith because in their view such analysis discriminates against their religious beliefs.” The reality is that unreasonable believers do object all the time, and will turn their anger into damaging edits, and this is a perpetual problem.

I do not single out the group ”Christian believers” in my criticism; I am a member of a church. I am referring to unreasonable believers who damage Wikipedia by insisting on presenting their beliefs as fact. I have participated in the editing of Ram Mandir, where a group of editors including me have secured the sentence “Many Hindus believe that it is located at the site of Ram Janmabhoomi, the mythical birthplace of Rama, a principal deity of Hinduism.” It was a long struggle to include the word “mythical”, because Hindu believers do not think that the birth of Rama is a myth.

When editing James the Just and James, brother of Jesus, I have had my edits reverted by a user with a history of edit-warring warnings and blocks. The user would undoubtedly start two new edit wars. I am sensible; I leave those articles for now and write this suggestion instead.

This is not an editing conflict, and is not about a few articles. Let me take a step back and explain what all of this is about. Let me pick a few statements among thousands that could be made about the uncertainty of religious texts and traditions. The following statements are non‑controversial:

Simon Cephas (Peter) is probably a historical person; he may very well have been to Rome, or he may not.
We don’t know anything for certain about Simon Cephas (Peter) having a leadership role in Rome, if he went there. We do not know the structure of the early Christian community in Rome.
The evidence for James, son of Alphaeus being a historical person is thin. It is quite possible that such a person existed, but it cannot be proven.

No sensible person would disagree. Our problem is that Christian believers write hundreds (or thousands?) of passages in the articles, where Christian tradition is presented as fact. Let me take one bad example from Saint Peter:

Peter's leadership of the early believers is estimated to have spanned from AD 30 or 33 to his death; these dates suggest that he could have been the longest-reigning pope, for anywhere from 31 to 38 years; however, this has never been verified.” (source: The Catholic Encyclopedia)

Wikipedia is 24 years old. Saint Peter is an important article. I’m sure you agree that it is embarrassing that such bad article text occurs in the lead section of Saint Peter. The sentence presupposes that a leadership position held by Peter is a historical fact. The words “this has never been verified” only refers to uncertainty about the length of the “papacy” because the source is the Catholic Encyclopedia. This useless “source” says that “It is an indisputably established historical fact that St. Peter laboured in Rome during the last portion of his life, and there ended his earthly course by martyrdom. As to the duration of his Apostolic activity in the Roman capital, the continuity or otherwise of his residence there, the details and success of his labours, and the chronology of his arrival and death, all these questions are uncertain… The essential fact is that Peter died at Rome: this constitutes the historical foundation of the claim of the Bishops of Rome to the Apostolic Primacy of Peter.”

Wikipedia is full of such biased passages in articles about early Christianity (and other topics) because religious users and edit warriors rule through their stubbornness and their numbers. The complacency and lack of interest in these topics among intellectually honest people allow this to happen.

I do not say that my recent edits are good. I was only trying to make a small breach in this wall of Christian POV with a few tentative edits that would need sources.

In conclusion, this problem cannot be solved by me and a few other people engaging in edit wars with people who will never give up. We need to positively identify this as a problem for Wikipedia, and edit a policy document to make clear that intellectually honest editors have the support of the community when addressing such problems in articles.

I suggest adding to WP:NPOV#Religion something along these lines:

In articles on the history of Christianity and other religions, confessional traditions must not be presented as historical fact. When non‑confessional scholars would not agree that a person or an event is historical, the lead section of the article must make this clear, e.g. with the words ”according to Christian/Muslim/other tradition”.

Jan Arvid Götesson (talk) 05:30, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

My experience is in agreement with much of the above. Church documents and documentarians simply cannot be unbiased in evaluating historical claims of their own religions. Hyperbolick (talk) 06:00, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't think this will actually do any good. You need to argue this from the WP:BESTSOURCES, not from the "assume religious organizations are wrong" POV. We don't need to put a(nother) thumb on the scale against religious sources, because we already put a thumb on the scale in favor of scholarly sources, independent sources, and secondary sources. In other words, you already have all the "policy" tools you need.

What you seem to need instead is to cite sources for your edits. The edit summary was "Please add the references", not "My church, right or wrong". Your changes got WP:CHALLENGED and it's your job to provide a source that backs up whatever POV you want to put in the article.

If you would like help, you might try to make some wiki-friends at Wikipedia:WikiProject History or Wikipedia:WikiProject Christianity. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:26, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I understand your point that existing policies should be sufficient. But take a look at this The user who wrote “Please add the references” changed the heading Beliefs into Facts above a section that said “The dead in Christ will resurrect first”. Such people cannot be reasoned with. This perpetual edit warrior will fight edit wars even if I or other people add sources.

The problem with your response is that you expect users to put a lot of work into just tidying up a bad article such as James_the_Less. Currently that article presupposes that “James the Less” is a historical figure. The problem is that this claim has been made in the first place in Wikipedia. It should be allowed to just tidy up and undo the worst damage by stating that the article is only about tradition and later constructs that are based on very thin textual material and nothing else. Jan Arvid Götesson (talk) 07:01, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

The policy is that uncited information can be challenged, and whoever wants to keep their content in must provide one (1) source. That's not usually "a lot of work" and doesn't require tidying up the whole article. (Also, it cuts both ways: they can challenge your uncited additions, and you can challenge theirs.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:15, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

This seems a bit strange to me. The talk pages of Adam and Eve, Yahweh, Tower of Babel, Muhammad, and several other articles get regularly flooded with complains that Wikipedia is insulting religious belief or that it is written by atheists for atheists. I have not seen protests that it is dominated by Christians. On the topic of sourcing policy, yes there are several problems. We can easily deprecate sources like The Catholic Encyclopedia as unreliable, but this will not prevent articles on Biblical topics from citing extremely outdated scientific views (William F. Albright and his followers) or fringe views like Kenneth Kitchen's arguments in support of the historicity of Solomon. Dimadick (talk) 07:10, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I have only read a subset of articles on religious topics, so I cannot tell to what extent articles contains passages biased in favour of tradition like the passages I found in the four articles on early Christianity that I mentioned in my first post. But such bias does exist in a number of articles, and I described how the bias was defended by an edit warrior when I tried to do something about it. I do not understand how the sourcing policy problems and the outdated sources and fringe sources you mention are relevant.

Please look at the sentence from the lead section in Saint Peter again:

Peter's leadership of the early believers is estimated to have spanned from AD 30 or 33 to his death; these dates suggest that he could have been the longest-reigning pope, for anywhere from 31 to 38 years; however, this has never been verified.” (source: The Catholic Encyclopedia)

How do you explain the existence of such a catastrophe in the lead section of a Wikipedia article on a very important topic? Many such instances inform my view that unreasonable believers do damage that objective users don’t notice and don’t prevent. Jan Arvid Götesson (talk) 07:32, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Changing policy won't change the content of article. Few people read it anyway, and this is especially true of those who are here to push their religion, I agree that complacency and lack of interest in these topics among intellectually honest people allow this to happen, but do not agree with the proposed solution. The solution is to not be complacent and show an interest. If someone starts an edit war then don't join in, but use the talk page. This is already policy. Phil Bridger (talk) 07:47, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
What should I do then?

Suppose I want to be the one who isn’t complacent about religious tradition being presented as fact. I start by editing an article that is less read than Adam and Eve or Tower of Babel. An unreasonable believer will then revert my changes, even if have sources, because the believer will claim that old texts from the first centuries AD, and books by biased Christian scholars, are better sources. I then refrain from edit war, and I write on the talk page, as you suggest. Then I will be the lone voice of reason on that talk page.

What should I do then ? Should I call in you, Dimadick and WhatamIdoing to help me? That might be canvassing. Jan Arvid Götesson (talk) 08:17, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
Pinging Dimadick and WhatamIdoing directly would be canvassing, but making a neutrally-worded post at WP:NPOVN, WP:FRINGEN, WP:RSN, or WP:NORN (depending on the exact question being discussed, different forums may be the most appropriate) is an appropriate way to get additional eyes on the issue. If you can distill a disagreement down to an A vs. B proposal (or something equally simple), WP:RFCs can also be used to establish consensus on the article talk page. _signed,Rosguill ^talk 13:50, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

Come now Phil, you know there are places where communities can brigade to form a faith based "consensus," which outweighs policy and reason. Hyperbolick (talk) 08:21, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
If the issue is groups of interested editors coming to an invalid consensus based on their personal religious beliefs in violation of policy, changing the policy is not going to fix that – almost by definition, people who are violating policy aren't going to change their behaviour just because policy changes. Instead, the solution is to get broader input on the article, using existing processes (e.g. WP:RFC).

In the case of the lead of Saint Peter specifically, it's not clear that there even is such a local consensus – I can't see any evidence that anybody recently has tried either to edit the lead so as not to imply that Peter's time in Rome is historical fact (which the body of the article carefully avoids saying), or discuss the issue on the talkpage. Caeciliusinhorto-public (talk) 13:42, 13 October 2025 (UTC)
I believe the point is that even RfCs can be dominated by POV pushers. A clearer policy means a closer would be more likely to close in favor of the policy regardless of the numbers. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 04:55, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Jan Arvid Götesson you're going to get repeatedly—and deservedly—reverted if your edits are anything like the ones you made to James the Less, where you just added random unsourced "well actually" statements to the article. I get you have not edited much over your tenure, but you seem to fail to understand collaborative editing and focusing on verifiability, not truth. If you want to argue about the historicity of Peter, then you need to actually present sources. Topics like these are always going to have issues with the preponderance of sources being related to the religion (we've recently had to deal with LDS topics and the same issue) but if I had seen your edits I would have wholesale reverted them as well as less than helpful. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 14:07, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

You are not addressing the problem. I wrote that I did not say my edits were good and needed sources. We can disregard those edits and talk about the problem: unreasonable believers have added a lot of incorrect and unverified/unverifiable information to articles. What are your thoughts if you disregard the messenger and his edits? Jan Arvid Götesson (talk) 23:16, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I don't think that wikipedia is the place to look for if something as true or not (see WP:NOTTRUTH). These types of topics by nature have various views in academic scholarship either way, so its not always clear what is "fact" or not. The proposed solution does not really do much at all since there are already numerous polices in place (as other have mentioned). Since Wikipedia is a collaborative effort, talk pages are the place to discuss or even wikipedia projects for others interested in those topics. Encyclopedias generally summarize multiple views on topics in their respective fields, not necessarily impose one particular view. Keeping in mind that wikipedia editors are not experts on these topics, we rely on sources by actual experts from different disciplines to determine what are the general views on a particular topic. I don't see any particular view being pushed in the articles cited. They seem to hold mixed views already, but mostly basic information in the intros either way. Ramos1990 (talk) 23:42, 13 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but I get the same impression as the previous post you're replying to. There are already a robust series of policies that effectively work to get scholarly knowledge as largely the basis for these articles. This is a solution in search of a problem, and I also can't shake the feeling that you're proposing this as a shortcut to resolving disputes with others, who apparently totally don't have that ironclad grasp on their emotions and passions like you do. This is a collaborative project in which everyone deserves respect, even people who we think are very wrong about something. CoffeeCrumbs (talk) 02:14, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Jan, Fuchs is addressing the problem. Here's the problem:

You found some uncited and badly cited stuff you disagreed with.
You replaced it with some uncited stuff you agree with.
You came here to say "Please change the policy so my POV wins, even though my edits are not good and have no sources".

The problem is adding uncited and badly cited stuff that matches an editor's personal beliefs. The solution is finding good sources and re-writing the article to match the good sources (even if the good sources don't match your personal belief). This is not too much work. Go log in to Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library and find the Oxford Reference item. Start with something like Oxford Encyclopedias of the Bible, under "James". Then look up what The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture says under "James the Less, Saint", and then move on to The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, "James the Less", for a convenient summary of the identification/mixed-up names problem. That's three solid sources from Oxford University Press – better than both what you decry as "old texts from the first centuries AD, and books by biased Christian scholars" and also better than the nothing at all that you put in the article. You can do this. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:40, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

There is certainly a lot of truth in your complaint and I don't think its news to anyone that matters of personal belief are where encyclopedias struggle the most... And open encycopedias like ours even more so because those most likely to be creating and editing articles about personal beliefs are those who hold those beliefs. This is not unique to religion and in the specific context of personal beliefs which go beyond the strictly factual (for example anything related to spiritual, supernatural, and preternatural beliefs) its important to strike the right balance between a believer's treatment of the subject and the understanding that in an encyclopedic sense these claims are universally false. In an encyclopedic sense all of the various faiths and belief systems are objectively false, that is the encyclopedic NPOV even if every single editor has some form of faith, spirituality, or personal belief that goes beyond what can be evaluated by factual encyclopedic standards. Perhaps the most ardent rational atheist will dispute that, but then again perhaps not. That being said there has to be a bit of a hard line when it comes to overlap with actual history. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:02, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

I'm a pretty ardent rationalist atheist, but I don't agree that any change to policy is needed here. WhatamIdoing seems to have spelt out the solution accurately, which is to follow our core content policies and to cite reliable sources. Some articles, particularly ones less read by people who don't follow the religion in question, may fail to follow NPOV. Just edit them so they do, and don't give in to any POV pushers. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:48, 17 October 2025 (UTC)

Planned extirpation of ":: ... ::" signs in citation titles

About 1,200 Wikipedia articles (so far as I can tell) contain references for which the title is bracketed before and after with "::" signs. Exemplary instances are:

Lisa Tuttle (containing a reference to ":: ihg :: International Horror Guild :: ihg ::"); and

Randy Brock (containing a reference to ":: Vermont Election Night Results ::")

These instances of "::" occurring in the titles are artifacts of page scraping; they do not appear in the actual article titles when the websites themselves are visited. I find these unsightly, and barring a good reason for keeping them, I intend to go through all articles containing these over the next few weeks, and eliminating them. If anyone does have a reason these should be kept, please let me know. Cheers! BD2412 T 03:45, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

This isn't a matter for VPP, and in fact it needs not discussion at all. Pick 20 articles at random, make the fixes, then wait ten days to give others plenty of time to object; if not, then do 100 more, wait a week, then another 200, etc. E Eng 04:07, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
I agree with EEng. WP:Be bold. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:30, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

Sounds like a plan to me. ―Mandruss ☎ IMO. 12:16, 18 October 2025 (UTC)
I am going forward, slowly. I wasn't asking just for permission, though. I also wanted to know if anyone knew of any technical issues with these edits. BD2412 T 18:18, 18 October 2025 (UTC)

MyWiki:Village pump (policy)/Archive 205

Contents

NoYear events naming RfC

RFC discussion at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy § Revised proposal to improve extended confirmed grants

RfC on BLPCRIME

RfC: Party affiliation in BLP infoboxes

Survey (party affiliation in BLP infoboxes)

Discussion (party affiliation in BLP infoboxes)

Are semi-automated edits to improve MOS:CURLY compliance okay with the community?

There is no shortcut to user page

Directing new users to essays on the top of policy and guideline pages

MOS: prescriptive, descriptive, or both?

Recently deceased crime suspects

User:Larry Sanger/Nine Theses

RFC: Alphabetical listing of all Olympians

Previous discussions

Survey

Responses

Discussion

Discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Addition of abusefilter-modify-restricted right to EFMs

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography § Rewrite Subsequent Use last paragraph

Revival of Wikipedia:WikiProject Policies and Guidelines

Copyrights: links to non-open access articles

Content merged and later removed

Demote Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Reliable sources and weight to Wikiproject essay?

Propose that longstanding redirects made into articles be subject to draftification

Proposal to change WP:MOS

clarity on WP:GEOLAND

Policies need to state explicitly that texts about early Christianity (and other religions) must be NPOV and that the unproven beliefs of Christians (and other believers) must not be presented as fact.

Planned extirpation of ":: ... ::" signs in citation titles

Navigation menu

MyWiki:Village pump (policy)/Archive 205

NoYear events naming RfC

RFC discussion at Wikipedia talk:Protection policy § Revised proposal to improve extended confirmed grants

RfC on BLPCRIME

RfC: Party affiliation in BLP infoboxes

Survey (party affiliation in BLP infoboxes)

Discussion (party affiliation in BLP infoboxes)

Are semi-automated edits to improve MOS:CURLY compliance okay with the community?

There is no shortcut to user page

Directing new users to essays on the top of policy and guideline pages

MOS: prescriptive, descriptive, or both?

Recently deceased crime suspects

User:Larry Sanger/Nine Theses

RFC: Alphabetical listing of all Olympians

Previous discussions

Survey

Responses

Discussion

Discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard § Addition of abusefilter-modify-restricted right to EFMs

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography § Rewrite Subsequent Use last paragraph

Revival of Wikipedia:WikiProject Policies and Guidelines

Copyrights: links to non-open access articles

Content merged and later removed

Demote Wikipedia:WikiProject Economics/Reliable sources and weight to Wikiproject essay?

Propose that longstanding redirects made into articles be subject to draftification

Proposal to change WP:MOS

clarity on WP:GEOLAND

Policies need to state explicitly that texts about early Christianity (and other religions) must be NPOV and that the unproven beliefs of Christians (and other believers) must not be presented as fact.

Planned extirpation of ":: ... ::" signs in citation titles

Navigation menu

Search