We have both WP:MEDICAL/WP:RD/G/M which covers basically mainspace/Wikipedia space, but how do we go about users giving each other medical advice on user talk page, e.g. stuff like this? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:46, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

The disclaimer warns users not to believe stuff like this; it doesn't prohibit posting it. And obviously the Refdesk guidelines, if they apply anywhere, don't apply to talk pages. And nobody is going to spot this stuff often anyway. Best thing to do is stay out of it, unless there is a pattern that supports an allegation of commercial spam. Of course, nothing prohibits you from saying "don't believe any of this" on a talk page yourself. Wnt (talk) 21:55, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Maybe that disclaimer should be quoted in full, anytime an OP asks for medical advice. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:58, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Those two linked disclaimers are about articles and refdesk. You'd need something a little different. Maybe a big red flag saying something like "Warning: only listen to doctors about health issues, because everyone else might have a conflict of interest", posted on every talk page where someone offers health or medicine advice, would draw attention away from these dangerous discussions. Dicklyon (talk) 22:03, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

Speaking of which, Conflict of interest in the healthcare industry is barely more than a stub, and there's nothing in there about, e.g., overuse of tests that involve newly purchased expensive equipment, referrals to facilities owned by the prescribing physician or that pay kickbacks, or the ethical problems of recruiting patients into clinical trials run by the physician. There are other under-developed articles as well. For example, Thought leader unaccountably doesn't mention physicians targeted by pharmaceutical companies to promote high-priced drugs (e.g., in local medical association meetings), even though "you're a local thought leader" is the excuse that the targeted physicians are fed to explain why the pharma company is giving them so much personal attention. We are missing quite a lot of information about medical ethics. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:34, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Oh, and we need Conflicts of interest in dentistry. I had, but can no longer lay my hands on, an in-depth news source on the difficulties of getting dental care to poor American children. One of the problems? In some US states, it is illegal for a non-profit organization(!) to provide dental services unless the CEO/Executive Director is a licensed dentist. Why? Well, the dental association says that people get better care when the treatment recommendation is being made by someone whose mortgage payment depends upon upselling you on cosmetic procedures, rather than by a dentist on a fixed salary who can work full time with patients instead of spending most of his time running a business and fretting about making ends meet.

This source: Jordan, Mary (2017-07-01). "The unexpected political power of dentists". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. might also be useful for building such an article. The widespread practice of making (mostly female) dental hygienists in the US work only in dentists' offices (and frequently making them cobble together several part-time jobs around town, because no dentist wants to pay benefits like sick leave and health insurance when he could have five part-time hygienists instead of two full-time ones) and prohibiting them from doing things like sealing teeth is another sign of how COI in that industry isn't being managed appropriately. Basically, if anything happens to your teeth, the local business owner with a dental license expects to get a share of the profits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:16, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Just googling for the phrase medical advice gave me "WebMD does not provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment"[1]. Our own article says Medical advice is the provision of a formal professional opinion regarding what a specific individual should or should not do to restore or preserve health. It's not some random stranger on the Intertubes saying "Take lemon juice with hot water". I'd say the panic about possibly giving "medical advice" is mostly due to a cultural meme that does not reflect any real legal (or moral) problem. The disclaimer makes it clear that whatever you find on Wikipedia is not "medical advice" (in the legal sense) and should not be mistaken for it. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 22:09, 21 October 2017 (UTC)

• I checked to see if that link is being spammed and it isn't. I think that person was just being funny. Or maybe they thought they were being helpful. Or maybe it was a weird form of gravedancing... hard to say without understaning the interaction. But i don't think it is particularly something to be concerned about with respect to medical advice. Jytdog (talk) 22:23, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• My own POV (subject to change without warning, etc.): I think we should stay out of it. It's not hateful or vandalism or something obviously destructive like that, so if someone posted something like that on my talk page, then I would want you to let me handle it. I assume that if it were your talk page, then each of you would also want the right to respond, or not, in the way that you thought best. So I suggest leaving it alone. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:21, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• There is one bit of medical advice that is never wrong, and that we SHOULD give: “Consult a doctor”. Blueboar (talk) 02:09, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
  • At the ref desk, it has been generally agreed in past that the best phrasing is, "If you're concerned, consult a doctor." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:20, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• We can't regulate everything. If you get medical advice on a user talk page, don't follow it if it contradicts what your doctor says. If you do follow it anyway, maybe that's just Darwinian selection. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:06, 3 November 2017 (UTC)

• The dictionary definition (according to Google Define - based on the Oxford Dictionary):

notability
nəʊtəˈbɪlɪti/
noun
noun: notability

    the fact or quality of being notable.
    "the village enjoys a notability out of all relation to its size"
    synonyms:	noteworthiness, momentousness, memorability, impressiveness, extraordinariness;
    prominence, importance, significance, eminence;
    fame, publicity, renown, notoriety, stature, media attention/interest
    "the village has always enjoyed a notability out of all relation to its size"

dated
        a famous or important person.
        plural noun: notabilities
        "a Fleet Street notability"
        synonyms:	celebrity, public figure, important person, VIP, personality, personage, notable, dignitary, leading light, star, superstar, name,
        big name, famous name, household name; lion, worthy, grandee, luminary, panjandrum;
        informal: celeb, somebody, bigwig, big shot, big noise, big cheese, big gun, big fish, biggie, heavy, megastar;
        informal: nob;
        informal: kahuna, macher, high muckamuck, high muckety-muck
        "the enterprise enjoyed the patronage of notabilities and aristocrats"
        antonyms:	nonentity

• Our definition (simplest definition - WP:GNG):

"If a topic has received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject, it is presumed to be suitable for a stand-alone article or list."

• Issue: Any word we could use would cause a similar issue, as all words have a established meaning already, notability is sort of close to our usage, so nothing seems better.
• Possible Solution: Invent a new neologism specifically for this purpose. Or, change an existing word to show it is not being used with its normal use - example: Wikinotability, or Wikirelevance (adding Wiki to the word makes it clear we are using it for a specific purpose. Like how we are an encyclopedia called Wiki - pedia. showing how we are better than a normal encyclopedia. This could be taken further to: Wikiability, or Wikivance, these are clearly created to be diffrent, rather than just adding Wiki. We have alreaady done this with words such as 'Wikilinks'.

The only disadvantage is that people would need to read the policy to know what it means, so it would require editors to use more Wikilinks to allow easy reference, this could be solved by a template (like ((WPN)) which would subst: a wikilink in place without having to type it out in full.

Dysklyver 08:31, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Discuss

• Oppose any change, obviously; as clear a solution to a non-existent problem as ever I've seen. The actual definition of "notability" used at WP:N (worthy of notice) tallies with the actual definition in the OED as opposed to "Google Define - based on the Oxford Dictionary" (Noteworthiness, distinction, prominence; an instance of this). There are justifiable discussions to be had over some of the terminology used by Wikipedia, such as "reliable", but "notability" is clearly the best word to use to describe "de we consider something notable?". ‑ Iridescent 08:58, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I assume you are aware that the notability policy is stated as being the requirement for sources, rather than the subject being 'worthy of notice', for example: My granddad was a highly prominent judge, community leader of distinction etc, definitely 'worthy of notice', yet there are no surviving reliable sources that mention him at all. According to your definition, he would pass WP:N.

My argument is primarily based on WP:WHYN, which is relevant reading and explains how the WP:N policy is based on WP:V, the requirement for WP:N does not include the requirement for something to be notable (which is an exact synonym of 'eminence & fame'). This is a separate consensus often used at the same time.

Your assertion here is based primarily on a relented consensus based on WP:NOT (don't include everything that is verifiable as Wikipedia is not a indiscriminate collection of information), this is not part of the notability guideline itself, although it could become so given it's widespread use.

Your comment only reinforces the point that the notability guideline is often confused with the actual definition, and that it needs to be dealt with, I would not put this forward if it were a non-issue. Obviously you can easily understand the guidelines, as most people posting on this board do, but this is not clear to newcomers. Dysklyver 09:31, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

WHYN is not part of the guideline as such.  Historically, people had the idea to make WP:N a content guideline, but the idea doesn't work.  The idea is circular reasoning, that a topic is notable if there is an article for it on Wikipedia.  The idea also competes with our core content policies, including DEL7 within deletion policy.  Unscintillating (talk) 10:46, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

How is WHYN not part of the guideline? It certainly is part of the guideline, since it is included in the guideline page, and is there by consensus. There is nothing on that page that says - "this is not part of the guideline" or "this is only FYi". This is the kind of stuff that confuses new Wikipedians, not the word "notability". --Steve Quinn (talk) 02:59, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose, I don't see how/why another word, or a neologism would be clearer than a particular reading of an existing term. I know there is sometimes confusion when something is borderline notable, but I don't believe this would help, since the 'confusion' is often caused by editors preferring their own definition to WP's. Pincrete (talk) 11:45, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• see [2]. Dysklyver 13:08, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. Attempts to rename "notability" basically are perennial proposals that have never gone through because of how ingrained the term is here. --MASEM (t) 13:13, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• Do I wish we had come up with a different title back when we created the guideline... yup. WP:Notedness (for example) would have more accurately described the concept that we were trying to express - that a topic needs to have been already noted by sources, as opposed to the topic being "worthy of notice"). However, that is water long under the bridge. It is too late to change the title now. A rename would cause more confusion than it would resolve. Blueboar (talk) 13:57, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I suggest seppuku.^[FBDB] EEng 22:06, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Dying for change....ClubOranje^T 01:09, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - are you all blind? this is fooling new Wikipedians, I was fooled until recently. Suggestion, change to "Sourceability" - ZLEA ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 20:08, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• I'm blatantly canvassing for contributions to my stub essay WP:Noted not notable. EEng 22:44, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• Noted is still "crap", its literally meaning is well known; famous. noted define, I prefer basic Wiki-Notability. Dysklyver 22:48, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
• "Wikinotability" might work.  I tried using lower case "wp:notability" for a while, but more recently I've been using "Wikipedia notability".  That would be another proposal to rename the guideline, too, WP:Wikipedia notability.  Unscintillating (talk) 10:59, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
• We could spell it backwards, ytilibaton (ybaton for short), and maybe then every sportsperson who walks onto a professional field will have to do just a little more to earn their ytilibaton. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:03, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
  • On a side note, sports-specific guidelines for league-based sports do not presume that all professional players meet English Wikipedia's standards for having an article. Only players from specific leagues (either by name or by their level of competition) qualify for this presumption. Additionally, sports-specific guidelines explicitly defer to the general notability guideline, and so the existence of an article can be challenged on the basis that the general notability guideline is not met. Admittedly it is a difficult matter to prove, given English Wikipedia's lack of a deadline to complete articles. isaacl (talk) 03:30, 5 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - Notability is already part of the culture and seems adequate. —PaleoNeonate – 02:00, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - I agree that "notability" serves our purpose. A change to a neologism is a good idea, but it is no better than "notability". Too bad this idea for a neologism didn't win the day when the content policies and WP:N were morphing and flexing many years ago. "Notability" is ingrained in our culture. If in practice we were drifting away from what we do now then this would be grounds for a change.

And has been pointed out, "notability" is no better or worse than any other word - because they all have common definitions. New Wikipedians should not have a problem with this if they take the time to read WP:N all the way through and even study it for more than five minutes, and click on some of the wikilinks there. And I like the fact that we are in agreement with the OED definition. Steve Quinn (talk) 02:38, 3 October 2017 (UTC)

• As coincidence may have, I just received a query on my talk page asking if a topic was now "noticeable enough" and had "significant attention" to have the article restored I deleted a while ago. That plus comments I regularly see at AfD indicate that "notability" may indeed be ambiguous enough for people less familiar to mistake it for "famous" or the like (fame often implies to coverage by non-reliable sources, so it isn't exactly synonymous). I don't know is "sourceable" is necessarily better though. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 15:03, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose - A lot is going on right now in terms of policy change discussions here, this shouldn't take priority. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 15:17, 3 October 2017 (UTC)
• Comment The OED definition of "notable" has been mentioned above "Worthy of attention or notice; remarkable." [3]. Dictionary.com defines "notable" as:

1. "worthy of note or notice; noteworthy"
2. "prominent, important, or distinguished"
3. "a prominent, distinguished, or important person"

[4]

It seems to me this is what we strive for while editing on Wikipedia. It does not seem to be a mistake that "notability" was selected. ---Steve Quinn (talk) 04:06, 4 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support - "Inclusion criteria" would be a much better way of describing what we currently call notability. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 00:02, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

  @Ajraddatz: being notable isn't our only "inclusion criteria" (e.g. WP:V is also an inclusion criterion), perhaps something else? — xaosflux ^Talk 00:36, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

  It might make sense then to merge the two into a page entitled "inclusion criteria", i.e. to meet a certain standard of importance and to have reliable sources confirming that standard. Now, I have no expectation of the community wanting this to happen. But "notability" is one of those words we love to use here (along with "need" at RfXs, as if anyone needed any advanced permissions) that I don't think accurately reflects to the public what we want it to. When we say the subject of an article should be notable, we mean that the subject should meet a certain guideline of importance that we have established in order to be included. Notability as an idea is heavily subjective, and using a word or phrase that better reflects the fact that we have established a guideline by consensus would seem ideal to me. -- Ajraddatz (talk) 05:03, 11 October 2017 (UTC)

  How about "Importance" - sort of the same problem as notability, it is not easily "measured" though. — xaosflux ^Talk 02:35, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

  Xaosflux, this feels like the appropriate spot to insert my standard complaint that people misunderstand that the GNG is not about importance, it is about verifiability (WP:V). The SNGs are about importance (WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE), and any real notability reform will be in a direction that leads us towards a more robust system of subject-specific criteria that help us determine notability/importance, with the GNG serving really as a test of WP:V. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:00, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose I understand the intent behind this proposal. There are frequent conversations where editors have to explain the difference between wiki notions of notability and wider understanding of that term. That said, wiki-notability is merely a subset of general notability with a tighter and (slightly) more-objective definition. This is a common feature of the English language and creating a neologism to bridge the gap won't solve it. We'll still be explaining what "Wikiability" or whatever means to others. Eggishorn (talk) (contrib) 02:53, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose pointless as of now because we are still working out the tensions within WP:N between the GNG and the SNGs. Until we have a system like I described in my reply to Xaosflux above, the notability guideline will continue to be in tension with itself because it is a guideline trying to explain how we apply two independent policies. Notability is a trade term within Wikipedia, and there is no need to change it until we further refine our guidelines for inclusion. TonyBallioni (talk) 03:00, 14 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. If it ain't broke... -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:30, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. It took a long time to arrive at "notability" and a WP contextual definition of it, and it's working well enough for our purposes. Its ingrained into WP lingo and process today, and changing it would start way more fires than doing so would put out. See Wikipedia:Notability/Historical (which I compiled; you're welcome. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:21, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Its amazing how many "notable" people for whom there are Wikipedia pages apparently don't care for having their picture taken given how many "BLP" articles exist without a single "image" of the "notable" subject. Then again, it's interesting how many articles are lousy with images to the point where they make infomercials look "encyclopedic" too. Equally amazing is how a "non-notable" subject is important enough to justify anywhere from paragraphs to pages of arguments against the "notability" of that subject. Kinda hard to understand how so many exalted encyclopedia-building editors consider themselves the authorities on "notability" but need to spend vast amounts of time telling "noobs" why the subject of their new article isn't "notable" to them. Of course those exalted "editors" rarely EDIT anything. They'd be more accurately referred to as "deleters" or maybe "censors". — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.234.100.169 (talk) 09:29, 23 October 2017‎ (UTC)

  See Wikipedia:Non-free content criteria policy. That lack of images is because they have to be available under a open, free-use license, which the vast majority of celebrity and politician and whatever images are not. Basically, someone who is a Wikipedian needs to take one, or someone who isn't has to release one they've taken, under a very permissive license (which often happens at Flickr, thus the large number of Flickr-sourced images here).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  16:26, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

• moral support I really want to change away from the word "Notability", but until we get a better word, there is no point. Hobit (talk) 02:07, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/RfC: Should the Reference Desks be closed

 – Hi everybody. Because this discussion has become so lengthy (300,000+ bytes), I have moved it to a subpage of the village pump so that the village pump is more accessible. I apologize if any confusion has been caused by this. Mz7 (talk) 00:39, 8 November 2017 (UTC)

Based on the advice given above by Jayron32, I am refining my proposal for WP:NOTNEWS. My proposal again reflects on this sentence: For example, routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities is not a sufficient basis for inclusion in the encyclopedia. Too many editors seem to believe this brief listing is exhaustive when, in reality, it is not. Of course, if it was it would read like "This applies only to...". I recommend adding the sentence This list is not exhaustive so there is no confusion, at least over that issue with the policy. I do not see why this call for clarification would be opposed but I've seen more surprising things from parts of the community.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 00:30, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. Unnecessary. "For example" does the job. I respectfully disagree with the assertion that there are scads of editors out there trying to write about routine news events like christenings and Sewer Board meetings because they don't understand what "for example" means and it has to be explained to them. What I do see are significant news events minimized by editors who take an extreme view of NOTNEWS. Coretheapple (talk) 13:15, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• It would be helpful to point to examples where events were kept that would have fallen under this, where editors arguing to keep said 'This event is not the type listed in NOTNEWS therefore NOTNEWS does not apply" to know if this is a severe problem. --MASEM (t) 13:18, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• I could suggest that we tweak the rule to address abuse of NOTNEWS, but I won't, That's because there is no consensus to change this rule. We had an RfC above and a straw vote at Village Pump, both of which reached that same conclusion. Time to let this rest a while rather than keep trying to nibble at it. Coretheapple (talk) 13:33, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support Clearly more clarity is needed, since people believe the list to be both exhaustive and final. If it isn't, we need to explicitly tell them that. --Jayron32 15:57, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

i've seen that asserted. Where is the evidence that editors view that as an exhaustive list? If this is not a real problem then we have a WP:CREEP issue. Coretheapple (talk) 16:46, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Coretheapple clarifying a policy isn't WP:CREEP. I can find many more instances but here is a recent example of an editor of 11 years asserting NOTNEWS doesn't apply to crimes because it isn't one of the examples provided.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:13, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Sorry but I'm not seeing Shrike making that assertion. (Pinging, so they can correct me if I'm wrong.) They said " WP:NOTNEWS doesn't apply "its not routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities" . They're saying it's not routine, not that it's not one of the examples listed. And yes, CREEP does apply to so-called clarifications of policy. Coretheapple (talk) 17:20, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Seriously Coretheapple? He quoted (incorrectly, I might add) that part of NOTNEWS to say crime wasn't one of the items listed. What possible harm can you reasonably find from adding this small sentence for "so-called" clarity? You are just fighting a small change for absolutely no rationale reason.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:34, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

A segment from CREEP: "WP:CREEP" is not a substitute for actual arguments. Instruction can be helpful, even if long – when clearly and accurately representing community consensus. Hmm, so how does it apply again?TheGracefulSlick (talk) 17:41, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

I think you're totally misinterpreting Shrike's comment in a very unfair way---but hey, if they think you're being fair and correct it's a different story. As for CREEP, it seems to me that assuming that people don't know what "for example" means, on the basis of such slim evidence, is the epitome of instruction creep. Coretheapple (talk) 18:02, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• I have read User:Shrike's comment and I do think that GrecefulSlick is misrepresenting it.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose To me, "its not routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities" seems like a perfectly clear statement; attempting to list all types of "routine" news would be futile and might, as editors have argued above, lead to more problems than it solves; and, I see no evidence that NOTNEWS is being misunderstood. What I do see is is a sort of WP:FORUMSHOP by TheGracefulSlick. Abut 6 months ago, GracefulSlick began a campaign to delete pages that she regards as non-notable terrorist attacks. Some were deleted, others were kept, still others closed as "no consensus." She rapidly brought some kept and "no consensus" pages to AfD for a second go, started discussions on the talk pages of pages that closed as no consensus to merge to lists, and filed ANI complaints on editors who opposed her deletions of terrorist attacks (including me). I suggest that we give it a rest, on the grounds that there is no community consensus on what is, in essence, a difference of opinion about the notability of low casualty terrorist attacks.E.M.Gregory (talk) 20:45, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

• Where to start with this comment? First off, "its not routine news reporting on things like announcements, sports, or celebrities" isn't even how the sentence is read in NOTNEWS. As I mentioned quite clearly in my opening statement, this proposal is not trying to list anything but rather take the advice that was given to me by a neutral admin from the previous thread; I revised my proposal thanks to a community discussion. Yes, I nominated articles for deletion but with thorough nom statements reflecting entirely on notability guidelines. Most of the 2nd nominations were months or even years after the originals so editors could reflect on any long-term impact. One, I admitted already was a bad nomination and I think it would be unfair to still hold it against me. Also true, I did start an ANI thread on you and you were warned about your behavior at AFDs. I sincerely apologize, but I do not think your !vote here was done in good-faith, considering you could not even be bothered with quoting the sentence correctly; then you felt compelled to bring a misrepresented take of my editing history into the conversation which could taint the discussion on a simple clarity statement for NOTNEWS.TheGracefulSlick (talk) 01:57, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

• Support per Jayron and nominator. I can easily see how some might complain based on an improperly exclusive reading of the list. CREEP is not a concern for me here. The proposal entails just a few words, and not everyone has English as a mother tongue. And CREEP is not a substituted for a grounded argument for opposing, as per WP:CREEP. (P.S. if E.M. Gregory is even a tiny bit right about TheGracefulSlick's motives, I would TROUT them for that, but still support this minor addition of extra clarification. It's nice when guidelines are clear and admit less bickering. ). SemanticMantis (talk) 21:51, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support My suggestion would be to add this new note as a note/reference rather than in the main text. Shouldn't be such an issue. Lourdes 02:51, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose for the same general reasons as before. This is especially true if the proposal is somehow related to an attempt to delete "minor" terrorist attacks. A terrorist attack by nature is notable -- it can scarcely induce terror without being known to sufficient reliable sources to be worth having an article about. Wnt (talk) 23:08, 25 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support, with strong caveats Notwithstanding the fact that GracefulSlick's comments end with non-neutral analysis and an unnecesary pre-emptory broadside at anybody who is about to disagree with them, neither of which is appropriate to an RfC opening, the actual substantive suggestion is a reasonable one, it seems to me. That said, I'd propose that if we are going to go out of our way to point out that the list is not-exhuastive, we should also take pains to note that the class is also not an open one. The backstory here about GracefulSlick's perspective on this (whether true or not) underscores the uncountable number of issues that can arise from people wanting to keep significant events off the project just because they are recent. Most all terrorist attacks (to take the present example, though there are countless other areas that apply) are going to qualify under our notability guidelines and WP:NOTNEWS should never work at cross purposes to WP:N, but rather inform upon it in a way that is not conclusive in itself. The list "announcements, sports, and celebrity" may not be the only areas we are concerned about, but they do have a common character which is the meaning we need to preserve here: they are all routine, and thus can be expected to be the focus of media designed to promulgate them, whether they are particularly noteworthy or not--and this needs to be taken into account when considering the weight we give to sources in judging notability. This will not be the case in the majority of instances where WP:NOTNEWS is invoked, I suspect. Snow ^{let's rap} 08:42, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

This may be the way to go, as a change to the wording that clarified what we consider "routine" without expanding it may be acceptable to all sides.

Adding "This list is not exhaustive" as suggested above won't help much; what we need are some more-or-less objective inclusion criteria for what is likely "routine" and what is "suitable for inclusion", encoded in the guideline as guidance. I'd point here to the relevant essays WP:MILL ("do not rely on news which are reported merely to fill a placeholder") and WP:SNOWFLAKE ("do report on what is unique to each routine news coverage, if the sources highlight something as remarkable about that item or event"). These opposing essays illustrate the tension inherent in the choice, and can provide some ideas on how to tweak WP:NOTNEWS to make it easier to follow, without changing its scope. Diego (talk) 09:44, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

• Note that a parallel discussion is underway at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not#Terrorism and WP:NOTNEWS.E.M.Gregory (talk) 14:23, 29 October 2017 (UTC)
• Support because it is demonstrably true that "for example" is not doing the job.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  17:15, 1 November 2017 (UTC)
• Support - for extra clarity. I should add, although, that I don't think that there is much of a problem with stuff like this as is, because most problems like this are covered by WP:SIGCOV. RileyBugz^会話_投稿記録 22:07, 4 November 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose Beyond My Ken (talk) 01:14, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

Context: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Qatar–San Marino relations and Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Canada-Cambodia Relations

I don't believe there's a clear guideline as for when articles on bi-lateral relations between countries should exist. I do feel that one is necessary.

The exchanging of ambassadors is a good starting point, as its presence or absence should not be controversial. While it clearly isn't a requirement for relations to be notable (Iran–Israel relations, for example), it generally is correlated with significant relations between countries.

This leads to several possible outcomes, at a minimum:

1. All country-pairs should have a bi-lateral relations page. Having an ambassador isn't at all relevant.
2. All country-pairs that partially exchange ambassadors (for example, one country has a resident ambassador and the other does not) should have a bi-lateral relations page.
3. All country-pairs that exchange ambassadors should have a bi-lateral relations page.
4. Some country-pairs that exchange ambassadors should have a bi-lateral relations page.
5. Some country-pairs should have a bi-lateral relations page, but the presence or absence of ambassadors isn't a useful test; other factors (such as a long-standing history or significant bi-lateral trade) are more relevant.

Thoughts? power~enwiki (π, ν) 17:58, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

FWIW, Several years ago I took a stab at a guideline here. Yilloslime ^T_C 18:25, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

Option 6: Any country-pair that can be reliably sourced as the subject of significant reliable source coverage about the relationship. Diplomatic relationships don't necessarily require an exchange of ambassadors to be notable (as you note, Israel-Iran is a clearly notable topic regardless of their lack of an ambassadorial relationship), but the exchange of ambassadors also can't be an automatic inclusion freebie that exempts the topic from actually having to be sourced to much more than just a primary source press release from the diplomatic corps itself.

Far too many of these pages get created as boilerplate placeholders which say little more than "Canada-Cambodia relations are a diplomatic relationship that exists, the end", which isn't a useful article at all. And even if something more substantial can be written and sourced about Canada-Cambodia relations, it's not necessary to keep the boilerplate page as the base from which to start it — there's so little substance to the existing version that starting over from scratch does not represent any significant increase in the workload involved in redoing it right.

There's no value in comprehensively boilerplating tens of thousands of placeholder articles about every possible combination of two countries, if all the editor can be arsed to actually do is write a stub which just says that the diplomatic relationship exists — if a person really cares about the topic enough to want to start the article, then by definition they should care enough about the topic to put enough work into the article to make it worth existing. Bearcat (talk) 18:30, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

• • There's something like 200 sovereign nations on Earth, so if we're going to have an article for every possible permutation, that would be almost 20,000 articles. Most of which will not be notable. I think we can all agree that this is excessive stamp collecting. The metric is as it's always been: showing enough independent, significant coverage to demonstrate notability. Reyk _YO! 19:00, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• I think the standard has to remain GNG. Either journalists and academics are writing about these relationships enough to pass GNG or the bilateral relationship isn't going to have enough material upon which for us to write. Chris Troutman (talk) 19:58, 22 October 2017 (UTC)
• Stick with the GNG, plus the tendency of editors to be slow to create boring articles (especially if they actually have to look up some sources for them). If we get 20,000 articles -- great! But we won't, at least not until we're at tens of millions overall. Wnt (talk) 21:17, 22 October 2017 (UTC)

The problem with "just use GNG" is that, in practice, it's not at all clear when coverage counts. Do WP:MILL coverage in newspapers of attending multi-national events count? power~enwiki (π, ν) 00:10, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

@Power~enwiki: I'll admit, when I look at the picture of the cookie-cutter homes in WP:MILL and read the legend, my gut reaction is "but wouldn't it be cool if we did?" However, in this case, I don't think that principle applies at all. I hope no one would argue that there is such a thing as a "run-of-the-mill war" -- every war deserves a separate article. They are all different. But the exact same thing is true of peace. Countries don't just stay at peace because nothing happens; they have to work at it, figure out ways to settle their differences over fugitives, border surveys, maritime collisions, radio spectrum, a hundred thousand different little things. And so you have to ask, what is the framework they do this in? To say that peaceful relations aren't notable is to impose an unhealthy and all too common bias for conflict over peace. Wnt (talk) 20:25, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

•  #2 is the most practical, because if there is even one embassy, there is always something to say in an article.  Requiring GNG is setting us up for voluminous meaningless AfDs, and potentially a resulting crosspatch of country pairs that do and don't have articles.  This is also a special case because the normal concepts for redirecting non-notable topics to a larger topic don't work well.  There is another subtle issue here that complicates AfD, that in terms of our concepts of secondary and independent, a press release or article from a government is not the same as a press release from a private company.  Unscintillating (talk) 02:18, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

I definitely agree with Bearcat's comments above. There is no need to define relations solely by the exchange of ambassadors, although it is likely a representative factor. What is important is to include information that supports the fact that there is a relationship between these two countries/states/entities. Examples issues to include would be:

• Treaties, pacts and international agreements (eg. information sharing agreements, tax treaties, resource extraction, defence sharing)
• Unresolved issues and negotiations to resolve conflicts/disagreements
• Significant economic relationships (major foreign investments, high degrees of financial dependence or remittance funds)
• Significant movements of people for labor exchanges, tourism, medical treatments, markets, refugees, etc
• Any shared infrastructure, resources, language, culture or activities that are discussed at an official level
• Recent military conflicts, support for internal unrest, or sponsored terrorism
• Exchanges of official representation
• Coverage of significant popular opinion on the relationship

There may be many more factors, but what is important is to demonstrate that there is a relationship and that it is not just an insignificant one. Loopy30 (talk) 17:33, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

This is an excellent summary of the kinds of issues that would represent useful and relevant content for the purposes of establishing a bilateral diplomatic relationship as notable enough to warrant a standalone article. I have little more to add but to endorse Loopy's comment. Oh, except to point out that one example of unresolved issues and negotiations would be a direct boundary dispute. Bearcat (talk) 17:41, 24 October 2017 (UTC)

Bearcat, I agree with you. This is a good list not just of whether an article should exist, but also what you should consider including in one. Also, this isn't the first time we've had a conversation on this precise question. Would you and Loopy30 please consider writing this down somewhere, before bilateral relations articles end up on the list of WP:Perennial proposals? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 9 November 2017 (UTC)

• Endorse Option # 5.) "Some country-pairs should have a bi-lateral relations page, but the presence or absence of ambassadors isn't a useful test; other factors (such as a long-standing history or significant bi-lateral trade) are more relevant." Basically, a WP:SIGCOV standard. Although I haven't been active in this area lately, a year or two ago I waded into a number of these pages, attempted to source some unsourced ones, and can clearly see the absurdity of having articles on bilateral diplomatic relations between Ruritania and Spensonia.E.M.Gregory (talk) 21:07, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• I never did figure out what is wrong with having the 20,000 articles mentioned above; I still believe in the value of the policy, NOT PAPER. These are articles all of which have the opportunity to grow, and to which beginners can make useful contributions. Most often the apparent difficulty in finding sources is just cultural bias, and to the extent that we succeed in our basic goal of increasing the range of editors at Wikipedia, more and more they will be more adequately sourceable. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DGG (talk • contribs)
  • Based on this discussion, I think a proposal to create all these pages (via bot) would likely pass. power~enwiki (π, ν) 00:10, 30 October 2017 (UTC)
  • What's wrong with it is that you get a bunch of articles saying routine, boilerplate things that nobody is going to bother keeping track of, and therefore nobody should trust. And that level, WP is paper: it still has to be kept track of. We don't need 19,000 articles saying that countries A and B do or do not exchange ambassadors and have basic extradition and trade treaties. Mangoe (talk) 01:43, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

• And such nonsense articles are also totally misleading because enthusiasts stuff them with Google hits so anyone viewing the article would think the two countries must be very close partners. If secondary sources have written about the significance (WP:N) of the bilateral relations, an article could be produced with some confidence that the so-called relations aren't merely routine. Johnuniq (talk) 02:11, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

What's wrong with that is that Wikipedia's primary goal is quality, not quantity. 20,000 good articles about bilateral diplomatic relations between countries, that are well-referenced and substantive and informative? Sure, absolutely, bring 'em on. But 20,000 boilerplate articles about bilateral diplomatic relations between countries, which just state that such relations exist, the end? What could possibly be the point of, or the value in, that? Bearcat (talk) 18:40, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

• comment I don't think the problem here is that we need a new or different standard for notability for these articles--if you put it to a !vote I'm pretty confident that consensus would favor using WP:GNG. The problem is interpretting GNG. What is the topic of these articles, really? What is significant coverage of this topic? How many sources are required? Some folks seem to think that any newspaper article mentioning two countries in the same sentence constitutes significant coverage of their relations. Other would say no. This is where direction needed, and a guideline or policy could help. Yilloslime ^T_C 04:02, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
• @Reyk: 39,800, but who's counting. I already got dibs on Kyrgyzstan–Paraguay, so don't anybody touch that one; there's 39,799 other ones for y'all. Mathglot (talk) 04:50, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
  • That's twice as many because presumably Kyrgyzstan-Paraguay would be the same article as Paraguay-Kyrgysztan. Reyk _YO! 04:55, 2 November 2017 (UTC)
    • Reyk, You're right, doh... Who knew that bilateral relations were commutative? Back to 7th grade with me! (Then again, one wonders if the Paraguayan embassy in Bishkek and the Krygyz embassy in Asunción really see things the same way...) Mathglot (talk) 21:12, 7 November 2017 (UTC)
• Comment Does anyone have a list of, say, the 1,000 most important bilateral relationships? It might be possible to extract from UN data, or their might be a international scholarship study somewhere. Those could then be prioritized, even if they're not necessarily the only ones that are notable. Also, for some of the smaller states, we might consider more merges of articles, like "county-region" relations articles.--Pharos (talk) 18:29, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
• The problem with relying on significant coverage is that few Western media provide adequate coverage of places such as Sub-Saharan Africa. Do this simple experiment: pick a country in that part of the world, & try to remember the last news report about its foreign policy. I can attest from experience writing articles on Ethiopia that many provably notable bilateral relationships would fail that test if applied too rigorously. An approach similar to what Loopy30 proposed above would accommodate the issue of significant coverage. -- llywrch (talk) 21:42, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

We're not limited to sourcing such stuff solely to news reports, or to Western media. There are also specialist journals on international diplomacy; there are actual media in Sub-Saharan Africa; there's Al-Jazeera; there are academic books on African politics and diplomacy; there are biographies of African diplomats and politicians; and on and so forth. It is in fact very likely possible to properly source a good article about every diplomatic relationship that exists on earth — the issue isn't really whether some countries might get left out, because there are always sources we can draw on to write a good one if somebody actually puts in the effort to look beyond just the big Western media behemoths. Whether there's any value in boilerplating a bad article just so that there's something in place, despite the lack of any discernible effort into making that something any good, is a different question. Bearcat (talk) 19:07, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

• Power, there was a lot of discussion (

and AfDs) about this in 2009. See Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Bilateral international relations and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject International relations/Bilateral relations task force, also see the suggested guidelines at Wikipedia:WikiProject International relations#Bilateral relations. Fences&Windows 10:57, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Indeed that is quite the history! I guess those of us that never learned this, are doomed to repeat it... Thanks for providing these links to the WP:BILATERAL project. Loopy30 (talk) 12:46, 14 November 2017 (UTC)

Over the past decade the guidelines on what constitutes an orphan article have been shifting - at least in some places. It used to be that an orphaned article had less than three incoming links from other articles (note, an orphan is a person who has lost one, or both parents). Initially disambiguations (set index articles did not exist then?) and lists did not count.

The following changes at least have since taken place:

• September 2009 This change recommends adding orphan tags, only if there are no incoming links. The removal of phrase "less than three" was again by User:OlEnglish here, at 06:20, 11 October 2011. This seems to have been a BOLD move, but based on the idea that by redefining the problem we could make it go away (dealing with backlogs by ignoring them is not a solution in my opinion).
• Now also disambiguations, set index articles and lists are considered sufficient incoming links.
  • As far as I am aware as per this current criteria disambiguation pages do not count. Eno Lirpa (talk) 12:20, 18 October 2017 (UTC)
• Other places have gradually been edited to conform with these changes, but there are still places that do not - for example New Page Patrol.
• WP:AWB has been changed to conform with the prevailing wisdom, which has changed over the years.
• We also do not deal with (and never have, really) "walled gardens".
• ((Orphan)) has become a "mostly invisible" tag.

Personally I think a more sophisticated method of monitoring incoming links might be appropriate these days, and as I said in 2010 " there is no intrinsic reason that some page should not be validly an orphan, and indeed many pages are only linked to from one or more lists." [Even so it was in 2017 trivial to create two new incoming links for Methuen Water Works, in that era claimed as non-de-orphanable.]

Given that the idea of de-orphaning was to "build the web", not to make sure that each page was reachable from every other, be it by means ever so circuitous, what do the panel think we should do in the future?

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 22:13, 16 October 2017 (UTC).

• If I had my way the ((orphan)) tag and everything associated with it would be deprecated completely. The people who take it upon themselves to tag articles as orphans appear unable to grasp the concept that because something is a niche topic and doesn't have many incoming links, doesn't mean either that it's not notable nor that the lack of incoming links is some kind of problem that needs to be fixed; "build the web" doesn't mean it has to be possible to navigate from every page to every other page, even if they're on completely unrelated topics, purely by clicking wikilinks. (Something with no incoming or outgoing links, on the other hand, is a problem.) Wikipedia does have many issues, but "it's difficult to get from 626 Notburga to Selina Rushbrook purely by following links" shouldn't be considered one of them. ‑ Iridescent 22:29, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• I agree with Iridescent. The mindless tagging and untagging takes more effort than just going in and adding links where they are appropriate, and it takes away from the pages that might truly be orphaned yet fixable. And as Iridescent said, not everything is going to be linked to a ton of pages and not everything needs to be either. Nihlus 22:54, 16 October 2017 (UTC)
• As one of the people working at the Feb 09 orphan category, I disagree that the orphan tag is useless or unhelpful. Building the web isn't just for the sake of being able to get to every page from every other page - the intent behind building the web is to increase the amount of information available to the reader. I have found plenty of instances where investigating why something is tagged as orphaned has helped me improve Wikipedia. I apologize for not having diffs at the ready, as these are observations made over several months of de-orphaning work and it would be quite an effort to go back through thousands of contribs looking for specific examples.

Off the top of my head: I have found plenty of orphans that have actually turned out to be duplicates of better-linked articles; merge and redirection improves the main article and reduces confusion for readers. Many orphans are drill-down topics that would be appropriate to mention in parent articles but have not been for whatever reason, adding that information to the parent article (and linking the child) enriches it. I have expanded plenty of list articles with orphans, increasing the accuracy and utility of those lists. Many species and/or genus articles are orphans, which has prompted me to research and create taxonomy articles to fill the gaps. And finally, many are just plain useful articles that someone tried to link to but some error (typo or formatting difference causing redlink, newbie failure to wikilink, etc etc) caused the link not to work. (There are also plenty of articles in the backlog that need deleting because of promotional issues, lack of notability, and even ancient copyvios, so if tagging something as an orphan gets extra eyes on articles when they're far out of the NPP queue, I'm in favor of that).

All that being said, I think that one incoming link suffices to make something not an orphan. There's no sense demanding that everything be linked from a bunch of places; some things are really only related to one parent topic and that's okay. An orphan should be any page which has no incoming links from mainspace. Any single link from mainspace, be it lists, indexes, navboxes, "see also" sections, etc (with the exception of disambiguation pages) should be enough for us to accept that a page is not an orphan. I would support the deprecation of the "low-linked" articles categories if we confirm the one-article de-orphan criteria, since that would be redundant. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 00:07, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

• My only thoughts here are that if it is at all humanly possible, I would love it if AWB did not put articles in the "tag as orphan" workflow until 8 days after creation. Quite literally the practice I hate most on all of Wikipedia is when people who just got AWB practice how to use it by tagbombing articles with speedy deletion tags on them as orphans that need more categories. Putting an 8 day hold on the AWB part of this would help prevent tagbombing of new articles and stop watchlists from being clutted by useless edits that are going to be deleted within a few hours to a week. TonyBallioni (talk) 00:17, 17 October 2017 (UTC)

• I feel the orphan tag serves an important purpose, yes there are some cases where there isn't going to be much to link too, but more often than not, I think that there is. Even more important than that. it gets people of thinking of ways that page could be incorporated into other articles, and investigating if there are options available. The tag should not be looked up as a badge of shame, but as a way by which many by many editors can help make the jigsaw puzzle of Wikipedia work. --Deathawk (talk) 05:51, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
• support single link de-orphan criteria, (excluding redirects); not every topic has a lot that can link to it. Also support TonyBallioni's suggestion of a stand down period for new creations. What we need is other criteria to de-tag the >130k articles tagged orphan; perhaps after a certain period at least 1 (2, 3?) outgoing links is enough to auto de-tag it. ClubOranje^T 12:07, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I take great pleasure in having never touched AWB, but I'm assuming this is something we can build into its default recommendations? I'd support a 8 day moratorium on AWB tagging any article because I don't think I've ever seen de facto NPP done well using AWB, but I'd settle for a delay on the orphan template as it is the one that is most frequently spammed by new AWB users. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:40, 17 October 2017 (UTC)
    • I think that a delay for both orphan and nocat would be appropriate. Whether or not the ideal delay is eight days is something that people would have to consider, but I am convinced that a delay would be helpful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:21, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
      • I'm not sure about nocat, as our catters use that find pages to cat, which they usually do very quickly. For Orphan there is a significant backlog, so a default delay might be a good idea - but I am not wholly convinced, especially given that the tag becomes invisible very quickly. I doubt (despite my comments above) that there are a significant number of pages where at least one incoming link cannot be created. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC).
        
      • WhatamIdoing my reasoning for 8 days is because by that time most of the articles that are CSDable or the obvious AfD candidates are gone. Adding orphan tags to these articles serves absolutely no purpose other than to clutter watchlists IMO. The nocat I'd suggest a 24 hour delay: even some very experienced editors create articles without cats then add them after creation. Getting an AWB tag on it while you are going through hotcat yourself can be very annoying for many people. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
    • I don't think NPP is done with AWB? Calling tags "spam" and conflating speedy with orphan is - well I would just say "wrong". All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 13:28, 19 October 2017 (UTC).
      
      • You are correct that NPP should not be done with AWB, but unfortunately tagbombing of new pages is often done with it. I never claimed that all orphans were CSD candidates. I was saying that as one of the more active people at NPP it is very common to see pointless orphan tags being placed on pages tagged for speedy deletion cluttering watchlists and this is most frequently done by new users that are just getting used to AWB. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:39, 19 October 2017 (UTC)
        • I don't see how speedy deletion pages are going to be on many people's watchlists - if you are saying this is a difficulty for you as a NPP who has watchlisted the articles when CSDing them, perhaps we should be getting the orphan tag applied before the CSD tag - 8 days later is not going to cut it in these cases. I also think that finding incoming links for CSDs would tend to mitigate against speedy deletion in cases where it isn't justified.
        • All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 20:50, 19 October 2017 (UTC).
          

Comment You may read User:Magioladitis/AWB and orphans for a full report of which pages are excluded by AWB. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:16, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

Thank you Magioladitis, that is very helpful. Would there be a way to get AWB to delay the tagging until a certain amount of time after article creation? TonyBallioni (talk) 13:20, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

TonyBallioni I have a similar open Phabricator task: T127173 which can be modified to much that demand. Till now we had no problems with that because we had a bot for both tagging and untagging and it was running also daily. -- Magioladitis (talk) 13:27, 20 October 2017 (UTC)

• Deprecate visible templates (or move to talk pages and use code to enforce their placement there – throw an error if used in mainspace); retain invisible maintenance categories, since these are useful for finding under-linked articles and working them into our "web".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  01:29, 21 October 2017 (UTC)
• Retain one link discounts an orphan tag, there are already 140,000 orphans (many wrongly tagged ). Increasing orphans to 3 links would at least double the list and disillusion those who are deorphaning, considerably slowing down the clean up rate. Atlantic306 (talk) 19:58, 24 October 2017 (UTC)
• Retain one link discounts an orphan tag. I agree with User:PMC that these tags often prompt me to take useful action, not only linking, but proposing merges. And agree with User:ToniBalloni that new article should be given a breather, although I wonder if a kinder, gentler tag, suggesting that adding links can strengthen a new article, with a collegial explanation about how to create links, might be a really nice approach with new editors and new articles. It's easy to forget how arcane editing is and how easily we dishearten new editors.E.M.Gregory (talk) 13:42, 25 October 2017 (UTC)

Comment: Orphan articles have proven very difficult to monitor for violations of Wikipedia policy. IIRC, the article that triggered the notorious Wikipedia Seigenthaler biography incident was an orphan article, which escaped notice because it had no incoming links. Hence we need to somehow identify articles lacking any reasonable links to it. -- llywrch (talk) 19:01, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

• Comment: there's no harm in an article being an orphan ... except in the (far-too-common) case where the article title is "Foo (xyz)" or "Foo, Placename" and there isn't a link, hatnote or redirect from "Foo". And similarly for the article "Name A. Surname" which doesn't have any link from "Name Surname". Those are important and need to be flagged up and fixed. Other orphans... by all means have categories of orphan articles for those who want to de-orphan, in general it's not a problem. PamD 22:19, 10 November 2017 (UTC)

Since there has been no notification here yet, there are currently three open RfCs on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Trains. The first pertains to the disambiguation style of British railway stations, the second pertains to the usage of "station" in the names of halts and transit stop articles, and the third pertains to the disambiguation style of rail/rapid transit lines. Jc86035 (talk) 09:44, 11 November 2017 (UTC)

Comments are requested at Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons § RfC about mentioning a persons criminal status (BLP CRIME). Thank you. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:37, 12 November 2017 (UTC)

• Contributed --User:Ceyockey (talk to me)

A Request for comment has been made at Wikipedia talk:Lyrics and poetry on whether or not the lyrics of national anthems can be posted on Wikipedia under a claim of Fair Use. Interested parties are invited to comment. Yunshui ^雲_水 15:26, 13 November 2017 (UTC)

I've not been involved in Wikipedia that much for a few years, but have just got involved in a debate that has quite worried me about how policy is being applied, or possibly not being applied.

I noticed we had an article called 2017 Zimbabwean coup d'état, even though most news organisations aren't currently calling it a coup, and the article says in the lead that the armed forces have specifically said it isn't a coup. I posted a move request to suggest that a different title ('2017 Zimbabwe crisis') might be more appropriate given the sources, WP:V and WP:NPOV.

The prevailing argument in the debate at the moment seems to be, to quote one user, 'Oppose per WP:DUCK. If it looks like a Coup d'état, sounds like a Coup d'état, it's a Coup d'état.' (Four users have specifically cited the Duck Test.)

To quote WP:DUCK: "The duck test does not apply to article content, and does not trump, or even stand aside, policies such as no original research, verifiability and neutral point of view." (Emphasis in original.)

I know it looks like a coup. I even agree it probably is a coup. My issue is that the core Wikipedia policies are that we don't just write what we believe; we write what is in reliable sources, we write only what is in reliable sources, and we present the views expressed in those reliable sources neutrally. If we (including several administrators) now ignore all of that in favour of "It looks like one to me".... I am honestly worried for Wikipedia.

Can someone assure me that I am worrying unnecessarily?

(Apologies that this might look like a WP:CANVASS - I'm not asking people to go over there and vote, just to explain why this isn't evidence that Wikipedia's core content policies are now routinely ignored in favour of personal opinion.) TSP (talk) 23:06, 16 November 2017 (UTC)

You're correct. It is something to be worried about, but I haven't seen it and so it maybe doesn't happen a lot, in which case I wouldn't worry too much. Best would be to just point out to the person (and any watchers) that they're wrong, and cite the relevant passage. Herostratus (talk) 06:25, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Well, the proposal failed, 6 for and 15 against; I'm not sure more than three or four of those oppose votes actually gave any policy-based reason for their vote. (Those that did present any policy-based reason mostly cited WP:COMMONNAME, but without any actual attempt to demonstrate that it was the term most sources were using.)

*shrugs* I guess Wikipedia editing is at least a lot easier if we can now just put <ref>This is obviously true</ref>.

(BBC still isn't using 'coup'; but obviously we know better than they do.) TSP (talk) 17:29, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

I think the user Jenks24 gave the best advice when they closed the discussion "No prejudice against revisiting when this has become less of a 'breaking news' type story" (bold mine). Instead of worry about what is right, worry about what can be done about it. From a purely pragmatic point of view, you are unlikely to move that small group of determined editors at the moment. Instead, give it a few weeks, then revist the issue. The issue is not what is "right" or "wrong", but rather what is to be done about it. The easiest path forward, if you are right, is to just let it chill for a while, and then come back when people aren't as likely to be in a combative mindset. --Jayron32 18:27, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

• This is exactly the kind of very predictable (and predicted in what is currently the first discussion on this page) outcome of ignoring wP:NOT#NEWS and writing articles about breaking news sourced to primary news reports, rather than waiting until secondary sources appear on which to base a proper encyclopedia article. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 19:14, 22 November 2017 (UTC)~
  • I disagree. Many people come to Wikipedia to read articles on recent events like this one. How many weeks or months do you think that we should wait until adding information about it to History of Zimbabwe or whatever? --186.54.2.155 (talk) 19:58, 24 November 2017 (UTC)
    • In the case of major events like this one it would usually only take a few days before secondary sources, such as articles in newspapers reviewing the situation rather than reporting breaking news, start to appear. At that time (and it may already have happened in this case) it would be clear whether we should call this a coup or not on the basis of what such secondary sources say. The point is that in this case an article was created before the secondary sources on which to base even its title, let alone its content, existed. 86.17.222.157 (talk) 21:31, 24 November 2017 (UTC)

On the base question, but in the abstract (I don't have time to do so a source analysis on this particular case): This isn't even new; see pretty much every debate in the history of WT:Manual of Style/Words to watch. The gist is that when it comes to any contentious label, it cannot be applied in Wikipedia's own voice unless it (or something closely synonymous, if there's any real wiggle-room – sometimes there is and sometimes there's not) is the dominant description in independent RS. E.g. if 10 sources say something was a rebellion and 1 says it was a revolution WP can't call it a revolution. If 8 say a group is a "white pride" organization and two say "white power", WP uses "white pride" because "white power" is probably being misused. If a dozen say "militant islamic faction", 2 say "fundamentalist islamic", and 3 say "islamist", we don't use "islamist" or "fundamentalist" in WP's voice, because they're not actually synonyms and people get this wrong all the time. Of course, source quality also plays a factor. If 15 low-brow newspapers, opinion blogs like HuffPost, and pop-culture magazines, plus a new book by a ranty polemicist with a poor reputation for fact-checking call something a coup, while 15 major news sites, including those with a reputation for serious political and world-events coverage, and a new book by a renowned polit-sci professor call it a populist power shift, we'll go with the latter, while "teaching the controversy" that some are characterizing it as a coup. We can always provide the alternative perception(s) within WP:UNDUE bounds and with specific attribution and, where needed, direct quotation.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  13:51, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

See Wikipedia:Names of articles on recent events and its talk page for a proposal to incorporate dates into article names even if not required for disambiguation. Andrewa (talk) 09:15, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

The ongoing actual consensus discussion is at Talk:2015 Thalys train attack#Requested move 21 November 2017.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  15:05, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, and the proposal talk page links there, and the proposal itself to the article concerned and now to some others. There's also a link to the discussion at WT:AT, but I think the proposal talk page is the place for discussion, with heads-ups elsewhere as appropriate. Andrewa (talk) 16:15, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

I'm doing this as a pre-emptive measure because there seem to have been quite a lot of user categories and userboxes that are being brought to the attention of both WP:CFD and WP:MFD. The earliest discussion I can find is Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 February 14#Category:Politically leftist Wikipedians, which saw both that category and an equivalent for right-wing Wikipedians get deleted. It seems that for awhile things were quiet, until we had this discussion, Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 September 4#Category:Wikipedians who are against Donald Trump, which also saw that category get deleted. I've nominated a category recently myself, but only one, and I didn't realize how widespread these materials are, or how much momentum this trend of nominating these things is gaining. There is also Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2017 October 6#Political support categories, which seems to be gaining a steady delete consensus (it's about user categories that specifically and unambiguously endorse candidates on both sides of the spectrum). Elsewhere, however, the solution is not so clear-cut, with many categories, in the view of users such as myself, expressing support for one sociopolitical viewpoint or another without using it to imply interest in collaboration with other Wikipedians in editing those same topic areas regardless of whether they personally agree with each other. Personally, my view is that these userboxes stand in clear violation of WP:UBCR, while the categories violate WP:User categories#Inappropriate types of user categories, namely "Categories which group users by advocacy of a position". This is not merely a fringe view either, as there's enough of us who think this way that it's clouding consensus on the issue, warranting broader discussion.

I believe the best way to go about this is to list examples of what might end up being discussed at either MFD or CFD. I encourage others to add to it, but within reason - this is not a substitute for discussion at either venue. Whether we decide to keep them or get rid of them, we'll likely still have to take it over there. It is not my goal to try to circumvent either venue; it is not merely about these specific examples or others like them, but the idea of them as a whole. I just want to nip this in the bud and give us some peace of mind. If you add something to this list, please leave a ping for the user who originally made it unless that user has already been pinged here.

Keep in mind that userboxes can also be categorized in a confrontational way, so on the face of it they may seem to express a message everyone can agree with, but in adding them to your own page you'll add a category you may not necessarily feel you belong in. Userboxes may be kept, but should be recategorized as the community sees fit. Feel free to point out problematic categorization wherever you see it.

((Template:User alt-right foe))

Paging Buaidh (talk · contribs). Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 14:02, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I agree, political userboxes should not add a user to a "Left/Right wing" or "Anti-Trump/Clinton" category, but to a category such as "Users that support Trump/Clinton". - ZLEA ^{(Talk,Contribs)} 17:07, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

We shouldn't even have those, since they don't support encyclopedic collaboration (likely the opposite), and the Trump vs. Clinton matter is already over anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  21:56, 8 October 2017 (UTC)

• Given that we are supposed to maintain a Neutral Point of View as editors, I don't think it appropriate to have any politically oriented user categories. Whether a user supports (or opposes) candidate X, Y or Z is irrelevant to writing and maintaining an encyclopedia.

And if we do decide to keep these categories, we should institute a topic ban to go with them... anyone who declares for or against a politician should be topic banned from editing articles that relate to that politician. Blueboar (talk)|

I hereby declare my strong opposition to Donald Trump and defy any editor to show that that has negatively affected my fairly active participation at Donald Trump since before the election. Just try a TBAN against me and see how far you get. Sorry but that's a non-starter. Besides, such a rule would do absolutely nothing for article quality, it would simply make POV editors keep quiet about their POVs. I agree that Wikipedia should be as apolitical as possible and editors should generally keep their political leanings to themselves (exception made in this comment for a good reason). ―Mandruss ☎ 18:02, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

You may have good intentions, but that's not a good idea. It presumes that any editor with any position strong enough that he/she mentions it on his/her userpage is automatically going to make NPOV-violating edits. This simply is not true, though. Master of Time (talk) 18:05, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Interesting, I'd never heard that viewpoint before. That's certainly not what I'm concerned about, and it's not been the concern raised so far. What we're worried about is this causing schisms among editors, perhaps people refusing to collaborate with each other or getting to any degree antagonistic over issues as sensitive as political ones. Biased editing on related articles was definitely not something that crossed my mind. As far as the point you two are making, there's a difference between "Wikipedians interested in Donald Trump" and "Wikipedians against Donald Trump"; the earlier implies some sort of vested interest in actually bringing more information about him to the encyclopedia, aside from the more positive connotations "interested" tends to have, whereas the latter does not actually carry any implication of interest in editing in that topic area at all, making it a questionable use of userspace and category space. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 21:08, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't disagree with that. My previous comment was only about the TBAN-if-you-declare idea. WP:UBCR (emphasis theirs): "Userboxes must not be inflammatory or divisive." Inflammatory? Probably. Divisive? Definitely. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:19, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

I see. I don't know how I missed that part of Blueboar's post. My apologies. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 21:34, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

A topic ban is definitely taking things too far. Concern over biased editing was not the spirit in which this RFC was started, and until now was not something I'd seen mentioned in discussion over this topic. As I said before, the concerns that folks like myself share is that it could foment discord among the userbase, making users reluctant to collaborate on certain topics or engage in certain discussions to avoid risking being antagonized for holding to one belief or another. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 21:32, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

• Break out the thought police. Only in death does duty end (talk) 18:19, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

• One, I hope we break out the rational arguments instead. Two, we can keep the petty mudslinging off the page. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 20:55, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

• Well, don't try to control how people express their opinions and you wont be accused of thought police. If I have a userbox saying 'I think the US president is a racist homophobic imbecile' vs 'I support the Democrats'. You could make a credible argument the first would be disallowed under BLP but any restrictions on the latter would just lead to the knock on effect of people complaining about every political position. Users advocating for gender legislation reform? That's a political position, cant have it on the userpage. Users in favour of gun control? Political position. Users with anti-racism statements? Political position. Unless you are going to blanket ban per Blueboar above *all* userboxes, this will never fly - as there will always be someone who disagrees politically with something or other. On a basic level a userbox that professes support for the LGBT movement is both offensive and inflammatory to a huge number of people. I will enjoy watching you attempt to get rid of them. Just let me know so I can get the popcorn ready. Only in death does duty end (talk) 15:28, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

• You are making valid arguments but using needlessly uncivil language. No one here is trying to be the "thought police". This RFC was not to enforce some kind of deletionist solution to the problem. I'll accept the outcome whichever way it goes. I simply believe this needs to be discussed as while we have reached consensus in some of the discussions I've linked, there appear to be many more that could end up at MFD or CFD sooner or later, and rather than bombard people with notices of discussions in progress, it would just be easier to find examples and reach some kind of consensus here to prevent needless discussions. Whatever outcome we achieve here will be replicated on the individual discussions, thus invalidating the need for them and saving us a lot of time & work. I have only made my own thoughts on the matter clear, I have made no attempt to control the discussion or enforce any kind of outcome - you made a blatant personal attack with that accusation. Try helping us achieve a consensus rather than getting confrontational. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 19:48, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• You could have just made your arguments in your original post and not gotten confrontational at any point. It would have been a very welcome contribution to this discussion. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 20:03, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• It's somewhat pointless to call something a personal attack if it wouldn't stand a chance of a sanction following a traumatic 10-day train wreck at WP:ANI. "Thought police" would not. But it's unhelpful hyperbole; if this is a proposal to "control how people express their opinions", WP:UBCR is another one that already has community consensus. We do put reasonable limits on editor self-expression here, or try to do so with incomplete success. ―Mandruss ☎ 07:45, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

• That it wouldn't stand a chance at ANI is not the point, and in fact is evidence that WP:CIVIL is increasingly irrelevant because people ignore it knowing that most transgressions against it won't be punished since it would take too long relative to the degree of slight that occurred. It is a personal attack, it's a false accusation. How people react to it does not at all define what it actually is.

You do have a point that Wikipedia already does try to control what users say on it, though, and to see that, look no further than WP:FORUM, which mandates that we relegate discussion on talk pages strictly to being about improving the articles to which they are attached. To pretend we have "free speech" here is laughable because Wikipedia is a private organization that can enforce whatever rules it damn well pleases on those who use it, not an attempt at any form of government that would have such obligations towards its citizens. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 02:31, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

• Zeke - I think other kinds for MFD would be (1) Coverage of something trivial and transient -- just momentarily viral on the internet and now no longer covered. In particular lately far too many articles about Trump (is it over 1,000 now?) where far far to many were some embarassingly trivial topic. (e.g. covfefe or high heels or hair or handshakes). Also MFD might be (2) Content present in more than 3 articles. I tend to think some of this was pasted into multiple spots and so winds up not a good fit to most places it was put. Markbassett (talk) 05:59, 8 October 2017 (UTC)
• Having thought about this some more, I realize that another important concern is the treatment of our userspaces as social media profiles, which are so often used merely as a platform for expressing and promoting points of view while refusing to be challenged. Ideally, I would think interests and tastes are not described unless they either 1) are used to imply where you're most likely to see a particular editor working or 2) could influence that editor's contributions in any way. Me personally, I've left a lot unsaid about me on my own userpage only because I did not see its potential to contribute to my profile as an editor. I have my own political opinions, but I don't see the need to express them here, largely because I don't intend to contribute to political topic areas if I can help it. But enabling these sorts of things might leave the door open for mere soapboxing of the kind that we see so often on Facebook - things people say only to be heard, not to actually make the encyclopedia any better for having said it or getting any kind of dialogue going. More often than not, they're intended for people to accept and start believing in without any response whatsoever. After all, our userspaces are not really part of the encyclopedia, and people have to take our actual article content with a grain of salt as it is. Why would a userspace rant be any more reliable? And would they necessarily be posted with an eye toward making the encyclopedia around which userspace orbits any better? Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 00:51, 9 October 2017 (UTC)
• I agree basically that we should not have categories that classify editors directly into any political or ideological mindset, particularly if they are just adding a userbox to their page (the userboxes are fine in this regards). Far too much potential for abuse internally and externally there. Fully agree that there is a problem if a user-box automatically includes an editor into a category, since that is ripe for problems if the user box is edited to include other categories by presumption. I don't see a problem on a user-page or user-boxes as long as all necessary content and behavior policies are followed (eg no BLP violations, political messages should remain civil, etc.),since the user is controlling that themselves. I would probably make a case that editors should not use user-page content to cast aspirations against an editor, under WP:NPA, so that people should be free to express their views to understand their editing patterns. --MASEM (t) 15:40, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

That last point is important.... adding political user tags can give the appearance of non-neutral editing, even when the actual editing may be neutral (or at least attempting to be neutral). I am concerned that these tags will lead other editors to dismiss a valid concern ("oh, we can dismiss this editor's concern... he/she is not neutral... see, he/she even proclaims their non-neutrality on their user page!"). In disputes, these tags will encourage others to focus on the editor, and not the actual edit. Blueboar (talk) 16:47, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

That type of concern should be handled by behavior around those making a deal of a user-tag, and should be called out as completely inappropriate, approaching an NPA warning, as otherwise we'd be questioning the differential between what is a political position versus other sentiments expressed by user-boxes. If an editor has a user box that says "I support the far right", we shouldn't care as long as their behavior in editing is not solely informed by that stance, and they follow all expected behavior patterns for editors. That's a whole problem of identity politics that is dominating the real world but shouldn't be a factor in editing on WP, and should actually be called out when people use that against editors when editor behavior otherwise does not warrant. Obviously, if we find a case of an editor that consistently edits uncollaborative with the POV represented by a user-box, that's a different situation that should be handled in a different manner. --MASEM (t) 17:04, 9 October 2017 (UTC)

Agreed. POV-editing should be handled on a case-by-case basis, and I really don't think userboxes should ever come into play in that situation - in fact, my experience would tell me the editors with the greatest problems concerning their biases would be ones whose usernames are redlinks because they didn't come to build a userpage, let alone an encyclopedia, so they wouldn't know or care about userboxes. The editors who take the time to actually use them are, in my book, far less likely to cause that kind of problem. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 03:21, 10 October 2017 (UTC)

We really have no community consensus as to the role of p&g, a consensus that should form the bedrock for everything else. Some will say that p&g guide behavior, so we can speak of violations of it. Others say that p&g reflect behavior, and a p or g should be updated if there are enough editors ignoring it or unaware of it (in that case it follows that speaking of violations impedes the community's ability to form consensus). Ample support for both concepts can be found in policy and common practice. I have never understood how both can be true, but that's what we appear to have and it makes this kind of discussion problematic. This is "meta" and probably out-of-venue, so feel free to disregard or respond on my talk page (I would dearly love to understand this apparent paradox), but it also seems at the core of the frequent issues like this one. ―Mandruss ☎ 08:52, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

• Categories are meant to allow easy access to topics that are connected. User categories are thus meant to allow to find users who share common characteristics which might be useful in improving the encyclopedia, broadly construed. So categories that group users by country, language, school etc. are good uses for categories, because you might need to find someone from country X, school Y, speaking language Z etc. Is there any need to find editors who support or oppose a certain politician? I can't think of one...
  Userboxes on the other hand serve a different purpose, they allow users to (positively) declare interests and (negatively) declare biases and thus are useful even when there is no reason to categorize such users. So a "Pro-Trump"/"Anti-Trump"/etc. userbox is definitely useful because it allows others to understand that some contributions might be tinged by a certain bias. Like Masem, I don't see a problem with that since contributions by people who take the time to declare their biases are usually made with more thought than by those who don't. Regards SoWhy 09:35, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

definitely useful because it allows others to understand that some contributions might be tinged by a certain bias. If I understand what you're saying, you have demonstrated the potential problem that Blueboar referred to above. I think we have more than enough false suspicions of POV editing held by people who fail to recognize/acknowledge their own bias, without feeding those people with ammunition for their ABF. Far from being "useful", it's both useless and destructive. ―Mandruss ☎ 11:30, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

I could certainly support userboxes ahead of user categories. Having too many on a certain subject might be something we look into solving, but that's probably another RFC. Userboxes are personal, and if this ends up changing the rules as to their content, that's fine too. If anything, we should look at it this way: Our policies on userboxes say one thing, but by and large, our userboxes, the things it supposedly governs, say a very different one, and the divide has only been allowed to grow over the years, especially these tense last few. It's obvious something needs to change there, whether any of us like the outcome or not. But categories definitely serve a different purpose on user pages compared to articles, which even serve a different purpose to those on talk pages, and so on. Being able to find someone based on potential political bias, if it is indeed helpful at all, has a far less obvious benefit than being able to find someone willing to make difficult blocks, provide copies of deleted pages, can provide some feedback on a much-needed topic area, or can potentially supply some good photography for a given subject. To put it simply, the categories define what a user can bring to the table of editing Wikipedia, and bias, one way or another, doesn't exactly have potential in that area. At best, it would merely show what might influence an editor for better or for worse. It wouldn't show some skillset this user has. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 02:31, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

Here is a convenient way to find the editors who currently transclude ((User anti-Trump)), just one of the many pro- or anti-Trump userboxes currently extant. I don't see much difference between the categories and the userboxes for the purposes of this discussion. Both have the same very real potential to impede the project's mission (building an encyclopedia), and both have little upside besides self-expression. In the end, Wikipedia is not a social networking site. This applies also to other divisive political userboxes such as ((User Black Lives)), but I'm willing to limit scope for now. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:54, 14 October 2017 (UTC)

• Remembering the Great Userbox Wars of 2006, I would suggest leaving them alone. They are not helpful, but the harm isn't as great as some people claim it is, and people really like to declare who they are and what they believe. Jimbo failed when he tried to make userbox policy by fiat. See WP:CSD#T1 and the links there. —Kusma (t·c) 14:06, 27 October 2017 (UTC)

• Hmmm, I'm honestly intrigued. Out of interest, @Kusma:, was this "userbox war" also about political content, whether completely or as just one type of content under review? A bit of history would be helpful to this discussion - I think you've opened an interesting thought line here. Zeke, the Mad Horrorist ^{(Speak quickly)} _{(Follow my trail)} 07:02, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

• @Zeke, the Mad Horrorist: The most contentious userboxes were the political and religious ones like "This user is opposed to abortion", "This user supports the Labour Party", "This user is a Catholic". People noticed that it was possible to find like-minded users by their userboxes or categories (but it did not happen very often). Some people decided to stop this and tried to make user space (or at least template space) neutral. Kelly Martin then deleted hundreds of userboxes out-of-process in January 2006. I think she believed that Jimbo was backing this. The result was hundreds of unhappy users whose pages had ugly red links and a RfC that went off the rails and was restarted. In February 2006, Jimbo Wales and some others added the speedy deletion criterion "templates that are divisive and inflammatory", which was supposed to be used against userboxes. Most of these deletions were controversial, and so we had an extra subsection of DRV to deal with them: Wikipedia:Deletion review/Userbox debates. For months, the topic of userboxes was hotly debated. For example, some people suggested they should be subst-only (see WP:MACK, which also has lots of links to other parts of the debate). Eventually it became more or less accepted practice (see WP:GUS) that userboxes about a user's opinion were not OK in template space, but were OK to have in userspace (and transclusion was legal). This kind of keeps template space NPOV, while allowing people to disclose whatever they like in annoying little boxes. In any case, if you want to start any proposals in this area, I strongly suggest you read all of the discussions I linked you to, and keep in mind that some people really are strongly attached to their user pages and to how they look. I do not expect that getting rid of userboxes is either feasible or worth the effort and disruption, but you are welcome to prove me wrong. —Kusma (t·c) 09:58, 2 November 2017 (UTC)

As someone who watched that fracas from the sidelines, I'll confirm that as a fair summary of what happened. IMHO, the Userbox Wars is one of the least analyzed events in Wikipedia history -- none of the books I have read about Wikipedia mention it -- while having the most far-reaching influence on the community culture. Which means we are all doomed to repeat its mistakes. -- llywrch (talk) 18:36, 7 November 2017 (UTC)

• Wikipedia:User categories already specifically cites a political example ("Wikipedians who dislike George W Bush") as inappropriate under "Categories that are divisive, provocative, or otherwise disruptive", and this also includes "support for or opposition to a controversial person, group, project, idea, policy, or activity", and all this on top of "Categories which group users by advocacy of a position" being inappropriate under the guideline. Meanwhile Wikipedia:Userboxes#Potentially divisive words sanctions userboxes about being for a political position but not ones for being against a political position, so along those lines political userboxes about being for something can be allowed (as long as they remain CIVIL). Alcherin (talk) 18:18, 27 October 2017 (UTC)
• We already have guidelines that call for statements of support rather than of opposition in userboxes. Beyond that, we do not need the User Page Police^TM. If you don't like somebody's userpage, don't look at it. But making them remove something about what they believe won't change the fact that they believe it, so WP:NPOV in article space is what really matters. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:55, 3 November 2017 (UTC)
• Delete categories, keep userboxes - If a user makes an edit which appears to have a POV, I would much prefer that this be a bias declared openly on the userpage with a userbox than one which it's impossible for us to know. Userboxes are elements a user uses to show various facts about himself, and with the ability of any user to create his/her own, it's nearly impossible to find users by their bias. Categories, on the other hand, are primarily a tool to make such searching easier; users should only be categorized by those categories which a decent user who knows what (s)he's doing may be looking for in order to get help on Wikipedia or sister projects. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:37, 6 November 2017 (UTC)

• @Od Mishehu: it's nearly impossible to find users by their bias. Not so. It's a little more time-consuming because you can only find them for one userbox at a time (using "What links here"), but that hardly qualifies as "nearly impossible". The userbox galleries conveniently list enough userboxes in one place to get you started, and you can have a good list of a few dozen like-minded editors within a matter of perhaps 20 minutes. It's easily worth that much effort to be able to stack a discussion using email, no? And you only have to do it once, the same list can be re-used for any future discussions in the same topic area. A userbox can be advertised in a gallery whether it resides in user space or Template space, so there is no real difference for purposes of this discussion.
  But, according to Kusma's assessment above, self-governance means these efforts can be defeated by a sufficient number of I like my userboxes non-arguments, so Resistance Is Futile and I shall cease resisting. ―Mandruss ☎ 21:35, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

• The point is that we don't need to find users by their bias. Finding users by their bias would be more useful for POV pushers than for NPOV enforcers. Indicating a user's bias is useful for judging his/her edits; finding users by their bias is unnecessary. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 07:22, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

• After re-reading that several times, I can only conclude that you completely misinterpreted my comments. I haven't said we need to find users by their bias. To the contrary, I've said that the ability to do so is dangerous, and I showed how it's easy to do so.
  And Indicating a user's bias is useful for judging his/her edits is just plain wrong. If we start using userboxes to "inform" judgments about POV-pushing, there will be two effects: 1. There will an increase in false positives, and there are already too many. I've been accused of POV pushing several times on the basis of one position in one discussion, and I've seen that happen to other good editors more times than I can count. The ability of the average editor to see bad faith where no bad faith exists is really quite remarkable, and the last thing we need is to exacerbate that problem by providing more fodder for false positives. 2. It will be easily gamed as true POV pushers will simply drop the userboxes or, better yet, declare the opposite bias. In short, that is a really, really bad idea. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:41, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

• So you think someone will add a "Pro-Trump" userbox to their userpage and then when making anti-Trump edits will point to the userbox and say "Bias? What bias? I like the guy!"? That this would work as an argument in any discussion seems even more far-fetched than the idea that someone will start compiling lists of people with a certain userbox to accuse them of POV-editing. Besides, as Od Mishehu points out, userboxes are just a way for users to declare their interests and biases. Would you also forbid people from adding any such information in text-form? After all, that can be used against them as well. Regards SoWhy 11:44, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

• 1. The point is that there is little correlation between bias and POV pushing. Every one of us has a bias whether we recognize it or not, and declaring that bias should not be used as fodder for false positives, which is an unavoidable side effect of what was suggested above.
  2. I have not suggested that someone will start compiling lists of people with a certain userbox to accuse them of POV-editing. I have suggested that some editors will undoubtedly use such lists to locate like-minded editors for canvassing purposes, and probably already are doing so. If you don't believe that a significant amount of canvassing is already done via email, I have some beachfront property in the Mojave Desert that you might be interested in. The "ends justify means" mentality is far too common for that not to be true, and a lot of it is in plain view for all to see.
  3. Your last comment is a classic example of "If we can't eliminate a problem completely, why bother making any improvement at all?" That is never a useful argument. Besides, do you know of a way to list editors who have declared a bias in text form?
  Regardless, as I said earlier, this whole debate is pointless if cogent reasoning can lose out to "I like my userboxes" comments supported by flimsy self-expression arguments (Wikipedia is not a social networking site) if supported at all, and the history of this issue, as described by Kusma above, indicates that's the reality. So I'll try once again to walk away from this thread. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:28, 23 November 2017 (UTC)

  POV editing isn't identical to POV pushing - the former is already being done in the first POV edit and can easily be the result of a bias even with no bad-faith intention; POV pushing is continually insisting on POV editing even after the user was asked to stop. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 15:56, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Break for navigation

Meaning no offense to Zeke, I think this discussion has been approached in a somewhat unfocused fashion. The process would be better served with a specific proposal and the current format is only going to invite in every wide-ranging perspective remotely connected to personal expression on Wikipedia, and encourage people to talk past one-another, as is already occurring above. That said, here are my thoughts on these sorts of categories and userboxes:

Personally, I think its manifestly evident that these sorts of boxes and especially the cats are problematic with regard to a whole array of issues relating to the signaling of POV and WP:Battleground behaviour; indeed, such categories of editor and flags of ideological positions would be ripe for exploitation by those editors inclined to form tag-teams and power-blocks on certain content issues--there is certainly no shortage of editors possessed of this sort of tunnel vision, especially in some of our more well known contentious topic areas.

However, the fact of the matter is that we don't even need to reach to WP:NPOV to see why it would be an ill-advised change in policy to start embracing such features for organizing editors by political allegiance. Because this notion already explicitly violates numerous principles found in WP:What Wikipedia is not, all of them representing broad and long-standing community consensus. Wikipedia is WP:NOTFREESPEECH, and the project doesn't exist to allow people to connect or to express themselves, and editors should not be in the habit of treating the project like a social media forum to broadcast their beliefs. That's Wikipedia 101. Now needless to say, we allow a certain amount of flexibility with regard to user pages, so that community members can establish their identity and embrace a little bit of the communal work spirit, bond over their shared editorial interests and be maintained in their enthusiasm for the project--and that's something to be valued. But allowing userboxes signaling opposition to a specific political candidate or office holder? Categories that aggregate editors by political philosophy? No, I'm sorry, but those kinds of behaviours/features have clearly leaped into WP:NOTHERE territory (even for those whose primary editorial concerns are in political topic areas) by signaling an individual's priorities or even advocating for political beliefs.

In short, editors should be keeping their personal perspectives out of their editorial work, so there's no pragmatic rationale for broadcasting their shared political affiliations on-project. And at the same time, they are not meant to be using this project as a platform for espousing their beliefs for personal reasons. So there's no context where these kinds of features make sense as permissible forms of open expression on the project--which, again, does not (and never has) guaranteed contributors unrestricted free speech. And again, that's before you look at all of the pragmatic reasons why it should not be allowed, because of the obvious problems with gamesmanship, canvassing, tag teaming, battleground attitudes, divisiveness, walled garden mentalities, aggregation of POV, vote stacking, confirmation bias, and just so, so many other issues that come along with allowing editors to gather under a particular political flag on-project. In other words, a WP:SNOW call for me. Though again, I'd like to see a more concrete solution proposed, rather than just having people affirm or reject that this is a problem. Snow ^{let's rap} 03:45, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

You might take a look at the RfC taking place at Talk:ʻOumuamua#Is the Inbound Velocity table original research?. It's a discussion on whether we're allowed to use the software tool JPL Horizons as a reliable source or if it's unpublished original research (WP:OR). This discussion has implications beyond the specific article. Can a piece of software (that is, an algorithm), run specifically to provide data to a Wikipedia article and not appearing anywhere else but Wikipedia, be considered a reliable published source; for example, in an inline citation? --RoyGoldsmith (talk) 17:41, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

I've started a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Red link#Where does this apply? regarding the scope of the guideline (in particular regarding user categories) - but remember to please keep the discussion civil. ansh666 21:15, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

See Wikipedia talk:Notability (organizations and companies) for an RfC on notability's independence concept.  Unscintillating (talk) 03:28, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Nope. Killed it. Jytdog (talk) 03:38, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: WT:WikiProject Dogs#Domestic animal breed page names, an informal RfC of sorts, in response to a WP:RM discussion the (entirely routine) outcome of which someone objects to. The proposal would reverse over two years of RM discussions to apply natural disambiguation to animal breed article titles, and instead impose not just parenthetic, but multi-word parenthetic, plus allow it to be variable by wikiproject. Perhaps this is a good idea, perhaps not.

I think broader input is needed specifically because a) it's an attempt overturn long-standing and many-times-confirmed consensus (which is possible but unlikely without a strong site-wide showing of agreement), yet b) the discussion has not been "advertised" anywhere but wikiprojects about animal breeds (i.e., the only editors who've ever favored parenthetic disambiguation in such cases, because it matches breeder jargon better, have effectively been directly canvassed, though I doubt that was the intent).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  09:39, 2 December 2017 (UTC)

Rejected. See more comments below. Nyttend (talk) 21:27, 10 December 2017 (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.

---

Should MOS:MATH and WP:INDENT be updated to comply with the WP:MOS and MOS:ACCESS instructions on accessible indentation in 2017 Wikipedia's article content?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T6521

Background: WP editors have long misused description list markup for indentation (we do it all the time on talk pages). MoS has also long advised to not do this in articles, and to instead use indentation templates (e.g. here). We provide various templates for doing accessible indentation that does not cause problems for screen readers (for details, see MOS:ACCESS, specifically WP:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Indentation).

WP:Manual of Style/Mathematics (MOS:MATH) has been advising (in one section) the continued use of description list markup for visual indentation in articles, for reasons that do not appear clearly articulable other than that doing it with : list markup is simply easier for editors. This appears to be a guideline PoV fork. (And a pointless one, since no one would be "punished" for doing it the crude way, we'd simply advise the better way and WP:GNOMEs would incrementally fix cases of it being done the bad way).

A decade-old essay, Wikipedia:Indentation (WP:INDENT), is also providing outdated and incorrect information on how to indent on Wikipedia; it pre-dates these templates' deployment. Editors are reverting WP:MOS- and MOS:ACCESS-compliance updates to MOS:MATH on the basis of this essay [8].

A background point from the opening paragraph of WP:MOS: "If any contradiction arises, this page has precedence over all detail pages of the guideline[e.g. MOS:MATH], style essays [e.g. WP:INDENT], and the Simplified Manual of Style." The policy basis of this is WP:CONLEVEL: no individual or group of topical editors can make up their own rules to override site-wide consensus based on their personal preferences. No WP:IAR rationale has been provided for forking MOS:MATH from the rest of MoS on this trivial point. This RfC is a procedural one, since at least two editors are edit-warring against MOS:MATH's accessibility compliance and demanding a show of consensus to comply.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  13:32, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

A better summary of the RFC issue is: "Should articles be forbidden from using colons to indent displayed equations, as in mathematics, chemistry, and other fields?" Tens of thousands of articles, including featured articles such as Californium, use colons for indentation. There is no recent "fork" here, as the language at the Math MOS has been in place since at least 2005 [9]. There is also no template that is even somewhat often used instead of colons to indent equations that appear on their own line - this indentation is essentially always done with colons. The MOS should reflect this near-universal usage, where the Wikipedia style is very clear from practice. At the same time, the developers should work to make this style emit better HTML. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:41, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Separately, neither WP:ACCESS and WP:MOS forbids the use of colons, and I think that all of the MOS policies are currently in agreement that colons can be used. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:50, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Congratulations for just contradicting yourself. It isn't possible for a guideline to "forbid" anything anyway. If there's a technical necessity for some reason to use : markup for non-list indentation, anyone can cite WP:IAR and just do it. It's difficult to imagine such a scenario, but whatever. No one can be "punished" for not writing in compliance with MoS. The only issues here are PoV-forking in an MoS that has nothing to do with indentation, way from the main MoS page and the accessibility MoS page, which do have something to do with indentation; giving bad advice when better advice is available; and (in theory) interfering with editors using the better advice to produce more accessible markup after the fact. No where anywhere in this is there any suggestion that anyone will be forced to stop misusing colons for indentation in articles (and it's not like we're going to stop doing it on talk pages, a lost cause until they're replace with some kind of threaded messaging system that's also capable of rendering MediaWiki markup samples accurately).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:28, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

• Indents are perfectly fine to do with colons, and I would oppose doing them with any other methods. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:55, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  Also, to all those complaining that the issue hasn't been addressed in years, Mediawiki is open sourced. If the WMF hasn't coded the solution to this rather low-priority thing, why not apply a little WP:SOFIXIT? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:21, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

  What Wikitext is VE producing for indents? · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 14:02, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  Nothing. You can use blockquotes if you want something indented in the visual editor. (In the wikitext mode, it's whatever you type, just like the older wikitext editors.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

• Indenting in this way makes sense in this context... and if it conflicts with MOS? Well, MOS does say that there will be exceptions. I think this is a valid exception. Blueboar (talk) 14:08, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
  • I don't think there is a conflict - the MOS has always allowed colons for indentation, as evidenced by their use in featured articles. I think the proposal here is, essentially, to change the MOS to forbid colons. Some language was added to WP:ACCESS just today [10]. — Carl (CBM · talk) 14:25, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

    Wait... there wasn’t any conflict between practice and guidance... until SMC created one with his recent edit to ACCESS? With no prior discussion for that recent edit? And then he points us to CONLEVEL? (Based on an edit that had a consensus of exactly one person... himself!) ... talk about gaming the system! I have reverted his edit. The way this is supposed to work is that we hash it out first, reach consensus, and THEN write guidance to reflect that consensus. An editor can’t slip in a change to guidance, with no discussion, and then immediately turn around and claim CONLEVEL applies. Blueboar (talk) 15:07, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

• Not yet. You haven't really come up with, or let everyone figure out, a good alternative. There have been some thoughts discussed, but this RFC is premature until there's something more solid to recommend. You also haven't addressed the technical feasibility of an automatic conversion tool, because something like "the gnomes will fix it all", is not a proper answer for that. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 14:11, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• No but only if it's technically possible to distinguish indentation and actual definition lists with an acceptably small increase in parsing time. Semantically, since the <dd> tag is only supposed to appear as a definition following a <dt> tag, if a ;/: MediaWiki list doesn't begin with a ; item (or doesn't contain any ; items) then all : in that list could be treated by the software as <p> with indentation. Jc86035 (talk) 14:30, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. If the MOS does not correctly explain that colon indentation is how Wikipedia presents displayed equations, fix the MOS instead. Or maybe go for a technical fix and stop treating ":" as a HTML "definition list" for screen readers: everywhere on Wikipedia, it is used for indentation level. A fix for this should include talk pages. —Kusma (t·c) 14:32, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  There is no (forthcoming) technical fix. One has been asked for from the MediaWiki developers for over a decade and they've done nothing to fix it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:22, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  There might be, if m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Reading/Functional and beautiful math for everyone were more popular. But in general, if you're interested in technical fixes, you should start there and work backwards to the detailed discussions at the German Wikipedia about this subject (earlier this year; look for a proposal by User:Debenben). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:47, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose proposed change to longstanding guidelines. Firstly, this is arguably one of the most ill-formed RfCs I've ever seen, and is unlikely to lead to a new consensus because it is not even clear what the "consensus" concerns. How, exactly, should displayed math be indented? As a block quotation? Using math display="block">? Some other method using templates? The phrasing is also highly misleading and non-neutral ("WP editors have long misused..."), with evidence for the "long misuse" apparently consisting of this edit and this revert, both from today by the same editor attempting to assert that the MOSMATH guideline is in conflict with ACCESS. Concretely, what seems to be proposed is this: that the way displayed math is typeset in Wikitext is to be changed on all of our mathematics and scientific articles, including all featured mathematics articles and good articles. Implementing this proposed change would require someone trusted by the community, with toolserver access, to change possibly millions of lines of code in tens of thousands of articles. Legions of mathematics and scientific editors would need to familiarize themselves with a more complicated syntax for doing basic Wikipedia editing (and it is not even obvious what that syntax actually is as of this writing). Editing Wikipedia would become correspondingly less inviting for new editors because of the more arcane methods of indentation that are proposed (when those new arcane methods actually are properly proposed). Not only has there been no such impact assessment, but the stated reasons for the proposal are spurious, as far as I can tell. The referenced part of WP:MOS discusses the formatting of block quotations, not displayed math. The relevant content guideline, with longstanding established consensus, on how math should be typeset when displayed on its own line, is WP:MOSMATH. It has also been asserted that this longstanding guideline is in conflict with WP:ACCESS, but while WP:ACCESS notes that the use of colons is not semantically ideal for this purpose, it even provides guidance on how to use colons for exactly this purpose. I agree with others here that, if the semantics of the way the colon is translated into html do not agree with the intended semantics, the issue should be fixed at the software level, not by requiring Wikipedia's new editors to learn CSS. Finally, I do not think this is a significant issue with screen readers and displayed math. Far greater is the issue of making equation alt text understandable to the vision impaired. The semantics of indentation are by far a secondary concern. Sławomir Biały (talk) 15:10, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  Hear, hear! I'm sick and tired of hearing about how screen readers can't understand this and that. If I can see it, the screen reader can describe it. Fix the broken screen readers. EEng 17:32, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  You realize you're supporting a minor MoS page contradicting two major ones, including the main one, in away that violates WP:CONLEVEL policy, right?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:22, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  Among several points that I raised in my vote, was your failure to show any contradiction with existing guidelines. Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:16, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. WP:MOS has not section about indentation and use of colon for that. All occurrences of "indentation" is this page are about block quotations, not at all about the usage of colons in math and talk pages. MOS:ACCESS says Colons (:) at the start of a line ... is not ideal for accessibility or semantics, but is currently in wide use. Thus, there is no guideline discouraging the use of colons for indentation (except for quotations), and there is nothing to which MOS:MATH and WP:INDENT should comply. Moreover, accessibility includes ease of reading sources, and any replacement of colons must keep reading sources easy. No such replacement is proposed. D.Lazard (talk) 15:33, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Support The use of colons produces broken definition lists (and broken html) that are yet another unnecessary annoyance for anybody using a screen reader. Their use should be discouraged, and it should be obvious that we ought to be bringing guidelines documenting poor practice into line with guidelines recommending best practice – which is to use one of the already existing templates that produce visual indenting without causing any problems for visually impaired readers. --RexxS (talk) 18:04, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Comment: This is Yet Another Case of the WMF doing something stupid (putting out HTML that contains definition lists for content that isn't even close to being a list of definitions) and the community trying to work around the stupidity.

$90 million dollars in assets, but somehow they can't afford to hire someone to fix the ancient creaky wikimarkup-to-HTML conversion software. --Guy Macon (talk) 19:04, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

That is a misstatement of the case. They haven't gotten around to it because that would cause a single wikitext encoding to create two different kinds HTML. That's bad for everyone--developers, users, and editors. --Izno (talk) 21:11, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

• Tentative support per RexxS. The ((in5)) template appears to be an adequate replacement for indentation of formulas and other things. I don't see this as creating a huge burden for the community: those who wish to change colon indentation to something more suitable could do so as they please with the support of the MOS; this proposal wouldn't mandate an immediate change of every instance, as at least one "oppose" suggests. I also don't see this as being problematic for new contributors: they can continue to use colons, just as many use hyphens instead of en-dashes in numeric ranges—no one is punished, but those who notice will quietly fix it. Rebbing 19:10, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. This is the wrong fix to a problem that is invisible to most editors and is really an issue in the Wikimedia engine having nothing to do with math. It would make Wikipedia mathematics editing harder, pointlessly, at a time when Wikipedia still lags behind literally every other mathematics-publishing site on the web in the quality of its mathematics formatting (see m:2017 Community Wishlist Survey/Reading/Functional and beautiful math for everyone) and when we still have battling gnomes some of whom are systematically going through mathematics articles stripping out <math> formatting and replacing it with html because our <math> formatting is so bad and some others of which are doing the opposite. The correct solution is for the Wikimedia developers to realize that the users have overwhelmingly decided that : means indent, not definition list, and to change how it is translated into html to reflect that. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:07, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Comment If we are to do it then the <math display="block"> is the format we should use, it is a special software feature specifically designed to work with this problem. There are something of the order 35,000 articles which use math tags, I can generate a list if needed. It's not an unreasonable number of articles to use some bot or tool to process the articles. I'm not convinced there is enough need to do this and whether this is really a case of busy work. --Salix alba (talk): 20:27, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose deprecating ":" as standard indent. The recommended alternative, such as it is, is more cumbersome for something as often-used (especially for multileveling), and is fragile (equal-signs in math equations!). The use it too widely ingrained in too many places to change without being disruptive. If the problem is that colon makes HTML with incorrect screen-reading for the visual effect it creates and everyone uses it for the visual and visual-content/semantics effect it creats, then fix the HTML generator. I think WP:DLISTs are fairly rare. And they are fragile (in general and also towards screen-readers) when written using semi-colon/colon. We have a template set for them that is less fragile. So let's:
  1. Work towards using a template to in a less-common situation and to make things less fragile.
  2. Then make colon just do intending because that's the common use anyway.

For #1, a quarry for "line beginning with a semicolon" would be useful. that would also find places that such a syntax is used as inappropriate WP:PSEUDOHEADs. DMacks (talk) 20:58, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

• Oppose. A classic case of the tail trying to wag the dog. If the problems arise because of the association of the starting colon with the HTML definition element, then the solution is obvious, you change the association instead of attempting wholesale behavioral modification of the editing population.--Bill Cherowitzo (talk) 21:03, 3 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose. A colon means indentation in Wikipedia and changing that is a silly idea. What should be fixed if anything for accessibility is how : is changed into html. Figure out how we should represent indents in the first place rather than having people use some other symbol which generates this other html. Dmcq (talk) 21:13, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  This is not a change; it's a conflict between an old MoS page (focused on nothing but math and having no bearing on indentation) advising bad markup, and two better-maintained MoS pages which absolutely do have normative things to say about page formatting, one of them being the main MoS page which trumps its subpages in the event of any conflict.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:22, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  No, it doesn't. As you can see, consensus supports the currently used style, and the MoS as a descriptive document should reflect that. —Kusma (t·c) 09:57, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

• Support, obviously, as the one who opened the RfC, and for reasons already given.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  03:23, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
• Support. MOS:MATH#Typesetting of mathematical formulae and MOS:DLIST contradict each other on colon indents and should be made consistent. The former leads to HTML that fails validation. That's not just of academic concern. It generates nonsense output for visually impaired users, complicates navigation for keyboard-only users, and scrambles the page structure with possible SEO consequences. Even if colon indents were valid HTML, they'd still be an HTML hack doing poorly what CSS does well. Sure, <dl><dd> displays the desired way in some configurations, but that's not true of all browsers, devices, and skins. For example, a <dl><dd> between two <p>s is noticeably off-center vertically in the Minerva skin. MOS:DLIST leads to conforming HTML, and avoids all of these problems. Maybe someone can suggest for Extension:Math to support <math class="some-class"> to make it nicer to attach CSS to the tag in lieu of colon indents. Matt Fitzpatrick (talk) 11:10, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  Wouldn't it make more sense to bring MOS:DLIST into line with the standard usage on Wikipedia? And then fix the conversion to html? Sławomir Biały (talk) 11:18, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  As noted above, fixing the conversion to HTML has been listed in the WMF MediaWiki bug tracker as a to-do item for over ten years. They simply do not ever get around to doing it, and apparently never will. It is thus upon us to write accessible code rather than rely on the software to fix it for us when we don't. PS: Using : for indentation is not a "standard". There is no policy requiring it, and there is no guideline demanding it, other than one disputed line in MOS:MATH (a page which has nothing to do with indentation) trying to WP:POLICYFORK from the rest of MoS, which is itself against CONLEVEL policy. Using : for indentation is a bad habit we should not continue to do in actual articles (even if we think talk pages are a lost cause), because we know it's an accessibility problem and we know there are very easy other ways to do it properly. There is nothing even faintly challenging about doing ((blockindent|Foo bar baz)) instead of :Foo bar baz. It costs us nothing but a few characters, and is actually far more robust, because the colon markup is easily bollixed. For example, if an inexperienced editor closes a linebreak, Yadda yadda.:Foo bar baz, it fails, but this is not true of the templated version. There are various other circumstance under which the colon markup fails, such as being the first line inside a newly opened block element (full bug documentation here). The way the "I don't get it and don't care" responses above are going, this bulk of this RfC is just a big "fuck you" to people who depend upon even marginal accessibility at this site. Not cool. Not viable.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:49, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  Comment: As one can see by looking at the source of the preceding comment, the one who opened this RfC uses colons for indenting. There is something wrong here :-) D.Lazard (talk) 12:03, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

  But the problem with screen readers and math is not the indentation, it's the math. This is a "fix" for the wrong problem. In any case, as the Phabricator link shows, the devs are aware of this issue but apparently do not think it is a substantial accessibility concern despite knowing more about the technical side of things than probably most of us here. If there is a strong case for an ACCESS violation, then I would raise it with the devs or the foundation. Sławomir Biały (talk) 12:33, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

• Moot. This seems to have gotten lost, but I just wanted to say again that this is all pointless until someone comes up with a workable alternative, and tests it – extensively. I've seen multiple different templates suggested, but are we sure we really want to co-opt something beyond its main purpose for something this major? Should we come up with a new dedicated one? Should we add an attribute to the <math> tag? Will whatever is ultimately proposed work if it's set on a line by itself surrounded by spaces without adding extra paragraphs? Because if not, then page sources become more difficult to read and edit. I'm vaguely aware of a desire to add MathJax support (although I haven't really followed this); will a proposed solution play nicely if it's added? Again, until this sort of stuff is hashed out, any sort of policy change is premature – and yes, SMc, it is a change. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 15:01, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
• Support in principle, per RexxS, though I would have liked to see a more concrete draft change on which to comment. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 17:52, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
• Comment: FWIW, I'm trying to start a discussion specifically on the "expand the functionality of the math element" aspect of this issue at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Mathematics#Extending math element functionality (merely to consider the possibility/feasibility of providing this alternative method of indenting math in particular). Also, just to make this explicit: as indicated in a piped link above by the OP, other relevant discussion predating this RFC is at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Mathematics#Indenting. - dcljr (talk) 19:00, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose: I think I understand the issue (that the use of a colon is an abuse), but unless there is a workable solution, I cannot support the change. -- Taku (talk) 21:42, 4 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose in over twenty years of writing HTML, I have not once used a dd/dl style list. I would support an alternate proposal to formally redefine ":" to be an "indented list", in a way that codifies and allows for its co-mingling with ul and ol lists, yet allows it to serve as generic indentation as well. power~enwiki (π, ν) 01:51, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Math block display

$${\displaystyle e^{i\pi }=0}$$

^ That looks indented to me. That seems like the functional and correct alternative. --Izno (talk) 21:11, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Yes, that produces the correct appearance, but it's much more cumbersome to type. And it's not an improvement to use the usual solution when things are too cumbersome to type, templates, because | and = are used too often within mathematics formulas and are a pain to use as characters in the arguments to templates. Apparently, though, this solution is even worse in its html semantics than using a colon for indented formulas, because it nests <div> within <p>, not allowed in html. And if that were fixed, the right solution would be for the engine to recognize :<math> and translate it into the block display as it already does (note that when math is part of an indented block, it's displayed bigger than in inline text) and to produce cleaner html for it. —David Eppstein (talk) 21:30, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

div-not-in-p: Is there an actual Phabricator task regarding that issue? (Edit: I have submitted one at T182041.)

right solution would be for the engine to recognize :<math> and translate it into the block display You and others keep saying this. I do not agree that it is a true statement, for multiple reasons (already elaborated on the Phabricator task for that "improvement" already).

cumbersome to type There are many things cumbersome to type--for example, image syntax. Yet we somehow persist. I am not entirely sure why you're going on about templates, as the above is not a template nor is it in a template. --Izno (talk) 21:55, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Maybe the better solution would be for the system to treat <math> when it is placed on its own line always as if it were a block. That reduces the burden further on us, and I would guess that's the intent in most cases when math appears on its own line. --Izno (talk) 21:58, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

<math> already sets its content to be class=mwe-math-element, so why don't we just use CSS (as was asserted to be the "correct" solution) in our skins to indent it? DMacks (talk) 22:09, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

The reason that doesn't work is because the Math extension HTML doesn't provide the necessary classes presently, without setting the math element explicitly to display as block, to differentiate block formatting from inline formatting for targeting in the CSS file. This failure is at presently due to the task on Phabricator I just filed. If the div were not placed inside of a p, we'd be fine to sort that out that way (minus the benefits that explicitly setting block currently provides, which is slightly larger presentation I think, but we don't get that already :D). I think I'll go file my other suggestion and see who pops up. --Izno (talk) 22:25, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

"more cumbersome to type" is a pretty poor reason to break accessibility and harm the ability to access Wikipedia for people with visual disabilities. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 08:29, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

Do really screen readers allow accessibility for math articles? I am not a specialist, but I am not sure that screen readers are useful for reading math. As far as I know, people with visual disabilities prefer the latex description of formulas rather than a spatial description of their displayed form that ignore the mathematical semantic. Thus accessibility implies to leave latex source as simple as possible, and this is in favor of keeping colon for indenting math. In any case, if screen readers are unable to deal with the present use of colon in math, they are certainly unable to deal properly with displayed formulas, and, in this discussion, the argument of accessibility is a pure fallacy. D.Lazard (talk) 09:34, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

To answer your question. Yes, all math has alt tags, which can be read by the the screen reader and some modern screenreaders can handle mathml to some degree (there is a hidden mathml description). There are also some specialised extensions, which can be used to enhance that even further. Screenreaders are able to handle colons just fine btw, it's just that they might tell screenreader users that a list will follow, while there won't be a list. This adds several words/sentences to the pronunciation that might be confusing and distracting for screenreader users. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 10:14, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

If you are talking of the option <math alt= > you are wrong: it is rarely used in math articles, and, when used, the provided text is usually confusing, and, in any case, less clear than the latex source. In any case, alt tags are the worse solution, as you will never find math-competent editors that are willing to translate latex in English. The few alt tags that I have encountered in my edits (more than 1000 math articles in my watch list) are not understandable, or at least highly confusing. D.Lazard (talk) 11:15, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

No, the math tag where it displays an image includes the LaTeX as the alt attribute automatically. --Izno (talk) 15:25, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

The behavior is also different between the two versions in terms of what gets produced depending on if there are blank lines before/after the formula, or if there are no blank lines, but newlines, or if it's all written as a single line. I don't know HTML well enough to really know what's better, worse, or wrong, but it seems like a displayed equation should be part of the same <p>...</p> block, since it's usually part of the same paragraph (often part of the same running sentence even). It's not like that currently, but regardless, <math display="block">...</math> is producing some inconsistent results. Is there a wikitext token to just say "leave this line blank"? Like a hyphen on a line by itself or something. That would at least mitigate the problem of having LaTeX code crammed together with English if there's going to be some difficulty in figuring out if blank lines should be ignored or not. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 23:07, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

((Block indent)) uses <div>, and it's valid markup to nest divs inside each other. There is nothing faintly "cumbersome", as wikitext goes, about ((block quote|1=Your math here)), expecially given the arcane geekery that goes into formula markup itself. This "it's too hard, so I'm going to use : and screw all those people who use screen readers" is about as plausible as NASA engineers claiming it's just too complicated to use turn signals when they're driving to work.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:24, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

If you convert to templates, then you won't be able to use the equation editor in the visual editor. If you haven't tried it before, then this link should take you to a little equation in my sandbox. (Setting block formatting is one click from the quick edit mode, or under the 'Options' tab in the full editing mode, but the other features in the full mode are even cooler.) Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:07, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Thanks for the ping and for taking the time to try and help with the problem.

I did a little survey in the German Wikipedia a few months ago. The long term goal that got the most votes was to turn <math> into proper inline math with \textstyle as default and use something like <math display="block"> or some equivalent notation as a proper block formula. The plan that I would have suggested is the following: Resurrect the MathJax display method which already was configured such that <math> was inline. It only turned it into a block equation for new lines with a colon in front. If that is done, one could replace the colons with some other markup.

I still think this would be a good plan, but at the moment it does not seem to be possible to get enough support for it. The biggest problem in my view are not the colon indentations but all those workarounds like ((math)) etc. I might be biased because the German Wikipedia is one of the few projects not using them and in the survey they decided unanimously not to introduce them. As far as I know those are not accessible to screenreaders at all and I continue to be surprised that so many editors are happy to learn some special mix of HTML and wiki-templates to write some formulas. Other options I can think of:

• Push ahead with turning <math> into inline math even without MathJax: I do not know any website that uses server-side generated svg images for mathematical equations. I doubt that it is possible to use this technique to get a rendering that is at least as good as those HTML workarounds. If templates are used for inline math, there is no strong reason why inline should be made default for <math>. Also <math display="block"> cannot replace a lot of block formulas, because \text{} often looks ugly and for non-latin languages it might be not readable at all. Even dots at the end of a sentence look different in math tags than outside of them. Currently some editors prefer to write them outside of the math-tags of a block equation even though this might lead to them being broken into a new line. Finally one would need something that can take care of the numbering of equations and replace templates like ((NumBlk)). Without those problems solved, such a change would just be a lot of work and might result in more workarounds.
• Bring back the "use HTML for simpe formulas" option that was abandoned in favour of MathJax: I still frequently encounter those \!\, hacks used to circumvent some bugs or because some editor wanted to ensure that all symbols and expressions have the same appearance. I am afraid that a solution like this might backfire and make everything worse.
• Change the global CSS to match that of enWP to make <math display="block"> indented everywhere: I think this does not really help. More or less everyone still uses the colons for indentations and with the problems mentioned above I do not see that this is going to change in the near future. In case this encourages people to use the new <math display="block"> option, there would be more than enough formulas still needing the colon indentation. Finally I do not know if there is a more intelligent solution than the

  .mwe-math-mathml-display math { display: inline; }
  

  abuse or if one should just leave the MathML rendering inconsistent.

Summary: At the moment I do not see a way out of this deadlock. I am kind of getting tired of all those meta-discussions and trying to convince people why something like MathJax is needed or why the WMF should care about math rendering. For now I will probably just go back to spending my time writing articles and maybe try again in a few years time.--Debenben (talk) 13:44, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

So I finally broke down and took a quick look at MathJax, and oh my god, why aren't we using this already? It really seems like the way to go. And if we're worried about accessibility via screen readers, it's apparently way better in that regard too. I'd also be fine with <math>...</math> for inline and <dmath>...</dmath> for a block as I saw suggested elsewhere (I can't remember where). I also still think that it would be good to keep these on separate lines in the editor with blank lines surrounding them to make it more readable, especially for long equations. And then it would be a lot better if there were a way to tell the parser to just "ignore this line" (no new paragraphs, and no breaking of lists, which would already be useful for separating comments on talk pages without having to worry about those same MOS:LISTGAP issues). But I have no idea how feasible that is, or how likely someone is to add it, even if it is. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 17:27, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

MathJaX was supported at one point, but was removed in 2015. See phab:T99369 for a long discussion on the topic, and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2015/Aug#Future of MathJax on wiki as well. Anomie⚔ 17:14, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Closing

After running for seven days, this discussion has largely gotten opposition; people make strong points, including the absence of a comparable alternative (as demonstrated by colons being used by the proposer), the fact that this proposal would render numerous good and featured articles at variance with policy, and above all else, the fact that the proposer has added his preferred wording to MOS:ACCESS and then half an hour later referred to that change as a basis for this proposal. Moreover, over at WP:VPT, the proposer left the following note:

The RfC at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#RfC: Accessibility versus convenience in indentation was opened as a question of whether it's permissible for MOS:MATH, which has nothing to do with indentention, to demand that editors misuse definition list markup in articles for this purpose, when the main WP:MOS page and MOS:ACCESS have for years recommended a better method of indenting. This has somehow turned into a torches and pitchforks campaign to ban the use of accessible alternatives to the abuse of : markup. I've never seen anything like it in my entire 12 years here, and am skeptical that the regulars of VPTECH would agree with the rationales being offered there. There's a palpable hostility in play, toward accessibility, HTML specs, and WP:CONLEVEL policy.

Our policies outright forbid such hostile characterization of other editors, and blatant canvassing like this has the effect of tainting all further support. Editors who falsify pages for their own purposes, or commit blatant personal attacks on others, or who engage in public canvassing are typically given extended blocks as well as having their proposals closed. Final note, since much of the opposition was related to the mode of resolving this screen-reader compliance problem, rather than the underlying idea of addressing the problem in the first place, it's of course all right for someone interested in the discussion to formulate a new proposal without waiting for days or months to pass. Nyttend (talk) 21:27, 10 December 2017 (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.

Followup

• The pile of accusations in the closer's WP:SUPERVOTE at the bottom of the RfC have all been refuted in detail. The actual canvassing to this discussion was by CBM here, in which he grossly misrepresented the nature, intent, and actual effect of the RfC's proposition, which is why the RfC had virtually no participation other than from WT:MATHS editors all making off-topic points about mathethematics, when this RfC was about WP:CONLEVEL policy and HTML specs. I don't really care, since the outcome has been slightly productive anyway; I'm just not going to let Nyttend's shipload of false WP:ASPERSIONS go unanswered.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:49, 12 December 2017 (UTC)
• Productive ongoing discussions since the RfC:
  • Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Mathematics#Extending math element functionality
  • Phabricator bug T6521 is seeing traction for the first time in over a decade as result of this RfC

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:49, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

The section was named "Russian railway line article titles" when the first users started to comment. I hate to open yet another railway RfC (why is that topic area so fraught with dispute?) but move-warring has broken out and it needs to stop. How should articles on railway lines in Russia be titled?:  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:11, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Comments on Russian metro lines

• Use option A per WP:CONSISTENCY, MOS:DASH, MOS:CAPS, and WP:USEENGLISH. What the official name looks like in Russian bureaucratese is irrelevant on English Wikipedia, since English and Russian do not have the same punctuation and capitalization practices, nor do signage and encyclopedic writing, even in the same language. The English title of our article is a translated approximation of the name in Russian, and is subject to English orthography and to Wikipedia's title policy and its naming and style guidelines. Option B is wrong twice over, and options C and D are just pointless mishmash, listed only for completeness.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:11, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Second Avenue Subway, BMT Fourth Avenue Line (more at Category:New York City Subway lines); Washington County, Sixth Avenue (more at Category:Streets in Manhattan). Who claims WP:CONSISTENCY and promotes an option that reduces consistency? Ping User:Dicklyon. 77.180.49.189 (talk) 00:18, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Ah, you noticed some New Yorkers can be pretty stubborn, too. See Talk:IRT Lexington Avenue Line#Requested move 17 November 2017 where I failed to find a consensus in spite of the guidelines and evidence. Shit happens. As for street names, those became consistently treated as proper names (in the US at least) over 100 years ago. Counties, too. Lines, not. Dicklyon (talk) 00:26, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Dicklyon could you compile a list and add evidence? Do you have more examples for lower case apart from lines? How is the distribution, e.g. https://www.rmt.org.uk/news/tube-chaos-on-piccadilly-line/ has "Picadilly Line", a UK website, about a UK line. 78.53.140.207 (talk) 00:50, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Like many things, London Underground names are sometimes capped in sources. I believe the UK Trains project looked at that specifically and decided that all those would use lowercase line, hence Piccadilly line. See Wikipedia:WikiProject London/Naming conventions#Transport. And no, I'm not going to compile a list (of what?). Dicklyon (talk) 01:02, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Dicklyon you claimed "Counties, too. Lines, not." but refuse "I'm not going to compile a list". So, what to do with a claim without proof? I gave an an example for X Line, but then you refer it to a UK WP project. Good to see double standard, WP:RUSSIA not allowed to handle things by its own. 78.53.140.207 (talk) 01:12, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Well, it's not that simple. The London folks make their lines and stations MOS compliant a long time ago (2007?); but it was a recent big mess to convince the UK Railways project; see the archives of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK Railways for all the dirt on me that you want. We had a big to-do about similar problems in China recently, though it actually went easier; moved about 1600 "Xxx Railway Station" to "Xxx railway station" with the help of a bot after getting consensus that it was OK noncontroversial. Your situation should be similar, I think. Bottom line, there's a general consensus, usually, that we should follow our house style, not let wikiprojects make up conflicting styles. This still leaves them considerable latitude on titling and disambiguating conventions, as you see what's going on now in Taiwan and Iran discussions. Dicklyon (talk) 01:23, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

• I agree with SMcCandlish on this matter. Tony (talk) 05:32, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

User:Tony1: Second Avenue Subway, BMT Fourth Avenue Line more at Category:New York City Subway lines. How would changing titles of articles about Moscow Metro lines to use lower case increase WP:CONSISTENCY? 77.180.49.189 (talk) 00:20, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

• A obviously is the WP MOS way. Take a look at Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya Line which in it's Sept. 2005 state said "The Kalininskaya is a line of the Moscow Metro. Today it is the only line to be named after a figurehead instead of the areas that it connects." This makes it pretty clear that all (or nearly all?) of the Moscow metro lines are named for places they connect, like many other lines in most other cities and countries and metro systems; the en dash is clearly the right punctuation for connecting the two place or direction names, while the hyphen makes no sense. In Russian orthography, I expect things are different, and it's OK to use the hyphen in the Russian. And the capped "Line" came to this article in December 2005. Not too surprising to see overcapping this old, but that's not a reason to avoid fixing it. It's not capped in the Russian, so not clear why anyone thought that was a good idea in English; most likely it was done originally, back in the day, by someone unaware of WP:NCCAPS. There's work involved to fix all this, but it's not a big problem compared to some others we've fixed this year, so let's get started. Dicklyon (talk) 06:00, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Comment the comment "This makes it pretty clear that all (or nearly all?) of the Moscow metro lines are named for places they connect" - makes it pretty clear that the author uses false information. Koltsevaya Line, Moscow Monorail, Moscow Central Circle, Third Interchange Contour. No, it's not like Beijing–Shanghai Railway where the two items connected by "–" mark the end points of a line. Several lines have been extended without any name change. Propsers have no clue and should leave it to WP:RUSSIA92.231.182.37 (talk) 06:26, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, I intend the scope of my comment to be the metro lines with hyphens in their titles. I stand corrected. And no I did not suggest that the places named would necessarily be at the ends of a line, though that's common in many systems, at least ones that aren't growing. Dicklyon (talk) 06:42, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

• A ticks the most MOS boxes and IMO should be treated as a de facto standard format. Jasphetamine (talk) 10:44, 14 December 2017 (UTC)
• Oppose:

1. Procedural
   1. Should be taken to WP:RUSSIA because the editors of that project are the ones that do the actual work. Cannot find any improvement by User:SMcCandlish, User:Tony1 to the actual content. Will they do the maybe 100 000 edits that are needed to convert all occurences visible to the reader? 92.231.182.37 (talk) 06:10, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
   2. Status quo (Option B) is not presented fairly, was written by user that supports Option A. Also why would the current naming be put at "B"? That's no neutral representation.
2. Policies
   1. MOS:DASH - fine, see Guinea-Bissau, "-" is allowed. No, it's not like Beijing–Shanghai Railway where the two items connected by "–" mark the end points of a line. Several lines containing "-" in the name have been extended without any name change.
   2. WP:CONSISTENCY - WP:RUSSIA has Moscow Oblast, Shatursky District, Central Administrative Okrug, Varshavskoye Highway, Mira Avenue, Mokhovaya Street, Cosmonauts Alley, Chistoprudny Boulevard, Boulevard Ring, Nakhimovsky Prospekt, Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane, Lefortovo Tunnel, Moskvoretskaya Embankment, Moscow Ring Road, German Quarter, Vodootvodny Canal, Arbatskaya Square (Red Square too), Tsar Cannon, Chudov Monastery, State Kremlin Palace, Alexander Garden, Kremlin Arsenal, Spasskaya Tower, Bagration Bridge, Donskoye Cemetery, Bolshoi Theatre, Vnukovo International Airport, Nekrasov Library, Cosmos Hotel, Rumyantsev Museum
   3. MOS:CAPS - all fine.
   4. WP:USEENGLISH - the titles are already English.

92.231.182.37 (talk) 06:10, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

A detailed response to this has been posted in #Extended discussion of Russian railways, below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:48, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

• I can support Option A per Dicklyon. It looks like it ties out to what is used for lines in other systems. Some of the stuff that got ported over to English ended up with some odd variations. There are a few that I’ve been meaning to get to myself. I can certainly help with some of the work on this if you need it. TastyPoutine ^{talk (if you dare)} 06:30, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
• Option A per WP:CONSISTENCY and WP:USEENGLISH. It would be just too unsightly and confusion to change the articles titles to something that is inconsistent with related articles. It would also fall out of line with the manual of styles linked above to change them. Boomer Vial^{Happy Holidays! • Contribs} 06:38, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
• Follow the sources. The entire discussion seems irrelevant navel-gazing. What do reliable sources use? Wikipedia's policy is to always do what reliable English-language sources do, if they exist. What do Moscow travel guides use? As reliable sources about different topics often use different conventions, Wikipedia is not internally consistent (and that is not a particularly worthwhile goal anyway). —Kusma (t·c) 11:22, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

@Kusma: this is a common misapprehension. We do not always follow the styles used in reliable English language sources, for a number of reasons: like other publications, we have our own style rules embodied in the Manual of Style; reliable sources are of different kinds, some more specialized than others, and we take into account those that are appropriate for a general encyclopedia. Peter coxhead (talk) 11:33, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Of course, our rules are not fixed in stone and can be changed (if there is consensus to do so)... there are a lot of editors who think our MOS rule should be changed to “follow the sources”. Don’t know if it is a majority of editors who think that... but if not, it is a sizable minority. Blueboar (talk) 11:57, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

A response to this has been posted in #Extended discussion of Russian railways, below.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  12:24, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Sourcing tends to be all over the place. Just as in some cases, there isn’t consistency in transliterating Russian, you also don’t get consistency in this matter. The Metro itself uses lowercase [11] while TASS uses an uppercase [12]. For what it’s worth, TASS also called the Koltsevaya Line the Circle Line which is probably correct since Koltsevaya in Russian is meant to be descriptive. But that’s a fight with another IP editor for another day. In any case, even the Moscow Times which is one of your best local sources isn’t particularly consistent (lowercase [13]) and (uppercase [14]) The New York Times wavers between the colloquial name with uppercase [15] and the official name with lowercase [16]. So in that case, my guess would be that the MOS is the best guide. TastyPoutine ^{talk (if you dare)} 13:35, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Thank you TastyPoutine. To add a not particularly RS: the English translation of Metro 2033 uses both "Red Line" and "Sokolnicheskaya line". In the absence of a strong argument that points in a different direction, lowercase "line" probably works best, although if a different convention has been in place for years, I see no particularly good reason to change that. —Kusma (t·c) 19:23, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

I would put it out there that it may be worth making effort to change. Articles that got ported over from foreign languages were pretty inconsistently set up and it’s probably better to get it right than settle into inertia. Something written a decade ago likely set it but without a good MoS and did their best. And the extensiveness of the system makes it difficult to make wholesale change. But if we can, I think wwe should make the right change now and move on.TastyPoutine ^{talk (if you dare)} 20:02, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

• Comment Option B is used since 2005 [17] 92.227.230.156 (talk) 17:11, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

  I presume you are the same as the dynamic IP who made the big "Oppose" section above, which I interpret as a vote for B. It would be better to clarify there than to vote again. Dicklyon (talk) 19:18, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

  Dicklyon, statement by 92.227.230.156 says "Comment", which is not a vote. And it does not even endorse any of the options, only adds a new finding in chronological order, so all voters before might have been under-informed. 77.179.37.199 (talk) 23:49, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

  Since the anon is now pretending to be different editors, I've taken this to WP:SPI.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:04, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

  User:SMcCandlish claims the untrue. Where did anyone here claim to "to be different editors"? 92.231.183.209 (talk) 05:19, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

  Covered at the SPI report; VPPOL is not the place for this discussion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  05:24, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

  User:SMcCandlish - VPPOL was the place where you made a claim regarding an activity that occurred here. Now you refuse to show the evidence. Did User:SMcCandlish lie? Where is the diff of the SPI where you cover that? 92.231.183.209 (talk) 05:42, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

  Take it to the right venue. See also WP:Tendentious editing; repeating demands after your told they're off topic doesn't make them on-topic.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  05:59, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

  Thanks for pointing out that Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Line that's been capped since 2005. As you can see in books, sources often call it "Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya line" with lowercase line. It is not near the usual threshold of "consistently capitalized in sources" that we use to determine proper names. Dicklyon (talk) 05:25, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Extended commentary by anon with multiple IP addresses

Comments regarding MOS:DASH

MOS:DASH lists Guinea-Bissau, so "-" is allowed. The "-" in the Moscow Metro articles are not connectors like Beijing–Shanghai Railway where the two items connected by "–" mark the end points of a line. Several lines containing "-" in the name have been extended without any name change. 77.179.78.253 (talk) 06:45, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Comments regarding WP:CONSISTENCY

WP:RUSSIA consistently uses the type name in upper case:

• Moscow Oblast, Shatursky District, Central Administrative Okrug
• Varshavskoye Highway, Mira Avenue, Mokhovaya Street, Cosmonauts Alley, Chistoprudny Boulevard, Boulevard Ring, Nakhimovsky Prospekt, Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane, Lefortovo Tunnel, Moskvoretskaya Embankment, Moscow Ring Road, German Quarter, Vodootvodny Canal, Arbatskaya Square (Red Square too), Bagration Bridge, Northern Sea Route
• Tsar Cannon, Alexander Garden, Kremlin Arsenal, Chudov Monastery, State Kremlin Palace, Spasskaya Tower, Donskoye Cemetery, Bolshoi Theatre, Vnukovo International Airport, Nekrasov Library, Cosmos Hotel, Rumyantsev Museum
• Meshchera Lowlands, Crimean Peninsula, Kara Sea, Kara Strait

The content is consistent as it is. All Moscow Metro lines are named consistently. Hundreds of pages contain the line names. 77.179.78.253 (talk) 06:45, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Also outside Russia many items use upper case. Even rail lines: Second Avenue Subway and all the lines in Category:New York City Subway lines. 77.179.76.40 (talk) 23:55, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Comments regarding WP:USEENGLISH

WP:USEENGLISH - the titles are already English. They are perfect English. 77.179.78.253 (talk) 06:45, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

They are as English as possible : NYC's BMT Fourth Avenue Line, Moscow's Filyovskaya Line. 77.179.76.40 (talk) 23:57, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Comments regarding MOS:CAPS

MOS:CAPS does not prohibit capitalization of proper names. MOS:NAMECAPS explicitly allows it. 77.179.78.253 (talk)

Extended discussion of Russian metro lines

• This discussion has been "advertised" to WT:AT, WT:NCCAPS, WT:USEENGLISH, WT:MOS, WT:MOSCAPS, WT:TRAINS, and WT:RUSSIA. The "WP:Naming conventions (Russia)" page is an old draft abandoned around 2011, so I skipped that; no one uses its talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:36, 9 December 2017 (UTC)
• Response to the anon's long block of FUD up there: This is not a "support" or "oppose" RfC; its a four-way multiple choice. Option B is not the status quo ante; they were at totally different names until you (at a different IP address) moved them [18] just over a day ago. And, no, it will not be taken to WT:RUSSIA (which has already been notified of this RfC). The entire point of WP:Village pump is to get broad editorial input, to assess actual site-wide consensus and avoid a bloc vote by an insular wikiproject or other knot of editors apt to produce a WP:FALSECONSENSUS. This was already explained to you at RM/TR, so I have to wonder why you're pretending it was not and are recycling the same "I want this on my turf" argument when you already know that is not going to fly.

  To address your various policy mis-citations: MOS:DASH: Guinea-Bissau is a single place, it is not a construction expressive of a relationship linking two different places the way Kalininsko–Solntsevskaya line does. WP:CONSISTENCY is a site-wide policy; it does not mean "make articles on my favorite topic consistent with each other but inconsistent with those on all the other topics just for the hell of it". MOS:CAPS: if "all fine", why are you back at RM tendentiously and falsely pushing more of the same moves as "non-controversial" [19]? USEENGLISH: Yes, these titles are in English, which means they follow English-language norms, not Russian ones. That's the entire point.

  PS: Option B is written accurately, based on the exact justifications that you (at yet another IP address) offered at RM/TR [20]: because the Russians, in their language, use a hyphen and capitalize (according to you, anyway; even that has not been verified yet, but is irrelevant).
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:47, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

• Response to Blueboar and Kusma: "Follow the sources" already is the rule, just applied in a common sense manner. MoS is based on major style guides, ironing out where they conflict. Beyond that, an unusual stylization (i.e. which doesn't match what MoS says to do based on what mainstream style guides in print say to do) is permissible here if it's used consistently in a sizable majority of reliable sources. Unless I'm sorely misremembering, you brokered that codicil yourself, Blueboar, so it's weird to me to see you acting here today like it's not in place. You and Kusma and a handful of others (not a large minority, or MoS probably would no longer exist) seem to want style at every article to follow the style used in specialist material for the topic on question. That's never going to happen for various reasons, the most obvious of which are: A) Music-journalism writing about rock stars and physics-journal writing about cosmology [and so on] use styles that are not appropriate for encyclopedic writing. B) Sources reliable for specialized facts about a topic are not reliable for how to best write English (unless they're coincidentally sources specialized about how to best write English, such as reputably published style guides). C) Few topics are the exclusive subject of a single specialized field, and different fields use different styles, so a unified MoS becomes inevitable if for no other reason that to stop specialists in different fields from fighting over style. That's how and why MoS arose in the first place, less than a year after WP was started, because the squabbling was already intolerably disruptive by then. Publishers have style guides for a reason.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  12:29, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

  @SMcCandlish: Indeed consistency of style across all of Wikipedia is not an achievable or even worthy goal. (WP:ENGVAR/MOS:RETAIN is one of our traditional rules in this regard, which achieves peace without enforcing consistency between articles). With respect to article titles, following the sources appropriate for the field is what we have done for years. Mao Zedong and Go Seigen and Shiing-Shen Chern and Chiang Kai-shek and Samuel C. C. Ting are five articles about Chinese people alive during the 20th century following five different and wildly inconsistent conventions for their name order, romanisation, language use, capitalisation and hyphenation. Each of them is at the correct title per Wikipedia:Naming conventions (use English). Legislating a consistent style for foreign topics against the evidence of scholarly publications just does not work. It is to Wikipedia's detriment to force people to use conventions against those correct in the article subject: it drives experts away and makes articles inconsistent with their sources. "Consistency" isn't worth that. So again, are there any relevant publications about Russian railways in English and what style do they use? —Kusma (t·c) 19:04, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

  Note that the discussion is not even about railways (which in Russia never use "line" or "Line" anyway), but specifically about metro (mainly Moscow Metro, though it will apply as well to other four cities which have more than one metro line).--Ymblanter (talk) 19:31, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

  The wording has been fixed.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:44, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

  Kusma, all you're doing is demonstrating my point for me. We do in fact have standard naming conventions for Chinese people (see WP:NCCHINA#Names of people); there are variations from it precisely because in those cases the bulk of the RS consistently do something different – and the same different thing – for those specific individuals. And if you think MoS's primary purpose is not cross-article consistency, you're not thinking about it very hard. If that were true we would need not a style guide at all, and it would simply be left to every wikiproject or even every random cluster of editors at every article to decide topic-by-topic on all style matters. We tried that in WP's first year and it was a disaster.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  05:11, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

  The question is always when we should follow the sources instead of our standards. Our difference seems to be that I think in cases of doubt, we should follow the sources. You seem to say in cases of doubt, we should impose some arbitrary standard. And indeed I agree that some sort of style guide, describing Wikipedia's common practice, is useful. However, I object to your characterisation of the MoS as saving Wikipedia from a "disaster" in its first year. I have admittedly not been here for Wikipedia's first year, but in the last thirteen years, the MoS has been a source of constant bickering that has created several ArbCom cases. The date unlinking debate alone led to millions of edits and thousands of hours of editor time that were used without a measurable overall improvement to Wikipedia. Infobox and citation style debates have cost us many good editors. It may look different from your end, but I have not perceived editors enforcing "standards" through the MOS to be a positive for Wikipedia: sometimes the net result is almost neutral (because the difference between "Line" and "line" is minuscule), sometimes negative (good editors gives up). —Kusma (t·c) 10:24, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

  It's not really clear what you're thinking when you say "follow the sources" in "cases of doubt". When sources are clear, we do follow them, as MOS:CAPS advises. When they're not, we default to our style (lowercase when it's not clear that sources treat the term as a proper name). Have you looked at sources on these metro lines? I have, and there's an awful lot of lowercase line there. In particular, see books like The Rough Guide to Moscow, Lonely Planet Moscow, and most fiction works that talk about Moscow metro lines, all with lowercase line. Dicklyon (talk) 17:29, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

  Kusma's anti-MoS fingerpointing is in the wrong direction anyway, on all counts (though see below for the spirit of the matter, which Kusma seems to intuit without realizing our guidelines are the solution not the problem).

  1. WP:NCCAPS, which is really the guideline central to these rail and metro moves, isn't part of MoS, but a subsidiary guideline of WP:AT policy. (It is and should be consistent with MOS:CAPS, of course, or we'd have a WP:POLICYFORK and conflicts between article titles and body text).
  2. The date auto-linking fiasco was caused by the MediaWiki developers deploying a problematic "feature" that did not work well here; MoS didn't cause that. (And it's not unique – similar disputes have erupted about WP:Flow, WP:Visual editor, and many other WMF technical debacles, like doing visual indentation with <dd> markup). There was an ArbCom case about date delinking in 2009 because certain individuals were engaging in uncivil behavior over the matter. ArbCom does not settle content disputes or write policy; "there was an ArbCom case" just means "certain editors were accused of being jerks". The end result of the de-linking (which the community decided in a series of RfCs and polls – not ArbCom, not MoS regulars) was obviously a net positive for the project, in getting rid of a problematic mess over which people were uncivilly squabbling, while reducing the pointless "sea of blue" overlinking effect our readers were being subjected to for no encyclopedic reason.
  3. MoS is entirely neutral on infoboxes, and leaves their inclusion up to editorial discretion at each article (see WP:INFOBOXUSE). People get into emotional infobox-related fights for MoS-unrelated reasons (and arguably WP-unrelated ones, to do with personal philosophies of information architecture and Web design "elegance"). Quitting in a huff after getting too emotionally invested in fighting about infoboxes (or any other trivial dispute) is a WP:CIR matter, not a policy problem.
  4. Citation style is covered by WP:CITE, which is not part of MoS. While I agree that disputation about citation style has frequently been disruptive, it has nothing to do with MoS. (MoS, including MOS:DATE, expectations are of course applied to citation content, when doing so does not directly conflict with a specific citation style that's used consistently in an article.)
  5. The other partly-MoS-related ArbCom case, in 2012, concerned incivility at WT:AT and WT:MOS in disputes about the wording of that policy and guideline (respectively) – just another editorial behavior matter, which could as easily have been about Pokemon or fungi. When ArbCom was asked last year if it considered the issue broad enough to apply to title and style discussions more generally (e.g. RMs, and RfCs like this one) it explicitly denied that expanded scope interpretation.

  "MoS has been a source of constant bickering that has created several ArbCom cases" simply isn't true; it's like blaming "the gov'ment" for all one's problems. Kusma's central concern, once the mis-blaming of MoS is cleared away, amounts to "people shouldn't bicker over stylistic trivia", which is true and good. MoS has eliminated the vast majority of style-related bickering that used to plague the project, article by article over the same trivia again and again; the handful of ArbCom cases were triggered by a few individuals who persisted in uncivil bickering. The most common "style" squabbling that recurs is actually over AT and NC, not MoS, matters (though citation to MoS often resolves them, because its applicability is so generalized and AT is not a style policy).

  Yes, "line" versus "Line" is trivial; continual disruptive bickering about it is not a trivial problem. The very fact that people will sometimes engage in it doggedly is why we need RfCs and naming conventions and style guidelines, to settle the question consistently and move on. Otherwise the same tedious dispute will still be happening in 2020 and in 2025. See also previous RfC on this page that closed a week or so ago in favor of developing something along the line of a MOS:TRANSPORT guideline; this RfC is another step toward that prescribed goal.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  06:42, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Scope

Resolved

As some mention below, this is more about metro lines than railways. I propose that to keep the noise down we limit to titles that come from Cyrillic titles such as "Святошинсько-Броварська лінія" which is now at Sviatoshynsko-Brovarska Line which is a line in the Kiev Metro in Ukraine (that is, not limit to Russia, but limit to such place-descriptive metro lines for now). This will reduce the fear of over-generalization, and we can discuss generalizations to other things elsewhere. Dicklyon (talk) 20:24, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Quoting Ymblanter (19:31, 9 December 2017): "Note that the discussion is not even about railways (which in Russia never use "line" or "Line" anyway), but specifically about metro (mainly Moscow Metro, though it will apply as well to other four cities which have more than one metro line)." - Spasibo Yaroslav! I agree with Dicklyon that it should be consistent with Kiev Metro. It should be consistent accross with Minsk Metro too. And also with systems outside the capitals. 78.53.140.207 (talk) 00:35, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

• Section headings updated to reflect narrower scope. The original section names are preserved with anchors, so links don't break.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  04:40, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

Status

I wouldn't quite agree with SMcCandlish that move warring has broken out, but we do need to hash this out, again, apparently. An editor changed some disambiguators (not changing the caps and dash issues, but bringing them to my attention at WP:RMTR). So I moved a few things to conform with normal style. He asked for a revert of those moves, at WP:RMTR. The admin who did (part of) what he asked unfortunately made a mistake and overwrote a line article with a station article somehow before going off for the evening. Another admin saw the requests still there, now with SMcCandlish's objections, and tried to finish up, without noticing the problem. It's still a mess. We'll get it sorted, maybe not today. So it's a good thing SMcCandlish didn't provide a link to the line article, because it would just confuse by taking you to the station article (this is since fixed). Nevermind, back to the real issue. Dicklyon (talk) 05:38, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

User:Dicklyon, and who did actual work on the articles? None of you. You both come in, move some pages around and everywhere else the year-old naming system persists. 77.179.78.253 (talk) 07:01, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

I had every intention of doing a lot more work there, but that got put on hold by your move revert request. I'll get back to it later, I expect. Dicklyon (talk) 07:18, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

User:Dicklyon, how would you ensure all occurrences visible to reader are changed? What tool is there to list all occurences to be done? 85.182.27.83 (talk) 07:40, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

That would be so awesome! We do still have widespread visible linking through wongly styled redirects, with over-capitalization, missing hyphens, hyphens for dashes, etc., throughout the en.wp, and a tool that replaces those with the preferred-styling title would be great. I've recently had some luck getting bot operators to do some large-scale moves, for downcasing railway station in China and a few other places for example, so I think there's hope for such things on specific subsets, and I'm willing to give that a try in the Moscow metro case, and then see from there. Lacking such tool support, I find that getting the titles styled right first is a big help; then getting templates updated will typically fix the majority of appearances of wrongly styled titles. So a little manual work goes a long way. Want to help? Dicklyon (talk) 19:26, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Dicklyon, it's not about templates, that's easy. "then getting templates updated will typically fix the majority of appearances of wrongly styled titles" - no, the problem is plain text. Without tool support it will take years, just look at districts and divisions of India. Several years ago five or so users decided to use "X district" where all of Wikipedia elsewhere uses "X District". And they still don't have it done fully. Why not help and create articles for the Line 11 several red links still exist.. ? I also see no consistency, some rail lines are singled out and many other things still have the type name capitalized, Mississippi River, Sixth Avenue (Manhattan). It should be done consistently for all things, only to do it for some classes (e.g. rail lines) is creating inconsistency. 77.179.37.199 (talk) 23:45, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

• User:Dicklyon claimed "So I moved a few things to conform with normal style.". But provides no evidence for his normal style. Normal style for many other subway and transport infratructure articles is to use upper case. Second Avenue Subway (Category:New York City Subway lines), Sixth Avenue (Category:Streets in Manhattan). Maybe move war there has no chance, so Moscow / Eurasia was selected? 77.180.49.189 (talk) 00:28, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

  I've been doing a lot of style work (using WP:MOS to define "normal style") on railway related articles around the world, as I find them. Recently a lot in China, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia; before that the whole of the UK, which was more of a challenge; it's true I haven't had much luck with the NYC subway folks yet, and recently lost a multi-RM there, so bummer. I had no plan to take on Russia, but your moves showed up at WP:RMTR, just too late for me to contest. Dicklyon (talk) 04:58, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

  How else would you capitalize Sixth Avenue? In US usage the "road type" words in street names are always capitalized ("Center Street", "Main Avenue", "Park Lane", and so on). They are proper names. "Sixth avenue" would be as nonsensical as "Jimmy stewart". --Khajidha (talk) 17:02, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

  PS - this also applies to your point about rivers. In the US many (possibly most rivers) are named "________ River". The word "river" is not some sort of type marker or disambiguation, it is part of the proper name. --Khajidha (talk) 17:10, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Collapsing a dispute which has been mooted.

Error in the question's premise Moot  – The Russian-language-related wording no longer appears in the RfC question or table. SMcCandlish's proposed option B, described as Hyphen and uppercase "Line" to mimic the WP:OFFICIALNAME in Russian Cyrillic is supposed to represent the status quo, and it pretty much does, but with the false premise that the Russian does it this way. In all Russian sources and Russian wikipedia, line is lowercase "ли́ния" or "линия". Furthermore, the justification for the hyphen can be found in some of the line article histories as "easier to type", when the articles were moved back from the en dash after a move "per MOS:DASH"; nothing about official, Russian, or Cyrillic in that reason. A couple of IPs (perhaps the same person) have told me that the capped "Line" is a "year-old consensus". Not clear why or where that happened. So not clear what a vote for B would mean, but I'm sure people will explain their choices. Dicklyon (talk) 05:38, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Option "B" has been framed by a person supporting Option A. Not trustworthy at all. The "mimic" stuff is nonsense. Uppercase exists due to WP:CONSISTENCY 92.231.182.37 (talk) 06:12, 9 December 2017 (UTC) As noted in my response to the anon, option B was drafted on the basis of the anon's own claims. Whether the underling premise is true I did not investigate, but it doesn't matter, since the idea that we'd write English to match Russian orthography is nonsensical to begin with.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:00, 9 December 2017 (UTC) User:SMcCandlish is saying the untrue. Nowhere was it suggested that uppercase is done in Russian Cyrillic for "line". 77.179.78.253 (talk) 07:04, 9 December 2017 (UTC) I agree. He misinterpreted your statement "all metro lines in Russia use upper case type name ("X Line")" as being about in Russian, but you meant in en.wp titles. Still, my point, on which I agree with SMcCandlish, is that there's no logical basis for the status quo as represented in option B. It's just how it is now, which I think is what you were saying, too. Dicklyon (talk) 07:18, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Dicklyon, you claim "there's no logical basis for the status quo". But several have been given. 1) It is all consistent, the page movers will not fix it in all articles. Or is there a tool to control that? 2) It is consistent with bridges, roads, airports, lakes, districts, towers, palaces, etc in Russia. See Wikipedia:Village_pump (policy)#Comments regarding WP:CONSISTENCY and comment there. Present your logic. 3) "-" is not used to connect end points. Comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Comments regarding MOS:DASH. 85.182.27.83 (talk) 07:36, 9 December 2017 (UTC) This is the third time this anon has called me a liar in this discussion (here and at RM/TR). Adding that to the ANI material. I did not lie at all: Here's a direct quote of the anon's actual statement in the original RM mess: 'all metro lines in Russia use upper case type name ("X Line") and use "-" as in Russian source, these are proper names'. That's an [ungrammatical] two-part claim about Russian-language sources. If the anon meant to say "All WP articles about metro lines in Russia use upper case type name ("X Line"), for no particular reason. Our article titles also use "-" as in Russian sources.', that would be a very different statement. The anon is in fact back-pedalling from an incorrect statement; the "these are proper names" bit demonstrates that, since being proper names would be an argument for capitalization but would have nothing to do with hyphen versus en dash. So, nice try, but no.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  07:44, 9 December 2017 (UTC) User:SMcCandlish is saying the untrue once again. He was not called a liar here. It was simply stated that "User:SMcCandlish is saying the untrue." 85.182.27.83 (talk) 07:53, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Don't be so quick to say he's calling you a liar, just because he says what you're saying is untrue. Consider the Russian capitalization rule, which I just looked up myself: "In compound proper names, as a rule, only the first member is capitalized: Чёрное море – Black Sea". So the lowercase линия actually gives no indication one way or the other about whether it's part of a proper name or not. I still say it's not, and maybe he is saying what you thought about the Russian, but it's not true he's claiming that that word would be capped in Russian. Anyway, no matter, things like "Xxx line" are not usually treated as a proper name in English (and Moscow oblast is only half the time, so we should probably downcase those, too), and the various things that are treated as proper names in English, like bridges and streets, are not relevant. Dicklyon (talk) 07:56, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Dicklyon, if you want to lower case type names of territorial entities you can start with Washington County. Note that CMOS suggests upper case, and that is what English WP does - everywhere except for India. Also, if the type name is not part of the proper name, then shouldn't it go into "()"? 92.226.217.125 (talk) 08:07, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Not comparable cases, and no it wouldn't go in parentheses if natural disambiguation is available; see WP:ATDAB policy.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  08:21, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Here's the anon explicitly calling me a liar, twice: [21][22]. See also WP:ASPERSIONS and WP:SANCTIONGAMING. One can't go around accusing people of dishonesty and then claim one isn't doing that simply because one used, in two instances, a different word than "liar". Changing one's IP address isn't going to fool anyone, either.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  08:21, 9 December 2017 (UTC) User:SMcCandlish is claiming the untrue once again. "Here's the anon explicitly calling me a liar, twice" 1) [23] does not contain the word "liar". It makes a claim about what would be a lie (It's a lie if the opposer claims that "X Line" and use of "-" has been started by IP requests "only just over a day ago"."), and then, after the other party does not pull back from the false statement about "Line", it is sure that he sticks to the lie. But there is no claim that the whole person is a liar. 2) [24] the diff does not contain the word "lie" nor "liar". It says "is saying the untrue", but that does not constitute lying. ... Now, "explicitly calling me a liar, twice" is just a false claim. It's a libel. 78.55.248.119 (talk) 05:52, 10 December 2017 (UTC) See WP:SANCTIONGAMING and WP:No legal threats. Probably also First law of holes.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  06:20, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Collapsing another dispute which has been mooted.

RfC misrepresentation Moot  – Later parties have removed the statements in question and restored the RfC to wording similar to that with which it started.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  04:50, 10 December 2017 (UTC) At least three things the anon changed in the RfC's wording are mispresentation of the intent and meaning of this RfC, of WP policies and guidelines, and of actual practice. It's pure FUD. Third Interchange Contour would not be "Third interchange contour" in option A, because it's a proper name, not a description. This RfC is not about anything other than the word "line" in descriptive titles of WP articles on railway lines. Moscow Monorail – Ditto. These bogus examples have been inserted as straw man and argument to emotion tactics to scare editors away from option A, which would not actually result in the titles the anon claims. The entire option B "reasoning" block – inserted after removal of most of the reasoning for option A by the same editor – is not a neutral statement but just one person's pleading and "evidence" presentation, a restatement of their !vote. And none of it aligns with reality; this is the anon arguing how they wished things were. A style that a handful of people made up in a wikiproject about a year ago – either without bothering to consult the titles policy and naming and style guides, or directly conflicting with them on purpose – is not "long-standing", but a recently introduced conflict of a WP:PROJPAGE essay with much longer-established WP:P&G material (see WP:POLICYFORK). "I can find some other 'Line' cases" = WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS; it's just stuff we've not cleaned up yet.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  09:49, 9 December 2017 (UTC) User:SMcCandlish claims the untrue: "A style that a handful of people made up in a wikiproject about a year ago" ... See 2005 version of Arbatsko-Pokrovskaya Line 213.39.186.49 (talk) 17:08, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Again, he probably mis-interpreted your phrase "year-old" as meaning about a year ago. Probably you meant "years-old". I agree the over-capitalization is very old there. Dicklyon (talk) 19:10, 9 December 2017 (UTC) Just for the record: If that's the case then it again is not me misinterpreting anything, it's the anon writing one thing then later claiming a different meaning. (Anon also made the same singular-year claim here.) This sort of equivocation has been happening with that editor throughout the discussion.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  04:53, 10 December 2017 (UTC) User:SMcCandlish - you are again claiming the untrue. [25] "Hyphen and uppercase "Line" to mimic the WP:OFFICIALNAME in Russian Cyrillic" - Russian Cyrillic has no uppercase "Line". And that was never claimed to be so. Re your "A style that a handful of people made up in a wikiproject about a year ago" - it's simply not true. IP made no such claim. IP did not claim "handful" nor "about a year ago". IP didn't define the number of years. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-year-old 78.55.248.119 (talk) 05:33, 10 December 2017 (UTC) Attempting to disprove equivocation with more equivocation is not a good tactic.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  06:19, 10 December 2017 (UTC) User:Dicklyon you claim, but don't prove. There is no "over-capitalization". It is only "over-capitalization" in your mind and that of some others. It's common practice to capitalize, it is a question of style: Second Avenue Subway and all the lines in Category:New York City Subway lines. Both ways are possible. 77.179.37.199 (talk) 23:33, 9 December 2017 (UTC) It's overcapitalization according to WP:NCCAPS and MOS:CAPS. This has nothing to do with your mind versus his mind or any other such projective nonsense. Either RS consistently treat these things are proper names and write them out and capitalize them the same way from source to source, or they do not. In these kinds of cases they do not, since they're descriptive phrases not names, and are not used consistently in sources at all, style questions aside. These things have no particular common names in English.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ<  04:49, 10 December 2017 (UTC) Yeah, you really shouldn't aspire to consistency with the New York subway over-capitalizers. Note that the New York Times and New Yorker magazine, to name a few, don't do that; they say Second Avenue subway, (100 years ago, the old one was called Second avenue subway, but times change); similarly for Lexington Avenue line, and New York subway, which NYC wikipedians insist on capping against the advice of their MOS; yes, WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS. But per our MOS, if the New York Times and New Yorker and other respectably edited English-language publications can get away with lowercase, then we there's no reason we should treat these as proper names. But I can't fix everything as once; when I get pushback, I slow down and work through it. Dicklyon (talk) 05:40, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Corresponding Requested Move discussion opened

I open a multi-RM on all the lines in the 5 metros I could find: Talk:Kalininsko-Solntsevskaya_Line#Requested move 11 December 2017. This seems like an opportunity for a more focused discussion now that we've all aired our feelings and it's clearly "A" vs the status quo. Dicklyon (talk) 03:28, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

I noticed that those sections have been abusing by editors to "promote" other pages they created or they like. Plus, the policy regarding "See also" sections says that "Whether a link belongs in the "See also" section is ultimately a matter of editorial judgment and common sense." Whether a link belongs in the section mostly depends on editors' POV and is often abused for promotional purposes (the same issue was the problem for ethnic gallery sections in the past and the problem has been solved, see WP:NOETHNICGALLERIES policy). We have already "Main articles", "Further information" links on articles and in addition to this, the useful articles are linked in the bodies of the articles already. Thus, due to the reasons i mentioned above, i think those sections are problematic, have been abusing and surpluss. 66.226.107.42 (talk) 06:38, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

PS:I am unable to edit with my physical ip right now and sorry in advance for this. Thanks. 66.226.107.42 (talk) 06:43, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

You can edit the "see also" section if you don't think the suggestion is relevant, and you don't have to follow a link that simply doesn't interest you. Read WP:ABOUT: "Wikipedia's articles provide links designed to guide the user to related pages with additional information." "See also" sections are part of that feature. Jack N. Stock (talk) 06:46, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

As i mentioned above, those sections mostly depend on the editor's judgment (that is what the policy says) and thus removing or edit-warring over this is meaningless. As for WP:ABOUT, as i mentioned above, we have already links in the bodies of the articles and "Further information", "Main article" links. In other words, see also sections are not "crucial" and unfortunately, have been abusing for POV & promotional purposes. 66.226.107.42 (talk) 06:54, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

It is hard to determine if there is abuse (or not) without some specific examples to discuss. Blueboar (talk) 11:55, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Exactly; which is why I was pressing you for examples of your complaint (or observation) in the section above. Dicklyon (talk) 22:17, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

We actually do have guidelines on see-also sections:

• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout § "See also" section
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Embedded lists § Related topics (navigational lists)

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:35, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

I notice that we have had a recent surge in discussions that pit our MOS against various project level guidelines. Is there a reason for this? (Not saying who’s right or wrong in these discussions... just wondering why we are suddenly getting so many). Blueboar (talk) 05:42, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

I suspect that it's because those who like the MOS are running up against significant opposition from those who like the individual project guidelines when the former group of editors try and change articles written/named according to the project guidelines. This is certainly the case with rail transport and so I presume it's the same in other areas too. I haven't been following all the discussions by any means, but from those I have seen I wouldn't like to say the manual of style is always or even almost always the better. Thryduulf (talk) 17:53, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

But why does this seem to be happening more often right now?--Khajidha (talk) 18:06, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

Do we have examples of what you're talking about? I've seen only very few such, like the NYC subway folks liking to cap all their stuff, but that discussion goes back a few years, nothing new. Dicklyon (talk) 18:18, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

If you're thinking of the recent China and Russia caps discussions, there was really no conflict with projects there. I was unable get much input from projects on those; they don't seen to care or have any conflicting style. There's one anon on the Russia stuff, and a one or two counter opinions on the China/Hong Kong situation, but nothing resembling project-level guidelines. In Taiwan, Philippines, and some other places the projects have been actively moving toward MOS compliance. Where is this "pit against" thing you think you've noticed? Dicklyon (talk) 18:34, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

• If it is, it doesn't represent anything new. The standard tension at Wikipedia (which could perhaps be generalized to a sort of standard tension in across all human endeavors in the history of mankind) is the tension between uniformity and flexibility, or between "lumpers and splitters", or similar. Without taking sides (because taking sides isn't useful, or even necessary here, because neither is right, and both are wrong; and also simultaneously both are right, and neither is wrong), the issue is thus: On the one side, there is a benefit to having a clear unified rule set that everyone follows (if we all agree to do the same thing, its one less thing to fight over, so we can move along to something actually important). On the other side there is a benefit to allowing a diversity of rules to allow for the greatest diversity of ideas (rules that exclude valid ideas or their expression limits the usefulness of the project). This tension spills out in various places, under various manifestations randomly and without direct cause; it just happens to flare up somewhere or another. Whether its the "All articles should have infoboxes" vs. "It's OK if some don't" debates, the "The MOS should be applied to every article without question" vs. "Wikiprojects should manage their own affairs" debate, to any of a gajillion or so manifestations. If you really want to be helpful, just recognize the problem isn't going away, treat all of these discussions with nuance, and there is nothing to do about it because there is no reason to do anything. It always happens, will always happen, and doesn't need approval to happen. It just does. Accept that it will, and manage the fallout with nuance and grace when it does. --Jayron32 20:14, 13 December 2017 (UTC)

As you say, it's a natural consequence of having decisions taken at various levels, the latter being a better way of managing almost any complex enterprise than trying to centralise everything. In theory at least it might help to have some common definition of the things expected to be consistent across WP - grammar, punctuation, linking, content of the lead section, etc. - and those left to projects to sort out, which for me would include stuff like the use of infoboxes mentioned above. Whether such exists in WP I have no idea? If it doesn't it could be a difficult and tortuous thing to create (or, rather, on which to gain any sort of consensus!) MapReader (talk) 04:10, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

@Blueboar:, since I do a lot of MOS gnoming, I'm really wondering if your comment was related to some of my efforts. I haven't seen such a thing, so wondering what you're seeing. When an active project is out of sync with the MOS like at Wikipedia:WikiProject_New_York_City_Public_Transportation#Naming_conventions, there's not much that can be done. I tried an RM; it lost; that's life. Are there other projects relevant to what you're thinking, where things have happened recently? The big noise above about Russia should never have happened; it's about a globally banned block evader and a screwup in executing his technical requests; not a project; open RM to fix it is unopposed, last I looked. What else is behind your premise that we are "suddenly getting so many"? Dicklyon (talk) 21:05, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

My comment was inspired by the fact that at least 6 of the current discussions on this page relate to questions re MOS vs Progect guidance. I am used to seeing one or two such discussions a month, and it seemed unusual to have so many. Blueboar (talk) 22:05, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Maybe I'm blind, but I don't see a conflict with project guidelines in any of those, with the exception of the NYC lines already noted. So if you see "discussions that pit our MOS against various project level guidelines", maybe it's just you seeing things oddly? Dicklyon (talk) 22:16, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Oh, a little bit of the China transport discussion did involve an MOS conflict, too, I see now. There was essentially no project pushback when fixing hundreds of those titles though. Like in other countries where we worked on that, users with a China interest saw the advantage of consistency with WP style, I think. There's more to be done there, but I'm not sensing any resistance. Dicklyon (talk) 22:23, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

It's just a factor of: A) some overdue MoS cleanup and consolidation happening at the same time as B) a bunch of large-category WP:CONSISTENCY cleanup that happens (as titles discussions often to) to involved MoS questions; plus C) conscientiousness that VPPOL be notified of substantive, non-trivial MoS changes and proposals; and D) using VPPOL for its actual purpose as a non-topical, "editors of all interests and backgrounds" centralized discussion venue for WP:P&G matters, especially when individuals or topical blocs of editors make consensus determination difficult.

As to specifics: MOS:MATH is a site-wide guideline; the idea that MOS:MATH agreeing with WP:MOS (to which it is subordinate as a matter of policy) and with MOS:ACCESS, on an accessible markup question is somehow "pit[ting] our MOS against various project level guidelines"; WP:WikiProject Mathematics was canvassed to the RfC, but does not own or control that guideline, the WP community does, and accessibility and HTML and template markup questions that aren't maths-specific are outside of both MOS:MATH's and the wikiproject's scope. The Russian metro line RfC would not have been necessary if not for a disruptive and tendentious anon, who has now been positively identified as WP:SOCKing, banned editor Tobias Conradi. The earlier one on Chinese railways is not an wikiproject versus MoS dispute, but a wikiproject versus wikiproject one; the railway and stations wikiprojects have had multiple RfCs concluding (in agreement with MOS:CAPS) to stop over-capitalizing words like "line" and "station" when outside of proper nouns; a few editors from the China wikiprojects wanted to WP:POLICYFORK from that, as if there was something special and different about how to refer, in English, to train stuff in China. And so on. It's just coincidental timing.
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  00:30, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

You've been around long enough to know what is and is not canvassing. But WP:APPNOTE is very clear that notifying Wikiprojects with an interest in a decision is not canvassing, and one of the best practices described at WP:RFC is to notify relevant Wikiprojects. I'll also remind everyone that Wikiprojects consist of editors who are just as much a part of "the community" as everyone else. Just to be clear, I don't claim that Wikiprojects always have the answers, or that Wikiproject Mathematics is always right, but there seems to be an implied attitude here that if you're not closely monitoring the pump and editing policies, then you aren't a member of "the community". Well I happen to think that all editors are part of the community, whether they are actively involved in policy work or not. Since not everyone monitors the pump as closely as most of the regulars here, it is very important for them to be notified of topically relevant proceedings here. Ideally all interested parties should be notified of a request for comment. While I've quite recently been accused of acting "tribally", I see more evidence that only those editors who regularly lurk on policy pages have opinions that are worthy of consideration, whilst those of us that edit more in focused content areas and articles are viewed as second-class citizens. Thus this is cast as "the community" versus "the Wikiprojects", which is a specious distinction with the sole intent of creating an artificial division of opinion. Sławomir Biały (talk) 13:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for pointing out that this is largely due to using "VPPOL for its actual purpose". And for reminding me that it's not all about me. I think Blueboar just can't stand to see MOS working so well and having so much consensus in input; I'll think of him as our Ajit Pai, wanting to let the various independent factions do their own thing even if it's bad for the overall project. Dicklyon (talk) 03:08, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Please note that I was simply asking “why?” we were getting more discussions than usual ... not passing judgment on the discussions themselves. Blueboar (talk) 21:13, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

But you presented it as "discussions that pit our MOS against various project level guidelines". No such thing is happening. Dicklyon (talk) 04:01, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

General community input requested at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Capital letters#Merge in MOS:PN.

Summary: We have a page (which is virtually never edited or cited) at WP:Manual of Style/Proper names that is redundant with WP:Manual of Style/Capital letters and its material on proper names/proper nouns, but the former is a bit more specific on a few things, and these should probably be retained. Ergo, it's proposed to merge the salvageable material from MOS:PN into MOS:CAPS. Some of MOS:PN would not be retained in MOS:CAPS because it is non-MoS material about article titles, redundant with various naming conventions pages such as WP:Naming conventions (people), etc.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  10:18, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

• The reason I oppose this at the discussion is that the long-time "WP:Manual of Style/Proper names" guideline includes the wording Wikipedia does not seek to judge such rival claims, but as a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English and SMcCandlish hasn't agreed that when a merge occurs that this language be included in some form. "As a general rule uses the name which is likely to be most familiar to readers of English" is wonderful encyclopedic-appropriate language, and is a common sense guideline/policy which is now in place. A merge should include this language, which has been stable. Randy Kryn (talk) 15:04, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

  No one proposed removing it, so I don't know what you're on about. The concept of "merge" here is "move content from one place to another, with a minimal changes only, to integrate it into the pre-existing material at the target page". It does not mean "delete the content and start from scratch".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  16:54, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

While reviewing an RFC, one of the arguments raised assumed Wikipedia:WikiProject Video games/Sources was a legit guideline. While someone did, a long time ago, incorrectly substitute the guideline template onto it (hence no tracking cat to discover it until now), there doesn't seem to be any actual discussion about it, which leads me to believe it was never raised for greater community discussion. Maybe it's fine as-is, though, since nobody's really raised it as an issue, but I thought I'd point it out here regardless. If it actually should be a guideline, the template should probably be updated to be non-subst, the page should likely should be moved out of its Wikiproject-subpage location, and its linkages (e.g., on WP:RS, WP:LGL) should reflect its official-ness status, if applicable. If not, it should probably be (un)tagged back as an essay or similar (and obviously can be otherwise left as-is). The latter is what seems safest to assume is the default in the absence of input to the contrary. --slakr^\ talk / 03:06, 5 December 2017 (UTC)

No, that's a WP:PROJPAGE (wikiproject advice essay). It's way, way too full of micro-detailed instruction creep to be a guideline.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  11:26, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

Where does it contradict policy? Benjamin (talk) 19:14, 10 December 2017 (UTC)

Its nothing to do with contradicting policy. Its a wikiproject advice page on the better (or worse) sources out there. To be elevated to an actual guideline it would need all the specific 'This is reliable, this isnt' removed - as reliability is dependant on context and information used, not solely the source. It could be turned into a guideline but what you would end up with would just be a cut-down version of WP:RS. So it would be completely redundant. Only in death does duty end (talk) 12:28, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Yeah, no one said anything about contradicting policy. Example: I hereby declare that the word "cat" on Wikipedia shall be taken to mean felid, since the word is often used this way in English: "the tiger is the largest living cat", "many of members of the cat family are nearing extinction". Felis catus, the domesticated species, is to be referred to as the "domestic cat" or "house cat". This proposition contradicts no policies. Do you think it's a guideline?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  17:02, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Speaking for the VG project, we don't consider it a policy, nor an attempt to override it. But it is meant to say "in our field, these are the sources we have deemed to meet WP:RS", so that new editors know where to look for sources, and when we go to GA or FA, we can point questions about source reliability to that page. I will note that its discussion page , that's where we do determine if sources qualify or not, following the principles of WP:RS, in context of the video game industry. In any case, the top box on it was changed to be a WikiProject guideline ("essay" for all purposes). --Masem (t) 17:12, 11 December 2017 (UTC)

Right; that's a WP:PROJPAGE essay. We have many of them, and some of them are very good. They're not guidelines. It takes a tremendous amount of community buy-in to elevate one of those "topical RS" pages to guideline status, as we have done with WP:MEDRS. It doesn't happen unless the community considers it a really serious matter (e.g. people dying because they relied on bogus medical "information" in an article here).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ >^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ<  17:02, 16 December 2017 (UTC)