Propose to add the following text to WP:IINFO (or some close facsimile should we decide to tweak the wording at any point):

5. Lists of victims In articles about tragic events, such as crimes or disasters, where people are killed or injured, bare lists of victims, which only compile names and basic information (age, birthplace, occupation, etc.) are to be deprecated. Victims of crimes and disasters and other tragic events may be named as a normal part of a quality prose narrative, but lists of victims names with no context are not useful to most readers anymore than lists of names are in other Wikipedia articles, and advice for creating lists of names of otherwise non-notable people are as applicable to victim's lists as anywhere else in Wikipedia. Victims lists are not accorded any special exemptions from the normal practices of creating lists of otherwise non-notable people.

Such changes are intended to avoid having to re-litigate the constant debates that happen over and over on various article talk pages. The matter has been under discussion at WP:VPIL for some time now, and there seems to be a general consensus to bring forward, for public consideration, the above addition. There was some concern over where to put this guidance, but WP:IINFO seems to be the place where it is most applicable. For the sake of organization, let's do the three section voting: Support, Oppose, and Discussion, where we can discuss tweaking the wording, make comments on our own or other's votes, change the target guidance page, etc.

Support

1. As nominator --Jayron32 19:40, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
2. Absolutely - FlightTime Phone (open channel) 19:48, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
3. Support - there is no need to include the names of non-notable victims at all in list form, and not in prose either, unless they played an active, notable role in the event (aside from dying) and they're participation is well sourced. Other than that, simply put; (with the one caveat) non-linked (red or blue) names do not belong. - wolf 03:31, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
4. Support As per Wolf. I will make some other points in the discussion section. In particular I think we should establish that the default position is no non-notable names. Lyndaship (talk) 09:51, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
5. Generally support, modulo the comments of Andy Mabbett and Iridescent, below. We definitely do need to avoid listing non-notable people, and we definitely do need to avoid having to re-re-re-re-re-fight this out page by page. We don't actually need to have the wording copyedited perfectly right here and now, so massaging like they want to do with it is fine, and is something we'd end up doing anyway over time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  13:12, 1 December 2018 (UTC)
6. Support with a minor qualification. Whatever we do, I think the status quo is not working. The lack of clear guidance on this subject is leading to numerous, lengthy, and often acrimonious local debates. It's time we resolve this issue one way or another. IMO lists of non-notable victims is a form of unencyclopedic bloat that is contrary to both NOTEVERYTHING and, at least in spirit, NOTMEMORIAL. The only exception I would concede is in some rare cases a mass casualty EVENT may involve a number independently NOTABLE victims whose role in the EVENT was largely limited to their dying. In such circumstances a short list of such NOTABLE victims might be justifiable. Long lists of such, unless they are stand alone articles, should be avoided. -Ad Orientem (talk) 14:28, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
7. Support seems to me a general rule is needed, but a list of non-notable victims seems to fail WP:NOTMEMORIAL. No problem with changing the copy edit to reflect only people who are not otherwise notable. SportingFlyer talk 22:20, 6 December 2018 (UTC)
8. Support. It is Indiscriminate Info to include random names from the phonebook in an article, without a clear and significant encyclopedic-rationale for each individual name to be included. "They died" is not a reason. I'd like to draw attention to a specific phrase from the proposed text: may be named as a normal part of a quality prose narrative. It is my rationale and intention that a "quality prose narrative" equates with a clear and individual rationale why each name is necessary to adequately explain the events and coverage. Examples: A criminal who caused the events is always a core figure in any coverage. If there's one or two victims, the media typically provides in depth coverage of the individualized-victims in the narrative. If a killer hunts down a single targeted victim and also kills a bunch of random bystanders, the target invariably receives in-depth individualized coverage as part of the media narrative. If a celebrity was among the victims, that's invariably a major element in the reporting. If a responding police officer is killed while attempting to save people, they invariably receive unique coverage in the media narrative. If a victim preforms heroic efforts during the crisis, the reporting will give them individualized coverage as a significant player in the narrative. However we should not list random names merely because they died, merely because they were listed in reporting, merely because news report provided some routine info about each victim in systematic and indiscriminate manner with no real significance to the narrative of events. If twenty people die, and a random Jane Doe is a 28 year old mother of two, that sucks but it doesn't add any encyclopedic information. Twenty random people died, obviously they had families and loved ones. Random names and random personal details of random victims generally don't have historical significance. Alsee (talk) 02:57, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
9. Generally support also, given the caveat expressed by Andy Mabbett. Bare lists of otherwise non-notable names do not add to the understanding of the topic. If the victims played some substantial role, for example due to their actions during the event, then it would be appropriate to include them in the description of the event. But I agree that they otherwise run afoul of NOTMEMORIAL and NOTDIRECTORY (#7). CThomas³ (talk) 07:25, 8 December 2018 (UTC)
10. Support not listing non-notable victims, who should appear only contextually where their inclusion is specifically necessary to understand the event and its aftermath, per previous discussion here and elsewhere and elsewhere and elsewhere. The principle isn't even really specific to victims -- the same should apply for participants in any notable event (eg Trinity (nuclear test)). ^~Hydronium^~Hydroxide^~(Talk)~ 00:25, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
11. Support – Wikipedia is not a memorial. There are certainly personal motivations both for and against listing victims, but if we remove those emotional elements, our encyclopedia should focus on its core values, such as WP:Notability and WP:Neutral point of view. Full lists of individual victims who do not stand out for anything else do not qualify for inclusion. Of course discussion on talk pages should be encouraged and honored, but an enormous amount of time will be saved if the general guideline gives a clear indication of the criteria under which people should be listed. — JFG ^talk 04:48, 15 December 2018 (UTC)
12. Support we should only list or mention people who are noteworthy, that have a wikipedia article or are notable enough that a stand-alone article could be created. MilborneOne (talk) 19:44, 17 December 2018 (UTC)
13. Support - definitely an improvement Llammakey (talk) 13:31, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

    Llammakey—I see you work on articles such as Passengers of the ships Anne and Little James 1623. Just out of curiosity, do you distinguish between the passengers on those ships and the individuals under consideration in this discussion and if so in what way? Thank you. Bus stop (talk) 15:52, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

14. Support this wording. I think that all objections fail to take into account the part saying "without context". If there is any context to be had, even if tiny, this would not apply. wumbolo ^^^ 08:45, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
15. Support: Listing not-otherwise-noteworthy people just because they were unlucky enough to be at the wrong place at the wrong time is unencyclopaedic, and frankly, boring to the general reader. An encyclopaedia should give me information I might want to know. I cannot imagine a circumstance where I would want to know the names of everyone who just happened to luck out on the day. If this were to occur, the information could be quite adequately provided by way of a reference or even an external link to a full listing somewhere else. The arguments in opposition below mostly reinforce my conviction that this should be specifically stated in guidance or policy. Special cases can be proposed, and where there is clear local consensus based on the exceptional merits of the case, decided on article talk pages before including in the article. · · · Peter (Southwood) ^(talk): 09:56, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    You are assuming that what you want to know is what everybody wants to know. Consider someone researching family history or doing sociological research into workers in a particular activity; they might find a list of names, addresses and families something that they "might want to know". Information such as this may be verifiable, but if the source is off line in the bowels of a university library it is not available to any readers "general" or not. To take a specific example: I have recently been working on the Clifton Hall Colliery disaster of 1885 where 178 were killed. A list in the text would be entirely inappropriate, but a separate article listing the name, age, address, occupation, by whom identified and marital/family status might be of use. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 14:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    WP:INDISCRIMINATE provides for the existence of information that is true, verifiable, and potentially useful to someone, but whose potential audience is too narrow for it to be considered encyclopedic. That last point is the one you'd need to refute for these lists. —swpb^{T go beyond} 16:45, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    Abolish WP:INDISCRIMINATE. Well, maybe not abolish, but reduce. Wikipedia is written for the benefit of its readers, and is not paper. All reasonably potentially useful information should be included. Benjamin (talk) 18:42, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

16. Support. Thanks to Cunard for pinging in people (like me) who've been in previous discussions on this matter. I agree with the proposal, in general we should not be including such lists, they add no value to the encyclopedic understanding of the topic. There may be relevant exceptions, but things like Schoharie limousine crash and Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting look like examples where there is no good reason to include a list, and hopefully this clarification of the policy will lead to them being removed in those cases.  — Amakuru (talk) 11:14, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
17. Weak support I agree wit those who say that including notable (I.E. notable in their own right) is acceptable, but also fail to see why it would be a list rather then prose. But articles should not become memorials to victims. So I am bit on the fence on this, I could just as easily vote weak Oppose for the same reason.Slatersteven (talk) 11:16, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
18. Support - Alsee has articulated the reasoning quite well. --Khajidha (talk) 11:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
19. For non-notable people, per WP:NOTMEMORIAL, and also because these were normally non-public figures who merit privacy even shortly after their death. There is little bona fide educational interest in reproducing lists of names. The wording needs editing for conciseness. Sandstein 12:05, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
20. Support I've taken part in a number of related discussions and have consistently opposed inclusion of victim lists. It may sound heartless, but I see no useful purpose to naming victims unless adding their name significantly adds to understanding the event. Such discussions typically take place in the immediate aftermath of some gut-wrenchingly awful event, often involve new editors, and unfortunately often involve accusations of bad-faith against those of us who wish to exclude ( insert name of other tragic event has a list so why not this event? You wouldn't be arguing that way if the victims were/weren't white/black/hispanic heterosexual/gay adults/children). A clear default position would be helpful and that shold be exclude IMO - whilst I perfectly understand the desire to 'honour' the dead by recording their names, no useful encyc purpose is achieved by doing so IMO - it isn't what we do. Pincrete (talk) 12:20, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
21. Support again. These lists provide value to exactly nobody, and create work to maintain. Any notable victims should be worked into prose. —swpb^{T go beyond} 14:57, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
22. Support. Somehow, these lists often end up linked, creating either permanent red links, disambiguation links, or redirects back to the article on the event containing the link. bd2412 T 16:58, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
23. Support, since most of the time these lists are of people notable only for being victims of the tragedy. There aren't notable people - if they are notable, mention them in prose. Kirbanzo (talk) 18:04, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
24. Support generally. (responding to ping) I would suggest this belongs in WP:NOTMEMORIAL and should be more explicit and give a basis. The wording proposed should simply identify the WP guidance instead of a vague “normal practices of creating lists of otherwise non-notable people.” Alternative guidance might be “avoid listing names in mass deaths unless the individual names are commonly listed in accounts, or are otherwise notable.” Guidance might mention that in larger events it is infeasible, and that if accounts generally did not do so it would fail WP:V or WP:WEIGHT. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 19:16, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
25. Mostly support, with the caveat that lists provided in secondary sources are reasonable. (Passengers of the RMS Titanic is an appropriate article, because the list can be derived from secondary sources, particularly books.) But most lists of victims of major disasters are inappropriate, because we simply don't know if there will be secondary coverage of the individuals involved (and there isn't, in most cases), and we shouldn't pretend that issues appearing in primary source coverage, like news reports, will necessarily be reflected in the secondary sources. News reports are fond of adding victim lists, both because people want to learn if they know anyone involved, and because it's an easy way of filling up space, but the solid sources we need to use are the actual indication of whether these individuals' place in the disaster be great enough that we need to mention many or all of them by name. Nyttend (talk) 19:48, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
26. Support Not a memorial. valereee (talk) 14:56, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
27. Support A list of people killed in an incident is, on the encyclopedia level, trivia. Wikipedia is neither a memorial site, nor an indiscriminate collection of information; it is an encyclopedia. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 13:24, 26 December 2018 (UTC)
28. Support Lists of non-notable individuals do not further the reader's understanding of the topic. –dlthewave ☎ 13:28, 30 December 2018 (UTC)
29. Support under the premise established in WP:BLP#Presumption in favor of privacy. --Izno (talk) 18:23, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Unless "bare lists of victims" in the first sentence is changed to something like "bare lists of non-notable (i.e. not blue-linked) victims". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:39, 28 November 2018 (UTC)
2. Oppose as worded; I agree with the principle that we shouldn't include long lists of non-notable people involved in any incident (victims or not), but having a flat-out rule that victims can only be listed in prose would have far too many false positives. If those voting support really think otherwise, feel free to turn Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Emergency workers killed in the September 11 attacks, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of victims of the Bazar de la Charité fire, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of investors in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities or Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of victims of Nazism blue and see what happens. (The last time AFAIK that this principle was seriously tested was Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of victims of the Babi Yar massacre; yes, that was a long time ago and consensus can change but I find it unlikely it will have changed to that extent.) ‑ Iridescent 22:49, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

   Iridescent, you might wish to see this AfD. And, the Babi Yar AFD was a decade back (which is close to a century in wiki-time). ∯WBG^converse 09:12, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

   The 9/11 list was an exceptional case. The numbers involved were huge (the raw text of the names alone came to 120kb); consequently, to source it to Wikipedia's standards would have involved 3000 references (or one reference linked 3000 times) which would have crashed the servers, even had it been split to separate out the four aircraft, three impact sites, and emergency services. I repeat my comment above; if you think consensus has changed, I've given you a bunch of redlinks above any one of which you can turn blue as a test case. ‑ Iridescent 19:34, 3 January 2019 (UTC)

3. Simple Oppose per WP:KUDZU. Should be decided on article Talk pages. Some of those who have largely refused to engage in dialogue on article Talk pages are now pushing for a top-down solution to their issue with lists of non-notable victims of disasters. Let them use the article Talk page to actually engage in dialogue with those editors with whom they disagree. Bus stop (talk) 15:20, 29 November 2018 (UTC)
4. This topic has been discussed to death, a general consensus is that this is to be handled on a case by case basis. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 16:24, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

   Appeal to prior consensus is not a strong argument. Even if that was the old consensus, it seems to be going the other way here. —swpb^{T go beyond} 14:59, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

5. Victims should be included only if there is a reference for them. —Eli355 (talk • contribs) 01:02, 30 November 2018 (UTC)

   @Eli355: If we know a name, there is a reference (source) for it. That's where we get the name. Thus your argument as written is that all reported names should be included in the Wikipedia article. For every modern-day mass killing, there is at least one source for the names of all of the dead, as here. Thus your position as stated is that all modern-day mass killing articles should list the names of all of the dead. Is that what you intended? ―Mandruss ☎ 04:03, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

   "Thus your argument as written is that all reported names should be included in the Wikipedia article." No, I think you are drawing an unreasonable derivation from what was stated, Mandruss. A more conservative conclusion would be that "all reported names could be included in the Wikipedia article." Bus stop (talk) 05:00, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

   Thanks, but please let the editor speak for themselves. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:07, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

   There is a difference between "victims should be included only if there is a reference for them" and "victims should be included if there is a reference for them." And it is as absurd to think we must include the names as to think we must not include the names. Bus stop (talk) 05:52, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

   "Thanks, but please let the editor speak for themselves." - seems pretty straight forward, yet you keep posting. How about not posting and just wait for Eli355 to respond to the question that was asked of them? - wolf 06:24, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

   thewolfchild—User:Eli355 wrote that "Victims should be included only if there is a reference for them." They did not write that it is mandatory that reliably-sourced, non-notable victims be included in an article. You might consider asking all editors that oppose a community-wide ruling whether or not they feel it is mandatory that reliably-sourced, non-notable victims be included in an article. This discussion is degenerating into a badgering of one editor on a flimsy if not entirely inapplicable point on something they may or may not have said. Bus stop (talk) 14:37, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

   Jeee-zzuz... you just just can't help yourself, can you? Two editors have now asked you to stop replying for Eli355 so that they will hopefully clarify their answer. So please, just stop already. - wolf 19:17, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

   @Mandruss: That is what I intended. —Eli355 (talk • contribs) 20:46, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

   Which interpretation does "that" refer to?  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:52, 12 December 2018 (UTC)

   @SMcCandlish: All modern-day mass killing articles should list the names of all of the dead. —Eli355 (talk • contribs) 01:10, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

   A fresh trout has been delivered[1].  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:37, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

   SMcCandlish—policy-level decisions should be implemented when there is an important issue at stake. But there is no important issue at stake in this discussion. I have heard the argument that there are debates. So what? In my opinion debates are commonplace and potentially constructive. And I'm not aware of any article that has suffered from either the inclusion or the omission of non-notable victim names. Bus stop (talk) 02:59, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

   I'm not aware of any article that has suffered from either the inclusion or the omission of non-notable victim names. You've made that statement before. The obvious logical fallacy has been pointed out to you before, but I'll point it out to you one more time. You're not aware of any such article because you disagree with the arguments against the lists. Thus you're essentially saying that you're right because you're right. That is not an argument, and I hope you will stop presenting it as one. ―Mandruss ☎ 03:30, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

   Mandruss—the burden is on you to tell us not only why non-notable victims should not be included in articles but also why policy should be enacted to curtail the inclusion of information pertaining to non-notable victims. A question of this nature is obviously resolvable on an article Talk page. Why are you trying to enact policy to curtail the inclusion of information pertaining to non-notable victims? That isn't a rhetorical question. That is a question for you to actually attempt to address. I think the burden is on you to present the case for the policy you are trying to enact. Bus stop (talk) 14:34, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

6. The individual talk pages should be used to work this out case by case. I agree that references are needed and that it is better to use prose. But a bare list is a transition from nothing to paragraphs of writing. So if we make a blanket rule we placing a higher hurdle to get over to improve the articles. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 07:35, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

   We have a cleanup tag for that: ((prose)). Nothing about the proposal suggests ignoring WP:NORUSH. —swpb^{T go beyond} 16:26, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

7. Oppose - Can we please just let editors decide things? FOARP (talk) 09:00, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

   That's exactly what we're doing here. —swpb^{T go beyond} 15:03, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

   No, no it isn’t. The people who will vote here will be a vanishingly small sub-set of editors, the most active ones, not in anyway representative of the whole. It will be decided, not based on an actual article, but on what people think in general should be done in a discussion largely detached form the actual subject matter which includes these lists.

   Editors deciding means exactly that - the editors of Wiki, the hundred thousand plus most of whom have never read a policy, deciding whether the articles they edit should include the list or not on a case-by-case basis.

   I mean there’s people !voting here who haven’t started an article in years and whose edits overwhelmingly aren’t in article space. Does that look like “editors deciding” to you? FOARP (talk) 15:36, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

8. Oppose. Rules creep. It's entirely down to the context. Lists of victims may or may not be relevant. -- Necrothesp (talk) 09:38, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
9. Oppose listing names of victims is a useful and natural part of articles on many events.E.M.Gregory (talk) 11:19, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
10. Oppose (pinged here) until last sentence is removed^Thanks, L3X1 ◊distænt write◊ 12:40, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
11. Oppose in many articles the name and residence of the victims provides valuable context for the event itself; but not in all of them. It should be up to each page editors' to figure out what is best for each case. This is, in any event, the general conclusion drawn from TP discussions. This proposal looks rather like an attempt to engineer a top-down solution, one-size fits all. Besides, do bureaucrats want to drown editors in a morass of WP:CREEP? That's one nice way to drive away beginners from this project. XavierItzm (talk) 13:26, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    In my experience, lack of explicit guidance, and the arguing that results, pushes away far more users than being decisively reverted with a summary that points to MOS, so that one can learn something and quickly move on. —swpb^{T go beyond} 16:18, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

12. Oppose because history has taught us that this will not end up being implemented uniformly. We will still end up with articles including the names of victims of American mass shootings in list format, and Bloody Sunday (1972)#Casualties will not be touched (because there's a huge amount of "relevant detail" in that "narrative" list!); but Remembrance Day bombing and Omagh bombing will never have all victims' names added. Policy will be quoted as to why one article can (must!) have them, and why one can't. Bastun^{Ėġáḍβáś₮ŭŃ!} 14:28, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    The proposal accounts for your example. Bloody Sunday (1972)#Casualties is not a "bare list" of "names and basic information" – the detail it gives on how these victims died is academically relevant to someone studying the nature of the event. The line created by the proposal is pretty sharp (I'm sure there are edge cases, but these aren't them). Moreover, the mere division of cases by a line, a "non-uniformity" as you'd have it, is the opposite of a problem: it is the sole means of handling diverse cases objectively, and is the basis of the entire MOS! —swpb^{T go beyond} 15:19, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

13. Oppose See Discussion. DonFB (talk) 14:49, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
14. Oppose providing they are named in at least two national reliable sources and are therefore in the public domain so privacy is not an issue. Also this is an example of instruction creep, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 14:55, 20 December 2018 (UTC) (pinged by Cunard)
15. Oppose Instruction creep. SparklingPessimist ^{Scream at me!} 15:02, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
16. Odd oppose. Yes, the bare lists of victim names are bad. But the reason why they are bad is that they should be full descriptions of the people killed. Even though victims obviously play a larger role in any massacre than the killer(s), there is a cult on Wikipedia that believes that victims are nameless sheep unworthy of recollection, while mass murderers are change agents who have earned their place in Valhalla by virtue of the souls they have extracted into their bloodstained blades, raising them to superhuman experience levels. The "bare lists" are often bad compromises between these cultists and the people who want to tell the whole story -- what was really lost in the massacre, rather than just that it happened. But my feeling is that to put a ban on the compromise in this "indiscriminate information" collection will be taken as a victory for the cult and a defeat for the encyclopedists, so I won't have it. Wnt (talk) 15:17, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    You're challenging a much more fundamental consensus than the one largely at issue here. We're talking about whether victims generally agreed to be non-notable should be listed; you're arguing that all victims are inherently notable, as notable even as the killers. While you can make that case if you want, it's going to be a very uphill push: WP:NBIO confers notability through sources, not as a celebration or reward. —swpb^{T go beyond} 16:13, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    I don't think anybody has argued that "non-notable" people are notable. "The notability guideline does not determine the content of articles, but only whether the topic should have its own article."[2] Bus stop (talk) 16:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    It's actually worse than that. Wnt's rationale is blatantly opposed to the principle that Wikipedia is not a memorial. Not to mention the name calling directed at the supporters of this motion.--Khajidha (talk) 16:21, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

    "Memorial" seems like a very pliable phrase. If multiple news sources profile the victims of a massacre, then when editors summarize what these sources say as part of the article, just as we would summarize intricate details about the car he mowed them over with or the magazine and bullets he shot them with, that is said to be a "memorial", because Everybody Knows they are nobodies not worth remembering. Whereas the killer, of course, should be covered in lavish detail, as he is an Emissary of Father Death, a deity incarnate, on whose words we hang to know the nature of morality and humanity and to decide what things to ban or mandate for all the ordinary little people. That's not a memorial, no ... maybe it's a shrine. I dunno. I'd just rather let editors summarize all the facts from all the articles printed about a topic. Wnt (talk) 04:46, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

17. Oppose because I think it's poorly written (Could the OP at least make up his mind about whether this new rule is supposed to go in the LISTPEOPLE guideline or in the IINFO policy? The section heading says one and the RFC question says the other), not going to achieve goal of stopping these disputes, and because it doesn't represent the discussions. In particular:
    • It talks about "Victims of crimes and disasters and other tragic events", but the conversation is frequently focused specifically on random mass killings (which, unlike this proposed rule, requires a minimum of four people being killed – this rule is written to apply to all crimes, including those with no fatalities or only one victim).
    • Some supporters of this rule oppose only including these names when they're formatted using unordered bulleted * list formatting, but not opposed to otherwise including these names. As a result, I cannot tell from this proposed text whether the first paragraph in Chicago Tylenol murders#Incidents, which "lists the victims" but does not use "list formatting" to do so, is acceptable, and I don't think anyone else can, either.
    • Then there's the whole thread about whether only "passive" victims should be excluded, so that you exclude the names and locations of the passive victims in the Tylenol murders and most of the non-violent protesters in Peterloo Massacre#Victims, but you include the names of people who did something, and you fight over whether victims of domestic violence or non-resistant martyrs are truly "passive" in the events leading to their murders.
      In short, this rule doesn't seem to get us any closer to actually documenting what the community usually prefers to do. Finally, given the lists below of dozens of articles that contain victims' names, I begin to wonder whether this rule might actually be the opposite of what experienced editors have been doing these last few years. Perhaps those lists aren't representative; I haven't checked for counter-examples (but there sure are a lot of them there...). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:59, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
18. Oppose as list vs prose illogical - I could get behind the base logic of "don't include all the names of non-notable victims" or some variant of that. I cannot however understand why this should be suitable in prose and not in lists - or at least reliably so. I can understand a top-down policy approach for an all or nothing approach, but if the dispute is going to be formatting based, then it should be left to the editors. Nosebagbear (talk) 18:09, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
19. Oppose (summoned by a ping). I have found lists of victims names useful in the past -- both in terms of human interest and as an aid in further research on the topic. It might not be relevant to you, but it will be relevant to somebody. Often the victims are commemorated with annual events or plaques. There should be some common sense guidelines -- like making sure the names are widely available, providing as much relevant info on the victim (manner of death, any actions taken during the event, any special honors like state funeral after) or limiting/pruning the lists of the number of victims exceed x. There is nothing inherently evil of individually "non-notable" items. Just because it is not a blue link, does not mean that the info is not valuable. Renata (talk) 18:29, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
20. Oppose whether or not some information is encyclopedic has nothing to do with the format the information is in. If a list of five names is unencyclopedic in list format then it is also unencyclopedic in prose format. I don't think it is necessarily unencyclopedic to include these names, and the lists presented below demonstrate that the proposal isn't merely confirming existing practice on this issue. Media organisations do sometimes devote substantial coverage to the victims of an attack, and while that doesn't make them notable it is accepted practice to include coverage of people only known because of one event in the article about that event. Lists of victims may also be useful for other reasons, e.g. Columbine High School massacre has a list of victims presented inline with the text to illustrate the narrative. Hut 8.5 18:40, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
21. Oppose - Handling this on a case-by-case basis is preferable to an outright prohibition. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:42, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
22. OpposeVictim lists should be the default in articles about mass shootings. First, these articles exist because people were killed in a mass shooting; the identities of these people are an important component of the shooting. If you leave out names and descriptive details, you are omitting key information. Second, the victims of shootings tend to receive substantial news coverage. While we are not required to include everything covered by the news media, the fact that they receive so much coverage (and not just the occasional offhand reference) indicates that their identities are in fact significant. Third, NOTMEMORIAL prohibits creating articles about non-notable people (i.e. its an applied restatement of notability requirements). It says nothing about neutrally worded lists of victims within articles. Spirit of Eagle (talk) 04:31, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
23. Oppose This has long been contentious. The archive at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not shows the meaning WP:NOTMEMORIAL has been up for grabs ever since it was first written in 2014. Any time the not-memorial policy is cited, half the editors dispute whether or not it is pertinent because there is no consensus as to what the policy even is.

    The false premise hiding behind all this confusion is that the names of dead people are supposedly special facts, requiring special treatment apart from names of pop songs or symphonies, or the names of products, or events in a timeline, or any other fact or piece of data. Recently deceased people can fall under the extra restriction of the WP:BLP policy, under WP:BDP. But if someone has been dead more than 6-12 months or so, their name is not a special fact. Featured articles like Sex Pistols have embedded lists of singles, about two dozen of them, with only 10 or so bluelinked, notable songs. The rest are just listed because they are facts that enhance the article, based on context and editorial judgement. See the list of non-notable works in the FA Franz Kafka. Non-notable stuff is contained in articles, facts or names in prose or list form, like the works in the FA bio Michael Woodruff, or lists of patents or inventions. If an article happens to have names of casualties or victims or whatever associated with it, it's no different than a band that might have names of band members, producers, managers, etc, associated with it. They're just facts. Do the belong in a particular article? It depends. We don't need a special policy just because the facts in question are the names of dead people.

    If you think a given list or article about an event is worse because it lists the names of deceased people, you should be able to make your case without leaning on a special policy that puts a blanket restriction on the names of the deceased. If editorial consensus is that a given page is better because it includes non-notable casualties, or song titles, or articles written, or patents issued, then you should respect that local consensus. Policy can't intervene and tell editors you disagree with that they're wrong. --Dennis Bratland (talk) 05:58, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

    Well said, Dennis Bratland. Renata (talk) 17:24, 22 December 2018 (UTC)

24. Oppose: This is clearly an example of a class of editorial decision that ought to be made as a matter of WP:LOCALCONSENSUS by evaluating the merits of each individual case, taking into account the full encyclopedic context of the event being covered and the nature of the content being considered. Creating a default rule here is unnecessary and indeed the most unwieldy, counter-intuitive, and potentially problematic route to contemplate. I try to stay away from the term "rule creep" where possible (as I personally do not view robust policy as per se negative in most instances) but I have to say it would seem to apply in this instance. Snow ^{let's rap} 07:23, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
25. Oppose per WP:CREEP, WP:NOTLAW and the opposes above. Andrew D. (talk) 09:10, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
26. Oppose This proposal is well-meaning and sounds good in theory, but when I look at article like this,[3] I don't see a problem. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 21:28, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
27. Oppose ((infobox criminal)) is one such example where a |victims= parameter allows for lists such as these. In light of what Bratland said above about treating facts all the same, it seems arbitrary to say a fact can't come in through the front door when other facts already enter through the side. If this were to become a blanket rule, then all of these other doorways for victim list-inclusion ought to be sealed up as well, shouldn't they?  Spintendo  22:55, 23 December 2018 (UTC)
28. Oppose. I think the local page is often the best place to decide, as I said previously. At the same time, it would be helpful if we had some guidance as when it is and isn't a good idea to include a list. A hard rule isn't the same as guidance. Before we can really reach a consensus on that guidance, or this current rule, I think we need to discuss when it is and isn't a good idea to have lists of names, and develop a criteria that has consensus. Even if it is nothing more than a widely accepted Essay. (like WP:BRD). Also, there needs to be enough wiggle room to deal with what we can't anticipate, which is a lot. A straight up or down vote on disallowing them is never going to pass, and with all due respect, a waste of time. Dennis Brown - 2¢ 16:39, 27 December 2018 (UTC)
29. Oppose First, I dislike having a blanket rule. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 11:57, 28 December 2018 (UTC)
30. Oppose as extreme WP:CREEP, this should be decided case by case as to what is appropriate for each article, rather than by abstract rule without regard to sources, circumstances, or subject. postdlf (talk) 00:49, 7 January 2019 (UTC)
31. Oppose In a number of articles listed below, the lists seem appropriate. Also WP:CREEP, etc. Hobit (talk) 15:45, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Neutral

1. LOOKING FOR A THIRD WAY: In a print source, lists like this are often included in footnotes or in an appendix. That's print's way of striking a balance between including all possible information that might be useful to someone later, and keeping the narrative readable. My suggestion would be to look for a "third way" to tidily meet both concerns. FOR EXAMPLE, what if there were a template to use on TALK PAGES to list people involved in an event? OR something similar to the template for succession boxes that could be added to the bottom of pages, and only expands if you click on it? Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 16:37, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

There are emotional reasons why people want to include such lists, and generally they do not improve the quality of the narrative. People trying to get around a new rule won't improve the narrative either, just result in article bloat. There are historical reasons to want to include such lists, and they don't always improve the readability of the narrative either. But the information involved can be useful and a standard technique for handling it would be a way to more easily resolve conflict. Mary Mark Ockerbloom (talk) 16:37, 24 December 2018 (UTC)

1. This should be handled on a case by case basis depending on the article and type of violent incident. If describing the manner/ages/details of how or which victims died would provide additional understanding, a list with explanations of the deaths would be appropriate. For example, the article on the Columbine High School massacre lists the victims, their ages, and how they died, which provides significant understanding as to what people might have been peers of the perpetrators, what people might have been teachers, as well breaking down what parts of their massacre were lethal. This is also demonstrated in the article on the Sandy Hook massacre where distinguishing the teachers, students, and the shooter's mother helps provide understanding of the death toll versus just saying "28 people including the perpetrator were killed".

In contrast, the article on the Lockerbie Bombing provides a detailed breakdown of victims by nationality, as well as notable victims, plus an explanation of which people died on the plane and who died on the ground. This is because providing a detailed list of people who died on the plane like in smaller events would be unwieldy due to the scale of the disaster, and the pertinent information is the nationalities of the victims who have died and groups that the bombing had an outsize influence on (Syracuse University having 35 students die). However, there is a list of people who died on the ground, as while a list of people who died on the flight would not provide too much information to the reader beside a cross section of America/UK/other parts of the world, a list of people who died on the ground allows the reader to understand which houses in Lockerbie were destroyed, as well as how the town was affected by the plane crash.

Honestly, in conclusion, I believe a one-sized fits all policy on lists of names would do more harm than good. Tragedies with large death tolls occur on a spectrum of differentiation that requires a unique assessment of every article in order to see how much detail should be provided in covering the victims of such events. Sometimes it's useful to detail every single person who died and how, in other cases such as plane crashes it might only be useful to detail nationalities, notable people, and specific groups affected. In some cases such as the Mississauga restaurant bombing there's no need to detail specific victims at all, as there's not much to be said about minor injuries. We need to take a case by case basis on every article talk page to see how much detail is appropriate to provide, so I'm !voting neutral instead of oppose as "oppose" would seem to imply that I am definitively in favor of lists, which I am not. Grognard Extraordinaire Chess (talk) Ping when replying 10:39, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Discussion

As I indicated at VPI, the effect for random mass killings articles will be that editors who want the victims named (for any of a number of reasons, not always openly stated) will simply write "quality prose narratives" that include every victim. The necessary material is almost always gathered by a handful of news organizations who have a different mission (and a profit motive), this CNN article being a typical example. This tactic will defeat the spirit of the guideline and, far from putting an end to the endless battle in this area, will merely change its nature. At VPI I said I would suggest an improvement after sleeping on it, but I have failed to come up with anything. I think we just need more and better minds thinking about it.
It would be easy to say that nobody should be named who doesn't have a Wikipedia article, but I'm not sure that's not too high a bar. It's higher than at WP:BLPNAME, which in my opinion shares the presumption of privacy with this issue. I wonder whether the test should be something more like "a substantial active role in the event". We would still differ on the definition of "substantial" (and maybe there's a better adjective) but we would clearly exclude the vast majority of names of victims, who had no active role. Trying to hide and running away are not active roles. Staying behind to hold a door open for fleeing students is borderline in my opinion. Physically attacking the shooter would be a substantial active role. ―Mandruss ☎ 23:51, 28 November 2018 (UTC)

This is an ongoing and continuous bone of contention. I feel that although the inclusion of non notables can be discussed on a case by case basis on article talk pages the default position should be no non notables unless agreed by consensus, ie the burden for inclusion should always fall on the proposer, with no squatters rights. Therefore I would support Generally victims should not be mentioned by name unless they were otherwise notable or had significant and substantial involvement in the incident (beyond being a victim). If challenged consensus must be established to include Lyndaship (talk) 10:01, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

as opposed to a non-continuous bone of contention? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:08, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

LOL ok. I suppose I could argue there have been breaks? Lyndaship (talk) 16:31, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

I have a feeling that while I would support this, we need to have a guidance page of how to handle naming victims of a crime/event when you omit the list (too much to cover in an policy page). --Masem (t) 17:16, 29 November 2018 (UTC)

• @Pigsonthewing and Iridescent: and Lyndaship, if you actually agree with the principle, or the basic initiative here, then why 'oppose'? How about 'support with a condition (or caveat)? Or post a "neutral" !vote (unfortunately there wasn't a 'neutral' section, that's been rectified). It would be unfortunate if this died because of a perceived consensus to oppose when really some of you actually support, but just want some kind of minor wording change. - wolf 10:23, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
  • I had supported the proposal Lyndaship (talk) 10:52, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
    • @Lyndaship: Yup, I see that now. Sorry about that, I don't how your name got added there, other than I was trying to do too much in a single edit and goofed up. Mea culpa, ambo te ignosce me. - wolf 15:51, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
  • For the reason I gave in my !vote. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 00:49, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
• @Eli355:, can you clarify your position on here? The very brief wording of your "oppose" give the impression you might actually 'support' this proposal. Thanks - wolf 10:23, 3 December 2018 (UTC)
  • @Thewolfchild: People should be included in these lists if there is some reference for them. —Eli355 (talk • contribs) 00:58, 4 December 2018 (UTC)
    • @Eli355: Uh, yeah... I saw that the first time you posted it. Like Mandruss pointed out above, we only know about names if there listed in a source. That's the point of this proposal, that shouldn't be the only basis for entry to an article. There should be a more encyclopedic reason. Do you understand that? - wolf 06:36, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
      • "that shouldn't be the only basis for entry to an article" That is correct, thewolfchild. Verifiability is not sufficient for inclusion. WP:VNOTSUFF: "While information must be verifiable in order to be included in an article, this does not mean that all verifiable information must be included in an article." But should we be deciding whether or not to include this information at the Village pump? Or should we be deciding this at individual article Talk pages? Bus stop (talk) 16:33, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
        • Seriously... not even reading your posts anymore. - wolf 19:17, 9 December 2018 (UTC).
          • @Thewolfchild and Bus stop: Whether the victims names should be included in the article should depend on the number of victims. If an event kills a few people, all of them should be listed, but if an event kills thousands of people, than only the more notable people should be included. —Eli355 (talk • contribs) 20:51, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
            • @Eli355: You made a rather vague a comment about names being added if there is a reference for them, you're asked to clarify it, and in response you make an equally vague comment about names being added based on numbers? Can you provide a more substantive reply to support your position on this issue? Thanks - wolf 21:15, 9 December 2018 (UTC)
              • thewolfchild—I made the same point that Eli355 is making when I said to you "My opinion is that victim identities belong in articles on disasters where practicable." It is practicable to add a small number of victims; it is impracticable to add a large number of victims. We also know that policy states: "While information must be verifiable in order to be included in an article, this does not mean that all verifiable information must be included in an article. Consensus may determine that certain information does not improve an article, and that it should be omitted."[4] Therefore without this proposal being passed the victim names can be omitted. Bus stop (talk) 22:45, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

• This discussion started on WP:VPIL where back on 30 Novemebr I posted "Short numbers of names (as proposed by Herostratus above take up a handful of bytes and don't seem too out of place (users read articles, not policies). For longer lists why not simply create a page "List of victims of XYZ" and hat-note to it?". Whether that opinion is right or wrong, it is depressing that nearly three weeks later exactly the same point is being vehemently argued over. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 23:19, 9 December 2018 (UTC)

• @Thewolfchild: What makes my comment vague? —Eli355 (talk • contribs) 01:12, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

• Okay... Eli, whether this is deliberate bullshit or just a WP:CIR issue, either way I don't care. I don't want you to clarify your opinion as I'm no longer interested in it. Have a nice day. - wolf 04:36, 13 December 2018 (UTC)

• @Bus stop, Knowledgekid87, and Graeme Bartlett: - each of you had stated in some form that this should be handled on individual talk pages, but one of the reasons why we're here is because that approach has failed over and over again, for years. And even in the odd cases where there was an agreement on particular article talk pages, that has just led to conflicting local consensuses, which in turn leads to wp:ose arguments in this project-wide dispute that has carried on for years without resolution. That is why we need a project-wide policy/guideline to (hopefully and finally) help settle this once and for all. (or for the most part, for awhile, at least). - wolf 10:23, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

thewolfchild—this is not a question that should be addressed on a community-wide basis. My opinion is that victim identities belong in articles on disasters where practicable. Any time you come up with a one-size-fits-all solution you run the risk of deadening the creative abilities of editors that are champing at the bit to write better articles. Why not just let editors write articles and engage in debate as needed? There shouldn't be a "default" position on something that does not have a consistent identity across all articles, namely "victim lists". And by the way, I do not distinguish between "lists" and "prose" as concerns the mention of victims in articles on disasters. Whichever form fits the specifics of that particular article at that particular stage in its development should be used. And if WP:CONSENSUS is to omit the names—that's OK too. The interested editors are not the same at the article in question as the editors weighing in here. Why devise nonsensical policy here to tie the hands of editors at the articles that will inevitably be affected? Bus stop (talk) 15:44, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Yes... BS, we're all well aware of your opinions on this, but you've adding nothing new here with your latest repeat posting of them. (Question, why all the wiktionary links? And, despite using said link, how does one still manage to misspell the word they're actually linking to said dictionary?)

Anyway, you made some grossly misleading comments here. Should this proposal be added to WP policy, in no way will it "deaden the creative abilities of editors that are champing at the bit to write better articles.".

First of all, adding obituary-type lists of meaningless, non-notable names of mass-death-event victims, does not make for "better articles". Second, no one's "hands are going to be tied". If at some point, some editor has a burning need to add an obituary-type list of meaningless, non-notable names of mass-death-event victims to some article, they can always come here and seek a community-wide consensus to change the policy. If the need to add said list is that great, and it will make said article that much better, then I'm sure the community will see that and support said editor.

As for editors who are not currently here to take part in this process, that just sounds like you're trying to create some kind of pre-emptive excuse. This forum is open to everyone. This subject has been discussed on numerous pages, for months, from the USS Fitzgerald and MV ACX Crystal collision talk page, to numerous other article, project and AfD discussion pages, leading to the idea lab and finally here. If these editors that you apparently don't know, and yet you're so concerned about them missing out on this proposal do in fact miss out... oh well. Can't expect everybody to be everywhere, everytime. - wolf 18:14, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

thewolfchild—here is a good explanation of "champing" vs. "chomping". From your aloof perch here at the Village pump you are in no position to dictate to editors whether they should include or omit names and other brief pieces of information on non-notable individual fatalities resulting from an article's topic. This is an instance of Wikipedia trying to shoot itself in the foot. You've yet to tell us why we should not speak of non-notable decedents. Bus stop (talk) 19:10, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

1. Erm, BS... surely you realize that was a rhetorical question? (as this one is)
2. You clearly missed the point of that question.
3. I am already familiar with the expression.
4. I am already aware of the alternative spellings.
5. I have no idea why you think I would be interested in any further reading or discussion about this expression, it's meaning, or it's alternative spellings.
6. I take it you're aware that your comment is both meaningless, and completely off-topic.
7. I take it that by posting such a meaningless and completely off-topic comment, you are declaring you have nothing new or meaningful to add to the topic being discussed?
8. Oops, nevermind. I see that while I was typing out my reply, you have since added more to your comment. While your remarks are somewhat snarly and accusatory, I suppose it could be considered "on-topic" (saving your initial comment (quoted above) from being deleted). I'm not on a "perch", I behind a keyboard, just like you, and you seem to have a bizarre definition of "aloof", (here, happy to help out).

I am not "dictating" anything. I'm taking part in a straw-poll and discussion regarding a policy proposal, just like you. (though I'm just being nicer than you are) If I'm not "in a position to dictate to others" that they can't include names... how is it that you seem to think you are "in a position to dictate to others" that they can't omit names?

"This is an instance of Wikipedia trying to shoot itself in the foot." - Umm... ok. Maybe you should take that up with Wikipedia. (I, otoh, am not trying to shoot anything)

"You've yet to tell us why we should not speak of non-notable decedents." - You've yet to explain how adding a list of non-notable names, of mass-death-event victims, who played no role in the event, except for dying, with no meaning to anyone except perhaps for family & friends, will in any way lend to the reader's understanding of the event. If 10 non-notable people died, what more is needed, than to state that 10 people died? Relevant, supporting information such as how they died, when they died (immediately vs later in hospital, etc. notwithstanding, how does adding a list of names add anything remotely encyclopaedic to the article? What insight can that possibly provide to the reader?

Now, this is the part where you don't actually answer questions, you counter them, with a revolving repertoire of circular logic, IDHT & IDLI tautological arguments, off-topic rants, and demands for answers that have already been provided to you, multiple times by multiple editors. Then lather, rinse, repeat... do the whole thing all over again with whoever is willing to respond to you.

As I said earlier, we are all well aware of your opinion on this. Unless you have anything new to add, (about the topic, not me, not some idiom, not about some pair of neat-o shoes you saw at the mall... ), then please stop pinging me. Thank you. - wolf 21:12, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

thewolfchild—you say "how is it that you seem to think you are in a position to dictate to others that they can't omit names?" I didn't say we "can't omit names". I said "if WP:CONSENSUS is to omit the names—that's OK too." And I said that there shouldn't be a default on this. Let the editors decide on the article Talk pages. And I don't recall referring to some pair of neat-o shoes I saw at the mall. And if you scroll up you will see that you pinged me before I pinged you and you have pinged me a total of two times. Have I pinged you more than 2 times? Maybe, for which I apologize. Bus stop (talk) 22:00, 3 December 2018 (UTC)

Question for Jayron32: The section heading says you want to put this text in the guideline WP:LISTPEOPLE. The proposal says that you want to put this in the policy WP:IINFO. Can you pick one or the other, and fix the proposal? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:39, 8 December 2018 (UTC)

Hydronium Hydroxide—you are mentioning Trinity (nuclear test). There were no fatalities in that event and it took place in 1945. You are sort of comparing apples to oranges, aren't you? How does "Trinity (nuclear test)" compare to Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Orlando nightclub shooting, Santa Fe High School shooting, Charleston church shooting—to name just a few of our articles in which non-notable victims are mentioned? Why would a decision at "Village pump (policy)" overrule the WP:CONSENSUS of the editors that wrote those articles? I thought WP:CONSENSUS was sort of sacrosanct. Bus stop (talk) 02:58, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Bus stop: Participants-in-an-event-that-is-tragic and Participants-in-an-event-that-is-not-tragic are both Participants-in-an-event and (from my perspective) should be treated similarly with regards to standards of determination for inclusion in an article; the comparison is of Red delicious apples vs Granny Smith apples. Trinity (nuclear test) is of significantly more impact than any of those events, and led to far more deaths -- thankfully individually unlisted in en-wiki. Non-notable participants (presumably since they are unlinked) are included within that article, but it includes neither indiscriminate lists of those actually involved in the conduct of the test, nor all those who witnessed (part of) it, nor all those present, nor any other indiscriminate list. I'm a little surprised by your final two questions, as you are an editor of so many years experience: Global consensus, where determined, trumps local consensus. If it didn't, then RFCs, AFDs, reasonable adherence to MOS, etc, wouldn't be able to be implemented. This proposal is an attempt to get global consensus on an area where the process of obtaining consensus on a page-by-page basis is deemed by some to be duplicative. Consensus for global consistency and consensus for page-by-page inconsistency may well both lead to groups of unhappy editors, but living with an imperfect standard appears to eat less editor/admin time than page-by-page debates. I understand, for instance, that we're on Infobox Wars part 167 and Cite Wars part 183, though the significant difference is that those are both stylistic preferences, whereas this intersects with actual content policies and guidelines. ^~Hydronium^~Hydroxide^~(Talk)~ 05:01, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Hydronium Hydroxide—a global consensus in this instance would be running roughshod over a clearly established consensus spread over many articles. We are not talking about 1945. Though unstated, I think we are discussing a more recent period. I listed Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, Orlando nightclub shooting, Santa Fe High School shooting, Charleston church shooting in my post above. Add to those 2016 Oakland warehouse fire and Columbine High School massacre. Please search the Talk page archives on those articles for the term "victims". Debates took place and a consensus was reached to include the victim names. We shouldn't be enacting policy to curtail the inclusion of victim names because the more broad-based consensus favors the inclusion of victim names. Bus stop (talk) 16:27, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

I don’t disagree... However, we also need to keep in mind that “consensus can change”. It isn’t wrong to occasionally ask whether a previously established consensus is still reflecting what the community thinks. Blueboar (talk) 16:49, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

Bus stop You are being selective by only mentioning articles which have formed a consensus to include. Can I remind you on Talk:USS Fitzgerald and MV ACX Crystal collision the vote is 11 to 5 AGAINST inclusion. I do not understand why you cannot support my suggestion that the issue should be decided on individual article talk pages through consensus but the default position should be no names until that consensus is established. Given the consensus to include (albeit by some very small margins) reached on the articles you have quoted why do you doubt the ability of your fellow editors to come to the correct decision Lyndaship (talk) 16:51, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

I am definitely being "selective", Lyndaship. I am trying to prove a point. And you are trying to prove a point. Therefore you mention the Fitzgerald/Crystal collision article. I can name one more to support your point: Thousand Oaks shooting. Consensus there was to omit. But in the majority of instances consensus has been in favor of inclusion. My evidence is merely anecdotal. I admit that. But another point has to be made: there is no reason the same conclusion has to be reached at all articles. This is not unlike the construction of all articles as concerns the inclusion of content. These are editorial decisions left to editorial discretion. I don't think victim names are all that different from a variety of other pieces of information. I happen to favor the inclusion of the names of fatalities resulting from notable incidents. I think this helps to write a complete article. And I find the deliberate omission of this information to be an uncalled-for truncating of the article. But it is not such a terrible thing if in some instances editors decide by means of our consensus-reaching process to omit these names.

Blueboar—this discussion is not "reflecting what the community thinks". The truest reflection of what the community thinks is seen in consensus at individual articles at which this question has had an airing-out. Bus stop (talk) 17:40, 15 December 2018 (UTC)

• Below is a partial (?) and non-chronological list of this years' other discussions that deal with listing non-notable people. Anyone is welcome to add ones I've missed. ^~Hydronium^~Hydroxide^~(Talk)~ 12:41, 17 December 2018 (UTC):

• Talk:USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crystal_collision#WP:NOTMEMORIAL_edit
• Talk:2017_Las_Vegas_shooting#Victims_list
• Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_149#WP:NOTMEMORIAL_Victim_lists_in_mass_tragedy_articles_-_Round_2
• Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_138#WP:NOTMEMORIAL_and_victim_lists_in_tragedy_articles
• Talk:Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting/Archive_6#Victims_list_revisited
• Talk:Santa_Fe_High_School_shooting#List_of_victims'_names
• Talk:Schoharie_limousine_crash#List_of_victim_names
• Talk:Humboldt_Broncos_bus_crash#Victims
• Talk:Childers_Palace_Backpackers_Hostel_fire#List_Of_Victims
• Talk:2017_Washington_train_derailment#Follow_WP:BRD_(Bold,_Revert,_and_Discuss):...
• Talk:American_Airlines_Flight_191#Deaths
• Talk:Pittsburgh_synagogue_shooting/Archive_3#Should_names_of_victims_be_listed?
• Talk:Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting/Archive_2#Removed_list_of_victims
• Talk:Umpqua_Community_College_shooting#Names
• Talk:2018_Leicester_helicopter_crash#names
• Talk:Marjory_Stoneman_Douglas_High_School#Shooting
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Death/Archive_3#Victims_by_Name
• Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Ships/Archive_56#Discussion_at_Talk:USS_Fitzgerald_and_MV_ACX_Crystal_collision
• Wikipedia_talk:What_Wikipedia_is_not#NOTMEMORIAL_discussion
• Talk:Tham_Luang_cave_rescue/Archive_2#Naming_the_boys (not dead)
• Talk:2018_Gaza_border_protests/Archive_1#List_of_Palestinian_civilian_deaths_in_Prior_violence
• Talk:2018_Gaza_border_protests/Archive_2#List_of_victims
• Talk:Dunblane_massacre#List_of_victims
• Talk:Thousand_Oaks_shooting#New_Details_On_Injuries_and_a_link_to_the_victims
• Talk:Passengers_of_the_RMS_Titanic/GA2
• Talk:December_2013_Spuyten_Duyvil_derailment
• Talk:Schoharie_limousine_crash#List_of_victim_names
• Talk:Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_shooting/Archive_5#No_consensus_for_victims_list

• It is plainly obvious that in the vast majority of instances consensus supports the inclusion in the article of all the victim names whether notable or not. Please see below. Bus stop (talk) 01:31, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

• Humboldt Broncos bus crash—all victim names included.
• Tham Luang cave rescue —victim name (there is only one) included.
• Stoneman Douglas High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Santa Fe High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Schoharie limousine crash—all victim names included.
• Pittsburgh synagogue shooting—all victim names included.
• Stoneman Douglas High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Umpqua Community College shooting—all victim names included.
• 2018 Leicester helicopter crash—all victim names included.
• Dunblane massacre—all victim names included.
• December 2013 Spuyten Duyvil derailment—all victim names included.
• Schoharie limousine crash—all victim names included.
• Virginia Tech shooting—all victim names included.
• 2012 Aurora shooting—all victim names included.
• Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting—all victim names included.
• Orlando nightclub shooting—all victim names included.
• Charleston church shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 Oakland warehouse fire—all victim names included.
• Columbine High School massacre—all victim names included.

• It is plainly obvious that in the vast majority of instances consensus supports the inclusion in the article of all the victim names whether notable or not. Please see above. Bus stop (talk) 01:31, 18 December 2018 (UTC)
• Comment: I added notifications to Wikipedia talk:Stand-alone lists (link) and Template:Centralized discussion (link). Cunard (talk) 08:19, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Its plainly obvious that most of these all American shooting and fairly recent events and hardly reflect the range of articles that potential could have lists of non-notable vicitims. In particularly these type of recent events have a high readership from those interested in these news type events so they expect to see victim names as if this was a newspaper which can slew the voting. So these recent events are not really a reflection on the thousands of articles about tragic events that dont or have never included names of non notable victims. MilborneOne (talk) 08:38, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

It is also plainly obvious that the more gut-wrenchingly awful the event, the more likely the event is to acquire a victim list. I would not be human if I did not sympathise with such a response (Dunblane massacre involved infants and is one of the few UK events listed above) - but is the awfulness of the event really a valid criteria for inclusion/exclusion of names? Because this is what actually happens when 'case by case' is the only guideline (no one has ever articulated how the names serve any useful encyc pupose - the intention, and effect is to 'honour' the victim, by individualising them, which may be an understandable wish, but isn't our mission IMO). Pincrete (talk) 12:33, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

• Many people use NOTMEMORIAL to argue against inclusion of names. As some editors have explained, NotMem does not apply to the individuated contents of an article; it applies to the subject matter of the entire article. (Probably for another full discussion: the NotMem text should be revised to make explicitly clear that it refers to a full article, not to just some of its content.) Properly read, NotMem is not a valid argument for excluding victim names from an article about a crime or calamity. I ask: why do mainstream news sources include names? The answer is because they want to provide comprehensive information. Though Wikipedia is NotANewspaper, it shares that goal: to be comprehensive (but not Indiscriminate or Trivial). As the NY Times is said to be the newspaper "of record," Wikipedia is--or should be--the encyclopedia of record. Having said that, I recognize it may be impractical to include names if the list is very long. A decision can be made at the article Talk page. In the interest of encyclopedic coverage, I believe we should not enact a policy or guideline that attempts to make exclusion of names the default choice. I would flip this proposal on its head (or perhaps, sideways) and say we should add an instruction at WP:Victim or WP:Listpeople to say: "Wikipedia does not encourage or discourage inclusion of names of victims in articles about a crime or calamity. Decisions about the encyclopedic value of such names may be made on Talk pages of articles." Such instruction might or might not reduce chronic debates about this issue, but it could prevent the encyclopedia from working against itself as authoritative and as the place at or near the top of people's choices for information of interest to them. DonFB (talk) 14:49, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

• Pinging the participants of the related discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 138#WP:NOTMEMORIAL and victim lists in tragedy articles: SkyWarrior (talk · contribs), Ivanvector (talk · contribs), Softlavender (talk · contribs), Masem (talk · contribs), Pincrete (talk · contribs), SparklingPessimist (talk · contribs), Davey2010 (talk · contribs), Snow Rise (talk · contribs), Nabla (talk · contribs), Mandruss (talk · contribs), swpb (talk · contribs), NinjaRobotPirate (talk · contribs), agnosticaphid (talk · contribs), Seraphimblade (talk · contribs), Dennis Brown (talk · contribs), Eggishorn (talk · contribs), Agathoclea (talk · contribs), postdlf (talk · contribs), HastyBriar321 (talk · contribs), A Quest For Knowledge (talk · contribs), L3X1 (talk · contribs), Coretheapple (talk · contribs), Graeme Bartlett (talk · contribs), Hawkeye7 (talk · contribs), Nihlus (talk · contribs), Rich Farmbrough (talk · contribs), Necrothesp (talk · contribs), Carwil (talk · contribs), Dicklyon (talk · contribs), Renata3 (talk · contribs), FOARP (talk · contribs), Knowledgekid87 (talk · contribs), Atlantic306 (talk · contribs), E.M.Gregory (talk · contribs), Patapsco913 (talk · contribs), BU Rob13 (talk · contribs), gidonb (talk · contribs), Sławomir Biały (talk · contribs), Huggums537 (talk · contribs), Flyer22 Reborn (talk · contribs), DonFB (talk · contribs), Herostratus (talk · contribs), Markbassett (talk · contribs), SMcCandlish (talk · contribs), Blueboar (talk · contribs), IJReid (talk · contribs), Hydronium Hydroxide (talk · contribs), and Abductive (talk · contribs).

  Cunard (talk) 08:52, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

• Pinging the participants of the related discussion Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 149#WP:NOTMEMORIAL Victim lists in mass tragedy articles - Round 2: Bohbye (talk · contribs), Spirit of Eagle (talk · contribs), Bastun (talk · contribs), Wnt (talk · contribs), WhatamIdoing (talk · contribs), Khajidha (talk · contribs), Edibobb (talk · contribs), No such user (talk · contribs), Alsee (talk · contribs), Zchrykng (talk · contribs), Slatersteven (talk · contribs), K.e.coffman (talk · contribs), Kierzek (talk · contribs), Ad Orientem (talk · contribs), Beeblebrox (talk · contribs), Bus stop (talk · contribs), Richard0612 (talk · contribs), Legacypac (talk · contribs), Amakuru (talk · contribs), WikiVirusC (talk · contribs), RileyBugz (talk · contribs), Hut 8.5 (talk · contribs), Cullen328 (talk · contribs), Bellezzasolo (talk · contribs), Javert2113 (talk · contribs), Nyttend (talk · contribs), Pbsouthwood (talk · contribs), Bagumba (talk · contribs), and Cesdeva (talk · contribs).

  Cunard (talk) 08:54, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Even the below represents only a small fraction of the number of articles mentioning identifying information pertaining to fatalities including name. This list, I believe, could be expanded many times over. The conclusion that I reach is that inclusion of such information is standard practice. I am posting this despite the fact that it takes up so much room because I don't think many participants in this discussion appreciate just how widespread the practice is. We generally allude in one form or another to deceased individuals. It is hard to say whether this is "memorialization" or not. I strongly believe it is relevant to an article. But in some instances editorial consensus is to omit identifying information for decedents. But the point is that in most instances such information is included. Bus stop (talk) 14:04, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

I only looked at a handful of the articles below (mainly UK IRA events), but in no case was there a bare list - including names in prose, where the individual had a significant role in the event is precisely what is proposed. In many/most cases that I looked from this list, this is what has already happened. Pincrete (talk) 20:27, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Standard practice is for inclusion. In the vast majority of the articles that I've looked at, some degree of allusion is made to the identities of the deceased. I have not made a distinction between list and prose as concerns this discussion. I don't consider one preferable to the other. As concerns depth of identity of decedents, I have encountered a wide range—from just the name to more extensive background information. In a small number of the articles I've looked at, the identities of the deceased are absent entirely from the article. Those sorts of articles are not included in the list below. I am at this moment adding a considerable number of articles to the below list. I hope I haven't added any articles twice, and I apologize if I have. Bus stop (talk) 14:16, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

• West Ham station attack—all victim names included.
• 1975 Piccadilly bombing—all victim names included.
• Walton's Restaurant bombing—all victim names included.
• Scott's Oyster Bar bombing—all victim names included.
• Kings Arms, Woolwich—all victim names included.
• Columbine Mine massacre—all victim names included.
• University of Texas tower shooting—all victim names included.
• Red Lake shootings—all victim names included.
• Oikos University shooting—all victim names included.
• Northern Illinois University shooting—all victim names included.
• Rancho Tehama Reserve shootings—all victim names included.
• 2013 Santa Monica shooting—all victim names included.
• West Nickel Mines School shooting—all victim names included.
• University of Iowa shooting—all victim names included.
• Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden—all victim names included.
• Marysville Pilchuck High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Thurston High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Lindhurst High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Kent State shootings—all victim names included.
• Mercy Hospital shooting—all victim names included.
• Tallahassee shooting—all victim names included.
• Capital Gazette shooting—all victim names included.
• Jacksonville Landing shooting—all victim names included.
• 2018 Scottsdale spree shootings—all victim names included.
• Burnette Chapel shooting—all victim names included.
• Yountville shooting—all victim names included.
• Marshall County High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Rancho Tehama Reserve shootings—all victim names included.
• 2017 Plano shooting—all victim names included.
• Clovis library shooting—all victim names included.
• San Francisco UPS shooting—all victim names included.
• Eaton Township Weis Markets shooting—all victim names included.
• Sandy, Utah attack—all victim names included.
• Orlando factory shooting—all victim names included.
• 2017 Schofield/Rothschild shootings—all victim names included.
• Cascade Mall shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 Citronelle homicides—all victim names included.
• 2016 Mukilteo shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 shooting of Baton Rouge police officers—all victim names included.
• St. Joseph courthouse shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers—all victim names included.
• 2016 Maryland shooting spree—all victim names included.
• Pike County, Ohio shootings—all victim names included.
• 2016 Wilkinsburg mass shooting—all victim names included.
• Hesston shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 Kalamazoo shootings—all victim names included.
• 2015 San Bernardino attack—all victim names included.
• Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting—all victim names included.
• 2015 Harris County, Texas shooting—all victim names included.
• 2015 Lafayette shooting—all victim names included.
• Mercy Hospital shooting—all victim names included.
• Tallahassee shooting—all victim names included.
• Capital Gazette shooting—all victim names included.
• Jacksonville Landing shooting—all victim names included.
• 2018 Scottsdale spree shootings—all victim names included.
• Burnette Chapel shooting—all victim names included.
• Yountville shooting—all victim names included.
• Marshall County High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Rancho Tehama Reserve shootings—all victim names included.
• 2017 Plano shooting—all victim names included.
• Clovis library shooting—all victim names included.
• San Francisco UPS shooting—all victim names included.
• Eaton Township Weis Markets shooting—all victim names included.
• Sandy, Utah attack—all victim names included.
• Orlando factory shooting—all victim names included.
• 2017 Schofield/Rothschild shootings—all victim names included.
• Cascade Mall shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 Citronelle homicides—all victim names included.
• 2016 Mukilteo shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 shooting of Baton Rouge police officers—all victim names included.
• St. Joseph courthouse shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 shooting of Dallas police officers—all victim names included.
• 2016 Maryland shooting spree—all victim names included.
• Pike County, Ohio shootings—all victim names included.
• 2016 Wilkinsburg mass shooting—all victim names included.
• Hesston shooting—all victim names included.
• 2016 Kalamazoo shootings—all victim names included.
• 2015 San Bernardino attack—all victim names included.
• Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting—all victim names included.
• 2015 Harris County, Texas shooting—all victim names included.
• 2015 Lafayette shooting—all victim names included.
• 2015 Chattanooga shootings—all victim names included.
• 2015 Waco shootout—all victim names included.
• 2015 Tyrone shooting—all victim names included.
• Montgomery County, Pennsylvania shootings—all victim names included.
• Marysville Pilchuck High School shooting—all victim names included.
• 2014 Harris County, Texas shooting—all victim names included.
• 2014 Isla Vista killings—all victim names included.
• 2014 Fort Hood shooting—all victim names included.
• 2013 Los Angeles International Airport shooting—all victim names included.
• Washington Navy Yard shooting—all victim names included.
• Ross Township Municipal Building shooting—all victim names included.
• 2013 Hialeah shooting—all victim names included.
• 2013 Santa Monica shooting—all victim names included.
• 2013 South Valley homicides—all victim names included.
• 2012 Empire State Building shooting—all victim names included.
• Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting—all victim names included.
• Chardon High School shooting—all victim names included.
• 2011 Seal Beach shooting—all victim names included.
• 2011 IHOP shooting—all victim names included.
• 2011 Tucson shooting—all victim names included.
• Hartford Distributors shooting—all victim names included.
• University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting—all victim names included.
• 2010 Appomattox shootings—all victim names included.
• ABB plant shootings—all victim names included.
• 2009 Fort Hood shooting—all victim names included.
• 2009 Collier Township shooting—all victim names included.
• 2009 shooting of Pittsburgh police officers—all victim names included.
• Binghamton shootings—all victim names included.
• Carthage nursing home shooting—all victim names included.
• Geneva County massacre—all victim names included.
• Covina massacre—all victim names included.
• 2008 Skagit County shooting spree—all victim names included.
• Northern Illinois University shooting—all victim names included.
• Kirkwood City Council shooting—all victim names included.
• 2007 Colorado YWAM and New Life shootings—all victim names included.
• Westroads Mall shooting—all victim names included.
• Trolley Square shooting—all victim names included.
• West Nickel Mines School shooting—all victim names included.
• Capitol Hill massacre—all victim names included.
• Goleta postal facility shootings—all victim names included.
• Red Lake shootings—all victim names included.
• Chai Vang—all victim names included.
• Marcus Wesson—all victim names included.
• Lockheed Martin shooting—all victim names included.
• John McDonogh High School shooting—all victim names included.
• D.C. sniper attacks—all victim names included.
• Appalachian School of Law shooting—all victim names included.
• Charles Andrew Williams—all victim names included.
• 2001 Nevada County shootings—all victim names included.
• Xerox murders—all victim names included.
• Larry Gene Ashbrook—all victim names included.
• Mark O. Barton—all victim names included.
• Thurston High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden—all victim names included.
• Pearl High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Bethel Regional High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Frontier Middle School shooting—all victim names included.
• Wickliffe Middle School shooting—all victim names included.
• 1993 Aurora shooting—all victim names included.
• 1993 Long Island Rail Road shooting—all victim names included.
• 101 California Street shooting—all victim names included.
• Wayne Lo—all victim names included.
• Lindhurst High School shooting—all victim names included.
• University of Iowa shooting—all victim names included.
• Luby's shooting—all victim names included.
• James Edward Pough—all victim names included.
• Las Cruces bowling alley massacre—all victim names included.
• Cleveland Elementary School shooting (Stockton)—all victim names included.
• Oakland Elementary School shooting—all victim names included.
• Old Salisbury Road shooting—all victim names included.
• Richard Farley—all victim names included.
• Ronald Gene Simmons—all victim names included.
• Edmond post office shooting—all victim names included.
• San Ysidro McDonald's massacre—all victim names included.
• Tyrone Mitchell—all victim names included.
• George Banks—all victim names included.
• Carl Robert Brown—all victim names included.
• Oregon Museum Tavern shooting—all victim names included.
• Greensboro massacre—all victim names included.
• Cleveland Elementary School shooting (San Diego)—all victim names included.
• Golden Dragon massacre—all victim names included.
• James Ruppert—all victim names included.
• Olean High School shooting—all victim names included.
• Ronald DeFeo Jr.—all victim names included.
• Jackson State killings—all victim names included.
• Orangeburg massacre—all victim names included.
• University of Texas tower shooting—all victim names included.

• It seems simple to me. JUST FOLLOW THE CITES. If most sources list the victims then WP should. If most sources do not then WP should not. Do not OR up a list, do not add prose that is UNDUE or OR. Just follow whatever the sources do and how they do it. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 19:25, 20 December 2018 (UTC)
• I used to be strongly against memorializing the victims in these sorts of articles, but I have come around to an abide-by-the-consensus-of-secondary-sources position, with an important caveat that the sources be in English. One should be careful to avoid sources that are biased or are attempting to gain political victimhood for an ethnic group. Abductive (reasoning) 05:18, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
• It would concern me that if we allow listing of non-noteworthy victims then we would have a lot of work in hand as some maritime disasters would need in some cases 1000 or more names to be added all of which are available in reliable sources, or is this one rule for recent and particularly American events but doesnt apply to ones outside of memory. It would be good to list the millions of victims of tragic events particularly in wartime but why should they be treated differently to an American school shooting with ten vicitms. MilborneOne (talk) 13:44, 25 December 2018 (UTC)
• That's a good point about accessibility. Where there is an easily accessible list on line (which is likely to remain accessible) then lengthy lists would seem to be a waste of time. In some cases however the list of names many not be available on line and therefore as the world's principal "go-to" reference we should consider including them. It doesn't need to be mandatory, but perhaps the deletionists might allow lists to remain, particularly if they were stand-alone lists which did not dominate the main article. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:37, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

(edit conflict) MilborneOne—you say "It would concern me that if we allow listing of non-noteworthy victims then we would have a lot of work in hand". Wouldn't we have a lot of work in hand rewriting the hundreds of articles that presently include all victim names? In my estimation 90% of the articles I've encountered include all victim names.

You didn't mention "memorialization" but let me point out that the information on victims is severely limited therefore it may not constitute memorialization. At most we find name, age, role-in-life, such as cop, teacher, student, and maybe home-town. Bus stop (talk) 16:20, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Clearly not looking at the same set of articles as me as very for example maritime tragic events do not have lists of victims (an those like Titanic that do are subject to some bickering), loads of other examples. We dont list the 2,259 victims of the Bhopal disaster as one example or the 1012 victims of the RMS Empress of Ireland. MilborneOne (talk) 17:33, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

I believe that where practicable our standard practice is to list all victims both notable and non-notable. A large number of victims presents a case where it is impractical to list all victims. You may be right that maritime events may show a lower incidence of inclusion of victims. I haven't looked at those sorts of articles in great numbers so I just don't know. Editors have by-and-large been exercising good judgement over the years, judging by the articles I have looked at. "Bickering" is not a good enough reason for enacting new policy. "Bickering" goes on in many places on the encyclopedia. What we want are good articles. In my opinion it is unlikely that we can enact policy that has the twin effect of reducing bickering and producing the best possible articles because collaborative editing inevitably involves dissension and disagreement. Talk pages properly used result in good articles where a high degree of collaboration is involved, that is, when a lot of editors are involved in the writing of one article. Bus stop (talk) 17:58, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

By extension of the reasoning in your first paragraph, this encyclopedia should never have been started because it was too much work. Even if your dubious 90% were 100%, we are allowed to decide to change the encyclopedia's direction without "appeal to status quo" like that. Wikipedia is a work in progress. (Of course my comment applies to any argument about amount of work, including MilborneOne's if that's what they meant. Amount of work should be extremely low on our priority list, on any issue.) ―Mandruss ☎ 16:32, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

Mandruss—was the editorial judgement that went into the writing of all of the articles containing victim names somehow flawed? As FOARP has perceptively said "The people who will vote here will be a vanishingly small sub-set of editors."

If you feel that my "90%" figure is "dubious" I am willing to stand corrected. I have taken the time to pore through many articles that seem to fit the criteria that would make them candidates for this discussion. And I have listed those that support my position. It is true that I did not list the articles that might support your position. I can do little more than state in complete honesty that my crude impression is that 90% of the articles I looked at included all victim names. And it is not only the percentage that matters to the discussion we are having. It is also the total number of articles involved—it is a huge number of articles. I think the list of articles could be expanded several times. I have not attempted to do so because I'm not nuts. Bus stop (talk) 16:56, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

• Comment I see above it has been said that no rationale has been provided for including the list of victims. Put simply the rationale for including a list of victims is 1) it is a relevant fact about the incident, equally as relevant as the number of victims, we know that it is relevant because reliable sources treat it as such. 2) It aids with the understanding of the incident - consider how you might actually describe what happened in this incident without using the names of the victims: you would be left saying "his first victim was killed doing X, then his second victim was killed doing Y", and the reader would be easily confused as to which victim was being referred to if they were only described as numbers.
• WP:NOTMEMORIAL has been raised above, but people really need to read what that policy says. It says: "Memorials. Subjects of encyclopedia articles must satisfy Wikipedia's notability requirements. Wikipedia is not the place to memorialize deceased friends, relatives, acquaintances, or others who do not meet such requirements." (emphasis added). It is clear that NOTMEMORIAL is about the subject of the article being notable, and not a ban on lists of people who died in any particular incident. Where the article is about a notable event NOTMEMORIAL falls by the wayside. FOARP (talk) 23:08, 26 December 2018 (UTC)

To be fair not memorial is used as it reflects the views of some users that the only reason we would be adding lists of hundreds or in some cases it could be thousands in one article of not noteworthy individuals would be to memorialise them, so far not other valid reason has been raised why a simple link to an external source is not good enough. So yes the policy may not apply but the spirit does. MilborneOne (talk) 13:29, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

There really aren't articles containing hundreds of victims, at least not to my knowledge. You are talking about the spirit of WP:MEMORIAL. The spirit of WP:MEMORIAL is that we don't create articles on non-notable individuals. I would say that the application of WP:MEMORIAL to this discussion is a misapplication of policy. We can give the benefit of the doubt and say that the reference is to the dictionary definition of memorialization. But the limited amount of information we are providing shows this is not the case. True memorialization involves more extensive information than name, rank, and number. True memorialization involves the presentation of vignettes from the deceased person's life that tug at the heartstrings with their poignancy. We do not indulge in that sort of thing. The sole purpose of our editors is an informational purpose. This is part of explicating a subject. Can you point to an article engaging in sentimentality in the presentation of the identities of fatalities? Bus stop (talk) 16:25, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, this appears to be a big misunderstanding on the part of the people in support of this proposition. We are not naming/listing those killed out of sentiment. We are doing so because - particularly in the context of terrorist attacks and mass shootings - it is an important part of describing what happened AND it's information that reliable sources treat as important. FOARP (talk) 21:12, 27 December 2018 (UTC)

Break (victims)

Except that in most cases, the bombers/shooters/etc don't really care about who dies. The point is to attack "location X", who exactly is at location X doen't figure into it. If an individual is specifically targeted (if the shooter says "I'm gonna kill you Mitchell!) then that person should be named. If a specific group of unnamed individuals is targeted (say, if the shooter says "all you cheerleaders are bitches who deserve to die") we should state that he targeted that group - without specifically saying that Brittany, Megan, and Rebecca were killed. Absent something like that we should just identify what the general group or location targeted was. For example, "the perpetrator rammed his car into a crowd outside the theater, killing 17" or "the bomb was placed in Monomonee Falls High School, the explosion killed 4 teachers and 9 students" or "the shooter fired into his place of employment, killing 12 people". List people who were explicit targets but not those who are basically collateral damage. --Khajidha (talk) 22:43, 28 December 2018 (UTC)

When a psychopathic murder kills John Smith first, then John Doe, then Jane Smith, then Jane Doe, and reliable sources state that this is what happened, then we should say exactly that in our article because that is exactly what happened. To advocate anything else is to advocate making this encyclopedia less accurate without good reason, and to ignore what the reliable sources themselves state was important about the event. It doesn't matter what format this is stated in. FOARP (talk) 17:18, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

There's a difference between specifically killing John Smith, John Doe, Jane Smith, and Jane Doe and going on a random spree that just happens to end in those people's deaths. In the first, the names are relevant, in the second they aren't. --Khajidha (talk) 19:13, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

You're saying we should first determine the intent of the killer before writing the article. Intent is something that the police, prosecutors, and courts themselves struggle mightily to determine and often get wrong. It clearly is relevant to discuss who was killed when in an article about a massacre or a serial killer since the murderer is progressing from one victim to the next. Indicating victims by numbers or letters ("Victim 1", "Person A"), rather than by their names - something we would have to do if we were not allowed to name victims - is a form of editorialising and requires us to ignore something that reliable sources find important (the identities of the victims).

I find the problem in these discussion is that they are divorced from the reality of the actual subject matter of the actual articles that are discussing. It is useful, then, to consider concrete cases. Please tell me, therefore, how would you describe this incident without naming the victims? FOARP (talk) 10:55, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

"Dunlap entered the restaurant at 9:00 p.m., where he ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and played an arcade game. He then hid in a restroom at about 9:50 p.m. He exited the restroom after closing at 10:05 p.m. and shot five employees with a .25-caliber semiautomatic pistol.

The first victim was shot while cleaning the salad bar. She was hit from close range in the right ear and was mortally wounded. Another victim was fatally shot near the left eye as he was vacuuming. A third pleaded for her life and sunk to her knees, but Dunlap fatally shot her once through the top of her head. Bobby Stephens, 20, the lone survivor of the shooting, returned to the restaurant after taking a break by smoking outside, thinking the noise he heard from the restaurant when he was outside were children popping balloons nearby.

As he walked into the restaurant and unloaded utensils into the dishwasher, Dunlap came through the kitchen door, raised the handgun at him, and fired a shot that struck Stephens in the jaw. He then fell to the floor and played dead. Dunlap then forced the store manager to unlock the safe. After she opened it, Dunlap shot her in the ear. As he was taking the cash out of the safe, Dunlap fired a second fatal shot through her other ear after he noticed she was still moving.[2] The manager who fired Dunlap was not present at the restaurant.

Stephens escaped through a back door and walked to the nearby Mill Pond apartment complex, where he pounded on a door to alert someone that he and others had been shot at the Chuck E. Cheese. Stephens was hospitalized at Denver General Hospital in fair condition. As authorities arrived on the scene, they found two bodies in the restaurant's hallway, a third in a room off the hallway, and the fourth in the manager's office. The initial victim was sent to Denver General Hospital, where she was declared brain dead.[2] She died from her injuries the next day at Aurora Regional Medical Center.[3]

Dunlap fled the scene with $1,500 worth of cash and game tokens he stole from inside the restaurant. Dunlap was arrested at his mother's apartment twelve hours later.[ " --Khajidha (talk) 16:16, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Khajidha—we are here to provide information. Reliable sources exist to provide information also. It is not that everything that is reliably sourced must be in an article, but the determining factor as to whether to include something or not is the consensus reached at an individual article. I don't think blanket rules are arrived at, at the Village pump as to whether or not to name fatalities. This is a decision that is best made at an individual article. If we arrive at a "blanket rule" here, the consequence will be the tying of the hands of individual editors for no good reason. Dialogue is essential to reaching the correct conclusions on issues of disagreement, but with the existence of a "blanket rule", dialogue would effectively be suppressed. The sort of reasoning you are presenting—that non-targeted victims should not be mentioned—could be presented by you or any other editor on an individual article's Talk page. Other editors may agree with you and others may disagree with you. No doubt other editors will raise additional factors that they feel should be taken into consideration. But that dialogue is eliminated when you devise "blanket rules" that do not serve serious purposes. What is the important principle at stake here? There is no important principle at stake here. We are discussing facts that are clearly within the scope of the article. Whether or not to include them is an editorial decision. Dialogue is essential to reaching the right decision on whether to include or omit. Bus stop (talk) 15:28, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

The good reason is that these names are unencyclopedic. --Khajidha (talk) 16:16, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

You're not defining "unencyclopedic". This is reliably sourced information that is within the scope of the article. I understand that we do not include all reliably sourced information, even if it is within an scope of the article. But what is the big deal with this information that would suggest that we should enact new policy to curtail its inclusion in articles? We use Talk pages to resolve all sorts of disagreements all the time. Would you argue that we cannot use the Talk pages of individual articles to resolve questions like this?

Khajidha—the version you wrote for "1993 Aurora shooting" is fine—if editors agree with you. Which editors? The editors at the Village pump? No—the editors at "1993 Aurora shooting". That is where consensus should be formed because that is where that specific article is being discussed. Bus stop (talk) 16:38, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Precisely. Let's look at what an article rewritten to this standard looks like: "The first victim was shot while cleaning the salad bar. She was hit from close range in the right ear and was mortally wounded." So, the gender of the victim is important, the fact they were standing next to the salad bar when shot is important, the fact they were shot in the right ear is important - but who they actually were is not relevant information to include? Instead identifying them by the order in which they were killed - which may not always be clear? — Preceding unsigned comment added by FOARP (talk • contribs) 17:35, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Actually, I'd be fine with even less detail.--Khajidha (talk) 18:43, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

This thread is missing the point: This is not a proposal to prohibit naming victims entirely, in fact it specifically states Victims of crimes and disasters and other tragic events may be named as a normal part of a quality prose narrative. Narratives like this one would still stand. As an aside, my personal opinion is that 1993 Aurora shooting is far too detailed. The description was pulled from an exhaustive court transcript, while other sources simply say that he shot the victims in the head and one survivor escaped through the back door. –dlthewave ☎ 19:08, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Dlthewave—it doesn't matter if victims are listed in prose form or list form. OK, it matters, but it matters to those writing the article. They are in the best position to decide on one form or the other. More than one of the sources already in the "1993 Aurora shooting" article include the names of all of the fatalities. It is up to the editors at an article, after weighing all of the applicable factors, to decide whether to use "prose" or "lists". Neither way is preferable to the other in a general sense. These are alternative ways of presenting information. We should not be trying to come up with a formula at the Village pump for articles that have a particular array of applicable factors known best by those trying to write those articles. I should also add that omitting the names of the fatalities is also acceptable. In a minority of articles it was decided to omit the names of the fatalities. These should be considered decisions best left to editorial discretion. Those working on the article are the best ones to make these decisions. Bus stop (talk) 20:49, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

As I said in my comment further up the chain "It doesn't matter what format this is stated in". I am aware that the proposal makes a distinction between prose and tables, but there is no basis for limiting the editor's choices as to how to describe an event in this fashion. FOARP (talk) 21:51, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

Per request at WP:RFCL, I have closed the recent RfC regarding the Authority Control template. Since the RfC was archived before closure, I'm posting the result below.

Should the authority control template link to websites that are not primarily databases (i.e. websites where the primary content is not a database structure)?

There is consensus against expanding the authority control template to include links to non-databases.

I'll note that I also closed the (moot) sub-questions in the interest of recording the result, so that if consensus changes in the future the views expressed can be taken into account. This was a (non-admin closure). --DannyS712 (talk) 05:57, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

Thanks for doing the evaluation and close. Here is the link.

• Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_148#RfC:_authority_control

I also posted notice on the talk page for the template at Template_talk:Authority_control#Close_of_RfC. Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:08, 9 February 2019 (UTC)

Bumping thread for 15 days. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 14:56, 7 March 2019 (UTC)

Un-bumping thread, discussion is closed --DannyS712 (talk) 00:03, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

This draft offers, in my view, a legitimate set of criteria for the notability of theatrical plays. -The Gnome (talk) 10:46, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Support

• Support per nomination. -The Gnome (talk) 10:46, 27 January 2019 (UTC)
• Support Wikipedia needs more guidance on notability. This is helpful. Coastside (talk) 21:05, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
• Support I am supporting this as part of a paradigm shift to judge notability on the basis of having a large amount of structured data versus the traditional GNG standard of expecting to see citations to traditional reliable sources. The trend that I am perceiving is that the quality of information in databases is better, and in the case of plays, we can access information about directors, venues, actors, length of run, and local reviews often without having access to reliable sources which establish GNG. English Wikipedia currently judges information from databases generally unreliable. I still respect Wikipedia's reliable source definition, but increasingly, reliable sources means human-written content which may be of low quality whereas database information is machine-arranged information from some authority but which does not meet WP:RS. To me, Gnom's draft appears to be a check of whether we have the data which would complete the Wikidata modeling of a play and even go beyond that to check that related entities - like the theatre house, director, and actors - also have good verified data around them. What I am imagining in this scheme is that we have the infobox for a play completed and referenced to a reliable database, and then perhaps without citations someone summarizes the plot of a play. In such an article there might be no WP:RS cited and WP:GNG met, but to me, such an article would be higher quality than an article about a play which lacked that data but which cited 3 critical reviews to pass GNG. Now might not be the time to approve this because English Wikipedia is still forming its policy on its relationship with data, but I do think that this proposal will seem much stronger when we know how much we can trust databases like Internet Broadway Database. If this fails, I would join anyone in exploring the development of a policy on the reliability of information from databases. Blue Rasberry (talk) 22:51, 15 February 2019 (UTC)
• Support. This is well done, potentially useful, and not in conflict in any way with how we assess notability of such articles. What the oppose people below seem to be missing is that SNGs (with one or two controversial would-be exceptions) are not alternatives to GNG; they are not in competition with WP:N. Their purpose is predictive: they explain in topically specific terms what kinds of articles in that category are likely to pass or fail our overall notability examinations, and why. They're not rulebooks, they're tools for helping (mostly new-ish) editors select appropriate topics and write them up in an encyclopedic manner. We actually need more of these. Should this fail to be elevated to a guideline in this proposal motion, it should be made a wikiproject advice essay and kept at WP:WikiProject Theatre/Notability or whatever. If it is referred to frequently enough – because people find the arguments in it compelling, as with any other essay we use a lot, not because it's being "cited" as a "rule" – then it'll likely become a guideline later. Or it simply won't matter that it doesn't have a guideline tag on it. It won't be the only such page. (Hell, some of our most cherished deletion-related material has ((Essay)) on it: WP:AADD, and what it says is considered actionable in deletion debates; it is effectively a guideline. Similarly, some guidelines effectively have the force of policies, like WP:MEDRS, WP:BRD, WP:ROPE, and WP:CIR – WP and its admins and processes act on their community-acceptance authority with firm force.) Lots of wikiprojects have notability, style, naming-convention, and other pages in this boat. Remember WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY. Consensus is what the editorial pool does in the aggregate over time, not what banners it puts on the tops of pages.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  11:43, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
• Support. I agree with SMcCandlish's views on the purpose of SNGs. For those concerned with the narrow scope, perhaps envision not just strictly plays but also musicals, operas, any written performed theatrical work. This proposed guideline works for them all. --Bsherr (talk) 17:16, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
• Support As with Blue, I think it's a good idea to use something other than the GNG in this area. In major theatrical centers essentially everything that opens gets reviewed,thoughfor some material it can be difficult to find, so it doesn't serve as a discriminating factor for notability , but rather for the diligence and access to sources of the contributor. The most satisfactory of the SNGs are the ones that are alternatives--GEOLAND and PROF, and the inclusion of all biological species the charting sections of music. (I'm omitting sports here, because the appropriate levels are always under some degree of dispute) These are ones that can permit us to build content, not argue about nuances of sourcing. All that is necessary in fact to harmonize the others with the SNG is to interpret "presumptive" in the way it means in law--it holds unless there is actual convincing evidence otherwise. It is very rare that a search for sources in most fields is sufficient comprehensive as to really be convincing evidence that none exist. Iyt can be done, and I have seen some afds in restricted fields where it actually is done, but but for most topics nobody has access to all the possible resources. Thus, all we can do is predict. DGG ( talk ) 20:10, 28 February 2019 (UTC)

Oppose

• Why? Is there some perceived need for an SNG specific to plays? --Izno (talk) 15:51, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

  The benefits of having one are the same for having in place one for films. -The Gnome (talk) 19:15, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

  Which are? --Izno (talk) 20:00, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

  On the basis of the strengthening of WP:5P1 and WP:INDISCRIMINATE, as well as more and more people turning to Wikipedia "to keep up with the popular culture moments happening around them" (link), Wikipedia has been tightening up on its inclusion criteria. Consequently, subject-specific guidelines for notability have been increasing in number at the rate of approximately one every year. This is a welcome trend as the increasing size of the AfD process indicates. Do you object to having WP:NFILM in place? -The Gnome (talk) 21:27, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

  P.S. Discussions at the pump tend to get unwieldy, as it is, so we should strive for clarity whenever we can. You can !vote to oppose the suggestion in the Oppose section and ask questions at the Discussion section. Wouldn't this be more practical and clear, also for readers? - The Gnome (talk) 21:31, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

  WP:OTHERSTUFF about the FILM question. Please answer my question directly. What is the benefit of Yet Another SNG? If the play is notable, it should be able to meet the WP:GNG. Are there plays which do not which we should cover? Conversely, are there plays we cover that we should not? SNGs, if they are employed, should cover those two cases. I doubt this one does, especially since it was initially drafted in 2011. 8 years is a long time on Wikipedia.

  Please consider reviewing WP:LISTGAP regarding the indenting you changed.

  I'll ignore your comment on discussions. It's my choice to have this discussion under the oppose section since I currently and will continue to oppose until I get some good answers. If you would like to reply in #Discussion, that is your prerogative. --Izno (talk) 23:14, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

I suggested placing this discussion in the, well, Discussion section since this is why we have such sections: to have discussions separately from !votes. It simply makes for better navigation. That's all. Of course, it's your prerogative to post anywhere you feel like. And I asked if you oppose the existence of WP:NFILM. You responded by invoking WP:OSE, which can only mean that you consider WP:NFILM to be "stuff" that "already exists" and "probably should not." Interesting. -The Gnome (talk) 23:39, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

I don’t know where I'll land on this question but this discussion feels like this is really a case of some stuff exists for a reason which not so coincidentally resides at OTHERSTUFF. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 06:17, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Greetings, Barkeep49. Izno above asked 'Why?' and I pointed out WP:NFILM strictly as a kind of short hand (similar justification). I then provided a fuller explanation for my proposal without using at all the existence of a precedent as justification. Hope this is clearer now. -The Gnome (talk) 17:36, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose as instruction creep and unneeded bureaucracy as GNG is enough. There are not enough play articles being written to need an SNG in comparison to the far greater number of film articles, thanks Atlantic306 (talk) 23:12, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

Greetings, Atlantic306. The relative dearth of Wikipedia articles on theatrical plays could actually be a shortcoming of our encyclopaedia. -The Gnome (talk) 09:34, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose for multiple reasons. Firstly, I just don't think it is needed. Secondly I believe the guidelines are too limiting - "The play has been produced by a notable theatre company or producing theatre and enjoyed a long and successful run in one or more major venues." A long run should not be a determination of notability. Equally, a play which opens on Broadway and closes within a week would also be notable. Or a play which plays at the Royal Court/Young Vic/National Dofrman would be considered notable despite being limited runs. Mark E (talk) 08:07, 3 February 2019 (UTC)

Greetings, Mark E. If you disagree with the language of the specific, currently extant draft, it can, of course, be amended, through a process of suggestions and discussions. If there could be an SNG which you'd find acceptable, then that would mean you would generally support the suggestion to have one. -The Gnome (talk) 09:34, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - No need for an SNG, GNG is enough. Blueboar (talk) 10:46, 7 February 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose GNG is sufficient. It has not been demonstrated how the GNG would encourage the deletion of articles that this SNG would somehow save.--Jayron32 16:46, 11 February 2019 (UTC)

  Jayron32, I would argue that # The play was directed by a notable director and starred notable performers.^[1] would most likely save a few. Don't ask me which ones ones, though. I'll concede I have no actual clue. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 02:57, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

  Well, no SNG should save an article that doesn't pass WP:GNG. The goal here is to make it easier to determine whether something should almost certainly pass WP:GNG. SportingFlyer T·C 08:27, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose It's a well drafted SNG and I don't have any problems with introducing it generally. My concern revolves around how few articles about plays I've seen around town here. I don't see many if any I remember at AfC or AfD. There's one active PROD over at Musical Theatre (which I agree with) and none over at Theatre as it stands right now. I just don't think it's generally needed in mainspace since determining notability of plays is a fairly rare task, one guided by WP:GNG, and it doesn't outweigh the need to keep the number of SNGs limited. I would consider adding it as a general non-binding guideline over at Wikiproject Theatre if you haven't already since I do think it is a well drafted proposal. I don't see any links to notability on the project page so please excuse me if I'm wrong. SportingFlyer T·C 08:26, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Neutral

1. Neutral. The Gnome, please do not get discouraged by the results of this RfC. I have come up with much worse ideas, so do not feel like this anyone here is saying your proposal is that bad. Many editors are simply of the reasonable opinion that there is nothing currently being expressed that warrants this change right now. I suggest that you, as you move forward, create theatre-related articles to improve our coverage of this topic. Thank you for bringing this policy up for debate, and I am sorry if these are not the results you had hoped for. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk-^☖ 02:57, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for the kind words, Matthew J. Long. Take care. -The Gnome (talk) 08:04, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Discussion

• I think we need more guides on notability and what to include and exclude in Wikipedia. There is a strong bias against "rules" and "instruction creep", which is understandable. There is a clear libertarian streak amongst the Wikipedia powers-that-be. Those who are comfortable with the status quo don't want more rules. For me the issues isn't rules but guidelines. There must be some kind of reference to help editors navigate. I think Gnome did a great job trying to provide a reference for editors to consider. If someone wants to add an article on a play, why not give them some kind of framework to decide whether it merits an article in an encyclopedia? As I see it, Wikipedia is ballooning into a glorified phonebook for 7 billion people and fansite for every video game character ever conceived. I would like to see more guidance to include content that will be relevant long-term and to exclude content that is better suited in blog posts than the encyclopedia. Soup nazi? No. Guidance and attempt to rationalize the influx of pop culture? Yes. Coastside (talk) 21:15, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

I know this has been discussed extensively, but when the cited sources are using "died by", why are we still using "committed"? valereee (talk) 18:37, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Because consensus for the last three years has been that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and not bound by the AP guidelines. See [14] [15] [16]. Praxidicae (talk) 18:42, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

We do not use euphemisms and we do not follow the AP stylebook that the news articles that use that phrase do. Praxidicae linked to a few discussions above. We've discussed this several times on wikipedia. We don't need to go over this entire issue again. Natureium (talk) 18:47, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

This again. I think the dispute is largely a cultural one - there are certain customs in Australia regarding how the media treats suicide cases. Without time to assess this issue, my preference is for the status quo. power~enwiki (π, ν) 18:50, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict):Also this discussion is one of the better ones regarding this matter, particularly InedibleHulk's comment: "Died by suicide" sounds awkwardly passive to me. Suicide is killing yourself, not being killed by yourself. Praxidicae (talk) 18:51, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

(after edit conflict) And, anyway, the phrases are synonyms. The word "commit" does not imply anything criminal. Its meaning is much wider than that. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:54, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Even if sources do use "died by suicide" it's quite normal to paraphrase or rephrase. Equally there is no policy that we have to use "committed suicide" if an alternative construction could be used. But I'd agree it's still debatable if these two phrases are exactly synonymous. Martinevans123 (talk) 18:54, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

From the most simple view of it, "died by suicide" is redundant. It's like "died by death", "fatally murdered" or "murdered to death." this discussion most adequately sums up the approach I think we should take. Praxidicae (talk) 18:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Regardless of the actual words used, it's important to focus on the event and not make value judgments about the action. So, for example, killed herself is right out. Bradv🍁 18:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

 Administrator note This proposal is being advertised at WP:VPP and WP:CD, and it has been requested that it stay open for at least 30 days. ~Swarm~ {talk} 05:14, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

I am entering and numbering this proposal in order to get it into the record, but am requesting that action on it be deferred until the current round of MFDs are decided.

As per User:UnitedStatesian, Create Criteria for Speedy Deletion criterion X3, for portals created by User:The Transhumanist between April 2018 and March 2019. Tagging the portals for speedy deletion will provide the notice to users of the portals, if there are any users of the portals. I recommend that instructions to administrators include a request to wait 24 hours before deleting a portal. This is a compromise between the usual 1 to 4 hours for speedy deletion and 7 days for XFD. The availability of Twinkle for one-click tagging will make it easy to tag the pages, while notifying the users (if there are any). Robert McClenon (talk) 04:21, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

This proposal should be posted in a wider venue, such as WP:VPR or WP:MFD. Many of those portals have been in place for months, making WP:AN too narrow a venue for them. CSD notices wouldn't be placed until after the discussion is over, and therefore would not serve to notify the users of those portals of the discussion. A notice to the discussion of this proposal, since it is a deletion discussion, should be placed on each of the portals, to allow their readers to participate in the discussion. The current round of MfDs are not a random sampling of the portals that were created, and therefore are not necessarily representative of the set. The portals themselves vary in many ways, including scope, the amount of time they've been accessed by readers, quality, number of features, picture support, volume of content, amount of work that went into them, number of editors who worked on them, length, readership, etc.    — The Transhumanist   07:09, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

How would you suggest to get a representative sample? Legacypac (talk) 07:20, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for asking. That would be difficult now, since there are already a bunch of portals nominated for MfD. If those were included, then the sample would already be skewed. I expect a truly random sample would reveal that some portals are worth keeping and others are not. A more important question would be "How would we find the portals worth keeping? Which is very similar to the question "what should the creation criteria for portals be?", the very thing they are discussing at the portal guidelines page right now. Many of these portals may qualify under the guideline that is finally arrived upon there. For example, they are discussing scope. There are portals of subjects that fall within Vital articles Level 2, 3, 4, and 5, and there are many portals of subjects of similar scope to the subjects at those levels. And many of the portals had extra work put into them, and who knows how many had contributions by other editors besides me. Another factor is, that the quality of the navigation templates the portals are powered by differs, and some of the portals are powered by other source types, such as lists. Some have hand-crafted lists, as there are multiple slideshow templates available, one of which accepts specific article names as parameters. Another way to do that is provide a manual list in the subtopics section and power the slideshow from that. Some of the portals are of a different design than the standard base template. Some are very well focused, contextually, while others are not. For example, some of the portals have multiple excerpt slideshows to provide additional context.    — The Transhumanist   07:46, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support in principle. Looking at the existing MFD discussions, TTH seems determined to drag and wikilawyer as much as possible to try to derail the discussions, even for blatantly and indefensibly inappropriate microportals like those discussed at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods; it's not a good use of anyone's time to go through the same timesink 5000+ times. (The cynic in me says that a speedy criterion wouldn't work as while the creators wouldn't be able to decline the templates themselves, TTH and Dreamy Jazz would probably just follow the tagger around removing the speedy templates from each other's creations.) In practice, it would probably be more efficient to do what we did with Neelix and have a streamlined MFD nomination process, in which "created by TTH" is considered sufficient grounds for deletion at MFD and they default to delete unless someone can make a strong argument for keep. MFD is less gameable and also gives a space for people to defend them in those rare cases where they're actually worth keeping. (Every time I look, I find that the flood of inane and pointless TTH portals has spread further than I thought; shipping containers portal, anyone?) ‑ Iridescent 08:26, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

  Dreamy Jazz seems unlikely do that, having already decided during this debate to stop donating their time to Wikipedia. Certes (talk) 18:06, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment – Another option would be to move these to draft space. The templates and lua modules could be modified so that the portals render right in that namespace (I wish I would have thought of this before). Being in draft space would give time to fix their various problems (keeping in mind that micro-scope is not fixable), and identify the ones worth keeping. I would agree not to move any of them personally, and would propose/request such moves after the new creation criteria guidelines for portals are settled upon. I would also be willing to tag those that did not meet those guidelines with CSD (as creator), saving Legacypac the trouble of nominating them at MfD (he mentioned somewhere that he thought I should help clean up this "mess"). Another benefit of this strategy is that if any of them sit in draft space too long without further development, they automatically become subject to deletion per the draft space guidelines, and those that reach that age without any edits can be deleted en masse without time-consuming effort-wasting MfD discussions. This course of action would of course need the participation of some lua programmers to add the necessary functionality to the modules, which would be a good upgrade for those, to allow for portal drafts to be created in the future.    — The Transhumanist   09:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

P.S. @Iridescent and Legacypac: (pinging)    — The Transhumanist   09:28, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Absolutely not. The problem is that hundreds of portals on obscure topics makes an unmaintainable mess. Passing it to another namespace does not solve the problem which is that the portals are not helpful and are not maintainable. Automated creation of outlines/portals/anything must stop. Johnuniq (talk) 09:36, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• No. I tried moving one broken portal to Draft as a test and it broke even more stuff. Not worth the effort to modify everything for draft space and then let the same little group of editors release them willy nilly back into portal space. Since this group ignored their own Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines "portals should be about broad subject areas, which are likely to attract large numbers of interested readers and portal maintainers." why should anyone trust them to follow stricter guidelines? Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Definitely not. What possible benefit would there be to cluttering up another namespace with ≈5000 pages that will never serve any useful purpose? If you want to goof around with wikicode, nobody's stopping you installing your own copy of Mediawiki; we're not your personal test site. ‑ Iridescent 15:38, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• As a general rule, Portal pages should not be draftified. In fact, we should not usually move anything not designed to be an article to draft space. Draft portals should be in portal space, just like draft books should be in book space and draft templates in template space (pages with subpages are a pain to move, and many namespaces have special features that suggest keeping drafts in the same space if possible). If a portal is not ready for viewing by the general public, tag it with a relevant maintenance template and make sure it is not linked to from mainspace or from other portal pages.
• In the case at hand, TT's mass created portals do not seem like they will all be soon made ready for wider consumption, so deleting them seems the better option. —Kusma (t·c) 20:15, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support nuking from orbit: It's the only way to be sure. ——SerialNumber54129 09:32, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• How is this the "only way" to be "sure"? What about actually viewing the portals themselves, as opposed to mass deleting them all sight unseen? North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:08, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support enough with the wikilawyering and obstruction. This proposal is a little too narrow though - TTH created 3500+ automated portals but others in his little team created around 1000 more. I just grouped some by User:Dreamy Jazz into Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#US_County_Portals Legacypac (talk) 09:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support These useless broken portals have to go. CoolSkittle (talk) 14:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

• Could you provide any evidence that all of the portals are "broken"? Many of them that I have viewed and used are fully functional, and not broken at all. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:09, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support, too many, too quickly, not enough thought went into their creation. Nuke these, revert other portals that were better before TTH "restarted" them. Automation should help with portal maintenance, not replace portal maintenance or move the maintenance burden to navboxes or other places. —Kusma (t·c) 14:57, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support, sensible and fair way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 16:53, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support: MFD could never handle the overwhelming amount of unnecessary and unsustainable portals, considering the magnitude of TTH's portal creation entering the thousands. –eggofreason^talk 20:12, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support nuking. Beyond My Ken (talk) 20:30, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Transcluded to Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion. ((3x|p))ery (talk) 20:31, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support mass creation of portals on these topics isn't appropriate without wider discussion, and the automated/semi-automated method used to create them doesn't produce high quality output. Portal:Sierra County, California, for example, is about a county with a population of 3,240, and consists of the lead of the main article, a few random contextless images grabbed from that article (mostly maps or logos) and portal boilerplate. Cleaning these up will require a temporary speedy deletion criterion, I don't think MfD could handle the load. Hut 8.5 22:25, 3 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support as proposer. I had already suggested deferring, but am satisfied that it is going ahead to mass-delete. I will add that, after a consensus is reached on whether and how to use portals, any that were deleted and are needed are available at Requests for Undeletion. Robert McClenon (talk) 01:01, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• This mass page creation went against WP:MEATBOT and at least the spirit of WP:MASSCREATION if not the letter. An appropriate remedy for automated script and semi-automated creation is speedy deletion. Did you know they were driving for 10,000 portals at a rapid pace? It's here [17] Legacypac (talk) 04:44, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose any and all notions of creating new CSD criteria at any drama board. Discussions here are too rushed, too emotive, too reactionary. Use WT:CSD. Consider using a WT:CSD subpage RfC. Do not attempt to mandate the detail of policy from a drama board. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:52, 4 March 2019 (UTC) Transclusion is not good enough. The discussion needs to be searchable from WT:CSD, and the specifics of any and all new criteria need to address the Criteria for a new CSD criterion. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:55, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Many editors at the Village Pump discussion, the Tban discussion above, and at MfDs also supported this. We do not need to fragment this discussion further. Legacypac (talk) 05:12, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Proposal 1 will make this Proposal 4 moot. This Proposal 4 is not a proper CSD implementation. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:41, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: Proposal 1 is about stopping TTH from creating new portals. Proposal 4 is about deleting those he created in the last couple of months. How is P1 going to make P4 moot? —Kusma (t·c) 10:19, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

List them all in an MfD, if they must all be deleted. A CSD that enables self appointed decision makes for which should go and which might be ok, is inferior to MfD. MfD can handle a list of pages. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 11:24, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

If you want them all at MfD stop objecting to the listing of specific Portals at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 01:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

No. Some of the Portals I would support for deletion, and others definitely no. This makes the proposal for a CSD invalid. It fails the CSD new criterion criteria. The proposal is neither Objective or Uncontestable. It would pick up a lot of portals that should not be deleted. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:44, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support. No care at all went into these portals, they are mindless creations with loads of errors and little actual benefit for our readers. I would also support the restoration of all pre-existing portals to the pre-transhumanist version, the new "single page" version may require less maintenance, but is way too often clearly inferior (see e.g. this, which is more like vandalism than actual improvement, and has been reversed since). Fram (talk) 10:31, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment. Anyone restoring old multi-subpage portals should bear in mind that they will require maintenance. If there is no-one willing to maintain them, they, too are likely to be MfDed. No old-style portal with a willing and active maintainer has been converted as far as I know, so I suggest that anyone restoring them should be willing to maintain them. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 16:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
  • No. Converting an unmaintained but well-designed portal into an unmaintained semi-automated worse portal is not the way forward. Any claims that the new portals are maintained or don't need maintaining is false, as the many problematic new portals demonstrate. Fram (talk) 17:00, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Portal:Germany was converted (more than once) although it has maintainers. To make sure your portal isn't "improved", you need to put a specific template on the page, which isn't very obvious. There are old-style multi page portals that require only minimal maintenance, and where the conversion removed specific features. All those should be reverted, also to protect the subpages from overzealous deleters (the worst is deleting the /box-footer subpages; this breaks all old revisions by removing a necessary closing div). —Kusma (t·c) 17:21, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose A mass-deletion of the new generation portals. Listing them at MfD will be sufficient for any that do not meet the criteria laid out in the portal guidelines (which are still under discussion). It makes little sense to remove the whole batch because some of them are problematic. They would need to be properly triaged to ensure the good ones are not caught in the process. I would of course, help with said triage. We're not trying to create more work for the community, just preserve good content. — AfroThundr ^{(u · t · c)} 23:47, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment - You created more work for the community by creating thousands of portals, some of which do not work, and with no intention to maintain them. I see no evidence that this effort created good content that needs to be preserved. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:17, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

There is no new content in the automated portals, it's all poorly repackaged bits of existing content. Legacypac (talk) 04:40, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

All portals, old or new, good or bad, manual or automated, repackage existing content. That's their job. New content belongs in articles. Certes (talk) 11:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• Strong oppose per wumbolo below: criterion P2 already covers a number of these, the rest should be discussed. I still stand by my original comment which follows this addition. Wugapodes [t^hɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 22:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC) Original comment: Weak oppose on principle. CSD is a necessary evil, and I don't think we should be hasty to add another criterion that skips our usual consensus process. I'm fine with nuking these portals and not opposed to deleting them, any diamonds in the rough will prove their worth by being created again, but I would prefer one big MfD with the rationale "created by The Transhumanist" which allows proper determination of consensus and gives those who want to spend their time triaging a chance to do so. Wugapodes [t^hɑk] [ˈkan.ˌʧɹɪbz] 08:03, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Building multipage MfDs like Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portals for Portland, Oregon neighborhoods is time consuming and tedious. A temporary CSD is rhe way to go. Consensus against this mess of new portals has already been established at VP, AN and in the test MfDs. Legacypac (talk) 17:20, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support due to the massive amount of time it would take to put the ~4500 portals through MfD. MfD has been swamped with portal deletion requests from some time ago, and I can't see all this stuff removed via MfD in the foreseeable future (as someone said earlier, there is still a lot of Outlines left over from one of TTH's previous projects, so who knows how long it would take for MfD to delete all of this). This CSD X3 would streamline the process, and it would probably only take a few days to a week. It would help, as also mentioned earlier, to extend the criterion to the other users involved in the mass creation of these portals. Rlin8 (☎·✎·📧) 03:31, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
  • MfD has never had an issue to nominations of list of pages. 4500 separate MfD nominations would be absurd, but a list would be OK. If each is new, and has a single author, notifications of the author will be trivial. A CSD proposal shortcuts a discussion of the merits of the new portals, and pre-supposes deletion to be necessary, contrary to deletion policy. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 04:01, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

TTH demands we place notification on every portal. We can skip notifying him, but building even 20 page MfD's is very time consuming. How do you propose to discuss 4500 or even 100 assorted portals at a time? These took 3 min to make - but far more than 3 min to list, tag, discuss and vote, then delete - when you add up all the time required from various editors and Admins. The test MfDs are sufficent and the very strong opposition to this automated portal project justifies this temporary CSD. Legacypac (talk) 04:16, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

"TTH demands we place notification on every portal"? Legacypac, I have missed that post by him. If he did that, it needs to be repudiated. If these are new pages, and he is the only author, it is sufficient to notify him once. If all 4500 are essentially variations on the same thing, as long as the full set is defined, and browsable, we can discuss them all together at MfD. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 05:34, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

User:SmokeyJoe during the Portland Oregon neighborhood MFD I specifically said I was not tagging all the related portals but he insisted I tag here [18] I could not get support in the section above to relax the MfD tagging because others wanted this CSD. During the Delete Portals RFC TTH went all out insisting every portal including the community portal be tagged for deletion - then he did it himself. That brought in all kinds of casual infrequent editors who were mostly against deleting the community portal. (Even though that was Pretty much pulled out of consideration for deletion before the tagging project). That massive tagging derailed the deletion RFC. By making cleanup as hard as possible TTH is making a lot of people want to nuke everything. Legacypac (talk) 06:11, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

Legacypac's analysis is erroneous and misleading. The WP:ENDPORTALS RFC was a deletion discussion, and posting a notice on each page up for deletion is required by deletion policy. Note that the Community Portal was only mentioned twice. A portal that was the basis for about 50 oppose votes was the Current Events portal. Neither the Community Portal nor the Current Events portal were exempted in the proposal at any time. If you didn't count those, that left the count at about 150 in support of eliminating portals to about 250 against.    — The Transhumanist   07:25, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

@SmokeyJoe: (edit conflict) See the top of this section for the referred to statement, which is not exactly as he quoted. A notice posted at the top of the portals slated by this proposal would be appropriate. Legacypac has been posting notice for his multi-page nominations using the ((mfd)) template, which auto-generates a link to an mfd page of the same title as the page the template is posted on. Rather than following the template's instructions for multiple pages, he's been creating an MfD page for each, and redirecting them to the combined mfd. Then a bot automatically notifies the creator of each page (me), swamping my user talk page with redundant notifications. Thus, Legacypac believes he'll have to create thousands of mfd redirect pages, and that I somehow want 3500+ notifications on my talk page.    — The Transhumanist   07:10, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

You want us to manually tag pages for deletion that you used an automated script to create? You flooded Wikipedia with useless pages in violation of WP:MEATBOT but you are worried about having to clean up your talkpage notices? Just create an archiving system for your talkpage like we did for User:Neelix's talkpage. If you don't want notices you could start tagging pages that fail your own guidelines with "delete by author request" instead of commenting on how we will do the cleanup. Legacypac (talk) 08:37, 6 March 2019 (UTC)

TTH, if you don't want so many deletion notices on your talk page, then remember in future not to create thousands of spam pages. Please help with the cleanup, rather than complaining about it.

@Legacypac: good work MFDing the spam, but it does seem that you are using a somewhat inefficient approach to tagging. Have you tried asking at WP:BOTREQ for help? In the right hands, tools such as AWB make fast work of XfD tagging. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:21, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support whatever course of action that will result in every portal created in this manner being deleted with the minimal of time and effort required. TTH has set up his automated tool, created a massive mess, and left it unattended for others to sort out. It should take less time to clean up this mess than it did to make it, not more. Nuke the lot and if there is anything of value lost then TTH can manually request pages to be restored one at a time at DRV. Fish+Karate 11:19, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per Fish and karate. RGloucester — ☎ 14:20, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose as written. I could support something that explicitly excluded portals which are in use and/or are being developed, but the current proposal to indiscriminately delete everything, including active portals, unless the admin chooses to notify any editors and the ones notified happen to be online in a narrow time frame is significantly overly broad. Thryduulf (talk) 01:54, 7 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support Not that portals are that bad, but I don't think we need portals on smaller subjects. (Portal:Spaghetti when we already have Portal:Pasta? Portal:Nick Jr., anyone?) Some might be worth keeping, but a lot are unneeded and unmaintainable. At least it's not a Neelix case. SemiHypercube 16:57, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @SemiHypercube: "Some might be worth keeping" is actually an argument against this proposal. Thryduulf (talk) 12:08, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
    • @Thryduulf: Kind of, but that might be a reason not to just mass delete all at once. In the Neelix case there were some redirects that were actually useful, so a separate CSD criterion was used to keep some redirects at the admins' discretion, so this might be a similar case (before you say that contradicts my "it's not a Neelix case" statement, I meant that in terms of what the redirects were about) SemiHypercube 12:23, 11 March 2019 (UTC)
    • It violates points 1 and 2 of the requirements for CSD criteria: objectivity and unconestability. Unless all the portals covered should be speedily deleted then none of them should be. If you only want to delete some of them then you should be opposing this criterion (just like you should have opposed the subjective Neelix criterion). Thryduulf (talk) 12:34, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

*Support Only realistic way to deal with these. Johnbod (talk) 01:57, 11 March 2019 (UTC) Duplicate !vote struck. GoldenRing (talk) 10:16, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

• Request the posting of a notice at the top of each of the pages being nominated here for mass deletion, as required by the Deletion Policy. This proposal is currently a gross violation of the deletion policy because it is a discussion to delete 3500+ pages, that have been created over the span of a year, that are presently being viewed hundreds of thousands of times per month (projected to millions of times over the coming year) by readers of Wikipedia. The proposal for mass deletion has been made without the required notice being posted at the top of the pages to be deleted. This is being decided by a handful of editors unbeknownst to the wider community, namely, the readership of the portals to be deleted. It may be that those reading such notices would decide that the portals should be deleted, but the point here is that you are denying them the opportunity to participate in the deletion discussion as required by the deletion policy.    — The Transhumanist   21:12, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Request you stop wasting people's fucking time. Only in death does duty end (talk) 21:41, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• He switched back to Outlines Special:Contributions/The_Transhumanist which are another unpopular plague for Wikipedia. The assertion that hundreds of thousands of readers a month are looking at his 3500 portals is fanciful at best and not supported by readership stats. Legacypac (talk) 21:58, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

Support opposing anything TTH says from now on. Per OiD. ——SerialNumber54129 13:30, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Strong oppose taking ad hominem arguments into consideration. Thryduulf (talk) 13:49, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Oppose WP:BLUDGEONING. ——SerialNumber54129 15:48, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Legacypac, technically he's probably telling the truth. Even obvious drivel like Portal:Coconuts averages around five views per day, thanks to webcrawlers and people who have the articles watchlisted and are wondering "what's this mystery link that's just been spammed onto the article I wrote?"; multiply that by 3500 and you have 500,000 pageviews per month right there. ‑ Iridescent 22:52, 11 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment Neelix created about 50,000 redirects, which were reviewed by the community. The number of portals is an order of magnitude smaller. If X3 is to be introduced, it should involve a similar review process. We should certainly delete portals which have too narrow a scope or are of poor quality and cannot be improved. However, systematic deletion of all portals which qualify for consideration, purely on an ad hominem argument, would be as wrong as semi-automatic creation. Certes (talk) 10:51, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Absolutely not. Look at the rate these were created [19] sometimes several dozen an hour, and sometimes an average of 12 seconds each. If so little thought went into creation, why make deletion so difficult? The Neelix cleanup took far too long (I was a big part of it) and we deleted the vast majority of those redirects anyway the extra hard way. As far as I could see the editors who insisted we review everything did none of the reviewing. Also, these were created in violation of WP:MEATBOT which is a blockable or at least sanctionable offense Legacypac (talk) 11:04, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

Two wrongs do not make a right - it is much more important that we get the cleanup right than it happens quickly. Whether or not TTH is blocked or otherwise sanctioned is completely irrelevant. While many (maybe even most) of the created portals should be deleted not all of them should be, and this needs human review: see requirement 2 for new CSD criteria at the top of WT:CSD. Thryduulf (talk) 12:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@Thryduulf, Certes, SmokeyJoe, and Legacypac: Concerning the rate, Legacypac's observation is not accurate. What the edits he is citing do not show, is the method by which the pages were created: they were created in batches, in tabs. Before saving, all the pages/tabs were inspected. For the pages that did not pass muster, such as those that displayed errors (this did not catch all errors, because lua errors can be intermittent or turn up later due to an edit in source material being transcluded), the tabs for those were closed. In a batch of 50, 20 or 30 might survive the cull (though batch sizes varied). Some tabs got additional edits in addition to inspection, to fix errors or remove the sections the errors were in, or further development. After all the tabs in a batch were inspected and the bad ones culled, the remaining ones were saved. That's why the edits' time stamps are so close together. If you look more closely, you'll see the time gap is between the batches rather than the individual page saves. Therefore, WP:MEATBOT was not violated.    — The Transhumanist   18:55, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

He claims [20] he created 500 portals in 500 to 1000 minutes. and is using a script Wikipedia:Miscellany_for_deletion#User:The_Transhumanist/QuickPortal.js If this is not MEATBOT we should refind MEATBOT as meaningless. Legacypac (talk) 19:07, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

A minute or two per portal of the new design sounds about right. Note that the script doesn't save pages. It puts them into preview mode, so that the editor can review them and work on them further before clicking on save.    — The Transhumanist   19:39, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

@Legacypac and The Transhumanist: As I said above, the method of creation is irrelevant to this proposal, as is what (if any) sanction is appropriate. Likewise discussions of WP:MEATBOT don't affect this at all. What matters is only that these pages exist but some of them should not, this proposal needs to be rejected or modified such that it deletes only those that need deleting without also deleting those that do not. Thryduulf (talk) 20:42, 12 March 2019 (UTC)

• Procedural note I have advertised this discussion at WP:VPP and would encourage others to add links where they think interested editors might see. I think this should remain open for 30 days, as it is quite a significant policy change. GoldenRing (talk) 09:24, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support now that the MfDs (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here) are closing with strong consensus around delete, it is clear this is the fastest path to improving the encyclopedia (which is what we are here for, remember?) Any argument that 3,500 more portals have to go through MfD is strictly throwing sand in the gears. It is going to be enough manual labor pulling the links to the deleted portals from all the templates and pages they have been added to. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:15, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
  • That shows that a speedy deletion criterion is possibly warranted for some, but several comments on those discussions - including your own at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Portal:Spaghetti - indicate that this proposed criterion is too broad. Thryduulf (talk) 15:33, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
    • You misunderstand my comment at that MfD: I strongly support that portal's deletion and all the others that would be covered by this proposed criterion. UnitedStatesian (talk) 15:37, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
      • You supported the deletion of Portal:Spaghetti because the topic was covered by Portal:Pasta, even though Portal:Pasta would be deleted under this criterion? That's rather disingenuous at best and very significantly and unnecessary disruptive at worst. Portal:Pasta is an example of a portal that should not be deleted without discussion. Thryduulf (talk) 16:00, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
        • Again, you misunderstand my reasoning: I was specifically pointing out to another editor that the existence of Portal:Pasta could NOT be a reason to delete Portal:Spaghetti, since in my opinion Portal:Pasta would likely also be deleted. Instead, I think the current Wikipedia:Portal/Guidelines provide ample OTHER reasons for deleting both portals (and many, many others, of course). Hope that clarifies. UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:55, 13 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose and keep all. WP:P2 covers unnecessary portals, and there is no rationale presented other than WP:IDLI to delete a large proportion of all of them, which were all kept after a RfC in 2018. The next time content policies are created at AN by the cabal of admins, I am retiring from Wikipedia. wumbolo ^^^ 16:40, 13 March 2019 (UTC)

  @Wumbolo: Well, if it came to that, take it to WP:RFARB first. Given the past history of WP:FAITACCOMPLI and WP:LOCALCONSENSUS extremism (i.e., WP:FALSECONSENSUS) cases, I have little doubt that ArbCom would agree to take a case about a gaggle of anti-portal people WP:GAMING the consensus-formation process by inventing sweeping policy changes out of their butts in a venue few content editors pay attention to and which is clearly out-of-scope for such a decision, even if it somehow had sufficiently broad input (e.g., via WP:CENT). I'm skeptical any alleged consensus is going to come out of this discussion, anyway.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:33, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support This is a repeat of the Neelix situation. ―Susmuffin ^Talk 00:01, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Susmuffin: The situation has similarities, but the proposed criterion is not comparable. Criterion X1 applied only to redirects created by Neelix that the reviewing administrator reasonably believed would be snow deleted if discussed at RfD (i.e. they had to evaluate each redirect), this criterion would apply to every portal created by TTH in the timeframe without any other conditions and without the need for anyone to even look at anything other than the date of creation. Thryduulf (talk) 00:13, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
    • Honestly, there are far too many portals to be deleted through the usual channels. However, an quick evaluation would be reasonable, provided we keep the portal system itself. ―Susmuffin ^Talk 00:24, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Unlike Neelix who created some reasonable redirects along the way, these autogenerated portals are of uniformly low quality. The community has looked at representive samples across a variety of subject areas at MFD and the community has already deleted 143 of the 143 portals nominated at closed MfDs. The yet to be closed MfDs are headed to increasing that number. No one has suggested any alternative deletion criteria for X3. Legacypac (talk) 00:45, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

That nobody has suggested an alternative is irrelevant - it's not up to those who oppose this proposal to fix it, and those who support it are by-and-large ignoring the objections. The MfDs have been selected as a representative sample of those that, after review, are not worth keeping and have been reviewed by MfD participants. This does not demonstrate that deletion without review is appropriate - indeed quite the opposite. Remember there is no deadline, it is significantly more important that we get it right than we do things quickly. Thryduulf (talk) 09:59, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

Not particularly similar to the redirect situation that occurred; portals are vastly different in nature and composition from simple redirects. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 03:16, 26 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose as unwarranted and dangerous (and circular reasoning). First, we do not modify CSD without a strong community (not admins' star chamber) consensus that an entire class of material is not just categorically unwanted but so unwanted that it should be deleted on sight without any further consideration. It's our most dangerous policy, and a change like this to it should be an RfC matter at WP:VPPOL. In theory, it could be at WT:CSD, except there is not yet any establishment of a consensus against these portals, and VPPOL is where that would get hashed out, since it's a project-wide question of content presentation and navigation (and maintenance, and whether tools can permissibly substitute for some manual maintenance, and ...). The cart is ahead of the horse here; we can't have a speedy deletion criterion without already having a deletion criterion to begin with. I strongly agree with SmokeyJoe: "Oppose any and all notions of creating new CSD criteria at any drama board. Discussions here are too rushed, too emotive, too reactionary."  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:05, 14 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose – WP:P2 covers problematic portals just fine. A concerning issue here is that some users herein appear to simply not like portals in general, and so there are several arguments above for mass deletion as per this "I don't like it" rationale. Mass deletion should be a last step, not a first step, and portals should be considered on a case-by-case basis. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 22:22, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

You created some with the same tools. One or two of your creations are now at MfD which is why you are now engaging against this solution. We will consider each of your creations at MfD. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

My !vote here is based upon my view of the matter at hand, and as such, it stands. Period. Regarding my portal creations, so what? You come across as having a penchant for scolding content creators on Wikipedia if you don't like the medium that is used. Please consider refraining from doing so, as it is unnecessary, and patronizing. North America¹⁰⁰⁰ 01:12, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Northamerica1000: I agree - for example, I actually welcome the creation of Portal:Economics because I think econ should be established as distinct from business as in Portal:Business and economics. Qzekrom 💬 ^they_them 02:20, 18 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - this CSD seems have to no more objective criteria than "shoot unless someone defends it". For this to be justified, they'd have to explain how no-one reacting within 24 hours was sufficient reasoning. As far as the initial proposal included, it didn't contain any acceptable objective criteria for something warranting deletion on quality grounds. Far worse, it didn't contain suitable justification (whether popularity/quality) for these portals to impose such a major hindrance to Wikipedia as to warrant a process with as few eyes (per consideration) as CSD. The nominator might have had more luck with a PortalPROD mechanism. Nosebagbear (talk) 23:09, 14 March 2019 (UTC)

This CSD exactly meets each criteria for CSD's at the WP:CSD page. It is clear. It is easy to decide if the page meets the CSD. We ran 145 of these portals through MfD already and none survived. Numerous editors suggested this CSD in the Village Pump discussion. These mass created portals universally have the same flaws. Therefore this oppose rational is flawed. Legacypac (talk) 02:34, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support: will allow to quickly manage the auto-created portals of zero utility. --K.e.coffman (talk) 02:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support enthusiastically. Taking all these portals through MFD would be a massive drain on community resources. TTH created these portals at sustained speeds of up to 40 per hour, so even the time taken to apply a CSD tag and assess it 24 hours later will require more editorial time than TTH took to create them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 07:23, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong oppose - There are good quality portals that will be excluded, few maybe, but deserve to remain. For example Portal: Cities, Portal: Architecture Portal:Sculpture.Guilherme Burn (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Guilherme Burn, maybe those are worth keeping. Or maybe not. But even if they are good, they are not worth the price of the community committing huge amounts of time to individually debating every one of the thousands of useless portals which members of the portal project have spewed out over the last year (often as drive by creations, and which project members have then piled into MFDs to keep.

If the Portals Project had exercised discretion so far, then we would be in a very different place. But it's utterly outraegous to ask the community to devote more time to assessing this spam than the Portal Project put into creating them. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 12:10, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

Could these portals be marked to be spared?Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn: not according to the proposal as written. The only chance of saving is if an admin chooses to notify and wait 24 hours and somebody objects within those 24 hours and someone spots that CSD has been declined previously if it gets renominated. Thryduulf (talk) 14:01, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn: Portal:Cities is totally moribund and unread, and has never had a single participant. Portal:Architecture dates from 2005 and wasn't created by TTH or this tag-team, so wouldn't be deleted regardless (although I imagine the enormous wall of pointless links which TTH's bot dumped onto the page a couple of months ago would be reverted). ‑ Iridescent 14:08, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

@Iridescent and BrownHairedGirl:One portal that does not meet Mfd criteria is enough for me to keep my opinion. Portal:Cities Although poor visualized is an important and good quality portal and the Portal:Sculpture (erroneously I quoted another portal) as well.Guilherme Burn (talk) 13:20, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

@Guilherme Burn: please can you clarify that statement that One portal that does not meet Mfd criteria is enough for me to keep.

Are you saying that you are willing to personally scrutinise a few thousand drive-by Portals at MfD in order to find the one which should be kept? Or do you want others to do that work?

TTH as made it very clear that these portals took on average between one and two minutes each to create ([21] Have you tried creating 500 portals? It is rather repetitious/tedious/time-consuming (from 500 to 1000 minutes)). So many multiples of that-one-to-two minutes per portal do you think it is fair to ask the community to spend scrutinisng them? And how much of that time are you prepared to give? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 14:12, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

So many multiples of that-one-to-two minutes per portal do you think it is fair to ask the community to spend scrutinisng them?Yes. The community also failed to set criteria for creating portals. What is the difference of Portal: Lady Gaga to Portal: ABBA? For me both should be excluded. If the community not had problems to create a portal for a unique singer, why now have problems with someone who has decided to create portals for lot of singers? And to be honest I do not think so much work like that, Mfd can be executed in blocks excluding several portals at the same time.Guilherme Burn (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose per SmokeyJoe et al. Completely unnecessary to override already existing procedure. Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  17:12, 15 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Paine Ellsworth: the administrative work of trawling through several thousand drive-by-created micro-portals is huge. Cleaning up this flood of portalspam through MFD requires a huge amount of editorial time, vastly more than was involved in creating the spam.

If you think that existing procedure is fine, why aren't you devoting large hunks of your time to doing the cleanup by the laborious procedure you defend? --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:33, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Because...? I don't know, I guess I think this whole thing is rather more of a knee-jerk reaction than a brainy, measured response. Sure I've done my share of big, teejus jobs for the project and plan to continue (on my terms). I have a lot of respect for editors like yourself and TTH who've been lifting this project out of the primal soup of its beginnings even longer than I have (I went over ten in January, or was it Feb? whatever) and I'm tired of seeing good, solid editors get reamed for their work and retire, just leave or get banned. Don't think it can't happen to you, because as good as you are, neither you nor the rest of us are immune to the gang-up-on-em mentality that turns justice into vengeance 'round here. Think you should also know if you don't already that I'm about 95 farts Wikignome and 5 parts other, and it takes a lot less for us to think we're being badgered and handled. I voted correctly for me and my perceptions, and I don't expect either of us will change this unwise world one iota if you vote you and yours! WTF ever happened to forgiveness? REspectfully, Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  13:28, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Paine Ellsworth: Thank you for adding the words that I dared not write in case I was next against the wall. Certes (talk) 16:31, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• @Paine Ellsworth and Certes: I genuinely don't in any way doubt the good faith of either of you.

But it seems to me that the unintended effect of what you are both saying is something like "I am not making any effort to assist the cleanup of this mass portalspam, but I will take the effort to oppose measures which reduce the huge burden on those who are actually doing that necessary cleanup work".

As I say, I do not believe that is what either of you intend. But all I see from either of you is opposition to any restraint on the portalspammer, and opposition to anything which would assist the cleanup. I respect the fine principles from which you two start, but I urge you to consider the effects on the community both of not easing the cleanup burden and of continuing to describe the likes of TTH in positive terms. Look for example at my post in a thread above about the #Lack_of_good_faith_from_User:The_Transhumanist, and at Iridiscent's observation above that of TTH's previous history of spamming useless pages.

As to lifting this project out of the primal soup of its beginnings ... that's an extraordinary way to describe TTH's spamming of hundreds, if not thousands, of useless, unfinished micro-portals. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 22:53, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

I am not making any effort to assist with mass deletions, beyond !voting to delete the clearer cases. We already have enough enthusiasts working in that department. Until recently, I had been adjusting individual portals and enhancing the modules behind them to improve quality, but I slowed down when it became obvious that my contributions in that area will be deleted. Certes (talk) 00:19, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

So that's as I feared, @Certes: members of that WikiProject are leaving it to others to clean up the mess created by the WikiProject and its members.

That only reinforces my impression of a collectively irresponsible project, which doesn't restrain or even actively discourage portalspam, doesn't try to identify it, and doesn't assist in its cleanup.

That's a marked contrast with well-run projects. --BrownHairedGirl (talk) • (contribs) 02:06, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

To editor BHG: not a surprising perspective, possibly a hasty generalization, however that's not your worst move. Your worst move is to consider "mass deletions" of what you deem "portalspam" as better than the "mass creations" of portals. Who's really to say? As an editor mentions below, "...these portals are doing no harm so great that they can be deleted without due process." So maybe you're wrong about those mass deletions that portray some portals as WMDs instead of the harmless windows into Wikipedia that they were meant to be? No matter, at present you are part of the strong throng. If you're right, you're right. But what if you and the strong throng are wrong? May things continue to go well with you! Paine Ellsworth, ed.  ^put'r there  07:01, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support and also apply it to those created by Northamerica1000, who has made such useless portals as Portal:Strawberries and Portal:Waffles. Reywas92^Talk 08:26, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Reywas92: Northamerica1000 has created only 70 pages in the portal namespace (excluding redirects) in the relevant timeperiod. In no conceivable scenario does that justify a speedy deletion criterion. Thryduulf (talk) 11:58, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support per F&K (whatever course of action that will result in every portal created in this manner being deleted with the minimal of time and effort required) and SN (nuke from orbit). I'll be honest I don't know enough to know whether it should be a X3 or a P2 or a single MfD list with 4,500 entries... but it should not need to involve manually tagging pages that were created by a bot or otherwise spending any real time figuring out which should be kept and which should not be kept. Delete them all. If editors feel like this portal or that portal should be kept, let them make the case for undeletion afterwards which can be examined on a case-by-case basis. (If that process is followed, it goes without saying that the portal creator should be banned from making any such undeletion requests.) Leviv ich 17:25, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  How are we supposed to work out what is worth undeleting, short of downloading all portals in advance lest they be deleted? Certes (talk)

  If an editor is not aware of a portal existing, then that editor shouldn't be asking for it to be kept. If there are particular portals that editors know they want saved, then they should have an opportunity to request that it be saved. But there should be no one-by-one examination of thousands and thousands of portals created by one user using semi-automatic methods. Leviv ich 19:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  Kill them all and let God sort them out is very much not the way Wikipedia works and is very much not the way it should work. Why should the review be restricted to administrators (as your proposal would require)? Why is it preferable to significantly harm the encyclopaedia by deleting good portals than to do the job properly and delete only those that actually need deleting (which are doing significantly less harm by existing than deleting good ones would cause)? Thryduulf (talk) 18:06, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  So let me create several thousand pages semi-automatically, and then I'll put it to you to go through them one by one and tell me which should be deleted and why? I don't think that's how it should work. It should work in reverse. The default should be delete them all, with some process for allowing people to request that particular portals not be deleted. BTW, when I say "all portals" I mean all portals covered by this proposal, not all portals that exist on Wikipedia. Leviv ich 19:39, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  If an editor created several thousand pages semi-automatically, the correct sequence of events is to analyse a representative sample to determine whether consensus is that they are (a) all good, (b) mostly good, (c) all bad, (d) mostly bad, or (e) a mixture. If (a) then no action is necessary, if (b) then individual deletion nominations are the correct response. If (c) then a CSD criterion to remove all of them is appropriate, if (d) or (e) then a CSD affectingly only the bad ones should be explored. In this the situation is somewhere between (d) and (e) depending on your point of view, but this proposal is treating them as (c). As I've said several times, I'm not opposed to a criterion proposed (in the right place) that caught only the bad ones and allowed for objections - that is not this proposal. This situation is frequently compared to Neelix, but the proposal is very different - this one: All pages created between Time A and Time B, unless anyone objects to the optional tagging within 24 hours. Neelix: All pages created between Time A and Time B that would be snow deleted if nominated at RfD, retargetting would not lead to a useful redirect and no other editor has materially edited the redirect. Do you now understand the fundamental difference? Also remember that pages can be tagged by bot. Thryduulf (talk) 20:56, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  Yes. We also need to clarify one important detail of the proposal: would an editor be required to look at the portal before applying CSD, or is there an assumption that everything created by this editor in that time period is automatically rubbish and does not deserve assessment? Certes (talk) 22:29, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  If a human being didn't spend a lot of time making a page, then human beings should not spend much time deciding whether to keep it. I put it to you again: suppose tomorrow I create 5,000 new pages and ask you to go through them and decide which to keep and which to delete. That would be insane; this is a website of volunteers; my doing such a thing would be disruptive. It would make work for others. Nobody reading this thinks it would be a good idea for me to do such a thing. Yet this is what is essentially being asked of us. Insofar as I have a !vote, I !vote no. Delete them all. They are all bad. Any that are good can be recreated as easily as they were created in the first place. Letting people flag keepers in one way or another is a perfectly reasonable way to prevent the baby from being thrown out with the bathwater. But yes, my starting point is that all of them should be deleted because none of them should have been made in the first place, and they do not have content value. Some portals are the product of careful creation and extensive work, but not 5,000 or however-many automatically created by one editor. The quantum portal idea is a much better idea, anyway. Leviv ich 02:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

  I've alreadyanswered this immediately above, but as you apparently don't like the answer I'll respond again. If you create 5000 new pages in good faith (which TTH did), then the correct response is for others to go through and look at a representative sample, then gain a consensus about whether they are all bad, mostly bad, a mixture, mostly good or all good. This has been done with TTH's portals and while you may think they are all bad that is not the consensus view, especially as others have taken over some and either have improved them or are working on improving them. This means that it is important that only the bad ones are deleted meaning any proposal (such as this one) to delete all of them is overbroad and needs to be opposed. Thryduulf (talk) 10:03, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

  This statement by Thryduulf is incorrect on many levels. Who has taken over and improved any of his creations? Where is the concensus view that they are not all bad when so far zero of his creations have been kept at MfDs. Where is the proof any of this was in good faith when he admits several sections down that no one (including him) has followed WP:POG Legacypac (talk) 10:38, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

  Are you even reading the comments made by those who disagree with you because I'm not seeing evidence of it, especially when it comes to the MfDs (to reiterate, a reviewed selection of the worst pages being deleted by consensus but not unanimously in all cases does not provide evidence of the need for deletion of all of them without possibility of review). Thryduulf (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

  Thryduulf, so I spend less than 1 minute per page creating 5,000 pages; you and others spend–what, an hour, cumulatively, at least?–per page to analyze it, discuss it, vote it, close it, and delete it. I spend 5,000 minutes; the community spends 5,000 hours. With all due respect I am flabbergasted to hear such a high-ranked Wikipedian express the view that this is OK or preferred. Even with your representative sample approach, say it's 100 portals that are looked at, that's still 100 hours of labor forced upon volunteers. In my opinion, no one should be allowed to make 5,000 pages without going through something like a BAG process to seek community approval. There was once a time, years ago, when it made sense to, for example, automatically create a stub for every known city and town in the world. I believe that time has long since passed; there are not 5,000 pages that can be created automatically that we need to have that we do not already have (IMO). And as for consensus, if they're not being kept at MfD, the consensus is clear. Those portals that people maintain manually are the same ones that can be flagged as exceptions to a mass-deletion. So I feel like we're on the same page about consensus, but I'm saying the consensus to keep a particular portal can be effectuated by allowing people to flag them as exceptions to mass deletion, whereas you seem to be suggesting: let's get together and spend an hour per portal to decide if it should be kept, even though nobody spent anywhere near that time creating it in the first place. If that's where we are, we'll have to agree to disagree, because I fundamentally don't believe these portals are worth a one-by-one analysis, and I believe the representative sample approach you advocate has been done and has led to the conclusion that these are worth mass deleting with exceptions. I guess that's for a closer to make the ultimate decision about, but for my part, from uninvolved editors, I'm seeing a lot more support than oppose for mass deletion. Leviv ich 14:42, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

  @Levivich: If you're just going to ignore all the explanations I give in response to you (twice) and all the explanations elsewhere from me and others about why a reviewed selection of the worst being deleted (and not unanimously in all cases) is not evidence of the need for all of them to be deleted without possibility of review by others then it is clear we will never agree. Fortunately, per WP:VOLUNTEER, nobody is being forced to do anything they don't want to do - including you - and it's really disappointing that someone as experienced as you feels the need to prevent that work being done by others just because you don't want to. Perhaps between now and the time this is closed those in support of this overbroad proposal will actually choose to address the points in opposition but unless they do the only possible outcomes are no consensus or consensus against. Thryduulf (talk) 16:36, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

  Thryduulf, I heard you say: pick a representative sample and decide if they're all bad, some bad, etc. As I understand it, a representative sample has been sent to MfD with consensus to delete almost all of them, if not all of them (I'm not sure if lists I've seen are complete). Then you say that just because the sample is all-delete doesn't mean the whole category is all-delete. I infer you think the sample is not well-chosen? By TTH's admission there are like 4,500–5,000 portals, and a tiny tiny percentage of those are being manually maintained–like less than 5%. Are we on the same page about the facts so far? If so, where do you see consensus other than "delete 95% of these things"? Why can't we tag the 100 that are manually maintained and delete the remaining 4,500? I am reading what you're writing, but I am not understanding it. Leviv ich 16:44, 17 March 2019 (UTC)

• Support: these portals are easy to create semi-automatedly and contain no information not found in articles so we're not losing any information from Wikipedia, which sets this apart from most other CSD criteria. An alternative proposal I would support is to expand the remit of P2 to apply to any portals with fewer than one-hundred pages under their scope (or alternatively, fewer than one-hundred notable topics if there is evidence that the portal creators and users are planning to create such topics as articles). If a topic doesn't have 100 pages on it at the bare minimum, there's absolutely no reason to focus a portal around it. Even for portals covering tens of thousands of articles, reader interest is very, very low and the current semi-automated busywork is not serving the readers. — Bilorv (he/him) _(talk) 19:05, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Biorv: a proposal for expansion of speedy deletion criterion P2 is being discussed currently at [[Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion)) (which is where proposals related to speedy deletion criteria should be held, not AN), so I will refrain from explaining here why I oppose your suggestion to avoid splitting the discussion. Thryduulf (talk)
• Support with exceptions. I support the speedy deletion of all portals auto-created in recent months as it seems excessive and unnecessary. However, those few portals which are manually maintained in good faith should be kept. Down the line we need to take another look at a notability threshold to keep a lid on portalmania. Bermicourt (talk) 22:37, 16 March 2019 (UTC)
  • If you believe there should be exceptions for portals maintained in good faith (and I agree there should be), then you should be opposing this proposal in favour of an alternative one that allows for that. Thryduulf (talk) 22:59, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

  X3 only covers the mass created automated portals started by TTH so already excludes the type of portal User:Bermicourt wants to exclude. Thryduulf is muddying the facts. Legacypac (talk) 23:08, 16 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose because a) on procedural grounds this shouldn't be discussed at the AN "closed shop" and b) because these portals are doing no harm so great that they can be deleted without due process. It is not TTH's fault that the guidelines for portal creation are permissive. Triptothecottage (talk) 02:56, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
• Comment: I have already voted here but I just wanted to provide an example of how much thought was going into the creation of these portals. Portal:Aquatic ecosystem was created by TTH on Aug 15 2018 and in classified as "Complete" despite having 4 selected images. An identical portal was created at Portal:Aquatic ecosystems by TTH on Nov 24 and is classified as "Substantial" (the portalspace equivalent of B-class). One wonders, which portal is of better quality, how was this determined, and how was this oversight not caught? — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 13:33, 17 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose: Criteria are supposed to be uncontestable - almost all pages could be deleted under this criterion, according to consensus. Looking at the most recent 50 portals created by TTH, I see a lot of frivolous ones, but I also see Portal:Pumpkins, Portal:Woodpeckers, Portal:International trade, and Portal:World economy, all of which represent subjects with well-populated categories. And I could add at least as many that are debatable. If TTH, now under a topic ban, were to create more portals, they could be speedy deleted under WP:G4. But the pages considered here were created before the ban, so they should stand or fall on their own merits. RockMagnetist(talk) 06:05, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @RockMagnetist: I think you mean WP:CSD#G5 (Creations by banned or blocked users) rather than WP:CSD#G4 (Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion). Thryduulf (talk) 14:49, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
    • WP:CSD#G5 cannot be used here. The locus of G5 revolves around obliterating the edits of LTA's and sockpupeters and for ban-evasion in a generalized scope. << FR ^(mobileUndo) 15:12, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
      • G5 can be used to delete pages created in violation of a topic ban, if deletion is the best course of action. I would never use G5 on a page that was a borderline violation, but that's not relevant here (I can't think of any page creation that would be anything other than clear-cut one way or the other). It's all theoretical though as TTH hasn't created any pages in violation of his ban and I think it unlikely they will. Thryduulf (talk) 15:37, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
      • @FR30799386 and Thryduulf: My point in mentioning G4 (oops - G5!) was that it is a more appropriate standard for deleting pages based on who created them. The current proposal is too broad. RockMagnetist(talk) 16:09, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose I have gone over many of the portals. It seems that there are a mix of topics which are mainstream and some which should not have been created. This isn't a white or a black issue, the wheat must be carefully separated from the chaff. << FR ^(mobileUndo) 12:04, 18 March 2019 (UTC) !vote from sockpuppet struck. GoldenRing (talk) 10:17, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

• FR, is there some issue with deleting them without prejudice to re-creating existing ones? These were basically made by a bot in what amounts to a single spasm, so deleting them all could be seen as a BRD reversion. The next step would be to let uninvolved editors recreate any worth keeping. Yes, that might take a while. There is no deadline and if some potentially useful portals have gone uncreated up til now, it's fine if they stay absent a little longer. 173.228.123.166 (talk) 04:07, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose - the proposal assumes that none of the portals should have been created, and that is an incorrect assumption. Certainly the are some that perhaps should not exist, but equally there are some that definitely should, and some that need a bit of discussion to determine consensus. Speedy deletion is not the way to resolve this. WaggersTALK 16:45, 18 March 2019 (UTC)
  • No, the proposal assumes (correctly) that 95% should never have been created, and that the tiny amount of time spent on those few that might be worth keeping doesn't justify the hours needed to discuss them all at MfD. The ones that get speedy deleted and would be an acceptable portal anyway can easily be recreated if someone really wants them. No effort has gone into creating these portals (usually not even the effort of checking if the result was errorfree, never mind informative or not a duplicate of existing portals), so demanding a week-long discussion for all of them because sometimes the mindless effort created an acceptable result is putting the cart before the horse. Fram (talk) 08:28, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

  Throwing out the baby with the bathwater is not a sensible solution. Also, given WP:PAPER, could you explain why the existence of these portals is such a problem? This is nothing more than a massive exercise in punishing a user for the crime of trying to improve the encyclopaedia and getting a bit overenthusiastic. It's horrible to see and I honestly thought the Wikipedia community was better than this. WaggersTALK 11:42, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

  The existence of these portals is a problem because they add extra clutter to already link-intensive articles (the lower part of our articles has become more and more overcrowded over the years, with authority links, navboxes, links to sister projects, ...) and removing links with no or very little value makes the articles better and avoids sending readers to utterly useless pages created in a completely mindless manner without oversight or care. Deleting pages which are useless is not "punishing a user", that is a WP:OWN approach you show there which should not be taken into consideration when debating whether to keep or delete pages. Punishing the user would be blocking or banning them. Fram (talk) 12:10, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

  And that is happening (or has happened) too, so my point very much stands. Describing an editor's good faith hard work as "useless" isn't exactly conducive to a civil discussion either. Certainly some of the portals created are worthy of deletion, others are worthy of being kept. I could support a new PROD criterion, but CSD is not the right tool for this job. WaggersTALK 12:51, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose—CSD is for stuff where there's zero grey area. At best, this should be a specialized PROD. Gaelan 💬✏️ 14:42, 20 March 2019 (UTC)

Arbitrary break (CSD criterion X3)

• Oppose Although the vast majority may not be needed: that does not mean they should just be deleted (without oversight or consensus). The arguments for this critera seem to be centered around: 'so little work was put into them, therefore we shouldn't need to put in any work to fix it'. Why not just let them sit there then? Is there a deadline? Seeing as portals themselves are an auxiliary aide to our main focus (of writing articles) this seems unnecessary. I'm surprised that this is (at least) the second time that a Private Bill has been proposed for the cSd, I guess times have changed a bit. It seems uncollegial to respond to opposers by saying: "then you better help out with all the MfD's'. I agree with the points made by SMcCandlish and RockMagnetist among others. Crazynas ^t 23:54, 20 March 2019 (UTC)
  • "Why not just let them sit there then"? Have you actually looked at the pure drivel many of these portals are? Most of these portals are not an "auxiliary aid", they are random shit, bot generated without bot permission but without actual human oversight. Sending any reader to such total shit is a disgrace. The below image is how one of these portals looks right now, after it has existed for 7 months and after this discussion highlighting many problems has run for a month. Time spent discussing these (time spent looking at these) is time wasted. Any portal which people think is necessary after all can be recreated (in a much better fashion) afterwards, the speedy deletion of these doesn't restrict this. But keeping the shit an editor mass produced because their may be some less shitty pages included is doing a disservice to the people who actually wander to these portals and can only stare in dsbelief at what we show them. "'Calamba, officially the ', (Tagalog: Lungsod ng Calamba), or known simply as Calamba City is a class of the Philippines in the province of , . According to the ?, it has a population of people. " Fram (talk) 09:16, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

have you looked at all the shit that sits in the mainspace (some of it for years)? There are like 182,000 unreferenced articles live right now, but this is the hill we're choosing to die on? Crazynas ^t 21:57, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Large in-line image

Thank you for identifying a problem with a small number of Philippines portals where the lead contains ((PH wikidata)), a technique designed for use in infoboxes. I'll pass your helpful comments on to the relevant WikiProject. Certes (talk) 11:02, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

No, please pass my comment on to all people supporting these portals, but not bothering to actually look at what they propose or defend. Creating and supporting pages with such blatant problems is basically the same as vandalism. There are e.g. also quite a few portals which confront their readers with the below "selected article" (as the default selected article, not even when scrolling deeper). Or with the same image two or three times. Or... The list of problems with these portals is near endless (selected categories only consisting of one redlink? Sure...). The fact that adding a category can cause a page to look completely different and generate different errors (like in the example above) should be a major indicator that this system, used on thousands of pages, is not as foolproof and low in maintenance as is being claimed. Fram (talk) 11:36, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Large in-line image

Thank you for your continued help in identifying portal issues. I have found and fixed three pages which had repeated "Read more" links. If you could be kind enough to reveal which portal you have depicted as "PortalShit2.png", we may also be able to fix that case and any similar ones. Certes (talk) 12:20, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

There are two very simple solutions: either support X3, and all these portals are instantly fixed. Or actually take a look at all these low maintenance, automatic portals of the future, find the many issues, and fix them. Which still won't solve the problem that many of them are utterly pointless, mindless creations of course. I've noted more than enough problems with these portals to wholeheartedly support speedy deletion, since spending any time "corecting" a portal like the Calamba one is a waste of time (as it should be deleted anyway, speedy or not). Fram (talk) 12:42, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Fram: You are clearly not understanding the opposition to this proposal. It is not about supporting the inclusion of poor content, it is about opposing a speedy deletion criterion that fails the criteria for new and expanded criteria and would delete content that should not be deleted in addition to content that should. Thryduulf (talk) 13:41, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

No, I often have trouyble understanding burocratic opposition which creates tons of extra work for very little actual benefit. Furthermore, I'm not convinced that this actually fails the four criteria: it is objective and nonredundant (I guess we all agree on these two?), it is frequent (in the sense that having 3K portals at MfD is quite a heavy load, it's not just one or two pages), so we are left with "Uncontestable", which doesn't mean that as soon ass someone opposes it, it becomes contested, but that "almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus.". Looking at this discussion and the MfDs, I believe this to be true. Opposing this new CSD rule "because it is contested" is circular reasoning, as you are then basically saying "it is contested because it is contested", which is obviously not a valid argument. Having a significant number of portals which fall under the X3 but should not be deleted (which doesn't equal "should never exist", only "should not exist in the current form or any older form in the page history") would be a good argument, but I haven't seen any indication of such. Fram (talk) 13:57, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Frequent is not an issue (it wouldn't be as a permanent criteria, but as a temporary one it's fine), non-redundant is not an issue for most (although a few might be caught by P2 that's not a significant proportion so not a probelm). This proposal (unlike the ones being discussed at WT:CSD) is objective as written (created by a single user within a defined time period). Uncontestable however very much is, the requirement is "It must be the case that almost all pages that could be deleted using the rule, should be deleted, according to consensus. CSD criteria should cover only situations where there is a strong precedent for deletion. Remember that a rule may be used in a way you don't expect, unless you word it carefully." It is very clear from this discussion and others around these portals that not all of them should be deleted - several have received strong objections to deletion at MfD, some are argued to be kept and others merged. "it is contested because it is contested" is exactly the point of this requirement - nobody argues in good faith against deleting copyright violations, patent nonsense, recreations, or specific types of articles that don't assert importance. There is consensus that were these to be discussed they would be unanimously deleted every time. There is no such consensus about these portals. Some, perhaps most, should be deleted but not all of them. Thryduulf (talk) 15:47, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

I am pleased to report that a recent module change should eliminate the problem where articles too short to be worth featuring occasionally appear as "Read more... Read more...". This should fix the mystery portal depicted above next time it is purged. Certes (talk) 11:26, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

User:Thryduulf your opposition to X3 is baffling. You oppose it basically because some topics where Portals were mass created using automated tools against policy may warrant portals. But none of these pages have any original content to preserve. They are mindless spam poorly repackaging existing content. Kind of a poor Wikipedia mirror effort. MFDing these has proven they are unwelcome - yet you want to force us to spend a week debating pages that the creator spent seconds to create without even checking for compliance against their own criteria or for major errors? If these deletions were actually controversial (the only one of the 4 CSD criteria you say is not followed) we would expect a significant number of the MfDs to close Keep. We might expect the creator to defend and explain, but instead the creator freely admits he ignored WP:POG. Seriously makes me doubt your competence and judgement. Admins should show better judgement then this. Legacypac (talk) 17:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Legacypac: Assuming you mean X3, then I have explained every single one of my reasons several times and you have either not listened or not understood on every single one of those occasions so I Will not waste even more of my time explaining them again. Thryduulf (talk) 17:16, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Second Legacypac. Additionally, part of what I meant by "some might be worth keeping" is that they can be deleted, but if any were actually worthy they could be recreated, perhaps with more care and effort than this. SemiHypercube 17:19, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

• It seems like a lot of what is objected to can be covered by a judicious use of P2, G1, and A3 (via P1) but there's probably something I'm missing. @Fram:, I'm not here to support bad content, but bad policy (and precedent) can be far more harmful to the project than 'repackaged nonsense' existing for a bit longer than some people want it to. This would have the side effect of saving the portals worth saving. Crazynas ^t 22:07, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose let's discuss deletion based on content and merit of individual portals. No need to throw the baby out with the bath water, this is not how we do things here. You're proposing deletion of many very good portals here. ɱ (talk) 15:41, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Please identify 35 out of the 3500 (1%) that are "very good portals" so we can run them through MFD to test your statement. Also there is no baby - there is no original content at all. No work done by humans is lost with X3 deletions because they were created using an automated script that was used without BAG approval to repackage existing content. Therefore WP:PRESERVE is not an issue. If someone started creating thousands of articles called "Foo lite" that just copied Foo mindlessly we would CSD them without debate. These are just in another mainspace but they are really Foo lite. Legacypac (talk) 17:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Except that's not comparable at all. The point of portals (which the community has repeatedly endorsed) is to duplicate article content and provide links to related content - which is exactly what these portals are doing. They might be doing it poorly in many cases, but that's qualitatively different to one article duplicating another. Thryduulf (talk) 18:10, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Wouldn't it be faster to delete them all and then recreate the ones that need recreating, rather than go through them one by one to see which to keep? Because the number of "keeps" is like 5% or 10% and not 50%? (It would have to be 50% to be equal time between the two approaches.) If you're not convinced that it's 5-10% keep and not 50% keep, what sort of representative sampling process can we engage in to test the theory? Leviv ich 19:13, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Yes it would be faster, but there is no deadline so it is very significantly more important to get it right than it is to do it quickly. Deleting something that doesn't need deleting is one of the most harmful things that an administrator can do - and speedily deleting it is an order of magnitude more so. As only administrators can see pages once they have been deleted, and doing so is much harder, deleting it first makes the job of finding the good portals very significantly harder. Thryduulf (talk) 21:30, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Timing matters because this issue is being discussed in several forums at once. If the first debate to close decides to delete, the portals may be gone by the time another discussion reaches a consensus to keep them. Certes (talk) 21:48, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

• CommentI listed The Transhumanist's portal creations, latest first, and examined the top entry on each page, i.e. every 100th portal.

It appears that most of the portals have a narrow scope and should go but a significant minority are either already of a good enough standard to keep or show sufficient potential to merit further attention. This impression is based not on cherry-picking but on a random sample. Certes (talk) 21:42, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Thank you for this, this is a very good illustration of why this proposal is too broad - it will delete portals that clearly should not be deleted, and others that may or may not need to be deleted (e.g. I've !voted to merge several of the portals about universities). Thryduulf (talk) 21:58, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

• Query Why don't we have a CSD for pages created by unauthorized scripts or bots? WP:BAG exists for a reason right? (And this seems to be a good example of it). Crazynas ^t 21:50, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
  • @Crazynas: because not all of them should be deleted, as [[user:|Certes]] analysis immediately above demonstrates perfectly. Thryduulf (talk) 21:58, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Thryduulf: You're missing my point. Just like we have a policy that banned users are to be reverted in all cases not because they might not make good edits (to game the system or not) but because they are a disruption to the community; so we should have a policy that pages created (or edited I suppose) by unauthorized bots are inherently not welcome, because of the potential for disruption regardless of their merit (by disruption I'm talking about this AN thread as much as the pages themselves). This is the whole reason we have a group dedicated to overseeing and helping with bots right? Crazynas ^t 22:12, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

No bots were involved. The pages were created using a template. One of your last page creations was a user talk page, where you welcomed a new editor using Twinkle. You did a very professional job, by applying a template which introduces the new editor with the sort of carefully considered and neatly arranged prose that we don't have time to write every time a new contributor appears. Using a template is not a valid rationale for mass deletions. Certes (talk) 22:22, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

Curious, what template did you use? I guess the difference I see is the twinkle is highly curated and subject to extensive review (as are the templates it calls). If all these pages were manually created, then what happened in the example of (what to me looks pretty much like G1) that Fram posted above? Why didn't the human that pressed the button take responsibility for that (so to speak) pile of rubbish? To clarify, Bot here covers scripts, AWB (which is 'manual'), java implementations etc. In short: "Bot policy covers the operation of all bots and automated scripts used to provide automation of Wikipedia edits, whether completely automated, higher speed, or simply assisting human editors in their own work." The policy explicitly references mass page creation as being under the purview of BAG here. Crazynas ^t 22:39, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

I haven't used any of these templates myself but recent portals have been created by variants on ((Basic portal start page)). The numbered versions such as ((bpsp6)) cater for portal-specific conditions such as there being no DYKs to feature. Certes (talk) 23:07, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Crazynas: I was simply answering your question about why we do not speedy delete every page created by an unauthorised bot, etc - simply because not every page created by such means should be deleted. You are also mistaken about banned users - they may be reverted but they are not required to be. Certes analysis shows that some of the portals created by the script have been improved since, sometimes significantly. Thryduulf (talk) 22:46, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

@Thryduulf: Sure, and this is tangential to the proposal here (which I'm still opposing, if you noticed). In any case the thought I'm having wouldn't be applied ex post facto but it would make it explicitly clear that mass creation of pages by automated or semi-automated means without prior approval is disruptive. Crazynas ^t 23:02, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

• Comment. The problem with many of these recently created template-based portals is that it is difficult or impossible to improve them. I've edited portals for over a decade but cannot work out how to change the portal code to include or exclude a particular article or image. (For articles I believe one has to change the template or mark the article as stub to exclude it; for images I believe it just harvests those from the main topic article.) Thus they are not drafts that could be further improved, they are static uneditable entities for which the only solution is to start from scratch. There is no thought to be preserved that is not equally present in the list of articles in the template/images in the root article. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:12, 22 March 2019 (UTC)
• The key issue is that traditionally, portals are viewed as entry points to broad topic areas. However a page generated by the helper templates that draw content from an underlying navigation box is more akin to a second screen experience: it provides an X-ray view into the navigation box. It's not clear this is the experience the community wants to provide for readers visiting something labelled a portal. isaacl (talk) 20:47, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
• the automated scripts are so easy to fool. Even if everything looks perfect when the portal is set up, as soon as someone adds an new link to a nav box (that may make sense in the nav box but not for the portal), adds an image to a page, or creates a DYK completely unrelated to the topic which includes the five letters "horse" within someone's name behind a pipe, you get random inappropriate stuff in an automated portal. The editor adjusting the nav box, adding a picture without a caption per WP:CAPTIONOBVIOUS or creating the DYK has no idea the portal is being busted. There is no edit to the portal to review so watch listing the portal does not help. You have to manually review the portal display regularly. That is before looking at lua errors. Autogenerated content is a bad idea. Forcing other editors to review your auto generated crap is wrong. Ignoring the guidelines because they are "outdated" and leaving 4500 pages that need to be checked and discussed against the guidelines by other editors is wrong. The only reasonable solution is to nuke these from orbit. Then if someone willing to follow the guidelines and use intellgently designed and applied tools want to recreate some titles, that is fine. Legacypac (talk) 21:23, 24 March 2019 (UTC)
  • Everything you say before "The only reasonable solution..." may be true but is irrelevant to this proposal as written. "Nuking them from orbit" is not the only reasonable solution, as fixing the issues so that the portals don't break is also reasonable. As is not deleting the ones that have been fixed so that the errors you talk about don't occur. Thryduulf (talk) 00:46, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

    Portal creation ... is down to about a minute per portal. The creation part, which is automated, takes about 10 seconds. The other 50 seconds is taken up by manual activities, such as finding candidate subjects, inspecting generated portals, and selecting the portal creation template to be used according to the resources available. Tools are under development to automate these activities as much as possible, to pare portal creation time down even more. Ten seconds each is the goal.
    — Portal Update #29, 13 Feb 2019

    Someone spent less than 50 seconds creating the page; requiring editors to spend more time than that to delete it has an extortionate effect, even though there's a good faith intent. If we don't nuke from orbit, then those who want these automatically-created portals deleted will be forced to spend far, far more than 50 seconds per portal discussing them one by one (or ten by ten, or one hundred by one hundred, it'll still be a lot of time). 50 seconds "taken up by manual activities" is how we end up with a Portal:Sexual fetishism that includes Pedophilia as one of the selected articles–probably not the best selection–but that's been there for five months now. Leviv ich 03:04, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

    • Two wrongs do not make a right and there is no deadline. The only reason for deleting them all you seem to have is that you don't like that these portals were created so quickly, and that some of them are bad. That's fine, you are entitled to your opinion and some of them are bad. However that does not equate to a reason to delete all of them without checking whether they are good or bad. If you have problems with specific portals then they should be fixed and/or nominated for deletion, as I see you have done in this case, but just because X is bad doesn't mean that the entire set of pages of which is a part should be speedily deleted. Thryduulf (talk) 09:35, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

      • "There is no deadline" is a complete non-argument. There is no deadline to have these portals either. Knowingly advocating for keeping problematic portals around until someone not only notices it but also decides to MfD it is exposing readers to shitty, thoughtless reproductions of content for no actual benefit (the benefits" of these portals are addressed dequately by the navigation templates they are based on) and with the risk of showing them all kinds of errors which gives a very poor impression. Luckily very few people get actually exposed to these pages, but this also means that the very hypothetical damage deleting some of these pages would do is extremely minimal. Fram (talk) 10:09, 25 March 2019 (UTC)

        • There was indeed no deadline for their creation, now they have been created that is irrelevant. If we follow your logic though we should delete every article and then just recreate the ones that admins vet as meeting an undefined standard. Yes, deleting more slowly does increase the risk that some readers will see errors, but thtat's exactly what happens in every other namespace without a problem. Thryduulf (talk) 16:35, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

          • No, that's not my logic. Your use of "no deadline" when it suits you, and the dismissal when it doesn't, is quite clear though. Deleting articles is losing content, deleting these auto-portals is losing nothing. Furthermore, we have in the past speedy deleted large groups of articles by one or two creators once it became clear that too many contained errors. This has been done with thousands of articles by Dr. Blofeld, with thousands by Jaguar, and with thousands by Sander v. Ginkel (the last ones moved to draft and then deleted afterwards). Once we know that with one group of creations by one editor, there are many problems, we had no qualms in the past to speedy delete them. That didn't mean that they can't be recreated, or that admins will first vet them, no idea where you get those ideas. Please don't make a caricature of what I support here, and please don't make absolute statements which don't match reality. Fram (talk) 17:41, 27 March 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose 1) Let's not create precedents where we hand single admins editorial control, admins may well be great editors (some better than others), but let's keep editorial control as much as possible only with all editors. 2) The formulation of this supposed CSD criteria seems to be a WP:PUNISH against a single user. (As an aside, different perspective: there are perhaps millions of pages in article space that are "poor", so portal space is bound to have them, too - just work through it -- and if we come-up with new forward looking policies and guidelines for all portals (or mass creations) consistent as possible with the 5 P, all the better). Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:42, 25 March 2019 (UTC)
• Support - per Fish & Karate. Ealdgyth - Talk 16:08, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. I feel there are much better ways of handling the situation, including but not limited to: expanding P2, Portal PROD, and even MFD. This is too broad of a sword that doesn't even cut in the right places since it's only limited to one user in a given time frame. -- Tavix ^(talk) 16:15, 27 March 2019 (UTC)
• Thought I had voted here but I guess I hadn’t. Regardless, my thinking on this has changed because of Certes’ in-depth analysis of TTH’s portal creations. Anyway: Oppose. The mass creation of portals is something that should be dealt with preferably quickly, but this proposal as written is not the right way to do it. Sure, there are a lot of crappy portals that could be deleted fairly uncontroversially, but there are also a lot of good portals as well as edge cases that deserve more community discussion on whether they should be deleted, or at least a longer waiting period so users may object. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 12:40, 29 March 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose for now. I still hope that the proposal might become limited to portals looked at and determined to be poor by some objective criteria, which I could support, but that hasn't yet happened. Speedy ad hominem deletion regardless of subsequent tuning, current quality or even potential for future improvement is likely to throw too many babies out with the bathwater. Certes (talk) 12:46, 29 March 2019 (UTC) Duplicate !vote stricken. GoldenRing (talk) 10:14, 4 April 2019 (UTC)
• Regretfully support: as an editor I dislike the idea of creations made by certain users being deleted en masse but, quite frankly, MfD cannot cope with the influx at the moment. Hell, I've got a decent laptop and MfD is getting so big scrolling down causes a bit of lag. SITH (talk) 20:57, 30 March 2019 (UTC)
• Strong support of something to this effect, per WP:MASSCREATION and WP:TNT (i.e., the babies thrown out with the bathwater can be recovered later). However, opponents raise good points of localizing control to a few members, and while I do argue that portals are not content, they are a navigational tool, so community control of them can be a bit "stricter" than mainspace articles, perhaps something like PROD would be better. Regardless of how this pans out, for future portals going forward I proposed Portals for Creation at RfC, and created a mockup here if anyone wants a look. — Preceding unsigned comment added by John M Wolfson (talk • contribs)

  Why is requiring administrators to comb through deleted portals to find those that should not have been deleted in order to restore them, having inconvenienced those people who use the portals in the mean time, in any way better for the project than deleting only those that need to be deleted? Thryduulf (talk) 07:34, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

• Support. Worthless pages which take 12 seconds to create shouldn't take more than 50000 times that for multiple users to delete. If a subject WikiProject or person interested in the portal's subject is willing to "adopt" that portal, or even assert that the portal is not useless, a more nuanced consideration may apply. And, I should point out, some of the individual deletions are incomplete, as user-facing pages (mostly categories and navigation templates, but some actual article pages) still point to the deleted portals. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 10:25, 4 April 2019 (UTC)