Talk:COVID-19 pandemic in Poland/Archive 3

New law: "specustawa"
The only information I have got from this section is I have learnt about opinions of various persons and how they voted.

Unfortunately, I have not learnt much about the law itself.

Is Wikipedia a political portal presenting people's opinions only?

Or does Wikipedia present facts?

What is the reason for such a section to exist? CoV2 (talk) 15:04, 15 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Please read WP:NPOV to learn about NPOV in Wikipedia (which is also a general standard in scientific research and other scholarly studies). There is no dispute that those prominent experts stated those descriptions (opinions) of the law and the procedures. Unless there is a dispute, we can consider it a fact that those experts - a prominent law professor/philosopher, and a former judge - gave their descriptions of what happened. So yes, this is factual type information that is presented in the section.


 * We can put it another way: it is quite likely that some legal experts consider the specustawa to be legally valid, so it would be unreasonable to state, as a fact, that the specustawa is legally null and void. So instead we give a legal opinion about it being unconstitutional. We are still waiting for someone to add a sourced opinion by a well-recognised lawyer to claim that the specustawa is valid.


 * The reason for the section to exist is that there is a pandemic ongoing in the world, part of that pandemic is in Poland, and part of the reaction by Polish society was to pass a law of disputed constitutionality that has had big effects on the handling of the epidemic and may have big, predictable effects on Polish society - according to named experts.


 * The reason you didn't learn much about the law itself is because you and others who read the en.Wikipedia did not add further material to the section, with appropriate references, and respecting WP:NPOV.


 * Welcome to Wikipedia! Please learn about the academic principles that are adopted here. Boud (talk) 19:46, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Recent press release-style contributions
Just for the record, we now have two new users whose first (and so far only) contribution to en.Wikipedia has been to add a long list of points to this article: The normal Wikipedia encyclopedic style is to prefer prose, by default - see MOS:LISTNUMBERED - Do not use lists if a passage is read easily as plain paragraphs. - and any well-edited article that is not on COVID-19 (the COVID-19 articles are mostly recent and not well NPOVed and so on) - so anyone who is looking to improve this article should feel welcome to work on these sections. The Tarcza antykryzysowa section would do with some NPOVing; there are plenty of references around in Polish. Boud (talk) 20:10, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * by on 9 April;
 * by on 13 April.

Added separate column for sources in template "Poland medical cases by voivodeship"
,, and to everyone interested: I have just added a separate column for sources in Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Poland medical cases by voivodeship, without creating a proposal since I'am the only one who is editting that template here, and we saw earlier that others also stated that this should be done. But if someone have any comments/ or is opposed -feel free to write your opinion. If thats ok -tomorrow (11 April) I will make this same with deaths template. Natanieluz (talk) 21:27, 10 April 2020 (UTC) : @Natanieluz - just thank you. Proposed it month ago or so, but was harangued by one of the activists here. Now it is possible to read it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.255.42.49 (talk) 16:41, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Sentence "starting from 12 April, allowing religious and other gatherings to be held for up to a maximum of 50 people" may be misleading.
According to https://www.gov.pl/web/koronawirus/zasady-na-dluzej, those restrictions were prolonged until 19 April, hence sentence "The same regulation loosened the restrictions on public gatherings starting from 12 April, allowing religious and other gatherings to be held for up to a maximum of 50 people" may be misleading. People may be fined for not obeying those restrictions, therefore, such information may be actually harmful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.143.98.10 (talk • contribs) 07:46, 17 April 2020 (UTC)


 * The information is perfectly correct - that's what is in the 31 March regulation, but it's now out of date; the starting date for allowing gatherings of 50 people was shifted to 20 April (instead of 12 April), and it's only for religious/funeral gatherings, not "other" generic gatherings.
 * , and corrected the start date from 12 April to 20 April (the edit was not quite correct, because the new start date is in the 10 April regulation, not the 31 March regulation, but overall, it was a good edit, easy for anyone else to do a minor tidy up later). The body and lead are now corrected.
 * As for information being harmful, there is no guarantee that any information in Wikipedia, or any other source of information, is correct. You need to think about how the information in the source is generated - what are the procedures? where does the information come from? what checking have you done yourself? What is the chance that the URL is the wrong URL? or that the server was cracked? You cannot check everything, but you can make a few checks, and assign probabilities to various possible sources of error. And your contribution to this talk page is, of course, a part of these procedures. :) Welcome to Wikipedia and knowledge!
 * As for harm itself: it's the authorities who have chosen to encourage harm by allowing religious gatherings of up to 50 people starting from 20 April while the COVID-19 pandemic is still far from the end of the first infection peak. Boud (talk) 15:37, 17 April 2020 (UTC)

Template:2019–20 coronavirus pandemic data/Poland medical cases formatting
This template is in the "Unofficial deaths" sections. In my browser this table is rendered only on half the width of the screen. Can this be fixed so that is goes across the whole screen like the other tables? I am afraid of editing templates.Nyx86 (talk) 15:08, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Hey! what browser are you using? I'am on Google Chrome 81.0 and everything looks good, can you provide us a screenshot to see how that exactly looks like? On my pc that template looks like that https://imgur.com/a/6P83UDu Natanieluz (talk) 18:19, 20 April 2020 (UTC)
 * , it appears in my browser the same way as in yours. I am complaining about the table being right-justified and only taking up half of the screen (lots of white on the left). All the rest of the tables in the article stretch across the screen, but this one stays fixed.Nyx86 (talk) 15:12, 21 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I think you could search for help by reading at Help:Tables and if that's not enough (it wasn't enough for me) asking at either Help talk:Table or the Teahouse. You can invite people to respond directly here at  Talk:2020 coronavirus pandemic in Poland  in case people are willing to do that. I don't think we really want to stretch any tables across the screen, what we really need is an improvement in the management of floats in the page layout so that we get text filling in nicely next to tables. I experimented a bit, but didn't find any better layout solutions. Boud (talk) 23:35, 21 April 2020 (UTC)

Proposal: semilog-ise the graph SARS-CoV-2 cases and COVID-19 deaths in Poland
Proposal: switch on the y-axis 'log' option for the SARS-CoV-2 cases and COVID-19 deaths in Poland graph. Reason: during the first few weeks, the numbers of deaths and recoveries were zero, which cannot be displayed on a log scale (0s are shown as 1s using the present script) and then for a few weeks there were only very tiny numbers, which were noisy because they were small. Now there have been big enough numbers of recoveries and deaths per day for switching on the log option to give an informative looking graph. This way, the growth rates of the three parameters will be easier to compare. Right now, it's clear that the official-COVID-19-deaths-per-day growth rate is higher than the officially-confirmed-SARS-CoV-2-cases-per-day, which will show up more clearly with a semilog graph, i.e. log in the y scale. You can see the effect by uncommenting the html comment and previewing. Another reason is that we already have the same cumulative data shown in the horizontal bar graph above, and we have the same per-day data shown in separate big non-log graphs, one for each parameter, lower down, so the more compact log version will be complementary. Boud (talk) 22:19, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Support (proposer - reasons above). Boud (talk) 22:19, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Support, as log scale is more informative for this type of chart.Nyx86 (talk) 14:08, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose (btw sorry for the late answer), this graph is now unreadable, is very hard to follow and tell how many cases were on specific day and that "time line" at bottom with days is now useless, nothing can be seen on it. (btw2: still the lowest value is 1).Natanieluz (talk) 14:50, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
 * No problem with being "late" - a week time scale is the typical deadline for decision-making on moderately active pages. I reverted to the linear scale until we see if we can reach consensus.
 * I don't understand what your reason is in terms of readability. How does switching to 'yScaleType = log' make the graph less readable? Do you mean that days with similar log values appear to be "nearly the same", while in a linear graph, they appear to be very different? This is not a question of readability, this is a question of epidemiological meaning. In terms of the epidemic, the difference between 20 and 30 cases per day is about the same as the difference between 200 and 300 or between 2000 and 3000 cases per day (apart from the increased noisiness for the smaller values); in each case going from 20 to 30, or 200 to 300, or 2000 to 3000, is a 50% increase. If that happens several days in a row, then that suggests exponential growth at plus 50%/day, or times 1.5/day - no matter what the absolute scale is.
 * To be more specific, for the situation right now:
 * both the semilog and linear options for the graph show that (per the official statistics), the number of new infections per day has been essentially constant for a month, but more noisy than expected for a simple Poisson process;
 * the semilog option shows clearly that (per the official statistics), the number of new deaths per day has been essentially constant for about three weeks, with apparently only Poisson noise; this is very difficult to see on the linear version, because the numbers are small compared to new infections: it is impossible to estimate the Poisson noise by eye from the linear version;
 * The other questions of readability are independent questions. I increased the size a bit, and labelled one day a week differently, as on the monitoring graph, which improves readability a bit.
 * On the question of the lowest value being 1: yes, this is a technical limit.
 * An ideal tech solution would be to have a button to click where the reader could choose whether s/he wants the linear or semilog version, but I don't have the time to try. Boud (talk) 23:29, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I meant that the values corresponding to specific day "zlewają się ze sobą" (I don't have excellent english words to represent my point) The "log" have various scales so in one point you have 1-10 and then "higher" you have 200-1000, without looking at the scale on the left side it seems like Lab-confirmed and Recovered have pretty much the same values. Sure I know that in epidemic 1000 or 2000 isn't a big different but on that "normal" linear graph you can exactly see in which day was the most new cases but as of the log all value seem similar. Natanieluz (talk) 10:57, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
 * You cannot interpret either a linear graph or a semilog graph without checking the scales. The log scale is perfectly uniform. (The non-uniformity of the ticks is a property of the decimal system; the scale itself is uniform as logarithmic (multiplicative) scale; see Benford's law for an interesting consequence.) Right now it is true that the lab-confirmed and recovered per-day counts are "pretty much the same". The day on which the particular value of new lab-confirmed cases was the highest is not especially significant: there can be a delay of +- a day or so in reporting a result, there can be a day when labs are more efficient in processing tests, there are days when results for clusters come out - these are not individually significant events for the overall development of the pandemic in Poland. Boud (talk) 21:54, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Ok, I see your arguments there are quite good. Somehow I didn't really care about it from the beginning whether it was that scale or another, I simply more prefer that linear scale :)) So feel free to change that graph to semi log. Natanieluz (talk) 09:34, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ For examples of graphs that show ways in which people are debating/learning about what sort of graphs are meaningful in this context, see xkcd.com/2289 and xkcd.com/2294. Boud (talk) 19:11, 29 April 2020 (UTC)

SARS-COV-2 spread in Poland and its neighbours (daily and cumulative) graphs
Hey! since you often updates this two graphs, do you know how to remove thats "empty, blank" space from the start and end of that timeline below? And also we need to make that timeline more readable :)), Here I explain what I meant, Natanieluz (talk) 10:21, 3 May 2020 (UTC)


 * Hi! The png image shows that 'time axis' is what you meant :) (unrelated to the text timeline). I don't know how to fix that. I agree it looks odd. Try looking at the parameters listed at Template:Graph:Chart, search around and try a bit more, and then ask at Template_talk:Graph:Chart or Module_talk:Graph. Boud (talk) 03:23, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Constantly changing this same thing over and over.
This is the third (12 and third time today - 3) time when you are changing this same thing, even when I told you that we have consensus about that on Talk Page. Stop doing that! Natanieluz (talk) 15:49, 6 May 2020 (UTC)
 * 5.173.189.115, I agree with Natanieluz, this is not OK.Nyx86 (talk) 14:49, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
 * 4th time..., can we have edit protection blocking ip address to edit on this site? Natanieluz (talk) 16:21, 7 May 2020 (UTC)
 * User_talk:5.173.189.115 has been warned. S/he might not (yet) know about talk pages or the history page. I don't think that the re pinging function works for IP users. However, messages on the IP's talk page should be obvious the next time that s/he connects to en.Wikipedia. Blocking is only done if someone refuses to change their behaviour and risks damaging Wikipedia: the preference is to convince the person that his/her actions will only be accepted by the community if they follow community norms. Feel free to add comments over at 5.173.189.115's talk page. Boud (talk) 15:07, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Hey again, today we had 2 big vandalism, majority of text was removed, and again that vandalism cames from ip addresses. We need to do something about it, maybe you know how to change page edit protection (and who can do that?) to for e.g. "autoconfirmed users" - semi-protection? (I saw that large part of covid-19 countries sites have semi-protection (e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4 and lots, lots more...)) --Natanieluz (talk) 20:41, 19 May 2020 (UTC)
 * The first of those to be reverted; the second of those  to be reverted (though, who noticed the vandalism and kindly fixed it, didn't realise that the previous edit was also vandalism). If you look through the edit history of this "main" PL COVID-19 page on en.Wikipedia, you'll probably agree that there are quite a lot of useful edits by IP editors. So is a 150-minute uncorrected vandalism of the page enough to justify semi-protection? The place to read about semi-protection is Protection policy. A counterargument to semi-protection would be that we already have dropped to a low number of editors, and that IP editors do contribute quite a few useful edits. Blocking policy - blocking tends to be done only temporarily, if someone really repeatedly fails to listen to warnings and does not learn. There are some editors who do vandalism patrols (Nyook probably noticed the big removal through a semi-automated alert method) - you might be able to convince some of these "vandalism patrollers" to add this page to their high priority list for checks. I know that having patience with vandals is difficult, but part of the success of Wikipedia is showing that we can use a very minimal set of restrictions of freedoms. Anyway, read through Protection policy and post a request at the appropriate place if you wish, where you'll get other points of view. I can see arguments both for and against. Boud (talk) 01:23, 20 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay I will hold on for now, we will see if there will be more vandalism in the next days. --Natanieluz (talk) 09:56, 20 May 2020 (UTC)

Phase 3
As I understand, here is an official information about Phase 3: https://www.gov.pl/web/koronawirus/3etap. Could anyone add some information to the article, please? --Alexey Vazhnov (talk) 14:37, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
 * And here is common information about phases: https://www.gov.pl/web/koronawirus/nowa-normalnosc-etapy --Alexey Vazhnov (talk) 19:43, 18 May 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia
Just because someone above asked for a volunteer to do the work of adding some content to the article does not put anyone in an obligation to do so. This is an encyclopedia article about the pandemic in Poland, not about official government actions regarding the pandemic - even though those do have some role in the article, they should not be the main theme.

In I reverted the recent addition of a section of which: Boud (talk) 02:03, 21 May 2020 (UTC) Boud (talk) 02:26, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
 * the section title was at h2 level instead of h3 sublevel, even though it was intended to cover epidemic control measures, so a subtopic;
 * the section title was mainly a quote rather than an encyclopedic description - there are plenty of sources disucssing the ethics of moving backwards towards the "old normal" of high-carbon-footprint activities versus the possibility of moving forward to a European Green Deal to avoid the big catastrophe that is underway and much more disruptive than the pandemic;
 * images in Wikipedia articles are to illustrate content, not to replace prose;
 * there is no statement on Twitter that the images are available under the same licence as images published at https://www.gov.pl/web/coronavirus, so so far, we have no evidence that any of the four images are free-licensed;
 * we normally don't post images with logos, especially when they're so prominent, unless the logo itself is the theme.

Boud (talk) 02:26, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
 * Avoid using images to convey text
 * Adding images to articles - The purpose of an image is to increase readers' understanding of the article's subject matter... - it does not replace the article's subject matter.
 * That images cames from MOHPL twitter, but there are also on that gov site, even on other MOHPL social media profiles, so I thought is pretty obvious coz they are the same pictures... but ok :D
 * And second - really puting a image isn't better? --Natanieluz (talk) 07:35, 21 May 2020 (UTC)
 * No, this isn't online social media. :) Boud (talk) 00:48, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
 * haha sure, of course :D, --Natanieluz (talk) 10:07, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Violation of talk page consensus
In on COVID-19 pandemic in Poland Ythlev violated the Talk page consensus on the issue, with the misleading edit comment Swapped outdated map. The official SARS-CoV-2 infection count in Poland happens to be very stable, so the old timestamp - 7 May 2020 - on the second-from-top-map was old, but the map itself was up-to-date. Ythlev is presently blocked from editing COVID-19 pandemic in the United Kingdom for two weeks and will hopefully respect the consensus here. Boud (talk) 21:19, 22 May 2020 (UTC)

Postexpandincludesize - WP:PEIS
is getting close to the WP:PEIS - the post-expand include size limit. Do Ctrl-U on the rendered page and scroll to the bottom - I see. These are byte counts. See WP:PEIS for an explanation.

suggested by Ahecht would provide one quite drastic solution. This gives.

Proposal: For the moment (at least), we only shift Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Poland medical cases by voivodeship from an include with to a link with .... This inclusion covers both the infection counts and death counts per voivodeship. Boud (talk) 00:43, 16 June 2020 (UTC)


 * and I'am neutral about making this two templates as separate subpages (Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Poland medical cases by voivodeship and Template:COVID-19 pandemic data/Poland medical cases), but as of number of charts - for eg. Sweden, Canada or Russia Covid-19 page have at least ten graphs; and also - like Boud said "Some new (to this article) editors decided that the existing graphs did not show enough detail, or did not look similar enough to other articles in this series, and so they inserted redundant graphs, repeated already graphed material in more detail." - we should stay with that, it's more readable.
 * When it comes to name of that section "SARS-CoV-2 cases and COVID-19 deaths in Poland: bigger graphs" we can change it to something like: "Statistics" or "Detailed charts". Natanieluz (talk) 14:33, 16 June 2020 (UTC)