Talk:Missed call

Pop song
What is the significance of the statement "In Oman, there is a pop song based on missed calls." in relation to this topic? Micmac95 (talk) 11:44, 5 February 2012 (UTC)

Dubious
"A missed call is a telephone call that is deliberately terminated by the caller before being answered by its intended recipient, appearing as a 'missed call' on the receiver's cellphone."

Since when has this been the definition? In my experience a missed call is any phone call that is terminated without being answered by the callee, whether it was deliberate on anybody's part or not. OK, so to "give [someone] a missed call" is to make a call to someone and then hang up without them answering. But if the caller actually intended to speak to the callee but the callee wasn't there to answer the phone, that is more accurately a missed call. Of course, handsets have no way of knowing for certain whether so they use the term "missed call" for all four scenarios.
 * 1) the caller just wanted to "ping" you rather than actually talk to you
 * 2) the caller accidentally started phoning you and so realised the mistake and hung up
 * 3) you just decided to let it ring for whatever reason
 * 4) you just weren't there to answer

On another note, I'm surprised to see no mention of what is probably the most common purpose of the first of these types in my experience: a way of giving somebody your number. Is this because the people who write these articles think this use case is common knowledge and so don't bother mentioning it? — Smjg (talk) 16:18, 22 June 2014 (UTC)


 * This opening sentence is intended to define the scope of the article rather than provide a catch-all definition of the phrase "missed call". If there was another article about missing phone calls we can and should make a disambiguation link to it from the top of this one, but I can't find any such article. --McGeddon (talk) 10:48, 25 June 2015 (UTC)


 * Hmm. This is rather like saying "a fruit is that which comes from the tree Malus domestica" and then developing an article about "fruit" on this premise.
 * Moreover, I can't see much sense in using a disambiguation link to distinguish between "a telephone call that is deliberately terminated by the caller before being answered by its intended recipient" and "a telephone call that the recipient wasn't there to answer", at least as long as the article is at this title. At the moment, it's an article about an arbitrary proper subset of the concept denoted by its title.  As such, either the article should be expanded to cover the whole concept, or the title should be "Deliberately missed call" or similar.  I'll think about how best to tackle the issue. — Smjg (talk) 16:36, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
 * I agree with with Smjg. The phrase "missed call" covers at least three things: accidentally missed calls, deliberate missed calls to give someone your number, and deliberate missed calls to send a pre-agreed message. The first two are too small to require articles on their own, but should be mentioned in an article about "Missed call"s. I don't think we should have a disambiguation page and then a separate article for deliberate missed calls to send a pre-agreed message. The best solution is just to cover all usages in the "Missed call" article. If no one objects, I'll make this change in the next few days. cagliost (talk) 13:19, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * Missing calls to communicate a phone number seems within scope of the current article (deliberately missing calls to communicate information), but is there much to say about accidentally missed calls? If all we've got is a one line "it's when you miss a call, accidentally" and 99% of the article is then about the interesting abuses of that system, we're not doing the reader any favours if we present this article as being about both subjects.
 * I wasn't suggesting a full disambiguation page, just a hatnote of "This article is about deliberately missing calls to communicate information. For accidentally missed calls, see X." - where X is a suitable article for mentioning accidentally missed calls in passing (perhaps Telephone call).
 * Renaming the article to "deliberately missed call" seems like it might be a good idea. --McGeddon (talk) 13:54, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure why you object to my original solution, which is to move the word "deliberately" to the second sentence. This elegantly deals with case where calls are missed accidentally in a single sentence -- it acknowledges it and moves on. At present, the article states "A missed call is a telephone call that is deliberately terminated", which is simply false.
 * I think we want to avoid creating any more articles, since accidentally missed calls don't merit their own article.
 * You say "99% of the article is then about the interesting abuses of that system, we're not doing the reader any favours if we present this article as being about both subjects." I agree, but acknowledging the existence of accidentally missed calls doesn't do this.
 * I don't think we ought to rename the article to "Deliberately missed call" -- we want people to be able to type in "Missed call" and find the article first time. Neither do we want more than one article. Therefore, I think the best solution is to have one article deal with all cases.
 * See Literary estate for an article which successfully deals with two concepts (literary estates and literary executors) in the same page. cagliost (talk) 17:45, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I thought that moving the word "deliberately" risked wrong-footing the reader - the WP:LEADSENTENCE is there to tell them what the article they're about to read is actually about, before they read it. If we haven't got anything to say about accidentally missed calls, we're not helping the reader to suggest that we might do. Changing the lead sentence and scope also means that the rest of the article has to be rewritten to be in line with it - the second paragraph's "In Bangladesh, missed calls make up 70% of cellular network traffic." takes on a very different meaning if we're now telling the reader that "missed call" means "any call that is missed for any reason".
 * Literary estate seems okay for dealing with two closely-related subjects that both merit explanation. I'm just not sure that both the subjects here need exploring in the same amount of depth. If a "deliberately missed call" was instead called a fnord, we wouldn't open the article with "A missed call is when a call is ended prior to answering. A fnord is a type of missed call where...", we'd just define a fnord in terms of being a missed call. And if everybody called graffiti wall painting, we wouldn't feel we had to open that article with "Wall painting is when you paint a wall. Wall painting is also writing or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched, or painted illicitly on a wall or other surface..." - we'd disambiguate somewhere else, or if there was nowhere to point to, we might conclude that "painting a wall" was such a prosaic concept that it didn't need explaining.
 * The subject matter of people deliberately subverting a phone system seems an interesting and well-documented one, and I think it merits being the clear focus of the article. I don't think we should dilute it simply because the common name for the practice happens to be a clunkingly literal one. --McGeddon (talk) 18:24, 10 November 2015 (UTC)


 * "Missed call" is not the common name for the practice. It's the common name for a generic concept of which the deliberately missed call is just one kind. — Smjg (talk) 23:52, 16 January 2016 (UTC)


 * The sources plainly show that "missed call" is a commonly understood term for the practice in India and the Phillipines. --McGeddon (talk) 10:07, 17 January 2016 (UTC)


 * This ambiguousness remains an issue in the GAN draft. The fundamental concept of using a missed call notification to impart information (similar to collect call "fraud") is narrower than the simple term "missed call". Per the article titles naming criteria, the title should be a balance of what is most recognizable (the name most people will call it), natural (reflecting what it's usually called), precise (unambiguously identified), and concise (not longer than necessary to identify), but in this case, "missed call" presents too much ambiguity and might need to be either longer or rescoped. (not watching, please ping) czar  17:36, 13 October 2017 (UTC)

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Illustration?
I am surprised this article has no illustration ... certainly there are plenty of screenshot possibilities, and indeed it may not even be necessary to make one, or even a free equivalent, since some of the most commonly used, like the iPhone version, have no copyrightable elements (well, maybe the phone icon, but that's de minimis here) and could thus be free images by themselves. Daniel Case (talk) 16:49, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
 * I found one icon on Commons that will do, although I still think we could use a real screenshot. Daniel Case (talk) 16:53, 24 March 2018 (UTC)