Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 160

RfC: Reliability of headlines
Should include a new subsection stating that headlines are unreliable? —  Newslinger  talk   01:33, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

Survey (Headlines)

 * Support - News headlines are almost never reliable for use as a source (the exception is the rare case when cited as a PRIMARY source to support a quotation of the headline itself). The guideline should explicitly say this. Blueboar (talk) 01:44, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support: News headlines often exaggerate the content in the story, or present the opposite of the truth... just to correct the reader in the body of the article. They can be completely unreliable. I saw an example of that yesterday; found some content using the sensational headline when the concept wasn't even covered in the article. Normal Op (talk) 02:30, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - even the most reliable publications participated in clickbait headlining.-- Moxy 🍁 02:38, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support, and with Blueboar's stipulation. Headlines should not be considered a reliable source for content, and this should be policy. However, stating/mentioning the name of a source article is a fundamentally different case and should be treated as such. Armadillopteryxtalk 04:52, 10 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Support - Headlines are meant to draw attention of the reader. Often, this is achieved by exaggerating the content to an extent, and making it inaccurate (and, therefore, unreliable). The only exception I can think of is what Blueboar mentioned above. Ahmadtalk 05:29, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support I've been hearing scientists and science journalists complain about bad headlines for 15 years. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 06:07, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Even when an article is written by a subject expert, the headline is often written by a sub-editor who knows nothing about the subject. Add to that the need for brevity and the temptation to sensationalize or sacrifice precision for cuteness. Definitely not reliably except for themselves. Zerotalk 06:21, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. If the content of the headline is justified, it will be repeated in the article.  The usual reason someone would cite a headline and not the article itself is that the article doesn't support the headline, ipso facto the headline isn't reliable. The exception would be when the statement being supported is about the headline itself (e.g., "Such-and-such newspaper ran a headline saying such-and-such"). i.e., Not to support WHAT the headline claimed, but to support THAT the headline claimed something. -MichaelBluejay (talk) 09:21, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per Michaelbluejay. Some headlines are notable enough for (coverage in) articles (e.g. "Super Caley go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious" and "It's The Sun Wot Won It") and so it is important that policy allows us to cite headlines in such circumstances (similar to how even the Daily Mail can be cited in an WP:ABOUTSELF fashion), but otherwise we should only be citing the content of the stories. Thryduulf (talk) 13:15, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support For reasons above.  Also, noting, that headlines are often not even written by the author of the article or even a sub-author and often by a "headline writer" doesn't (have time to) really learn the article. They are written as clickbait, to grab attention, to sound cute/catchy  (e.g. plays on words) and server other purposes than being a summary of the article.    Even in a perfect world they would be an inherently faulty summary due to brevity. North8000 (talk) 15:23, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I realize I'm in the minority here, maybe even a minority of one, but I never really understood these ideas about the unreliability of headlines. Headlines are vetted by the same editorial staff that vets articles. If we don't trust a source to write reasonably accurate headlines, then we probably shouldn't trust that source at all. Yes, headlines are summaries and therefore lack nuance, and we need to avoid using them out of context, but headlines are subject to editorial oversight at reputable sources just like articles are. I don't understand the contention that because headlines are written by "specialists", they are therefore unreliable, either. Again, they are subject to final editorial oversight just like the rest of any published article. Anyhow, I realize that "headlines are unreliable" has become accepted and unquestioned wisdom at this point, but I feel that the assumptions on which this idea is based are faulty. MastCell Talk 17:12, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Re lack nuance: The lack of nuance alone is problematic; that is compounded by loss of context. Those are not issues in body text. It’s not so much a matter of 'reliability of headlines' as it is 'reliance on headlines' given the lack of nuance and loss of context. Humanengr (talk) 18:22, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per MastCell, specifically "If we don't trust a source to write reasonably accurate headlines, then we probably shouldn't trust that source at all." Headlines are crafted well enough to attract copyright due to the skill involved, so they should be viewed as the product of editorial oversight too. Lack of nuance isn't an issue of reliability - it should not be possible for someone to be able to use a headline here to support a claim, when it is obvious from discussion that the intended use is ignoring nuance present in the article. But if even so called reputable outlets are reacting to clickbaot headlines, they should be punished by not being given the respect of Wikipedia. Jenga Fet (talk) 18:02, 10 August 2020 (UTC) — Jenga Fet (talk&#32;• contribs) has made few or no other edits outside this topic.
 * The headline of this vote (‘Oppose’) is contradicted by its body text: it should not be possible for someone to be able to use a headline here to support a claim, when it is obvious from discussion that the intended use is ignoring nuance present in the article. Humanengr (talk) 17:32, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * No, it is not "contradicted by its body text". The text is calling for the applicaton of good judgement, not the heavy-handed blankt ban called for by the proposal. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:56, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - Headlines are generally not vetted by the editorial staff. They are normally a different department than the writers and editors which may not even have input. The purpose of the headline is to get views and attention to the article. There are plenty of examples listed in the background of this RFC that show headlines may not even be an accurate summary of the article. Again that is not actually the purpose of a headline. Bottom line if the headline is not supported by the body then it is certainly not verifiable. If the information you wish to source is only covered in the headline of the article then it is probably not due, probably not subject to editorial oversight, and just there to draw a reader in. Why not set a higher bar for sources instead of a lower one? PackMecEng (talk) 18:24, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support: Again and again I have seen a story from the AP printed by different newspapers with wildly different headlines over the exact same story, and the headlines were often misleading clickbait. One time I saw an AP story that talked about wolves being taken off the endangered species list. One newspaper chose the headline "Good news! Wolves make amazing comeback!" Another wrote "Federal government OKs hunting of endangered wolves". --Guy Macon (talk) 18:42, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support with the caveat of covering notable headline text in its own right (i.e. Dewey Defeats Truman). I literally cannot think of a time when a headline text would be used in isolation and without regard for the actual text of the article in question. There can't possibly be a reason to use a headline and only a headline.  If it's saying anything useful, it should be supported in the article text in question.  If it literally exists in the headline alone, why are we using it to support writing in Wikipedia's voice???  -- Jayron 32 18:45, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose in current form, first of all because of MastCell's points, and second of all because this proposal goes too far. Yes, it is often the case at some sources that headlines are less reliable than the body, but at RSP we almost always use the language generally reliable or generally unreliable (emphasis added), whereas the proposals here so far just blanket state unreliable, which is stronger even than the language we use for e.g. the National Enquirer. At the highest-quality sources like The New Yorker, I'm fairly sure that headlines are put through the same rigorous fact-checking process as the rest of the publication, and I would challenge anyone who supports calling headlines unreliable without caveat to make a persuasive case to me that New Yorker headlines are unreliable. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 19:05, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * See New Yorker 10/30/2017: What Does Tulsi Gabbard Believe?. Humanengr (talk) 19:28, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * , the question of that headline doesn't seem to have any discernible premise, other than that Gabbard has beliefs. Could you clarify your point? &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 18:40, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I was reminded of that headline by 's cmt below: headlines may be useful, not so much in that they provide any new information not found in the article itself, but in identifying the source's main thrust. On that, the headline indicates the focus of the article is Gabbard's beliefs whereas that is only a very minor fraction (<1%) of the article. The 'main thrust' of the article concerns one of her spiritual teachers. It gets into that after a bridge that insinuates given the framing provided by the headline — in a way that can't be fact-checked — that Gabbard is disingenuous about 'What she believes'. Humanengr (talk) 08:30, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * No one so far has responded to my argument about Unreliable vs. Generally unreliable. If this does end up passing, I would at least want it to be be written better, so that we don't end up deprecating Atlantic headlines more strongly than National Enquirer body text. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 18:46, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I feel this is overly specific advice as writers can employ rhetorical devices mid article, too. Personally I suggest guidance that all source material should be interpreted within its context. isaacl (talk) 19:06, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose I think this is mixing click-bait headlines with regular ones, I don't think you can make a single general statement about all headlines. I also don't think this is such a big deal that requires a separate section in WP:RS, in most case the article text will provide the same information, probably just with less punch. Thanks. Mike Peel (talk) 19:10, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * It’s not the same information if it has less ‘punch’. Humanengr (talk) 18:54, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support in some form. Caution about using headlines as a source should be a guideline on Wikipedia. For those who are sceptical about the utility of a guideline like this, I spent many months arguing initially one but later several users who thought that "China virus" should be in the lead as an alternative name of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, the cause of COVID 19 sourced entirely to article headlines Talk:Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2/Archive 6. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:16, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Especially as headlines can be different in the print and web versions, and they are changed far more often than the actual article without a note (go see the URL of an article and it often has the original headline). Headlines use different terms than rest of the article. It isn't even just about "clickbaiting", it's that for Wikipedia's purposes, you always need to go beyond the headline. --Pudeo (talk) 20:54, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support in some form. Headlines may be misleading or contain exaggerations. I'm not sure why someone would use a headline to justify a point - so I am not sure if this is just layers of bureaucracy. --Enos733 (talk) 22:23, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Mastcell is incorrect that headlines are vetted by the editorial staff, they are not. They are written for space and clarity if in print, and if on the web, to draw your eye, and that's what leads to clickbait. This gets even the best sources like the NYTimes in trouble (see the mess over Lawrence Lessig regarding Epstein). For our purposes, they are only a means to identify a specific article in a work for referencing, and that's it. --M asem (t) 04:02, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * To add to my !vote, the other issue is that even if a headline was factually true, there is almost no reason to use a headline by itself in isolation from the rest of the article as a source. A headline should be like our ledes; it should properly duplicate information found in the article body and not be introducing something novel. So while some headlines may be reliable from some sources, they are still "sources to avoid" on the general principle of things; there's just simply not enough context in that few characters. -M asem (t) 14:49, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support: if I had a dollar for every time I came across a clickbaity or inaccurate headline... Bowler the Carmine (talk) 05:09, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose, mostly per MastCell. Headlines should be given the same scrutiny as the underlying sources. The claim that headlines are not subject to editorial control, while it may be true in some case, lacks evidence that it is a widespread practice. I'm also not aware that we have a problem with editors writing article content based on headlines anyway. This might be worth considering if someone could point out a few dozen cases where articles were damaged by editors citing headlines. - MrX 🖋 12:33, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Where is a situation in which you would want to use a headline of an article that is not supported by the body? I can think of plenty of situations where the inverse is true but not the other way around. It is also something that seems to pop up over and over at RSN with the same outcome as noted below, so why not codify that into policy? Finally we need positive affirmation of the reliability of a source, the discussions at RSN and on WP:HEADLINE are enough to show, at minimum, large inconsistencies in the way sources handle headlines. So unless we can show a particular source has the required oversight to meet RS in their headline section we have a problem. PackMecEng (talk) 15:33, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't have one that I'm currently working on but it's conceivable that such a case may arise at any time. I find that it's usually the same few editors arguing against headline reliability and always without presenting evidence of it being an issue. To me, this would be like arguing against other components of a source like photos, captions, dates, bylines, quotes, and so on. - MrX 🖋 19:30, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Weird because examples are listed below. Who are these same few editors you allude to? It seems most here have given reasons, examples, and diffs either above or below in the discussion but the oppose side of the argument do not. Instead pointing to vague ideals and equally vague accusations. It would be helpful if you could show some examples of wanting to use a headline that is not supported by the body of the source being useful or due. I think you would have an extremely hard time of that because it is a situation that basically does not exist. PackMecEng (talk) 19:41, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * If by weird you mean WP:CREEPY, then I agree. Those are links to discussions, not examples of unreliability. They are not indicative of a common problem that needs to be solved with a content guideline. For example, in discussion #5, we shouldn't have to ask if a Splinter headline is reliable, when the real question is "Is Splinter reliable?" #3 mostly consists of bare assertions plus a topic ban violation. - MrX 🖋 20:15, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose, primarily per MastCell. If a source uses "clickbait" headlines, the problem is that the source is clickbait and should not be used, not that "headlines are unreliable." In reputable publications, the headline summaries the body of the article. Thus, headlines may be useful, not so much in that they provide any new information not found in the article itself, but in identifying the source's main thrust. That is useful when considering matters of weight. In any case, it is telling that there has been no evidence presented that we have a problem with editors writing article content based on headlines. I would like to see some real evidence of a substantive problem before we make rules. Neutralitytalk 15:34, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Listed below in the discussion section are several examples of problems with people citing headlines where the body of the sources does not support it. Also if the body supports the headline there is no problem, this discussion if for when they do not match. PackMecEng (talk) 15:39, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * It seems the issue comes up pretty rarely, and when it does the issue is mostly about due weight, not about "reliability of headlines." Note also that one of those discussions is about the Daily Mail, which is formally deprecated anyway) and several of those past discussions are not really tied to a specific issue in an article. Neutralitytalk 15:49, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:CREEP. A headline isn't a separate source; it's part of a source.  And it is not explicitly identified as such.  Interpretation of sources should be based on study of them as a whole, not by cherry-picking particular sentences.  Trying to subdivide sources in this way is taking wikilawyering too far and will lead to vexatious arguments about chapter headings, footnotes, captions and other tyopgraphical entities. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:16, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support in some form. I wouldn't go so far as to say that they're unreliable, but they should be treated differently than the body of the article, and should never be used to support something that isn't explicitly stated later on in the body. The notion that high quality sources don't use clickbait or misleading headlines is easily disproved. Just today I clicked on this headline from the BBC because it clearly implied that Joe Biden had picked a running mate. (He hasn't afaik.) Does this make the BBC a "clickbait" source that should be avoided (as User:Neutrality said above)? Probably not. It just means you need to look deeper than the headless if you want to use something as a source. ~Awilley (talk) 17:55, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per Masem, Awilley and other support voters. Even top-quality news media like New York Times and BBC use clickbait headlines. If we didn't use sources that used clickbait headlines, we'd have no news media sources at all. Le v ! v ich 20:41, 11 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support When browsing the NY Times online, oftentimes the headlines that show up on the main page are different than the body of the article. Headlines are often meant to be sentimentalist generalizations and should be treated accordingly. Zoozaz1 (talk) 02:37, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Agree with that headlines should be treated differently than the body of the article and in particular they …should never be used to support something that isn't explicitly stated later on in the body and 's related if the headline is not supported by the body then it is certainly not verifiable [emphasis added]; and  re faultiness stemming from brevity. Even an ideal headline is (per ) a nuance-deficient summary. That and lack of context mean it should not be relied on for a fact claim. Also agree with  re covering notable headline text in its own right [emphasis added]. Humanengr (talk) 06:10, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per Jayron32 (If it literally exists in the headline alone, why are we using it to support writing in Wikipedia's voice???) and others. -  DoubleCross  ( ‡ ) 15:25, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Headlines are just clickbait. They are not subject to the usual editorial control. (By the way--this is true sometimes even in scientific journals. Nature for example has for many years run at least for the most important articles an headline which is different from the actual title of the article) .  DGG ( talk ) 16:03, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I mean... Support the notion, but Oppose adding any specific guidance to that effect. We really don't need to legislate every tiny thing.  G M G  talk  16:07, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I don't think this requires legislation; it should be left to editorial discretion on a case-by-case basis. Some publications have a reputation for exaggerated headlines, and that's reflective of those publications' editorial approach. As others have said above, in such cases, the issue's therefore more one of whether the publication should be considered reliable at all. Or, it could just come down to a particular article–publication combination. If any relevant statement is added, it should certainly stipulate the type of headline because of the nature of the publication: A newspaper/site or news service reporting on current events or other hot, trending issues is out to attract readers right here, right now; a news headline in an arts/entertainment magazine, say, or related industry publication is out to grab the reader also, but the audience is usually theirs already. JG66 (talk) 06:40, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Question Can you link to examples of reliable sources saying something in a headline that is not in the article itself?  D r e a m Focus  02:49, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * For a fact-based news article, i.e., not an opinion piece? And excluding obvious errors?  I can't think of any that I've seen recently.  Sometimes headlines are unintentionally funny, but it's pretty unusual to find a headline that says "Dewey Defeats Truman" above an article that says Truman defeated Dewey.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. If this requires any clarification, it requires no more than a footnote that headlines should not be cited for content not in the body of the story (unless the headline is itself a subject of discussion. Overkill. The Big Bad Wolfowitz (aka Hullaballoo). Treated like dirt by many administrators since 2006.  Fight for freedom, stand with Hong Kong! (talk) 04:50, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This is simply overly broad and not needed. Our existing policies should be sufficient. -- Calidum  05:50, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - Headlines are written by editors who are hilariously out of the editing loop, and further tweaked by algorithm. Bot-generated A/B tested headlines may get clicks, but are not journalism. Schierbecker (talk) 04:30, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support: this is a point worth covering in our guidelines because it is natural for editors to make arguments based on headlines. Some people are arguing that if we cannot trust a headline then we cannot trust the source. Unfortunately this would leave us having no news media sources to work with, or worse, repeating deliberate spin and misleading descriptors rather than factual content. Headlines in the modern world consist solely of political propaganda, appeals to emotion, clickbait and other tricks to drive up engagement and revenue. In some cases the bodies of the articles are not much better, but we need something to work with to build our articles from. I do not trust headlines from The New York Times, the BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald etc. Additionally, headlines generally vary between print and online editions, are regularly changed after publication (in the online case) and can even vary between the same version of the article (A/B testing)! — Bilorv ( talk ) 10:13, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support I've seen headlines in reputable sources that misstate or even directly contradict what the publication's body states, and I recently had a Wikipedia editor attempting to make a claim based solely on what a headline said rather than what was in the cited publication. Meters (talk) 22:08, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support sorry but too often I find headlines that make statements that are not supported in the article, particularly about political issues. There are sources discussing headlines that I think show that we shouldn't use them. The conservative Washington Examiner, the now defunct progressive Think Progress which explains why the article's writer doesn't write them, with the 3rd reason that "there’s a corrupt bargain. As a writer, you want to put together a responsible, defensible article. But you also want lots of people to read your article. An irresponsible, overblown headline can attract readers. But then you look irresponsible! The ideal scenario is for headline-writing to be someone else’s job. That way, they can err on the side of grabbing attention and if people complain you can always disavow it."  Doug Weller  talk 14:31, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. We should selectively reject headlines just a we should selectively reject content found in the body of an article/source. Bus stop (talk) 14:50, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per everyone else. Even if we find better wording for this proposal, I cannot imagine any situation when the content of the headline would be deemed preferable to the content of the body of the source. Headlines are often consciously simplistic 'eye-catchers', that misrepresent the body text. Pincrete (talk) 17:42, 17 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose Seriously, a whole subsection on this? Not just a sentence, or a footnote, but a whole ===Subsection=== just about headlines?  No, thanks, that's too WP:CREEPy for me.  I wonder whether the supporters – pinging Schierbecker, Bilorv, Meters, Doug, and Pincrete as being the most recent –  actually think their concerns about headlines really require an entire ===Subsection=== in WP:RS, or if they might settle for something a little less verbose.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:14, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment I don't care whether it is a subsection or something else, as long as it is made clear. Are you opposing simply because you don't want to see it as a subsection?Meters (talk) 23:22, 18 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Meters, for clarity, I think it's a bad idea to add this, because we are not having any actual problems with this. We should not endlessly expand guidelines to cover situations that are easily handled in normal, everyday discussions.  But if and only if we have to have a statement about such a common sense thing, then let's not create a whole separate ===Subsection=== for it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:40, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Ditto Whether it be a sentence, a phrase or a sub-section doesn't seem to matter, To be honest I hadn't noticed 'sub-section", but whatever briefly makes the point clear works for me. Pincrete (talk) 09:24, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not clear on what you're suggesting. "Less verbose" than what—I can't see any specific prose mentioned here. For the sake of argument, let's agree that we need to add some text somewhere about headlines. In this hypothetical case, where in our policies and guidelines do you put the text? — Bilorv ( talk ) 11:26, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not convinced that it's needed. No evidence is given that there are intractable disputes around this.  But you don't normally propose the creation of a whole ===Subsection=== if you only want to stick one sentence or a footnote into a guideline.  Currently, the shortest subsection in that guideline is three sentences long, and most of them are multiple paragraphs.
 * If we truly need to say this, even though there are apparently no ongoing disputes about editors trying to cite the headline "The Sun is Really Big" when the body of the source says the opposite, or when the source doesn't mention the Sun's size at all except in the headline, then a quick mention in the existing WP:NEWSORG subsection would IMO be more than adequate. Or maybe we should consider a general admonition to read the whole source, not just the two sentences you saw in Google Book's snippet view, or the headline you read on a paywalled news article, and to only cite a source in support of a sentence if the overall thrust of the source is towards supporting that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:38, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Strong Support. Headlines, in mass media, are the most creative part of any text: their aim is not to convey as much information as possible but focus on the part that attracts the most attention. (It was not always like this. Newspapers of yore used to carry a lot of information in their headlines, especially the front-page ones, and space be damned: Check out a typical New York Times headline here.) Headlines cut corners, are imprecise, generalize, and do not follow sources too closely. In our day and age, in particular, the age of click-baiting, the focus has shifted even more away from accuracy and towards attracting attention. Headlines today are generally the least reliable part of an article. Who says this? Well, myriads of sources, e.g. the Harvard Business Review here (" if only the media were less distractible and headlines more accurate"); statistical research such as this ("Functionally speaking, headlines are simplifying mechanisms that summarize and attract attention to what lies below. Headlines and full-text stories both have been separately coded for emphasis.The analysis shows a considerable difference between articles and their headlines in terms of emphasis and issue salience. [Readers] who scanned headlines were supplied with a different set of heuristic cues than those paying closer attention"); articles such as this in The New Yorker by psychologist Maria Konnikova, tellingly titled "How Headlines Change the Way We Think"; etc. -The Gnome (talk) 10:08, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. Normally any headline-content should be reflected in the body of an article. If the headline isn't reflected in the body of an article, there are good reasons to call the reliability into question. It is known that headlines can skew to sensationalism to draw attention, or be oversimplified for space reasons, and that they do not always go through the full normal editorial process. I believe I recall some news authors expressing unpleasant surprise at how some headlines had been drastically rewritten late in the process. As some have commented, it's fine or even preferable if this can be added as a sentence rather than a full section. And to explicitly note an obvious technicality, a headline is of course reliable for the purpose of documenting itself. Alsee (talk) 23:28, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. I don't clickbait has anything to do with it. I've concluded that articles are written by journalists and headlines by interns. A recent headline elsewhere reported that bats fly further than wildebeest and caribou. I'm sure the underlying article was better crafted. Georgia Army Vet Contribs Talk 23:45, 23 August 2020 (UTC)
 * OPPOSE I don't see any evidence of this being such a great problem we need a rule on it.  D r e a m Focus  04:04, 27 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose – I do not buy into the idea that we should excuse publications that write misleading headlines and I would like to see a write up of the proposed addition. While I support the idea, I am hesistant this addition will be used in debates to excuse publications, as a counter to the argument that misleading headlines form a portion of the evidence against the reliability of a publication. I would like an additional sentence or footnote that to that effect repudiating such misuse. --- C &amp; C ( Coffeeandcrumbs ) 17:36, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support headlines are written to sell papers (old world) or as click bait (new world) thus they tend towards sensationalism not accuracy. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 18:42, 1 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose This proposal and many comments supporting it (note references to "clickbait" and "interns"), suffer from recent-ism. Historic headlines, for example, may be both reliable and useful. Editors should be trusted to exercise good judgement, and to make choices depending on the circumstances. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:52, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. I mean, we're talking about using headlines to reference statements of fact, right? Well when the heck are you going to ref a headline when the accompanying article doesn't support the assertion??? Never I hope. If you have a headline "Senator Smith Says New Monetary Policy May Spark Inflation" but the article doesn't say that -- Smith said no such thing, or what he did say was far more complex and bound about with conditions and exceptions -- are we really going to write "In 2020, Smith said that the new monetary policy might cause inflation" amd ref that to the headline??? Really? Wouldn't that be... bad? Herostratus (talk) 03:36, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Herostratus, can you give a real example? Have you ever seen an editor try to do that? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:11, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I can't, and I don't recollect doing so. I believe that one or two people above have vouchsafed the existence of examples, but the number must be vanishingly small. On that basis, leaving things as they are would be OK too on grounds of avoiding instruction creep, I guess. Herostratus (talk) 01:12, 14 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Herostratus, I think you're right about this being instruction creep. Some might call it a solution in search of a problem, even.  Obviously you wouldn't want to use a headline that directly contradicts an article.  But if you need to actually be told that, with a whole ===Subsection=== about it, then I kind of doubt that you should be editing Wikipedia at all.  I wonder what edits the OP is trying to stop with this proposal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:50, 16 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Support If there is useful and reliable content in the text after the headline, use that. If there isn't, the headline is misleading. Exception of using headlines as a source for themselves as headlines. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 10:31, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose strongly. A headline is usually the most important point that an author is trying to convey to the reader. Therefore, this is something which deserved a special attention by the reader. Claiming that it must be ignored is absurd. Yes, a headline may or may not be strongly supported by the content of the article. This must be checked on the case to case basis. Usually it is supported to significant degree. Making a declaration in advance that [all] headlines are unreliable [content] goes against our core Verifiability policy. It is just as reliable or unreliable as any other content in a publication. My very best wishes (talk) 14:39, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Headlines are rarely written by the author of an article. The editorial staff is in charge of those and they are trying to get clicks or sell papers. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 15:17, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Why do you think so? The titles of scientific articles are always written by authors of the publications; the editorial staff has nothing to do with this. Do you mean that in newspapers the titles of the publications are written without consent of their authors? Any studies to support such claim? My very best wishes (talk) 19:48, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The Gnome gave some rather good sources in their post above, it's worth a read they put it better than I could. Do you have anything that supports the notion that titles of scientific articles are always written by authors? I don't think I have ever seen that before. PackMecEng (talk) 20:03, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * These publications make an excellent point that in addition to reading the headline, one must read the entire publication and think what it actually tells, because the headlines are occasionally misleading and always oversimplifications. I completely agree with this. But it does not justifie that the headlines should be simply ignored, as this WP proposal suggests. To the contrary, the reader should pay a special attention to the title. That is exactly what authors of the cited publications did. As about scientific papers, well, it does happen, although not often, that a reviewer (not editor) suggests to change the title of a paper, but in all such cases it results in a better title. My very best wishes (talk) 20:28, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Does ’s alternate proposal below — with its if, may be, and often —adequately address your concerns? Humanengr (talk) 22:47, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * No, absolutely not. They suggests the following: "Headlines are written too quickly and briefly grab readers' attention, and may be overstated or lack context. They are often written by copy editors instead of the researchers and journalists who wrote the articles". This is simply not true, but exactly the opposite. Yes, the title of your paper or a book grabs the reader's attention. Everyone knows that. Therefore, all authors (even such as me) spend a lot of time to properly title their articles, so this is actually a good descriptive title to properly reflect the idea of the publication. Speaking about researchers, no one ever decides the title for them. A reviewer or an editor might suggest something (this is a very rare occasion), but it is exclusively authors who decide the title.My very best wishes (talk) 03:25, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * For traditional print newspapers, headlines are written by copy editors experienced at doing so because they need to fit the headlines into the available space like a puzzle, while respecting various rules for layout, succinctness, and revealing the main point of the story without stealing its thunder. See "How to Write a New York Times Headline" for more details. Also see "Hey, Google! Check Out This Column on Headlines" on how the need to put keywords in the headlines has changed things, including an expanded set of editors who may write or tweak headlines. On the web, layout considerations are much less important, but the other rules remain. isaacl (talk) 05:07, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. If the body of an article does not make the point that the headline does (which does happen), the headline alone should not be relied upon to source content in an article. Schazjmd   (talk)  15:15, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per Schazjmd (immediately above me). - Dank (push to talk) 03:50, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. This has to be done in this age of clickbait and a hyper-competitive media environment. It's not instruction creep, it's necessary instruction. We should not be making it easier for sensational or POV article content to be pushed on the basis of a headline as a source. Crossroads -talk- 03:33, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per the sources provided by the Gnome. Historical headlines may not suffer as much from sensationalism, but if their content is not included in the article, I still think that they shouldn't be used as a source for facts. There are case-by-case exceptions when it makes sense to use or quote the headline, but the general rule still applies. (t &#183; c)  buidhe  23:08, 9 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support - headlines are frequently more click-bait than actual article summaries. For example, today I saw a headline in a Hebrew news website which said something along the lines of "a surprising side-effect of Corona". The article actually talked about a side-effect of stress related to the Corona situation and its related laws, not of the virus and its effect on the body. I have seen headlines which turn out to be quotes from people who argue with the article content. The headlines are never reliable. 46.116.4.50 (talk) 19:37, 14 September 2020 (UTC)

Discussion (Headlines)
Notified: Reliable sources/Noticeboard, Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources, Wikipedia talk:Verifiability, Wikipedia talk:A headline is not a reliable source, Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Reliability. — Newslinger  talk   01:40, 10 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Has there been a recurring problem with people citing headlines? Have there been any cases of use of headlines leading to inaccurate statements in Wikipedia?  If there hasn't its really quite unnecessary to start writing guidelines for a nonexistent problem. SpinningSpark 01:45, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, please see below. —  Newslinger  talk   01:57, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Where is the "below" that shows people are trying to cite only headlines, and that this problem isn't easily resolved through normal discussions, i.e., in exactly the same way that we resolve problems with a sentence or two taken out of context? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:45, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Please see the following discussions on the reliable sources noticeboard for context:
 * (2010)
 * (2014)
 * (2017)
 * (2019)
 * (2019)
 * (2020)
 * (2020, active)

Notified: Template:Centralized discussion. — Newslinger  talk   01:49, 10 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I've seen it many times.North8000</b> (talk) 15:34, 10 August 2020 (UTC)

According to our annotation, Business Insider sends 51 % clickbait, followed by Huffington Post, The Independent, BuzzFeed, and the Washington Post with more than 40 % each. Most online-only news publishers (Business Insider, Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Mashable) send at least 33 % clickbait, Bleacher Report being the only exception with a little less than 10 %. TV networks (CNN, NBC, ABC, Fox) are generally at the low end of the distribution. Altogether, these figures suggest that all of the top 20 news publishers employ clickbait on a regular basis, supporting the allegations raised by bloggers. Potthast, M., Köpsel, S., Stein, B., & Hagen, M. (2016). Clickbait Detection. Advances in Information Retrieval, 810–817. --Pudeo (talk) 20:30, 14 August 2020 (UTC)

Notified: Talk:Piers Robinson#Forge. Humanengr (talk) 06:20, 17 August 2020 (UTC)


 * As I said above, again and again I have seen a story from the AP printed by different newspapers with wildly different headlines over the exact same story, and the headlines were often misleading clickbait. What is to stop a POV-pushing editor from selectively choosing the headline that supports his POV? Also, Wikipedia citations list the actual author when we know it, but authors typically have no control over headlines. --Guy Macon (talk) 20:26, 5 September 2020 (UTC)

Workshop (Headlines)

 * Here is one way this new guidance can be phrased, adapted from the essay A headline is not a reliable source:


 * I think a guideline for chapter/section names in books is definitely too WP:CREEPy. I've never seen anybody try to use the title of a chapter as a source. Ever. I have seen people try to use headlines as sources, which is part of why I support the original proposal. ~Awilley (talk) 00:40, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Also re captions, I see News Co/Lab's Students Guide to Information Disorders: 5. False connection: Headlines, visuals and captions that don’t support the content … re clickbait: eye-catching headlines, visuals and captions that draw readers in, but don’t match the content with captions can often give a certain impression that’s not backed up by the text. This is especially deceptive when people get their news from headlines as they’re scrolling through social media. Humanengr (talk) 06:26, 12 August 2020 (UTC)

Here's an alternate proposal:

This takes a slightly softer approach by specifying when they aren't reliable. ~Awilley (talk) 00:40, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * That's good and better than the first version, but explicitly noting that headlines are a reliable source for themselves when they are the subject would be better still. Thryduulf (talk) 01:25, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Agree, as per for notable headlines. Humanengr (talk) 06:33, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd avoid using the word "notable" as that implies they are notable enough to be the subject of an article, which is extremely rare. Rather most of the headlines we mention are noteworthy only in the context of a much larger article (e.g. the topic the headline is about, a phrase used in the headline, the publication the headline ran in, etc). "Note worthy" might be better but I'm not sure. Thryduulf (talk) 09:36, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Agree with Thryduulf. A (very) few headlines are noteworthy in themselves, particularly if they are taken up by other media or by politicians.  See Gotcha for an example. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 09:57, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * To clarify, I used the word "notable" in the normal sense, not in the Wiki sense. I meant "Some headlines are historically important in themselves and worth talking about".  Those are different from "using a headline as a footnoted source to justify some text at Wikipedia" which we should never do.  In other words, we can talk about the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman" for its own historical significance, but that headline should never be used to verify the statement like "In the 1948 Presidential election, Thomas Dewey defeated incumbent Harry S Truman"  That would be wrong.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 14:26, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Use case: as w/ Gotcha, cite by secondary as headline qua headline? Humanengr (talk) 15:05, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Isn't this a bit redundant as any headline we want to mention in this context is going to be mentioned in secondary sources anyway. AIR<b style="color: green;">corn</b> (talk) 22:53, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Exactly. What Aircorn said. Any headline notable enough to be discussed in an encyclopedia will have secondary sources. ~Awilley (talk) 03:45, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't want to get bogged down in one particular example, but if discussing a headline (using secondary sources) it is a bit stupid not to link to the primary if available so that readers can see what is being talked about. Would not seeing the Sun's front page improve comprehension, or would it just pander to "creepy" wikilawyers? Martin of Sheffield (talk) 07:17, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * There's nothing wrong with linking to the actual headlines in this context. Or even showing a small fair use screenshot of the newspaper itself like at in our article on Headlines. It would be like using a WP:PRIMARY or WP:SELFSOURCE with a secondary source to demonstrate notability. Of course none of this would need to be codified in policy. We're way into Creep territory already. This is just common sense I think. ~Awilley (talk) 14:41, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Agree that headlines via secondary sources need not be codified. (Apologies that my attempt to incorporate suggestions/criticisms contributed to this mini rabbit hole.) Humanengr (talk) 00:03, 16 August 2020 (UTC)
 * @, Maybe fold in per at start of 2nd sentence: Headlines, subheadlines, and other types of labels or captions that are commonly seen in news articles.. Humanengr (talk) 16:05, 12 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't support treating captions the same as (sub-)headlines. While concision is often important when captioning (especially image captions), clickbaiting is not and sensationalism usually correlates pretty accurately with the sensationalism of the prose, unlikle with headlines. Thryduulf (talk) 11:47, 13 August 2020 (UTC)
 * in response to your email (which did not (afaict) include anything that could not have been written here), yes there are examples of captions saying different things to the body of the article but that is nowhere near the same extent as (sub-)headlines and so should be discussed separately. Thryduulf (talk) 09:56, 14 August 2020 (UTC)
 * We still need to change "not a reliable source" to "generally not a reliable source" per the RSP norm. Otherwise, we'll be deprecating Atlantic headlines more strongly than National Enquirer body text, which would be absurd. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 06:14, 23 August 2020 (UTC)

Continuation of workshop
If you would like to help refine the final wording of the new subsection that will be added to the reliable sources guideline, please participate at. —  Newslinger  talk   17:58, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

Past images in articles
I've pinned this section because it needs closing before archiving. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 14:47, 21 August 2020 (UTC)

I would like to discuss what the policy is, or should be, on images that were once used in articles but no longer are. To my mind, such images should be retained, either here or on Commons, because they form part of the history of the page. Deleting old images breaks old versions of the page. It also removes some of the attribution, which becomes a licensing and legal problem for any reusers of old versions of the page relying on hyperlinks for attribution. In my view, we should also retain images used as part of talk page discussions. Sometimes, the discussion makes no sense without the image.

Some background; I deprodded around one thousand images back in May that had been mass proposed for deletion on the grounds that they were not used in any article (although the vast majority of them had once been so used) and the "poor quality" made them unsuitable for Commons. These deprods went largely unchallenged, but there is still a steady stream of simmilar cases turning up in CAT:PROD and the deprod sometimes gets challenged at Files for discussion, the latest case being. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 10:37, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I dunno, how important is it for images to display in old versions of the page? In practice it may also be difficult to know about a file's past usage. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 11:42, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The importance of old images is exactly the same as importance of old text for precisely the same reasons (which are in my opening statement). If you think this is unimportant you need a better rationale than "dunno".  As for "difficult to know", on the contrary, in the vast majority of cases it is very easy to find out.  One has only to check the edit history of the uploader; the image is often used in an article in the very next edit.  Not checking this is just pure laziness on the part of the nominator. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 13:08, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Not sure I understand why old images need to be deleted. If the image was good enough for an article at some point, then it should be moved across to Commons. If the quality is seen as poor, then tag it somehow as "needing a better version". If the image is re-used and somebody is motivated by the poor quality, then a new version will happen. &mdash; GhostInTheMachine talk to me 12:39, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm assuming this is about fair-use images? One of the fair use conditions is for images to be used on pages. We can't be an image gallery for copyrighted materials. If items are free, they should be moved across to commons anyway, so I'm not sure what the policy change here is being proposed? Best Wishes,  Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 13:18, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * No, this is not about fair use. The images being discussed here were all nominated for quality reasons.  They were all uploaded with a free license, usually self-created. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 13:38, 21 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Depends on WHY the old image was removed. If it was simply because editors thought that a new image was better, then we have no problem with maintaining the old image somewhere (such as commons).  However, if the old image was removed for cause (such as violating copyright), then we MUST purge it completely. Case by case situation. Blueboar (talk) 13:30, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed, of course, we should not keep copyrighted images. You say "we" have no problem keeping but the NFF FFD page is absolutely causing such a problem.  Its reasons for nominating include orphaned, obsolete, low quality, and unencyclopedic, all without any reference to policy or guidelines.  All of these can include files that appear in article histories.  And on the last criterion, I have created files in the past to clarify a talk page discussion.  These are clearly unusable in an article but are open to deletion (some have been) under these criteria. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 13:47, 21 June 2020 (UTC)

Response from FFD nominator: User:Spinningspark says they deprodded a thousand images in May. I believe that I have nominated two of those and File:Null-balance voltmeter.png from June at Files for discussion. I believe that it might be useful for other editors to see more than this one cherry-picked example of what they think is valuable to keep. I notice that while at least two people from this discussion have !voted on the image mentioned above, nobody appears to have found reason to !vote on File:Roodog2k-roo1.jpg that is also being discussed currently. Files for discussion/heading was created more than 10 years ago (and I believe that something similar was in use before that, but ten+ years is a lot around here) and listed "Obsolete, Orphan, Unencyclopedic, and Low quality" as four of the five common reasons for nomination, which are still the first four in the header today. At some point in the last few years, images were added to the Proposed Deletion process (at a time when I was less active). There are a few of us who look through the orphaned images from fifteen years ago and try to process them; If they have reasonable source and license and a chance at reuse, we move them to commons;  Occasionally, we find one that we can reuse in an article immediately;  A lot of them are things that may or may not have ever been used in an article and we make a decision on whether or not we think it will be reused. We could leave it behind and hope that when someday someone decides to create Null-balnce voltmeter, they will look back at a 15-year old version of voltmeter and see the perfect image instead of creating a new one themselves, but most of us who do the work have been around here long enough to doubt that will happen. The other problems with leaving the image behind are (a) that it will sit in the swamp of orphaned images that we slog through and we will have to look at it each time we pass through and make the same decision repeatedly and (b) that the various ways to look for orphaned images will not actually display all 75000, but only the oldest ones. If any of you hearty souls who feel that these old images really belong over at Commons would like to help out with moving old orphaned images to Commons, I would love to have the help. As long as WP:FFD continues to describe many of these ancient images as common reasons for nomination, I will continue to nominate them through whatever process avails itself. ★ Bigr   Tex  23:07, 23 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I believe that how we handle files is outside the rest of all parts of the other contributions to the history of a article page, and thus retention of older, unused files is not necessary, though we retain the file: space history aspects related to that file that relate to who had uploaded the file and the source/other details. All of our disclaimers to users, and our upload notifications all suggests that the hosting of images (and other AV file types) is wholly separate contributions from mainspace contributions, and while you are still agreeing to make your contribution to the project, it is not being tracked as part of the contribution of the article it will belong to. When looking at contributions to an article, it is not the image that we look at as the contribution, but the text/code that puts the image in place as the contribution, since that image can change independently after that text is added to the article (by a file update). A reuser of an article that is taking images would be required (if they are following the letter) to point to the histories of both the article and all used images to track contributions.  So no, I don't think we're required to keep old images. That said, obviously we delete unused NFC, but I see no reason why we need to delete unused free images unless its clear they are completely unusable or otherwise clearly violate other policies (eg: graphic nudity beyond what's necessary for articles on human anatomy). Poor but not unusable is not a good reason to delete a free image --M asem  (t) 13:57, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The argument is not that old images are needed for attribution, it is that old images allow inspection of previous versions of an article, including meaningful diffs. We don't purge revisions with unused text on the basis of "orphan" or "unnecessary". That's because it can be useful to view old revisions, for example, if wondering why a certain section is the way it is—has an edit from long ago accidentally damaged or omitted an important point? Johnuniq (talk) 04:00, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * But we do have to reconcile that we are required to delete unused non-free images from a copyright and WMF standpoint. When the unusued image is free (for the stuff that can't go to Commons) I fully agree, lets keep it to help with previous revisions of articles, but my point is that if the old image was a proper non-free but since replaced, the file: page should be present that a user checking an old revision can see from the source on the file: page to get an idea of what it is (and even if that's not the case, the description should be sufficient to get an idea, this is why we have this information). We need to delete the "pixels" from the File: page and while we need to "delete" the non-free file page to remove that from being included in scope in article scope, we shouldn't purge the deleted text revisions on the file: for this reason. --M asem  (t) 15:53, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Images not currently in use that are of lower quality than others that do not have any other (offsetting) added educational value are not in scope for commons. A recent dicussion on commons concluded that "image was formerly in use in a wikipedia article" was not a reasonable basis for keeping an image tagged for deletion. One of the reasons mentioned there is an important one unrelated to images directly...we routinely make widescale changes that make previous revisions of a page no longer "as they were at the time" when viewed in article-history. A simple example is a change to a template that makes some formerly-used field no longer visible (same effect as if an image in use at the time were deleted). Images solely for discussion of wikipedia issues and brainstorming (no encyclopediac or educational content) obviously aren't in scope for commmons...they should be tagged Keep local with some rationale so others will be less likely to mis-handle them. DMacks (talk) 14:13, 21 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I also note that WP:CSD F1 and F8 have existed for a looooong time. Some deletion...speedy, not even discussed, of some free images that were once in use, making the old revisions of articles that once had them no-longer-render-as-they-did, is currently a policy. DMacks (talk) 02:36, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * F1 and F8 apply to duplicated images, the former on Wikipedia, the latter on Commons, and what "unused" means is here is open to interpretation. Virtually none of the thousand files I deprodded was a duplicate — that's why they weren't speedied.  Of files that are duplicated on Commons, the vast majority are moved there with the same name as Wikipedia.  There is thus only a speedy problem with a tiny minority of a tiny minority of files, and in any case, they are probably an oversight of the original policy draft.  The original proposal for F8 is here.  This was clearly controversial as the proposal had failed multiple times previously.  Part of the agreed compromise says "If the image is available on Commons under a different name than locally, it must not be used on any local page whatsoever."  In other words, don't delete the local copy if our article uses a different name from Commons.  I also note that the original version of F8 – then I9 says "bit-for-bit identical", in line with the original version of F1.  It got changed in this edit as a result of this discussion with poor participation.  I don't think any of this shows consensus for these deletions.  In fact it shows that we have got where we are largely through undiscussed scope creep. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 14:00, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * It's a policy that supports deletion of currently-unused files in a way that breaks layout of old revisions of an article. DMacks (talk) 15:15, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * We strongly discourage (if even recommend against) image placement layout on articles ("pixel perfect placement") over placing images at relevant text in the document with minimal hints guiding sizing and location. That deletion of images causes these "layouts" to be broken that are not supported by policy is not something we should be worried about. --M asem (t) 15:26, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * That is entirely not the issue in hand. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 15:40, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps "layout" was an imprecise term on my part. Better would be "display" or "content" (whether the image is present at all) let alone the pixel positioning of objects. DMacks (talk) 15:59, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Deleting old images because anyone can prod is ridiculous. It makes looking at old article revisions very hard; it does not save space; it does not save anything; it's a waste of time. Sure, put some energy into deleting old dick pics and similar because discouraging people from using Wikipedia for non-encyclopedic self gratification is useful. However, File:Null-balance voltmeter.png is part of the history of an encyclopedic article. If that should be deleted, why not permanently delete old revisions of text that are no longer used? Johnuniq (talk) 00:10, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * You will notice that (a) I have not voted for keeping the roodog image, even though was aware of the nomination, and (b) it has not actually ever been used in an article so is irrelevant to this discussion. It is easy enough to template images that have been reviewed once so that they need not be looked at again.  That's a really poor jsutification for mass deleting images. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 23:33, 23 June 2020 (UTC)

The policy justification for these deletions is WP:NOTWEBHOST. Images with no potential to be used in article or project space in the present or the future (for reasons including "obsolete, unencyclopedic, low quality") don't need to be here, even if they have been used in articles in the past. Being orphaned is not enough. The text of Template:Orphan image puts it well, I think. (Full disclosure, I placed a handful of those PROD tags, and I've made delete votes based on this reasoning at FFD.) Wikiacc (¶) 01:44, 24 June 2020 (UTC)
 * This. I've previously PROD'd such files as well.  The choice to use PROD over FFD was deliberate; if someone *really* wants to maintain old page histories, then I'm not going to stop them, the file may be restored without fuss.  But IME, this is neither a common want nor need.  -  F ASTILY   00:04, 25 June 2020 (UTC)

Proposal on images in page histories
So let's make a definite proposal to focus this and bring it to a conclusion. I'm deliberately not proposing a definite wording to guidelines so we don't get bogged down in the minutia and address the principle, but the pages that might need editing if this passes include, but are not limited to; I'll make a separate proposal for article and talk pages as I suspect there will be a difference in attitude to the two. Note that the example I raised at the beginning is heading for keep at FFD, so there is prima facie evidence that this has consensus for at least some images. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 11:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Criteria for speedy deletion
 * Proposed deletion
 * Files for discussion


 * pinging previous participants in this discussion to try and finally get some consensus on this. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 10:25, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I disagree with your proposal, but have spent the last two weeks declining to participate because there was no discussion (which implied to me that there is not great interest or support for your proposal) and because there are no instructions for how to participate. ★  Bigr   Tex  15:16, 10 July 2020 (UTC)

Should files be retained so that the appearance of a historical page can be preserved? 17:56, 12 July 2020 (UTC)

Proposal on retention of images in article histories
Proposal: That images that have appeared in past versions of an article should generally be retained. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 11:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. Images that were used in articles should be retained unless there is a specific reason to delete them. I'd make an exception for images that were exclusively used for vandalism, but that's the sort of thing that can be worked out when we get to the detail stage. Thryduulf (talk) 13:04, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support as nom. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 13:08, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose because there's usually an alternative or other reason. If an image has novel educational value, it should be moved to commons. That's what happened with the image that started this discussion (Files for discussion/2020 June 21), so there is no precedent created for "keep because was formerly used" (more than half of the !votes for some sort of keep did not mention that as a basis). Commons is a collection of realistically-educationally-useful images even if they are not in current use, and they get lots of categories there to help future editors find existing images for new article content (maybe another language has been looking for an image of something we already have?). That's true equally if the image is a novel aspect of an article-topic that isn't covered in enough detail to merit an image, or got removed because of NOTGALLERY concerns. However, if an image is simply poorer than an alternative (someone makes an illustration in higher resolution, fixes a typo or other factual mistake, etc) at an alternate filename, then the original file does not have value except for article-historical reasons and I would delete. If it were moved to commons, it would likely be deleted there. Having images of lower-than-alternatives quality or with mistakes makes it harder to find the good stuff to write as best we can. If an image is wrong, then it's too easy for someone not to know that and reuse it (especially external users), in which case we fail our WP:V role. We routinely make changes that cause "old revisions" of large swaths of articles to no longer look the way they did at the time, including being completely broken, content missing, etc, especially in the world of templates, and the site-wide CSS and rendering engine itself. Now that we have section-transclusion and pulling content from wikidata (and have always had embedding of images from commons), there even are tons of "regular edits" (not just widespread things) that make looking at an old revision of page not the same at a later date (or even looking at the current version of a page). Therefore, I don't accept "to see how it was" as a generally valid reason to keep. DMacks (talk) 15:37, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * There is WP:NODEADLINE. If old images should be moved to Commons, then why not actually do so before deleting them locally, instead of leaving a redlink behind? If you can't be bothered to do that, then you shouldn't be cleaning up unused local files. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 18:22, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The question is "should we keep", which I assume because we're here on enwiki means keep on enwiki. That's why I opposed the question as written based on giving alternatives such as moving to commons. DMacks (talk) 03:53, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Importing another thought I mentioned in the previous discussion but forgot to include here in the formal RFC... "delete enwiki images, leading to redlinks in previous revisions" is a fundamental effect of CSD#F8 when commons has a different name for it and of CSD#F1 in general. That's a consensus policy for speedy without discussion, so the proposed policy-change here (keep if formerly used in good faith) seems like it would require abolishing those criteria. That policy talkpage should be alerted. DMacks (talk) 04:03, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I interpret the proposed policy in a completely different way from you. To me, the fact that images can be speedied locally under F8 after transfer to Commons is so untouchable that I can't imagine a new policy changing that, and any proposal which does not explicitly overturn F8 should be read in a way that does not imply that. So for me, the only effect of opposing this policy would be to allow deleting images without transferring to Commons, which seems counterproductive to me. Regarding Commons potentially having a different name for it, we can always create redirects on Commons. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 14:31, 28 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose - I find the supposed need to be able to see exactly what a page used to look like doesn't match the history of how page history is primarily used (for crediting edits toward the existing version, and for tracking editing problems), nor with how we treat anything else here. There are a number of things we do that make looking at an historic (say, 2010) edit different from seeing it exactly as it appeared at the time (for example, we don't subst every template, so the templates all have their modern appearance when we look at the historic edit.) And the upshot of such a policy would be to incentivize putting in pointless photos, because any picture you once put into an article stays on forever, relevant or not. --Nat Gertler (talk) 16:26, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support if they are free images, with some clear encyclopedic value (no random pics of people's genitalia for example). If they can be moved to commons, they should be. If not, kept on WP. But considerations should be made for when improvements have been made and otherwise keeping an equivalent image (eg say a line-and-text drawing at 300x300px is reuploaded at 2400x2400 for better resolution, the 300x300 version is clearly not needed). Oppose for any non-free unused image as per the WMF resolution, we simply can't do that. Comment that I don't see the need to distinguish between image use on mainspace or talk space, because this is near impossible to track when starting from the image page, and would make for an admin nightmare. --M asem  (t) 16:42, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support strongly per keep history. MediaWiki was designed as an improvement over UseModWiki, and one of the main features was keeping all history, not just some. It's important that we keep our history in a useable state because editors may want to go back to find images to re-use, figure out how a page's appearance has changed over time, or revert to a previous stub. There's little value in deleting free images, and a potential for harm. Having been used (and stable) in an article should be a sufficient reason to keep a file. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:51, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Keeping history is important. Deletion does not save space and only wastes time and energy in pointless discussions. It is useful to delete images uploaded for non-encyclopedic reasons in order to discourage self-gratification. That does not apply to images that were useful in articles and which might have some detail that would throw light on article wording. Johnuniq (talk) 23:47, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support (for free images) as long as the image has remained in the article for a significant time (say, at least a month). Storage is cheap, and having an old revision look as close to it used to is very helpful to editors who want to compare an article throughout its history. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 00:19, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per DMacks globally, and oppose for non-free images per Masem. --Izno (talk) 17:53, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Images that were part of an article and still meet the tests in WP:MTC should be moved to Commons so that the article history is preserved. (Otherwise, why not just purge old article versions as well??). — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:35, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose - As others have said, there are already a variety of changes that make pages in the history distinct from how they were at the time. Images form a relatively small proportion of this perceptual gap; the logic that deleting images "breaks" old versions of the pages is incorrect - they are already "broken". I also don't see any convincing reason why images should be retained, apart from "it's part of the history", which in my opinion isn't a convincing reason on its own. Many sites like the Internet Archive already retain a lot of these images anyway. - <span class="nowrap" style="font-weight:bold;font-size:85%;transform:rotate(358deg);display: inline-block;">Axisixa T  C  01:03, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose We should move to commons any image has proper source and licensing information and a possibility of future encyclopedic use, here or elsewhere. If it doesn't, we've listed that we are not a File Storage area for more than 10 years and it should be deleted.  We have existing processes in place to determine into which of those categories an image belongs and some of which have been in place for even longer.  I also find arguments about other history-breaking changes compelling.  ★  Bigr   Tex  03:38, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support for free images. Keeping a non-free image is problematic as per minimal use. Whether it is on commons or en.Wikipedia makes not difference. But commons really doesnot care to keep this old stuff for en.Wikipedia, so if deleted off commons it should be restored back here. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:46, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per ' excellent analysis above. To underline a few additional points: we are not a hosting service. When files get deleted, it happens for a reason. The purpose of revision histories is not to serve as facsimiles of how pages used to appear. We delete unused/deprecated templates as well. Orphaned pages would be nothing more than a maintenance (and watch) burden. But above all: images deemed realistically useful not just in the past but for the future should, can, and are habitually transferred to Commons under current policy. If a need truly arises to see a deleted image in a revision history, you can always ask an admin and a copy will be provided to you. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:38, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose - Images are deleted for a reason. "We used it before" is not a sufficient rationale for countering our deletion reasons. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:45, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * this proposal will not override other deletion criteria such as licensing. It is for when "unused" is the only deletion rationale.  That is why the proposal says "generally" and not "always".  In other words, images previously used should not be considered "unused" but can still be deleted for other reasons. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 07:15, 16 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support File space is not a problem and the images don't actually get deleted anyway. What's most important is maintaining our audit trail as the years pass so that we can fully understand earlier versions of articles which may get munged or distorted.  Copyright is not a long-term issue because all copyrights expire as the years pass.  We should be planning for Wikipedia to last for centuries and it will then be interesting to study the evolution of its content.  Consider the state of content from classical history which is now fragmentary as a result of attrition, decay and malicious destruction. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:42, 25 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per above. We are not a file hosting service.  If necessary, useful images can always be copied to Commons.  Without an obvious way to check if an image was previously used in an article, this is not enforceable. -  F ASTILY   22:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose Solution without a problem that's likely to cause new problems. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:04, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support  to keep history. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 10:09, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose im someone who has historically gone through orphan images. I think this is useful because some good images are buried in all the garbage, often not properly labeled and essentially never categorized. But the only way to find them is to delete the garbage as you go. If all images that were ever used in any article had to stick around, it would make the task of sorting the wheat from the chaff even harder than it already is. I think the potential identification of good images among the garbage is more important than the preservation of old page histories. Calliopejen1 (talk) 17:39, 16 September 2020 (UTC)

Proposal on retention of images in talk page histories
Proposal: That images that formed part of a meaningful talk page discussion (in any namespace) should generally be retained. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 11:45, 26 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. If an image has been used on a talk page in any meaningful way then it should be retained unless there is a specific reason to delete it. Thryduulf (talk) 13:05, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support as nom. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 13:09, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. If the loss of images makes a discussion in a talk page archive unintelligible, it may be necessary to hold the discussion all over again, which is likely to be a waste of everyone's time. If an editor who provided a useful image in the past is no longer a participant, the results of the redundant discussion may be inferior to the result of original discussion. Jc3s5h (talk) 13:14, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Semi-support as long as two tagging processes are used:
 * An image whose discussion reveals a mistake gets clearly tagged as having a mistake (comparable to c:Template:Disputed diagram) to alert anyone who stumbles across the image (for example, looking at an older version of an article!).
 * An image that is incorrect, clearly lower quality than alternatives, or created solely for discussion and workshopping gets tagged Do not move to Commons. License-compliant images are generally moved to commons for benefit of all, but if there's no benefit for anyone else to have or it's not in their scope, they will just delete it and we'll have lost what we wanted to have.
 * And this is all predicated on discussion/image itself being in good faith and seeing the image likewise being useful (per one of Nat Gertler's concerns in previous section). We routinely remove talkpage content for NOTSOAPBOX or spam purposes, so a discussion of such an image might be valid but the image itself in bad faith (bad-faith content even of images should be removed). DMacks (talk) 15:46, 10 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose only because from the file: space standpoint, we cannot easily tell when images have been used elsewhere after they have been removed. It doesn't make sense to create distinctly different policies here. --M asem (t) 16:43, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support per above. If a discussion centers around an image, deleting it removes the context of the discussion and makes it more difficult to understand if not completely useless. — Wug·a·po·des​ 20:53, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support It is sometime necessary to dive into history to understand why an article is the way it is, and what might be done to improve the article. Deletion does not save space and only wastes time and energy in pointless discussions. Johnuniq (talk) 23:49, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Images used on talk pages are often central to the conversation, which cannot be easily understood otherwise. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 00:21, 11 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per DMacks globally above, and oppose per Masem specifically for talk pages. --Izno (talk) 17:54, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Images that are part of a meaningful talk page discussion and meet the tests in WP:MTC should be moved to Commons so that the talk page history is preserved. (Otherwise, why not just purge all talk archives??). — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 20:35, 12 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose An image that is in use on a talk page or it's archive is not what is being discussed here. We are talking about an image that was used on a talk page but at some point in time was removed from that talk page.  In either case, we have deletion processes that allow for review and movement to Commons for images with valid source and licensing information.  The idea that an editor is going to find a deleted discussion in the history of a talk page to save time from repeating that discussion without understanding how to obtain access to the deleted image or mention it to someone who might feels somewhat far-fetched to me.
 * If an image has a possibility of future encyclopedic use, here or elsewhere, we should move it to commons. If it doesn't, we've listed that we are not a File Storage area for more than 10 years. ★  Bigr   Tex  03:04, 14 July 2020 (UTC)
 * If an image is moved to Commons, it already can be speedied under F8. So opposing this is pointless unless you explicitly want to delete such images without taking the few minutes to move them to Commons, in which case: why? -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 14:25, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Is that question to me? If so, can you rephrase it?
 * I'll try to address it, but I may be answering something different than you were asking: I have no desire to spend time to move an image to Commons if it is going to result in a deletion discussion on Commons because the image has no expected future encyclopedic use; That is a waste of my time, the nominator's time at Commons, the admin's time at Commons, and more of my time when I have to try to remember and justify why I moved it. I prefer using the Proposed Deletion process for those images, but am also happy to use the Files for Deletion process if necessary.  Again, I am talking here about orphaned talk page images that someone uploaded in the (generally distant) past for use on some talk page and is no longer in use on that talk page and for which the discussion in which it was used has not been permanently archived.  ★  Bigr   Tex  03:25, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I see, I think we are interpreting the proposal differently. I assumed that it was referring to images used in talk page archives, because almost all talk page discussions get archived (unlike mainspace edits, which I suggested a separate set of rules for). If an image is part of a legitimate talk page discussion and somehow didn't get archived, then that is an oversight and the discussion should get archived. If an image was used on a talk page and quickly reverted, then I agree that it can be deleted. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 03:37, 29 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I am basing my understanding off of the beginning of the discussion that led to the proposal (above), "I would like to discuss what the policy is, or should be, on images that were once used in articles but no longer are."
 * I suspect that this part of the proposal was prompted in part by Files for discussion/2020 June 12 where one former editor posted a screenshot of a memorable edit count on another former editor's talk page (edit link). It remained there for four days and then was archived by the recipient. It lived in the archive for almost a year before I lose track of it; the recipient asked for all of their userspace content to be deleted when they left the project.  ★  Bigr   Tex  04:14, 1 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose per my comment in the above section and 's comment in this. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 20:38, 15 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per above and per my comments above. - F ASTILY   22:47, 28 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose If they're currently used in an archive, that still counts as in use. If they got blanked off the talk page, they're probably not that important anyway. --AntiCompositeNumber (talk) 17:05, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support Gratuitous deletion in such cases is disruptive and is mostly a waste of time as the files aren't actually deleted. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:12, 25 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Support for future historians, and when no useful purpose served by deletion. &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 10:12, 3 September 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia is engaged in information laundering
First I would like to state that my general appreciation for Wikipedia is enormous, and longstanding. More recent developments have sullied this, however. Most people understand the concept of money laundering. Dirty, unusable money goes in, is channeled through certain places, and comes out as clean, usable money. A similar thing has happened to wikipedia, mostly or exclusively in regard for "hot" current topics. The background and causation is what has happened to the media around the world. Since the internet, news is basically free, so journalists today are forced plumb depths they generally would not have done in previous decades. Often, they resort to championing causes in order to attract consumers who feel good hearing things that agree with their own preconceptions. In short, journalists today frequently lie, blatantly and copiously. This happens with alarming frequency at the most prestigious media organizations. Rather than reacting to this phenomenon in a holistic and robust way, wikipedia (forgive me for labeling wikipedia as a whole for the deeds of certain individuals) has cynically exploited this situation by selectively banishing certain media outlets while blindly repeating material from equally reprehensible organizations or worse. In this way, lies are recycled through corrupt media and appear on wikipedia as clean information, apparently trustworthy and there we have information laundering. This needs to be fixed. Otherwise, the results may include general information pollution with wikipedia acting as a proliferator of lies that may approach the situation under totalitarian regimes, and of course the negative impact on wikipedia's own reputability. There may not be an easy solution, but the first step is undoubtedly to considerably reduce trust in media. Asgrrr (talk) 01:30, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * , Is there some practical/actionable point you wish to make? &middot; &middot; &middot; Peter Southwood (talk): 11:08, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * , I would suggest the basis that all media are now generally untrustworthy. Relax the NOR rule so that OR can be used to dispute material based on media assertions, but not to introduce material. I'm tempted to mention Snopes as an outlet that is regarded as trustworthy by Wikipedia, but frequently publishes dishonest conclusions to the point of absurdity. Since wikipedia needs to retain the services, so to speak, of media outlets, there needs to be a mechanism available to mitigate the damage done by the lapse in professionalism that is latterly apparent in the conduct of media companies in general. Asgrrr (talk) 23:32, 12 September 2020 (UTC)
 * RSN already does original research to check the validity of sources. If there's a track record of a source publishing absurdities and you can prove it, even using OR, you can put it at RSN. Most sources are declared unreliable based on the conclusions presented by RSN participants, not any third-party source. TryKid&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 09:53, 13 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, I am aware this is how the system is supposed to work, but it seems clear to me the system isn't working, based on how many sources are still considered reliable by wikipedia but have become purveyors of propaganda. That this is the situation seems so glaringly obvious to me, that I don't find it very realistic or worth the effort to mount a campaign to get any of them debunked. If that were a realistic prospect, I feel that it would have happened ages ago, so I think it more appropriate to try to call attention to the problem in a more general way. Wikipedia is in deep trouble since fairly recently and better persons than me have called attention to it. For crying out loud, there are prominent pages being held hostage by representatives of terrorist organisations. Pages on non-political, non-current subjects seem unaffected, but how long will that continue? How long until the "Shut down STEM" mindset creeps all over the science articles, just to mention an example? The system is broken and needs to be fixed and I want people to realize that and start talking about it without flinching. Asgrrr (talk) 00:37, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * there are prominent pages being held hostage by representatives of terrorist organisations [citation needed] – Teratix ₵ 00:56, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Try it like this: [ Citation Needed ] (click on the link and see what happens) :) --Guy Macon (talk) 01:41, 18 September 2020 (UTC)


 * I'm curious as to which sources are considered "reprehensible"? Have they been discussed at WP:RSN, and if not, why not? DonIago (talk) 16:02, 3 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm curious about how you would fix this. Who is the ultimate arbiter of truth? You? Us? And how is that an improvement? &#8213; Mandruss  &#9742;  16:08, 3 September 2020 (UTC)


 * People could do what I do when I find a substandard source: replace it with a better one. (Which leads me to my favorite hobbyhorse, can we start purging all of instances where Encyclopaedia Britannica is used in a citation? It's a bad look when we treat our competitor as a reliable source, implying it is better than our efforts.) -- llywrch (talk) 20:55, 17 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Most of the time Encyclopaedia Britannica got written by experts, like reputable full professors. The same cannot be said about Wikipedia. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:01, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I'll simply point you to Harvey Einbinder's book The Myth of the Britannica concerning the reliability of that reference work. The vast majority of its article were not written by experts, but by freelance contributors, whose knowledge of a given topic was about the level of the average contributor to Wikipedia. (Or you can read this online review of the book.) -- llywrch (talk) 23:46, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * It's a very good look when we base decisions about what sources are acceptable on their reliability rather than petty jealousy. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:07, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * See Einbinder's book I reference above. -- llywrch (talk) 23:46, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * We have the ambition to surpass Britannica, but we do not hate Britannica. Tgeorgescu (talk) 21:08, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I didn't say I hated it. I just dislike that we cite it so often & so needlessly. -- llywrch (talk) 23:46, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * It's a competition? We are here to further human access to knowledge, not to become the sole source of it. --Nat Gertler (talk) 00:31, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The EB thinks its a competition. YMMV. -- llywrch (talk) 23:46, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, that is because Wikipedia has put the printed EB out of business. Anyway, I did read the article on evolution, it is written by Francisco J. Ayala, the article on human sexual activity is written by Paul Gebhard. So, at least in these cases, the articles were clearly written by full professors. Tgeorgescu (talk) 11:48, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Unfortunately we are seeing all too many of these vague and ambiguous pronouncements that unspecified problem exists, with the claimant disappearing as soon as specifics are sought. BD2412  T 01:44, 18 September 2020 (UTC)


 * It's fairly obvious that English is not his first language, with that said, we should not criticise him too harshly if what he's trying to say is not expressed in the most precise terms. (this comment is not directed at any particular respondents. Anyway, @User:BD2412, you maybe didn't see that he replied farther up in discussion about one hour before your post (I'm assuming per your comment about him disappearing). I think the point he was trying to make is that, due to the maelstrom of disinformation (and misinformation) over the last 4 or so years, that 'reliable sources' no longer truly exist as they did in the olden days of the 'pedia. Nor could they. This is hardly a fringe notion: there's been much mainstream acknowledgement of this situation, which has become pervasive.


 * So, what I think he's proposing is for the NOR policy to be relaxed to allow content that is 'reliably sourced', but is in fact the product of disinformation to be challenged and removed if it can be proven to be so, even if 'original research' be used in doing so. I assume in the form of SYNTH would be most likely. I would support this idea, personally. Note, this would only apply when challenging content for removal, never for adding content.


 * On the other hand, I can also see how this could be abused, too, though. And my opinion is that this is already permitted under the scope of WP:NOR policy (after all, there's no obligation to include anything and everything just because it's reliably sourced), and I can see how if the policy were reworded to specifically make this allowance, it would be abused by countless obstructive editors and their sockpuppets. Firejuggler86 (talk) 01:07, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you for taking my point and tackling it head on, Firejuggler. I have foreseen the same problems you mention, but one has to start somewhere. Admitting there is a problem is of course the bare minimum. Asgrrr (talk) 22:49, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * To be clear, the gravamen of my response is that "all media are now generally untrustworthy" is a hopelessly vague statement, since "all media" can mean just about anything. BD2412  T 01:44, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
 * It does mean everything and anything. What is vague about that? You name a news/information outlet, it's untrustworthy. Or that would be the policy. Asgrrr (talk) 22:49, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

A different conclusion could easily be reached: The realization that Wikipedia is unable to handle the task of presenting information on current events, and that all such articles should be removed, temporarily anyway. Who expects an encyclopedia to be up to date on recent events anyway? That is one way to stop the rot, and would probably save the rest of wikipedia from becoming corrupted because the editors involved would lose interest and leave. Asgrrr (talk) 22:49, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Do you have any examples you can present here? By example, I mean a Wikipedia article of somewhat-good quality that contains information from a source considered reliable but that is actually untrustworthy. El Millo (talk) 23:28, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes I do have such examples and I can present them here, but I'm not going to and I have hopefully sufficiently explained why I don't intend to, for the time being anyway. Or what would be the purpose of that? Import the debates on those articles' talk pages into this forum? Asgrrr (talk) 23:59, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

ArbCom 2020 election RfC
Requests for comment/Arbitration Committee Elections December 2020 will close in a few days. One proposal that might pass is to require a minimum of 15 supports for a proposal to pass, but there are several proposals mutually exclusive proposals that have not had that level of engagement (i.e. "Do X" and "Do not do X" both have fewer than 15 supports). To avoid any complications from this it would be very useful if more editors could express their opinions. Thryduulf (talk) 12:02, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Is listing dramas broadcast by a television station still against the policy?
What Wikipedia is not says:

"an article on a broadcaster should not list upcoming events, current promotions, current schedules, format clocks, etc., although mention of major events, promotions or historically significant program lists and schedules may be acceptable"

Recent I found two pages, List of dramas broadcast by Vietnam Television (VTV) and List of dramas broadcast by Sanlih E-Television both still exist. Is it still against the policy? Xiao Wang (talk) 04:20, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Not sure I'd interpret it that way. The articles list program lists from preexisting airings, rather than upcoming ones. But I'm also not certain those two articles don't fail WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE.--WaltCip- (talk)  14:54, 24 September 2020 (UTC)

Votes for Drafting?
Hi! I've had a couple of articles recently changed to drafts instead, about Amador Granados (a Mexican actor who has been in plenty of movies, there are many-I admit-non reliable sources available about him but if you just google him you will see he is well known) and about Felicilandia, an old Puerto Rican amusement park. These articles just had someone come "bang!" like that and changed them to a draft. I propose that instead of having people do that-therefore practically disappearing a worked for page from Wikipedia-shouldn't we have a vote instead before that happens? Like AFD but like a vote for drafting, or AFDR, instead? Thanks and God bless you! Antonio Never drafted by anyone Martin (que fue?) 14:59, 21 September, 2020 (UTC)
 * This was recently discussed above at . It was decided that only newly created articles can be draftified without discussion.  Amador Granados was sent to draft the same day it was created.  Felicilandia should not, since it was created four months prior and draftified after the clarification of policy. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 17:41, 21 September 2020 (UTC)


 * The least stressful way to deal with this is to think of the move to Draftspace as a chance to improve these articles. Don’t rely on others to do this.  Do it yourself. The first step is to find more reliable sources and cite them in the articles.  Blueboar (talk) 18:01, 21 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I think that would take us further down the path of draftifying being a form of pseudo-deletion, which it's expressly not supposed to be. Moving to draft should be seen as what it is: an action of a single editor that is subject to WP:BRD like anything else. If you disagree with a draftification, you're perfectly welcome to just move it back to mainspace yourself. The templates used by the draftify script could probably do a better job of explaining this, rather than giving the false impression that it's some sort of "official" decision mandating the use of AfC. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 07:34, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Excellent summary by Joe. Draftification is basically a BRD action made to try and avoid a deletion discussion. If you think that it's not reasonable you can just move it back, and it can be taken to AfD as appropriate. Articles shouldn't be draftified twice Nosebagbear (talk) 10:05, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * "Articles shouldn't be draftified twice" Quite. can we bake that into policy? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:08, 24 September 2020 (UTC)
 * For the record, a 4-month-old article that's not actually looked it a new article that should be subject to draftification just as easily as one created the same day. , another way to look at it is that publishing the article in the first place was the B in BRD, and the draftification was the R.  Then to really get over the D hump, it would have to go through AfC.  Why take this tool away from NPPers if anything can just unilaterally be moved back to mainspace.  This seems a bit bassackwards. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 13:09, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I would say the key to this is a balance between 1) the number of page views the article has received since it was “published” and 2) how often has it been edited. An article with few views and no edits can be considered “new” for months.  An article with lots of views, and lots of edits can be considered “established” after a few days. Blueboar (talk) 13:45, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I think a reasonable rule of thumb would be an article that survives in mainspace either by deliberate patrol by NPP or by hitting the 90-day NPP cutoff is not usually fit for draftifying. --Izno (talk) 15:26, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Because the damage done from a few more AfDs is less than the alternative. Also, your "R" would require it to revert to where it was, but in the event of someone just creating an article from scratch, that wouldn't exist as an option - or R would be a delete, and the Community has already judged on deletion requiring one of the specific processes designed for that purpose. Nosebagbear (talk) 13:46, 22 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Also this. --Izno (talk) 15:26, 22 September 2020 (UTC)

Deprecating usage of the template √ to write root radicals has an RFC for possible consensus.
"Deprecating usage of the template √ to write root radicals" has an RfC for possible consensus. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you.  Walwal20  talk ▾ contribs 02:12, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

What can be done about AFC?
AFC recently had a major failure assessing the contributions of a quite-good apparent education or WP:GLAM project about Korean literature. I really couldn't have designed a better test of AFC's competencies, and it failed miserably. Based on some IP edits that snuck in (not specifying because I don't want to be accused of outing), I believe this was a project of a quite prestigious Korean university. Though many of the articles were about topics that had entries in the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture and cited these encyclopedia entries as references, the majority of the submissions by the project were rejected and deleted. We're talking dozens and dozens of articles that generally were of higher quality than the average existing Wikipedia article. Not a single AFC contributor inquired with WP:KOREA about any of these drafts to ask questions about their sourcing. And despite the sudden influx of articles all on the same topic, no one reached out to the article authors to ask whether a particular project was going on, to try to engage these very valuable contributors. Instead, we sent them templated decline messages and deleted their work. Here are their user talk pages so you can see how they were treated: User talk:Kumquat30, User talk:GoldenAlpha77, User talk:Njoyseon, User talk:Serendipity217, User talk:Seray Lim, User talk:Sojungyang, User talk:Shinewer01, User talk:Benlawrencejackson, User talk:AsterYomena, User talk:SeanLinHalbert, User talk:Minheepark33, User talk:Chaekbeolle. There has been discussion at WT:AFC and Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Korea about this project in the last week, but I wanted to get more eyes on this, because we have a major gatekeeping failure here. I'm not saying that every single article below deserves a Wikipedia article, but the vast majority do, and in almost every case they deserved an evaluation by the community rather than a single reviewer. If this is how AFC is treating valuable good-faith contributors, I wouldn't want valuable good-faith contributors touching AFC with a ten-foot pole. Calliopejen1 (talk) 22:33, 24 September 2020 (UTC)


 * You have also started a discussion at WP:VPM, so this is at least the 4th discussion on the same topic in different places. Please keep discussion in one place instead of starting multiple discussions on the same topic.  RudolfRed (talk) 01:05, 25 September 2020 (UTC)


 * I got involved with AfC about ten years ago and remember having the same discussions then. At this point I've accepted that it's essentially broken by design. AfC is a sump for articles we've excluded from mainspace because they're overwhelmingly likely to be bad. Sometimes good articles end up in there, but it's not surprising that they don't fare well in a process that mostly functions to explain to new users why we don't want they're selling. Any proposal geared around those few good articles is going to fail because 99% of what AfC reviewers have to look at (and it's not a popular job) isn't worth the effort. I find it helps to think of it as a spam filter. You accept that sometimes real emails end up in the spam folder, because you don't want to sort through all of it manually. What you do do is check it every now and again for mistakes; i.e., watchlist an article alert or WP:AFCSORT category for the subject you're interested in and fish out any good drafts; or if you're running an editathon, get the participants "whitelisted" by telling them not to use AfC. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 07:33, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
 * That is the crux of the matter - do everything you can to avoid good-faith editors interacting with AfC because it simply does not work for good faith editors. We should not simply accept this however - we need to reform it or replace it with a system that actually works. As a project we need more good faith editors, especially those who work in underrepresented topic areas, even if they aren't perfect from the start - yet imperfect editors working in minority topics are among the worst treated by AfC. AfC reviewers are experienced at determining whether XYZ Corp, Joe American Businessman or Random Garage Band are notable, they've become familiar with the majority of good sources and mistakes are accordingly relatively rare, which is helped by there being relatively few missing encyclopaedia articles in these topic areas. General sources in these topic areas with which the reviewers are unfamiliar are more likely to be low quality than high quality. Assessing the notability of pre-1900s Korean literary works however is very different - all the sources (good and bad) are unfamiliar, there are limited articles to compare to and (English language) information on Google is limited so the process breaks down. Thryduulf (talk) 10:15, 25 September 2020 (UTC)
 * An example of 's point about good-faith editors working on articles in obscure fields may be this query about turnaround time from a recent new editor who has been using AfC to create articles in free jazz areas, with two accepted this year and a couple more in the queue. AllyD (talk) 10:29, 25 September 2020 (UTC)

Request to stop non-encyclopedic self advertising
Please stop this "Wiki loves monuments" nonsense. We are not a person, but a brilliant encyclopedia for people seeking information. "Send a photo and win..." - so distasteful! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.8.131.123 (talk) 07:33, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree. I wouldn't have bothered to start a discussion about it, but now that it's here, I resent the milliseconds I have to spend dismissing it. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 07:49, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * By the way, I have the Wikilove option unchecked in preferences, so its pretty obvious I don't want Wikilove banner messages. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 09:15, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think that WikiLove-the-profile-option is related to the banner messages which are titled "Wiki loves", despite the similar name. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 09:21, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Still don't want it. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 14:53, 2 September 2020 (UTC)


 * I mean, I am perfectly happy with the "thanks" being enabled and so on, but I am against these banners. I can't disable every banner, but advertorial campaigning ones like this I can do without Nosebagbear (talk) 09:54, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't mind the encouragement or the winning of something; I do mind the "love" opinion being put in the project voice for things that are not integral to the effort. "Wikipedia loves the disseminating of human knowledge" would be fine. "Wikipedia loves reliable sources"? Great. But monuments? Some folks thing they're horrible or inappropriate, tying the world to one vision of the past... and at a time when someone monuments are being torn down (with good reason), I don't think we need to be telling folks "if you dislike monuments or are merely ambivalent about them, Wikipedia is not for you." --Nat Gertler (talk) 15:34, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * In practice, a lot of these so-called "monuments", such as the National Register of Historic Places in the US, are actually mostly architecture, which is much less likely to be objectionable because it was generally built for a functional purpose rather than solely to glorify a person or thing. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 21:54, 2 September 2020 (UTC)
 * , that may be true, but when people see "Wiki loves monuments", they're going to make assumptions, not check a statistically random sampling of monument pages to ascertain the precise characteristics of the group being referred to. I agree with that this is not a good look for us, and that the phrasing should have been thought through more carefully. &#123;{u&#124;  Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 01:56, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The "Wiki Loves X" naming schema is very problematic (even more so for some other topics...), but nobody's ever put forward a proposal for an alternative name for such contests. It's been used regularly over the past decade, and the name limits the topics we can have such contests for, causes occasional neutrality issues, and sometimes strikes the wrong tone for an encyclopedia. --Yair rand (talk) 03:42, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
 * NatGertler, why am I not seeing anything in Monument about the criticism of monuments tying the world to one vision of the past? I'd love to have that included, if you can find a source.    WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:58, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Courtesy pinging and, who appear to be the main contacts for the banner, per CentralNotice/Request/Wiki Loves Monuments 2020. &#123;{u&#124;  Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 01:57, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the pings - i got pinged in turn. First, let me clarify a bit of terminology because I have the feeling we have multiple discussions mixed together:
 * Wiki Loves Monuments is an annual photo competition. The word 'monument' refers to a set of (protected) historic sites that are determined by the government. This definition is different in each country, and many years ago we bit the bullet and went with the word 'monument' which seems to describe his pretty well in a majority of the countries. Notably in the US, this is often confused with 'statues', which are at most a subset. The US would indeed use NRHP but also state and city registers. Most sites are old buildings, things that are part of what we need to remember as society - and that we may want to document for Wikipedia. It is also an outreach effort to engage more people in our movement. And successfully: A majority of participants never contributed to Wikimedia before. This is why we advertise more broadly than to registered users.
 * 'Wiki Loves' is also used for a range of other photo competitions. Unfortunately, the word has become "reused" by some other activities over the years. I don't like it, but I've given up the struggle to argue against it. It may be confusing sometimes.
 * 'WikiLove' is something entirely different: to the best of my understanding it's a software tool to help people express appreciation for a different editor.
 * The banners for Wiki Loves Monuments only run in countries where the competition is held, at that time. For the US, that will be October this year, for India it's September (due to COVID we allowed countries to shift their competition month from the usual September). The banner is then a call to action, and people should be able to upload a photo that they took before. If this is unclear to you, please give that feedback to the national organizers: all these activities are organized on the national level first and foremost, and they probably appreciate input how to clarify their landing pages. effeietsanders 16:29, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Irrespective of what "Monuments" means in the context of the competition, it is presently open to a different and potentially politically charged interpretation. BD2412  T 16:43, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * By insular-minded Americans who have never looked at any of the entries, possibly. Otherwise no. Johnbod (talk) 16:51, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Putting aside the fact that Americans make up a substantial portion of the English-speaking world, why not refer to them as "historical structures" if that is the intent? Also, why do monuments get this boost, while we don't have for example a "Wiki Loves Judges" program for the thousands of missing national-level judges around the world? BD2412  T 17:46, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, volunteers are welcome to start any other photo competition they like. For better or worse, the Wikipedia community hasn't chosen to enforce a priority queue of topics. isaacl (talk) 19:53, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * If it were an en:wp thing, I'd support a rebrand (though not to your suggestion). But it's on Commons, & we are stuck with the name we have - which I think was given its English form by the Dutch or other Continental originators of the idea, and probably makes easy sense to a wide range of 2nd language editors. Judges aren't very attractive, and won't sit still. Was that a serious suggestion? Johnbod (talk) 20:03, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm sure you are free to start any commons (using commons in its legal sense of licence-free media) photo drive you would like (or love), you just gave to go organize it. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:10, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not even talking about photo drives, why do we advertise this photo drive over any other kind of content drive? We have substantial gaps in coverage of topics of great significance. BD2412  T 21:13, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Because it's been a huge success, with "more than 1,7 million pictures submitted by over 60,000 participants" since 2010. Quite a lot of which are either very pretty, or useful, or both. Johnbod (talk) 01:11, 8 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Have you organized any drive you would like a banner for? -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:18, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I haven't been so self-indulgent, because if everyone could get a banner for a drive on their preferred topic, we would have banner ads every day. I prefer to target my drives to relevant WikiProjects, rather than pushing them on the entire community. BD2412  T 21:44, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Anyone interested can start a content drive and request a targeted central notice. There are guidelines and from the calendar of scheduled notices you can see some article-related ones. Drives targeted to specific WikiProjects are great, too. If you don't want to see any central notices, you can change your preferences accordingly. isaacl (talk) 16:06, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

I concur. I am a (minuscule) part of Wiki and I do not love X. Not in my name. Zezen (talk) 18:47, 26 September 2020 (UTC)

Time to start developing inclusion guidelines within cities and neighborhood pages?
I have just read this story published on 18 September 2020 Wikipedia edits have massive impact on tourism, say economists

"An experiment by economists at the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, and ZEW in Mannheim, Germany, found that a few simple edits to a Wikipedia page could lead to an extra £100,000 a year in tourism revenue for a small city, underscoring the power of the free online encyclopaedia."

"In fact, the effect is so large that it raises questions about why more cities around the world don’t do such basic editing themselves, the authors say."

With such things being suggested, it might be beneficial to amend COI policies specifically to address editing of cities/villages/towns by the tourism board and the municipal government. I've actually ran into an incident with the Government of Lake Oswego, Oregon doing its own reputation management white washing on their page last year.

Also is it time to get ahead of the curve and start developing additional contents policy about contents and editing policy regarding cities/regions/neighborhoods articles? For example, policies on the addition of restaurant, venues, notable people and such. Many smallish town articles area already bloated with a list of people who have Wikipedia pages that have lived for any duration of time or attended school there.

Graywalls (talk) 09:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)


 * If this statement is true: this didn't affect en.wiki and so exactly what we can do to stop or limit it is hard to say because each wiki's approach is to COI is different. en.wiki's approach is extremely strong against COI already. --M asem  (t) 13:59, 29 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Our PAIDCOI rules would already cover what was needed (the tough part isn't the rules, it's locating to act on them!). Any contents policy like that seems a recipe for CREEP and bureaucracy. Nosebagbear (talk) 08:21, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * For what it's worth, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Cities/Settlements: Article structure. Graham 87 08:52, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

<span id="RfC on mentioning race or ethnicity in place of nationality in the first sentence of a Biography"> Mentioning race or ethnicity in place of nationality in the first sentence of a Biography
Per MOS:ETHNICITY, The opening paragraph should usually provide context for the activities that made the person notable. In most modern-day cases, this will be the country of which the person is a citizen, national, or permanent resident...Ethnicity, religion, or sexuality should generally not be in the lead unless it is relevant to the subject's notability.

The way I see this most commonly manifested in the first sentence of the lead is as follows: John Doe (born 1980) is an American chef. Essentially, the common format is [name] [(birth date/death date)] is/was [nationality] [occupation/notable descriptor].

However, there are exceptions to this common format. The first is where nationality is too hard to define in one or two words (Elon Musk) and thus is left out of the first sentence (I do not intend to address this here). The second is when ethnicity/race is swapped in place of the nationality. I want to say there was some kerfuffle about this involving Polish Jews some time ago, but particularly now where I see it is with African American biographies. For example, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X. This is by no means uniform though, as Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr. follow the traditional nationality route.

The question here is not whether these persons' ethnicity was important to understanding them and thus warrants a mention in the lead. The question is whether it is acceptable to trade out nationality with race/ethnicity in the first sentence of the lead. If so, are there conditions? Or should we never do it? Should there be a firm policy on this matter? -Indy beetle (talk) 16:03, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Discussion (race or ethnicity)

 * Comment The term "African American" includes the nationality "American", meaning we don't mention ethnicity "in place of" nationality, but in addition to. That's why I don't understand the question. --Rsk6400 (talk) 05:59, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The question is whether we want to define people in ethnic terms or national terms. Irish Americans would be the same. It refers to an ethnic group within a larger country, but it is still an ethnic term. -Indy beetle (talk) 19:14, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for bringing this up, ; it's a very good question to be thinking about. The issue that we ought to be on the lookout for is that dominant identities (e.g. male, white) tend to get coded as default, resulting in situations where we say Jane Doe was a female American astrobiologist but not John Doe was a male American astrobiologist or Stacy Smith was an African American alligator wrestler but not Karen Smith was a white American alligator wrestler. For that reason, more formal standards might be good, since they'd help us avoid inadvertent systemic bias.
 * However, on the other hand, I think the criterion we ought to use to determine which demographic characteristics to list in the lead should be the ones that are most essential to the subject's identity, and that's a fuzzy line. So we should be noting in the first sentence that Anne Frank was Jewish, but probably not for Edward Kosner (click through if you haven't read about Jew tagging yet), and for some other page it's a borderline case. Not having a formal standard allows us more flexibility to emphasize the aspects of a subject's identity that are important and de-emphasize those that are less so. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 02:20, 6 September 2020 (UTC)


 * To be clear, MOS already stresses that ethnicity, religion, etc. should not be included in the lead unless its very important to that person's biography or notable work, so I'm not worried about that in the broad sense. What I am concerned about is the very specific use of it as a way of qualifying someone's nationality (the gender examples you give are also very related to this and quite good for discussion here). What I said on the talk at the Harriet Jacobs is that if we incorporate ethnic status, or I guess any minority status in the beginning of the first sentence this way we suggest that either someone is "special" for being not whatever the general ethnic expectation for their country is and thus deserves some sort of accommodation, or that they aren't "true" Americans/Brits/Kenyans/etc. and thus their national status needs qualification. The latter is the greater problem. -Indy beetle (talk) 02:57, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I think that there are cases where both ethnicity and nationality are relevant to a person's notability, and so they should both be mentioned, per WP:ETHNICITY. I agree with above that sometimes the exact criterion for when notability qualifies for adding multiple such characteristics to an article is a bit fuzzy, and there are pros and cons to that. But, I'm not sure if that is what your question is addressing as I cannot really think of a case that I have seen where ethnicity fully replaces nationality, as the cases you have mentioned are instances of mentioning both, so I'm not sure what your question is fully. Nangears (talk) 02:54, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Essentially, why are we calling Harriet Jacobs an "African-American writer" when we aren't calling John F. Kennedy an "Irish-American politician"? And does that difference matter? -Indy beetle (talk) 03:02, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Well as Jacobs's most notable work is directly tied to her being African-American, I would say it is relevant to her notability and should be included in the lead. An argument could be made that it is relevant to his notability that Kennedy is an Irish American, as he is known for being the only Catholic American president to date, and that his Catholicism is related to his Irish heritage. Personally, I would say that is a tenuous argument, as it is notable that he is Catholic which is related to being Irish-American, but being Irish-American is not what is actually notable. Further, what qualifies Kennedy as being notable for an article is him being a US president and all American presidents are notable enough in their own right for a page, and him being Catholic is not an inherent part of him being president nor is it inherent to what makes him notable. For this same reason, the article for Barack Obama, as you mentioned above, does not include that in the first sentence of his lead, as he is notable for being a president of the United Staes, without qualifying that he is also notable as the first African-American president of the US. By contrast, not every American author is notable enough for an article, and being African-American is an inherent part of Jacobs's notability, as a large part of her notability is tied to her autobigraphy, which is about her experience as a slave, which is directly tied to being African-American. I agree with above, that at times this can lead to a bias, based on what is considered default by societal norms, but there is also issues with wholesale adding or removing ethnicity from all biographies, so I think that it might be necessary to leave some ambiguity in WP:ETHNICITY. Nangears (talk) 03:23, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Note that nationality or ethnicity is used as an adjective not as a noun. Barack Obama is "an "American politician and attorney," Malcolm X was "an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist," Anne Frank was "a German-Dutch diarist of Jewish origin." Here nationality or ethnicity tells us where that person was active. Malcolm X's following was largely limited to African Americans, while Obama was elected president of the United States. Anne Frank was forced to hide in an attic because she was a Jewish person living in the Netherlands. That seems to follow common sense. TFD (talk) 03:26, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * To, then what about Martin Luther King Jr.? Is it not "inherent" to his notability that he was also an African American, much like Malcolm X? Is the MLK article "wrong" to not call him an "African-American civil rights activist" in the beginning of the first sentence (ditto for Rosa Parks). What I'm saying is, there doesn't appear to be "common sense" with how this is applied. I think we need better guidance on this issue, or at least direct people in MOS/policy to form a LOCALCONSENSUS. -Indy beetle (talk) 03:39, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * King and Parks have more crossover appeal. They are seen as icons by the broader American public, while Malcolm X is not. And King spoke about the rights of all Americans, while Malcolm X restricted his demands to African American rights. Of course, the dividing line isn't clear. Also, we can look to tertiary sources as examples. I just think that having hard and fast rules won't provide better results than following common sense. TFD (talk) 04:11, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I fail to see the big deal in this. There is no harm done in getting this "wrong". "African-American writer" and "Irish-American politician" can be present or absent and it is of little consequence. If there is a dispute, the dispute needs to be resolved. Bus stop (talk) 03:52, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I for one would say that yes, it should be mentioned in the lead section of MLK as it is in Malcolm X. If we agree on that we can just go and add it there. El Millo (talk) 03:59, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Commenting on the criterion relevant to the subject's notability: I think that everybody around the world - provided they have ever heard of them - knows that Anne Frank was Jewish, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and MLK were African Americans. That's because you simply cannot tell their story without mentioning their ethnic background, and so it is "inherent" to their notability. But many people know a lot about JFK and still are ignorant of his background. With Obama we really have to use common sense, since POTUS is (or should be) the president of all Americans, regardless of background. I think the current solution is quite intelligent ("American" in the first sentence, "first African-American president" in the next). --Rsk6400 (talk) 05:57, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * It is a minor issue. One can quibble over whether or not to say in the lede Anne Frank was Jewish or Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and MLK were African Americans. In the grand scheme of these articles there are arguments pro and con. If we omit it early on we can include it in short order. There are literally arguments for early inclusion of these sorts of identities and slightly delayed inclusion of these elements of identity. For instance an argument for slightly later inclusion of identity is to not allow identity to possibly displace the reason for notability. No one is notable, for instance, solely for being Jewish or black or Irish-American or Catholic. By delaying mention of these identities we allow a reason for notability to be stated first. In a second or third sentence identities of these sorts can be mentioned. Bus stop (talk) 18:03, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Just a comment that the whole discussion somehow assumes that the change would only affect articles on American personalities. But in fact it will affect Russian/Ukrainian, Polish/Ukrainian, Bulgarian/Macedonian, Uzbek/Tajik, Armenian/Turkish/Iranian, Georgian/Abkhazian and you name it personalities. And I can already foresee continuous massive edit-warring in thousands of articles (most of which are currently not monitored by any meta-active users) if this information is allowed to be in the lede.--Ymblanter (talk) 21:18, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes I didn't mean for it to be so US centric (why I mentioned Polish Jews), the African-American/American example is just the most common example I'm familiar with. -Indy beetle (talk) 04:07, 7 September 2020 (UTC)
 * This is the first thing I thought of, too. I feel it would be wrong, and quite dismissive actually, to call Vladimir Sangi a “Russian writer of Nivkh origin” rather than a “Nivkh writer”, or Sitting Bull an “American military leader of Lakota origin”, rather than a “Lakota leader”. Sometimes ethnicity is far more important than nationality. Dylanvt (talk) 13:44, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, but I believe these cases are already covered by the policy.--Ymblanter (talk) 14:03, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I think the guidance is fine. In general the first sentence should be nationality. And in later parts of the lead, ethnicity can be mentioned if it gives good context about what's notable.  I would not take anything in particular from the various examples, no one goes through them all and tries to make them conform one way or the other. Alanscottwalker (talk) 22:17, 6 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Religion must be put in the incipit of a lot of P articles concerning bishops, priests, missionaries, theologians, occultists, mystics, esotericists. For all of them religion is the main property qualifying a biography as notable for WP. And most of readers still doesn't believe in a universal religion for which all the beliefs are equivalent each other. Furthermore, nationality is generally a redundant information implicit in the place of birth from which it can be derived: therefore it can be origin of contradictions and data incoherence to be solved. Most notable is the ethnic origin that identifies the familiar background and the subsequent life of a person, so as to put ethnicity in the incipit of the articles.
 * Sometimes ethnicity defines nationality. Jewish have a double nationality as "German Jews", "Polish Jews" and so on..the second nationality is the first for its relevance and usually come from a familiar background toward multiple generations. We can't delete Jews nor relegate them at the end of the articles in a categorization nobody will read and anyone can delete. In other Wikipedias I experienced -as a mere past example- a some sort of "antagonism" in categorizing Sephardi Jews surnames; I would like not to meet the same shameful situation on the English Wikipedia. Hence, without covering the role of the defender of anyone or anything, I courtesy ask to leave at the beginning of the articles the ethnic origin, at least when it is associated to a WP:reliable source.
 * Finally, let we have few words on the Freemasonry, which concerns religion and often ethnic origin, and it is identified with a Satanist religion by non modernist Christians. Wikipedia has 334 articles with the expression "Christian fundamentalist" and just less than 10 with the expression "Satanist Freemasonry". This explains a clear POV and dangerous orientation of the encyclopedia. Despite a partial openness to the general public, at least here the Masonic initiation is tolerated, but it can't be adequately highlighted on the sections' headings. If the information is sourced and the affiliation to a Masonic Lodge is prolonged for many years, then it is a reasonably candidate for staying at the beginning. i apologize for the lenght, but there are many questions to be discussed. I am Christian.Philosopher81sp (talk) 19:58, 14 September 2020 (UTC)


 * At least two of your statements are horribly wrong: Most Jews don't have a double nationality, and identifying Freemasonry with a Satanist religion is promoting religious hate. If somebody with more experience than I have deletes your comment, they have my full support. --Rsk6400 (talk) 18:01, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * And let me add that the idea of Jews having two nationalities has been used by antisemites to accuse them of being unpatriotic. --Rsk6400 (talk) 18:56, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * This discussion just exemplifies the problems that we can get into if we categorise anyone by more than their citizenship, unless there is a good defining reason to do so. My particular bugbear, which doesn't just apply to Wikipidia, has been the idea that Jews, particularly pre-World War II when they constituted a significant percentage of the population, cannot be really Polish. Many things that I have seen written by both Polish Catholics and Jews have supported this idea. And Philosopher81sp's rant above just brings to mind the expression "Jews and Masons" which I have heard many times from Polish anti-semites. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:48, 16 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I apologize if someone misunderstood a simple example to say three independent qualities (affiliation to the Satanist Freemasonry; other religions; ethnical background) can't be a priori banned from the introductory part of the WP articles, having so many biographies for which those elements are much more important than the nationality. If we report a biography of priests, bishops, missionaries, mystics, saints, it is self-evident that religion must be specified at the beginning of the article. for all of them, religion is the most relevant information we can provide to the reader. If the subject of the article was a Freemason for decades, then it shall stay at the top of the article, given that the Masonic beliefs had a relevant impact in the personal choices, way of life and professional-academic career. Finally, if a person is Jewish, I don't see any reason to say that information in the final categories. It has to be cited as first. On the Jewish Polish, I totally disagree: it is not the citizenship and the recognition of the right to vote that makes a person to belong to a nation, firstly, it is his role and contribution to the national history which subsequently is followed by an official take of possession of the related rights. But Jewish Polish were an example for the Jews belonging to any of the 100 and more nations existing on Earth. I was simply saying that nationality can be derived from the place of birth and in general it is not the first element to define the personal identity. It is often preceded by the religious and the ethnic backgrounds.Philosopher81sp (talk) 17:05, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Related to the "Collapse bottom", to be hopefully omitted or deleted: there is a mistaken association of Jewish people with Freemasonry. It is false since Jesus Christ God was Jewish for those who believe in Him at this point, I am called to briefly clarify my edit. I didn't want to do so, but it has become necessary. I am Jewish, so I can't be anti-Semite. But this is not so relevant for the discussion. Freemasonry always denies to have a spiritual-angelic core. Pope St Pius X defined Freemasonry as the Synagogue of Satan and I am used to take inspiration from him (source: Etsi multa luctuosa). It is an authoritative source, never retracted by the subsequent Popes. For WP:censorship, I don't see any reason to delete that affirmation, apart some respectable opinions which nobody can impose to other readers and contributors of the website, according to the policy WP:POV. At least, the entire discussion, originated by a mistaken example, at this point can be hopefully deleted.Philosopher81sp (talk) 17:05, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The entire I am Jewish, Jews can't be antisemitic, and the Pope should be taken as an authoritative source on the Freemasons run here is equally bizarre and bigoted. If you are viewing the world through those filters, Wikipedia may not be the project for you. ---Nat Gertler (talk) 17:26, 17 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The entire sequence is orginated by what some users have misunderstood or would intepret in my topic. The same title Allegations against Jews and Freemason indicates it is so. I haven't accued anyone. Someone tried to impose to others his opinion that Freemasonry is not a religion (a mere opinion) or it is not a relevant information to be reported at the top of article. Maybe, we have some Freemasons or payd users to preserve the Masonic secrecy we can meet in other well known encyclopedias. The project probably is not the right on for them.I don't think this is my case.Philosopher81sp (talk) 12:39, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * There are relevant reasons not to exclude a priori that the initiation to the Satanist Freemasonry or the being part of other religion shall be cited at the top of the WP articles. Without a specific ban, I think me and other users can decide on a case-by-case basis, dependingo on the reliability of the related sources and the relevance of religion and other memberships in the respective biographies. I think this has to be limited only to the most relevant cases.Philosopher81sp (talk) 12:39, 19 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Please note that the above conversation is precisely why I think our lack of guidance is a problem. -Indy beetle (talk) 04:21, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Extremely excessive number of articles on non-notable concert tours
If you check any category like this, this, or this you will find several, even dozens, of articles on completely non-notable, often poorly referenced, sometimes unreferenced, concert tours, which often just consist of a huge table with a list of every date and location and an uncited numbered list of songs in the setlist. References, if existent, are usually limited to primary sources simply announcing the existence of the tour, which does not make it notable. See the |notability guidelines for concert tours, especially “significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources” (i.e. not the band’s website or a youtube comments section), and “Sources that merely establish that a tour happened are not sufficient to demonstrate notability”, as well as “A tour that meets notability standards does not make all tours associated with that artist notable”. I propose that the vast majority of these articles be deleted. If we must we can put some basic info about the tours on artist and album pages, but certainly not those ungodly tables of every date and location. Dylanvt (talk) 14:08, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * See WP:AFD for options on how to request that articles are deleted. -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 14:39, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * That page says this: “For the avoidance of doubt, bundling should not be used to form consensus around policy decisions such as ‘should Wikipedia include this type of article’”. That is my concern: it seems that Wikipedians have collectively decided that every concert tour that has ever happened should be included in Wikipedia. I refute that. I just didn’t think it was clear-cut enough to start officially nominating them all for deletion. Dylanvt (talk) 14:45, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Articles about concert tours are fine. There have been concert tours that have reliable and substantial third party coverage, and as such, merit an article at Wikipedia.  If you find a specific concert tour that itself does not have reliable and substantial third party coverage, nominate that article for deletion.  If there are more than one such articles, nominate each for deletion.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 15:20, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * There's also the more general point that judging notability is very subjective. For example, as an Englishman with no interest in sport there are many many stub articles about (American) footballers, basketballers and baseballers that are all but incomprehensible and totally pointless.  The tours you refer to may be of great interest to the fans of the groups concerned.  In general, unless you are paying the bill for WMF's disk farm, how does it affect you?  Picking one of the 1977 tours at random, it is 7500 bytes in size.  With storage around £50/TB that's a bit under 1/25,000 of a penny or approximately 1/20,000 os a US cent. Martin of Sheffield (talk) 15:44, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Sure, but potentially being of interest to fans of a musical group doesn't make something encyclopedic. I actually would support deleting pages for many obscure, non-notable sportspeople. In any case, no matter how little space these concert tour pages take up, according to our own policies, they shouldn't exist in the absence of “significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources”. Barring that, they should be, at most, mentioned on artist or album pages, perhaps with a link to some external site.
 * Again, of course notability is subjective, but the existence or non-existence of “significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources” is certainly objective. Dylanvt (talk) 17:05, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * You are welcome to nominate any of these articles that don't meet the notability guidelines for deletion. Just recognise that there are some such articles that do meet the notability guidelines, so don't nominate them indiscrimately. And I would dispute the that "significant coverage in multiple independent reliable sources" is an objective criterion: there is little objectivity involved in "significant coverage", "multiple", "independent" or "reliable". Whether a particular topic passes the guideline is often determined by who happens to show up at a deletion discussion. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:08, 30 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay. I've now nominated quite a few, but I'm not doing so automatically or indiscriminately, because you're right, plenty of them do meet the guidelines. I'm only nominating ones without references or whose only references are "X announces tour!" I only brought the issue here because of the sheer number of articles like this. I thought there might be a better approach than deleting them one by one. Of course it's not an urgent matter in any case. Dylanvt (talk) 20:41, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Also consider that a nontrivial amount of these tours are directly connected to albums, so if there's not much coverage of the tour apart from the album, a merge makes sense. The first one I clicked from the categories above is an example of this: Am I a Girl? Tour, which looks like it should be merged sans the table of tour dates (WP:NOT) to Am I a Girl?. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 03:06, 1 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree there is a problem. I took two samples from the 1977 tour category that leapt out - In the Flesh (Pink Floyd tour) is unquestionably notable beyond all doubt (particularly the last show in Montreal where Roger Waters spat in a fan's face, David Gilmour refused to play an encore, and the whole thing ended up inspiring The Wall. Led Zeppelin North American Tour 1977 is also notable. Of the remainder, I have already nominated several Genesis tour articles as being original research and I think A Trick of the Tail Tour is original research unless somebody can find me multiple reliable sources that used that name, as opposed to simply talking about specific tour dates. If you want a list of tour dates, Fandom is thataway. <b style="color:#7F007F">Ritchie333</b> <sup style="color:#7F007F">(talk) <sup style="color:#7F007F">(cont)  09:09, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

There are too many articles on minor tours which should be deleted or merged, but I think there are more worthy candidates to make your case than the Ziggy Stardust Tour, which was immortalized in one movie and at least two official live albums. Fram (talk) 09:34, 1 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Just an aside: You know that you don't have to nominate any of these for deletion if you want them to go away. Just create a list at the artists page, and redirect them to that article.  Easy peasy, lemon squeezy, and doesn't require any AFD discussions.  Doing that takes much less time and energy than starting an AFD discussion, and you don't need to wait around for people to comment on the discussion.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 11:17, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * .... assuming you think that the title is a suitable redirect term, that is. <b style="color:#7F007F">Ritchie333</b> <sup style="color:#7F007F">(talk) <sup style="color:#7F007F">(cont)  11:35, 1 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Quite. The Ziggy Stardust tour must be one of the most notable there has ever been, although I will declare an interest as I was at the Hammersmith Odeon on 3 July 1973 (yes, I wasn't always old and grumpy). This was the type of indiscriminate deletion proposal that I was warning you against above. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:59, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Easy, peasy, highly sneaky. And liable to be reverted, if only on principle. Johnbod (talk) 14:49, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Bold editing is not sneaky, and reverting an edit "on principle" just because it was a bold edit would be disruptive. Lev!vich 15:43, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * It's called deletion by redirect. There is an essay somewhere. Only done when totally uncontroversial to avoid wasting time at AfD. If any chance of dispute then it circumvents the consensus process, not Bold rather kind of cowardly. --  Green  C  16:09, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, well if there's an essay somewhere, then that settles it. Every bold edit is someone's idea of an uncontroversial improvement. I mean, that's why it's called WP:BOLD, because by making the edit, the editor is boldly staking out the proposition that the edit will have consensus. And if anyone disagrees, that's what we have "undo" for. See how well the process worked for Ziggy Stardust Tour? No 7-day discussion needed to figure that one out, just a bold edit and an undo. That's the best way forward. Lev!vich 16:24, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Just need to find reliable sources for the personnel, tour dates and set lists, then it's a 5x expansion for DYK. Get in! <b style="color:#7F007F">Ritchie333</b> <sup style="color:#7F007F">(talk) <sup style="color:#7F007F">(cont)  16:32, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

I'd caution against nominating based only on the sources present in the articles; WP:BEFORE indicates that the nominator should also search for potential sources that have not been included in the article but would indicate notability. As others have alluded to, you should also consider alternatives to deletion, such as merging or redirecting pages instead of nominating them for deletion.—Ost (talk) 14:58, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm pretty new to these sorts of edits (I usually just copyedit and add banner templates for problematic pages); can I make redirects without discussion or nomination, if I think it would be uncontroversial? Can I just blank the least notable of these tour pages and create redirects to the album or artist pages? Dylanvt (talk) 16:56, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I would say Something for the Rest of Us Tour is a good example of an uncontroversial redirect. I just nominated it for deletion, but would it be better to blank it and create a redirect? There is no content except for tour dates. Also nothing on it online. Dylanvt (talk) 17:25, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * , given the nature of Wikipedia, unfortunately those aren't questions that anyone can give you an authoritative "yes" or "no" answer to. Yes, you are permitted to boldly change an article into a redirect, but only, as you said, if you think it'll be uncontroversial, which is a matter of prediction. If you do too many bold redirects that turn out to be reverted/controversial, other editors will surely complain about "bold" becoming "reckless". But if you do 100 and no one complains, someone might give you a barnstar for helping clean up the wiki. :-)
 * My advice on deciding: check to see how many page views an article has, how often it's been edited, and how many page watchers it has. Something for the Rest of Us Tour is a good example: 30 page views in 30 days, only edited once in the past year, and less than 30 watchers (page info). Assuming you've confirmed the tour is not notable with a WP:BEFORE search, probably nobody will mind it being boldly redirected. On the other hand, if an article was edited 10 times today or has 100 page watchers, chances are a bold redirect will be quickly reverted, accompanied by loud complaints. When in doubt, you can always post a message on the talk page, "I'm thinking of redirecting this to [target] because ...", and see if anyone responds (give it a few days). Try not to do too many at once, especially at first... perhaps do a batch, wait a little bit, and see if you get any push back. If not, do some more.
 * Thanks in advance for putting in the time for the cleanup by the way :-) Lev!vich 17:40, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks in advance for putting in the time for the cleanup by the way :-) Lev!vich 17:40, 1 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks in advance for putting in the time for the cleanup by the way :-) Lev!vich 17:40, 1 October 2020 (UTC)

Should the use of the 'Undisclosed paid' template be explained on article talk pages?
Please contribute to the discussion at Template talk:Undisclosed paid. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:15, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Question (?) mark over the "Fifth pillar"
I came across a Wikipedia page Five pillars, It sounds like a policy page when factually unfortunately it is not.

In a world ever eager in marred in hammering and enforcing commandments and rulings with blind folded literalism the fifth pillar Wikipedia has no firm rules  written by User:Neutrality is quite unusual, no doubt which should have been awarded and rewarded. Far from rewarding the same by adhering to the principle..

But whenever I look back bottom lines of Five pillars and compare with predominant stiffing hegemony of Wikipedian curators continuously hammering long lists of rules after rules policy pages after policy pages I find myself perplexed. Forget commitment, on several instances even an ounce spirit of flexibility seems missing next to the absolute.

The fifth pillar of page Five pillars ends up creating  false hope impression and eventual trauma, on unsuspecting readers, Specially principle of "Wikipedia has no firm rules" is most exception than rule the way Wikipedia is practiced.

"..Wikipedia has policies and guidelines, but they are not carved in stone.." is this statement truly practiced in Wikipedia other than few twisted examples if not then why do have it ?

If there is no sensitization on Wikipedians part about this value then why have a showpiece which is not practiced. Why not write what you do and why write what you don't do ?

Sorry for the rant but I sincerely feel Wikipedians sincerely revisit this aspect. Delete it or rewrite it

Bookku (talk) 14:23, 18 September 2020 (UTC)


 * We really do have (some) firm rules -- no child pornography and no undoing Office actions come to mind -- and the fifth pillar should not say we don't.
 * How about "Wikipedia has very few firm rules"? --Guy Macon (talk) 15:02, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * We don't really "need" a rule on those things - since WMF deals with those --- meaning it's not really an "English Wikipedia" rule, it's a global Wikimedia Foundation rule. — xaosflux  Talk 15:12, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Some people might dispute that child pornography one. Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia. Note the article explicitly states that it is about the English Wikipedia, and not Wikimedia or Wikipedia in general. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 19:52, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The irony is that, while technically they can change, their base thing they are trying to tell is almost always the same. Example: How WP:NVOP is applied can change, but it's base (trying to not make biased edits) is always the same, no matter what. So it does probably need a revision. Arsonxists (talk) 15:23, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * You should read through the essays listed at "Ignore all rules" essays and related topics. It will explain what you have misunderstood about how many rules we have and use. --Izno (talk) 16:03, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * @Bookku the five pillars page is intended to be a summary of all the rules, policies, and guidelines. We document all of them for Wikipedia's record.  It is intended as a quick start so that new editors diving in can understand the basic and core policies of Wikipedia.  And about the "Wikipedia has no firm rules", that means that no specific Wikipedia policy is permanently engraved in stone.  That does not mean Wikipedia is not subject to other rules, like international copyright law or the founding principles here. Aasim 18:25, 18 September 2020 (UTC)

This isn't going to change anything, but for what it's worth, I share your frustration. Wikipedia has grown increasingly bureaucratic over the years. Benjamin (talk) 21:23, 18 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The statement "we don't need a rule on those things, it's a global Foundation rule" implies a firm rule: "You must follow all global Foundation rules". 147.161.9.237 (talk) 14:49, 21 September 2020 (UTC)


 * is correct, the "no firm rules" pillar, like the "ignore all rules" policy, has yielded to reality. It is still an ideal to strive for, but there are rules, such as policies related to copyright, real-life personal safety, and other legal issues, where there is little or no "wiggle room."  In other words, some of our rules are, out of necessity, firm rules.
 * That said, we shouldn't change the existing text. However, we should consider writing an explanatory preface to the document stating up front that the entire "Five Pillars" embodies the ideal of what Wikipedia would be in a perfect world, and that all editors should strive to maintain them whenever possible, but acknowledge that there are times when "reality" trumps "idealism." Previous comment originally appeared at Wikipedia talk:Five pillars davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  01:47, 23 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Should be left as is, with no additions or explanatory text (which would then be de facto incorporated into the language of the pillar). Like the brief language in, for example, much of the United States Bill of Rights has helped develop an arc towards a new definition of civilization, this pillar, even though not exactly accurate in the broader sense of copyright and limiting content, has done much to guide the progress and growth of Wikipedia. Randy Kryn (talk) 02:48, 23 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Speaking of questionable pillars, does anyone actually believe that Wikipedia editors "treat each other with respect and civility"? That one seems to have been thrown out the door years ago. Kaldari (talk) 00:20, 29 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Many editors interact with me in a respectful manner without personalizing the discussion. Sadly it only takes a few behaving poorly to make contributing to Wikipedia unpleasant. isaacl (talk) 05:56, 29 September 2020 (UTC)

Disallow political opinion and userboxes on userpages
Recently, I have stumbled across many user pages with political statements and userboxes on them and surprisingly I have noticed that you are allowed to do this, political statements on userpages gives myself (and likely other editors) a thought in my head that makes me consider whether a users edits abide by WP:NPOV or not.

I am proposing a policy that forbids users from putting political opinions on userpages as I find it quite inappropriate to have on a place where you're meant to have a neutral point of view, also it can (depending on the political statement) already break WP:UP, WP:POLEMIC. <b style="text-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #b114ff; color: #b114ff;">Cairo2k18</b> • (talk)  •  (contribs)  22:26, 5 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Given several recent heated discussions on MFDs over certain userboxes, this at least must apply to userboxes that speak to a political or ideological message, as while the userboxes that were deleted were in the context of being harassing other editors, it creates a massive double standard and slippery slope that anyone could possibly find any political/ideological message to be insulting/harassing to them, and the consensus from these discussions gave room for the line to be practically anywhere. We might as well get rid of such boxes altogether. Whether that applies to user text, that's more difficult (canned code verses personal statement), but users should be aware that the line being taken to take for offending other editors based on expressing one's political or ideological believes can be very low, and are cautioned about expressing these views. --M asem (t) 22:35, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd rather editors with a particular bias be upfront about it than not. I think that general principle is consistent with the way we treat coi, paid, and promotional edtiting generally. Paid editing is not per say forbidden, but it is required that paid editors disclose their activity, making it easier to spot and fix any bias resulting from it.  If you have a conflict of interest with a particular article (say one about yourself), you are supposed to disclose that fact and ask someone else to make your proposed edits.  If you have strong opinions (be they political, religious, or other), it seems consistent with the way we treat other biases that you should disclose them, making it easier for other editors to keep an eye on your edits in those areas.  In that light, I see nothing wrong with brief, neutral political statements (such as a userbox that says, "this user supports X party") that function as disclosure of information that may be pertinent to the person's editing. ~  ONUnicorn (Talk&#124;Contribs) problem solving 22:36, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Wokipedia? A user page is supposed to offer some information about the user. If they choose to declare allegiance to a certain belief, the rest of us have to accept that people have beliefs and some of them are actually different from our own. Actual problems are where a user might support something that crosses the line into what injures others, and/or what is indistinguishable from trolling. Johnuniq (talk) 22:36, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The point of having userboxes is precisely to do just that: I fully disclose my political, linguistic, cultural and geographic perspective so that other editors may examine my contributions with full knowledge of my biases. Every editor has biases; some of us are just honest about them. VanIsaacWS<sup style="margin-left:-3.0ex">cont 22:39, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Before proposing bans, I think you need to clarify exactly what you are wanting to ban. Does "political opinions" or "political or ideological message" for instance refer to pro- or anti-creationism.  Is the Flying Spaghetti Monster a ideological statement?  Is banning forced marriage cultural imperialism?  What about attacking religio-cultural norms like FGM?  Martin of Sheffield (talk) 22:42, 5 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I don't see the need. As long as people don't have hateful messages in their user space, it should be fine. And when those pop up, it can be dealt with by the community, as was done recently. Isabelle 🔔 22:55, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * So... A user box that says: “This user thinks you are a poopy head” is out? Blueboar (talk) 23:08, 5 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Would a userbox saying that one understands that anthropogenic climate change is real be political even though they're just acknowledging a scientific fact? Where do you draw the line on "Blue Lives Matter" vs "All Lives Matter" vs "Black Lives Matter" vs "Black lives are (important/loved/special)"...?  If we had such a policy and we used it against neo-Nazis (no "It's okay to be white" or "White Lives Matter"), we're going to get the alt-right arguing that opposition to their bigotry (not just "Black Lives Matter" but even "Black lives are (important/loved/special)") is political.  Such a policy would be a favor to the alt-right and climate change denialists more than it would the community.  Ian.thomson (talk) 23:15, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That said, I am actually in favor of allowing users to put Nazi crap on their user page so we can immediately block them for not being here to build the community for everybody. Ian.thomson (talk) 23:17, 5 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That is a guideline, not a policy. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 16:53, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That's just an essay, actually. --Yair rand (talk) 08:32, 7 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Agree with all responses above, people hold political opinions and provided they are not being discriminatory, inciting violence or other illigal activities then let them acknowledge their opinions on their user pages, it actually aids other users in understanding their likely viewpoint. We all have biases. Cavalryman (talk) 23:29, 5 October 2020 (UTC).
 * Alright, thanks for explaining this. I did not think of that, so I guess I should probably disclose my biases as well. <b style="text-shadow: 0px 0px 10px #b114ff; color: #b114ff;">Cairo2k18</b> • (talk)  •  (contribs)  03:12, 7 October 2020 (UTC)


 * There are now about a dozen different places this discussion is taking place all at once. Opening more threads is not productive. Maybe a couple people can volunteer to draft an RfC. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 00:20, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Agree with Cavalryman. Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 00:24, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * This is based on a fundamental misinterpretation of NPOV. Articles must be written from a neutral point of view; this does not require editors to have or display a neutral point of view in non-article spaces. Frickeg (talk) 05:55, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * So instead of being open with our biases, you propose we hide them. That'll work. --Golbez (talk) 13:35, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed with Rhododendrites that the WP:TALKFORKING here is egregious., please consolidate everything. But since this has been opened, I'll copy my comment from the idea lab: &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 02:21, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * "the WP:TALKFORKING here is egregious, but I'll participate anyway." Hmm. &#8213; Mandruss  &#9742;  02:36, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Please close per WP:TALKFORK and WP:MULTI. &#8213; Mandruss  &#9742;  02:36, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * +1. --Yair rand (talk) 08:32, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Discussion at Wikipedia talk:Article titles § RfC: Shooting or Death or Killing or Murder?
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Article titles § RfC: Shooting or Death or Killing or Murder?. --- C &amp; C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 20:49, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

"What's Special About This Number" webpage in WP:NUMBER is 404 now
"Integers ...... 3. Is it listed in a book such as David Wells's Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers, or Jean-Marie De Koninck's Those Fascinating Numbers, or on Erich Friedman's "What's Special About This Number" webpage?"

Now the webpage is 404 page not found. How to solve the problem? -- Rowingbohe♬ (Talk/zhwiki) 08:32, 3 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That page is now at, but I'm not sure that we should give special consideration in a guideline to this list. Phil Bridger (talk) 09:10, 3 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Link amended on guideline page in the interim. --Paul Carpenter (talk) 01:44, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Proposed Deletion of Previously Deleted Articles
This is primarily a question. It might turn out to be a proposal. Let us assume that there was previously an article on XYZ, and then it was deleted after deletion discussion WP:Articles for Deletion/XYZ. Then an editor creates a new article on XYZ, and a New Page Patroller, first, notices that there was previously an article on the subject that was deleted, and, second, concludes that the new article fails notability. The reviewer thinks that this is a non-contentious deletion, because it was already deleted once, and it doesn't meet any of concerns stated in the AFD. So the reviewer tags it with PROD. The PROD template then displays a message that says that there may have been a previous deletion discussion. So the reviewer looks at the policy and concludes that the template error message is correct, and removes the PROD template, and puts the same rationale that they had used in the PROD as the rationale in an AFD. So far, so good. Obviously the reviewer was me. So the question is: Should the reviewer be allowed to Propose Deletion? This is not a case where a previous PROD was removed, or where an AFD resulted in a Keep. The previous AFD resulted in a Delete.

So, first, is it currently correct that the PROD was a mistake and should be removed and replaced with an AFD? Second, if so, should the policy be tweaked to permit a previously deleted article to be Proposed for Deletion when it is brought back in this fashion? Robert McClenon (talk) 03:42, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I regard PROD as a fragile construction which can be useful but which implodes under the slightest breath of controversy. From that perspective I'd say, yes to your first question: the new article should go to a new AfD (unless sufficiently close to the earlier deleted instance that the first AfD discussion applies and therefore eligible for CSD G4). And no to your second question, PROD should not be extended to apply to a previously AfD-ed topic, even if there had been no Keep opinions there. (I am also placing a notification of this discussion at WT:PROD.) AllyD (talk) 06:55, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * PROD should not be used when the previous article was deleted via (or even nominated for) PROD or AFD, but I think it's fine if the article was deleted by speedy. GiantSnowman 07:12, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Isn't this what Criteria_for_speedy_deletion is for? <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 08:06, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily. In this scenario it is specified that the reviewer considers that it fails notability, but it isn't specified whether it is substantially the same article as the one that was previously deleted. Since G4 wasn't mentioned, there is an implication that the article fails it, such as containing a reference to something that took place after the deletion debate, but which the nominator thinks does not take the topic over the notability threshold. For example, a football player who was in the squad of a major team but never played; if the only new data since the deletion debate says they have now left the squad without ever quite making the first team, then one could argue that G4 applies. If however the new info has them in a post football career but with an assertion of importance that suffices to avert A7 but isn't sufficient to meet notability then G4 would clearly not apply.  Ϣere  Spiel  Chequers  09:08, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Another problem with WP:G4 is that most editors cannot see the deleted article, so usually have no way, other than guessork, to determine whether it is substantially identical to the deleted version. There should be no shame (and I don't believe that there is currently) in nominating an article that otherwise meets the criterion, only for an admin to see that it is not substantially identical, but admins should use their critical faculties rather than rubber stamp such speedy deletion nominations. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:03, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, not being able to see the prior instance is a pain: wouldn't it be nice if there was a tool something like that for Copyvio which at least gave you word/phrase similarity counts when you are considering nominating G4? Without that, you're left inferring copy-paste from the Accessdate on references preceding to the current instance, or just reading each comment on the first AfD and considering whether it also applies to the new instance. (I did that in this case and then took it to AfD again.) AllyD (talk) 14:48, 10 October 2020 (UTC)


 * The essential feature of the PROD process is that it is for "uncontroversial deletion" and "must only be used if no opposition to the deletion is expected". In this hypothetical case, it seems that there's opposition to the deletion.  Someone is pushing back and so the PROD process is not appropriate. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:29, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * If there was a prior discussion I don't think the deletion can be considered uncontroversial, regardless of the outcome. Unless the new version is the same as the deleted one, which is already covered be G4. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 09:38, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * If there were any good-faith arguments made against deletion in the previous AfD, then absolutely, another discussion is necessary, assuming G4 does not apply. However, if the participants were completely and unhesitatingly in favour of deletion, I would say PROD should still be a valid option. I know this violates the letter of PROD policy, which prohibits PRODding after an AfD, but it is more in line with its spirit – giving a simple way for unopposed deletions to take place. It seems to go against common sense that an AfD unanimously in favour of deletion could imply that deleting the article would be a controversial action. – Teratix ₵ 11:44, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * The only time a second prod or prod after AfD should be allowed is where the first prod/discussion related to a different article that happened to share the same title (e.g. if Example (company), an article about an American widget manufacturer was deleted at AfD this should not preclude prodding a new Example (company) article about a Japanese fashion retailer). In any other circumstance AfD is the only applicable ways forward if the new article does not meet a speedy deletion criterion. Thryduulf (talk) 12:08, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * ^-- This pretty much sums it up, assuming  meant "a different subject/topic" when saying "a different article". davidwr/  (talk)/(contribs)  21:08, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * "a different subject/topic" is indeed a better way of phrasing what I meant. Thryduulf (talk) 21:12, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * If an article is created on the same topic as a deleted article then deletion is clearly not uncontroversial, so it should be sent to the default deletion process (AfD) to get consensus on whether it should be deleted, if it is not subject to WP:A4 WP:G4. Phil Bridger (talk) 14:03, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * presumably you mean WP:G4 - A4 was merged into A3 in 2005. Thryduulf (talk) 14:23, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, thanks for putting me right. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:52, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd just point out (because in my experience there does appear to be some confusion between the two) that there's absolutely no problem in speedying an article that has been deleted by AfD before, only PRODding it. If Freddie Z. Smith has been deleted via AfD previously, and someone comes along and recreates it with the sum total of text "Freddie Z. Smith is a legend", then A7 still applies.  I've closed a lot of PRODs (presumably the ones that the usual suspects failed to remove) that could actually have gone via CSD. Black Kite (talk) 15:59, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

Notice of RFC: BANEX exception for permissions requests
Lev!vich 22:49, 12 October 2020 (UTC)

MOS:GENDERID being used in place of WP:Article titles and for category arguments
Opinions are needed on the following matter: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. A permalink for it is here. Flyer22 Frozen (talk) 20:47, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

Any animated GIF should have an ON/OFF switch
On the article Resonator there is an animated gif. This and any constantly playing animated GIF is annoying !!. Any animated GIF should have a switch with which the gif can be switched on and off.

On my screen the gif in "Resonator" is beside the first seven lines of text (not above). So I can't just scroll it out of sight. And if I push the right edge of the window towards the left, the window remains beside the text. Many animated gifs are between text that is: with text above and below and beside the gif. So there is no way to evade this constant movement. So I, and many others too, would greatley appreciate this suggested switch. On talk of "Resonator" there is at least one other reader who is annoyed. I'm sure, ther are many more.

This one on Talk:Resonator, User:Spinningspark, mentioned: Phabricator task T61217 is relevant to this, but there has been no activity for years.

Plus: I (Steue) suggest that animated gifs are halted by default.

Please ping me. Steue (talk) 07:52, 6 October 2020 (UTC)


 * I am not aware of a way to freeze the image so I was WP:BOLD and altered the image in Resonator to be hidden by default. Does this seem to be a reasonable thing to do? — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 11:48, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * That removes the image from the mobile skin, which is a step too far. I will look for an alternative way to do that. — GhostInTheMachine talk to me 12:18, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I reverted the hiding per MOS:DONTHIDE. I also moved the image back up to the top.  Having it below the text like that is awkward for other reasons.  As for the overall wish for pausing gifs (there are animated PNGs too, by the way, and maybe other formats?), that's certainly a reasonable feature request, but I'd wager some careful thought needs to go into how it's handled.  I haven't checked, but there might even be browser extensions that let you do this already. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 12:28, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * FYI, T85838 is open to create technical functionality for this, feel fee to add support there. — xaosflux  Talk 12:25, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Etiquette at Phab is against voting. Comments with practical value (e.g., examples of obvious or serious problems or alternatives that you found) are highly desirable.  Just saying that you want something is not. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 02:17, 14 October 2020 (UTC)

There's no easy way to enable starting and stopping of animated gifs on a page. It's one of the annoyances of animated gifs, and why so many websites have sections for "gifs" that actually display looping webms (i.e. videos). It seems like it would be a major undertaking to create a way to do that in mediwiki (though others will be more knowledgeable about the specificity there than me). I would be surprised if developers looked at the size of that task and concluded anything other than that it would be better to just switch to video. The downside is that, at least at first, if we switch from gif to video, if there's a case where you do want it to play automatically, that's gone (but I think it would be easier to modify webm display settings to create a template parameter to do so). Also with the way we display webms now, we don't have a way to just play it inline, I don't think, and part is obstructed by the playback controls. In the short term,, there are plugins for the major browsers that pause all gifs on the internet by default and require you to click to play. It might be easier to implement on your end. :) &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 15:18, 6 October 2020 (UTC)


 * A workaround would be to capture a single frame of the animated image and display it instead, along with a link to the animated image. isaacl (talk) 23:40, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * You may wish to stop all of them in your web browser, eg see . Graeme Bartlett (talk) 00:18, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Many thanks to all of you and
 * a million thanks to Graeme Bartlett.
 * I changed it in my Firefox to play "once" and it works!!
 * The add-on which howtogeek.com mentions is no longer available.
 * Deacon Vorbis, for which other reasons is it awkward?
 * Steue (talk) 06:37, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
 * @ Rhododendrites
 * "GIF Viewer" can start and stop gifs, but this is a completely separate program, and I don't know wether this may help in the WP.
 * Steue (talk) 07:13, 9 October 2020 (UTC)


 * The solution from isaacl sounds pretty good and feasable to me.
 * Steue (talk) 07:17, 9 October 2020 (UTC)


 * (and any others interested) Add   (sorry, I just learned importScript has been deprecated and doesn't work on the mobile site, you can still use it on the desktop site though) to Special:Mypage/common.js (source) to have a button on every article page that stops the window (JavaScript window.stop) which should halt animated GIFs in most browsers. — Alexis Jazz (talk or ping me) 10:31, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

The onus on start/stop the GIF should lie with its Wikipedia creator. Xxanthippe (talk) 10:51, 9 October 2020 (UTC).


 * Having to reload the entire page to restart an animation sounds like a terrible design and probably most animated image formats don't work like that. (Videos do, but they also come with controls out of most browser boxes.) There is a reason that accessibility says there should be controls and not that images should stop doing things. --Izno (talk) 14:39, 9 October 2020 (UTC)ideally


 * Thanks Alexis Jazz, I shall try this.
 * I completely agree with you, Xxanthippe.
 * Of course, Izno ideally the solution should not require the user to reload the page, it should be enough to click on the "switch." either to switch the gif ON or to download the animated gif, in case the page first only loads/loaded a non-animated gif or a e.g. jpeg.
 * Steue (talk) 21:25, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

Just to add my opinion, I think animations are wonderful tools to explain STEM concepts to general readers, and should be more widely used (disclosure: I have created a number of gifs for WP articles). I suspect only a minority of readers are irritated by reasonably unobtrusive animations. I absolutely agree with the need for a prominent ON/OFF button. But I think the default should be ON; the animation running. With an opt-in, the vast majority of nontechnically-oriented readers, who would most benefit from the animation, will not notice or understand the button and will not turn it on. --Chetvorno<i style="color: Purple;">TALK</i> 19:12, 14 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Last I heard, the Community Wishlist is expected to open in a couple of weeks. It's possible that this would be a reasonable size project for the wishlist.  If it's too big, then they are at least likely to produce an engineering evaluation, which would IMO still be a step forward. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 15:31, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Soliciting Community Input on MOS:TERRORIST
There is a discussion on the implementation of MOS:TERRORIST at WT:W2W Transcendence (talk) 18:34, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Does WP/UNDUE hold for the WP site as a whole?
Last count, I came up with 139 WP born from the Trump Russia collusion hoax. The material contained in these articles is more voluminous than the material on major organized religions plus any wars the US has been involved in added together.

Does WP/UNDUE hold for the entire site or just individual WP? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:46:C801:B1F0:2461:5DFD:6A2C:87C5 (talk) 10:51, 6 October 2020 (UTC)


 * "139 WP" What's a "WP", in this context? Where are these 139 examples? Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:38, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Presumably "Wikipedia pages" is meant. The short answer is: yes, it does.  I can't say too much more without knowing the exact complaint(s), but WP:RECENTISM has some good reading here.  The unfortunate fact is that it's a lot easier to create a lot of low-quality articles because of heavy, even if brief, news coverage than it is to organize the more relevant information into a smaller set of good articles.  There are other things like WP:NOTNEWS that can be applicable also.  But these issues plague all sorts of coverage of recent events, not just this. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 14:54, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * This is basically part of it. We have a problem on WP with "hyperreporting" ( not my term) that we want to document everything that comes through the news and that causes people to create pages of great detail on current events, yet when we go back to equivalent events of the past - the Watergate scandals and the like, its clear the volume written then compared to now is far different.
 * There is some value in the short term of simply documenting what happens with sourcing as a sorta work in progress. That gives a way to go back and pull sources from key points to make an article with an enduring, long-term view. But unfortunately few people ever go back to these articles written in the short term to trim down and cull them down to what's needed and instead leave the blow-by-blow and hyperreporting (if you see WP:PROSELINE, that's a good sign there's a problem). We need better encouragement of editors to come back to events after they seem to have settled down and no longer active and determine what's key and what's not. I'm sure in the example of the Trump Russia hoax thing of the 139 pages there's multiple duplications that really don't need to be there if one or two editors sit down and figure out a better structure, for example. --M asem  (t) 15:01, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * And just to add as another example: I have no idea how many articles we have but our stuff on COVID is in a similar shape. I wouldn't say it needs to be touched now while it is still an issue, but when the world's less worried about the disease, the heirarchy of pages needs to be looked at and drastically reworked. --M asem (t) 15:03, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * intitle:covid. I haven't counted, but let's just call it "lots". My personal favorite: Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on The Walt Disney Company. &#8213; Mandruss  &#9742;  15:52, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

UNDUE is about proper balance in coverage of a subject, so I don't think it makes sense to apply it to the project as a whole. Limiting the number of articles on X does not get you more articles on Y. Editors are always going to focus more on subjects they are interested in, and for which they can get sources more readily. I think there's something of a valid point made above about summary style and historical perspective, but beyond that "other editors write too much about subjects I don't care about" is really one of those perennial crank complaints we need to just disregard. postdlf (talk) 17:25, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * There is a difference between editors focusing more on subjects they are in, and justifying loads of spin-off article as due just because there a separate articles. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 17:35, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Also, I think it is probably significant that the original IP referred to the "Trump Russia collusion hoax". That is rather POV language and suggests an intense personal bias on the part of the complaining editor (no BALANCEd or NPOV coverage of this topic refers to a "hoax"). I'm not saying there aren't too many pages featuring Trump and Russia - there probably are - but the original post reeks of WHATABOUTISM and should probably be taken with much added salt content. Newimpartial (talk) 17:50, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

Yeah the "hoax" word basically invalidated the credibility of the OP, we have to assume their judgement of Wikipedia is impaired due to their extreme bias (even the Republican-led Mueller Report showed enough evidence to discredit the "hoax" denial, it's more a matter of degree). I have seen old current-event articles refactored a decade later with recentism removed because no one is watching or cares much anymore. -- Green  C  18:17, 6 October 2020 (UTC)

I appreciate those taking the time and effort to offer the constructive responses, I should've been more specific. I want to know when X future event takes place is there a WP policy to cite to lessen the endless spinoffs. The reason why is in part stated above, facts change even years later and the volume of articles needing the same changes becomes insurmountable for anyone to possibly keep track of and subsequently change. It seems a disservice and with either the example that I cited or covid, the probability of WP accurately representing the RS majority into infinity is almost zero percent. The only solution that I could come up with is a separate WP for current events which after some time then gets moved into the regular WP. The current situation leaves WP as more of a chronicle of times and events. This disservice can be rectified with lessened and more concise articles in the first place. I should've used Covid but haven't been following those pages so it did not come to mind. I'm hopeful that the above personal attack nonsense(hoax is still used in the RS minority POV see Fox et al) has not permanently ended discourse here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:46:C801:B1F0:B424:DCDD:60B9:9757 (talk) 03:16, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * a separate WP for current events. &#8213; Mandruss  &#9742;  03:39, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Please see the Reliable sources noticeboard; Fox is not a reliable source on political issues.
 * That said, I actually agree that some kind of "quarantine zone" could be an effective way to deal with NOTNEWS issues, which are a real problem. Newimpartial (talk) 03:43, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * If we're not using Wikinews, we almost need like a "holding area" for current events like COVID where people can drop in current news, while it is curated into main space as reasonable stories can be written. But I have a feeling this would be really had to maintain under the open wiki approach. --M asem (t) 04:32, 7 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Surely we already have such a "holding area", called draft space. It is currently misused as a backdoor route to deletion, despite what policy says, but this would be a good use for it. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:29, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Editors want to work in "real space" for these breaking news articles, nor do I blame them, but these articles are too "raw" to be final encyclopedic articles. I wouldn't say these are efforts that we "throw away" at the end of the day, and while the event is active staying in main space makes sense (in addition to gaining the benefit that Wikimedia software auto-archives all reference links, a useful feature), but after the event has calmed down and we can rationalize a better structure, we may need to pack the working versions away for something more encyclopedic (and as to keep contribution history). Whether that itself is a new namespace or something like moving the pages into a directory under the mainspace topic with indexing to allow them to be found easily, I don't know. --M asem  (t) 21:30, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Several times I've gone looking for some information on a past event, and been pleasantly surprised to find a detailed article written when it was "recent". Rest assured that these article will be looked at, will be referred to, and will be maintained in years to come. Moreover, the references captured at this time will trigger their preservation for posterity by the archive bots. Hawkeye7  (discuss)  05:03, 7 October 2020 (UTC)


 * An essay on this subject is at Systemic bias. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 12:21, 10 October 2020 (UTC)

The answer to the question posed in the heading has to be "no". The only way to get a fair balance in Wikipedia as a whole between topics relating to the Anglophone West and those relating to, say, China or countries in Africa would be to delete much of our content about the Anglophone West. This balance can only be reasonably addressed at the margin by those few editors that care creating, or not deleting, content about under-represented areas, not by removing content in well-represented areas. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:45, 10 October 2020 (UTC)
 * No, it isn't "The only way to get a fair balance in Wikipedia as a whole between topics..." - it's just the easiest way. Johnbod (talk) 20:21, 16 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I would certainly go beyond "the easiest way". There is no reasonable prospect of a proportionate number of articles being produced on the English Wikipedia about most parts of the world outside the Anglophone West to those within it, so, yes, it would, in practice, be the only way. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:36, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Two other thoughts. The most common form of bias is selectively under covering or overcovering topics or negative or positive aspects of topics. We need to all eschew bias when building an encyclopedia and not just sit back when the bias is towards one's own side. Next, if there are too many articles on a topic possibly co-ordinating between them and removing duplicates. Also we should be very wary of and usually compound criteria titles. We need a "Dogs" article, maybe we could have a "big dogs" sub-article, but certainly not a "dogs with black fur" article.<b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 21:22, 16 October 2020 (UTC)

Can Template:Undisclosed paid be used without explanation?
Discussion at Template talk:Undisclosed paid has stalled; more voices would be beneficial. Andy Mabbett ( Pigsonthewing ); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 11:17, 18 October 2020 (UTC)

NCOIN?
Hi all, since WP:NCOIN doesn't exist, is there an existing precedent for the notability of coins? I am thinking of 5 cents (World War II Dutch coin) and 5 øre (World War II Danish coin) as examples given that they have been notability tagged for just short of 5 years. -- The SandDoctor Talk 07:56, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:GNG seems like it would be appropriate. --Izno (talk) 15:04, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
 * And I wouldn't have thought that it would be difficult to find sources that satisy the general notability guideline for any coin that has been in general circulation. Have you tried doing that for these coins? Phil Bridger (talk) 16:34, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I am not familiar with Wikipedia articles on coins. The problem with finding sourcing is the fact that these ceased production 77 years ago. I haven't found much aside from ebay listings and the like, so thought I would check in here. I'll go ask WikiProject Numismatics I guess. -- The SandDoctor Talk 17:48, 18 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I'd have thought academic sources and books would be the way to go - have you tried REFDESK and the WIkipedia Library? Nosebagbear (talk) 10:45, 19 October 2020 (UTC)

Scrubbing activities
I want to talk about things that I hereby label "Scrubbing activities". By that I mean altering longstanding content in rapid response to recent real-life events. This can particularly mean changing a definition of a word, phrase or concept, deleting same, adding a new element of same, or potentially any other changes to longstanding content. I do NOT include simply adding references to recent events. An example of this (and there are more) is what happened recently at the "86" page. Such activities draw wikipedia into disrepute, because the suspicion of bad faith is inevitable in such a case. This can also poison the relations of Editors for much the same reasons. If such activities DO turn out to be well-founded, the changes involved can be implemented in the long term. It might be a good idea to have a rule against this. Asgrrr (talk) 15:23, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * What about WP:BRD. That might already cover it. Graywalls (talk) 15:41, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think it does. Asgrrr (talk) 18:56, 19 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia like the rest of the internet has unfortunately joined the "Its all about the pageviews" society and despite numerous policies about current events, recentism and too soon allows current events to dominate page creations and even the editing of long standing pages. Rather than being about documenting, wikipedia has become a part of making history.


 * Put simply, editors know if they get their preferred facts into an article, it will shape future conversations. Slywriter (talk) 00:29, 20 October 2020 (UTC)

Is it time to place greater restrictions on AfD?
Deletion discussions remain one of the most hotly controversial parts of the project, but the bar for participation is lower than most other controversial parts of the project.

Bad faith nominations are a common form of harassment or POV-pushing, and while such nominations are rarely successful, there are no protections in place to prevent it from taking a toll on the victim (in cases of harassment) or taking a large amount of volunteer time (for harassment or for POV-pushing). Starting a deletion nominated currently requires autoconfirmed status (4 days + 10 edits).

Once the nomination is started, it's common for people associated with the subject to use social media channels to influence the discussion (whether to support or oppose deletion). New users who sign up just to advocate a position in a deletion discussion rarely take the time to familiarize themselves with Wikipedia's deletion-related policies and guidelines, leading to large numbers of low quality !votes that complicate discussions. In very rare cases, after discussions are already severely affected by canvassing, we semi-protect them. Canvassing creates a lot of drama, rarely helps a deletion discussion, and wastes a huge amount of time and energy.

Is it time to place greater restrictions on AfD? Three inter-related questions for the community. Please note that this is not a proposal, but a discussion to see if a proposal makes sense.

1. Should there be stricter requirements to start a deletion discussion?

2. Should deletion discussions be semi-protected by default?

3. If yes to either of the above, what is the best way to allow new users to participate productively (for example, using AfD talk pages)?

&mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 22:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)

Discussion (AfD restrictions)

 * Some context for why I started this thread: For years I've participated at AfD and have seen the problems caused by canvassing over and over again. So question #2 has long been on my mind. What has me thinking about question #1 took place over the weekend: a Wikipedian created an illegitimate sock puppet for the sole purpose of nominating for deletion three related articles: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, Corina Newsome, and Earyn McGee. It's not the first time I've seen people use AfD to nominate groups of related articles in bad faith, nor the first time I've seen it used to to target biographies of women or people of color in particular. It didn't take long to cause a stir on Twitter, etc., perceived as yet another example of systemic bias on Wikipedia. Of course, those of us insiders know that this was actually an example of process working in the end -- that this was just one illegitimate sock puppet causing trouble, and the articles had little chance of being deleted because it's "not a vote" and whatnot. Here's the thing, though: it's still damaging. Bad faith nominations are not only a huge time sink to the community, requiring people to make sure process does win out; it's also a terrible experience for the article creator/editors, it's a terrible experience for the article subject, and it's a terrible experience for anyone else who looks in and cannot be expected to see what we see. They see Wikipedia working on deleting a topic they care about, and cannot be expected to understand the "don't worry, it's not a vote, and process will win out" part that we might say to ourselves while grumbling. So I, for one, do think it's time to raise the bar a bit. How much to raise it is the big question as far as I'm concerned. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 22:10, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * On the last two of those, unless I'm missing something, that was an empty nomination ? I would say that admins should feel empowered to close empty or bad faith nominations, especially if they believe they may draw external involvement (Which should be taken as a given for any BLP for anyone of an underpresented minority on WP). If an experienced editor believes the article does merit deletion, let them open a fresh deletion discussion with proper rational (and there should be no penalty here if that's opened even the same day as the rapid closure of the previous one).  We may not catch all the bad faith ones, if they are nominated with a reasonable cause (as the first of your three appears to be on a first quick read), but at least we shouldn't let the clear bad ones linger for the 7 required days and cause long term problems --M asem  (t) 22:26, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Right. Like I said, process usually wins out, but why is this permitted to begin with? How often do you see successful, good faith, policy-based nominations from new users, as compared to the kind of problems caused in this example? How many of those positive examples could be handled through other means (e.g. requesting an AfD at WT:AFD, PROD, etc.)? My central point about question #1 is about new users' nominations being a net negative, and that the negative effects probably reach further than most people would think, because we tend to think of AfDs as being behind-the-scenes projectspace business. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 22:32, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I think the deep problem is identifying bad faith nominations. I worry that closing empty nominations is not a robust solution to the problem, because it doesn't take much for disruptive editors to learn how to give the appearance of a rationale. Just quickly looking back over the (all presumably good faith) AfDs I've participated in this year, the modal deletion rationale is typically one sentence along the lines of "This article does not meet the notability guidelines", and (very reasonably) nobody blinks an eye when that's written by an editor with a few hundred edits who stacked a dozen pages in AfD in one afternoon with identical rationales -- most of the time, that sort of deletion is just a user who spent a few hours helping to build the encylopedia by patrolling for non-notable pages, and decided they found several. So I worry that resting everything on an idea like "admins should delete any rapid string of AfDs by a new editor with empty/totally trivial deletion rationales" just moves the problem to a question of how to tell the difference between good faith (but perhaps rather lazy) tagging on the one hand, and disruptive trolling on the other. In this situation, for example, it seems reasonable to guess that with a bit more effort the person who started this AfD might have been able to write a persuasive appearance of a sincere deletion rationale, since they openly admitted to being a sockpuppet during the AfD (as was noted at AN). And that same AfD but with a policy-motivated deletion rationale would still have been subject to all the same canvassing, spam, and trolling. - Astrophobe  (talk) 23:06, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Empty nominations are easy. And given that most experienced editors know of the BEFORE process and how to nominate, I could see that when we have a sub-par nomination (no sign of prior research, maybe just claimed "person is non-notable", and a quick check of the target AFD page shows 20+ sources with clear reliable sources being used, they can do this rapid close and add something in their close "Any experienced editor, believing this was a valid AFD, may reopen/restart this". Heck, that's even better, just have the rapid close if the admin thinks it is a bad faith AFD, but if an experienced editor thinks it is valid, they can ask to have the nomination opened again on the admin's talk page, mimicking the process one uses to question the standard admin closure process.--M asem (t) 23:49, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * we need to be more nuanced instead of immediately calling this a "bad faith nomination" just because the nominator chose a sock-puppet account rather than their established Wikipedia identity. As someone who has recently been singled-out and targeted by a right-wing website for my involvement in blacklisting The Epoch Times, I can understand why someone wanted to shield themselves from the backlash of a self-righteous Twitter mob crying racism and sexism. --bender235 (talk) 13:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I would never base a "bad faith nom" on the basis of the account only, unless I know that editor has some type of block/warning or the like specific on using AFD in that topic area or in general. (eg, someone that I know has a AP2 DS on them that they are not to make any edits in that area, and they nominate a topic clearly in the AP2 topic area, that's a bad faith). Barring knowledge of that, the only assessment of "bad faith" is the nature of the nomination and the actual sate of the page - is there a massive disconnect that indicates that this may be a POINTy or nonsense AFD that AFD doesn't need to waste its time with. I agree we should not judge the editor - IP, new editor, or experienced - otherwise in evaluating whether an AFD is good or bad faith normally. --M asem  (t) 14:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * That is good to know, but I felt like having to emphasize it because the general conclusion in WP:ANB seems to have been along the lines of "three AfDs were started by sockpuppets accounts with a vengeance," i.e. not worth being taken seriously (I'm quoting specificly, but it was more or less the general opinion). --bender235 (talk) 16:20, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I mean, if this solution I suggest is implemented, and one finds that a single user has been submitting several AFDs in a row that have been quick closed as these bad faith noms and suspects possible sock activity, by all mean then check to see if the editor is a sock. But the editor should not be pre-judged outside of any known DS/bans attached specifically to that editor's name if we all for evaluating bad faith noms. --M asem (t) 16:28, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * First off, I would be against semi-protection by default because many articles listed for deletion are from new editors, and they should be able to participate in the deletion discussions of their articles. While this doesn't always wind up for the best, I imagine locking them out of the discussion or bunting them to an unseen talk page would have even worse outcomes. However, I would be in favor of raising the bar for filing a deletion to extended confirmed, as virtually all new page patrollers will meet that standard easily, and it will create a significantly higher hurdle for bad-faith actors. This won't stop PROD or CSD tagging - but that's a feature, not a bug. Both are easily removed in cases of abuse, and let people that are not extended confirmed and still want to help address the worst new articles. The Squirrel Conspiracy (talk) 23:03, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * This is a good point. I actually intended to be less specific than "semi-protection by default" in order to allow for that one exception (article creators/editors weighing in), but forgot when it came time to hit save. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:35, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Generally new users can't create articles either so this wouldn't be a problem but if their article is created through AFC then they may not be able to participate.  Crouch, Swale  ( talk ) 15:01, 18 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for starting this discussion, and I think it's worth reinforcing that this problem of targeted and high-profile bad faith deletion spam is not at all new, and that with the growth of conversations about Wikipedia across other major platforms, I expect this sort of canvassing to only grow more severe. Per the opening paragraph of the discussion and per , I expect that I would agree with a proposal to require a higher bar to begin AfDs. But requiring a higher bar to contribute to AfDs is, to my mind, much more complicated. On the one hand, I am really sympathetic to the argument that it would be dangerously discouraging to new editors. I remember vividly my early experience editing Wikipedia: I believed that about $$3/4$$ of whatever you do on this website will get rapidly undone for completely opaque reasons, with lots of giant paragraphs full of incomprehensible acronyms and links and all sorts of emphatic italics about how astonishingly bone-headed you must have been to write that content (I'm not saying that's the impression people were trying to give, just that that's how it often feels to very new editors). People absolutely should be encouraged to WP:BB from their very first edit, including writing pages from scratch, and if their page comes up for deletion they should be allowed to participate in the discussion on it. From personal experience I believe that good faith participation in AfDs by brand new editors who don't yet have a clue is a huge net good for the project, especially as a hugely important (if often unpleasant) learning experience for them. Nothing motivates you to wade deep into notability policy like trying to come up with an argument for why your afternoon of work shouldn't be undone. Having said all of that, not raising the bar for AfD participation leaves half of the problem we're talking about unaddressed: it means that canvassing good faith and constructive deletion discussions is still just as easy, whether you're trying to sway the discussion towards keep or delete. It's very easy to imagine a good faith editor questioning the value of a page about someone with tens of thousands of twitter followers and that person reacting by canvassing support, just as happened in this instance, in which case we would be in the same exact position that we're in now. So I would be very interested in discussing further policies that would allow people with a sincere connection to the page to participate, while ruling out the kind of canvassing that is already a very serious problem and that looks like it will only get more serious over the next few months and years. - Astrophobe  (talk) 23:44, 9 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I honestly don't see it as a problem. Most of the time canvassing is obvious and the topics are notable. I actually got stuck into the project because I wasn't specifically canvassed, but I read something about whether something should be on Wikipedia off of Wikipedia. Not being able to participate may create a "walled garden" effect for the entire community. That being said, there is a bad faith nomination issue, it was obvious in the cases you mentioned, and we need to do a better job of a community of not defaulting to "no consensus" when a deletion discussion goes off the canvassing rails, but I don't really support increasing the standard threshold. For instance, this should be very unlikely, but there may be instances where a low profile BLP realises there's an attack page written about them here and needs to deal with it. I might be willing to support a specific action item, though, such as a flag when a non-extended confirmed user starts an AfD. SportingFlyer  T · C  01:47, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I would oppose these type of changes. Its hard enough to delete an article as it is. Think about it, it only takes one person to create a bad article, but many to have it deleted. And when we can't agree and the AfD is closed as "no consensus", it gets kept by default. This actually contradicts WP:ONUS where the person adding the material must get consensus, not the person proposing deletion. As for sockpuppets, that is not a issue exclusive to AfDs. They can show up in any discussion anywhere.--Rusf10 (talk) 02:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * can show up in any discussion anywhere sure, but in structured discussions they can be more disruptive. it's also a place where it's much less likely they'll be able to contribute positively. in an article talk page, there's at least an argument from the perspective of knowing the subject; arguing about notability is a bit more, well, technical from a procedural standpoint. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Let me amend 's account of the three AfDs that triggered this discussion by the fact that questionable tactics were used on both sides of those "arguments." While it is true that the AfDs were started by sock-puppets, it is equally true that all three subjects of the articles for deletion were using their social media presence to WP:MEATPUPPET the discussions. So it won't surprise you that for more than half of the participants—Protonk, Kslays, Wurstendbinder, nejaby, AmyFou, Mglymour, Kellyjeanne9, Mfield, Dziban303, Rtol, Younotmenotyou, LadyFaeyre, Plcoffey, Smreillyatx, Kithrup—their keep !vote just so happened to be their first edit in months (sometimes years!), and another seven—Co2ke, Watchtower2.0, Loveofstreams, Bunsenberner, LadyAedes, Jtshapiro, Sharkirk—were outright single-purpose accounts. Unfortunately this strategy had success, and as I already elaborated elsewhere, I am afraid that without proper adjustments on our part, this will be the "new normal," i.e. the new go-to strategy for medium-scale Twitter personalities who always wanted a Wikipedia shrine for their personal vanity. --bender235 (talk) 04:07, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Right, canvassing for keeps is a huge problem. And isn't that what 's suggested point 2 addresses? The way I read it, the problem you describe is a big motivation for that remedy. - Astrophobe  (talk) 04:52, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I would even equate off-line canvassing by a subject or by a connected contributor to COI editing. Point 2 of the proposal would not take care of the issue (most of these accounts were autoconfirmed, just dormant), and probably has zero chances to pass at any RfC anyway.--Ymblanter (talk) 05:51, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Bender, are you suggesting that the three articles in question should have been deleted? That they are "Wikipedia shrine[s] for their personal vanity" in your book? Axem Titanium (talk) 07:39, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * as explained in my !vote in the AfD and later my comment on ANB, I do not believe that the either of the subjects meet WP:ANYBIO. Regardless of that, though, I refuse to accept that we now have to tolerate "WP:SELFPROMO by proxy" in which people essentially solicit their own WP:RESUME from complaisant social media followers, as Opoku-Agyeman implicitly did, and then funnel those same followers into AfDs or other discussions under the guise of fighting for social justice (that just as an explanation why a number of overzealous editors in those AfDs immediately were crying racism and basically compared the AfDs to people being killed in the streets). As I wrote elsewhere, once the word spreads that this is a viable strategy for any minor social media personality to brute force their way to a Wikipedia vanity shrine, we're pretty soon facing chaos. --bender235 (talk) 13:05, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I do agree with you that offline canvassing is essentially just COI editing. What I do not think is clearly true that most of the accounts in the recent spate of canvassed AfDs were autoconfirmed editors -- look at the two rapidly closed (and therefore actually readable) AfDs at Corina Newsome and Earyn McGee. Both of them were absolutely overrun by IPs and single-purpose accounts. It's easy enough to say that the suggestion as written here so far wouldn't perfectly solve the problem or is pretty much guaranteed to fail at RfC, both of which I agree with. More interesting is asking how we can tweak AfD to make it robust to these sorts of multi-front attacks from the outside, which have already been seriously disruptive and I believe will only grow more severe. It could very well be that the answer is there is no possible reform and we just have to live with this issue, but I don't think that's possible to conclude without some more discussion. - Astrophobe  (talk) 08:14, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I think if every instance of canvassing on twitter would result in a COI template appearing on top of the article, and potentially in an appearance of a paragraph explaining how he subject was canvassing on twitter then they will start thinking twice before starting canvassing. I agree that semi-protecting AfD would generally help (though not entirely) to this issue, however, it is not really desired from other points of view, and this discussion so far shows a clear opposition to this proposal. In addition, I have no idea what to do if (i) a Wikipedia editor canvasses other sympatheric Wikipedia editors outside Wikipedia (which happend a lot and in the past resulted in keeping clearly non-notable articles) and (ii) people are showing upat AfD and it is clear that they are correlated but the source of canvassing could be found. --Ymblanter (talk) 10:02, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * The really harmful perception that encourages canvassing seems to be that it's a straight up or down vote that everyone in the world has an inherent right to participate in. We already have Template:Not a ballot, but it's clearly highly ignorable for motivated people. I wonder if there is a template that is garish and intimidating enough to actually persuade people that canvassed votes won't work. Maybe a pop-up like some web sites have to discourage ad blockers, and an mp3 that autoplays a siren noise when you load the page ;) - Astrophobe  (talk) 18:31, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * as correctly pointed out, a lot of the Wikipedians canvassed to those AfDs were inactive but established accounts. A rule limiting the participation of newly created accounts therefore wouldn't help. Of course, generally restricting sporadically active Wikipedians for !voting isn't a viable solution, either. After all, we are a project of volunteers and clearly not everybody finds time and means to contribute on a regular basis. It's just that in those particular three AfDs the canvassing was so blatantly obvious, with person after person basically copy-pasting the same rational referencing the rarely cited WP:BASIC over and over again. When I was looking for fellow veteran Wikipedians to intervene on the evening when all of this unfolded,  reassured me that "any admin worth their salt will see past meat and spa votes." Unfortunately that never happened. --bender235 (talk) 13:05, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * As I see it, there are two separate issues. One is people who have (almost-)never used Wikipedia before, who have no investment whatsoever in the site, either being unaware of our rules about things like canvassing and COI or having no reason to care about them. Anecdotally I think this is one of the most far-reaching problems confronting Wikipedia. I know that when I've tried to explain things like "you shouldn't write a page for your dad" to people in my life who don't edit here, the most common response is something along the lines of: nobody cares about Facebook's terms of service or Twitter's terms of service or The New York Times's terms of service, why should I care about Wikipedia's terms of service? It's easy to imagine that a bunch of the first-time editors who were canvassed into that discussion would tell you that the principle they were following in voting keep is more noble than abiding by Wikipedia's policies would be. That's the issue that I think there's room to fix. The second, separate, issue is people who actually are editors here, or who have been active editors in the past, who may or may not be breaking COI/Canvassing rules. I'm not interested in accusing anyone of anything so I'll just assume for the moment that is a problem that exists in the abstract. It's hard to imagine a policy-based solution to that problem other than sanctioning the user, because if somebody has an investment in the website and is ignoring policy anyways, then I definitely agree that we shouldn't adopt a suboptimal global policy to handle that; we have a whole other set of rules for user misbehaviour. So I see the former as worth trying to fix with a policy change, and the latter as just a matter of users breaking rules and all the various policies we have to deal with that. - Astrophobe  (talk) 18:47, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * XfD is already biased too heavily towards indiscriminate inclusionism. We smile benevolently on keep vote canvassing, and allow personal attacks on nominators to pass without comment. Now here is a proposal to skew the conversation even further away from discussion of article subjects and contents and further towards lawyerly rules about who is allowed to talk. I am not in favour. <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 08:42, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I've ever seen an indiciation of AfD being a hotbed of indiscriminate inclusionism, nor indeed community encouragement (or at least, lack of notice or reticence) on canvassing of Keep votes. Nosebagbear (talk)
 * This suggests that there are areas where pretty much everything nominated gets kept, does not matter whether or not material is compliant with WP:GNG. Not that I strongly oppose this, and in some areas (such as localities) it probably makes sense, but this definitely backs up the inclusionism claims.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:51, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Well, by its nature XfD tends to attract pages that ought to be deleted so in that sense it leans towards deletionism. But what I mean is that the lenience we show to misbehaving editors correlates directly with whether they voted keep. For instance, I once objected when some pretty blatant keep vote canvassing was allowed to determine the outcome of an AfD/DRV. All I got in response was blank looks and a (hopefully not serious) suggestion to counter-canvass if it bothered me so much. That's not advice I intend to take because, even if I felt like being unethical, a delete voter could never get away with it. I could give other examples of keep voters free to make insulting personal commentary and delete voters getting in trouble for backchat but of course if I did it would only be dismissed as a list of personal grievances. <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 10:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I could understand this position regarding #1, but #2 is much more likely to apply to canvassed keep !votes than canvassed delete !votes (at least in my experience). &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Call me a cynic if you like, but I don't see that ever being enforced consistently. <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 12:22, 14 June 2020 (UTC)


 * So, I get both the base concern(s), but also the issue with SP - that the creator in particular is disadvantaged. On the thought of Extended-Confirmed to start an AfD - does anyone know what % of good-faith AfDs are started by non-EC users? That seems relevant here. It's a shame we don't have PC2 - this would be a great area for it. Nosebagbear (talk) 09:44, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * AfD needs improvement, for certain. Some kind of competency requirement for nominating articles could help, so could a quicker closing process for bad nominations. Unfortunately, it's hard for me to come up with a good way of accomplishing...Jacona (talk) 12:58, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * AFD will never be perfect and it is 100x more "friendly" than it was 10 years ago. Participation is lower as well.  I see no benefit to suppressing participation any further and that is what more rules will do.  Dennis Brown - 2&cent; 13:48, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * This would be solved if we had more mechanical and less subjective notability rules. Then it wouldn't matter who was being canvassed. We should repeal WP:N altogether and just amend WP:V to require two independent, in depth, reliable secondary sources for every article. Then AFDs will just be about whether there are two qualifying sources or not. If there are, it can have a stand alone page. If there aren't, no stand alone page. Simple and no need to discuss whether or not something is "notable". No SNGs to argue about. Basically, make GNG a hard policy and be done with it. Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 16:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * We've seen editors try to work with more mechanical/objective application of notability "rules", claiming things like "I have three sources, that's enough", but this makes things worse because now you have people gaming the system worse than what we see now. Also, this underminds the purpose of notability on WP, which is to reflect topics that are likely to be able to be fleshed out to fuller articles but need sourcing work to help get there, and because we have no DEADLINE, require the flexibility of judging what sourcing exists at AFD rather than rote rules to keep them. --M asem (t) 16:34, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I disagree, because that would only further muddy the distinction between what's verifiable and what's notable. Those two are not the same, and while the existence of reliable sources (i.e., verifiable facts) is necessary for someone or something to be notable, they aren't sufficient. --bender235 (talk) 16:50, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Going to echo Masem here and agree that this would be susceptible to gaming the system. Axem Titanium (talk) 16:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your comments. To clarify, I am indeed proposing something radical: far more than "blurring the lines" between V and N, I'm talking about getting rid of that line altogether. That's why I'm not worried about "the purpose of notability", because I advocate getting rid of the entire concept of "notability". Let's face facts: 6,000,000 articles, and they're not all about important topics. We have hundreds of thousands of articles about athletes, songs, Pokemon characters, and all the rest. If the purpose of notability is to reflect topics that are likely to be fleshed out, well, then WP:N has failed miserably at that purpose.It's the entire concept of "notability" that is to blame: the notion that a topic has some property, "notable", that determines whether or not it should be in the encyclopedia, and we, as editors, are tasked with examining the topic and determining if it has this property or not. We act like notability is something we discover. It's not. It's something we invent. "Notability" is whatever we say it is; literally, whatever we agree to write at WP:N. If the purpose is to identify topics that can be fully fleshed out, there is no better way to do that than to identify if there are two good sources that we can use in the article. If there are two good sources, we can write an article about it that complies with V, NPOV, and NOR. If there aren't, we can't. This is the principle behind GNG, WP:THREE, WP:42, etc.We should embrace the fact that an AFD is not about a topic's inherent property of notability, but really just about whether to have a stand-alone page or not. We should have a stand alone page if we have the sources to support it. By making the "notability" simply a matter of "sufficient available sourcing: yes or no" and not about anything else, it will be harder, not easier, to game. Every keep !vote, to "count", would have to identify the two sources, and the entire discussion would be about whether the two sources meet WP:GNG criteria. The current system is already being gamed, and has been gamed, for a long time. Gaming is what led to this thread in the first place. Restricting the conversation to just be about the quality of sourcing and nothing else, will lead to less gaming, nor more. Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 17:30, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * that's a radical idea, to put it mildly, and I'm afraid that completely eliminating the notion and threshold of notability would turn Wikipedia into somewhat of a repository for everything that was ever written, and every person that ever existed. I mean, I might be able to find a census entry and a birth announcement (two reliable sources!) of some 19th-century John Smith of Iowa, but what's the point of writing up an article recounting his dull biography of plowing the corn field from the cradle to the grave? At some point we have to be firm and say Wikipedia is just not the place for this. --bender235 (talk) 17:39, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * , 6,000,000 articles says to me that Wikipedia already is a repository for everything that was ever written. Please note that I didn't say "two reliable sources", I said "two independent, in-depth, reliable secondary sources" (in other words, same as WP:GNG), so no, a census entry and birth announcement wouldn't cut it. Requiring two GNG sources for every article will reduce, not increase, the number of stand-alone pages. Of this much, I'm sure. What makes my proposal radical is that if it were implemented, millions of articles would be eligible for deletion, which are not currently eligible for deletion, because meeting GNG isn't currently universally seen as a requirement. Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 17:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * (sorry for the multiple pings), as one concrete example, under "my" suggested system, this AFD would have resulted in "delete" because there aren't two qualifying sources. Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 18:27, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * No matter how you slice it, WP:PROF almost certainly needs to remain a standalone rule. Many academics are worth having an article written about them despite never having appeared in a newspaper. Significant coverage in secondary sources is not a requirement; merely having one's research (a primary source, albeit a reliable one due to peer review) cited heavily by other papers is sufficient to meet the bar. And we can write an article on their work using mostly those primary sources, with the reassurance that they are reliable because they have been thoroughly vetted by the academic community. -- <b style="color:red">King of ♥</b><b style="color:red"> ♦</b><b style="color:black"> ♣</b><b style="color:black"> ♠</b> 19:01, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * , if we did this, I would support having exceptions (specifically to the "independent" and "secondary" requirements), including PROF exception, as well as for other specific areas where there is a lack of independent or secondary sourcing, but where the community feels non-independent or non-secondary sourcing is nonetheless reliable enough to satisfy V.
 * Instead of asking, at an AFD, "is it notable?", we ask, "is there enough verifiable information to support a stand-alone page?" A statement, to be verified, needs to come from a reliable source (a source with a reputation for accuracy), it needs to come from an independent source (or else there's a bias concern, usually), and it needs to come from a secondary source (to avoid OR interpretation of primary sources). For an entire page to be verified (or in other words, for a topic to be verified), we also need in-depth sources: enough content to fill a page.
 * Even if the community adopts this view of verification, it can still decide that there are some topics, like PROF, where a "reliable source" need not be independent or secondary, and so exceptions could be made. This is also the sort of exception that could be made to address under-coverage of historically marginalized people and topics. Thinking of whether to have a stand-alone page as a matter of V instead of N is a better framework all around. And then, in AfD discussions, the only keep !vote that would count would look like "keep - [source 1] [source 2]", and it wouldn't matter if people were canvassed or IP editors or socks or whatever, because instead of counting votes, or assessing votes, we would just be counting sources and confirming that they meet "the test" and that there's two of them. Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 20:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with those who argue that an uninterpreted WP:V is not enough of a basis for deletion policy, but I agree that notability has not served us well. The problem that deletion policy is there to solve is that there are forces out there that aim to undermine the encyclopedia, so we need to choose the ground that we can defend. The notability criterion is a solution: it says the topics we should have articles for are those on which good articles could be written. I have thought since 2006 this is wrong: the criterion we should apply is maintainability, not notability, and we should deal with articles as they are, not as they might be (although I am all for editors who transform bad articles into good ones during the AfD process). The events that convinced me of this led to this AfD: Articles for deletion/Stephen Schwartz (journalist), an example of something then unmaintainable that I thought should have been deleted, although the subject was notable. More recently I have been bothered by how the WP:INHERIT criterion has frequently been used to delete high-quality, well-maintained, encyclopediac content; cf. Deletion review/Log/2020 June 8 for the most recent example I aware of; there are have been better exmples. We should drop the abstract ideal of notability as the criterion we use and adopt the pragmatic criterion of maintainability that I think in time would lead to a more intuitive deletion policy. &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 06:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Speaking as a proud simpleton who loves hyper-minimalist rules, I would support this, but it seems like a different (though of course related) proposal. - Astrophobe  (talk) 18:37, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with those who argue that an uninterpreted WP:V is not enough of a basis for deletion policy, but I agree that notability has not served us well. The problem that deletion policy is there to solve is that there are forces out there that aim to undermine the encyclopedia, so we need to choose the ground that we can defend. The notability criterion is a solution: it says the topics we should have articles for are those on which good articles could be written. I have thought since 2006 this is wrong: the criterion we should apply is maintainability, not notability, and we should deal with articles as they are, not as they might be (although I am all for editors who transform bad articles into good ones during the AfD process). The events that convinced me of this led to this AfD: Articles for deletion/Stephen Schwartz (journalist), an example of something then unmaintainable that I thought should have been deleted, although the subject was notable. More recently I have been bothered by how the WP:INHERIT criterion has frequently been used to delete high-quality, well-maintained, encyclopediac content; cf. Deletion review/Log/2020 June 8 for the most recent example I aware of; there are have been better exmples. We should drop the abstract ideal of notability as the criterion we use and adopt the pragmatic criterion of maintainability that I think in time would lead to a more intuitive deletion policy. &mdash; Charles Stewart (talk) 06:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Speaking as a proud simpleton who loves hyper-minimalist rules, I would support this, but it seems like a different (though of course related) proposal. - Astrophobe  (talk) 18:37, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * I think one of the issues is that AFD, unlike a lot of other Wikipedia processes we think of as happening "in the background", slaps a big red notice on top of an article in articlespace. I'm not suggesting that we change this at all, but it is worth keeping this fact in mind when we discuss solutions. The notice demands your attention when you're on an article and even invites you (yes, you!) to participate in the deletion discussion. You can imagine that a new/IP user would feel confused if they're not allowed to participate at all at this point. Axem Titanium (talk) 16:57, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * If a change were made, we could update the template accordingly. Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 18:02, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * This is a good point, thanks. If we enacted some sort of restriction like this, at very least the wording of that notice should be changed, but I'm not sure in what way. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm sure that banner is responsible for a good chunk of the hollow "keep" votes that show up for pop-culture articles. It stands to reason that if you're looking up the article for a particular thing, you beleive that particular thing should have an article.  (Even if there's no particular policy-based reason for it to.) ApLundell (talk) 14:52, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Personally I would support automatically adding extended confirmed protection (30 days/500 edits) to all AfDs as they are created. Positive contributions from editors not meeting these criteria are incredibly rare IMO, and it would stop SPAs, socks, IPs called from social media etc. Number   5  7  17:46, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with this suggestion. Article creators who are not EC can make their case on the talk page (along with other non-EC editors). EC editors can read those talk page arguments and take them into consideration in their AFD !votes. The closer can also take into consideration arguments made on the talk page. But it'll help keep the discussion more focused if only EC editors participated on the AFD page. Frankly, non-EC editors do not have the experience necessary to meaningfully contribute at an AFD, even if they wrote the article. And I say this as an editor who participated in AFDs before I was EC (and I shouldn't have, because I had no understanding of notability guidelines then [or now really]). Levivich&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 18:01, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I would like to see some facts here. How many AFDs in the past month/year can we reasonably classify as being disruptive in the senses concerned in this proposal? I would say that if that number is less than 5 or 10%, I don't see a need for systemic change. --Izno (talk) 18:13, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * What happened in the AfDs mentioned above is being repeated at Articles for deletion/Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone now. What happens on Wikipedia doesn't stay on Wikipedia. With every AfD like this, someone on Twitter will be more emboldened to post their vanity shrine on Wikipedia. EC protection will really help in cases like that. TryKid&thinsp;<sup style="white-space:nowrap;">[dubious – discuss] 22:21, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Also the same tactic was just tried by at CfD/Black geoscientists. Something needs to change before this really becomes the new normal. --bender235 (talk) 23:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Will editors who are not admins be able to nominate articles for deletion?  Hawkeye7   (discuss)  23:52, 10 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Under these suggestions anyone who is extended confirmed could nominate AFDs. Personally I would support limiting nominations and participation to extended confirmed users and the article creator because it would give more time to block the sockpuppets who seem to zero in at AFD whether they are nominating or voting, imv Atlantic306 (talk) 00:20, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I agree with Atlantic306. Mccapra (talk) 12:01, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Under normal circumstances I think our AfD process works fine and don't need adjustment - usually no or minimal disruption and no need to protect the AfD until something problematic happens. For example, I recently dealt with an case where an article creator was blocked during an AfD of their article and suddenly brand-new accounts showed up to !vote. SPI, checkuser, semi-protected just because of the sockpuppetry, bam - dealt with. What we need to have a process for is cases like these, which are the exception rather than the rule - demonstrable and widespread off-wiki canvassing that turns the AfD into chaos (a flood of mostly-new users using non-policy-based arguments). I think semi-protection is the right call in most cases, but what do we do if there's demonstrable canvassing of experienced editors, for example? creffett (talk) 00:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Some of the examples listed above are quite extraordinary, I agree with bender235 that “something” needs to be done before this becomes the normal. Whilst it would not deal with bad-faith nominations and canvassed inactive users, perhaps upon presentation of evidence of off-Wiki advocacy, !votes be restricted to extended confirmed users and !votes already cast by non-XCON users be struck/deleted. Cavalryman (talk) 03:42, 11 June 2020 (UTC).
 * actually what upset me the most in these Twitter canvassing campaigns is the piggybacking on a social justice cause. People weren't just told to vouch for the notability of some hashtag activists, they were sent here to fight supposedly systematic sexism and racism in Wikipedia and its entire community (see, , ). And sure enough the majority of canvassed !voters came waltzing in crying racism right away without even bothering to consider the arguments presented up to this point. That's what concerns me the most. Apart from slandering the Wikipedia community unjustly, it makes certain subjects and topics toxic to a point where our usual (bureaucratic) processes can no longer be applied. Who wants to be the Wikipedian permanently branded as a racist in the Twitterverse simply for questioning the notability of a social media starlet? The nominator of AfD/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman stated that he/she created a sock puppet rather than use his/her established account to avoid online harassment, and perusing the comments and replies of the self-righteous Twitter mob above, I don't think that was a stretch. To me, this whole incident and its likely future copy-cat versions are worrisome. (And just to show that I am not exaggerating, here is a now-deleted tweet by singling me out by name, simply for questioning whether her newly created Category:Black geoscientists doesn't fit our existing category pattern.) --bender235 (talk) 16:39, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Please write to T&S about the tweet, this is a cleart wiki-harassment. I have warned her in the morning (qand may be this is why the tweet has been deleted), but if I have seen this I might have indeffed.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:41, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think it will be necessary to block her. After all, she deleted the tweet immediately after I told her it was uncalled for. But it goes to my point that the social media canvassing tactics used in AfD/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, AfD/Corina Newsome, and AfD/Earyn McGee, will soon be the "new normal," because they clearly worked. All three articles are now even being pushed for DYK (see DYK/Black Birders Week, DYK/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman). With this much success, why wouldn't this strategy be copied? --bender235 (talk) 19:05, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * , I agree completely, aside from the utterly appalling conduct of that editor the broader trend in identity politics is to brand anyone who presents a rational and articulate counterpoint a racist/bigot/Nazi etc, thankfully not a common issue in the dog articles I tend to edit and to be honest one of the reasons I usually give anything political on Wikipedia a very wide berth. I tend towards supporting the idea of BLUELOCK for AfD discussions (less article creators), I suspect SILVERLOCK would be no impediment. One of the reasons I proposed a middle ground above is to protect closers from the inevitable social media targeting that would follow from a close that went against canvassed IP & SPA opinion. Kind regards, Cavalryman (talk) 22:48, 11 June 2020 (UTC).


 * Wikipedia has already strayed too far from being the encyclopedia anyone can edit. Keeping that in mind, further restrictions on editing abilities for newer users should only be implemented when absolutely necessary. I think our admins are pretty good at recognizing canvassing and meatpuppetry by SPAs and the like. Since AfD isn't a vote, closing admins are expected to throw out !votes that are frivolous and/or not based in our policies and guidelines. Even if that weren't possible, I'm not convinced it happens often enough to justify such drastic action. We also have to consider the effect this would have on editor retention. Wikipedia is already confusing enough to newbies, with its byzantine policies, litany of jargony acronyms, and Kafkaesque bureaucracy-that-isn't-a-bureaucracy. I'm convinced this would be a net negative. AfD has far more pressing concerns to deal with anyway. The biggest two that come to mind are careless nominations where WP:BEFORE clearly didn't happen (especially wrt non-English sources), and nationalistic or politically motivated bloc voting by established editors. Established editors know how to make their !vote look like a valid policy-based rationale even when their real motivations are ILIKEIT/IDONTLIKEIT. Freshly recruited meatpuppets don't know how to do this, and so closing admins can safely disregard them per WP:NOTAVOTE. In particularly extreme cases, admins should semi-protect the page as they sometimes do now. That's far better than the current proposal which throws the baby out with the bathwater. &minus;&minus;&minus; Cactus Jack 🌵 05:11, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * While I appreciate the argument on principle, I don't know if being an encyclopedia that anyone can edit is the same as being "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, and anyone can jump into the behind-the-encyclopedia technical processes without spending time learning about them first". As for WP:BEFORE, I don't necessarily disagree; don't you think that requiring more experience would make it more likely that someone is familiar with (and follows) that guidance? &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)


 * We need to remember that AFD is just one of our deletion processes, if we were to restrict people from filing AFDs we shouldn't be surprised if they tag more articles for Speedy deletion or simply draftify them. That said I'm OK with the idea that we restrict some people from deletion generally. Over the years I have seen a number of editors who didn't realise they were overly deletionist until they ran an RFA and had their deletion tagging checked and criticised. So I would be OK with 6 month bans from the deletion process where people were only allowed to participate in the deletion process re articles that they had started. I really really don't like the idea of restricting people from a deletion debate where it is their work that we are considering deleting. So restrict the people who have been making mistakes in their deletion tagging, not a blanket restriction on new or newish editors.  Ϣere Spiel  Chequers  13:32, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't know how we've escalated past the early suggestions of SP for participation to ECP, which is seriously, seriously OTT. While their average edit quality is certainly worse, I've seen many legitimate !votes from editors in that group. Shifting to talk page for all of them brings multiple issues: that's fiddly to spot, so some just won't note to participate there (that is, they'll know the TP exists, but not that they'll be read) & also massively drops that chances that every person in the AfD will read the !votes or comments, which disrupts and weights the discussion inappropriately. We also should be using the least disruptive method, and disrupted AfDs are relatively rare. We aren't implementing a "have more experienced participation" restriction. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:49, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * AfD is infested with socks. You can see it with old AfDs (a few years back) and seeing how many participants have a strike-through (with that userscript installed). They get busted eventually, somewhere else, and leave behind fossil evidence. I would support reasonable moves to address this problem. -- Green  C  16:51, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, there is a problem, but it is only a problem with a very small percentage of AfD discussions. Far more discussions have the problem of a lack of participation, which this proposal would only exacerbate. Maybe we need to encourage people to be less tolerant of canvassing, or of other abuses of this process, but I don't think this is the right way to go about it. I remember that my very first logged-in edit to Wikipedia 13 years ago was made to an AfD discussion in response to canvassing on another site, but it was not supportive of the canvasser. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:50, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I wonder how typical my own experience is. I began editing in any serious way in 2013. I think it was late 2017 or early 2018 before I even knew AfD existed. Once I discovered it I spent many weeks just observing it before I commented. It was months before I put my first article up for deletion. How many people in this discussion have a completely different experience? I simply don’t assume good faith for ‘new’ editors who show up and are busily nominating articles for deletion in the first couple of weeks. There are all kinds of productive ways new editors can contribute to the project but sitting on your hands for a while before you start nominating articles for deletion seems entirely appropriate. Mccapra (talk) 20:02, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I had a similar experience. My first participation in a AfD was in AfD/Jamaal Anderson in 2007, only after having made hundreds of contributions over the years. AfDs—or any Wikipedia backroom bureaucracy—are almost naturally intimidating to the uninitiated, due to the various cryptic acronyms that are casually thrown around by the regulars. Unfamiliar with these, inexperienced or canvassed editors tend to copy-paste these acronyms in AfDs without actually understanding them, which makes them easy to spot for the trained admin eye. To his credit, immediately spotted the unusual frequency of WP:BASIC citations in AfD/Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman. --bender235 (talk) 20:37, 11 June 2020 (UTC)


 * A couple of points worth mentioning here. Other language wikis It would be great to both explicitly encourage editors to look at other language wikipedias for sources and to encourage editors from other language wikis to participate in AfD's, especially in situations where there is the likelihood of sources being in non-English languages. Draft namespace Draft namespace is relatively new compared to AfD and moving good-faith contributions to draft to enable relatively slow-moving editing to occur should be encouraged, particularly for topical subjects. SPAs and paid editing my feeling is that a large numbers of the SPAs involved in articles that end up at AfD are undeclared paid editors. This is a larger issue than AfD, but it may be worth thinking about what can be done in this specific context. The best I can think of is a bot that creates a table on the talk page listing all the AfD participants and editors involved in the article and gives edit counts, how many are related to the issue at hand, and also scans for their names in sockpuppet investigations and other administrative actions. Stuartyeates (talk) 21:21, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I am very against default ECP. I'm open to reasonable suggestions for how to resolve the identified problems, but ECP is not one of those. To comment on Rhododendrite's questions: (1) I think this is reasonable. We have technical restrictions on who can move pages, so I think it's reasonable to have slightly more stringent requirements to nominate for deletion. (2) I'm not a fan, but am open to it. I would prefer the first option and see how that goes before default protection. Perhaps more practical is expanding the protection policy to allow protecting AFD discussions for sock/meatpuppetry or obvious canvassing. (3) I think just encouraging use of the talk page by everyone would work, but why have newbies go to talk just to be ignored? We're basically telling them to send their emails to /dev/null. — Wug·a·po·des​ 23:31, 11 June 2020 (UTC)
 * 2. Should deletion discussions be semi-protected by default? Can I suggest some alternatives?
 * Grouped edit notice for Template:Editnotices/Group/WIkipedia:Articles for Deletion
 * Some type of edit filter warning for non-(auto)confirmed users
 * Something similar to GettingStarted, but it pops up when you enter  for the first time; if for non-(auto)confirmed users, it pops up something similar to Not a ballot.
 * If the above aren't going to work in any circumstances, okay then go ahead and semi- protect it and hope those SPAa and canvassed users don't gets 10 edits after 4 days. This will prevent new users from participating, but 99.999% of the time, they think it's a ballot. Nobody uses the AfD talk pages, so let's direct them there. With that comes with more very complicated ideas, like moving policy based votes into the actual AfD by experienced AfDers, and considering if the talk page will be additionally used to addresss the consensus outcome. &#123;&#123;reply to&#124;Can I Log In&#125;&#125; 's talk page! 05:34, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm certainly not against less restrictive interventions like these; I'm just pessimistic they would be helpful. I've seen notavote added to lots of AfDs, and [just based on anecdote of course] I've not really seen it help much. Call me cynical, but when I add it, I'm really just trying to signal to other experienced editors (and the closer) that there may be canvassing/SPAs going on here. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Thanks for starting this, Rhododendrites. Something that deletion discussions and move requests have in common is that, because they have a mandatory period and appear to readers, they can do damage when bad ones are launched. For move requests, we're trying to help by making the notice less prominent, but for deletions, it needs to be prominent. I wish there was a way we could signal to readers "this article is currently nominated for deletion, but it's very unlikely to pass", but we can't exactly just have it display the running !vote total (either technically or editorially). Still, there might be some changes we could make to Template:Article for deletion to help make it clearer what being up for deletion actually means. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 08:06, 12 June 2020 (UTC)


 * We already have strict requirements for starting an AfD: WP:BEFORE. The problem is that they are not enforced.  From what Uncle G has said, AfD was deliberately made rather difficult as a barrier to frivolous nominations.  The tool Twinkle has subverted this to make a deletion nomination much easier than other, more productive actions such as searching for sources, working on the article or starting a discussion on its talk page.
 * Another problem is that the readership tends to be excluded from these discussions. An article may be read hundreds or thousands of times while it is at AfD but we rarely see these readers joining the discussion.  I myself got started on Wikipedia when I saw a deletion notice on an article that I had been reading.  Perhaps I have more aptitude for the Wikipedia interface than the average reader but if there had been greater barriers in place, then I too might not be here now and the hundreds of articles that I have started might not have been written.  Wikipedia is the encyclopedia that anyone can edit and so we should freely accept comments rather than engaging in voter suppression by restricting discussions to a dwindling number of incumbents and insiders.
 * Andrew🐉(talk) 11:01, 12 June 2020 (UTC)


 * It strikes me as odd that we have concluded that the project is best served by creating some filters around article creation for new editors (I don’t know, maybe that’s still controversial?) but we continue to treat AfD as a free for all. It’s true that the best barrier we have is WP:BEFORE but I guess we’re having this discussion because it doesn’t seem as effective as it once was. Mccapra (talk) 11:15, 12 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Quite frankly, I think concerns over this matter are completely overblown. People have constantly been predicting doom and gloom over small problems, but it seems to me that AfD is more sturdy and capable of dealing with sockpuppeteering and canvassing than many give it credit for. New editors do not find AfD and immediately start making bad edits. It takes a lot of time for the average editor to even build up the confidence to start making proper edits, never mind contributing to AfD. There are really only two ways in which a new editor will even get exposed to AfD, either an article they created was nominated, or they were canvassed there. The former is an important learning experience, and being able to contribute gives a new editor valuable insight into how the process works. Stopping these editors from contributing will just further the image of Wikipedia as a bureaucratic nightmare where decisions are made by elitists in ivory towers. In the second case, such instances are isolated and so painfully obvious that dealing with it really does not require pre-emptive punitive measures. This sort of goes without saying, but default ECP is a terrible idea and I am opposed to it in the strongest possible terms. Devonian Wombat (talk) 05:02, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Not doom and gloom. More about tons of wasted time, harassment, and possible external influence on our process (whether in good or bad faith). One of my original points was that we're typically able to deal with this, but there's so little benefit in forcing good faith participants to do so. Lots of wasted time, lots of attempts to influence the outcome. I don't disagree that the article creators/editors themselves should be allowed to participate, though. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:52, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Follow-up - apologies to start this thread and only come back a few days later. Several good points here. If these were actual proposals, it seems like were firmly in "no consensus" territory here, at this point. One thing that I think would make sense for me (or someone else) to do if formally proposing these measures would be to gather some data. My perception is that, putting aside the article creators/contributors themselves, new users almost never make valuable, policy-based contributions to AfD. That applies to nominations especially, and !votes slightly less. But I appreciate that not everyone may have the same perception. One open question for me is how to allow article creators/contributors to participate while preventing other new users? Maybe the only way is to direct them to the talk page, and to rework the notifications to be very clear about how to do so (i.e. to do everything we can to encourage participating there). Not sure. &mdash; Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 23:58, 13 June 2020 (UTC)
 * As somebody said above (or elsewhere, I do not remember), there are only three categories of IP / new users taking part in AfD discussions: (i) they have been affected (created or significantly contributed to an article being discussed, typically by getting a template on their talk page); (ii) they have been externally canvassed to the discussion; (iii) they evade a block. If this correct (and research probably could be made about this - canvassing is difficult to detect but it must be visible by clusterization of new votes in the same discussion), then these issues probably should be separated -canvassing is not just about new users, and we certainly want creators of the articles participate in the AfD on the articles they created.--Ymblanter (talk) 09:15, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
 * I strongly support reforms to streamline the AfD process. In my time I have closed well over a thousand XfD discussions, and have observed two key patterns of sockpuppet manipulation. The first is where novices desperate to keep an article create numerous obvious sockpuppet accounts; the second is more sophisticated, typically connected to paid advertising, where the sockpuppet accounts are crafted with a veneer of legitimacy through the creation of nominal user space pages and through perhaps commenting on a handful of other AfDs or making a handful of other minor edits before engaging in the AfD of concern. Nevertheless, it should not be possible for an account created after the initiation of an XfD to participate in that XfD. I don't think that this is at all problematic for new users, who should expect that some time and experience is required to obtain certain rights. This should also not be a problem with respect to editors creating new pages. Quite frankly, editors should not be able to create new pages at all until they meet some minimal threshold of activity, so the ability to comment in XfDs should coincide with the ability to create new pages at all. BD2412  T 19:00, 14 June 2020 (UTC)
 * These concerns raised seem pretty well addressed by WP:AFD, WP:AFDEQ, and WP:DISCUSSAFD in that legitimate AfD debate cannot be drowned out by obvious manipulation (sock-puppeting) or poor quality commentary, as AfDs are not a poll (consensus is not based on a tally of votes, but on reasonable, logical, policy-based arguments) and those processing the AfD are required to adhere to this (and if they do wrong, the article does not disappear, and can be recalled through the deletion review process WP:DRV). It also appears some of the generalisations about new users (who may or may not be new, given some new registered users have previously been editing Wikipedia for years as non-registered users) has some undertones not in keeping with the spirit that Jimmy Wales had for Wikipedia (that the value of an editor was not in how long their registered account had been in use, or even how many edits they had made, but in the quality of their contributions to Wikipedia, which may come from registered editors both new and old). Some form of artificial class system based on seniority/tenure/clique would seem contrary to that - even the auto-confirmed class (which has been deliberately set at the low threshold of just a few days) isn’t really such a class system. Like Devonian Wombat stated, New editors do not find AfD and immediately start making bad edits... There are really only two ways in which a new editor will even get exposed to AfD, either an article they created was nominated, or they were canvassed there. Therefore, there does not appear to be an issue with the current framework for AfDs that requires re-invention in my view.  Kangaresearch   08:16, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * What said: AfD is one part of WP that really works well, participation at AfD is down, newcomers who are there are apt to be defending pieces they personally have a stake in, there is no better way to learn the notability standards than to actually participate in deletion debatese, there would be nothing gained and much risked by tightening standards for participation there. Carrite (talk) 14:08, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps all that's needed is a guideline that says that it's acceptable for an experienced editor to move the banner to the talk page in cases where it doesn't seem likely the AFD will pass. Or perhaps BLP shouldn't have the banner at all?  It's not hard to see how it can be percieved as an officialy endorsed slight against the BLP subject. ApLundell (talk) 15:02, 18 June 2020 (UTC)
 * Remove AfD from Twinkle. You used to have to go and create the deletion page yourself and copy and paste the correct templates in. This was fine. Some things shouldn't be made easier. It takes two separate people turning two separate keys to launch a nuclear misslile. This could be streamlined, but would that be an improvement? I haven't seen any evidence that either way that adding AfD to Twinkle was a net improvement. It's not helping, so end it. Herostratus (talk) 02:22, 22 June 2020 (UTC)
 * 1. Should there be stricter requirements to start a deletion discussion? What kinds of requirements? At a glance, imposing more requirements would just make it so some deletion-worthy articles remain on the wiki. A lot of stuff can't go through PROD, and isn't eligible for the strict CSD criteria, but is clearly deletion-worthy and should go to AfD. I don't see stricter requirements helping the process.
 * 2. Should deletion discussions be semi-protected by default? Canvassing is a problem, but I've seen less active Wikipedia users contribute helpfully to AfDs before, particularly AfDs that would benefit from more niche knowledge, particularly AfDs for some non-Western topics. I don't know if making discussions semi-protected would help in that sense. An experienced closer can deal with arguments from SPAs and effects due to canvassing, but the process does not benefit from suppressed views of the kinds of users I mentioned.
 * AfD has problems, but I'm not sure these are solutions. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 17:16, 23 June 2020 (UTC)


 * Stricter requirements: Yes. Notification of the article creator and any other editors who have edited the article significantly should be required, not recommended, in the instructions. Some people don't use their watchlists, some have watchlists so long that an AfD can slip by, some are inactive but have preferences set to notify them of edits to their user talk page, and it is a basic courtesy that also increases the chance of participation by people who know the topic. I'm not sure how it would be enforced, but WP:BEFORE should be required. Deletion nominations by editors who don't know the topic and haven't looked to discover it is, in fact, a topic, or who simply don't like the topic, are an increasing problem as the number of articles grows and participation at AfD dwindles. They waste other editors' time and risk our losing useful articles. Restricting participation, for example by semi-protection: No. Apart from the principle of minimizing barriers to participation by unregistered editors, on which I am firm—they include not only potential new editors but also experienced editors whose wisdom and knowledge we should value, and it's their own business if they choose not to register an account—many people are first drawn into the discussion and collaboration aspect of Wikipedia editing through AfD. I saw an AfD on recent changes and was able to provide the rescuing source, and hadn't realized till then that such discussions, where we might lose a valid article because someone didn't have access to a book, were happening. And that is indeed the venue where most of us learn the ropes of notability. In any case, COI editors would be far more likely able to bypass restrictions than good faith newbies, including subject-matter experts. So attempting to restrict AfD participation would do more harm than good. Yngvadottir (talk) 00:58, 6 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Just noting yet another brand new account nominating yet another biography of a woman for deletion. Created an account, made exactly enough edits to be autoconfirmed, then came back a few days later and nominated here: Articles for deletion/Sarafina Nance. Like the examples that immediately preceded my opening this section, and like the many other new accounts nominating/proposing articles by and others, it's awfully hard to see this as something other than harassment by deletion process and demonstration of how easy our very low bar for creating these nominations is to game. &mdash;  Rhododendrites  <sup style="font-size:80%;">talk \\ 18:31, 7 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Mm. As a frequent AfD flyer over the last fifteen years, there are many changes I would want to make.  I would love to stipulate that articles cannot be taken to AfD until at least three days after creation.  I would love to stipulate that closing admins cannot make headcount-over-policy closes, nor consider the opinions of any Keep voter stating that there are sources out there, who does not then put those sources into the article.  I would love to stipulate that editors who haven't been auto-confirmed for at least a month cannot participate in the process, either filing or voting.  Hell, I would love to stipulate that any editor who votes Keep based on a perceived flaw in one element of the nomination, while ignoring the valid elements that remain, should be taken out and shot. But other than requiring extended confirmation in order to file -- a harmless enough stipulation -- I don't see that there's a lot we can (a) do about it, (b) agree upon, or (c) enforce, given our obvious competing interests.  This is an area where our respective hobby horses clash skulls as hard and often as anywhere on Wikipedia.   Ravenswing      02:28, 21 July 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment on process it seems like there are lots of different things happening in this discussion around highlighting issues and solutions but its all getting mixed together so its difficult to know if there are common themes and agreements on ways forward. Is there a way to collate comments into different themes or something to 'see what's going on'? I'm not sure if there is an established process for this? John Cummings (talk) 15:36, 6 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment on process 2 There's a major in balance that is encouraging the proliferation of rubbish articles. The process of getting rid of those articles that don't quite meet CSD is quite taxing, much like defending patent troll lawsuits put a lot more burden on those defending them than those filing them. AFD's like those involved here is significantly taxing and consumes much more editor resources than creating them. There should be a sort of "reverse AfD" where articles being created (especially those in people, companies & organizations and products category) that require notability to be established in a manner similar to AfD before they can appear. Graywalls (talk) 16:02, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Well we have Articles for Creation and New Page Patrol. It’s often NPP volunteers who bring articles to AfD. The benefit of both AFC and NPP is that the onus is on the creator to do the work of finding refs, rather than on someone else. Mccapra (talk) 16:59, 4 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Yet so many utterly promotional and non-notable articles make it into the article space. The process is nowhere near as scrutinized as AFD nominations are. Graywalls (talk) 21:13, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

Notability in AFD
Not sure if this discussion is still active, but thought it worth adding my perspective/experience.

First, just as I've seen stacked IWANTIT discussions, I've also seen IDONTWANTIT steamroll discussions as well. (I'm avoiding the "inclusionisn/deletionism" labels, as, in my experience, most people do not tend to completely reside in black/white boxes.)

I remember a long while back, when blp first started being an issue, and around that time, "notability" really came to the fore.

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."—Jimmy Wales

That quote pretty much was undermined by the apparent necessity of blp.

I even remember a discussion about forking blp's to a separate Wikimedia wiki (WikiBio, or some such).

So to bring it back around to this discussion, What if we just restrict "notability" rationales for deletion, to biography articles (article named for a real person or a group of persons, living or not)?

I welcome discussion on it, but I think WP:V / WP:NOR / WP:RS should easily take care of the rest, thus addressing concerns about the "subjectivity" of the application of "notability" in a particular discussion.

pinging user:Rhododendrites, user:Masem, and user:Astrophobe - the first 3 to comment in this discussion.

I hope this helps as a way forward. - jc37 03:15, 24 July 2020 (UTC)


 * You cannot restrict notability rationales at AfD without first changing the notability and deletion policies. The former says stand-alone articles must be notable and the latter says they can be deleted if they are not.  If an article cannot be nominated for notability reasons at AFD, that leaves no practical way of deleting it.  Contrary to your claim, there are numerous articles that go through AfD that have verifiable information, but not enough to meet WP:N.  What you propose goes way beyond a change to the AfD process. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 15:41, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
 * Do you want any old completely non-notable company, product and theory to have an article? We have policies of deleting due to notability for obvious reasons. Best Wishes,  Lee Vilenski (talk • contribs) 15:50, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
 * To be clear, I'm not resolutely against a fundamental rethink of our inclusion criteria (in fact I think that would be highly beneficial), but I'm not in favour of the (implied) change in this proposal. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 16:40, 24 July 2020 (UTC)
 * I think there are problems with our notability standards that I won’t expand on here. However I don’t see a reason why we would restrict notability to BLPs only.  I think our fundamental problem is that we aspire to collect and share the sum of all human knowledge but we’re not completely clear about what ‘knowledge’ is.  Is it the same thing as ‘stuff’ or some kind of subset? Personally I’m very relaxed about small town mayors and other people we currently AfD out of existence so I don’t have a problem with significantly widening our definition of notability. But we also need to recognise that there is a tidal wave of rubbish pushing its way onto Wikipedia - promotional material about every pizza restaurant in Akron, Ohio, every ‘AI startup’, and all sorts of bizarre POV stuff about history and nationality.  If we let all of that in we’ll rapidly become Opinionopedia. If we’re the world’s intellectual junkyard that’s a significant change of mission and why we should continue to require notability for BLPs but not for other articles doesn’t seem consistent to me. Mccapra (talk) 18:37, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

On the subject of notability
I agree whole-heartedly that we have a participation problem at AFD, in the fact that it is too easy to nominate, and too easy to Ivote "Delete" based on that catch-all "notability". Do we still allow stub articles on Wikipedia? Because one thing I'm seeing with select really prolific nominators, is the tendency to go through a whole category (geographic, institutional, etc) where stubs have been set up (not necessarily with a "stub" template at the bottom), and AFD them as "Not notable". That is followed by ivoters who are new enough to have not much clue on Wikipedia stub policy, who ivote a delete. And you end up with hundreds of deletions of what would have previously been acceptable as stubs. Because "notability" is not established. We have a really serious problem with this. — Maile (talk) 22:48, 10 August 2020 (UTC)
 * This is often the fault of the closers, who could pick one of the alternatives to deletion such as redirect. the remedy is to use Deletion Review more frequently, asking for not an overturn, but a relist, on thegrounds of insufficient discussion. Relists usually attract more attention. (Generalizing a little, there is almost nothing in Wp which would not be helped by more participation)  DGG ( talk ) 16:11, 12 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree; I'm pretty new here and already two of my articles are nominated for deletion on the count of notability (Lucy's Heart and Olivia Harkin if you're interested).

Lucy's Heart is a short film that was shown on at least one film festival (that I could verify) and has an extensive IMDb listing, but because of its very nature (independently produced short film) it didn't get coverage in media outlets that count towards notability. So: not notable according to WP:NFILM. So basically, a whole subgenre of film isn't notable. The deletion voters' argument is that there are numerous other outlets on the internet where you can list those films. By that logic, we could basically call it quits on wikipedia, because that goes for pretty much any headword on here.

Olivia Harkin is an actress, to my personal frustration not notable by current WP standards (I imagine that must hurt if you'd read that about yourself), so: AfD. Again, no citable sources discuss her as a person, only her work. Rave reviews on her drumming in Fame: The Musical, but not about who she is or where she was born. But what if someone would like an overview of the work she's done? You can only find where she's in if you know where she's in in advance this way.

The deletion voters' argument on the latter again is to put this information in other places (IMDb), and again I reply: then why bother with wikipedia project in the first place? IMDb is a commercial entity; if Jeff Bezos decides to pull the plug, it's all gone. If he decides he wants to make more money, he could make you have to pay to access it.

Jimmy's vision is to have a place for our collective knowledge, so that anyone could look up anything. Sure, examples given in other posts here make sense, as articles can be very easily used as political battlegrounds, but aren't we enforcing too strict a rule when it comes to notability? After all, what's notable or not differs per person. In my research I often scan databases of old newspapers. The kind of articles or subjects you stumble upon there is remarkable. Sometimes very useful, as it might put me on the right track of finding something, but those same articles wouldn't be notable on WP. Those would be lost for future generations if it was up to some people here.Sjokhazard (talk) 07:41, 8 September 2020 (UTC)

Political parties, notability and AfDs
I am a regular AfD contributor with specific focus on political parties. This debate about notability strikes at the heart of my "interest". I hold my hand up to admit that my bias is towards the deletionist tendency, because I believe Wikipedia is not a Gazetteer of political parties and that we should do far more than just host stub articles for political parties that merely exist, rather than achieve electoral success or achieve historical significance. As of late there has been a clear consensus by the wider community that political party articles should be deleted where GNG and ORG guidelines are not met: see Residents' Association of London, Patriotic Socialist Party, Free England Party, Gwlad Gwlad, Miss Great Britain Party, Common Sense Party (UK), Cymru Annibynnol, Christian Democratic Party (United Kingdom) and so on. Not one of these parties achieved anything beyond existing, some had no electoral candidature at all, surely the most basic thing a party should achieve.

What I would like AfD to do is based on my understanding of our basic principles of notability and importance. Nobody has lost any vital information through the deletion of these articles, yet there is no safeguard against similarly scant articles being created.

I am interested by the idea spoken about elsewhere in this discussion about asking AfD nominators to show they've exhausted other avenues - including re-directs and mergers. I would certainly approve of this functionality, as it might make the 'clear up' of stub articles into more general article spaces easier and more convenient. However I would also like to recommend that the community draws up a policy on political party notability, so we can say for certain what exactly makes a political party worthy of a full article in mainspace. doktorb wordsdeeds 07:24, 5 September 2020 (UTC) 07:23, 5 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Contrary to your claim, Wikipedia is a gazetteer, but that does not mean that every political party needs an individual article. <b style="background:#FAFAD2;color:#C08000">Spinning</b><b style="color:#4840A0">Spark</b> 09:02, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Well, hush my mouth, I became so used to using that phrase in successful AfDs that I didn't stop to check that I was contradicting page one, line one, of Wikipedia's founding principles! All the same (and to sound a touch like a politician) I stand by the general point. Wikipedia contains elements of a gazetteer but is not specifically a gazetteer of political parties. The fact remains that there is fuzziness around GNG and ORG guidelines with regards to political parties and I will be interested to see if we can agree on what to do about the substantial number of articles about them. doktorb wordsdeeds 09:15, 5 September 2020 (UTC)
 * My personal way of thinking anbout them is whether they have actually fielded candidates in an election. If they have, they're notable in the sense they should get an article, because encyclopedia users are likely to look here. If not, it is possible but unlikely they may get an articles as if they were a social club of indeterminate nature if they received sufficient coverage.
 * And a gazeteer is not a list of people or of groups--based on Gazetteer, its a " geographical dictionary or directory ". I think the term you are looking fori s directory, and here the basic rule is WP:NOT DIRECTORY. DGG ( talk ) 22:20, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Even if we were to want to cover every party that ran a candidate, that doesn't mean that each is best handled with an article. For example, the American Delta Party was created solely as a way for Rocky De La Fuente to get his US presidential ticket on the 2016 ballot in states where having a party made qualifying easier than running as an independent. It has run no other candidates, and is not even running Rocky this year as best as I can tell. As such, it's best handled as it is now - as a redirect to the page on Rocky's 2016 campaign. --Nat Gertler (talk) 22:41, 20 September 2020 (UTC)

An XFD Idea to Toss Around - Discretionary Sanctions
This is an idea that has occurred to me from time to time, and then sometimes I have thought it was a good idea, and sometimes I have thought that it wasn't such a good idea. That is to impose Community General Sanctions (or ArbCom Discretionary Sanctions) on XFDs. General Sanctions are imposed on areas in which there is a high tendency to disruptive editing, such as areas that are real battlegrounds (e.g., Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan), or where there is a high incidence of fraud (cryptocurrency), or where there is a special need to deal with disruptive editing (e.g., BLPs, to protect, you guessed it, living persons). There are a few editors who make a nuisance of themselves either nominating things for deletion or defending things from deletion. Perhaps general sanctions would help deal with troublesome editors by allowing an uninvolved administrator to initiate sanctions that would otherwise require WP:ANI. Comments? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:46, 30 July 2020 (UTC)
 * We need to decrease the use of DS, not increase it. Discretionary sanctions gives any one of the 500 active administrators the power to block in a way which requires exceptional effort and consensus to overturn. It was adopted at a time when Wikipedia had a real problem with the so-called "unblockable" editors, who, however much they misbehaved, would be unblocked by one of their friends; it was necessary to have a sticky block like this to deal with them. The approach worked, and there are many fewer such editors now. So exceptional circumstances where the ability to give a sticky block in contentious topics if necessary. I don't think AfD is in such a desperate condition at this time. Considering that there are some very different philosophies of what consititues an acceptable WP article in some fields, this gives any admin from one of the sides the ability to remove those who disagree, in a way that is exceptionally difficult to reverse. There are editors who abuse the afd system, and ordinary blocks are sufficient to deal with them.  DGG ( talk ) 00:35, 16 August 2020 (UTC)

Requiring alternatives to deletion be exhausted before nominating an article for deletion
Hi all

I spent a while looking at what is going wrong with AfD because of several issues I had with articles being deleted (mainly of biographies of women). One way that I think would reduce the issues with articles being nominated for deletion is that currently the rules do not require contributors to explore the alternatives to deletion before nominating an article for deletion. If nominators had to show they had exhausted alternatives for deletion before nomination this would both provide additional motivations to improve the quality of articles (e.g more references to improve notability) and take most of the 'fun' out of malicious and low effort nominations.

John Cummings (talk) 15:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * On this basis how would you suggest we modify WP:BEFORE? There are times when nominators are too quick to put an article up for deletion, but if there are decent sources it does not take long for other editors to flush them out. If there are articles you think we should be keeping that are actually being deleted (as opposed to being wrongly nominated and then kept following discussion) this suggests that nobody at AfD is doing their job properly, not just the nominator, but this isn't a pattern I recognise. Mccapra (talk) 16:41, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * WP:BEFORE clearly says that alternatives to deletion should be considered before nominating an article at AfD. The problem is that we have some editors who don't consider themselves to be subject to the instructions that apply to other people (I suppose they regard them as the little people as opposed to the Übermenschen that they are themselves), and actually boast of not following them. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:07, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * That may be true, but if it is a behavioural pattern there are ways of addressing it that don’t require us to change the AfD guidelines. Ultimately if editors active at AfD do their job collectively, then nominators who haven’t done a proper WP:BEFORE won’t get very far. There’s a case that such nominations waste other editors’ time, but not that we lose decent articles because of bad nominations, AFAICS. Mccapra (talk) 18:33, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I disagree. Many AfD discussions are closed with a couple of "me too" votes, without anyone actually considering alternatives to deletion. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:12, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * , that is dishonest, offensive claptrap and you know it. Instead of calling people names, how about you try characterising your opponents' positions accurately and fairly, and debate them on their content instead of wild speculations as to their motives? Or is that too hard for you? <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 18:39, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Please link to any AfD discussion where I have not done as you ask. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:09, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I want to say that this (BEFORE required before launching an AFD) has been a WP:PEREN but its not listed there, but I can tell at WT:AFD that the idea has been proposed and rejected many times. What I will say is that if you see any AFD nominated, and keeping in mind the history of the editor nominating it, that you do not believe in good faith that they have executed a proper BEFORE search appropriate for the topic, mention and call this out. (This would be the case for where we're talking topic pre-Internet, where sources more local to the event may be needed in print and thus not easily found just be a google search). --M asem (t) 18:23, 6 August 2020 (UTC)


 * , exactly, WP:BEFORE says they should be considered but doesn't require it, either of the nominator or anyone taking part in the process or to use them to reject deletion nominations if its clear alternatives are possible. Making it a requirement would put the onus on nominators to explore alternatives and save the time for people taking part in AfDs discussing articles that shouldn't have been nominated in the first place, it would cause no change for people already following the recommendation. I've thought about this quite a lot and cannot think of a downside to this change, am I missing something?
 * I'm unclear how exactly this could be implemented in practice, my suggestion would be the nominator would be required to show they have exhausted alternatives in nomination process, not just say 'have you considered the alternatives to nomination = yes' but to actually show the work e.g showing there aren't enough reliable sources in common places for that topic e.g Search results, Google Books, Scholar and News etc. John Cummings (talk) 18:40, 6 August 2020 (UTC)


 * I think you may be missing WP:CREEP which, ironically, is seemingly the favoured link for one of the WP:ARS stalwarts across a broad swathe of discussions such as this. - Sitush (talk) 18:40, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * thanks, this change would wouldn't include much new instruction, my guess would be one change and one new line. It would mainly be a change in the wording on WP:BEFORE from 'Consider whether the article could be improved rather than deleted' to something like 'Exhaust opportunities to improve rather than delete the article' (that wording needs some work) and then an extra line in the AfD nomination form asking the nominator to show they've actually done this. John Cummings (talk) 18:50, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * First, I would recommend reading the WT:AFD archives because again, making BEFORE mandatory, while not a perennial suggestion, has been asked many many times. Also, not all AFD requests are based on lack of notability, which BEFORE is specifically about. There's also reasons that may be based on notability that BEFORE can't address, like if the sources available - maybe established in a previous AFD as exhaustive - still don't give significant coverage per the nominator, and they seek deletion. BEFORE is not a one-size-fits-all approach prior to all AFD, basically. --M asem (t) 18:58, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * But this discussion is not about notability. It is about looking for alternatives to deletion, which are also addressed by WP:BEFORE. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:56, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * The problem with BEFORE is that making it a strict requirement turns the discussion away from the article, it content, and its sources and towards a lawyerly checklist and procedural shutdowns. It's best to regard BEFORE as advice on how to write a convincing nomination. That it keeps getting used as the delivery mechanism for personal attacks on deletion nominators doesn't help either. <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 18:44, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * A much better way of reducing the load at AfD would be to create a new permission called article_creator or something like that, give it to every editor who has shown that they can create articles that don't have notability or other serious issues, and require that every new article created by editors without the permission goes through AFC. Black Kite (talk) 18:46, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Since 2018, we've already had article creation restricted to autoconfirmed accounts, after the Foundation reversed its unilateral prohibition on implementing the plan which had been first approved in 2011. (See WP:ACTRIAL for the full history of this long contentious issue).  Based on my experience with the issue, I believe that 1) The restriction to autoconfirmed accounts is sufficient in keeping the worst abuses to a minimum and 2) It took the Foundation 7 years to come around to what was a WIDELY supported community initiative.  I think your proposal is dead in the water, as I see no way the Foundation would support any additional restrictions on article creation, given how hard the fought against the community on this one.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 19:00, 6 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh, I didn't think it would. But I can't think of any other way to at least restrict the large amounts of spam, cruft, paid editor creations and other crap which isn't coming through AFC. Black Kite (talk) 19:58, 6 August 2020 (UTC)

I think that the balance needs to be tipped a bit in the opposite way. A significant part of creating a article in Wikipedia is to find and include references. That's why they are called editors and not title generators.<b style="color: #0000cc;">North8000</b> (talk) 20:09, 6 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Going back to the original proposal to require alternatives to be exhausted, I’ve been giving it some more thought. First of all my question is do we think that articles on decent, notable topics are getting deleted at AfD constantly? Regularly? Occasionally? Very occasionally? Because I think to make a major revision of WP:BEFORE we’d need to agree that there is a problem of sufficient magnitude to warrant it.  For my own part, I’m not persuaded.  I look at AfD every day though I don’t scrutinise each individual discussion closely, and my impression is that overall, it’s doing fine.  Yes there are nominations what are not grounded in policy, but other editors contributing to the discussion deal with that.  I’d support some thresholds for allowing editors to make an AfD nomination at all in order to reduce the number of pointless nominations but I know that doesn’t enjoy support here.


 * The main alternatives to deletion, other than just leaving the article alone, are going to be redirect or merge. If we’re going to say that we won’t allow an AfD nomination until both redirect and merge have been tried and failed, I don’t support that. Often articles nominated at AfD don’t have suitable merge or redirect targets anyway.  Also I think this will impose much too high a burden on the nominator.  Merge proposals can take months, and any time we’d save at AfD we’d lose in hugely expanded merger discussions.


 * To me the main benefit of an AfD over alternatives is that it gives us to opportunity to reach consensus. If I find a BLP that I think doesn’t belong in Wikipedia I don’t want to engage in a potentially endless ping pong of doing and redoing redirects while the article creator undoes them before I’m allowed to seek consensus on what should be done.  We should be able to seek consensus quickly, not only as a last resort. If the conclusion of an AfD is to redirect then there is a good chance that can be made to stick, and that is less of a waste of everyone's time than expecting an individual editor to doggedly pursue alternatives for days, weeks or months before being allowed to nominate at AfD. Incidentally I would expect one unintended outcome of taking this approach would be to increase incivility and edit-warring.  AfD is a formal, rule driven process where we can air differing views on notability dispassionately and without making it personal. Only letting editors into that forum after they’ve done a dozen rounds of slugging it out one to one with the article creator isn’t really going to help us build the encyclopedia any better. Mccapra (talk) 04:58, 7 August 2020 (UTC)
 * I think has made some good points. The only difference of opinion I might have is if, after trying to redirect, it gets reverted, then take it to AfD. Same with a merge. However, a merge can consume more time and if that gets reverted, for me it is not a happy occasion. I haven't been able to read this entire page. I've only gotten through about 1/3 of the page. I intend to read the whole thing over time.


 * This is a really good discussion. I think AfD nominations only by extended confirmed users is a good idea. Also, an article created by social media canvassing should have a COI tag placed on it, and may brought to the COI noticeboard for discussion.


 * As an aside, it is upsetting to see claims of social injustice by Twitter personalities just because an article is nominated for deletion. That is not the issue, period. We have notability criteria which is usually a neutral arbiter for keeping or deleting an article. One more thing - perhaps AfDs of canvassing Twitter personalities' articles should be automatically posted at WP:AN to garner admin eyes in case the canvassing is too overwhelming (something like that). ---Steve Quinn (talk) 06:45, 23 August 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose per CREEP I really don't see the necessity in this. Yes, there are users who abuse AfD. They can be topic banned for repeated disruptions. Articles are usually brought to AfD not for quality control but because someone believes the topic lacks notability. Thus, aside from a BEFORE check, there is nothing that can be done to "improve" the article if it simply lacks notability, so urging editors to exhaust themselves in improving an article that can't be improved or shouldn't be improved is unhelpful. -Indy beetle (talk) 16:46, 4 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. I am absolutely against wasting more editors' time by forcing them to jump through more hoops in order to earn the right to nominate an AfD. The unintended consequence of this, I fear, will be that Wikipedia will simply fill up with more promotional BLPs of non-notable people.  There is an absolute plague of these, dozens every day.  Every one is created and defended by a fan or a UPE.  There is generally nothing to redirect or merge them to.  It is hard enough to get editors to deal with these as it is and much of the backlog at AfC and NPP is accounted for by them.  I hesitate to nominate them for deletion myself because often this leads to a week of back and forth in the AfD discussion and on my talk page, draws in sockpuppets and kicks off a major effort by the creator and their real/sock friends to talk the nomination out with bluster and irrelevance. If I'm going to be told that instead of having to deal with these muppets for seven days I'm going to have to argue a merge and a redirect with them too, I just won't bother and will leave them to someone else to deal with. Perhaps I'm not typical and there's no shortage of other editors to take on this task.  If there are, could they sign up for NPP please as we desperately need them - we need more articles coming to AfD, not fewer. There is a constant daily battle to get crap off Wikipedia, and we're not keeping up with that even as it is. I am in favour of trying to reduce the number of frivolous or badly-argued nominations by requiring a higher threshold of editor experience to be able to nominate an AfD, though I recognise that's not what is being proposed here and that it has been discussed and rejected before. Mccapra (talk) 11:29, 5 September 2020 (UTC)


 * oppose as instruction creep. Either flesh them out early on and properly in draft, or refund them to draft.  And there is no problem to recreate them with proper sources if you think an article has merit.  --Dirk Beetstra T  C 03:49, 6 September 2020 (UTC)


 * oppose as impractical. The best way to proceed with an unsatisfactory article is a matter of judgement. As others have pointed out above, using some of the alternatives to deletion can actually in some circumstances have the effect  of removing a possibly acceptable  article. If the user is still around, draftifying is effective, but not if they have left or if they are nan ip--the articles will almost certainly receive more attention at AfD. Redirect  and merge has at least in the past been used as what has sometimes been called an "smerge"  --the content merged is soon after quietly deleted, and then the redirect is removed because it no longer points to anything in the article. (This leaves very little in the way of traces to recover the text, which defeats the intent of merges and redirects.) There are other ways, but i consider them really illegitimate. AfD is a straightforward process. If more people paid attention, it would be even more  effective is rescuing rescuable content. (but there are a great many Wikipedia processes about  which that can be said).  DGG ( talk ) 01:25, 27 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose That would mean that editors can dump a few words disguised as article and that other people are forced to improve it. Totally impractical. You can see that effect already at many AfDs were editors state that the article "can be improved by normal editing". And the editors stating that are never to be seen again at that article. It would pose a serious risk for the quality of the encyclopedia. The Banner  <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 12:51, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

RfC 2 minimum quarterly thresholds for participating in deletions
There seems to be some good discussion taken place at Village_pump_(policy) for past some weeks.

Herewith I am requesting comment for; two minimum quarterly thresholds criteria for participating in further deletions.


 * Criteria 1) There should be minimum: Null / One / Five / Ten / Twenty percent quarterly unreverted positive encyclopedic text contribution  of total deleted or reverted contribution before joining in further deletions and reverts.
 * Criteria 2) There should be minimum : Null / Thousand / Five thousand / Ten thousand / Twenty thousand bytes quarterly positive encyclopedic contribution before joining in any deletion / move /merge / AfD discussion.

Choose your preferred criteria.Or Suggest some new.

Thanks

Bookku (talk) 14:08, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * End of RfC proposal note.

Bookku (talk) 14:08, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment: Purpose of such restriction
 * Many policing curators do not seem not to know or forget practical difficulties of people face while contributing encyclopedic text.
 * Army of Curators is too large compared to people who actually research and contribute encyclopedic text and these army of curators too inexperienced or tend to loose their experience and forget pain of actual.
 * When ten votes are enough for deletion ten times curator join in, Positively contributing editors go in minority and end up getting harrassed by numeriacally large army. One likes or not this large army prevails democratically and those who don't have Phd in Wikipedia rules but contribute with sources feel harassed. Curator should be essentially a regular encyclopedic text contributor too at least to a minimum level.


 * WP:SNOW close as a hopeless proposal. I know you mean well with this, but there's no way to measure what you're suggesting (who's going to count up the net contributions of someone? would a -100K vandalism revert count against the net?).  Most AFDs aren't well-attended, and if an inexperienced editor wants to dip their toe in, let them.  There are a lot of ways to contribute constructively to Wikipedia, and trying to gatekeep AfD like this isn't going to make anything better. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 14:33, 27 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose- bad idea. <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 15:00, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Unenforceable CREEP. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 15:09, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose. One of the big problems with deletion discussions is the lack of participation, with too many pages being kept or deleted after just a couple of perfunctory comments. To address that we need to encourage more people to take part, not place restrictions that mean there will be fewer. Phil Bridger (talk) 15:16, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per everyone above. Most of my text contributions to articles are gnoming which frequently doesn't result in a lot of bytes added or removed. One task, rescuing broken links is a significant improvement to the encyclopaedia, can take significant time and effort, but results in the addition of zero prose to the article. Thryduulf (talk) 16:35, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Support I realize this won't pass, but I'd like to express my support for anything that makes deleting content harder. Benjamin (talk) 18:20, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * But this proposal does not make deletion harder. People wanting to keep an article will be excluded just the same as people wanting to delete it. It simply makes deletion depend on an even smaller number of editors than is currently the case. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:41, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * The intention seems to be to exclude non-inclusionists from the AfD process, and that sort of partisanship is enough reason to auto-oppose. The fact that it would likely have the exact opposite effect is no reason to suddenly support it. So yeah. <b style="color: Maroon;">Reyk</b> <b style="color: Blue;">YO!</b> 10:44, 28 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Oppose There's too much lack of recognition for gnomes as it is. We don't need to be excluded further. I dream of horses (Contribs) Please notify me after replying off my talk page. Thank you. 20:20, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose It is impossible to implement as proposed. Restricting access to AfD in this way would make it impossible for for new editors to defend their creations. Per and  the proposer doesn't seem to understand how AfD works. Vexations (talk) 20:37, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose requiring volunteers to meet a participation threshold or they won't be allowed to participate is antithetical to what Wikipedia is all about. MarnetteD&#124;Talk 21:51, 27 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose - Someone with no editing experience can be a net benefit to a deletion discussion if they can provide sources or knowledge on the subject - what we need to do better is make it clearer to newcomers what is expected of an article.Nigel Ish (talk) 11:02, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose hopelessly vague (how do we quantify "positive contribution") and counterproductive. Justification is lacking. Proposal seems to assume that the majority of AfDs would be "keep" if we kept those pesky folks who don't do much content work out, which fails to recognize that sometimes things actually need to be deleted. GeneralNotability (talk) 12:31, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose per most of what has been said above. This proposal is largely unenforceable and counterproductive to maintaining the encyclopedia. Criterion 2 in particular would likely bar a lot of longstanding, experienced editors from participating if they happen to have not edited much lately. It would also bar WikiGnomes, who often know a lot about policy but tend to make contributions of far fewer bytes than content creators. Armadillo  pteryx  12:43, 28 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Oppose discrimination based on not-registering an account. The main page still states the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.. Then why would we start excluding certain groups? The Banner  <i style="color:maroon">talk</i> 12:45, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

Another idea to go along
Get rid of autopatrolled that makes it far easier to put out companies, organizations, people and products articles onto Wikipedia than delete them. I'm sick of those articles that are put out by promotinal editors in those categories where they look like a few sentences put together, then a farm of links dumped in further reference to quickly get pages onto Wikipedia, which may or may not pass notability if they were to go through AfD. Graywalls (talk) 20:29, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * Can you point to any such articles that have been created by people with the autopatrolled right? If this is only an occasional problem then it simply means that some people should have this right withdrawn, and/or that requirements for granting it should be tightened up. Only if it's a very common issue should the right be disposed of completely, since it massively relieves the workload of new page patrollers. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:50, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * https://web.archive.org/web/20190425150437/https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/wikipedia-page-creation-get-your-own-custom-authority-page-on-wikipedia.925936/ Nothing in specific, but this is an indication of those privileges being abused for public relations and marketing purposes. Graywalls (talk) 03:43, 21 October 2020 (UTC) replying to