Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2018-05-24/Discussion report

This month has been a busy one for discussions on major topics. The following is an overview of what's been going on:

Is competence required?
In an attempt to change the status of WP:CIR from "essay" to "explanatory supplement (to WP:DE)" Swarm's edit was reverted. This RfC was thus created to see if the community agrees with Swarm's change. Supporters have pointed out that people get blocked with the essay cited as a reason. Several supporters are in favor of further promoting it to policy status. However, although opposers raised the concern that this could be seen as a personal attack, the RfC was indeed closed with a consensus concurring with Swarm's changes. With around 90% of the !votes in support of the proposal, the essay page was subsequently promoted to 'supplement' status.

Event coordinator user right is coming
With the implementation of ACPERM, as reported by Kudpung in the April issue of Signpost (Special report), the question arose of what to do about editathons. Some editors think that removing the ability for new contributors to create pages would decrease the effectiveness of an editathon and proposed an "event coordinator" user group that would allow members to temporarily give users the "confirmed" right to create pages. Theredproject pointed out that in the recent Art+Feminism editathon, only about 1% of new articles by participants were deleted, compared to the 80% deletion rate for new articles overall. Some users suggested adding this capability to the account creator user group instead of creating a new group. Consensus was strongly in favor of this idea, and it was closed early in favor of adoption per WP:SNOW.

On infoboxes
When do infoboxes belong in articles? As ArbCom suggested this question should be discussed, a discussion popped up on the policy Village Pump. The topic of the discussion was whether infoboxes should be included by default on most articles, on "broad classes of articles" or omitted from most articles. Most people agreed that there should not be a "default", and that we should stop discussing this over and over.

In a separate discussion, some users think data from Wikimedia's raw data repository Wikidata could be used in infoboxes of articles. There's a wide variety of options as to how this would be implemented (if at all). The community is fairly evenly divided as to whether or not such a system should be implemented. The discussion can be found here.

Reporting harassment
A discussion is ongoing to make it easier to report harassment on Wikipedia. The discussion is part of Wikipedia's community health initiative, which serves to reduce harassment.

Drafts to be deleted – in certain cases
The community decided in this RfC that drafts can be deleted (on MFD), but not for failing the notability criteria. This follow-up RfC proposes a revision to the information page on drafts saying that "A draft that has been repeatedly resubmitted and declined at AfC without any substantial improvement may be deleted at Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion if consensus determines that it is unlikely to ever meet the requirements for mainspace and it otherwise meets one of the reasons for deletion outlined in Deletion policy." As of May 16, support !votes outnumber oppose ones by a factor of 4 to 1.

Portals are staying
And finally, the portal discussion that was the subject of the previous Discussion Report has now closed with a "strong consensus" against deleting portals or marking them as historical. However, as many users agree that portal reform is needed, more portal-related discussions are likely to take place in the coming months. Jimbo got in on the discussion too, suggesting on his talk page that we look at how portals are used on other language Wikipedias but not stating an opinion one way or another.