Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Self-references to avoid/Archive 2

The Avoid self-references guideline sucks
This Avoid self-references guideline about self-references sucks. It really sucks. Wikipedia should be able to talk about itself if necessary. If other Web sites copy the articles of Wikipedia, and if they don't have different namespaces like Wikipedia, then it's the problem of those Web sites if they have broken hyperlinks that originally were between namespaces. Why should we Wikipedia users care about other Web sites' problems? If someone wants to read Wikipedia content, they can just go to Wikipedia, even if the content can be copied for free. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 19:07, Jun 2, 2005 (UTC)


 * A quick question: would you consider it appropriate for, say, the Encyclopedia Britannica to refer to its own editorial board in the middle of an article, or to use itself as an example in topics like book, CD-ROM, or website; or perhaps if Encarta always referenced the most relevant Microsoft product on every page - wouldn't that seem a bit unprofessional and unnecessarily biased? One reason to care how content will seem when copied is to take "Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" out of the context of "Wikipedia, the online project" and concentrate on what an encyclopedia should actually contain; who knows, one day we might be our own mirror - in print, on official CD-ROMs, or who knows what else. While the policy can be frustrating, I think in most situations it does encourage practice which improves the policy of the encyclopedic content - which is what we're all here for, after all. - IMSoP 12:11, 27 August 2005 (UTC)

On the self-reference article...
Quote from the Wikipedia 'Avoid self-references' text:

'many people find such self-references unprofessional'

Quote from 'Avoid Weasel Terms' article

'Who says that? You? Me? When did they say it? How many people think that? What kind of people think that? Where are they? What kind of bias do they have?'


 * It is a project page, not an article.
 * Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley talk contrib 15:38, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

User Categorisation no Selfreference but Community building
" One is that these references complicate forking and the use of Wikipedia articles by others, ..." - While that may be true, it is not the main goal of Wikipedia. Wikipedia must be useful for their creators and The Wikipedia Community in the first place and not for people who earn money by using our work for free. Deleting Category:Wikipedians is as ridiculous as trying to delete the Community Portal.
 * While I don't specifically support the Project User categorisation that converts Wikipedians and its sublists to User Categories, it is unfair to blame it as unnecessary self-reference. The page Wikipedians was one of hte first pages on Wikipedia and it is absolutely necessary for Wikipedia and Wikipedia Community building. Wanting to remove that is subversive and directed against Wikipedia. The reasons for this attempt are highly suspicious:

Again here should rulethe principle: function before style. You cannot delete important functions that make working on Wikipedia possible merely to make lokk it better on foreign websites. It is their job to program a converter or a Wikipedia bot to change the appearence to their likin as long as it conforms to the Wikipedia copy guidelines. From Avoid_self-references: "so the articles produced should be useful even outside the context of the project to create it." Again you want to rip out functionality this time a feature that is essential for the readers of Wikipedia simply to make it look "better", imean better on pages I never heared of ? I think this page Avoid self-references has once started as a reasonable advice, but it needs a serious cutdown to the basics: 1. Do not brag how great Wikipedia is in every article. Enough. The latest changes in this advice are contraproductive. --Davion 21:15, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Category:User en is used by Project Babel to bring together people speaking different languages and enhance translations of Wikipedia.
 * Template:Wikiquote (this is not a self-reference, per se, but it promotes Wikiquote to a certain * Template:interwiki

Just ask yourself a simple test question: Would this supposed self-reference item be appropriate in insert your name here's Encyclopaedia? If I were to make my own fork or mirror, I would removed everything that references Wikipedia itself because it does not seem appropriate in my own encyclopaedia. The items such as user categories will not necessarily be deleted immediately because they serve a great purppose but is something to be marked as self-reference to be made aware of. -- Zondor 05:20, 22 October 2005 (UTC)


 * That question has little to do with establishing what is or isn't a self-reference: rather, it would tell us what's meta-content of various kinds.  In most cases that's implied by the namespace, but in the case of categories, obviously there's a single namespace, used equally for articles, user pages, etc.  One could add a tag saying  "this is a category of wikipedia project pages":  but equally, that's pretty evident simply by looking at what's in the category.
 * If there really has to be a template for this, it should avoid the terminology of "self-references", and it should not be subst'd -- otherwise we simply end up with another piece of freeform text which is made more difficult to update, and is less convenient for the cited purpose of automatic non-mirroring. But I'm not convinced they shouldn't simply all be removed.  Alai 17:56, 12 November 2005 (UTC)

Possible bot
The following remark was made on the project page, but is clearly talk-page stuff. I've moved it here.


 * [Begin moved material]
 * Looking through WP:RFD, there are many votes for deletion of redirects to the wikipedia namespace to avoid self-references. Perhaps there can be a bot to search for redirects from the main to the wikipedia namespace and to delete them. There could be other combinations as well between various namespaces. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Zondor (talk • contribs) 6 Nov 2005
 * [End moved material]

"Work in progress" messages
Some editors put "t.b.d." placeholders, or "needs work" comments in an article. After a couple of years of editing articles, my sense is that it's a guideline if not a policy that such statements do not belong. There are a few article maintenance templates that are sometimes appropriate, but my impression is that it is highly preferable to avoid such self-references in favor of less obtrusive techniques for making omissions explicit. Am I right? Is there a better place than Avoid self-references to direct an editor's attention when this convention is not followed? 66.167.139.76 23:52, 13 November 2005 (UTC).

Monobook
Monobook currently redirects to Help:User style. Can that be right? A redirect out of encyclopedia space? (I don't watchlist this page, so if you need to ask me something, please use my user talk page. Thanks.) -- Jmabel | Talk 22:36, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
 * No, it's not right, now fixed. Rich  Farmbrough 20:28 1  March 2006 (UTC).

Articles about Wikipedia
The policy makes an exception that

Wikipedia can, of course, write about Wikipedia

We therefore have a bunch of articles about Wikipedia and assorted things, such as critics, people, etc. I'm not commenting on the quality of those articles here. However, I think the existence of those articles was a mistake. I feel that having articles about Wikipedia etc is tasteless, and is a violation (in spirit) of WP:AUTO. It also causes odd effects, in that some articles now mention that the person responsible attempted to edit their article.

I'm therefore tossing the idea into the wind, that this exception should be removed, and consequently Wikipedia and all associated articles should be either deleted or moved to another namespace. Wikipedia should totally ignore the existence of itself. I would be interested to hear considered thoughts on this. Morwen - Talk 02:05, 21 December 2005 (UTC)


 * There's certainly room for improvement in this area, but Wikipedia is clearly notable; failing to acknowledge its existence would cause more problems than we have now. Consider, for instance, the hypothetical List of websites by Alexa rank:
 * 22. somewebsite.com
 * 23. 
 * 24. someotherwebsite.net
 * This will only become a bigger issue as (I hope) Wikipedia becomes more prominent. We wouldn't want to get into a 1984-ish scenario where certain things are written out of existence.  ("In 2015, a study showed that Britannica was trailing behind in quality" or ", the creator of the popular encyclopedia , was awarded the Nobel peace prize", while unlikely at the moment, may at some point be appropriate statements to include). &mdash;Kirill Lokshin 03:30, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
 * This will only become a bigger issue as (I hope) Wikipedia becomes more prominent. We wouldn't want to get into a 1984-ish scenario where certain things are written out of existence.  ("In 2015, a study showed that Britannica was trailing behind in quality" or ", the creator of the popular encyclopedia , was awarded the Nobel peace prize", while unlikely at the moment, may at some point be appropriate statements to include). &mdash;Kirill Lokshin 03:30, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
 * This will only become a bigger issue as (I hope) Wikipedia becomes more prominent. We wouldn't want to get into a 1984-ish scenario where certain things are written out of existence.  ("In 2015, a study showed that Britannica was trailing behind in quality" or ", the creator of the popular encyclopedia , was awarded the Nobel peace prize", while unlikely at the moment, may at some point be appropriate statements to include). &mdash;Kirill Lokshin 03:30, 21 December 2005 (UTC)


 * I still have working on Autobiography on my to-do list. One of the things that it doesn't say, which it should in my view, is that the acceptable way to write about onesself (and indeed one's relatives, one's company, one's school, one's web site, and so forth) is to use and to cite third-party sources, independent of onesself (and one's company/school/web site), exclusively.  (Doing so works in practice.)  By this standard, it is acceptable to construct a Wikipedia article about Wikipedia as long as it is entirely constructed from sources other than Wikipedia itself.  There are a lot of such sources cited in Wikipedia. Also note that verifiability involves verification by reference to published sources, not verification by repeating the original research.  If the only way to verify that someone edited xyr own article is to laboriously trudge through the edit history to check that the relevant edit exists, then that is original research that does not belong in Wikipedia.  If, however, that fact has been reported and discussed by a reliable source independent of Wikipedia, then it is fair game for inclusion. The point of the sentence fragment that you quote is that this guideline is nothing at all to do with the concerns of autobiography, but rather to do with the concerns of mirroring Wikipedia, and that therefore this discussion belongs on another talk page. ☺ Uncle G 04:09, 21 December 2005 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia clearly satisfies our criteria for notability. Some of the more specific Wikipedia-related topics may not, but VfD is the Court of Notability, and hopefully they'll decide in an objective manner. Considering that we have articles about esoteric Pokemon and individual episodes of the Simpsons, I think we can tolerate discussion of the biggest encyclopedia in the world. Deco 04:21, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

Explain this please
this edit doesn't make sense to me. How is it self-referencial for the article to have a link to the philosophy portal? Please defend this edit or it will be reverted Argyrios 01:04, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
 * In my opinion that editor was mistaken. Wikiproject Philosophy is part of the project, not the encyclopedia, but the Philosophy Portal is part of the encyclopedia. Ergo a link to it is okay. Deco 04:17, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

An exception to the self-reference rule?
If anyone is familiar with the JT LeRoy hoax, that will help understand the background of my question.

The issue is this:

A few weeks ago a New York Times story pretty much settled a debate regarding the true identity of an author named JT LeRoy by offering strong evidence to suggest that the author is indeed another author, Laura Albert.

Before this story broke, there was some doubt but nothing conclusive. A lot going on in the LeRoy article's Talk page and one of the editors made the claim that he or she was, in fact, LeRoy's assistant and claimed to have spoken with him in person and at length on the phone. When the Times article broke, it became pretty clear that the claims this editor made about the author's identity could not have been accurate, and in all probability this person was either an agent of the author, or even the author herself (given her penchant for using false identity).

I believe this to be both noteworthy and encylopedic because it outlines what I think will become a bigger issue, down the road, and that is the issue of Wikipedia itself becoming an occasional front, by interested parties, in the battle over public opinion.

So I added a section about this (and would like to expand), however I am caught at the rule of avoiding self-reference.


 * Adam_Curry
 * self referential link was turned into a Special page.


 * Marty_Meehan
 * self referential links

These self-refs are dealt with in two different ways. Comments?


 * It's not a self-reference when you write about Wikipedia where it's actually relevant to the subject, i.e. things like "xyz stated in a now famous interview that Wikipedia was..." as opposed to "Websites such as the one you're viewing". —Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 21:27, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
 * I tend to agree but I wasn't sure if the consensus is 100%. There was some argument in the discussion pages of the above articles.
 * However, it hasn't really been established what to do with the Wikipedia page once it has become a reference. If its an archive, do we move it to Special:? Do we lock it from editing? Do we do nothing?Yeago 21:32, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
 * We'll just have to wait and see, when it becomes a big enough deal, I guess. =)Yeago 22:46, 16 February 2006 (UTC)
 * Refer to it with http:/en. reference, include last accessed date and all that jazz. Rich  Farmbrough 20:31 1  March 2006 (UTC).

Let's put more emphasis on acceptable cases
Currently, if one reads this guideline carefully, one can understand that it is acceptable to write about Wikipedia in a variety of circumstances. I think this should be made more clear to the casual reader. I propose adding a list of positive examples after the second full paragraph, which currently reads, "Wikipedia can, of course, write about Wikipedia, but context is important..., use external link style to allow the link to work also in a site with a copy of the main namespace content." Examples: I think this would make this guideline more beneficial to the project. Johntex\talk 04:17, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Articles where Wikipedia played a major role in the subject of the article, for example: John Seigenthaler Sr. Wikipedia biography controversy
 * Articles about prominent people involved in Wikipedia, for example: Jimbo Wales
 * Articles about Wikipedia
 * Articles where Wikipedia is illustrative of the subject, for example: online community, encyclopedia
 * Articles where it is likely the reader actually wants a Wikipedia policy article or similar, such as userbox
 * Definitely a good idea (seeing as some people misinterpret the meaning of the guideline on this talk page). Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley talk contrib 15:50, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Simple question
Just wondering what people think about:


 * Considered by many an archaic term, quackery is most often used to denote the peddling of the "cure-alls" described above.

It referes to information under a different level 1 heading. Is that okay in regards to selfref policy? It seems to me like it's an accident waiting to happen, when someone moves the original text. ॐ Metta Bubble puff  06:47, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

Someone working with this policy might want to check...
Someone working with this policy might want to check the note at the top of Systemic bias. I'm not sure whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. - Jmabel | Talk 05:03, 3 April 2006 (UTC)

Self-referential content
Is there any rule about content that refers to itself? Not referring to Wikipedia, but referring to itself. I think it's inappropriate, as it could lead to confusion, could be "broken" by other editors who don't understand the example, etc. Examples of typography, code, and so on should be explicit and separate from the text of the article. Some examples:
 * Justification (typesetting) The following paragraph is justified.
 * Literate programming "This whole article is, in fact, a simple program that can be run using the example literate interpreter on the interpreter page."
 * Interpreter (computing) "There is a program to try with this interpreter, on the Literate programming article. If you want to do so you must save the interpreter as INTERP.BAS and then save the Literate programming article as TESTPROG.TXT in the same folder."
 * Dash "In North American usage—and also in old British usage&mdash;an em dash is never surrounded by spaces. In contrast, the modern practice in many other parts of the English-speaking world and in journalistic style is to separate the dash from its surrounding words when used parenthetically, by using spaces &mdash; or hair spaces (U+200A). Some writers eschew the use of the em dash – instead, they replace it with the shorter en dash – which is then also surrounded by spaces or hair spaces; this "space, en dash, space" sequence is also the predominant style in German typography."
 * Quotation mark 'Curved and straight quotes are also sometimes referred to as “smart quotes” and "dumb quotes" respectively;' — Omegatron 23:27, 20 April 2006 (UTC)


 * There is no rule against this. I don't think there should be.  Often, self-referential content is a more effective way of conveying information.  Obviously, you need to be cautious in cases where it depends on aspects of formatting that won't be universally displayed, but that doesn't invalid the basic idea. &mdash;Simetrical (talk • contribs) 02:13, 16 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Could there be some template to warn other editors? Runcorn 17:23, 18 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Why? Just make a rule against it. — Omegatron 17:34, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
 * You don't think such things can sometimes add to the article? —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 20:42, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
 * I just think they are better set apart from the text.
 * For instance, instead of demonstrating two different styles of typography in a single sentence of the article text itself, demonstrate it with some floating framed passages of text. One would have a passage of text with one typography style, and another would have the same passage of text with the other typography style.  Then you have two copies and you can compare them to each other.
 * Instead of saying "This whole article is, in fact, a simple program that can be run using the example literate interpreter," set aside that section of the text inside a box, and don't refer to the article that contains it. Use an example that people might actually use.  "This is an example of a simple program in a literate programming language".  No one is going to write a literate program with the area of a circle and the area of a rectangle, but put the rest of an encyclopedia article in the comments.  The program is out of place for an encyclopedia article and the rest of the article would be out of place in a real-life program.  In fact, maybe I'll demonstrate what I'm thinking of in that article... — Omegatron 03:12, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Can we please add something about this to the page? I'm still seeing examples. Self-referential content is bad, and serves no purpose that self-contained examples can't serve better. It's not clear to people who don't speak English, for instance, making it more difficult to translate. Some examples don't translate well to other media, like paper, PDAs, cell phones, screen readers, etc. There's no reason for it. — Omegatron 02:36, 28 August 2006 (UTC)

User Categories in Articles
Hi - I need some clarification. Should links to categories that are lists of users subcategories of Category:Wikipedians be included in the main Article space?

Dispute details. It seems clear to me that a reference to a category that contains lists of wikipedians (links to the User space) is a self-reference that should be removed. Yesterday, I happened upon the Louisville, Kentucky article to do some research - noticed the link in the see also section and removed it. User:Stevietheman has reverted the change twice - with comments "(rv to last edit by Stevietheman; the "metadata" is staying)" and "(rv; it's staying)." I brought the issue up on the talk page and the only other editor to comment agreed that it should not be in the article space. I have removed it again, and linked to it on the talk page instead.

Am I correct here that this is a self-reference that should NOT be in the article space - it seems stupid to edit war about something like this so I am going to abandon my attempts to follow the style guide here for a bit, but think that some clarification from an admin could be helpful in resolving the issue. Thx in adv Trödel  16:09, 31 May 2006 (UTC)


 * You are correct. I'll check out the talk page. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:15, 1 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Without regards to this individual dispute over such an innocuous entry (obviously, I wasn't as interested in warring over this as Trodel was--I dropped it after the second revert), I would like to see if it is possible to "legislate" exceptions to this guideline. It would seem natural to link to a category/list of Wikipedians in a polity from an article about that polity.  Yes, it's not specific to the article content, but I would call it one of those "Wikipedia-related general interest article add-ons", kind of like how the Louisville, Kentucky exhibits a star for its FA status.


 * I am not expecting to determine the consensus right here, but I'm just asking if it is reasonable to pursue a campaign to see what the true Wikipedia consensus would be on this issue. &mdash; Stevie is the man!  Talk 04:32, 2 June 2006 (UTC)


 * You can always try. See How to create policy. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 06:44, 4 June 2006 (UTC)


 * But here I doubt it will work. I strongly suspect there will be consensus against it. TheGrappler 16:04, 25 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I would think that linking this sort of thing from the talk page would be much more appropriate. - Jmabel | Talk 23:36, 6 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with Jmabel; such links referring to the Wikipedia-related nature of something should be on the talk page. --ais523 11:20, 29 August 2006 (UTC)

Avoid self-references in categories?
Many WikiProjects have "staked their claim" in category space, by sticking their templates in Category: pages. That is blatantly self-referential. Others stick to putting the templates in Category talk: pages. I think this is far better. However, I don't want to go on a burst of sticking templates from Category: to Category talk: unless I see guidance that WP:ASR actually applies to category pages as well as articles, and the guidelines do not make it clear! Does anybody know if there is previous consensus on this? TheGrappler 16:04, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Just coincidentally came to this page with a similar issue; I found are a number of projectspace pages in Category:Wikipedia stubs, which seemingly should solely contain mainspace articles about Wikipedia. The question at hand is simply whether the Category namespace is part of the encyclopedic content. Categories, lists, and series boxes seems to speak as if it is.  More input on this matter would be appreciated. ~ PseudoSudo 08:03, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I think that's a useful point. CLS does indicate we should these as encyclopedic content, in a different way to Portals, for instance. TheGrappler 17:31, 27 June 2006 (UTC)

Basically categories should not mix links to different namespaces. So there should be no articles in the Category:Wikipedia stubs but those should be sorted as outlined in the WikiProject Stub sorting. Since there is no other functionality like categories for other namespaces, the best we can do is make sure that links don't cross namespaces. -- Trödel 21:42, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
 * The further question is whether the text on a Category: page should cross-link. Keeping the contents of a category split between namespaces is clearly a good idea, but should a wikiproject notice be placed on the Category: or Category talk: page? I'd suggest the latter but the former seems more common. TheGrappler 22:49, 27 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I think that the introduction text of a category (that references articles) should not have any cross-links - and any advertisement of a wikiproject related to that category should go on the talk page - but I don't know if there is any documented standard. That seems in keeping with the general goals of ASR. -- Trödel 04:39, 28 June 2006 (UTC)
 * For the purpose of ASR, I would consider categories to be just like articles. This makes sense to me because they're a navigation aid used to travel between articles, not unlike a list or disambiguation page. Deco 23:00, 27 June 2006 (UTC)


 * I agree with Trödel and Deco. I think any project notices should go on the Category's Talk page, not on the category page itself.

Are links to categories self-references?
It is sometimes appropriate to link to a category in a see also, like "Category:Works by Albert Camus". However, this seems to be a borderline self-reference, especially if accompanied by text like "See all Camus' works by browsing the category Category:Works by Albert Camus". What do others think? Stevage 07:40, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
 * No more than referring to another article is. TheGrappler 11:22, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Hrmmm, unsure. I would say it's okay to link it, but don't refer to "browsing the category" and don't imply that it's a comprehensive list. For example, a better link might read Articles about works by Albert Camus, or something like that. Deco 11:25, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
 * To clarify my comment: there is no guarantee that somebody who is reproducing an article is reproducing all of WP's content, so a "see also" link to an article is effectively self-referential to an extent. (Having said that, I've seen "see also" red links before! But this is no guarantee that a reuser will want them!) The particular problem here is that not all reusers also copy across the category system. My suggestion, as a compromise in the spirit of ASR, would be: put it in the see also section so the link can be trimmed without any harm being done, rather than putting it in the main article text where it would change things significantly if it were removed. Does that sound sensible? TheGrappler 21:34, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I don't think we should worry about the repusers. They can take any portion of WP and there is no guarantee they will even take the whole article space.  Johntex\talk 22:45, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
 * This is my feeling also. I just thought it was worth mentioning that things are a matter of degree here, and this degree seems fine to me! TheGrappler 13:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)
 * As long as the category contains a list of articles - it is not a self reference. However, a link to Category:Wikipedians is since it contains links to non-article space pages. -- Trödel 22:11, 29 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Excellent point! TheGrappler 13:04, 30 June 2006 (UTC)


 * It would be nice to have a standard naming convention for categories. "Articles about..." seems workable. Where would such a thing go? Stevage 17:37, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Where do Wiki* self-references go in articles?
Is there a policy on where Wikiquote, Wikibooks, etc. templates should be within an article? I saw a page with three of them together in the "External links" section. At the very least it looked poor. This is also not what I think of as an "external" link. Thoughts? Gimmetrow 00:56, 18 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Hmm. That's where they usually go... - Jmabel | Talk 06:35, 22 July 2006 (UTC)

Links to other (minor) Wikipedias
Would someone who has been more active than me with the "Avoid self-references" issue please have a look at the Padania article? In the Languages section are a bunch of links to eight minor-language Wikipedias. The presentation seems to me to suggest falsely that they would be links to English-language articles on the languages themselves. Thought? Comments? Suggestions? - Jmabel | Talk 21:22, 30 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Resolved. - Jmabel | Talk 06:31, 28 August 2006 (UTC)