Wikipedia talk:Village pump

Appropriate forum quest
Greetings, all. What is the appropriate forum to point out and possibly discuss a media report about malicious Wikipedia editing? -The Gnome (talk) 09:00, 23 April 2023 (UTC)
 * It's difficult to say without knowing more. You could start at WP:VPM. If it potentially involves admin stuff, you may want to post at an admin board. But you may want to check if it's already been discussed, whether it's appropriate to discuss it, and consider what you hope to achieve. -- zzuuzz (talk) 21:18, 23 April 2023 (UTC)

Who posts at the Village pumps?
Folks watching this talk page might be interested in the numbers we've gathered at Request a query. A few numbers:


 * Since their creation, across all Village pumps and their subpages (e.g., Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/RfC: Ending the system of portals), 26,102 registered editors and 10,410 unique IP addresses (which probably don't represent that many unique humans/devices) have edited the Village pump pages (quarry:query/77482).
 * This represents only 1 out of each 530 registered editors. 99.8% of registered editors have never posted to any of the Village pumps.
 * 16,408 of the editors with 500+ edits have posted at least once to a Village pump. This means that only 17% of extended-confirmed editors have edited a Village pump page at least once (ever), and 83% of experienced editors haven't.
 * Only 1.4% of all experienced editors (500+ edits) have edited a Village pump page this year. Looking at the ones who have ever edited a Village pump page, only 10% of them did so this year.  90% of experienced editors who have ever edited a Village pump have not done so for at least a year.  An unknown, but not small, fraction of these experienced editors have not edited any page this year (or even this decade).
 * Newcomers appear at the Village pumps, but they are relatively uncommon. 60% of participants have made 500+ edits (and experienced editors make a lot more edits to the Village pump pages than the newcomers).
 * Fun fact: Of the 4.9 million registered accounts that only ever made one edit, almost 900 made their sole edit to a Village pump page.
 * Articles for deletion pages have always been more popular than the Village pumps. A registered editor is 6x as likely to have edited an AFD discussion than a Village pump page.
 * Looking at this year (to date), 1,953 unique registered editors have edited a Village pump page. I don't know how many unique registered editors have made an edit during this timeframe (@BilledMammal, is that something you could figure out?), but 121,540 have made an edit during the last 30 days, so that's probably on the order of 1% of this year's editors.
 * Looking at this year (to date), 82% of the people editing the Village pumps have made 500+ edits (ever+any page), 7% have made 100–499 edits, 5% have made 10–99 edits, and 5% have made 1–9 edits.
 * Looking at this year (to date), AFD pages are more popular than the Village pumps at all levels of experience. This year, an autoconfirmed editor is 4x as likely to edit an AFD discussion as a Village pump discussion.  Editors with 500+ edits are 3x as likely to have edited an AFD this year than any Village pump this year.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:11, 23 October 2023 (UTC)


 * That's quite a scathing story that those numbers tell. The village pump is an obscure backwater at this point. It's failing at its core mission. Maybe we should rename it, and redesign it. Andre🚐 18:48, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure that there are better options, and in general, it's more effective to go where the audience already is, rather than trying to build an audience. @Cryptic, could we compare it against the WikiProjects' talk pages?  @Enterprisey, @Seddon, @Vermont, do any of you know how many unique registered editors from enwiki have used Discord this year?
 * https://forum.movement-strategy.org/ is deliberately cross-project and multi-lingual, so I'm not sure we could easily get numbers for enwiki specifically. Microsurveys (89970) would help when the need is to poll people for an opinion ("Do you agree or disagree with this statement? 'As a rule, the more accepted knowledge Wikipedia can encapsulate, the better it is' "), but they're not useful for discussions (e.g., proposing a compromise that would get a dispute un-stuck), and the current state of the software is somewhere around "the dev can hard-code your question if it's really important", which is not so useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:58, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
 * 56619 registered users and 21551 ips have ever edited pages starting 'WT:WikiProject' or 'WT:Wikiproject' and not including a '/'; 4380 and 565 if you meant just edits in 2023. 656311 registered accounts have at least one live edit from this year. —Cryptic 20:13, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Love that statistic, thank you. @WhatamIdoing, can we say that we should be investing more in Wikiprojects, then. I would. Andre🚐 21:04, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Well, I don't know, @Andrevan. That was 10 years ago, but back in 2013, I personally (and manually) posted to the 100 most active WikiProjects to tell people about the imminent deployment of the visual editor, and editors still insisted that nobody had told them about this.   WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:56, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
 * They are dreadfully inactive and often have been. A few projects remain active though. Someone should study that. Part of it is definitely that they have topics and projects that people are interested in. But why have some wikiprojects flourished while their adjoining portals rotted, etc., is a mystery. Andre🚐 23:22, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Some of this is known. A new WikiProject will generally fail (within the year) if there are no experienced editors or only a handful of editors total in the founding group.  Narrow scopes are associated with failure.  Infighting is bad for the group. Goals can be good.  Providing mutual support is good (e.g., if you're struggling about something related to medicine, then post at WT:MED, and we can usually get it sorted). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:01, 24 October 2023 (UTC)

That's good info but IMO not a negative reflection on the Village Pump. There are lots of editors and lots of pages and so only a small fraction will have edited any given pages. Also there are a limited number of topics at the village pumps. BUT, there are a lot of huge topics / discussions that get decided at the village pumps. I'm an active editor and all of the pumps are on my watchlist (so/but I just see the one most recent posting on one topic) and sometimes I miss major RFC's at the pumps. For those, I think that the problem is that few editors routinely see the centralized discussion list. These are the most important and supposedly widely advertised RFC's (with the pumps being the most common spot for them), but where would a typical editor routinely see that list? Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 20:02, 23 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that reality is a negative reflection on anything. I do think, though, that we need to be wary of people claiming that The Community™ can be found at the Village pump (and only there). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:58, 23 October 2023 (UTC)

The comparison of the village pump pages, and AfD is an odd one. As editors will be an order of magnitude more likely to have editted an article talk page, but that because they are so many more of them. Advertising and notifying editors of the village pump does seem to be the issue. Central notification is only as good as it's visibility, and is visibility isn't good. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 20:10, 23 October 2023 (UTC)


 * I think these numbers show that AFD is somewhat more representative of the general pool of editors than the village pumps (e.g., somewhat less dominated by high-volume editors).
 * I'm not sure that the existence of a talk page induces people to edit it. There might be so many more of them, but they get relatively few edits.   WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:52, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
 * But each individual AfD also gets less edits than a more centralise discussion. The volume of talk pages edits overall is much greater than AfDs, you can't say one is the will of the community and the other isn't just because you feel that one is more representative than the other. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 12:17, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Each individual AFD discussion is also listed on a longer page, just like each individual Village pump discussion is listed on a longer page. So if you seek out a discussion about one page/subject, you might notice another while you're there.  That doesn't really happen with the Talk: namespace; discussions there are more isolated. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:42, 24 October 2023 (UTC)
 * Yep 2605:B100:32A:3A36:E849:954D:7502:AB79 (talk) 12:31, 10 February 2024 (UTC)

Symbolism of the village pump metaphor
What is the etymology of using "village pump" as a general discussion place on Wikipedia? I assume it's because in the past, a whole community of people lined up to use a physical village pump, and used that time to talk to each other. Is this correct? 184.146.170.127 (talk) 19:59, 11 June 2024 (UTC)


 * That's correct. On Commons – the repository of media files used by Wikipedia – the Village pump page is decorated with photos of literal village pumps. —⁠andrybak (talk) 21:07, 11 June 2024 (UTC)