Wikipedia talk:Village pump (proposals)

Archiving issues
The last archive subpage mentioned in the page header is Village pump (proposals)/Archive 195, with only 9,854 bytes content. Village pump (proposals)/Archive 196 does not exist yet. And the bot just skipped it and moved recent VPPR discussions to Village pump (proposals)/Archive 197, and then continued to Archives 198, and currently Archive 199. What went wrong with the bot? &#8212;CX Zoom[he/him] (let's talk • {C•X}) 18:33, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
 * bumped the counter without actually archiving anything. Really, it should have been reverted at the time, and whilst Village pump (proposals)/Archive 195 would still have been short, there wouldn't have been a gap in the sequence. It's been six weeks now, and there have been several archive edits taking the sequence from Village pump (proposals)/Archive 197 up to Village pump (proposals)/Archive 199, so it's too late to simply adjust the counter. There are two things we could do: the easiest is to create Village pump (proposals)/Archive 196 as a dummy page; or we could move Village pump (proposals)/Archive 197 to Village pump (proposals)/Archive 196 and so on up the chain - this is slower and more accurate, but may break inward links. -- Red rose64 &#x1f339; (talk) 22:02, 26 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I am going to do the later. The number of inward links low for these 3 archives (197, 198, 199). WP:TPO allows for fixing links. – robertsky (talk) 00:10, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
 * And... moved, moved, moved, edited links on the following pages:
 * 197->196:
 * User:Novem Linguae/Essays/Community tension with the WMF
 * Village pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 73
 * Wikipedia Signpost/2023-02-04/News and notes
 * 198->197:
 * Talk:Henry V of England
 * Talk:Charles III
 * User:InfiniteNexus/cases
 * User talk:Grorp
 * 199->198
 * Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Council
 * .. and adjusted the counter to 198 as well, some 1.5-2 hours before the next archival edit is made by the bot. If the bot ends up creating 199 instead of adding to 198, we can adjust the counter back. – robertsky (talk) 00:30, 27 February 2023 (UTC)

Looking for some unofficial clerks
I think we need some unofficial clerks for Village pump (proposals) and Village pump (policy). The two main tasks (IMO) would be:


 * Notice when the section heading claims it's an RFC, but it isn't actually a Requests for comment, because the OP never added the rfc template, and either change the section heading or encourage the OP to get it properly listed.
 * Notice when a predictably large discussion is being started, and gently encourage them to have that discussion on a separate, dedicated page. (The goal is to keep the village pump pages short enough that people can actually use them, which definitely means a page size shorter than 500K, is probably under 250K, and might be as small as 100K.  See also Village pump (technical), where we're trying to hash out a goal size.)

Does anyone else see these problems, and would anyone like to help out with the work? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:15, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I disagree with #2; part of the reason we have discussions at the village pump is to get broad participation, and holding the discussions on a separate page inhibits that. Yes, the pages can become more difficult to use, but I think the negative impacts of that is less than the negative impacts of reduced participation. BilledMammal (talk) 23:56, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Sounds like you might have a faster device and/or internet connection than me! I find heavyweight discussion pages very difficult to deal with. None of a page can be read in the mobile interface until the entire thing loads into memory, since all the subsections start out collapsed. If a discussion gets over about 100k, I'll just read it in diff mode if I'm tryna follow it.I think the slight downtick in participation that may be (data, anyone?) associated with holding it on a dedicated subpage with just a link on the VP itself, is probably an acceptable tradeoff for keeping the pages' resource footprint on the lighter side. Folly Mox (talk) 01:07, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I'm doubtful that there's any decrease in participation. About two-thirds of Times that 100 Wikipedians supported a policy change was on dedicated subpages (and only one was at a village pump).  All but one thing at Times that 200 Wikipedians supported a policy change and everything at Times that 300 or more Wikipedians supported something was on a dedicated subpage.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:28, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * One good clerky action would be to keep a regularly updated section at the main VP page pointing to the subpage. The updates could be as simple as "discussion is ongoing". It might encourage further participation and notify watchlisters. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 02:42, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Splitting improves watchlists, allowing us to tell easily whether a contribution summarised as "/* Discussion */ Reply" is on a subtopic of interest. Of course, the main pump would keep a short section containing a static wikilink to the subpage. Certes (talk) 09:57, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Splitting is useful, the size of the paid admin proposal was starting to break the page. But I don't think discussions need to be moved to a subpage straight away, let them start and be moved once they get to a certain size. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 10:35, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
 * IG as said above, size can be an issue - We can start putting size limits where we keep pages to  size here, and a discussion that exceeds it is moved to another page, with a copy of the opening comment and a link to the rest of the discussion. That way, particiants get the gist of what was proposed, and can easily go participate. Captain Jack Sparrow (talk) 14:14, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I often read on a mobile device and connection; I just use the desktop site. Even with Vector2022, it's far better than Minerva in terms of usability and in term of responsiveness. BilledMammal (talk) 04:34, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I've split off a long discussion to Requests for comment/Emoji redirects. That brought the page down to just above a quarter million bytes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:42, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Archiving, again.
I noticed today that several inactive threads were not auto-archived. I don't know why that is but one-click seems to work just fine and I've used it to archive some stale discussions. Just Step Sideways from this world ..... today 21:43, 29 April 2024 (UTC)


 * Per User_talk:%CE%A3, I think it might be a general problem with Special:Contributions/Lowercase_sigmabot_III and/or some settings in it. Someone in that thread pinged as someone who might know what to do Soni (talk)  23:30, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the notice. I've kicked it again and added a workaround in case this issue happens again. —&#8239; The Earwig (talk) 04:30, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Avoiding the pump for single-article topics
Regarding this post that editors seem to feel is misplaced, would it be advisable to have the instructions at the top include a point along the lines of "issues that affect only a single article do not belong here"? Cheers,  Sdkb  talk 19:57, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I think that the list is already of the size that it won't be read by many people. Could you suggest some bullet points to remove to make way for this one? And I note that it's just one editor, rather than "editors", but I happen to agree so I suppose the plural is correct now. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:11, 8 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Very fair. Proposed speedy deletion criteria seems like an infrequent enough thing it could probably be removed (it's also something that is more likely to be done by at least moderately experienced editors, who will ideally know better than to use the pump for it). Ditto for new wikis. Proposed new articles could be wrapped into the single-article bullet point as a specific example (it's something more likely to be done by newcomers, so probably worth spelling out). (I was including my own unstated agreement when I made it plural, so that's now three of us.)  Sdkb  talk 20:55, 8 July 2024 (UTC)