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Bot to add Template:Unreferenced and Template:No footnotes to pages (single run)

This proposal seeks to assess the current community consensus regarding a bot mass-tagging pages with {{Unreferenced}} and {{No footnotes}}. These are two separate issues, and the consensus (or lack thereof; see below) regarding them is different, so I will address each in turn.
Unreferenced

There is consensus in favor of a bot run to tag pages with {{Unreferenced}}. That being said, there were a number of concerns expressed during this discussion that should be taken into account, and are incorporated into this close:

  1. If it is technically feasible to implement at {{Unreferenced}}, the bot should leave an annotation in the template along the lines of |source=GreenC bot (as suggested by Andy Dingley), which should cause the template to instead categorize the page in a separate category (as suggested by John Cline), addressing the concerns raised by Wugapodes and others about bloating the current maintenance category as well as making it easier to review the pages the bot tags
  2. This was implied by the proposal, but for the record, the bot should skip pages with any form of citation, not just pages with <ref>s
  3. Given the concerns about the potential for false positives, GreenC is expected notify the community once they have finished the bot's trial (assuming it goes to trial; as usual, BAG can deny this bot on other grounds) and allow time for any community input regarding the bot's propensity towards false positives.
No footnotes

There is no consensus for a bot run to tag pages with {{No footnotes}}. Per the bot policy, operators are required to show that their bot performs only tasks for which there is consensus. Thus, no consensus defaults to the community does not approve of a bot run to tag pages with {{No footnotes}}.

If you have any questions about this close, please ask me. Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 03:14, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

There's a BRFA to make a single run through all pages, adding {{Unreferenced}} or {{No footnotes}} to pages as appropriate. GreenC kindly did the leg work making the bot. As currently written the bot will not tag stubs, redirects, "List of...", "Index of...", "<year> in...", and some other cases. You can see test results here for where the bot would or would not apply different tags. There is concern at the BRFA that this run may appear disruptive if consensus is not gained at a wider forum first. Hence, this post: would folks support a bot run to tag unreferenced or no footnotes pages? Ajpolino (talk) 17:01, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

  • As it's easy to do, I'd like to see this new tag annotated such as |source=GreenC bot, with a link to some relevant explanation. We gain little benefit from tags and a lot of friction, especially where they're seen as "drive-by" tagging with no explanation.
Also, what happens afterwards? Will those articles then be speedied for deletion as "unsourced"? I can see all those itchy trigger fingers just waiting to do such a thing. And of course, a bulk deletion run of massive volume would have so much greater 'success'. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:06, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
Also, will this recognise BLPs and treat them differently? Andy Dingley (talk) 18:23, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
Do "unsourced" tags need an explanation? Natureium (talk) 18:33, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
Yes, because there's so much pushback against them (and many wind up mis-applied - an article without inline citations might still have references). If we're going to tag things, make the reasons and their provenance clear – saves argument later. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:08, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support - Now that new pages patrol is fairly organized, most new unreferenced pages are likely getting tagged. So a single run of the bot should be sufficient. Category:Articles_lacking_sources already has 184,000 articles in it. But a group of editors are making steady progress, and have chopped that number down from 202,000 a year ago. Knowing the scale of the task would be nice. Also, I usually search through the category by keywords so I can deal with e.g. all Kyrgyzstanian villages in one go with one good source. Having all the unreffed articles tagged would greatly facilitate that. Lastly, I see no down side to having unreffed articles tagged as such. Who knows, the tag might even cause someone to fix a few of them? Happy editing! Ajpolino (talk) 17:09, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support - Easier to find articles with issues if they are tagged. Easier to fix them if you can find them. ~ ONUnicornproblem solving 17:11, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support - This would let us target unsourced articles. I stumble across one every once in a while, and try to find some source, but we should be more systematic. And if we can't find any source to support one of those articles, then we should delete it. - Donald Albury 20:07, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support - Would be super helpful for this to be implemented. --Atcovi (Talk - Contribs) 20:09, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. --Emir of Misplaced Pages (talk) 20:16, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support AmericanAir88 22:55, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. This is a straightforward task that would save a lot of editor effort. — Newslinger talk 23:01, 14 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. These tags sit very prominently at the top of an article and so ought to be used judiciously. {{Unreferenced}} should ideally be placed on articles only if the absence of sources isn't otherwise immediately obvious to the reader and there is reason to believe some of the article's content might not be completely reliable: for example, there's no point tagging short articles whose content is easily verifiable in a quick web search. This is a task that requires judgement and so it can't be performed by a bot. I understand that many editors might disagree with this view on the use of the "unreferenced" tags, but the case against adding {{No footnotes}} – which is also the major task of the bot as it's expected to affect over 110,000 articles – is much clearer. In-line citations, though useful in many circumstances, aren't a universal requirement (see for example WP:MINREF). It's perfectly acceptable to have a reasonably developed article with a list of general references at the end but not a single footnote. If it doesn't contain potentially contentious statements (or other material that needs to be supported by in-line citations), then there's really no issue to point to and so the placement of a "No footnotes" tag can be seen as disruptive. Again, the decision on whether to place the tag or not requires evaluation of the content of the article, and that's not something that a bot can do. And of course, if editors find it useful to have a bot flag up articles in such a way, then this can be handled in any of the less obstrusive ways that many similar maintenance task are handled: for example by the creation of a list in projectspace, or by the addtion of invisible categories. – Uanfala (talk) 00:26, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support very helpful. :) Siddiqsazzad001 <Talk/> 06:19, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support very useful, saving hours of editors' time. Carefully thought out and ready for a trial. Boleyn (talk) 20:31, 15 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Strong Support On several levels. We owe it to the reader to tell them that we haven't checked the veracity of the article. To be able to counter the slur "Misplaced Pages is unreliable, people can write any nonsense" with "Not true- all articles require references- and if they don't have them we tag them prominently with "No footnotes- please help to provide them". Then, in talking to newbies at editathons- my line of "each wikipedia edit has three parts 'an interesting fact- a reference saying where you found it, and a note telling other editor what you have done" now has teeth. And, for the nervous new editor. ¨Don't try to start a new article- just go to one with the No footnotes tag and start there- it is unloved and you can only improve it.ClemRutter (talk) 14:07, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
I disagree with pretty much everything but your last two sentences. Firstly Misplaced Pages:Misplaced Pages is not a reliable source because people can write any nonsense. Go look at List of hoaxes on Misplaced Pages and see the 50+ hoaxes that existed on this website for over 8 years. One of 12 years was just deleted not two weeks ago. Second, the information has been checked by the the author of the article and if you doubt that you should challenge it specifically, not have a bot tag things that don't have a little blue number after them. Third, unless an article contains direct quotations, claims that have been challenged, claims likely to be challenged, or contentious material about living persons, policy does not require references: ...the policies require only that it be possible for a motivated, educated person to find published, reliable sources that support the material, e.g., by searching for sources online or at a library. Lastly, if we "owe it to the reader to tell them that we haven't checked the veracity of the article" then we should pending changes protect this whole place and turn it into Citizendium. Not having a template at the top doesn't mean the information is true, reliable, or even verifiable. Wugapodes 05:24, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support - I agree with Clem. As for the tag's prominence, they ought be. Most of the time these conditions are easy enough to correct, how long they remain so situated is mostly an editorial choice (even for new users as referencing is usually a task learned early, even by casual contributors).--John Cline (talk) 14:28, 16 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Uanfala and WP:CITEVAR. Articles don't need to have footnotes, see Misplaced Pages:Parenthetical referencing, and I doubt throwing a {{No footnotes}} tag at the top of the FA Actuary will be helpful to anyone. {{No footnotes}} which would be added to Aerin says "its sources remain unclear" except that the source is very clear given it's three paragraphs on a Tolkien character cited to two of Tolkien's books. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the information about this Tolkien character comes from one of Tolkien's books (perhaps even the ones in the references). While {{unreferenced}} definitely applies to Love After Midnight, should it really be added considering the information is clearly available if you just looked at the album cover (a fair use image of which is included in the article, but a bot wouldn't know that). Inline citations are only required if material is challenged, so adding a tag to an article that is already verifiable isn't useful and bloats a maintenance category for pages that actually do have issues with verifiability. Wugapodes 04:58, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
    To say: "Inline citations are only required if material is challenged" is to rest verification on diligence to only a fourth part of expected standards. There are four instances that necessitate inline verification. If you focus on the larger picture, where the other 75% may dwell, I think both you, and Uanfala would find it much more intuitive to support this reasonable measure; for the larger good that it will do.--John Cline (talk) 07:14, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
    I'm well aware, I mention all four in a comment I made above, but none of the other three apply in the articles I mention (no direct quotes, not BLPs, nothing seems likely to be challenged) so I didn't mention the other three. Determining whether the state of sourcing and verifiability is in line with policy is a task for humans and it should be done by humans. This is not a bot proposing to add {{BLP unsourced}} to unsourced BLPs, it's not a bot that would add {{Quote without source}} to direct quotations without an inline citation, it's not a bot that would add {{Disputed}} to articles which seem to be hoaxes, it is not a bot that would add banners which show actual problems stemming from policy but rather is asserting that a whole article has problems because it doesn't have little blue numbers. If the bot were to add any of those three banners (appropriately) I'd be more inclined to support, but right now this just seems like what will happen is a ton of articles that comply with policy and with style guidelines will get swept up in. Category:Articles lacking sources contains 3% of all articles. Category:Articles lacking in-text citations contains over 1%. It will take 9 years to get through {{unsourced}} at our current rate of 20,000 articles per year. I fail to see a "larger good" in bloating already massive categories with an unknown number that may not even be a valuable use of our time because no human actually triaged it.
    And this isn't even me hypothesizing. I went through all the type 2 {{no footnotes}} articles in the dataset listed at BRFA and many of them I would not tag at NPP. There are even articles like Fossilized affixes in Austronesian languages, Nummer 5 which would have been tagged but do use inline citations (with page numbers!) via parantheticals; the second article, Nummer 5, even uses citation template {{harv}}. If you want to bloat those categories, I'd be fine with the bot adding the category alone, but if we're going to be prominently displaying a message to our readers that there is a problem with an article I want a human to have judged that it is in fact not in line with policy, not a bot failing to find its prefered citation style. Wugapodes 08:17, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
    Your rebuttal is cogent and well reasoned; I respect your entire platform. I think it will not achieve more than its due recognition (as great philosophy) until nirvana hath come. Meanwhile, this reasonable thing (that we can do) should be done; and continuously improved (until nirvana hath come).--John Cline (talk) 08:45, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
    Addendum - I'd like to add that my support of this proposal is in no way meant as a dismissal of your valid concerns. They deserve mitigation,as they did (even before this proposal) and reasonably. perhaps, even more so amid the emerging consensus. I share your disdain for arriving at a page only to see a prominently displayed maintenance tags that inappropriately ascribe the wrong maintenance needs and very often show they have been mistagged this way for years. A bot that can add a tag ought always multitask to remove tags that are misapplied as well (that might do a lot, in itself, to reduce some backlogs. And to alleviate the potential of bloated categorization, it would be technically easy and editorially prudent to modify the categorization for each of the tags the bot will handle so as tags placed by the bot can be categorized as such, and diverted to a sub-cat of the main-cat eliminating any potential effect from bloat while allowing the segregation of bot placements where an editor may want to deal with pages tagged by the bot in particular, and thereby could. I hope they will do such things just because it is an improvement compared with not doing it. Anyway, I did not mean to seem dismissive, and I saw in my comment where it could easily seem like that is what I was attempting when I really was not meaning to. Cheers.--John Cline (talk) 12:22, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
    Comment The name {{No footnotes}} is a bit misleading as the template says that both footnotes and parenthetical citations can count as inline citations. I think the bot should skip over articles with parenthetical citations, such as Actuary. Qzekrom (talk) 15:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. Every mainspace article should be flagged for such sourcing problems; doing so is de rigueur for patrollers, but because of the decentralized way patolling is done, many article have been missed. Let's find and fix that.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 16:12, 19 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support unsourced only some of the concerns about "no footnotes" seem legitimate; on a spot check, while many of those articles have problems, often the lack of footnotes is not the main problem with the article. Stubs like Forstegg Castle or Robert Săceanu don't have enough content to need footnotes, and David Garst is all clearly sourced to the one reference given. I don't see any reason to not support the {{unsourced}} run; the only false positive I found was a crypto-list at Clarinet-cello repertoire. I'm assured through the earlier discussion that templates that generate references are all included, it's not just checking for ref tags). power~enwiki (π, ν) 22:54, 21 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support With Conditions. I am not too excited by the Template:No footnotes part of this proposal. It would really be a hassle if anything. However, adding unsourced is a great idea and has my full support. That would seem awfully useful for readers and editors alike. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk- 16:58, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Support (and tweak?). I don't think this is a bad idea, but I'm cautious about "will not tag stubs". A lot of stub-tagged articles are very long, not really stubs any more by any reasonable definition, and often these are some of the least well-maintained pages - the fact that they still have a stub tag suggests an experienced/confident editor hasn't worked with them enough to notice and remove it.
Would it be worth tweaking this so it's a little more sophisticated and eg/ only skips anything that's a stub and is also under, say, 5000 characters (a very generous upper limit)? If that's not practical, fair enough, but it would be good to include these large "not really stubs" as well if possible. Andrew Gray (talk) 22:39, 30 January 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose all. {{No footnotes}} should not be bot-applied ever, because it will tag pages that actually contain WP:Inline citations (but don't happen to use ref tags – this includes several FAs, by the way). That tag requires human judgment. Bot attempts to apply {{Unref}} result in a number of errors, although usually a fairly small (couple of percentage points) number. But the problem is that this tag is basically pointless. Except with quite new articles, we have no evidence that anyone sees that tag and addresses the problem. Also, when it's a stub, I like to think that our readers are smart enough to see that there aren't any blue clicky numbers on the page. As an alternative, I'd like to see a bot remove the unref tag when refs are added (NB: not "substitute {{refimprove}}", which is something that a bot can't form a judgment about; just take it out). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:04, 1 February 2019 (UTC)
Which FA do you mean? Let's test it, see what happens (dry run mode). I've gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid spurious tagging. It's not a simple bot. Also, when it makes mistakes, I improve the bot further so that type of problem doesn't happen again. -- GreenC 21:57, 9 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support unsourced only. As others have mentioned, articles don't require footnotes. While I agree that in the vast majority of cases adding footnotes will be helpful, I don't think a bot going around tagging all articles without footnotes would be helpful. Darylgolden Ping when replying 11:49, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

 

This article contains no references. Any idiot can see that; but we are assuming that you, dear reader, are not just any ordinary idiot, but an especially incredibly amazingly stupid idiot who suffers from paranoid delusions, and we fear that you may see plenty of references where in fact there is not even a hint of them. That is why we felt necessary to put this warning here at the top of the article, rather than in the talk page. But, don't feel bad; any idiot, including yourself, can help Misplaced Pages by adding plenty of references to obscure, cranky, irrelevant, or unobtainable sources to this page, so that other idiots may mistake it for a peer-reviewed authoritative journal article. Chances are that it will be years before any editor will bother to check those sources. (November 2009)

 

  • Oppose "Unreferenced" per Uanfala and others, and Strong oppose "No footnotes". The vast majority of non-stub articles have some references; and seriously - articles don't need footnotes! And based on (an admittedly unscientfic) clicking of the 'Random article' link ten times, 90% of our articles don't have them. So we'd be adding "Unreferenced" to a tiny percentage of articles, and adding "No footnotes" to the vast majority. What practical purpose would that serve - especially the latter case? Nobody visiting Millom Rural District is going to care - or try to find suitable ones for inclusion - if there are no footnotes there. An alternative useful proposal would be a bot that would add Category:Unreferenced to unreferenced articles - then all such articles can be easily accessed from one place, rather than plastering templates everywhere. Bastun 10:12, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
The test data gives a statistical estimate how many would be tagged with 'No footnotes', it's either 0.02 (less than the number of already tagged with unreferenced) or 0.005 depending on which threshold is chosen. It's targeting the absolute worse cases using a conservative approach. If the article has a top hat of any kind, one of over 7000 templates (including infoboxes) etc.. it gets skipped. There are many many ways articles are skipped. -- GreenC 01:55, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both. Would be helpful for all of them, and while articles (as stated above) don't need footnotes, it is however by far the most common form of referencing, and consistency is good for a reader passing by who may not know about the other forms of referencing. As for {{unsourced}}, I am supporting so that the article gets added to the maintenance category, so that editors can find about it and do something. 10:21, 11 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support both. As a matter of principle, its inconceivable that any article beyond stub length would contain zero WP:MINREF material. In particular, practice has shown that just about any statement is likely to be challenged. Misplaced Pages is going to be here for a long time, and our standards on sourcing are getting more – not less – demanding all the time. Even for content that doesn't strictly meet MINREF criteria, inline citations are clearly expected by WP:V and WP:REF. – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 02:01, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per WP:CONTEXTBOT. How in the world is this bot supposed to identify all appropriately formatted footnotes? Imagine that your article has zero <ref></ref> tags, because you've used a "Bibliograpyh" header with full citations, and you're using parenthetical citations for necessary details (e.g. page numbers). Maybe you can train the bot to notice if there's a section entitled "References", "Bibliography", "Notes", etc. with content, but how is the bot supposed to know that an article's properly cited if it doesn't use cite.php, and a typo causes there to be no header with a standard works-cited title? WP:CITEVAR says we don't convert an article from one style to another without consensus, and by implication it's wrong to tag an article for "no footnotes" if you just don't recognise the footnotes style. Obviously we need to forgive a human who's never seen parenthetical citations and tags articles inappropriately, but humans can easily be educated, while educating bots to be 100% error-free on the edge cases is impossible. Nyttend (talk) 23:53, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Well it's unavoidable the bot will make even a single error ("100% error-free"), but there is the other half of the equation, the vast majority of tagged pages that humans have failed to do anything about for years and decades. Do we leave those thousands untagged for fear of a few arguably mis-tagged pages? The bot is aware of common section titles, over 7000 templates and much else besides. Forget the <ref></ref> tags, the bot has many ways to look at it. The scenario you give sounds GIGOish. If no-GIGO and 100% error free is the threshold I withdrawn this bot and all bots. -- GreenC 01:55, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
I get the feeling that many of the opposes above are based on the mistaken notion that the bot either requires the article to have <ref></ref> tags (thus negatively sanctioning other allowed WP:CITEVARs) or that {{No footnotes}} would be inappropriate if the intended CITEVAR was something else (the template – though named so – says no such thing; it says "sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations"). – Finnusertop (talk ⋅ contribs) 15:26, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
I can't speak for the others, but my opoposition is partly based on the assumptions that the bot requires the presence of either ref tags or some sort of citation template (which would mistakenly flag up articles that have text-only inline citations: Wugapodes has given examples above), and more germanely on the fact that a bot can't discriminate between articles that do need to have in-line citations and ones that don't. – Uanfala (talk) 15:42, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
The test data shows the bot is really very accurate. -- GreenC 16:16, 13 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support I agree with Andrew Gray, the matter of stubs should be handled. Take, for example, Pakistani railway stations of which 1,254 exist in real life. In Enwiki, we have 1,172 stubs, almost all prepared by expert editors from one or no sources. One argument in opposition is that a tag at the top is distracting to the reader. A stub, however, is invisible. It allows large groups of articles to be ignored for years. There is no reason that 2,100 Indian railway station stubs should not be processed by this bot. Rhadow (talk) 14:11, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose no footnotes as footnotes are not considered essential or tag worthy for non BLPs, and this would be overtagging and unnecessary Atlantic306 (talk) 19:32, 14 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both' as for footnotes: Footnotes are never required for any article . Even for BLP, any way of associating a statement with the reference for it is acceptable.WP:INCITE says "Inline citations allow the reader to associate a given bit of material in an article with the specific reliable source(s) that support it. Inline citations are added using either footnotes (long or short) or parenthetical references. " Footnotes is the usual and recommended method, but not the only one. It's bas enough that the manual tag reads inaccurately, but we certainly should not be adding inaccurate tags by bot.
and as for "unreferenced" Looking at some at random, and remembering from a long experience, about one-third of them have external links or other ways of giving sources that could be trivially used as references. They just need moving to the usual place, not adding. Again, it's bad enough that a sometimes incorrect tag is often added manually, without doing wrong by bot. Even for quotations that people marked as needing sources, the sources are often there, but in a nonstandard way. DGG ( talk ) 05:21, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose Useless clutter per banner blindness and WP:TCREEP. Andrew D. (talk) 22:02, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose both. If you want Misplaced Pages to have a uniform referencing style then start an RFC proposing that Misplaced Pages adopts a uniform referencing style, but in the absence of such a consensus using a bot to expressly force other people to follow your personal preferences as to how you think articles should be formatted is pretty much the textbook example of tendentious editing. Misplaced Pages doesn't have, and never has had, any kind of rule that footnotes are required; there are featured articles without a single footnote. ‑ Iridescent 22:13, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment As the bot author, I don't like tags much either. A bot like this has a number of advantages for anti-tagging. 1- it will free up tagging editors (WP:NPP etc) to do something else with the knowledge a bot is on the job, resulting in overall reduction in tagging. 2- the bot has an accuracy rate of 98% or better, far less than manual tagging error rates (see DGG's 33% comment above) meaning fewer overall tags. For those who think a bot is not qualified or capable of these decisions, manual editors are worse. 3- the bot can just as equally remove tags. If it sees a page that would not qualify for a tag (that it would skip) but it contains a tag, it can be removed. This might result in a overall net-reduction in tags. The bot is tag-agnostic focusing on quality of tagging to reduce the amount of error-prone manual tagging and de-tagging. 4- there is a single point to make adjustments ie. tagging algos can be controlled and improved, unlike manual tagging. -- GreenC 23:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support with caveat The bot should not tag pages that have higher priority sourcing issues, see WP:OVERTAG. Qzekrom (talk) 15:46, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
Correct, it does not do that. Indeed it does not tag any page with a preexisting top hat of any type. This is one feature of the extreme conservatism I keep mentioning. It will skip pages at the drop of a hat (sorry). -- GreenC 16:49, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Protecting large categories

We currently give pre-emptive protection to templates that have a large number of transclusions, because a single vandalism edit can damage a large number of pages. Why not categories with lots of articles included? If you place {{Category redirect}} on Cat:A, a bot will move its articles to destination Cat:B. If someone redirected an exceptionally large category, we might have thousands of pages bot-moved to the wrong place, and unlike reverting template vandalism (which requires only a single reversion per vandal edit and a wait for the job queue), someone would have to revert each of the bot category-move edits. (Catalot would simplify this, but since a category generally contains articles that belong in it, you couldn't move everything from Cat:B to Cat:A without moving pages that belonged in B.) This isn't a matter of WP:BEANS either, as Grawp's been doing such a thing for years if I remember rightly. Nyttend (talk) 00:28, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

I had no idea the articles were moved - should they be? I hope someone keeps an eye on Category:Misplaced Pages non-empty soft redirected categories (currently empty). Perhaps the bot should need an admin to activate it. Johnbod (talk) 05:36, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
I think the reason we don't do this is a) categories are at the bottom of the page, so not very visible and not a promising vandal target, b) if adding a template to a category is enough to make a bot move it around, you can do the same trick to reverse the move and c) I don't think that such category vandalism happens frequently. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 06:28, 8 February 2019 (UTC)
Nyttend already explained why your suggestion in b) would not work. I'll try to explain it again. If we start with 100 articles in Cat:A and 100 in Cat:B, and Cat:A is redirected to Cat:B, then we will have no articles in Cat:A and 200 in Cat:B. Reversing the process will then give us 200 articles in Cat:A and none in Cat:B, which is not the same as the starting point. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:19, 9 February 2019 (UTC)
Exactly. Yes, it's not a common problem, but even with a 200-article situation, this procedure may only be undone by spending quite silly amounts of time (to quote WP:HISTMERGE out of context). Lots of categories have far more than this; consider redirecting Category:American Freemasons to Category:American amputees, and you'd have 585 articles to sort through. (It would be even worse if there are amputee Freemasons, since the old category would simply be removed from the article and you'd have no indication that the article was previously in both.) And that assumes you've only redirected one category; take several massive categories and redirect them all to the same place, and you might end up with ten thousand articles in the same category. With a couple of minutes' search, I just identified ten completely unprotected categories containing over 150,000 articles total, and I know that these categories are added directly in the article (as opposed to being template-transcluded) and that there's very low risk of duplication. The chance that this specific incident will occur is small, for sure, but should it occur, the risk is great enough that we need to do something about it — either protect these categories or amend the bot's workings, e.g. it only runs if the person who redirected the category is autoconfirmed. Nyttend (talk) 00:08, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
FYI, the bot has a seven-day waiting period after a category redirect is created before it will start moving anything out of the redirected category. That does allow an opportunity for interested users to monitor newly-created redirects and revert any vandalism before a problem occurs. But, like much else on Misplaced Pages, it does require vigilance. --R'n'B (call me Russ) 00:44, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
I asked R'n'B to come here because he runs the bot (or one of the bots) in question, User:RussBot. Nyttend (talk) 01:17, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
@Nyttend: Would it be easier to just create an edit filter for redirecting categories? --DannyS712 (talk) 01:28, 12 February 2019 (UTC)
Maybe, or you could have the existing new-redirect filter look at category edits too. But I'm still concerned that this and the current 7-day delay wouldn't be enough, since not many people pay attention to specific categories or filters of this sort. I'd rather see the bot pay attention to an editor's standing, or semiprotect pages, or something else. Building on Johnbod's idea: what if the bot would run only when a fully-protected page was marked as "yes"? Either it could run on all the non-empty redirects at once, or we could have a way to tell it to run only on some of them. Nyttend (talk) 01:48, 12 February 2019 (UTC)

I think the correct solution is to create a filter to watch for redirecting existing categories, and for users to create pages with links to Category:Misplaced Pages non-empty soft redirected categories and keep an eye on the "related changes" link on that page (e.g this page). These measures, along with a 1 week delay, should be enough to prevent the cateories from being merged in this way. עוד מישהו Od Mishehu 12:54, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Datebot proposal - closed

Per request at WP:RFCL, I have closed the recent RfC proposing a "Datebot". Since the RfC was archived before closure, I'm posting the result below.

This is a proposal to increase date consistency in citations, per MOS:DATEUNIFY. Specifically, a bot would look for templates like

and bring present dates in line with desired usage on that specific article.

There was no consensus for a bot to automatically attempt to increase the consistency of date formats within articles.

The proposal, discussion, and full close can be found at Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 156#"Datebot" (limited_scope)

Thanks, --DannyS712 (talk) 00:16, 17 February 2019 (UTC)

Encyclopedias for Deletion banner campaign for EU Copyright/Article 13

Encyclopedias for Deletion: the European Union has proposed legislation which would interfere with the ability of Misplaced Pages to continue on the internet. Please act today: https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ Thank you.

Please consider joining the feedback request service.
An editor has requested comments from other editors for this discussion. This page has been added to the following list: When discussion has ended, remove this tag and it will be removed from the list. If this page is on additional lists, they will be noted below.

This Encyclopedias for Deletion banner campaign for EU Copyright/Article 13 was originally Requested at Talk:Main Page#Please include banner in EU locales ("Regarding please display https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ prominently as a noticebox warning as above for readers in Europe. Thank you.") Please conduct the RFC discussion here. EllenCT (talk) 05:21, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Only in the European locales. EllenCT (talk) 21:22, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Background information: Dimitrov, Dimitar; Davenport, Allison. "Problems remain with the EU's copyright reform". wikimediafoundation.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 7 February 2019. EllenCT (talk) 22:08, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

Survey: EfD banner

  • Oppose any use of the encyclopedia for political advocacy, even if a majority of a tiny subset of editors agree on a position. ―Mandruss ☎ 10:14, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per my thoughts at User:Mz7/Avoid political banners. Taking a side in a political debate necessarily jeopardizes Misplaced Pages's ability to maintain a perception of neutrality with respect to that issue. Neutrality is one of our most fundamental principles as a project, and it's not really something that's supposed to be negotiable. Additionally, as editors point out below, the proposed legislation makes an explicit exception for online encyclopedias, so I fear that a big banner that says that Misplaced Pages is proposed for deletion is sensationalizing it quite a bit. Mz7 (talk) 10:37, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose for the reasons I stated earlier today in what is now the Discussion section of this RfC (it was not an RfC at the time). - Sitush (talk) 10:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Strong support. Neutrality is not a suicide pact, and Article 13 would destroy Misplaced Pages as we know it. It may be exempt from Article 13 as an encyclopedia, but the sister projects such as Commons and Wikidata are not and Misplaced Pages heavily relies upon them for content. However, we should not allow our interpretation of the law dictate whether a banner is worth putting out. Here's an article from the Wikimedia blog: "How the EU copyright proposal will hurt the web and Misplaced Pages". If we don't want to promote a third-party website because we don't trust it, we can link to the fastest-growing petition on change.org, and change.org is appropriate. Inaction is a slippery slope; when they start going after Misplaced Pages, it will be too late. wumbolo ^^^ 11:06, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support, You are allowed to have political opinions and biases, you just aren't allowed to taint the content with them or canvas. Try you and stop someone declaring they are republican or democrat either on their own talk pages or on other talk pages. You want people to declare their biases. You try and stop people declaring they are nationalists or anti-nationalists. It's just an enlarged version of a userbox. ~ R.T.G 12:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
    It's just an enlarged version of a userbox. Um, no. This is not about individual expression. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:15, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
It is precisely a request for the individual to express themselves. What was your statement trying to explain? ~ R.T.G 16:49, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose using the main page, sorry ~ R.T.G 17:38, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose no advocacy for political reasons.Pharaoh of the Wizards (talk) 12:26, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Misplaced Pages should make a political statement in this way if and only if there's an existential threat to the encyclopedia that has a serious chance of being enacted. No informed opinion on whether this meets that standard. Tazerdadog (talk) 13:01, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose this banner, SUPPORT Misplaced Pages taking action. This proposal seems designed to fail -- it can be called inaccurate (since Misplaced Pages, last I heard, would have a narrow exemption), it uses an in-joke meme that sounds flippant to insiders and incomprehensible to outsiders. We need a banner but it must link to high quality information about the scope of the legislation and updated analysis of how it DOES affect our activities. Wnt (talk) 14:06, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose because this is technically a form of fake news. Tgeorgescu (talk) 15:30, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support as proposer. EllenCT (talk) 15:37, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Mz7. We don’t get involved with politics. TonyBallioni (talk) 16:52, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per what Mz7 said. We should also get something about this written on WP:PERENNIAL since it comes up fairly often now. Killiondude (talk) 17:28, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Mz7. Whatever other suggestions for banners are made below would be the same thing as well. Natureium (talk) 17:35, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support The Wikimedia Movement takes political advocacy positions and seeks to influence law, government, and legislation on matters which affect the right of the Wikimedia platform and routine Wikimedia engagement to exist and be legal. For example, we advocate that accessing and editing Wikimedia projects is legal everywhere. I agree that we need more policy in place - such as to determine which government policies affect Wikimedia platforms, and how we prioritize our attention - but in the absence of community developed policy, I think that that by default our standard for taking positions in the name of the community should be rather low. Wikimedia public policy is a perennial issue and eventually we have to address it. Some documentation of the last big related controversy on which the WMF board took a position is at meta:EU policy/2018 European Parliament vote, and see the related talk page. I dismiss all oppose votes that imagine that Wikimedia projects should accept local law and government without seeking to assert Wikimedia community interests. Editing wiki is not a crime, and anyone who tries to legislate the criminality of wiki is in error! Blue Rasberry (talk) 19:03, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Nothing to stop the WMF advocating, and I'm sure they have been in discussions about it, per notes elsewhere. That doesn't mean they can splash a political banner on every project. IIRC, even with the SOPA blackout thing they sought consensus of the community. - Sitush (talk) 19:12, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Right, the Wikimedia Foundation is free to organize advocacy that aligns with the movement, and individual Misplaced Pages editors are free to express their support of such advocacy. The relevant distinction is between this and making a statement as the collective editorial community of Misplaced Pages. We are not the editorial board of a newspaper; unlike other publications, Misplaced Pages specifically has a mission to create a neutral encyclopedia. Political banners like these take the somewhat hypocritical step of disregarding our mission in order to protect it. I'm fine with the WMF lobbying governments on our behalf, but I'm opposed in principle to holding any kind of discussion to determine whether we as a community endorse any kind of political issue. Mz7 (talk) 03:30, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose dropping an external link on the main page with a banner whose wording I find tacky at best - that the external link says nothing about Misplaced Pages at all doesn't help our readers either. — xaosflux 19:08, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
    To summarize some of my other comments - I'm only opposed to us editorially adding this - if the WMF thinks this is a serious threat they should just do another Central Notice (and likely targeting readers that are constituents of the lawmakers involved) like last time. — xaosflux 19:42, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose -The alleged effects on Misplaced Pages appear to be vastly exaggerated. This is not a threat to the encyclopedia or supporting projects at all. The requirement to provide "effective and proportionate measures" to prevent access to unlicenced material is what we claim to do anyway.Nigel Ish (talk) 19:18, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per exactly what Nigel Ish said. Misplaced Pages shouldn't be engaging in political activism at any time, and certainly shouldn't be adopting an fringe position based on the wild exaggerations of a handful of ultra-libertarian activists. ‑ Iridescent 19:29, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
@Iridescent: I am not a libertarian, let alone ultra. EllenCT (talk) 22:55, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
@Iridescent: I'm a social democrat. Do you believe me? EllenCT (talk) 06:43, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Misplaced Pages should not engage in political advocacy on any topic... nothing more to be said. Blueboar (talk) 19:55, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose using the main page for political advocacy in general, though I'd support some exceptions, this isn't one, because online encyclopedias are exempt. "Free to use" is a promise worth keeping, "free to reuse" enriches for-profit publishers. Strong oppose to using this particular banner (or linking to that particular website) because we shouldn't link to propaganda. Leviv ich 22:48, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose this proposal but support another neutrally-worded one like what we did in July. I’m all for inside jokes, but this is too important when you think about what effect this would have on Wikimedia. We should put up a banner that gets the message across but isn’t too heavy-handed about it. — pythoncoder  (talk | contribs) 23:21, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose as I always do when it comes to getting involved in political matters here. — GodsyCONT) 03:32, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose this banner, but support the intent. A central notice/banner like last July would be fine. Misplaced Pages should be apolitical in matters that are unrelated to Misplaced Pages. This isn't one. This jeopardizes our core mission, and we cannot be silent on the issue thinking this is similar to taking position on whether or not the 2019 Canadian Food Guide should be endorsed or rejected. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 10:14, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • 'Support using Misplaced Pages for freedom of the internet-related political causes. Oppose the suggested banner per Wnt. —Kusma (t·c) 11:51, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment for the votes that oppose this on political grounds, what was the PIPA/SOPA blackout about again? Dax Bane 13:36, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
    Comment Once I have made a mistake, I am not forced to make the same mistake forever. I am allowed to avoid that mistake again, am I not? I am allowed to improve and become a better human, am I not? --Jayron32 16:09, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
    @Jayron32: are you saying the choice to continue to exist is a mistake? EllenCT (talk) 06:00, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
    I'm actually saying that Chicken Little is not a life coach. --Jayron32 13:16, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
    Put differently, if Misplaced Pages can be killed that easily, it's valued far less by the world than we think. If that's the case it needs to be killed. I strongly doubt that's the case; rather, any legislation that proved to threaten Misplaced Pages's existence would be amended in short order to prevent that from happening. The global public would see to it. Advocacy like this isn't just inappropriate; it's entirely unnecessary. ―Mandruss ☎ 13:33, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Mandruss. --Jayron32 16:09, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose Not wikipedias job to do political activism. Only in death does duty end (talk) 16:20, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Strongly oppose: While I am against the EU copyright directive, slapping a banner on the main page is a violation of Misplaced Pages's neutral point of view on the subject. However, another blackout (as some people have mentioned in some other places) over it is the Wikimedia Foundation's choice, not ours. Kirbanzo (talk) 16:49, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. Sure. Sounds good to me. Enterprisey (talk!) 03:39, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. So I can look Uncle Fritz square in the monocle and say, "Nein!" Lugnuts 08:03, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose - Personally I would maybe support a banner or something related but I cannot support the proposed banner (which IMHO is awful). –Davey2010 12:21, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose - this banner is misleading because saying Misplaced Pages could not continue on the internet if Article 13 is approved is exaggeration. While I might support a banner similar to the previous banners that received consensus, I am strongly opposed to the ones that have so far been proposed because they all read as sensationalistic propaganda to me. Ca2james (talk) 17:47, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support the core sentiment, but oppose this specific message. This would affect the ability to access Misplaced Pages from the EU (but access from everywhere else would remain untouched, I guess). However, I do agree the banner should be toned down a bit. This should definitely be a neutral/informational advisory, not a deletion-style warning to "Vote Against Article 13 Or Else Misplaced Pages Will Die". Because as I said, access to Misplaced Pages from everywhere else, like the US, wouldn't be affected by Article 13. epicgenius (talk) 18:56, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per Mandruss. I don't care which governments pass laws limiting Misplaced Pages. I did not give anyone permission to perform political advocacy here, especially in Misplaced Pages's name. Chris Troutman (talk) 23:35, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose, just like with other advocacy-on-the-Main-Page proposals, like the SOPA situation some years ago. Individuals may express opinions privately, e.g. in messages to each other or with userboxes, but placing political advocacy of any sort on the Main Page, or on normal articles, is throwing one's toys out of one's pram. Nyttend (talk) 00:40, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support While I generally agree that Misplaced Pages shouldn't engage in political advocacy, I think an important exception needs to be made for issues that threaten the very function of the project itself. Benjamin (talk) 23:04, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose, per Mz7, Sitush, and xaosflux. Misplaced Pages is not a platform for political or social advocacy or activism, and this proposal is simply a sensationalist reaction. If they must, as owners of the encyclopedia projects, the WMF can go ahead ad do what they like - on their web site. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:14, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose: Misplaced Pages is an exemption from Article 13. I am happy with us having banners which take a stance on political events that could affect the existence of or a fundamental principle of Misplaced Pages, but this is not such an event. — Bilorv(c)(talk) 03:19, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose I do not feel that Misplaced Pages is a place to take any type of political stance. -- Dolotta (talk) 18:45, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support in theory, without the hyperbole. WP has a long history of opposing "our brains are falling out on the floor" legislation that would harm freedom of online expression. However, "Encyclopedias for Deletion" is a silly name, and in-joke only some people will get, and claims like "interfere with the ability of Misplaced Pages to continue on the internet" are nonsensical. Lay out the facts dispassionately and without hyperbolic activism antics. (I say all this as a former professional activist, so I know it when I see it.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:29, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Discussion: EfD banner

We do not spread fake news. Tgeorgescu (talk) 04:40, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
A story on the BBC News website in the last week said that online encyclopaedias were specifically exempted from Article 13. Is that not correct? - Sitush (talk) 04:51, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
It is true, but that provision does not allow us to keep our licenses' promise of reusable content, for both commercial and noncommercial entities. EllenCT (talk) 04:54, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
That is the reuser's problem, not ours. - Sitush (talk) 04:58, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Do we place any faith in our own promises? Our terms and conditions of service? Those promises are woven deep into the fabric of the encyclopedia's policies. If you deny this is an existential threat, then it is your burden to propose changes to those policies. Are we as good as our word? EllenCT (talk) 05:01, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
No, we are not as good as our word. I get fed up of reporting copyvio here and at Commons. - Sitush (talk) 05:04, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
That is not a solution. It's an end. It's just a pouring out. You shouldn't make a decision without checking that attitude is present. Maximum copyright will not make it more difficult to pretend there was no copyright. It will make it harder only for those who are honest. ~ R.T.G 16:46, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Why? If someone uploads a copyrighted photo to Commons it could take many years till the violation gets discovered, so assuming that the photos from Commons are free is a legally unsafe assumption anyway. Same applies to plagiarized text. Tgeorgescu (talk) 04:59, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
I appreciate that we are plagued by plagiarists, but that doesn't mean we should break the promises made by non-plagiarist editors, or that the Foundation can break those promises without permission from the volunteer community in the form of replacing our licenses with a claw-back of permission from those to whom we have promised free commercial and noncommercial use. EllenCT (talk) 05:25, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
I, for one, would be quite happy if we scrapped that promise. It is unworkable anyway. But it is a different discussion. - Sitush (talk) 05:34, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
We still tell reusers to review all media provided on WP for reuse within their country, even media from Commons. There are some obscure copyright rules that even our commons media cannot be reused there but are fine in the bulk of the rest of the world. Our disclaims have this warning. --Masem (t) 05:39, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Just because we equivocate such that we can does not mean that we should break the promises woven so deeply into our policy. EllenCT (talk) 05:44, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Regardless of what other users here have said so far, I still think it is a nice thought. ―Matthew J. Long -Talk- 07:10, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
?? Chocolate cake is nice but no-one suggests we put up a banner advocating it. - Sitush (talk) 08:11, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
If your chocolate cake is under threat, put a banner up. Interested? Child labour in cocoa production. ~ R.T.G 15:47, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

@Wumbolo: regarding your support !vote, if Article 13 really is such a big deal for Commons then merge it into a WP project so it becomes part of the encyclopaedia or, hey, abandon it because it is half-broken already. As for WikiData, well, that's had five years or so to get going from a relatively high start base in terms of experience in policy formulation etc and it is a pretty much a disaster. Certainly won't be any loss to WP. - Sitush (talk) 11:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

BOO! Argument from ignorance. False. Search results for "commons is a failure"... 7 hits. How many of the seven are about Misplaced Pages? They are all listed here with this post. ~ R.T.G 12:09, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Where did I use the word "failure"? Talk about ignorance! AS for the notion in your !vote that it is just a "large version of a userbox", well, it isn't: main page does not have userboxes and it represents all of us, not one person. - Sitush (talk) 12:12, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
If broken is not failure... Extreme copyright prevents the emergence of living artists on the grounds of uniqueness. Today is a renaissance of art. Ultra-extreme copyright makes that a narrow path through a desert. Talk about ignorance rather than simply using the word as a form of attack/defense. I didn't talk about ignorance, I linked an article about reason and debate. If you haven't read it yet or understood it, by the definition of ignorance... I am sorry, but this request is not for use on the main page, is it? It's a request for you to use it your self in user space. Argument from ignorance. ~ R.T.G 15:44, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
As far as I can work out, the request was for it to be used on the main page. That's what other people thought also., and it was certainly the original request. If people were arguing whether the thing should exist or not then that would be a matter for WP:TFD. Nothing to do with my ability to reason, I think, but rather your ability to understand the purpose of this RfC. And, no, "broken" is not a synonym for "failure", nor did I say it was "broken". You think you're dealing with an idiot here but, I assure you, you are not. - Sitush (talk) 16:12, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
I didn't mention your ability to reason, but I said quite clearly that you haven't bothered. You are responding that my disagreement in terms is a claim to your idiocy. You say that a thing which is broken has not failed. Sheesh. What sort of reasoning is that? It's fighting talk. How do you know, if you reasoned with me, and your reasoning was true, that I wouldn't accept it even though I still hold my personal wishes? Well, you don't. ~ R.T.G 16:30, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
You are now trolling and deliberately missing the point. End of. - Sitush (talk) 16:34, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
You don't have to use personal attack to avoid admitting you have no debate. ~ R.T.G 16:43, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
No. You said a lot more than how you feel about the main page. Sorry. ~ R.T.G 17:38, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

@Mandruss: Political advocacy is actually an express mission of the WMF, like it or not. Benjamin (talk) 23:03, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

@Benjaminikuta: WMF owns the place and they are free to do what they want. They either care what editors think about the matter, and I'm strongly opposed, or they don't, and this entire discussion is an irrelevant waste of everybody's time. ―Mandruss ☎ 23:37, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
So you fundamentally oppose the mission of the WMF? But anyway, votes are judged on the merits of the argument, and you didn't really make an argument. Benjamin (talk) 08:26, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Using the encyclopedia as a delivery vehicle for political advocacy, using a single voice to represent all Misplaced Pages editors, when there is absolutely no reason to believe that even a simple majority of the editing population support the message, is not the only means available to WMF to pursue that mission. Misplaced Pages is fundamentally a group of volunteer editors and their work product, not the face of the WMF. I'm sorry you don't think I've made an argument. ―Mandruss ☎ 12:41, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Quite. The Foundation is perfectly entitled to get into bed with the likes of UKIP, PiS and the Lega Nord in defending the right of corporations like Google and Facebook to dominate the Internet by riding roughshod over less powerful people's intellectual property rights, but it should not use a volunteer-written encyclopedia as a vehicle to do so. Phil Bridger (talk) 13:18, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Noting that my position has nothing to do with the specific political issue at hand, which is why I haven't addressed it any of my comments. To my mind it's beside the point. ―Mandruss ☎ 15:40, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I didn't mean to imply that anyone who takes the same position as I do on the issue of a banner necessarily shares my opinion on the EU proposal, and apologise if I seemed to make that implication. One of the reasons why we shouldn't have a banner is that Misplaced Pages editors do not have a uniform opinion on this or any other matter. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:06, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
You claim getting rid of Google and Microsoft will be like some sort of big step, for humankind. But you have no expectation of what will come afterwards though do you. Where have all the homeless come from? "And the bull ran little races, and capered sportively around the child; so that she quite forgot how big and strong he was, and, from the gentleness and playfulness of his actions, soon came to consider him as innocent a creature as a pet lamb." Your government doesn't care what the name of the corporation is. This is not a divorce from the corporation or a step against them. Scatter Youtube today and piracy will come back to life before the weekend is out. Freedom is based on restriction. Copyright should be suitably restricted to culture a healthy society, just like everything else is. Once they raise corporate bars they never go back, no matter how tricked you feel later, they allocate the money. When someone comes along and says, we want to change back this corporate decision, they say, can you replace the revenue? Cognition#Metacognition. ~ R.T.G 18:09, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
This just underlines my comment elsewhere in this discussion that this seems more like a 1970s student union meeting than a mature discussion on an encyclopedia. I remember one person (the sole representative at my university of some Trotskyist splinter group) who would, whatever the issue, make a completely incoherent speech against it and finish with, "this issue is totally irrelevant to the one important task: let's all go away and prepare for the revolution!", and then he would walk out expecting everyone to follow him. You remind me of him. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:26, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I said, this isn't aimed at what you are hollering it is. This is not part of the revolution against the corporation. I said, the reality is quite the opposite. ~ R.T.G 18:54, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
@Benjaminikuta: That is false. The WMF Mission remains "to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally", and that's it, regardless of what certain individuals within the WMF would like it to be. Wikimedia is not about advocacy, and does not accept advocacy except in very limited circumstances, if that. The WMF maintains strict guidelines for when advocacy may be acceptable. --Yair rand (talk) 21:21, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation will not associate with or endorse policy, political actions, or political associations, unless the community, Meta, or the Foundation staff recommends they do so. They are very strict about that, and only eager towards politics that challenges the WP missions.
There is no guaranteed public domain release, and copyright has exhibited an endless upward crawl of mission creep since almost 40 years.
About the methodology behind copyright today. If you are an artist from an early age, and you lose your life before you are a teenager, there's 70 years off your copyright and that can only prop up super-uber-mega-conglomo-corporat... It's not for the artists, even if they think they might get something, get that!
Creators and performers do not need absolute copyright. They just need some. What they need is buyers. They need you to want the art and performances. Like philosophy, art is behind everything civilised that humans do in todays world. There is art in all human creation and activity. Yet desire to be an artist, in this "western world", is supposed to be a joke. The same people calling artists a joke are saying that life+70 on reimagining old work is going, to make things easy, for creativeness.
The word artisan is become archaic in the "western world". On one hand you make a joke of them, while on the other you believe in the strictest laws upon them. What did artists and performers ever do to you, except set you free? Like so many problems in todays world, it's not just the law, but the buyers who have no interest in the product, leaving a swinging door to profiteering. ~ R.T.G 23:02, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
@Yair rand: Wikimedia Foundation: "Another main objective of the Wikimedia Foundation is political advocacy." Benjamin (talk) 00:18, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@Benjaminikuta: The WMF's objectives are not, in fact, set by an incorrect Misplaced Pages article or a mistaken statement by the Guardian. --Yair rand (talk) 00:44, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@Yair rand: Are you sure that they're incorrect? https://wikimediafoundation.org/advocacy/ https://policy.wikimedia.org/ Benjamin (talk) 00:49, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@Benjaminikuta: Yes. The WMF Mission remains the actual WMF mission. The WMF takes certain limited stances in order to avoid interference against the Wikimedia projects, so that we can continue our work here, but it is not an advocacy organization. To quote a rather important message from the Executive Director to the Board:
What is not the core work of the Wikimedia Foundation?

The Wikimedia Foundation is not a think tank or a research institute. We're not an advocacy organization or a lobbyist, and our core mission isn't to keep the internet free and open. We are not a general educational non-profit. (We are a website, or set of sites, and everything we do needs to be understood through that lens.) We don't just reactively "support the community"—responding to requests from editors and doing what they ask us to do. Our purpose isn't to provide MediaWiki support for third parties (but it's in our interest to ensure that a healthy third party ecosystem develops around MediaWiki). We're not, ourselves, content creators. Our purpose is not to ensure the chapters grow and develop, nor is it to support the chapters in their growth and development: rather, chapters are our partners in supporting editors and other content creators.

The Wikimedia Foundation is not the only fish in the sea of free knowledge; not everything that needs to be done must be done by the Wikimedia Foundation, and it's not our job to do work that other individuals or entities are better positioned or mandated to do, however important that work may be. When we try to do work that more properly belongs to other individuals or groups, we imperil our ability to get our own core work done, and we arguably make it less possible for other entities to do what they're supposed to be doing.
— then-Executive Director Sue Gardner
--Yair rand (talk) 03:28, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Alternative 1: Please don't let Europe take your freedom

In response to Wnt's valid concerns, I will in one week ask for expedited closure considering this alternative:

Please don't let Europe take your freedom. The European Union has proposed legislation which would interfere with the ability of Misplaced Pages to continue to provide freely licensed content on the internet. Please act today: https://SaveYourInternet.EU/act Thank you.

If there is anyone in support of the original who is not in support of this alternative, please say so. EllenCT (talk) 16:47, 18 February 2019 (UTC)

EllenCT will you please clarify matters because I and several other people think you are asking for a banner to be displayed on the main page but RTG, and seemingly RTG alone, thinks you are just promoting the fact that the banner exists. Obviously, if someone objected to the banner existing then the correct venue for discussion would be WP:TFD. And promoting it in the hope that more contributors will put it on their own pages does not require an RfC. - Sitush (talk) 17:02, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
I am asking for a non-template banner such as either proposed alternative to be displayed on the Main Page, and have announced my intentions to ask for expedited closure due to the existential threat to the freedoms we have been promising re-users since the start of the project. If there are serious plans to try to accommodate the proposed EU legislation, then it is incumbent upon those opposing advocacy to prepare a series of RFCs on changes to all of the wikipedias' content licenses and associated policies and guidelines. EllenCT (talk) 17:16, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Thank you. Hopefully RTG sees your reply because they're spouting nonsense all over this thread due to getting the wrong end of the stick. - Sitush (talk) 17:21, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose for almost the same reason as in the above section, if the WMF considers this to be an existential threat they should put up a CentralNotice as the server owners. Targeting only the English Misplaced Pages, and targeting it to readers that are not constituents of nations that have no vote in this proposal is wasteful as well. — xaosflux 19:11, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment I'm fine with a Main Page banner; I'm not sold on the specific phrasing and link target used here. In these regrettable times, Misplaced Pages is political, just because it tries to be factual. We shouldn't pretend that we are "above" politics just because our mission has, in principle, no partisan alignment. We might dodge Article 13 based on the particular exemptions they decide to carve out, but Article 11 is enough to leave a massive amount of our reference work in legal limbo. If the Wikimedia Foundation is gravely concerned, a banner on the Main Page is the least we can do. I suggest re-using the banner from last summer (with the date updated appropriately). XOR'easter (talk) 19:18, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
    @XOR'easter: if the WMF thinks this is a grave issue, they can just put up a CentralNotice - it doesn't need to be an editorial decision from the enwiki community. — xaosflux 19:37, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • A CentralNotice would be even better. The Foundation is unlikely to be able to obtain the necessary community agreement to relicense existing already-contributed content, to comply with the law as currently proposed in Europe. That is certainly an existential threat to a vast portion of Foundation pageviews. EllenCT (talk) 21:27, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose per my previous comment; Misplaced Pages shouldn't be engaging in political activism, and certainly shouldn't be engaging in political activism based on the lies and exaggerations of the unholy alliance of the ultra-libertarian lunatic fringe and the anti-European nationalist hardliners. ‑ Iridescent 19:32, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • There is no point in proposing “alternatives”... Misplaced Pages does not and should not engage in political advocacy... even on (or even especially on) issues that might affect Misplaced Pages itself. Blueboar (talk) 20:00, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. Apart from concerns about whether Misplaced Pages should engage in activism, the link in this banner does not explain in any way how this proposal would damage Misplaced Pages, but simply invites people to sign a petition. I do not agree that we should do anything at all, but, if we were to do anything, it should link to something that actually explains what is going on rather than invite people to oppose it blindly. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:43, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment. EllenCT, that would be me. I preferred the original and would not support this banner. Thank you for all you do! :D ―Matthew J. Long -Talk- 20:59, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Aww, thank you! I'm waiting to see what Jimbo proposes before I commit to specifics. EllenCT (talk) 21:25, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Please don't do that. Jimmy Wales's opinion should count for no more that anyone else's. Phil Bridger (talk) 21:36, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
He might be our best liason to the Foundation, sitting as he does on both the Board of Trustees and the Advocacy Working Group, and having dealt with existential threats in the past. EllenCT (talk) 21:38, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
There have been no existential threats in the past, and I don't believe that this one is either. Nobody in this discussion has linked to any neutral explanation of what the proposals actually say, but only to sensationalised interpretations of what they imagine they might lead to. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:00, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Good point; here is some background information: Dimitrov, Dimitar; Davenport, Allison. "Problems remain with the EU's copyright reform". wikimediafoundation.org. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 7 February 2019. EllenCT (talk) 22:08, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Yet again, that not neutral background information, but something produced by the Wikimedia Foundation to justify why so much money should be spent on peripheral issues such as employing people to write drivel rather than what should be their central purpose of providing infrastructure. Surely it's not beyond the human wit to actually say what the proposals are rather than offer links that tell us what's wrong with them without actually saying what they are? Phil Bridger (talk) 22:22, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
@Phil Bridger: are you looking for and ? I like this part: Online services are means of providing wider access to cultural and creative works and offer great opportunities for cultural and creative industries to develop new business models. However, although they allow for diversity and ease of access to content, they also generate challenges when copyright protected content is uploaded without prior authorisation from rightholders. Legal uncertainty exists as to whether such services engage in copyright relevant acts and need to obtain authorisations from rightholders for the content uploaded by their users who do not hold the relevant rights in the uploaded content, without prejudice to the application of exceptions and limitations provided for in Union Law. This uncertainty affects rightholders' possibilities to determine whether, and under which conditions, their works and other subject-matter are used as well as their possibilities to get an appropriate remuneration for it. EllenCT (talk) 06:56, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Without wanting to sound too sarcastic, if you seriously think that the Pirate Party are a neutral source on matters of copyright you should probably withdraw not just from this discussion but from any discussion regarding copyrights. ‑ Iridescent 08:48, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I posted this BBC story here earlier today. Is that any use? And, fwiw, I too am not happy with the appeal to Jimmy, nor the excitable tone being used in the templates. - Sitush (talk) 22:28, 18 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, Sitush, and sorry for missing that before. That link confirms that there's nothing for Misplaced Pages to worry about, as we don't rely on users uploading copyright-violating content, which is the target of that proposal, in the way that YouTube and similar services do. I'm sure that Google can afford to do its own lobbying without unpaid help from us volunteers. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:16, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Notice of possible intent to withdraw proposals

I am considering withdrawing these proposals, and replacing them with a request that the Foundation, "institute a copyright royalty distribution program designed to compensate editors in proportion to their needs times their likely future contributions." EllenCT (talk) 05:17, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

There is no contradiction between gratis and copyrighted. I may release my text under copyleft because I own the copyright. See? No contradiction. I am an adult and decide for myself to volunteer. Tgeorgescu (talk) 05:30, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
I am also an adult and find your use of the "fake news" epithet along with the claim on your profile page that you report computer hacking to Moscow charming. You'll fit in great around here. EllenCT (talk) 06:38, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
For details see https://www.kaspersky.com/blog/kaspersky-in-the-shitstorm/19794/ Tgeorgescu (talk) 00:21, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
This sounds like someone throwing a tantrum, EllenCT. Was that your intent? Are you seriously suggesting some peculiar form of paid editing? Your repeated links to Jimbo and his talk page add nothing and read like an argument to authority ... but Jimbo has no substantive authority and, in the eyes of a fair number of people, isn't even a half-decent editor. - Sitush (talk) 07:42, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Okay. Attacks opened and ignored, makes further ones, difficult to intercept, and perceive. Get up off Ellen and Jimbo. Ellen is just trying to make an interpretation of something which may affect the site. This topic doesn't even affect you and you are spitting attack. You give no reason, just opinion laced with personalised attacks. It's bitter. She is making an argument to authority. We are only free on equal terms. No personal attacks. I don't care how important you think you are. NO PERSONALISED ATTACKS IN ANY FORM. "Would you like to know more?" ~ R.T.G 13:23, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

Alternative 2: Wnt's text linking to EFF

Regarding I am copying Wnt's suggestion here:

Proposed EU legislation would damage the ability of Wikipedians to research and generate content that is freely reusable. Current and historical news coverage would be severely impacted. See EFF's analysis for further information.

My current thinking is to ask Foundation officials to use some combination of Wnt's and my proposals in a Europe-geolocated CentralNotice, and study the institution of a double-blind editorial bonus award system based on need times contribution. EllenCT (talk) 15:29, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

You should check out meta:CentralNotice/Request where these are handled. — xaosflux 16:06, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
Thank you kindly. EllenCT (talk) 06:02, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose any use of the encyclopedia for political advocacy, even if a majority of a tiny subset of editors agree on a position. ―Mandruss ☎ 16:14, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Good grief, you're not going to stop flogging this dead horse are you? Oppose for the third time. ‑ Iridescent 17:15, 19 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Still Opposed - tweak this any which way you want... it still isn’t appropriate. Misplaced Pages is not the right venue for it. Take the political advocacy off wiki. It is verging on being disruptive. Blueboar (talk) 00:39, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Sigh. I did not propose this for a vote here because as I said in the text this was taken from I think WMF can arrange with the ALA for a better landing link, and doubtless better text, if it desires. But to call freedom of expression "political advocacy" is wrong, because what is the alternative? The position of banning freedom of expression leaves no room for advocacy! You people are complaining about bias when the position being advanced is one where in the EU, in China, in Russia, in Australia, wherever, the story is always the same, that people are only allowed to hear what robots allow them to hear, programmed by private unaccountable billionaire companies to comply with idiotic public officials' written and unwritten demands! Who will fight "bias" then? You will be whitewashing every last detail that might support some position you once actually agreed with, pretending that by doing so you will gain some concession from implacable machines bent only on your enslavement, and still it will not be enough! Wnt (talk) 00:47, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Take it elsewhere... see WP:RIGHTGREATWRONGS. Blueboar (talk) 00:51, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose This one is better than the other three because it is more factual and less sensationalistic. However, it does not actually ask anyone to do anything (so there's no clear point to the banner) and I oppose links to external organizations. Ca2james (talk) 17:47, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Needs action, otherwise good - in a similar vein to Ca2james, it's a much better phrasing, but could use more of a suggestion of what to do if you agreed with the point. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:02, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose because the first sentence is accurate, the second sentence is not accurate, and the third sentence contains a better link than the last ones, but still a link to one particular organization, and we shouldn't endorse organizations in banners or engage in political advocacy (per the second pillar). Leviv ich 19:26, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
@Levivich: Would the UN be acceptable to you? Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights: . Wnt (talk) 01:47, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
@Wnt: Yes, changing the link to a link to that UN report would satisfy my concern about the link; that's a neutral reputable source. It wouldn't change my !vote, however, or my general feeling about a banner on this subject, because, as noted in the UN report: The following entities are excluded from this definition: Non-profit “online encyclopaedias,”.... As I understand it, the proposed law would not restrict WP, but would only restrict people's ability to re-use WP content, and that, in my opinion, isn't something WP should be advocating for/against. Leviv ich 02:07, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm actually more concerned about interference with our ability to obtain information. Use of news aggregators is a routine part of making articles about relatively recent events. Having a comprehensive listing of sources and long headlines to scan through is essential for spotting the articles that aren't carbon copies from large syndicates, allowing us to broaden the number of independent reliable sources, hence document notability and reduce POV bias. Wnt (talk) 09:54, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I think consensus is clear

Should this be Snow closed? Blueboar (talk) 18:42, 19 February 2019 (UTC)

I am strongly reminded of Misplaced Pages:Village_pump_(proposals)/Indefinitely_semiprotecting_the_refdesk, in which a "landslide" of votes for deleting the Refdesk was marshalled in a short time, yet that was not the consensus in the long term. The specific wordings advanced (even my own, which I did not put for vote here) were not ready for prime time, because this is a developing news story, but I want to be clear that any rapid voting on this issue is at most a rejection of those specific proposals and not in any way evidence of meaningful consensus against having a banner or taking other action in general. If you want to claim that kind of consensus you at least have to propose such a general statement and line up convincing support for it. Wnt (talk) 00:59, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
The mere fact of a large majority in opposition, after less than 48 hours, does not warrant a SNOW close in my opinion. I was about to respond that it's too early to close because the proposals are not clearly and objectively inconsistent with some Misplaced Pages policy or principle. In the process of checking myself, I ran across this at Pillar 2: We avoid advocacy.... On that basis I think a SNOW close is in order. If editors wish to propose that Pillar 2 be modified to say, "We avoid advocacy except in cases that some editors believe are existential", they are free to do so separately, but for now we are in violation of a "fundamental principle of Misplaced Pages" and the discussion lacks legitimacy. ―Mandruss ☎ 01:11, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
That is talking about articles, not notices to editors. Does Misplaced Pages commit "advocacy" by collecting images from museums, or in trying not to be banned from collecting images from museums? Wnt (talk) 01:28, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm not familiar with the image issue you refer to, so I can't respond to that. Did it involve a banner that encouraged editors to support one side of a political issue with the aim of influencing pending legislation? ―Mandruss ☎ 01:35, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Misplaced Pages has WP:GLAM that works to put people in with museums all over the world and get permissions to improve public access to materials in their collections. Why should we not urge viewers to retain our access to things like news aggregators, scholarly reviews, and public forums where free-licensed photos of events may be posted -- if fear of unlimited liability and the excesses of corporate censorbots do not stop them from ever being made available to us? Wnt (talk) 02:03, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Museums and other institutions and collectors have already donated millions of digital copies of public domain images for the sake of Misplaced Pages. If one museum were to be given a powerful copyright effect, and hold ransom, that could destroy the other museums for joining in the change of the world, as instigated by Misplaced Pages. If a government were to decide they wanted to enact copyright across the board on images of museums artifacts, because they couldn't or didn't want to work on getting the public into the museums to experience the effect of a fine gallery, or were just greedy for the maximum (eating cake and dropping crumbs), wouldn't they be asking to close Misplaced Pages down? I have here an old news sheet on Commons about a suffragette who killed herself upon the kings horse. The servant children are running after the royalties because they might throw some pennies. Why did Emily kill herself on the kings horse? Was she hurt? Abused? Or was she just oppressed and bored, her enjoyment of life, even in wealth, having ended long ago, after the age of running after pennies? You cannot have (piped)something from nothing, and Misplaced Pages depends on people appreciating that, or else it will be somewhere far off in the future and take perhaps even more than twenty years to rebuild, we will all be dead before it comes back if it is tried again shut down by an international convention such as copyright. ~ R.T.G 02:19, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
False equivalence. Editors and readers don't see that unless they specifically seek it. But I'll admit my pillar/SNOW argument isn't as airtight as I first thought, and I'm prepared to let these proposals fail for lack of consensus.
There will forever be strong opposition to allowing a relative handful of editors to speak for all Misplaced Pages editors, in a space visible to all editors and readers in the normal course of editing and reading, on any political issue. I don't think anybody would support including a disclosure like "62% of 0.13% of active Misplaced Pages editors support this statement.", but such a notice would be highly misleading and highly inappropriate without that. ―Mandruss ☎ 02:24, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
I must apologise, my statement there does beg for the point. When they make these harshly restrictive decisions they hark back the attitudes of Emily Davidsons day, when a harsh life was promoted as a good thing. When beating and breaking people was said to give them character. Fear is what it gave them, and suicide was the response because in those days if you simply protested in a group of men you were likely to feel this--> File:Edinburgh police truncheons (19thC).JPG or worse, (deadly when used the knock out protesters). These harshly restrictive decisions hark back to a time of attitude that we don't understand any more and should fear. Pretending the world is perfect to accept harsh restrictions because the world is modern, and you are superficially safe, also calls back those days. You can't have freedom without restriction, but you must have some freedom or what have you. I hate talking aganst copyright because copyright is a good thing, but life+70 so that you can pave the immortalisation of corporations? That doesn't "encourage" anything! That's more of a sentence than a decree. ~ R.T.G 05:32, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
No, there's not a chance this should be snow closed as there is both clear support and clear opposition here, and a WP:TROUT upon you for suggesting it.
Personally, I'm disappointed in the extremely vocal minority here who blindly oppose any sort of banner on the basis of "the rest of the free content world might burn, but they wrote in an exception for Misplaced Pages so we'll certainly be entirely unaffected (never mind those contrary experts) and must not do anything", or "this only directly affects the EU and not the rest of the world", or "our policy of NPOV in articles must be blindly applied to all communication". Or worse, those who seem to be opposing even if it would destroy Misplaced Pages.
Yes, the specific proposals here are not very well done and EllenCT is doing themself no favors by flooding the discussion with slightly modified alternatives that seem to be fatiguing everyone except the blind opposers, but these people are taking it to the opposite extreme. Anomie⚔ 13:29, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Anomie, exactly what i was thinking and exactly why i simple didnt bother participating here. Btw julia reda just confirmed, that its not like we are exempt from article11 either. Seems lik a nice courtcase waiting to happen for us to waste our doner money on, and possibly will require excluding the EU from distribution. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 17:19, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Oh, please, do we really take a twitter post from an MEP from a fringe, childish, party as gospel here? Is this an encyclopedia or a 1970s student union meeting (of which I unfortunately have experience)? Phil Bridger (talk) 21:03, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Twaddle to SNOW - I suspect know from the former discussions, plus Jimbo's page (where he isn't participating for now due to a WMF request), there is a deluge of individuals who would support some variant. At this point, I suspect a firmer point/some method of gathering attention could probably manage it. I've said that in a bit more detail in option 3, but I wanted to specifically note my unhappiness to consider SNOW closing this topic so soon. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:14, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
    @Nosebagbear and Mandruss: A week later, do you feel SNOW closure is inappropriate? (I note it's near-unanimous opposition to every proposal here.) Leviv ich 03:53, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
    I think SNOW is misapplied when it's used for cases of !voting greatly leaning one direction; see Misplaced Pages:Snowball clause#A cautionary note. This is not in the category of "bureaucratic discussions over things that are foregone conclusions from the start."—if this had been foregone from the start, it would have SNOW closed in the first day or two.
    But that's semantics. We can close any discussion when we judge that it has received enough discussion, when all stated arguments and viewpoints have been sufficiently discussed and the likelihood of any significant new arguments or viewpoints is deemed to approach zero. That includes RfCs. I have no opinion on whether it's time to close; only that I think we're well past the window for SNOW. ―Mandruss ☎ 04:14, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Alternative 3: Proposer's draft CentralNotice request

Here is the meta:CentralNotice/Request I am presently planning to ask of the Foundation upon closure of this RFC:

Current and historical news coverage is at risk. The European Union has proposed legislation which will inhibit the ability of volunteer encyclopedia editors to develop and disseminate educational content under a free license. The Electronic Frontier Foundation explains. Please act today: https://SaveYourInternet.EU/act Thank you.

As above, I also intend to ask the Foundation to study a more equitable double-blind bonus system for the best editors scaled by their need. EllenCT (talk) 06:25, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

  • Oppose any use of the encyclopedia for political advocacy, even if a majority of a tiny subset of editors agree on a position. ―Mandruss ☎ 11:52, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Still opposed - per all the arguments (repeatedly) made above. Blueboar (talk) 12:17, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Modest support. I don't see much obviously wrong with this, though the second link is not strictly necessary. It would be better to have WMF guidance, coordinated action with the ALA, etc., and I'm not sure I like the visual format, but at least it's a tenable starting point. Wnt (talk) 15:23, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose. The first sentence is about Article 11, which does not affect Misplaced Pages in the same way as Article 13, and the second is about Article 13; putting them together the way they have been conflates the two and is misleading. Also note that links outside of Wikimedia do not meet the meta:CentralNotice/Usage_guidelines. While I might support a banner similar to the previous banners that received consensus, I am strongly opposed to the ones that have so far been proposed because they all read as sensationalistic propaganda to me. Ca2james (talk) 17:35, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose as Article 11 - Article 11 is pretty irrelevant to us. I once again agree with @Ca2james: on each point. The prior ones (esp opt 1) were better. I actually am in favour of vastly more attention - I'd actually support another SOPA-style blacking out, but once we've caught people's attention, we need text that doesn't make us look like we're frothing at the mouth. Jimbo did say 5 days ago he was chatting over what actions to take with the WMF (they've asked him not to communicate publically atm) - we'll see what comes from that aspect, but until then we can at least work on the message that works better. Nosebagbear (talk) 19:11, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Still strongly oppose – this is less accurate than Alternative #2, and doesn't address any of the problems with Alternative #1 or the original proposed banner. Also oppose more proposals until consensus is gauged as to whether we should have any banner at all. Leviv ich 19:29, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment: have you spoken with the owners of the website to which you are linked to find out if they're capable of managing the potentially massive hit (and accompanying hosting service cost) of people clicking that link? Aside from that, this is not appropriate and is highly biased. Risker (talk) 05:13, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Still Oppose, per Mz7, Sitush, and xaosflux. Misplaced Pages is not a platform for political or social advocacy or activism, and this proposal is simply a sensationalist reaction. If they must, as owners of the encyclopedia projects, the WMF can go ahead and do what they like - on their web site. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 09:23, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Still oppose. Posting the same lie a dozen times is not going to make it the truth. ‑ Iridescent 21:16, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Alternative 4: The crux of the issue

Remember Aaron Swartz and Fight Knowledge Restrictions: the European Union has proposed legislation which will inhibit the ability of volunteer encyclopedia editors to develop and disseminate educational content under a free license. Please act today: https://saveyourinternet.eu/act/ Thank you.

Restrictions placed upon access to knowledge is evil. Nocturnalnow (talk) 05:14, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I despair

I checked this page again today, and, amazingly, find that people are still pushing versions of this proposal. The whole basis is flawed, because neutral sources, rather than opinion pieces written by fringe groups such as the Pirate Party and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, confirm that there is no threat to Misplaced Pages or its reusers from these proposals.

If people want to defend the right of those cuddly little underdogs from Google and Facebook to make billions of euros/pounds/dollars on Youtube and Instagram on the back of practically unenforceable copyright violations of the work of those grasping capitalist producers of music, videos, etc., against the evil Illuminati lizards who control the European Union and the rest of the New World Order, then they have a right to do so. Just please don't try to drag Misplaced Pages and its editors into it.

I always thought that Lenin had a good name for such people, who consider themselves to be good right-on liberals, but from reading our article on the phrase it seems that he never used it himself. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:32, 20 February 2019 (UTC)

Yep. I, too, suspect that at least some people haven't got to grips with what is being proposed and its actual effect on Misplaced Pages. Outrage from US-based institutions who can appeal to the First Amendment and similar "freedoms" doesn't really wash and, for the umpteenth time, I will remind people that the proposals specifically exempt non-profit online encyclopaedias.
I also think that even approaching meta for a central notification that applies just to Europe has problems that some may not have considered. Our projects are language-based, not country-based and, obviously, the English WP has a much wider audience than just English-speaking areas of Europe. I would imagine that the same applies to the French WP and perhaps also Spanish. Certainly, linking to online petitions in such circumstances is likely to turn off politicians etc, who will recognise that potentially a big chunk of those signing up are not even within the European constituency (let alone the EU constituency, which is even smaller). There is also a massive political problem in Europe regarding the general role of Facebook, Google and the like, whom the politicians are quite happy to kick for all sorts of reasons, notably privacy and tax avoidance. (I agree with them on that issue, fwiw, but most politicians are opportunists anyway and if they see a chance to give a kicking to a bogeyman, they'll do it.) - Sitush (talk) 22:07, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
CentralNotice messages can be configured to only display in certain countries. I'm not endorsing such a message in this case (I don't really have a strong opinion either way) but just want to clarify that it would be possible to show one only to visitors within the EU. the wub "?!" 00:00, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
OK, that's good. Thanks for letting me know. - Sitush (talk) 19:52, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Oh, and a point specifically relating to the UK: the UK chapter is a registered charity for the purposes of education. Political campaigning by charities is a very dodgy area in law and they could be tainted by association. As I understand it, WMUK struggled to even get registered in the first place, so although I am not involved with them I should think they would like to avoid the possibility of their status being challenged. - Sitush (talk) 22:22, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
WMUK is absolutely NOT a registered charity for the purposes of education; applications on this basis were refused because we do not test or award certificates etc as required according to this appeal judgement against the Charity Commission. A reapplication under a different heading was successful. Yes, charities need to be careful about anything that approaches political campaigning, but lobbying and activism to enable the the charity to fulfill its non-political charitable purposes is not uncommon. They know where to get specialist advice, and don't need it from those who clearly know very little about their situation. Johnbod (talk) 22:56, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Ok, sorry. I stand corrected on that point. It is a while since I looked into it. I believe the Institute of Economic Affairs are being investigated, and would have thought they knew what they were doing. - Sitush (talk) 23:28, 20 February 2019 (UTC)
Many would argue their entire purpose is political, and that is always going to be tricky. Our article begins: "The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) describes itself as a "free-market think-tank" dedicated to "analysing and expounding the role of markets in solving economic and social problems". It has been described by others as a "right-wing think tank"."
  1. "About Us". Institute of Economic Affairs. Retrieved 20 February 2019.
  2. Ashley Cowburn (10 July 2018). "Labour demands investigation into right-wing think tank over accusations it 'offered access to ministers'". The Independent. Retrieved 20 February 2019.

Johnbod (talk) 01:21, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

I see references for some side-track here, and links to "useful idiots", but where is this neutral commentary that reassures us that a wave of massive censorship isn't really going to cause us any trouble?
The apparently unsourced argument that Misplaced Pages has a narrow exemption doesn't really hold water. The problem is that somebody has to write articles. How do people write articles if not just Google News but any other kind of news aggregation is banned? Do you suppose there are still microfiche readers in the library to read through all the hardcopy? And how long do you suppose Misplaced Pages's little exemption is going to last if we are really the one place that people can go to get a broad, comprehensive look at all the developments leading to an event of political relevance, when all the others are banned? and when non-serious editors are coming here to try to upload and share things that censor-robots find seconds faster on any other site? And most fundamentally, if the EU and China and a lot of countries in between have decided that the way to deal with "expression" is to force companies to run automated censorware on everything ... how long can the concept of an encyclopedia anyone can access, or of making information of any kind free to anyone, continue to exist at all? Wnt (talk) 02:57, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
Once again you are believing the far-right conpiracy theorists rather than looking at what this proposal actually does. Part of the problem here is that only those who believe that the European Union is an evil empire controlled by New World Order Illuminati are particularly vocal about this subject, because more level-headed mainstream opinion is that there is no great problem with these proposals, apart from for the companies that make billions out of advertising on copyright-violating content. The statements that "not just Google News but any other kind of news aggregation banned" and that this will "force companies to run automated censorware on everything" are totally ridiculous hyperbole. Maybe you should read an encyclopedia article about the subject rather than believe what you are told by the lunatic fringe on the Internet. Phil Bridger (talk) 19:40, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
@Phil Bridger: Yeah, lunatic fringe on the Internet. Like the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, for example. Obvious nutcases, probable terrorists, ought to be held in a camp sucking off an electric cattle prod and really will be once the EU makes their next big set of reforms, no doubt. Not good people, clearly. Wnt (talk) 22:59, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

Deference to the text, not links, of the prior proposals achieving consensus

Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals)/Archive_151#Proposals for wording of a neutral banner recently came to my attention on JimboTalk. The wording of all of the proposals there which achieved consensus are, in the opinion of this RFC proposer, better than the wording all four of the proposals here. However, I will refrain from asking for expedited close until next week (as I said I would above) to allow for further discussion and link mix-and-match updating, as I feel the SaveYourInternet.EU/act and EFF links are both superior to the links in the CentralNotice proposals in the archive. And I do think this is important enough to deserve some kind of an exclamation mark on the Main Page, for Europe only. EllenCT (talk) 20:02, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

How are links to fringe advocacy web sites better than a link to a neutral explanation of what these proposals actually are, which is not what you think they are? Once again, you are believing the conspiracy theories about evil scaly Illuminati running the European Union and the rest of the New World Order rather than the facts, which are that the EU proposal attempts to rein in the ability of Google and Facebook to make billions of whatever currency you use out of copyright violations of work produced by musicians, filmmakers, etc. And, if you want to be taken seriously here, please stop referring to Jimmy Wales and his talk page. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:19, 21 February 2019 (UTC)
Reptiles, idiots, and children? Your attacks are mostly based on insult. You seem almost, to have something to say, but it is really about stopping others saying things. If you want to talk about it, read this and this. If you simply want to express the severity of your emotions, then we can discuss the expression of the severity of your emotions, while this is neither the time nor the place for that, @Phil Bridger:. ~ R.T.G 13:53, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
There's no need to remove attacking speech as it comes up. It stifles debate but, well you know, reptiles and stuff. And anything that reminds you of children well, sheesh, right Phil? ~ R.T.G 13:56, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
Billions. Billions, I tell you! But not Jimmy Wales though. Where does he think he gets off, giving advice on train stations!? ~ R.T.G 16:00, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I'm perfectly happy with Jimmy Wales expressing his support for having a station at Aylesbury, or wherever it was, on HS2. At least while he's doing that he's not supporting far-right conspiracy theorists on Misplaced Pages. Phil Bridger (talk) 17:14, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
There is nothing far-right about suspicion of maximised law. Copyright law is directly significant to Misplaced Pages. Jimbo didn't support conspiracy theories, but Misplaced Pages theories. I don't get it. This is about copyright law in Europe. Copyright law directly affects Misplaced Pages. ~ R.T.G 23:05, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

Good Faith Question.

How do the users in this discussion who oppose any perceived form of political advocacy feel about Misplaced Pages:SOPA initiative? Was doing the blackout a mistake? ―Matthew J. Long -Talk- 05:28, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

A similar question was asked previously, and Jayron32's response was good enough for me. I would have opposed that blackout had I not been otherwise occupied at the time. ―Mandruss ☎ 05:43, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
My feelings have shifted over time on this. It's been a long time, and I think I may have actually supported SOPA back in the day, but if the same vote came up today, I would be against it. This is for a couple of reasons 1) I tend to think that the "existential threats" that this sort of legislation people say will occur is probably overblown, it's a Chicken Little sort of problem: the sky is not falling. It may be raining a little bit, but these things tend to shake out on their own, if it causes some changes to the way Misplaced Pages operates, we'll adapt. Though I don't really think it will, much. Still, that's what the WMF has lawyers for. 2) People, as individuals, if they have feelings about this, SHOULD be advocating outside of Misplaced Pages. Contact their MEPs, or encourage their European friends to contact their MEPs and let them know why they don't like the legislation. 3) I'm generally opposed to organizational influence on legislation, and especially a diverse organization such as Misplaced Pages which brings together a wide range of political and cultural perspectives and for which we may not be speaking with one voice. 4) Also, there's the issue of an American organization trying to influence European legislation. Yes, it is a connected world, but if we have any respect for sovereignty, we really need to be wary of the optics of that. Outside influence over the political process is a big story in several countries now, and even if we think we have the best intentions, it really isn't the place of an American organization to try to influence European legislation. 5) I am uncomfortable with an organization which has a cornerstone value of neutrality taking a political position on anything. So, in summation, yes, Europeans should be involved in their own political process as individuals, whatever their feelings are on either side of this issue. No, Misplaced Pages or the WMF, as an organization should not. --Jayron32 13:27, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
You point out that the WMF has lawyers, but you seem quick to ignore them when they say that something actually would be a problem.

You also seem quick to conflate the encyclopedia itself, the community that creates the encyclopedia, and the Wikimedia Foundation. The encyclopedia is the thing that has neutral point of view as one of its cornerstones. The community has many points of view, and while it's unlikely that we'll ever be entirely unanimous I suspect that we're generally opposed to government censorship and supportive of the public domain and open and free content. Neither the encyclopedia nor the community are by any stretch just an American thing. As for the WMF, that could be considered an American organization, but you seem to deny that an organization located in one country can have a global mission, and I see nothing about point of view in the WMF's vision, mission, bylaws, or 2018–20 strategy.

I also note that the EU has in several cases taken the position that anything on the Internet accessible from the EU is under their jurisdiction, which would seem to invite anyone and any organization on the Internet to have a position on those EU laws. Anomie⚔ 01:59, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

I didn't conflate anything. I told the individual people with individual concerns to contact their individual MEPs and express those concerns. That's how the community can leverage its influence on the legislation. If the WMF specifically has a position, they are free to argue that position in whatever forum they deem necessary. --Jayron32 16:16, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Anomie, I thought Jayron32's answer was rather comprehensive. It certainly addressed my specific concerns. ―MattLongCT -Talk- 19:26, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Mass-removing Template:Orphan image from non-orphans

Hi, I just discovered that File:Template W for welcome.png currently transcludes {{Orphan image}} because it doesn't have any file links. This particular image isn't really orphaned: it's linked in the documentation for Template:W as an example of why the template behaves as it does, but it wouldn't be good to display the full image because it's so huge and would overwhelm the rest of the documentation. I expect it's not particularly difficult to find other {{orphan image}} files that are similarly linked from various places. With this in mind, a proposal:

  1. Someone writes a bot to go through each file transcluding this template (if this proposal succeeds, I'll go to WP:BOTR with this discussion as my reason for the request)
  2. Bot removes the template from any file that's currently displayed anywhere (although maybe another bot's already doing this)
  3. Bot removes the template from hides the template on any file with a normal link, except those linked only from Project: and User talk:
  4. Bot removes the template from hides the template on any file with a normal link from certain Project: pages. I'm envisioning WP:HD, the various WP:VPs, the various WP:RDs, and the various WP:GLs, and there may be other such pages.
  5. Bot removes the template from hides the template on any file with a normal link from user-talk-space if it's not associated with a deletion notice (e.g. "I've nominated this file for deletion").
  6. Bot leaves the template on all other files

Obviously item #5 would be the hardest to determine; if there's no easy way to determine whether a link is associated with a deletion notice, the bot could ignore all normal links from user-talk-space. Nyttend (talk) 00:54, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

You'd also have to ensure that User:FastilyBot doesn't edit war with your new bot. That bot already does #2, BTW. Anomie⚔ 01:20, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
Ah, good point. We don't want to have to expand WP:LAME#Bot vs bot. (On #2, that's why I said although maybe another bot's already doing this.) I've amended #3, #4, and #5. User:Fastily, would you mind offering an opinion on this proposal? I wonder if your bot could be instructed to look at the code and see whether {{orphan image}} is present (and if so, refrain from adding the template), rather than seeing whether it's currently transcluded. Nyttend (talk) 01:48, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
I doubt there are many instances of the situation you've described. If you want the bot to go away, use {{Bots|deny=FastilyBot}}. As for your proposal:
  • 3: probably doable - this is already being done for links from the article namespace
  • 4: impractical - would require a rewrite of the bot (not to mention a substantial increase in the number of queries the bot makes to the API and the maintenance overhead of a blacklist), all for very few pages affected and no obvious benefit
  • 5: impractical - same as above. Would require a rewrite, and large increase in number of queries, all for few pages affected with no obvious benefit
-FASTILY 04:50, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
#4 shouldn't substantially increase the number of queries if you're already doing #3. But it would still need the maintenance of a list. Anomie⚔ 12:12, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
If I was querying for each file via the API, then yes. However, I'm generating the list of files using the toolforge replica so as to reduce the total number of queries to Misplaced Pages. -FASTILY 01:04, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
{{Orphan image}} is for when a file doesn't have any file links, that is when the file is not being displayed anywhere. A file that is only linked to, not used, correctly transcludes the template. — JJMC89 (T·C) 05:35, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
While you're right that that's the stated purpose of the template, if someone actually did nominate the image in the situation discussed here for deletion as the template recommends that would be a poor decision. So perhaps the template should be updated to change its purpose, which is what's being proposed here. Anomie⚔ 12:12, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
JJMC89, the text of the template agrees with you, but the point is to mark images that really aren't used, and files with useful inbound links shouldn't be considered orphaned or unused. I respect the technical difficulties and can't continue to advocate something that's impractical, but if there weren't any technical difficulties, there wouldn't be a solid reason to oppose this idea, in my mind. Fastily, would you mind tweaking it to go with #3, or do you have to go through a BOTRFA first? And since it's already doing #2, if you tweaked it so it didn't tag for #3, would it be able to remove tags currently placed on #3? Nyttend (talk) 23:08, 22 February 2019 (UTC)
Then we disagree. IMO, if an images isn't displayed, then it isn't being used. Images like the one in the OP, should be deleted as unused, especially since the text explanation (or a recreation of the output using wikitext) is sufficient. — JJMC89 (T·C) 00:21, 23 February 2019 (UTC)
I invite you to dump such text (complete with file information templates) into the documentation page, and wait until several people have agreed with retaining that information there. Then, once you've wasted a pile of time belonging to other people, I suppose I'll move it to Commons, where it's pointless because it only pertains to en:wp, but at least it will automatically be in scope as something that's used on another project, and further nonsense of this sort will be rejected with prejudice. Meanwhile, you also need to get FastilyBot blocked for removing this template from pages of this sort that are used in mainspace (including pictorial images that can't be replaced with words), because already Fastily observes that inbound links from mainspace are not really orphaned. Nyttend (talk) 02:15, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Advanced futures and parameters of the search engine exported to the Misplaced Pages mobile version

At February 2019, the advanced search features are available only for the Desktop version of Misplaced Pages. They automatically disappear, while switching to the mobile view, which is linked at the end of each page.

Why don't you extend and make them available for the mobile view, that probably is more used than the Desktop one?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.223.68.157 (talk) 18:39, 22 February 2019 (UTC)

New life for Wikizine

Hello everybody !

If possible, answer in french.

For the Wikizine, you can take the presentation of the French edition (Wikimag is the real name), and create editions with other frequency.

Sincerely, Aabbccddeeffabcdef (talk), the 11:27, 23 February 2019 (UTC).

Talk pages consultation 2019

The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the various Wikimedia communities, including the English Misplaced Pages, to participate in a consultation on improving communication methods within the Wikimedia projects. As such, a request for comment has been created at Misplaced Pages:Talk pages consultation 2019. All users are invited to express their views and to add new topics for discussion. (To keep discussion in one place, please don't reply to this comment.) Jc86035 (talk) 14:57, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

Indexing the Wikimedia Blog and commenting on it

While I wasn't paying attention, WMF announced that "We have moved!", by which they meant we have gotten rid of our comments section and "The new blog is integrated with the new Wikimedia Foundation website" by which they meant the new blog is integrated with Facebook and Twitter, who alone hold sole ownership of the power of human communication anywhere in the world. For example, I see no comments at even enabling scripts. Presumably, I could log in to Facebook or Twitter and see them getting glowing or hateful feedback from whichever PR firm owns the most bots to upvote the posts they like and downvote the others, but I don't see the point. That said, the WMF did overlook one site, namely Misplaced Pages. And, fortunately, the new site still at least has a CC license.

Many -- though I'm not sure how many -- of the WM Blog posts are already mirrored on Misplaced Pages as a section of the Signpost; they can be found by looking at . I am thinking that much of what is needed is simply an index at a page like Misplaced Pages:Wikimedia Blog so people have a tidier list to go through, with some summaries. Additionally, however, we need the power to fill in deficiencies, and I am not sure if treading on Signpost turf even to just add new or missing mirror blog pages would be kindly received. Also, it's possible I already missed some such effort by someone who didn't miss what happened last summer. And the Signpost might have a bot set up already. Etc. So I thought I should see what is going on. Wnt (talk) 16:24, 23 February 2019 (UTC)

@Wnt: I recommend going ahead and creating it. --Yair rand (talk) 21:08, 25 February 2019 (UTC)

Wrapping signatures in markup

I propose we introduce some sort of markup to distinguish signatures in wikitext: that is, the parser would start expanding ~~~~ to your signature wrapped in some tag, like <sig>. Prior discussion (there may be more): T27141 Enterprisey (talk!) 07:29, 24 February 2019 (UTC)

  • Support, as proposer, for the main reason of improving life for developers of tools and user scripts that interact with discussions. Parsing signatures is a big pain and every tool seems to handle it in a different way, leading to endless bugs. This change would make, say, reply-link much more reliable. (There would also be the minor benefit of being able to style signatures without having to use user scripts.) Enterprisey (talk!) 07:29, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support, makes sense. You might want to post WP:VPT as well. -- King of ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ 07:32, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
     Done Enterprisey (talk!) 07:35, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support for simplifying how scripts interact with page content; don't see any downsides --DannyS712 (talk) 07:48, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • This would have been wonderful if it had happened in, say, 2002. But since it didn't, every tool is still going to have to parse tagless signatures (unless you can come up with some plan to somehow make fixing it on every page someone's ever signed feasible, in which case, you're a better person than me) in addition to the new-and-improved tagged signatures. We had endless bugs; now we'd have endless+1. The css is a benefit, but not worth it on its own. —Cryptic 08:42, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    @Cryptic: even if we can't apply this retroactively, better late than never --DannyS712 (talk) 08:45, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    Yes, you're right. Although there are some tools/scripts that only interact with current discussions (e.g. reply-link), which wouldn't have to parse tagless signatures after all of them vanish into the archives. Tags would be a large benefit in that case. Enterprisey (talk!) 09:29, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support - This makes sense, and I trust Enterprisey on all things technical - if he thinks it's helpful, it probably is. Tazerdadog (talk) 09:27, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Isn't this a bit late? doktorb words 09:40, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    The proposal is for the future: there will be plenty of talk page posts in the coming years. Johnuniq (talk) 09:59, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support The overhead is much less than that of many decorated signatures and would be very desirable for the stated main purpose, namely to make the reply-link script more reliable. That script would be extremely helpful for new users and might be a default-on gadget for them. Then the attempt to resurrect Flow would be redundant. Johnuniq (talk) 09:59, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support. That way, people can also use their skin.css to disable annoying signature code like text-shadow for signatures only. Regards SoWhy 11:23, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Would be hugely helpful, per above. Given the variability in signatures — I'm no picnic — and the importance of communication, giving readers control over how to distinguish message and messenger would be a welcome improvement. reply-link going to gadget status (or built-in‽) would be helpful, but even simply styling css would be great. Lack of applicability backwards would be a problem, but probably much less worse than the parser/linting changes, which hardly matter much (although admittedly, those were/are fixable). ~ Amory (u • t • c) 11:31, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Notifying the respective operators of Lowercase sigmabot and Cluebot, @Σ and Cobi: as I believe the archiving scripts would need modifications to support these changes. Other affected bot operators may need pinging.
     — Berean Hunter (talk) 13:00, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    ClueBot III does not even attempt to parse signatures, and instead works on revision history to find out what was added when, but thanks for thinking of it :) -- Cobi 00:07, 28 February 2019 (UTC)
  • @Enterprisey: besides just putting a blob of text in the wikidata, do you envision this adding other semantic meaning to the actual web content? (How will you render this in html - such as just drop the tags, convert to span - possibly including a data element?) — xaosflux 15:31, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    I don't want to clutter up the wikitext too much, but if we put a unique (to the page) identifier on each, it would immensely simplify a reply-link function or two. Of course, I don't know how helpful this would be to other tools, and it might not be worth it if just one script were to use it. Other information, like timestamp or user, can be parsed out of the signature relatively easily, so I don't think adding them is worth it. If we go for <sig> or another custom tag, it would be just converted to a span with a class, leaving attributes intact, and if we did just a <span>, it would be preserved. Enterprisey (talk!) 22:13, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Question Is the timestamp to be inside the markup, or outside? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:36, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    Probably inside. Also, {{unsigned}}, {{unsignedIP}}, etc. would likely be entirely within the markup, including the "preceding...", because its part of the signature, not part of the comment. --DannyS712 (talk) 16:43, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    Perhaps improve both (e.g. <signature>,<signature text>,<signature datetime> etc) but this could easily get out of control and we end up with big XML blobs for each entry :D — xaosflux 16:45, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    <time> is a standard element in HTML 5. --Izno (talk) 20:03, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    One problem with putting the timestamp inside the markup is that some bots recognise the "(UTC)" time zone indicator as the end of the signature. One example is Legobot (talk · contribs): when it builds the RfC listings (pages like WP:RFC/BIO), it copies all text from the {{rfc}} template (exclusive) to the next valid timestamp (inclusive). I have noticed in the past that if the original timestamp is inside <small>...</small> tags, such as might be emitted by {{subst:unsigned}}, the terminating </small> is not copied to the RfC listings; hence, I doubt that Legobot would copy any closing tag that is proposed in this thread, should that tag be after the timestamp. The bot is unlikely to be modified to cope: check its talk page to see how many bugs have been fixed in the last three years, also how many proposed enhancements have been adopted. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:07, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    @Enterprisey: What is this <sig>...</sig> element? I cannot find it in the current HTML specs. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:07, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    I just made it up. It would be a new "tag" recognized by the parsers. I prefer <sig> over because it's fewer characters (especially considering the class name we'd need to put on the span), and would clutter wikitext less. (Izno also commented about this.) Enterprisey (talk!) 22:17, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment Don't use <sig> as it will not strongly<sig>distinguish from the other text. Use <<<and>>> as it is the<<<most>>>prominent without###obscuring###adjacent text. ~ R.T.G 18:54, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    Please, no new wikitext constructs. Simple HTML style tags won't cause compatibility issues with existing markup, are far easier to implement, and much easier for bots/scripts to make use of. the wub "?!" 23:23, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
    • Comment A relative matter is section previews. If previewing a section when editing, caused the references to be fetched from the reflist template, it would be magic for main topics where references are getting as high as 500+ per article. Programmers are probably the most underappreciated part of the encyclopaedia, it might remain to be said. ~ R.T.G 23:24, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • I do not support the introduction of a custom tag. I would be fine with auto-injection of e.g. <span class="signature"></span>. --Izno (talk) 20:03, 24 February 2019 (UTC)
    This does seem tidier. –xeno 13:02, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support whatever makes reply link better Leviv ich 06:09, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Brevity please - I'll trust those qualified on helpfulness etc, but given discussion over what exactly the wrap should be, I'd like to stress brevity (and thus, I suppose, <SIG> as my preference) - signatures already fill up an absurd amount of wikitexxt, and this will presumably enlarge that. Nosebagbear (talk) 14:36, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support – and, per the above, it would be nice if the syntax coloring in the standard editor were made to know about (and color) it. —— 15:06, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Comment I'm on the fence on this one. On the one side, I see value in Brion's  comment from 2014. Yet many signatures aren't readably any longer for humans anyways. Ideally I'd at least want to see HTML markers at the html level, but that is difficult without dedicated wikicode syntax. However, having the user table available during parsing should make detection a whole lot simpler and reliable than when we have to do it with Javascript? Maybe it's possible ?
Ideally... Structured Discussions.... This info shouldn't be stored solely in wikitext I think. Representing it as wikitext is one thing, but in order to properly format posts in multiple media and screensizes, make it searchable etc, requires storing/indexing it in separate database fields somehow. I can imagine adding wikitext reply, parsing it, storing it in a JSON blob with the relevant information and rendering those blobs back as wikicode... —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 15:17, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
  • And after five years of development (during which other work would be under-resourced), Frankenwiki might emerge to allow a browser's Ctrl-F to search everything on a talk page or its archives, with copy/paste of wikitext between the article and talk. When all that's needed is a way for newbies to reply to a message, which would be achieved with reply-link as above. Johnuniq (talk) 22:42, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
    Johnuniq, just because it's much work is no reason to outright dismiss ideas, and I did say: Ideally. Almost everything to do with MediaWiki is a lot of work, if there were no people being bold, nothing would ever get done. It's also about choosing intermediate solutions that do not block future solutions, about not cluttering wikitext more than is necessary etc. You are just being selfish about the target you care about, which is your right, but bad software design. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:52, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

Hiatus on mass creation of Portals

Proposed That mass creation of Portals using semi-automated tools be paused until clearer community consensus is established.

Discussion After seeing the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Miscellany for deletion#Portal:E (mathematical_constant), I was surprised to see a single good faith user had created over 500 new portals in the last 2 months, and there may be other mass creators beyond that one user; it seems like the unstated objective is to create a Portal corresponding to every navbox template on Misplaced Pages. This seemed to me to be contrary to two sentences from Misplaced Pages:Portal/Guidelines: "Do not expect other editors to maintain a portal you create" and "the portal should be associated with a WikiProject" (parenthetical comment: for clarity, that should read "...with an active WikiProject"). Accordingly, I make the above proposal. UnitedStatesian (talk) 14:32, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian: Please clarify what you mean by "mass creation"; the figure provided above is less than 10 new pages per day per editor, which has never been considered mass creation by any WP standard. Also, please clarify what you mean by "semi-automated", since all software programs, including Misplaced Pages's internal text editor, may be considered semi-automated. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   19:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@Transhumanist: You are trying my good faith assumption, as I think you know what you have done, and how you have done it: instead, why don't you explain both IN DETAIL to all of us: how you choose what new portals to create, what automated .js or other code you run, etc.? Creation of 500 Portals in two months, which is a ~10% expansion of the portal space in that period, is what I would count as mass creation, regardless of how the term has been used in the past to apply to the article space (where the equivalent would be half a million new articles in that time). UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:38, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian: No, I'm not testing you, so please bear with me... I would like to know how many portals and by what methods we will be allowed to create portals per this proposal if it does pass. Because, if it does pass, I wouldn't want to violate it, and for that it needs to be clear (otherwise, it would be subject to pure discretion after-the-fact, which is a recipe for a block). For example, what would you consider non-mass creation using semi-automated tools? And what would you consider mass creation using non-semi-automated tools? Both of those are not covered in your proposal above, but it isn't clear what would qualify. Thus, discussing this is the civil way to clarify things, which is what we are doing. All in good faith. Based on your answer, you provided 500 in 2 months as an example, but not as a definite limit: you also provided a percentage, which would be a bigger number as the number of total portals increased. I look forward to your reply. Sincerely,    — The Transhumanist   20:26, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Like Potter Stewart w/r/t obscenity, I know it when I see it, as will presumably any administrators in the unlikely (and against everyone's intention) event it gets to WP:ANI. That's all I am going to say. Apparently every other supporting and opposing editor is also able to draw their conclusion without having any specific limits in the proposal. UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:33, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian: In that case, I'll ask you a specific question: if I created 8 portals per day, would that be considered mass creation under this proposal? I'd like to know, before I actually do it. It is the editors who need to know what they can and cannot do. If only the opposers/admins know, and it's their personal preference, and that's the rule being proposed, then it's surreptitious. Editors need to know in advance of creating portals how many are against your no creation rule.    — The Transhumanist   21:23, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
What part of "That's all I am going to say" is not clear? UnitedStatesian (talk) 21:33, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Your proposal is not clear. You haven't defined what rate of portal creation is acceptable or unacceptable. How will an editor know how many portals he or she can create or not create in a given amount of time?    — The Transhumanist   08:12, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
UnitedStatesian. The Transhumanist asked a fair question. Your ability to know it when you see it does not translate well into a universally comprehensible guideline. You and others are objecting to an undefined rate of "too much". It is necessary to define what is too much and why it is too much, for it to be consistently applicable. It is a bit like saying Mozart's music has too many notes. It is also possibly unenforceable.· · · Peter Southwood : 17:22, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
On the other hand, it does not really matter who makes the first suggestion for a limit, as long as they are willing to give a reasonable explanation based on policy and logic of why they think that limit should be applied.· · · Peter Southwood : 17:22, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
@The Transhumanist: related to the bot policy semi-automated tasks are generally a series of edits executed in a batch, the operator needs to provide an input and request a batch start, but does not monitor each related edit in the batch, once the batch ends it will not start again without human intervention. — xaosflux 19:32, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
If I understand correctly, and it is possible I have this wrong, each portal is personally visually checked in preview for obvious errors by the creator before publishing. I think this may disqualify it as semi-automated, but I have not done this myself, and am reporting what was explained to me when I asked some time ago. I have created a small number of portals using the same method but individually instead of in batches. The procedure gets faster with practice, but some errors do not manifest immediately as they depend on details which differ between articles. There are several that have been picked up, reported and debugged. I have no doubt that there will be others as that is normal for new software, and the new model portals are largely new software. The actual portal page is mainly calls to a number of templates and modules to display existing content. There is almost no new content in them, they are a systen to display existing content in a different way. · · · Peter Southwood : 14:00, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
We don't need spam links to Portal Land on every article. Was this Bot approved to do this at BAG? Can we stop it somehow? Legacypac (talk) 17:50, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
It's not every article, just every article with a corresponding portal (about 5,500). UnitedStatesian (talk) 17:52, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
UnitedStatesian, is that bot configured to avoid adding the same portal to the same page repeatedly, if the link has been removed by human editors in the meantime? If I should ever find that bot edit-warring against human editors, I'll block it without further warning. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:48, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Don't know, pinging @Dreamy Jazz: to see if they can answer. UnitedStatesian (talk) 20:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Future Perfect at Sunrise, the bot does not edit war. It only checks to see if the page links to the portal when it checks a portal. The bot was approved to run on all portals every month, so if the link is removed the bot will add the link again and it is unreasonable to assume that it has to know if it is edit warring per WP:CONTEXTBOT (The link could have been removed by a vandal or by mistake). Also these links that the bot added were only to directly related pages (root articles, categories shown on the portal as categorytrees or as
If the bot reverts human editors, then it is edit-warring, no matter if you want to call it that or not, and it will be blocked for it. It's not up to the bot to decide whether any preceding removal was "by a vandal or by mistake"; the bot needs to assume that any such removal was a deliberate editorial choice. Bots must never be used to enforce their bot owner's personal preferences against conceivable editorial disagreement. In the present case, it should not be difficult for the bot to keep a list of portals/pages it has already processed, and make sure it touches each of them only once. I highly recommend doing that. Fut.Perf. ☼ 15:19, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Future Perfect at Sunrise, the bot will only process new portals now. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 17:55, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
so edit wars will not be possible. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 18:01, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Thanks, that's good to know. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:03, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
I am trying to work out what "spam linked" is intended to mean, besides the somewhat obvious point that the user does not like it. · · · Peter Southwood : 17:41, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support and likely support mass deletion of those recent portals too, with the occasional exception. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:05, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
  • For example it looks like a goal is to create a Portal for every District in every state of India. Portal:Beed_district being a random one I picked from a long list of Indian District created in rapid succession. There are a LOT of Districts in India. Then Portal:Burger King which does nothing the article Burger King does not do. Legacypac (talk) 17:13, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Oppose in part whilst I do support a discussion and perhaps a stop on mass creation, I think for this to go anywhere real discussions need to happen about creation criteria. The problems which editors who support this are citing are too many too narrow scoped portals. However, I oppose because I can see this going towards "delete all mass created portals", which I oppose. Before any deletions occur, discussions need to be held about criteria for creation/deletion so that all editors understand what is acceptable. The Transhumainst has created these portals because they think they are useful. The community needs to decide whether they are useful and then once that is decided then the lines have been set in the sand. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 17:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Respectfully oppose – First, I would like to thank UnitedStatesian for acknowledging my good faith efforts to improve the encyclopedia. Thank you. I in turn acknowledge UnitedStatesian's good faith efforts and concern for quality control. Thank you, again. Now, I will address UnitedStatesian's arguments: I have no expectation of others maintaining the portals, as the portals are self-maintaining, or automatically maintained. The clause in the portals guideline was referring to manually maintained portals, and was written when the vast majority of portals were manually maintained. The new portals are not of the manually maintained variety. Each excerpt displayed in the new portals are transclusions of article leads, or portions of article leads, and therefore always match them and never go stale or fork. In addition to this, the selection of excerpts displayed is dynamic, and automatically updates, because they are pulled off of a corresponding resource page, usually a navigation footer template. So, as the coverage in the nav templates expand, so does the coverage of the corresponding portal. Each portal has conditional sections as well, that appear only when there is content to display. For example, if there is ever news on a portal's subject, a news section automatically appears. Once the news is 45 days old, and there is no other news to report, the news section disappears. Another conditional section is Did you know. (Continued...
(...continued) Concerning, WikiProject association, all subjects fall under one WikiProject or another. Meanwhile, all portals are also associated with the Portals WikiProject, that has a very talented and active team involved in the improvement of all portals and further development of portal design itself. As time goes on, portals will continue to improve. (Continued...)
(...continued) Some editors above do not like portals (comparing them to a plague), but they do not state why portals should not exist, in terms of Misplaced Pages's policies and guidelines. One mentioned traffic (readership), and that has never been a criteria for deletion or creation of a page. If it were, half the encyclopedia would be subject to deletion. The strongest feature of Misplaced Pages is its breadth of knowledge, covering pretty much everything under the sun and beyond, waiting for you when you need it. This makes Misplaced Pages one of the first stops for information. With so much information, a means of navigating it is needed. While search provides most navigation needs, Misplaced Pages also provides link-based or click-based means of navigation as well, to assist in situations where search is inadequate, like when a user doesn't know what he or she is looking for exactly, or when they just want to see what articles Misplaced Pages has on a particular subject. For those times, Misplaced Pages provides its navigation subsystems: outlines, indexes, categories, navigation templates, and portals. Portals have some features that the other navigation subsystems do not, including slideshows to provide excerpts to browse, and a compilation of link resources from around Misplaced Pages, including from other navigation systems, bringing these resources together on a single convenient page. (Continued...)
(...continued) Since Misplaced Pages's navigation subsystems are internal navigation systems, they do not receive much external traffic from google, duck duck go, etc., like articles do. And so none of the navigation pages (except those posted on the Main Page, and a few other very high-traffic subjects) will ever get a high volume of visits. But, that is not their purpose. Their purpose is to be there when needed to help users find their way around the encyclopedia. And the navigation pages, including portals, do that quite well.    — The Transhumanist   18:01, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
"Before any deletions occur, discussions need to be held about criteria for creation/deletion so that all editors understand what is acceptable." This is the same story again and the core problem. Mass creation without any guidelines on what is useful. Stop creation. Draft your guidelines. Run it past Villiage Pump with an RFC. Delete anything that does not meet the approved guidelines. Then you can think about creating new Portals. Legacypac (talk) 18:14, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Legacypac, hello. I have started a conversation about this over at Wikipedia_talk:Portal_guidelines#Portal_creation_and_deletion_criteria. Input is welcome. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 18:44, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
@UnitedStatesian and Blueboar: Currently, the bot policy says regarding mass creation that The community has decided that any large-scale automated or semi-automated article creation task must be approved at Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval - maybe this should be extended to namespaces other than articles? It also applies to non-hidden categories, but not to portals --DannyS712 (talk) 19:25, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
Probably poor wording choice on my part, as these are not bot-created portals, so are not covered by WP:MASSCREATION. It was not my intention to use a WP-specific term of art. UnitedStatesian (talk) 19:38, 26 February 2019 (UTC)
That still would allow for the number of portals the proposal above would disallow, as the bot department's policy pertains to a specific threshold per editing session. Ten articles at a time, or even twenty, isn't considered mass-creation, for example. The proposal above is (unintentionally) using the proposal page to set policy. (What if this proposal passes, and no consensus is ever reached on the topic, as intended in the proposal? Then it becomes the default policy. That is an inappropriate use of this page.)    — The Transhumanist   19:42, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

@The Transhumanist:, I believe it should be a no-brainer that now that you know there is substantial opposition to your mass-creations, you should, as a matter of course, deist from further creations until a community consensus in their favour has formed – rather than insisting on your "right" to continue creating those pages until any such community discussion has concluded against them. Please answer me this with a clear yes or no: Are you willing to make such a commitment here and now? No more new portals until a clear guideline for what is and isn't acceptable has been agreed on? Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:53, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

UnitedStatesian was concerned with the rate. Being an opponent of portals in general, you are obviously trying to conflate that to mean any new portals at all. I'm not buying into that. I'll patiently await US's response. Thank you.    — The Transhumanist   21:14, 26 February 2019 (UTC)

information Note: the community may be interested in taking a look at Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval/Dreamy Jazz Bot 2 and Misplaced Pages:Bots/Requests for approval/Dreamy Jazz Bot 3 --DannyS712 (talk) 10:01, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

  • Support – This unilateral creation of hundreds of useless portals must stop. RGloucester — ☎ 14:16, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support especially in mathematics, and in areas where there is an active wiki project. In mathematics, no portal should be created without a WP:Consensus of project members. The lack of discussion in the wiki project has several damageable consequences: 1/ In the selected articles, formulas are awfully rendered (colons displayed before displayed formulas, html formulas not displayed if they contain {{=}}, ... 2/ the selected articles and selected figures are often unrelated with the subject of the template, or so weakly related that a professional mathematician must think a while for imagining the relationship. There are probably other flaws, but this would need some time to find them, time that would better spent for improving math articles. Moreover, although, I do not like inboxes in mathematics, they are generally much more useful and much less confusing that automatically creates portals. D.Lazard (talk) 15:32, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support: Portals should be created only after careful consideration and deliberation. Jonathunder (talk) 15:35, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support Experience shows that after the first flush of enthusiasm, portals are maintained if, and only if, there's an active and knowledgeable set of editors supporting them. Generally, this means that they need consensus within an active Wikiproject. Peter coxhead (talk) 16:49, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Peter coxhead, portals are automatically kept upto date with selected articles, news, DYKs and images, and changes to content shown will be shown immediately. Portals, as long as they rely on the single page automatically updating design, will requires nominal maintenance compared to what they used to need. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 17:25, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
@Dreamy Jazz: consider Portal:Spiders, which was never agreed by WP:SPIDERS. Yes, some of it will be kept up-to-date automatically (e.g. the categories), but who agreed the subtopics? If a major new topic is added, who will update this section? It uses {{Spider nav}}. Since 2010, only two editors I recognize as active in editing spider articles have edited this template (one of them being me). So how will this be automatically kept up to date? Sorry, but this claim is nonsense. Peter coxhead (talk) 18:46, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • support not too long we've debated the potential mass deletion of largely inactive umaintained portals and now we moved on to bot supported mass creation of those? Portals usually should only be created individually with couple of editors interested in maintaining them (and supported or at least not objected by associated projects).--Kmhkmh (talk) 17:00, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
    Kmhkmh, portals are automatically updated. The effort needed to keep them fully working is nominal compared to what it used to be. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 17:22, 27 February 2019 (UTC) striked by dreamy jazz. Dreamy Jazz 🎷 18:48, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
    Every page should have some watchers at a minimum to guard against vandalism. It's unreasonable to expect one editor to watch over hundreds of portal pages; the only scaleable approach is to ensure the work is spread out to those who are interested in the topic area. Having portal creation go through active WikiProjects is one way to do this. isaacl (talk) 17:34, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
(ec) Being automatically updated does not mean that they do not need maintenance. See my above comment about math formulas rendering. Also, what when the automatic process insert errors or misleading information? Should the experts of the subject be also expert of the automatic process for being able fixing such issues? Are you sufficiently competent in the subjects of the portals you have created for being sure that the automatic process works correctly? You will certainly argue that if categories, inboxes, ... are correct, the process works correctly. The problem is that Misplaced Pages is never finished, and you cannot hope that all articles are correctly categorized. D.Lazard (talk) 17:44, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
Being automatically updated would make for a decent argument if it wasn't for the fact that automatically created portals are automatically of bad quality. An automated process simply cannot select articles that are actually interesting, news that are actually pertinent, or images and image captions that are actually informative when viewed outside the context of the articles where human editors originally placed them. Automatically created portals are no better than automatically written articles; they simply don't work. (See Portal:Greek alphabet for a particularly ugly example.) Portals that only consist of re-jumbled snippets of their nominal "main article", as many of the manually created ones have been, are already a bad idea in themselves; portals that take that same useless design principle to its automated extreme are almost invariably even worse than that. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:00, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Dreamy Jazz Imho there is no such thing as an automated portal maintenance. Yes you can have automation to reduce simple manual labour aspects of maintenance. But portals require more than that, they need to designed and supervised by editors knowledgeable in the portal's subject, hence automatic portal maintenance or creation is no-go (short of major AI breakthroughs).--Kmhkmh (talk) 18:13, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support topic bans preventing all those involved from creating new portals, and a mass deletion of all the Portal:Blueberries and Portal:Nudity dross. I'd concur with using the same "unless anyone other than the spammers can give a legitimate reason for keeping, it's deleted" CSD process we used for Neelix. ‑ Iridescent 21:11, 27 February 2019 (UTC)
  • Support a hiatus. I like the idea of Portals, and have been an enthusiastic editor of them in the past. However we don't need them for every single topic. the wub "?!" 23:26, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Question About Portals as Experiments

In other discussions of portals, TTH is arguing that portals are needed for experimentation in innovation and navigation. I would like to know what sorts of innovations will be tested by the use of portals, and who will be doing the testing. If the purpose of the portals is testing, then we should have a coordinated group of test volunteers with some plan for what features are to be tested and how the testing will be done. Creating hundreds or thousands of portals will scatter any test effort to the point where there will not be useful test results. Can User:The Transhumanist please explain what functionality will be tested using portals? Can they also explain what their methodology is for deciding what portals should be created? Robert McClenon (talk) 07:31, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Portal scope (creation eligibility) is covered in Misplaced Pages:Portal/Guidelines#Article selection. Innovations on portals are discussed at WT:WPPORTD and can be read about there and in its archives. The innovations (portal components) are "tested" as any template or module on Misplaced Pages is, by using it and fixing bugs as they are found; first, by the developer, then released per Template:Template rating and Template:Module rating. See also Misplaced Pages:Lua#Unit_testing. For more details on template and module development, Evad37/Certes/FR30799386 would be able to give more definitive answers.      — The Transhumanist   11:44, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

Proposal to make TfD more RM-like, as a clearinghouse of template discussions

FYI – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see Misplaced Pages talk:Templates for discussion#RfC: Proposal to make TfD more RM-like, as a clearinghouse of template discussions.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  05:17, 27 February 2019 (UTC)

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