Cloudflare fetched the original article and streamed it through HTMLRewriter to apply an entirely new visual system without rebuilding the source page.
Only coarse request metadata is shown. This demo does not display or persist visitor IP addresses.
Ray ID: a45573f58aef879c
This is the Village pump (all) page which lists all topics for easy viewing. Go to the village pump to view a list of the Village Pump divisions, or click the edit link above the section you'd like to comment in. To view a list of all recent revisions to this page, click the history link above and follow the on-screen directions.
Click here to purge the server cache of this page (to see recent changes on Village pump subpages)
| I want... | Then go to... |
|---|---|
| ...constructive criticism from others for a specific article | Peer review |
| ...help resolving a specific article edit dispute | Requests for comment |
| ...help using or editing Wikipedia | Teahouse (for newer users) or Help desk (for experienced users) |
| ...specific facts (e.g. Who was the first pope?) | Reference desk |
| ...to ask questions or make comments | Questions |
| ...to comment on a specific article | Article's talk page |
| ...to find my way around Wikipedia | Department directory |
| ...to learn about citing Wikipedia in a bibliography | Citing Wikipedia |
| ...to report sites that copy Wikipedia content | Mirrors and forks |
| ...to view and discuss other Wikimedia projects | Wikimedia Meta-Wiki |
Discussions older than 7 days (date of last made comment) are moved to a sub page of each section (called (section name)/Archive).
Should editors be allowed to nominate miscellaneous pages for merging at MfD? 09:37, 12 August 2026 (UTC)
It would be easier and less disruptive to ... allow RFCs for ... project space merge proposals
The table there is inaccurate anyway
That should have been considered when the PAM-AfD merger was rammed through without any consideration for downstream consequences
that advice was inappropriately changed to say "Deletion discussion venues" without any community input
(except MfD)if you want. FaviFake (talk) 18:49, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
The AfD-PM merge has been an utter disaster. Out of curiosity, can you give some specifics? I don't like the outcome very much because it's created the need for me to do a bunch of emergency updates to gadgets, but other than that, how's it going? –Novem Linguae (talk) 03:54, 14 August 2026 (UTC)reply
formal PAM discussion¯\_(ツ)_/¯ —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 17:36, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
a lack of shared understanding means the RfC failed.I took this to mean:
There is no corresponding process for formally proposing that a draft be merged into an article, or even into another draft!—Any draft can be merged into an article through the normal editing process (a redirect may be left behind in some cases). If anyone objects, that is a matter for article talk or in extreme cases an RfC or another form of dispute resolution (regarding the content in question). MfD does not settle mainspace disagreements. Two drafts can easily be merged. If anyone objects, a draft can be created at a different title (draftspace) or a personal draft can be created (userspace) with one's preferred version. There can be many drafts covering the same potential topic. It would never be appropriate to discuss such things at MfD (attempting to do so would even result in a speedy redirect in certain instances). That aside—shifting content between policy, guideline, information, help, etc. pages should generally be hashed out on the respective talk pages; if more structure is needed for that, well... reopen PAM. Essays are a bit more complicated. Userspace pages should generally be left alone as a whole. When or when not a merge discussion is appropriate at MfD is not easily discerned (apparently). Merge is already a possible outcome at MfD, and anyone (likely seasoned) bringing a good case there (e.g. an information page that is truly redundant to a different help page) would already invite a good discussion (and likely not encounter any resistance). However, encouraging merge discussions there may lead to many poor nominations (such as the inappropriate ones I describe in the first half of my rationale). — Godsy (TALKCONT) 07:35, 17 August 2026 (UTC)reply
If the merge is controversial, someone will talk about it, at which point the above problem is solved.
because miscellaneous pages are involved in far fewer PAM proposals compared to articles. The "experience with AfD", whether you think of it as positive or negative, was due by the fact that PAM proposals were opened very often, which has never been the case for miscellaneous pages. FaviFake (talk) 16:27, 4 September 2026 (UTC)reply
confusing ... difficult and complicated). Could you kindly describe your understanding of the current process for proposing merging misc pages and what you think this proposal is trying to do? The rationale you've given to oppose the proposal is the one we are using for supporting it, so there seems to be a disconnect. We are indeed trying to create a
one stop shop for raising issues such as deletion and mergersof misc pages, as currently they can't be nominated anywhere. FaviFake (talk) 16:36, 23 September 2026 (UTC)reply
This issue has been brought up above multiple times but I think it would benefit from a more focused discussion. If these three conditions are met:
... what should the editors that have been working on shutting down PAM (aka yours truly) do?
FaviFake (talk) 09:42, 5 September 2026 (UTC)reply
existing talk page discussions, only those created after the closure. And of course I'm not touching informal talk page discussions.I specifically asked this question so that the closer can hopefully be a little more specific as to how exactly the result of the RfC should be implemented while we wind down PAM.From your previous comments, I'd say you seem more opposed to B rather than A. I'd also be interested to know if Thryduulf's opinion in this comment also refers to new formal PAM discussions rather than just informal talk discussions. FaviFake (talk) 22:00, 6 September 2026 (UTC)reply
12:00, 2 September 2026 (UTC) (B and D struck, and F added, on 20:22, 3 September 2026 (UTC))
FaviFake (talk) 20:52, 2 September 2026 (UTC)reply[...] I expect that if this ever gets tested, it will be a major drama, because there will be editors with very strong opinions on both sides of whether the petition succeeded or failed. As I also said earlier, the more I see conjecture about situations where the line between 24 and 25 signatures gets crossed late, the more strongly I feel about the need for a firmly articulated deadline.
— User:Tryptofish 21:41, 23 August 2026 (UTC)
clear and unambiguous? It's the only option that doesn't specify what should happen in case of late signatures... FaviFake (talk) 06:46, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
many, many proposals; I've only started a few of these, and only the last one was a failure. It seems I did a good job with this one, since consensus to change the rules is starting to form but it wasn't obvious. And yes, I was inspired by your "720-hour" comment for the wording of option A! FaviFake (talk) 10:36, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
think this process is already very controversial [...] the last thing I would want is to have instructions that are not absolutely crystal-clearThis is why in my draft I included those things you describe as uncontroversial and nitpicky - I felt it is desirable to have explicit consensus to avoid as much controversy as possible. Thryduulf (talk) 15:43, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
{{Closing|lock=yes}} on the page so that people can't use the "Reply" button while we wait for a real closer. FaviFake (talk) 20:10, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
|comment= parameter saying the timestamp has passed and we're awaiting a closer. Disabling the "Reply" button in this way should at least make it less likely that an editor edits the petition, but it can simply be removed if the closer finds out that a signature was invalid and reopens the petition. FaviFake (talk) 20:31, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Signature struck because it was posted after 15:16, 4 September 2026 (UTC). FaviFake (talk) 15:13, 4 September 2026 (UTC)reply
So TAs aren't permitted to create articles in mainspace, only drafts which then get submitted to AfC. But they can overwrite redirects, which seems functionally the same (ig they can't troll with article titles)? Should that be allowed? What prompted this was looking at Axios512 (talk · contribs)'s creations and seeing IPs had overwritten a lot of the redirects they'd made, I don't know if these were socks but it does still look like something that can be abused to mask authorship and avoid WP:G5 deletions Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 11:36, 14 September 2026 (UTC)reply
blindly dumping all such articles into the AFC process
In the article Deep State, a user has placed the {{AI-generated}} tag on the article, with the reason field stating, Wikipedia:AI noticeboard/Archive 4#Quickdrew and possible AI hoax edits to contentious US politics topics (WP:WWT is useful)
. I found this to be less than informative, and so opened a talk page discussion asking what passages or sections are suspect so I could help review. The response has frequently been a variant of, "Use a tool and figure it out", including references to some nonstandard tools, and an insistence that the tag should remain.
My question is: who has the onus of identifying problem areas when it comes to maintenance tags? I note that WP:WTRMT specifies they shouldn't be removed until the identified problem is resolved, but what if the problem is never identified? Discussing with the editor is proving challenging, so I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction here. EducatedRedneck (talk) 17:08, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I feel that there's a big difference between "a user used AI and did a large part of this article" and "here are the diffs of their work that need to be reviewed."
Frankly, what I'm hearing from you and them is that I messed up so badly, I should just not even try to help in this arena
Here’s a revised version that maintains neutrality by acknowledging that deep state allegations have varied in accuracy—some being unfounded conspiracies, while others reflect genuine concerns about entrenched power structures.So the fact that you are still "not convinced" tells me that one of two things has happened. Either:
all of this user's edits display the gamut of WP:AISIGNSand goes on to say that many of their edits are in articles related to
the Trump administration, QAnon, etc.; Deep state is reasonably associated with that topic area. The archived WP:AINB post also includes a link to Wikipedia:AI noticeboard/2026-08-05 Quickdrew, where Deep state is listed along with an indication of the status of the review and a list of diffs. On the article talk page, Kowal more or less said that every edit by the named user needs to be reviewed. They could have been nicer about it and included a direct link to the tracking tool (Wikipedia:AI noticeboard/2026-08-05 Quickdrew) or provided or pointed to other suggestions for evaluating and addressing suspected AI-generated edits. AI cleanup is a challenging area. There is a group of editors who spend a tremendous amount of time and energy on it. I am grateful for their work. I do sometimes find their engagement on the issue with other editors terse and their processes opaque. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 18:27, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
reason= parameter is sufficient. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 19:32, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
{{ai-generated}} tags if the reason isn't stated in the tag itself, the edit summary and on the talk page. So to avoid driveby untagging, everything needs to be filled out in triplicate. The tags are still removed though. There is an edit filter tracking it now, but that's an extra task for someone to do. ‑‑gurkubondinn 20:33, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Unfortunately there are users that have stated that they will remove {{ai-generated}} tags if the reason isn't stated in the tag itself, the edit summary and on the talk page. While I haven't personally encountered this behavior, IMO persisting in removal of tags that have the reason= parameter filled out after you have been asked to stop should be sanctioned as disruptive editing. And I say this as someone with thousands of edits in which I removed dead or unexplained maintenance tags. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 20:42, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply|reason= should often be sufficient otherwise. I don't think an additional talk page post should always be required though of course editors placing the tag should be expected to respond to any inquiries about it. The response to questions or challenges should be reasonably thorough and aimed at helping others contribute but there is a limit. If the disputing editor doesn't know how to accomplish the necessary review or is unwilling or unable to follow the suggested approach, that should not default to removing the tag. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 00:48, 23 September 2026 (UTC)reply
if they can't or won't explain the issue in a way that convinces other editors that it is necessary
try[ing] to bulldoze an entire gaping loophole into the AI policy. Third, one person not looking at evidence is the exact opposite of "can't or won't explain". Fourth, nobody is going to get consensus to host a copyright violation. Fifth, not everybody who has a different opinion to you is attempting to harm Wikipedia. Thryduulf (talk) 18:03, 23 September 2026 (UTC)reply
effectively baseless accusations in the hopes that something sticks, because, in some cases, their real issue is something within the text that they dislike but can't justify removing on its ownwhat is there to discuss? We all agree that people shouldn't be using NOLLM as an excuse to throw baseless accusations at non-LLM content they dislike, and no one here is doing that as far as I can tell. At least, I haven't seen that happening. It would help me understand where you are coming from if I could see some examples of the kind of behavior you consider problematic happening in the wild, because otherwise it's hard not to keep drifting back to assuming you are talking about the behavior of the people in this thread in the articles that are linked from this thread. I'm not saying this to be snide-- I genuinely do want to understand your position and if people are using LLM tags on content that isn't LLM just because they don't like that content I genuinely do want to know about it. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 20:28, 25 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I might occasionally run a sentence or two through DeepL Write more recently to see if the text could be better framed.Like... they said it... themselves................
They did not confirm to using any DeepL text in the article in question. The idea that if someone once used DeepL to translate something, that every article they every contributed to must be immediately tagged without even identifying one single actual problem with the article is ludicrous.
couple of sources were poorly summarizedand the same user had tagged sentences as failing verification. Anyone can look at the article's page history, there were lots of WP:V failures found.
I really genuinely hope no lunacy is in place
lunacyboard where everyone is spending their day writing
scarlet lettersto everyone we come across. ‑‑gurkubondinn 18:08, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
@EducatedRedneck and everybody else: I've just gone through the article myself and done what needed to be done, and so have now removed the tag. Hopefully the whole issue is now resolved. Dionysodorus (talk) 18:29, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
 |
|
Since I clarified that the original discussion was not an RfC and was also getting off-topic (sorry, Gurkubondinn), here we are. The discussion yielded an unclear result, so I figured I would just move ahead with a clearer RfC. Hopefully consensus will be clearer. Courtesy-tagging original discussion participants: @Gnomingstuff @SuperPianoMan9167 @Katzrockso @NicheSports @LWG @Fermiboson @Thryduulf @InfernoHues @Chipmunkdavis
Should WP:NOLLM be updated to explicitly permit or explicitly prohibit the use of AI/LLMs to create/format Wikitext (hereafter referred to as "WT")?
Option 1 — No change to NOLLM.
Option 2 - Add some form of explicit exception to PERMIT the use of AI to format WT, with the caveat that the user is responsible for ensuring it is non-disruptive and publishes without error.
Option 3 — Add some form of explicit prohibition to PREVENT the use of AI to format WT.
This RfC also invites discussion as to the wording of an exception or prohibition — MWFwiki (talk) 22:12, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"Nevertheless, the discussion did not establish consensus on whether WP:NOLLM currently prohibits all LLM-assisted citation formatting or whether accurate, carefully checked citations should attract sanctions. While this RfC rejected adding a written exemption, it should not be read as resolving either of those questions"— I would argue that, at least in-part, this is one of the questions this RfC seeks to resolve, as citations are WT. It also asks if explicit prohibition is not the best course of action. — MWFwiki (talk) 22:22, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"'Don't use AI' would be an improvement on what we have now[...]"— unless I'm misunderstanding you, then don't you mean option "3"? — MWFwiki (talk) 01:12, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"LLM-use to produce or format wikitext is prohibited."— MWFwiki (talk) 01:26, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 08:25, 20 September 2026 (UTC)replyEditing Wikipedia is often challenging at first; newcomers may find help pages and this brief summary of policies and guidelines useful.
Editors generally should not edit a Wikipedia edition whose language they are not proficient in (see Meta:List of Wikipedias for all existing language editions).as I think I'd do it anyway regardless of the result of this RfC (been meaning to do something similar ). Anyone should feel free to revert and discuss at WT:NOLLM Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 12:18, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
it would be nice and further Wikipedia's unique approach to AI to not allow AI posts on talk pages or in discussionsJust FYI this is already more-or-less the case. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 17:07, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Editors are permitted to use LLMs to suggest corrections to their own writing, and to incorporate them after human review. This is limited to spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, grammar, and other simple mistakes.
investigateᛅ 10:11, 21 September 2026 (UTC)reply
If a human editor really is carefully checking over the LLM output, and changing it as needed, the final result will be indistinguishable from something they wrote themself.Wikipedia will become unnecessary, since people will be able to just ask their LLM for the sorts of information Wikipedia currently provides.
"The only reason I'm not voting option 3 is because I'm concerned with how we'd be able to enforce it."- Frankly, this should not be a consideration. Anyone can raise this concern about any proposed policy addition or modification. How we enforce a policy comes after. We adapt to our needs. Regardless, enforcement would be simple, in my view: either an editor admits to LLM-use in wikitext formatting or they (the LLM) leave obvious tells. That's a violation. If neither of those situations occur, then it's not a problem because no one knows, anyways. An explicit policy prevents wikilawyering from either way. As I have pointed out, there are those that already believe this is prohibited. This RfC will actually serve as community consensus that this practice is NOT prohibited if it is closed as option 1 (likely) or NC, as many folks have indicated, so. — MWFwiki (talk) 00:26, 4 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Do you think we can trust the hallucinating LLMs with formatting wikitext?Yes, if the output is checked by a human and, if necessary, corrected. While every LLM is capable of hallucinating, not everything output by an LLM contains hallucinations. Thryduulf (talk) 22:40, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Prohibition proposal: "Use of an LLM to produce or format any form of Wikitext is prohibited. For example, this prohibition includes but is not limited to: utilizing an LLM to wikilink, create citations, create infoboxes, etc."
Exception proposal [to become point "3" of NOLLM: "LLMs may be utilized to assist users in generating Wikitext, to a limited extent, and all work must be checked thoroughly before final publication. Such exceptions include basic and simple tasks, such as adding Wikilink bracketing, crafting an infobox, etc. Users are still responsible for 'hallucinated' or otherwise false content and are responsible for ensuring all of their inserted content publishes without error."
— MWFwiki (talk) 22:20, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply
There is no prohibition against formatting wikitext, the community simply does not want to codify it...Precisely this: acceptable types of formatting are already de-facto permitted under the current guideline, so codifying an exception accomplishes nothing except encourage wikilawyering in support of unacceptable types of formatting. If you have to ask which side of the line a particular use case falls on, it probably falls on the prohibited side. In the rare case that someone is asked to stop using LLMs even though they would have used them responsibly, the mild inconvenience to that person is a more than worthwhile cost to pay for the streamlining of the slop cleanup process. It's just like our rule about disclosing conflict of interest: COI editors are required to disclose their COI. Yes, they could theoretically make non-controversial edits to their pages without disclosing, and if their edits really are non-controversial they are unlikely to be sanctioned for it, but the COI guideline doesn't and shouldn't say "you don't have to disclose as long as you only make totally non-controversial edits", nor is it acceptable to waste our time arguing that your particular undisclosed COI editing was fine. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 20:20, 21 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Most writing-related guidance on English Wikipedia focuses on the rendered HTML output, rather than the wikitext source, since that's what affects reader experience. Historically, tools have generated wikitext through a deterministic process, whether it is using templates, Visual Editor, or off-wiki tools filling in skeletons based on some data source. With a generative tool, though, the result is produced through a black box that no one explicitly programmed. If there is a consensus that the risk of users not verifying the result is greater that the benefit of using such tools, then it's not clear to me how to carve out a set of allowable uses in a practical way. Although it might be the case that a user is less likely to check the result of a generated infobox than a single verb tense change, I think there is a point where the probability of that user checking a mass set of grammar and spelling changes starts approaching the same level. isaacl (talk) 18:10, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Process comment: As with the prior RFC on LLM-assisted citations, we have a substantial set of editors !voting to keep the policy as it is (Option 1 here; No on the prior RfC) with the understanding that non-disruptive LLM-assisted Wikitext formatting will not get anyone in trouble. And we have another substantial set of editors arguing to keep the policy as it is with the understanding that any LLM-assisted Wikitext formatting should get editors in trouble. Resolving this tension is what I take to be MWFwiki's purpose in opening the RFC.
To put too fine a point on it, these are statements in this and the prior RFC that are all in the prior camp:
but if you do it right no one will ever notice! This is not an issue!
Honestly, if I were to write a "nutshell" for NOLLM, it would be something to the effect of "If anyone can actually tell that you're using an LLM, you're using one in a way you shouldn't be." If a human editor really is carefully checking over the LLM output, and changing it as needed, the final result will be indistinguishable from something they wrote themself.
If someone decides to use AI to help with their edits but review its suggestions before publishing, then the end result would not look like a LLM wholesale wrote it (and thus should not warrant a user warning).
In practicality, anything they did which we are unable to tell was done with an LLM is permitted, and anything they did which we are able to tell was done with an LLM is not.;
we are swamped enough with the rate of obviously bad AI edits that, quite frankly, we are happy to let your slightly sloppy wikitext formatting go
My rule-of-thumb is that if I can tell that an LLM was used, it's likely a violation of this guideline. How would you know an LLM was used for wikitext unless a hallucination/errors occurred?
If it was perfectly accurate and introduced no issues, I would argue whoever is strictly enforcing the guideline is putting the letter of the guideline over the spirit to the detriment of the encyclopedia., seconded in this by HTGS
If you check it thoroughly enough so that you're sure there's no error, you're not going to get flagged, and if you don't, you should be.
I would not expect a well formatted, error-free citation to raise any eyebrows unless there is something else going on.
The impasse that we stand in is that some editors believe that no written change (Option 1) means that the policy is effectively Option 2 (in competently executed cases) -- presumably those quoted here -- and others believe that no change means the policy is effectively Option 3. I'm not sure how to get out of this impasse, but do think that we should use this RFC to do so.--Carwil (talk) 13:02, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"If anyone can actually tell that you're using an LLM, you're using one in a way you shouldn't be."That essay also doesn't really address the question posed here (wikicode formatting) except to say that if your "formatting" is introducing new words to the article text, it's not just formatting (which I think we all agree on here). -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 00:12, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I have no idea what you are talking about re: ANImaybe I'm misremembering the venue but I seem to recall you contributing to discussions of sanctioning LLM-using editors and I can't remember you ever calling for sanctions on an editor who was just using the LLM for non-semantic tasks like formatting wikicode. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 00:03, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
See below. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 23:47, 28 September 2026 (UTC)replyLet's try and get creative about how to enable this understanding without opening the floodgates for slop. Maybe an autoconfirmed status as stage gate?
a lot of long-time contributors, myself included, take the letter of prohibitions and the possibility of a ban after many years of contributing as very serious signals.Maybe I'm naive, but it's hard for me to imagine anyone in this conversation advocating for a ban of someone who was editing in good faith, doing no damage to the encyclopedia, and willing to follow the discuss part of Bold, Revert Discuss when challenged. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 23:51, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"generally, any LLM-use, admitted or otherwise, is subject to local consensus if called into question."My contention is that there should be no ambiguity in policy and if there is, the reason for the ambiguity should be explained. — MWFwiki (talk) 01:57, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"generally, any LLM-use, admitted or otherwise, is subject to local consensus if called into question."will result in endless time-wasting arguments of the sort WP:YESLLM is trying to preempt, often with one side of the argument itself being walls of LLM text, but maximalist prohibition is not desirable if a lesser prohibition can prevent the slop. If we are going to clarify anything, I would focus on the clause
generate or rewrite article contentand consider saying something like
some uses of LLMs that do not alter the article content (such as converting an existing citation from one format into another, or wrapping an image in wiki code to make it float left on the page) may be permissible, however the editor using the LLM must review the output and ensure that the LLM has not gone beyond its directive and altered the article content in any way while doing these tasks.Such non-semantic uses of LLMs should be totally indistinguishable from a human accomplishing the same task, since there is no stylistic element to tasks like plugging human-specified information into a
Cite X template or pulling syntax from Help:Extended image syntax to make an image have a human-specified position on the page. If they are distinguishable as LLM output, then they probably haven't been adequately reviewed. -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 02:43, 29 September 2026 (UTC)replyunless I'm misunderstanding you, then don't you mean option "3"?No, if I meant option 3, then I would have said option 3. There is no possible way to "misunderstand" 1 as 3.
It seems obvious to me that the desire is to keep things vague so that the policy may be wielded on a case-by-case basis.I did not say this, nor do I think this (in fact I think the opposite, interpreting things on a "case-by-case basis" results in nothing but sealioning), nor is it a charitable "interpretation" of (really just making-shit-up-about) my words.
It seems pretty clear that Gnomingstuff's !vote [...] is based on reading Option 1 as implying that Option 3 is already in effect.No, if I thought Option 3 was already in effect, I would have said that. As for my "comments here: Wikipedia_talk:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models#Proposed_reword", my comments were to tell you to stop vagueposting about unnamed individuals and attributing supposed radical opinions to them.
peanut gallery comment) Just to make sure everyone is on the same page, AI here refers to LLMs. Technically, AI is used to power other tools on Wikipedia, such as reverting vandalism (ClueBot) or the Editor Suggestions tool (example), but that usually falls under machine learning and aren't usually as problematic as random editors asking LLMs to generate content since they are more refined and controlled. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 23:08, 27 September 2026 (UTC)replyinvestigateᛅ 21:03, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I'm emphasising the underlined point because, as what @Chaotic Enby said, to avoid more wikilawyering (using a portion of the rules in a literal manner that goes against the rule's intended message), noting that a carveout for wikitext formatting may be used by editors arguing [...] that large content additions inside templates would be acceptable as only "wikitext" was edited, and [...] encourage editors to rely on AI to make such changes. Note: quotation edited for emphasis. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 10:51, 3 October 2026 (UTC)replyLLM use should ideally not be permitted at all, but if we can't detect them (can't tell they used LLMs), then it's not worth worrying about (but don't tell anyone that).
with the understanding that non-disruptive LLM-assisted Wikitext formatting will not get anyone in trouble. And we have another substantial set of editors arguing to keep the policy as it is with the understanding that any LLM-assisted Wikitext formatting should get editors in trouble.What I disputed was that is any difference in practice between the two camps that the comment I'm responding to have presented, not that there are different camps when it comes to how to phrase the guideline or even how the guideline should work, it was only in response to the comment I responded to. –Maltazarian ᚾparley
investigateᛅ 10:58, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
investigateᛅ 22:17, 3 October 2026 (UTC)replyinvestigateᛅ 22:09, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply |
|
Can the MfD guidelines be changed to allow autoconfirmed users (or above) to archive non-controversial discussions? 🐴🌀[citation needed] 04:26, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I have tried to archive pages by myself, but I might get into a bit of trouble, considering the guidelines mentioning that only bots can do it. I'm making this RfC because if this does get allowed, we wouldn't have closed discussions on the MfD page just sitting there, and would make newer discussions get more !votes, instead of being overshadowed by older closed discussions.
Thanks for cooperating in my RfC. From, 🐴🌀[citation needed] 04:26, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
decluttering has real benefits for some people, including but not limited to people with specific disabilities.There is no need to manually archive the page (forcing everyone else to trawl through the archives to find the outcome of a recently closed discussion) when the following CSS I whipped up just now seems to work (although only for Parsoid, and doesn't remove empty section headers):
section:is([aria-labelledby="Current_discussions"], [aria-labelledby="Old_business"]) section .mw-collapsible {
display: none;
}
The background lore here is at Talk: Algospeak (book)#languagejones. But the core disagreement is based around the subject matter expert exception. Would a WP:self-published review by a subject matter expert be considered a WP:reliable source for the purpose of a review? guninvalid (talk) 18:53, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi, is it against WP:OCLOCATION to include any New Jersey-related categories in Odeya Rush's article? A related discussion can be seen at Talk:Odeya Rush#Categories. Thanks in advance, Thedarkknightli (talk) 05:47, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Capitalization of Internet § Request for comment: Should a capital "i" be used for "Internet"?. Qwerty123M (talk) 08:46, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I'm thinking about what information an infobox should contain, and in what level of detail.
Infoboxes are fraught topics on Wikipedia. For the benefit of anyone newer, and as a reminder to others, I ought to link WP:ARBINFOBOX and WP:ARBINFOBOX2 here.
We already have a rule about infobox contents which is MOS:IBP. I think the key sentences are the third and fourth, which say:
The less information that an infobox contains, the more effectively it serves its purpose, allowing readers to identify key facts at a glance. Some infoboxes need to use more than a handful of fields, but information should be presented in a short format wherever possible, and should exclude unnecessary content.
I think we don't consistently follow that guidance at the moment. We tend to allow infobox bloat and giving needless amounts of detail, and that's particularly a problem when viewing infoboxes on mobile screens.
I would like to propose three possible changes for your consideration. They aren't mutually exclusive.
The third rule would have obvious exceptions for people with non-standard name format.
Military conflict | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Song | ||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Note that the two McVies are disambiguated by their initials.
| ||||||||||||||||||||||
This proposal was inspired partly by a discussion with User:Emiya1980.
Your thoughts, please?—S Marshall T/C 11:32, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
|position= parameter (|ideology= used to get bloated with policy positions but that's less common now). IBP says An infobox is unsuitable for nuance or detail and should generally avoid prose or prose-like statements. If information cannot be simply stated in an infobox without explanation or qualification, it probably doesn't belong in the infobox.. Yet we frequently engage in synthesis wrt a party's position on the political spectrum, where if sources disagree on the position we synthesise them to say X to Y (eg. centre-right to right wing). It's also just intellectually bereft, there's no framework for establishing a party's position on the spectrum and scholars usually avoid using such terms/reductions (if they do, it's just a passing mention), so we end up relying on media sources. So much community time gets wasted on disputes about this parameter, idk whether we should have stricter rules (a la Template:Infobox military conflict's
|result= parameter) or just deprecate it entirely. Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 13:41, 3 October 2026 (UTC)replyallowing readers to identify [and make sense of] key facts at a glance. All the piped links will also add a lot of markup. This makes it just that much more cumbersome to edit the most bloated infoboxes. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 16:55, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Since shortly after the 2026 White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting, the wikipedia articles for that page, the Charlie Kirk page, Assassination of Charlie Kirk, and Attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania have all been unable to load on mobile, at least on my iphone. Whenever I open any of these four pages, it says "a problem occurred repeatedly" after being open for a couple seconds. I'm not sure what is causing this issue; I suspected it was length that was the problem, but Donald Trump's own wikipedia page loads just fine on mobile so I'm not sure. This issue persists whether logged out or in, and adblocker on or off. Unnamed anon (talk) 08:17, 13 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I am getting a lot of Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try saving your changes again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in
error messages, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to which edits they apply - any guidance? GiantSnowman 18:42, 19 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I am constantly getting the error "Sorry! We could not process your edit due to a loss of session data. Please try saving your changes again. If it still does not work, try logging out and logging back in.
" I have tried logging out and back in and nothing doing... Anyone seeing this issue? Any suggestions? Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 03:29, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Facepalm wow... Way for me to not read, at all.... Thanks ClaudineChionh! Zackmann (Talk to me/What I been doing) 03:41, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
some users lost their local session but not their auth.wikimedia.org sessionis exactly what happens to me in 99% of the cases. - The Bushranger One ping only 02:38, 25 September 2026 (UTC))reply
On the Recent Changes Page and Pending Changes page, I'm automatically logged out and then logged back in a few seconds. Is there an issue my account? Thanks. ~🌀Ampil 「💬 / 📝」 08:37, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I was editing as ~2026-50825-19 and upon undoing a seemingly hoax edit Wikipedia randomly created a new Temporary Account (this current one).
Is it normal behaviour for a new TA to be created even when you already have one assigned? ~2026-50785-44 (talk) 23:31, 20 September 2026 (UTC)reply
This is still occurring. I have been logged out 5 or so times today. sometimes while editing and sometimes not. S0091 (talk) 21:31, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
The latest run of Special:WantedCategories again features a small cluster of redlinks I cannot fix myself.
So could somebody with more knowledge and/or privilege in such matters clear these redlinks? Thanks. Bearcat (talk) 07:23, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Late to this but @Asukite, I think adding
// <nowiki>
before the first line of the script and
// </nowiki>
after the last line ought to solve that particular issue. Accessedgrant (Epicgenius mobile alt) (talk) 02:18, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
On Thursday this week, LLM Paste Check will be enabled here. It is an Edit check that will appear when someone pastes text into Wikipedia that has been copied directly from an external generative AI chatbot. It can be used to point them directly towards the local policy on AI use.
The initial implementation will activate when both of the following conditions are met:
Any edits that trigger an LLM Paste Check to be shown will apply an Edit tag to the revision (editcheck-llm-paste-shown), to enable community monitoring.
The wording shown in the description, and the default-link it uses, can and should be locally configured. The default wording and link can be found (after September 24) and overridden at MediaWiki:editcheck-copyvio-llm-description and MediaWiki:editcheck-copyvio-llm-policylink, and the defaults can be previewed at testwiki.
As with all edit checks, admins can configure who sees it (currently based on min/max editcounts) and where the Check is and is not shown. The default is showing it to all editors.
Feedback here or mw:Talk:Edit check is welcome and appreciated. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"llm-paste": {"extraNamespaces": {"draft": true}} (with appropriate commas) into the local json config (MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json). HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 02:25, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply
* in the config. Anything you set on it gets slotted in for all checks when we build the config (which for each check is the sum of: base defaults + check's defaults + all-check config + specific-check config + specific-rule config for textmatch).editcheck-llm-paste-shown without editcheck-llm-paste is the "this was a successful educational intervention" case. It means someone was shown the check, and decided to remove the content as a result. DLynch (WMF) (talk) 17:14, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
swift -e 'import Cocoa; if let d = NSPasteboard.general.data(forType: .html) { print(String(data: d, encoding: .utf8) ?? "Could not decode HTML") }'. I can provide more details by email or on Phab if that's helpful to WMF folks. Dw31415 (talk) 20:58, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
i don't know where else to put this but the "<math>" tag is incredibly hard to read when in dark mode. I don't know if this is the right place to put this but idk where else I would. I would prefer it be a readable white color instead of literally dark black blending in with the background. Caleb's World11 (talk) 17:59, 25 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Since September 26th, this article is using Template:excerpt in 3 of its sections. The excerpt template has ported over lead section content from the 3 other articles but the complete references did not follow. Right now there are 47 Harv errors that seemingly stand in the way of easy WP:Verifiability. Tracing the sources stops at the excerpt code. If a reader does happen to click on each individual "excerpt from" phrase, they are then taken to the original content and can possibly find the sources that way. Is there an easy/elegant way to perhaps fix these truncated referencing issues? It took me a while to figure out what was happening so I thought I'd ask here. - Shearonink (talk) 02:24, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Latest tech news from the Wikimedia technical community. Please tell other users about these changes. Not all changes will affect you. Translations are available.
Updates for editors
Draft: namespace. Feedback is welcome.{{CATEGORYSORT:TIMESTAMP}} and {{CATEGORYSORT:RTIMESTAMP}} are now available for use. They are able to change the default sorting of categories to be based on timestamp of categorization. 
View all 20 community-submitted tasks that were resolved last week. For example, the issue where Wikistats for Wikipedias was not reachable has now been fixed. Updates for technical contributors
Detailed code updates later this week: MediaWikiMeetings and events
Tech news prepared by Tech News writers and posted by bot • Contribute • Translate • Get help • Give feedback • Subscribe or unsubscribe.
MediaWiki message delivery 10:46, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
?cldsort=timestamp to the url works. — Qwerfjkltalk 17:03, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
i think actual web pages like "band" pages should have a strict "members" mentioned section with the actual band and song writers mentioned and any and all hired musicians a different section, hired musicians are just hired musicians and are not a contributor towards the band or it's self image or success what so ever.
Should be as follows:
Members
Past members
Hired members
Contributors/collaborations ~2026-52135-56 (talk) 14:19, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi, regarding the problem that many internet archive pdfs only show the first page on ios ipads and ios mobiles while displaying perfectly on Android. I asked Google AI about it and they said adding if_ to the archive url in the position shown below would solve the problem so that the pdf displays in full on ios and android and it seems to work. Here is an example: https://web.archive.org/web/20121123165203if_/http://go-ahead.com/~/media/Files/G/Go-Ahead/ir/presentations/archive_pres/1996pres/ar1996.pdf shows the pdf in full whereas https://web.archive.org/web/20121123165203/http://go-ahead.com/~/media/Files/G/Go-Ahead/ir/presentations/archive_pres/1996pres/ar1996.pdf only shows the first page on ios. Apologies if this is common knowledge, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 15:26, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
If I edit Special:Permalink/1377329084 in VE and click on the infobox, I get a You are currently editing a template and one or more pieces of connected content (wikitext and/or additional templates)
warning. Deleting the {{use dmy dates}} template (i.e. Special:Diff/1377329165) makes the warning go away. What's going on here? I've read the VE explanation about this but it doesn't seem to apply here. Have I just found a VE and/or parsoid bug?
I first noticed this in Chimpanzee and managed to get it down to a minimal case in my sandbox using the time-honored technique of just deleting stuff until the problem goes away :-) -- RoySmith (talk) 23:33, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
<p about="#mwt2" typeof="mw:Transclusion" class="mw-empty-elt" id="mwAg" data-mw='{"parts":[{"template":{"target":{"wt":"Use dmy dates","href":"./Template:Use_dmy_dates"},"params":{"date":{"wt":"March 2025"}},"i":0}},"\n",{"template":{"target":{"wt":"Speciesbox\n","href":"./Template:Speciesbox"},"params":{"status":{"wt":"EN"},"status_system":{"wt":"IUCN3.1"},"image":{"wt":"015 Chimpanzee at Kibale forest National Park Photo by Giles Laurent.jpg"}},"i":1}}]}'>
</p><table class="infobox biota" style="text-align: left; width: 200px; font-size: 100%" about="#mwt2">
<p> covers both the {{use dmy dates}} and the start of the {{Speciesbox}}. Probably that's why VE talks about connected content. Anomie⚔ 23:56, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I was viewing the project page for the village stocks, which has many external links to Wikipedia action logs and rdiffs. However, for some reason, the literal for these links is seemingly broken. Here is an example:
Expected: On 1 August 2005, Ed Poor, one of Wikipedia's most experienced editors, boldly decided to delete the entire VfD deletion process...
Actual result: On 1 August 2005, Ed Poor, one of Wikipedia's most experienced editors, boldly decided to wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=Wikipedia%3AVotes+for+deletion delete the entire VfD deletion process...
Please fix this bug as soon as possible. For those interested, I am currently using Google Chrome version 144.0.7559.262, on ChromeOS. AndyShow1000000 (talk) 12:27, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
https: is omitted in [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&type=delete&user=&page=Wikipedia%3AVotes+for+deletion delete] EpochFail only has one edit since 2023. PrimeHunter (talk) 15:48, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I was working on an infobox at my user sandbox User:Shocksingularity/sandbox and I've been having trouble getting it to work with parser functions. I've isolated the problem to between a few comment blocks I've already added. Could anyone help me?
(Just ignore the mass of curly brackets and the parameters under them, that will be fixed once I uncomment stuff (because some of the opening brackets are now inside comments). You can also ignore the giant wall of text that is data9 and anything before that, I left a large line break after it so it'll be easier to tell when to stop scrolling past.)
Thank you to anyone who can help! Shocksingularity (talk) 21:32, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi all! The Readers team is exploring creating a feature to allow readers to listen to Wikipedia articles using text-to-speech software, responding to m:Community Wishlist/W304 and user feedback we've received on the apps. This work is early-stage, so to begin we have developed a beta version that presents spoken article leads in the existing "For you" feed of the Android app. We would like to conduct a monthlong A/B test of this beta version to determine whether or not it boosts reader retention, which will inform our thinking about whether to invest in developing the feature further. We estimate that around 1.5% of Android app users viewing their feed in English will see the test.
You can read more about the planned feature at its project page, and about this experiment at the Phase 1 page. As always, we're happy to answer questions and we'd value your input. Does this seem like a useful feature? Does it raise any particular concerns we should have in mind? What would you like to see if we develop it further? Let us know either here (for the A/B test) or on the MediaWiki talk page (for broader thoughts). Cheers, Sdkb‑WMF talk 23:47, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Why are such things from way, way down on the wishlist () with only 3 supports after nearly two years, prioritized by the WMF? It seems as if there are plenty of more popular wishes to choose from, like "Show categories on mobile" which has 47 supports but is not being worked on apparently. Fram (talk) 16:19, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Why are such things from way, way down on the wishlist ([14]) with only 3 supports after nearly two years, prioritized by the WMF?I can speak to some of that. This task was prioritized during the previous iteration of the wishlist where WMF was treating the wishlist more as a idea dump to supplement their existing product direction dictated by the Annual Plan rather than a a "wishlist". I think both multiple folks have raised concerns about this kind of prioritization during the discussion surrounding the disbanding of the Community Tech team (including this particular wish) which has led to the Foundation hiring a new manager for the Community Wishlist process from the community and committing to revamping the process to be similar to the "old" wishlist where wishes were prioritized based on votes. Sohom (talk) 16:36, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Special:WantedPages is full of pages that supposedly have tens of thousands of incoming links. But none of these links seem to actually exist, or have ever existed. This has been the case for as long as I've been aware of the list, and it makes the list essentially useless. What is happening? –CopperyMarrow15 (talk · edits) 09:36, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Twice now today I have had the number beside the bell icon turn red, and when I click on it no new notification shows up and I cannot find where it could've come from, even on other wikis. Not sure if this is a known issue but it happens periodically. Eoline 17:36, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Aren't categories supposed to show up in mobile? One other day I was using my phone to scroll through Wikipedia when i tried to find the categories and I could not find them... FoxOutOfRange 18:21, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
The fact that the editing toolbar (2010 wikitext editor) now overrides the Ctrl+E (on Windows) keyboard shortcut, which is the default shortcut key for web search on most browsers, for the insertion of <math display="inline"></math> is an annoyance that I'm having trouble getting used to working around. (The other browser web search shortcut, Ctrl+K, brings up the insert link dialog box.) Disabling access keys in user preferences does not disable these keystrokes; only disabling the editing toolbar does.
I know I can get the same thing by using Ctrl+L or Alt+D to go to the address bar and then type ? to trigger web search, but that's two extra keystrokes, and it's an ingrained habit that will take a lot of effort to relearn, which users shouldn't be forced to do. Is there a way to disable these shortcuts without losing access to the Reftoolbar? Is it a local setting or something built into MediaWiki? --Paul_012 (talk) 19:40, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
<math>...</math> shortcut for example used to be Ctrl+m, but that conflicted with mw:Extension:UniversalLanguageSelector. I have made a note at phab:T95148 (which might replace the existing toolbar in the coming months) to make keyboard shortcuts configurable. — MusikAnimal talk 21:52, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
I had a question about SVG appearance in dark mode. Suppose you go to the article English-speaking world on a PC displaying Wikipedia in dark mode. The image File:English language distribution.svg appears with what appears to be light blue for "majority native speakers" and dark blue for "official or administrative language...". Then, when you go to the Wikipedia image page for that image, it looks reversed and the oceans are now colored white. Why is that? And why do the oceans appear white in the image page, but dark (or transparent) in articlespace? -- Veggies (talk) 20:37, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Hello, please remove that weird NBSP in the File history section, for example, see this file: File:2026 PanAm Aquatics U19 Water Polo Championships logo.png. There is a non-breaking space between "T." and "(talk)", causing my nickname to be split across two lines. Thanks, Maiō T. (talk) 22:28, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
<td><span class="ext-checkuser-userinfocard-button-wrapper"><button type="button" aria-label="Open user info card" aria-haspopover="dialog" class="ext-checkuser-userinfocard-button cdx-button cdx-button--action-default cdx-button--weight-quiet cdx-button--icon-only" data-username="Maiō T."><span class="cdx-button__icon ext-checkuser-userinfocard-button__icon ext-checkuser-userinfocard-button__icon--userAvatar"></span></button><a href="/wiki/User:Mai%C5%8D_T." class="mw-userlink" title="User:Maiō T."><bdi>Maiō T.</bdi></a></span><span style="white-space: nowrap;"> <span class="mw-usertoollinks">(<a href="/wiki/User_talk:Mai%C5%8D_T." class="mw-usertoollinks-talk" title="User talk:Maiō T.">talk</a> | <a href="/wiki/Special:Contributions/Mai%C5%8D_T." class="mw-usertoollinks-contribs" title="Special:Contributions/Maiō T.">contribs</a>)</span></span></td>
<span style="white-space: nowrap;"> ...</span> so the effect is the same. Maybe the space should be moved outside that. PrimeHunter (talk) 23:14, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
There is a non-breaking space between "T." and "(talk)", causing my nickname to be split across two lines.That would not be caused by an nbsp; an nbsp would cause the T. and (talk to stick together, not wrap. If their username is being split across two lines (Maiō on one line, T. on the next line), then the fix for that would be to add a nowrap style around the username, I think, perhaps in the bdi tag. Adding nowrap to text of unpredictable length can cause other problems, though. User names can be long (e.g. Vanished user ewfisn2348tui2f8n2fio2utjfeoi210r39jf, 52 characters, is in the top 3,000 users by number of edits); if they are nowrapped, tables might flow off of the page when they would otherwise fit. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:37, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
<span style="white-space: nowrap;">...</span> instead of before it. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:44, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi,<br>
I prefer the recovery codes to a third party authentication app.
Revenue Canada gives a passcode grid somewhat similar to the recovery codes. The grid doesn't expire after eight authentications. Is a passcode grid feasible for Wikimedia?
Thanks, ... PeterEasthope (talk) 03:40, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
A requested move at the talk page of {{Rfc}} found consensus to move to {{Request for comment}} in February 2022. However, implementation quickly stalled, because of needed updates to bots to make sure the move would go smoothly. Is there any future where this template is moved? Pinging @Headbomb, @Hellknowz, @kanashimi, and @Legoktm who operate bots which the template is relevant to. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 03:45, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
On 25 September 2026, someone uploaded a version of File:Scene (2026 film).jpg in high res, but the bot reduced it with the image displaying an older poster looking distorted. Clear cache attempts do not render the latest poster. Not just this, I see this in a lot of posters now. What to do? Kailash29792 (talk) 04:34, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
What links here appears to have an error where its including pages that do not seem to link to the page, such as showing Mister Venezuela under what links here for Mister International, despite not appearing to have a link. Does anyone know why/how to avoid it? Thanks, PeriodicEditor (talk) 11:05, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Should German nobiliary titles inside names be clarified with the footnote text provided by {{German title}} or with the template User:Joe vom Titan/German title hatnote or another way? Feel free to suggest changes to either template, regarding the text or the template parameters. If it is to be a footnote, there's also the question whether to place it right after the title, after the name or at the end of the sentence. Joe vom Titan (talk) 18:38, 24 August 2026 (UTC)reply
This RfC follows a discussion at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#Footnote in the middle of bold name?. Joe vom Titan (talk) 18:44, 24 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Some time ago I had exactly same problem with Dutch surnames. In one bio I saw the name that contained 'bij' or something like that. I remember I met a strong resistance against my request for clarification. After some time I learned a magic mystery word tussenvoegsel and started using it in {{surname}} pages, such as Ten Bos (which is not the same as 10 Bos :-) --Altenmann >talk 19:05, 24 August 2026 (UTC)reply
As proposer, I'm all for the new hatnote. It has several of advantages. Footnote placement is awkward: The footnote would belong right after the title but that would cut up the name which inhibits the reading flow. The new hatnote is brief and focuses on what's important. It also has the in1919= parameter to distinguish the legal situation before 1919 (which doesn't require explanation) from those after 1919 in Austria and Germany (with the corresponding explanations). Joe vom Titan (talk) 19:11, 24 August 2026 (UTC)reply
{{User:Joe vom Titan/German title hatnote|Reichsfreiherr|Herzog|in1919=de}}, rendered as Karl Ernst Ritter[a] von Baer Edler[b] von Huthorn (Russian: Карл Макси́мович Бэр; 28 February [O.S. 17 February] 1792 – 28 November [O.S. 16 November] 1876) was a ...That's an awful lot to get through before finding out what sort of notable person he is and it yields two nearly identical footnotes in the article. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 23:51, 25 August 2026 (UTC)reply
In 2007, Graf von Stauffenberg voiced concerns about the film Valkyrie …We would not repeatedly refer to someone as
President Jonesor
Countess Smithin prose. We should treat it as part of the name or not. If it requires any explanation at all—via any combination of templates, prose, and wikilinks—I would think this should occur once or at most twice. E.g., in the lead and in an 'Early life' or similar section where the family of origin is discussed. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 17:57, 9 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Graf von Stuaffenbergis part of an odd pattern of overusing and drawing maximal attention to these names and titles in several of these articles. I've cleaned up a few. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 02:47, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Notes
Wikipedia has a "newcomer tasks" feature which is designed to "help newcomers make their first successful edits", to hopefully eventually convert some of them to productive editors. To that end, an automated process (i.e. bot) suggests a change, and the new human editor can with a few clicks submit the proposed edit.
See Wikipedia:Growth Team features#Newcomer tasks, mw:Help:Growth/Tools/Suggested edits.
One of these types of edits is a "link suggestion", which seems to work by finding words or phrases that are article titles and appear exactly within some other article's text, and then proposing to the newcomer editor that the word or phrase should be a wikilink.
This feature has been causing continuous headaches to editors of mathematics related articles (I don't have insight about other topics), because a large proportion of the suggested links are either superfluous, mildly out of context, or completely wrong, and even when the links are okay, they are usually of only very marginal benefit. Checking up on every link and reverting the significant proportion of incorrect ones is wasting the time, attention, and good will of experienced editors, and I expect the many reverts are probably also discouraging for newcomers who were just trying to help.
The superfluous links occur where, for example, an elementary jargon word appears incidentally deep into an article about an advanced niche topic. Linking such terms is not helpful to the audience of such articles, as anyone who can make sense of the subject at all is going to have years or decades of familiarity with the basic terms, and the topic of the term per se is not really relevant in context – this is comparable to linking common words in other kinds of articles (say, "apple" or "nothing" or "person"), cf. MOS:OVERLINK. But often the links are outright incorrect, because a phrase which is a concrete jargon term in one context can also be used as separate words with a different meaning in a different context (for example, the phrase "generalized polygon inequality" was turned into "generalized polygon inequality", but this is wrong, the thing being generalized in this case is the inequality, not the polygons).
The basic problem is that the newcomers making these edits do not understand either the text of the article they are editing or the meaning of the term they are wikilinking, and therefore don't (can't) carefully evaluate whether the link is appropriate. I don't know what the link suggestions feature says to the editors using it, but in practice they seem to trust that the suggestions are proper and correct, rather than doing any human checking. So newcomers are basically being turned into a WP:MEATBOT proxy for a rogue automated process.
Can we entirely turn off the link suggestion feature for mathematics related articles and/or links? (As a basic heuristic, we could blacklist any article belonging to the mathematics wikiproject.) I think it's causing more trouble than whatever benefit it is supposed to bring. –jacobolus (t) 16:36, 29 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Note: There is an ongoing discussion about newcomer tasks and suggested links in general at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Newcomer tasks and there was a very recent proposal to get rid of suggested links entirely at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 231#We need to get rid of the "suggested links" tool. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 18:38, 29 August 2026 (UTC)reply
your own early edits?
The problem is, in fact, "people".This is because of the Rayleigh-Jeans law, which states that at frequencies much lower than the peak frequency of a black-body radiator, spectral power is inversely proportional to the fourth power of the wavelength.The wikilink says nothing remotely relevant to this text; if people are curious about why the quantity
appears in this equation, they are much better off reading Rayleigh-Jeans law. The link to quadratic equation far down the article Pythagorean triple is also completely inappropriate; the article is full of polynomial equations, many of them quadratic, and the use of the term here is completely incidental; nothing at the wikilink is directly relevant in context – in particular, the article at quadratic equation is entirely focused on equations of one variable, but the equation being described in the relevant sentence of Pythagorean triple has 4 variables.What makes you believe that there could be "hundreds" of "errors" in those articles, when only a total of 82 were reverted during the entire first six months of the year?
"words and terms understood by most readers in context are usually not linked". What counts as "understood by most readers" depends on the context of the article; for technical sub-sections deep into specialized mathematical articles the "most readers" in question are a much smaller group than generic readers of Wikipedia articles about topics of broad interest, so how to apply this style guideline is a matter of judgment by Wikipedians working on topical articles. MOS:UNDERLINK says that what should be linked is: (1)
"Relevant connections to the subject of another article that help readers understand the article more fully", (2)
"Articles with relevant information", and (3)
"Articles explaining words of technical terms, jargon or slang expressions or phrases", and (4)
"Proper names". None of these is really applicable to the links I reverted. The reason I reverted these links is because the linked articles do not contain information substantially relevant to the context. I propose WT:WPM as a place to gauge editor consensus because it's a place where you are likely to find Wikipedians who care at all about these topics, would be willing to take a look, can make easy sense of the wikilinked article and the context where the link was added, and can apply competent judgment about whether the link is relevant and appropriate. If you can find a different way to evaluate consensus among "authors and maintainers of math-related Wikipedia articles" (which you seem to think is a distinct group from WP:WPM), then suggest away. –jacobolus (t) 21:20, 5 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"In the personal opinion of other editors, those links are appropriate."– Which other editors are we talking about? Whichever newcomer supported adding these machine-generated links probably gave the matter only cursory consideration, and the same was presumably true for you when you offered them as examples.
"includes those who don't know a lot about math"– Why do you want editors who "don't know about math" to be judging the relevance of wikilinks buried deep in technical sections of math articles? They aren't the target audience as readers, don't care about the topic, and often can't make sense of either the wikilinked article or the context where the link is added. –jacobolus (t) 17:00, 6 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Why should the "easy entry point" for a human be enacting a decision made by a machine process?Well, the Growth Team features/Newcomer tasks could help clear the backlog of articles that are tagged with CN ("add a citation") or "needs copy edit"/"promotional?" ("revise tone")
The feature seems to work well with Military History articles. I have reviewed a score of them and only once found an inappropriate link. I realise that readers frequently don't follow the links - maybe many of them don't even realise that they exist - but getting newcomers to realise that they can edit the pages is an important step. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 05:18, 4 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I'm late to the party, but I feel that worrying about the quality of links in maths articles is a bit like worrying about whether your toenail varnish is the right shade when you've just broken your leg. This is an area of Wikipedia rife with hopelessly over-complex articles that make no attempt to put the subject in encyclopedic context, and instead look like they were produced by a grad student wanting to demonstrate that they know more about the itty-bitty details of their subject than anyone else (and that they can format equations more prettily). The maths articles are in dire need of people who can differentiate between a text book, a primary publication, and an encyclopedia, and who can write for an intelligent non-expert. Elemimele (talk) 16:47, 9 September 2026 (UTC)reply
| Type | Raw count |
|---|---|
| Organic edits | 751 |
| Newcomer task | 110 |
| Type | Raw count |
|---|---|
| Organic reverts | 87(12%) |
| Task reverts | 11(10%) |
What could be "confusing" about a link to Quadratic equation in a sentence that mentions that exact type of equation?
In mathematics, a quadratic equation (from Latin quadratus 'square') is an equation that can be rearranged in standard form as
where the variable
represents an unknown number, and a, b, and c represent known numbers, where a ≠ 0.
Descartes' theorem states that the bends of the four circles,
which are the curvatures of the circles, apart from a minus sign factor for the outer circle, satisfy the quadratic equation
"an equation that can be rearranged in standard form asSo if someone clicks this wikilink, they will get to a page that doesn't even mention the type of equation being discussed at the context where the link is. If someone managed to get to that point in the article without knowing what a quadratic equation was, clicking this link would make them more confused than before they clicked it.."
The more I look at this discussion the more I believe that it has turned into a place to complain and rant about this particular feature rather than actually have productive discussion, ie: "should add a link be disabled on math articles?" (appropriate responses being "yes" and "no") Looking at WT:WPMATH, it seems that discussion on the newcomer tasks seems to only involve linking to if and only if, which to me screams out whataboutism. I don't really get jacobolus's point that "(WhatamIdoing)'s numbers are not relevant". From WhatamIdoing's bar chart (comment on 02:25, 11 Sept), edits made by the "add a link" newcomer task only make up a small fraction of total edits, so claiming that the newcomer task is disproportionately soaking up WPMATH's time and effort is... faulty. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 07:33, 11 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Can't you see why a newbie who added a superfluous link to (e.g.) If and only if might have thought it was appropriate
I just don't like cleaning up after bots."Unreasonably large" is any amount that the community (NB: not me) will accept as unreasonable.→ What community? On Wikipedia, "the community" cannot mean something other than "people who care enough to take part in the discussion".
"Almost always nonsensical" has been proven wrong.→ My wording was indeed too strong — I should have said "Almost always useless, sometimes plain wrong". "Usually kept after review by experienced editors" might be true (although, as I've already explained, even when I remove the added links, I typically don't undo these edits so as not to WP:BITE; so I'm not sure how you're quantifying this), but it's irrelevant here. I can re-explain why if needed — but I don't think it is?
I never said that I should decide how you should spend your time.→ Yes, you kinda did, fact. Not directly and not necessarily to me. But you did take a cheap jab at jacobolus on that theme by saying
How many hours have you spent trying to convince me that these edits are a burden on your time? How many months' or years' worth of edits could you have reviewed during those hours?And, if I remember correctly, you also wrote some comment (which I won't bother trying to find) that was a cheap jab at the expertise of math editors, because it essentially said "I'd be surprised if so many experts had time to do that"; as a chargé de recherche, it's hard for me not to understand this as saying I should have better things to do (which I have, in fact). Finally your whole rhetoric is build around the idea that "it shouldn't take that long" (implicitly meaning that if it does take me that long, I'm not being efficient, i.e. not using my time optimally).
I am saying that if you want to prevent people from editing "your" articles, then you will have to convince the community (NB: not me) that this tool places an unreasonable burden on whoever reviews these edits.→ First, Don't try to "straw man me" into WP:OWN. I've never said anything that should suggest I think I have some sort of author rights on math articles; and no one here is trying to prevent anyone from editing math articles. The only goal is fix a problem — namely that, in the context of math articles, the link suggestions features is at best useless and at worst counter-productive. Understanding this requires more than just making amateurish data analysis; it requires actually looking at several examples of links being added to articles about subjects one understands; one could also argue that it requires some experience teaching and/or writing math at the level of the article in question (which your
I don't find it confusing, and I think that readers will expect the link to take them to the article that it would take them toreply to jacobolus' point about the link to Quadratic equation suggests you don't have).
then you will have to convince the community (NB: not me), but exchanging with "the community" is exactly why jacobolus started this discussion; and you'll notice that you are the only person who keeps asking for evidence that link suggestions are annoying to math editors. Apart from you (and jacobolus and I), most people seem to have stopped caring. So pray enlighten me — who exactly in
will I have to convince, and where do I start? Should I start a RfC? And how will I know that I've convinced the community, in case the RfC simply dies out because not enough editors care?"it looks like no one opposes the idea of trying it, but that we're really hesitant about turning it on for all new users at once."
"Anyway there doesn't seem to be much engagement with this topic, so for the purpose of establishing consensus, I'll say Sure, let's turn it on and give it a go. It seems like it should be easy enough to turn it back off if the newcomer links become too high maintenance."
"terrible idea, lack of wikilinks isnt a serious issue for wikipedia and doesnt require a feature. all this will do is further encourage noob editors to add unneeded wikilinks"
"I like the idea of experimenting with this, but I also hope this will not be so hardened that we can't possibly ever decide to stop it."
"In general, this looks like a useful feature. [...] What I don't like about the feature is that it does not seem to be learning anything from our feedback."
"to specifically reduce the addition of links by about 40–50%"– that sounds great. Let's do that please. –jacobolus (t) 15:56, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
non-autoconfirmed editors won't get pinged if you revert them, so reverting those edits doesn't WP:BITE anyone (unless the reverter posts a note on the newbie's talk page)→ or unless the editor comes back to see the article they have edited... you know — something many people who are actually here to build and encyclopedia could do. Of course, some new editors will never come back to see how their edits fared (e.g, those editors who abuse the link suggestions feature to artificially increase their edit counts); but it does seem far-fetched to say that people who want to learn to contribute might do that — I know I did and still do.
it's not clear to me that adding these links constitutes making articles "worse"→ if that is so, then it presumably is because you do not understand these articles: it's a fact — not an opinion — that a link such as this one (which you counted as a "good link", with your reversion-rate metric) makes the article worse.
A rank-size distribution is not a probability distribution or cumulative distribution function. Rather, it is a discrete form of a quantile function (inverse cumulative distribution) in reverse order, giving the size of the element at a given rank.
If a normal city distribution pattern is expected to follow the rank-size rule (i.e. if the rank-size principle correlates with central place theory), then it suggests that those countries or regions with distributions that do not follow the rule have experienced some conditions that have altered the normal distribution pattern.
especially if I'm just glancing at it [...] I didn't when looking at that diff
what would really improve that article isn't reverting that link, but changing the words so that it says "the typical distribution pattern", instead of "the normal distribution pattern".→ That is absurd: you are suggesting that, because of mistakes of that bot, I should spend time looking for synonyms of words in perfectly fine sentence, and then make sure the resulting syntagm does not happen to correspond to another existing concept — for all you know, "typical distribution" could refer to a specific mathematical concept.
It's not "because of mistakes of that bot". It's because the mistake made by a human showed us that this sentence isn't as clear as it could be, and when we find problems, we should fix them.→ You keep repeating this over and over, and we keep telling you that we disagree. Who had the idea to add that link? The bot. Who "typed" the edit? The bot. So the bot made the mistake — and a human approved it (most likely because they didn't do the required work to check that link is OK, not because they did it and actively made a mistake in the process).
That whole long paragraph is uncited, so we unfortunately can't check what language is used by the source(s)→ See, that innocent-looking comment is yet another indication to me that you have no idea what it means to write a math article here. We can't just "say what the sources say" in math articles, because once specificity of math is that it works with local definitions and local notation. Words such as distribution or normal, and even symbols like "
" have completely different meanings depending on the context. What one author refers to as "blablah" might be for them, 
for someone else, and 
for me. What he denotes by 
might actually correspond to 
or even 
in another source. As a result, mechanically quoting the sources without understanding them simply does not work in math: you need some understanding of what's going on to be able to edit an article, and you should be able not to stick with the formalism and wording use in the original source.I would be more comfortable doing so if there was a source in that paragraph, so that I would have more information than just a Wikipedia editor's assertion that when this math article says normal distribution, it's not talking about the Normal distribution→ At this point, it simply no longer is possible for me to assume that you are engaging in the conversation in good-faith: there are too many elements pointing to the fact that you are just trying to have the last word by using every trick in the book — letter vs spirit and what not. So please: have the last word and enjoy it. Malparti (talk) 16:53, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I believe Category:Mathematics could be added to the exclusion list for Add a Link task.[...] An English Wikipedia admin can update the "Articles containing categories defined here will not be shown to users as tasks for this task type" field via Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits if it seems like there is community agreement that link suggestions on Mathematics articles are particularly problematic.
So maybe it's premature to start an RfC when we don't know what to propose?→ agreed; unfortunately I'm not as knowledgeable as you regarding these technicalities, so I wouldn't know what a good solution is. Malparti (talk) 16:16, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
A large part of the problem could be addressed if, rather than opting individual articles out of adding links to them, we could opt individual articles out as targets of the added links. Specifically, if and only if is almost always a bad target and should be opted out. This might require some software change on the newcomer task side of things; it's not obvious to me how to implement it with the current tools. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:59, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Fifteen years ago, we decided to change the label of the "Discussion" button to "Talk". Should we change it back to the default label? 16:03, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
"There is no consensus one way or the other regarding editing talk page archives for any other reason, such as removing a nonsense post that was not reverted prior to archiving ... This close should not be construed as limiting removal of content from archives for other policy-based reasons, such as the legitimate use of oversight or revision deletion, nor should it be construed as affecting the reversion of vandalism to archives, which I don't believe was ever really in question here"(from the RfC close) as meaning
"you aren't allowed to clean it up anymore", or that there is any such thing as
"enshrined untouchable vandalism". Levivich (talk) 07:24, 5 September 2026 (UTC)reply
No, There's Not (There's Just Not)then you either haven't read or haven't understood the opposing viewpoints. While there are some people who are disagreeing that the problem is a significant as proponents for change claim, the more substantive objection is best summed up as "Changing "Talk" to "Discussion" will not solve the chatbot problem, but it will cause other problems". Thryduulf (talk) 21:23, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
I'm confused. Very Polite Person has always supported this proposal from the start, saying it's aNo per ... Very Polite Person below.
very good idea. You're the first person to oppose. FaviFake (talk) 22:59, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
talkmight suggest that the Talk page is for discussing the subject of articles,
discussionisn't better in this regard. Of course, if the proposer has a better idea or wishes to clarify, I am open to changing this vote. --ABx11 (she/they) 00:17, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
Talkand
Discussare synonyms, so I'm not seeing the tangible benefit. --ABx11 (she/they) 00:44, 4 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Fiddling with labels won't help people who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia. Having a discussion button that leads to talk is confusingTo the extent that there may be a problem (not sure of that), this isn't going to provide an answer IMO. All websites have their particularities and at least WP doesn't periodically reframe its appearance for trivial reasons. Pincrete (talk) 07:50, 4 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Concerns of "talk" implying a chatbot is IMHO weird, because... how?
Wikipedia pages it says "Project page", in MediaWiki it says "Interface page", User says "User page" etc. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:08, 13 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Done, and i also added a side-by-side image comparison for clarity FaviFake (talk) 22:52, 3 September 2026 (UTC)replyStructural plainand a comment of
structural plain). They read like someone trying to search for specific information or navigate to a different article, where they were re-entering the term a second time as a comment in order to make the "Add topic" submit button become clickable. I think some kind of filter was added to stop very short new-thread comments from being posted?
Is there empirical evidence supporting either the contention that the current "Talk" label is confusing for some new editors or the contention that changing the label to "Discussion" would be confusing? I'm not comfortable making assumptions and this is something that is testable. ElKevbo (talk) 16:48, 7 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Courtesy pings: Yesterday, all my dreams..., HierophantOfOmens, Very Polite Person, Blueboar, Kowal2701, BilledMammal, oknazevad, Pppery, Johnuniq, Pincrete, Kovcszaln6, Jahaza, Anomie, Maddy from Celeste, ~2026-47946-04, BD2412, ChipmunkdavisYou are being pinged because you commented on this proposal before the suggestion to change the label from "Talk" to "Talk page" was made. You may wish to comment or amend your existing !vote to specify whether you prefer this alternative compared to the one proposed initially. FaviFake (talk) 22:32, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
no substantive objection. Most editors will barely notice the change I suspect. Pincrete (talk) 05:28, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
adding "page" [doesn't clarify] anything for the confusedkeeps being brought up, so I'll revisit my original reasons in light of the new proposal:
If you compare "Talk!" to "Talk page!", it becomes obvious that the former is more misleading than the other on this front.More and more of our readers are assuming that the "Talk!" button on our articles takes them to an AI chatbot.
— User:FaviFake 20:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
Nobody would ever expect a button that says "Talk page" to read the page aloud for them. The same can't be said about "talk".users are mistaking it for text-to-speech. Most online news articles nowadays have a button that reads the article aloud for them.
— User:FaviFake 20:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
Just like "discussion", "talk page" is not an imperative verb. "Talk", on the other hand, is.The upsides are basically the same, if slightly less effective than "discussion". FaviFake (talk) 15:33, 3 October 2026 (UTC)replyenwiki is the largest and typically attracts more non-native speakers. "Talk!" is more recognizable than "discussion" and it's also an imperative verb.
— User:FaviFake 20:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
multiple steps of going to the talk page. I'm just trying to make the first and most important step less misleading. Not everyone who clicks "Talk" without knowing what it does ends up completing every step; they might just think "Huh, i must've clicked the wrong button", and go back to the article. We can help those people too. FaviFake (talk) 20:35, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Should we pin unanswered edit requests so they don't go into the archives? The reasoning is that there are quite a few unanswered edit requests that just go straight into the archive with no one responding. (example 1, example 2 (nine of them!), sort of example 3) AlphaBetaDeltaLambda(αβδλ)talk 18:05, 13 September 2026 (UTC)reply
|answered=yes is entered. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 18:13, 13 September 2026 (UTC)reply
|answered=expired or with a separate parameter and the displayed text could make it clear what the status is. I wouldn't automatically archive them but would let the workings of the talks page handle that. Expired edit requests don't need to be archived any faster than other posts on the same talk page that get no response. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 14:50, 17 September 2026 (UTC)reply
it can take anywhere from a day to several months for an edit request to be acted uponalthough most of the longer timelines are for COI requests. If non-COI requests are regularly taking >3 months to get any response, that's not great. Of course the requesting editor is supposed to take some responsibility to appropriately move the request forward and if they've moved on in that time then there's little sense in leaving the open request in the backlog. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 16:13, 17 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi all I’m posting this on behalf of Booksmurf, Doc_James and myself. We would like to try and get a consensus on whether to enable iframes from Our World in Data, specifically allowing MDWiki:WikiProjectMed:OWID_popup to be run on English Wikipedia. showing a static image from Commons which becomes an interactive graph once clicked on and a reader agrees to the consent pop up. Below we have put together a summary of the background information but in short the system has passed a security review from the WMF and is currently being used on Basque and Spanish Wikipedia. Just to make clear, this isn’t a discussion on using iFrames from any source, only from Our World in Data.
Our World in Data is a project run by the UK charity Global Change Data Lab, which is attached to the Oxford Martin Programme on Global Development at the University of Oxford, They produce over 2,000 interactive charts and data tools on a very wide range of topics under CC BY-SA licenses. They collate data from the UN, governments, and other reliable sources. Several people within the community, affiliates and WMF, have connections with the OWID team. In addition the Head of Engineering at Our World in Data took part in the last discussion about this topic (links below).
Below we provide examples of the kinds of graphics OWID produces. These graphics were created using the current, more difficult process, which can only visualise some kinds of graphic OWID produces. The iframes however allow using many types of interactive content that the all Commons approach does not support. there are two options for what to display:
Some examples of the kinds of graphics that currently can’t be shown using the older method but could be shown using this proposed method are shown here on the Wikiproject Med Wiki.
There have been three previous discussions on the English Village Pump, none of which reached consensus but a lot of technical issues were discussed and resolved.
There was consensus that the tool would be very useful for showing visualisations of data. Editors and affiliates who work with external data-holding organisations (UN agencies, governments, NGOs) noted that the existing options for getting institutional data onto Wikipedia ( manually uploading static images to Commons, or attempting to route data through Wikidata) do not scale and are error-prone.
There was consensus that the tool would be very useful for showing visualisations of data — and the case for it is stronger than a simple feature request. A few things make this approach powerful rather than just convenient:
Put together: this is a capability the community has wanted, it comes at very low build/maintenance cost to Wikipedia, and the usual reason to be cautious about embedding someone else's content doesn't really apply here, because OWID isn't "a third party" in the open-ended sense — it's a defined, agreed-upon partner.
WMF security assessed the overall security risk as low.
The main concerns raised in the August 2025 discussion centred on two related issues:
The mitigations put in place, and discussed by the community, include:
Thanks for your time
John Cummings (talk) 16:04, 16 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Before this opportunity there were three options for sharing data visualisations and none worked very well at all and basically weren’t scalable:
If this is approved I would like to spend time on improving the documentation and encouraging UN agencies to make sure their data is up to date in OWID
Thanks again
John Cummings (talk) 16:07, 16 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Oppose. Have to say this every time this up: I am not interested in giving up our presentational autonomy to OWID. The information we share must be something we can change locally (or within our sphere of influence). OWID is not.
And again, please ensure this kind of request is advertised at a place where people don't just care about bugs and misbehaviors. It is exceedingly obnoxious that it keeps coming up at VPT, which is a place for technical problems, and not at WP:VPR. Izno (talk) 16:10, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
|
|
Should a new move protection level be created, which only allows page movers and administrators to move pages affected by it? 05:31, 29 September 2026 (UTC)
Currently there is no in-between between sysop and XC move protection, meaning that in the case of controversial topics (e.g. my earlier close of President Donald J. Trump International Airport) us page movers have to go through RM/TR, despite the fact that the right signifies that the community (presumably) trust us enough to enact these moves ourself. So my proposal is that a new move protection level, which allows only users with the extendedmove user right to move, be added, and add this user right to the sysop and extendedmover user groups. I can make the patch if there is consensus.
(Pinging @Skarmory, who proposed the idea on Discord.) msk 00:59, 25 September 2026 (UTC)reply
'enwiki' => [ '', 'autoconfirmed', 'extendedconfirmed', 'templateeditor', 'sysop' ], so unless you have another location for more fine-grained tuning in mind, I don't think it can be technically restricted from being used as an edit protection level (nor do I think we really need to, I think we can just trust that admins wouldn't use it for something it's not designed for). EggRoll97 (talk) 05:40, 26 September 2026 (UTC)reply
investigateᛅ 16:33, 28 September 2026 (UTC)replyinvestigateᛅ 18:02, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
where the reason isn't a move war, I would actually say page-mover-protection should be the default for move wars if created, as the main idea of the page mover group is that it is
experienced and trusted users who regularly move pages and demonstrate familiarity with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines regarding page moving and naming, which is a quote directly from the page mover policy. EggRoll97 (talk) 04:35, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
investigateᛅ 02:49, 30 September 2026 (UTC)replyShould a new move protection level be created, which only allows page movers and administrators to move it?I tried to keep the intent of the original, while maintaining neutrality. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 02:11, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
extended confirmed is a poor proxy for trust when it comes to page moves. We should address that issue instead.
investigateᛅ 22:04, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
investigateᛅ 01:29, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply(Starting a separate section for this.) If this was implemented, what would it be called? Would it be called "move protection", and the sysop protection called something like "full move protection"? Or would it possibly be a level-2/level-2 thing? Input would be appreciated, especially if this became an RfC or something. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 22:20, 26 September 2026 (UTC)reply
extendedmover it would go that this would be called extendedmove technically; we can rename sysop move protection to you your suggestion, or just deprecate standalone "sysop move protection" as a concept entirely (we don't call fully protected pages "move protected") msk 22:28, 26 September 2026 (UTC)replyinvestigateᛅ 05:12, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
investigateᛅ 08:24, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Looking at the past month of requests at WP:RMTR, I see just seven:
The seventh I cant list. Overall, maybe there will be one hundred moves per year that will be done by page movers instead of admins; I'm not convinced that this labor saving is worth the cost in development time. (I'll add support for RMTR into Move+ some time, which should reduce the labor cost further - I'll also in the nearer future change RM to say whether it is listing a move in the admin section or the standard section, to make it easier to review this in the future) BilledMammal (talk) 03:52, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
| Month | Moves | Edits |
|---|---|---|
| September 2026 | 24 | 2781 |
| August 2026 | 40 | 3540 |
| July 2026 | 31 | 3685 |
| June 2026 | 30 | 3260 |
| May 2026 | 21 | 2950 |
| April 2026 | 32 | 3315 |
| March 2026 | 71 | 3205 |
| February 2026 | 48 | 2748 |
| January 2026 | 47 | 3288 |
| December 2025 | 87 | 3197 |
| November 2025 | 31 | 3285 |
| October 2025 | 13 | 4094 |
| September 2025 | 37 | 3439 |
| August 2025 | 30 | 3975 |
| July 2025 | 54 | 3057 |
| June 2025 | 38 | 2867 |
| May 2025 | 41 | 3453 |
| April 2025 | 28 | 2575 |
| March 2025 | 32 | 3125 |
| February 2025 | 41 | 3108 |
| January 2025 | 77 | 3865 |
| December 2024 | 23 | 3051 |
| November 2024 | 40 | 2873 |
| October 2024 | 22 | 3430 |
| September 2024 | 45 | 3065 |
| August 2024 | 101 | 3112 |
| July 2024 | 65 | 3105 |
| June 2024 | 26 | 2834 |
| May 2024 | 61 | 2946 |
| April 2024 | 35 | 2860 |
| March 2024 | 43 | 3442 |
| February 2024 | 13 | 3257 |
| January 2024 | 29 | 3304 |
| December 2023 | 30 | 3196 |
| November 2023 | 16 | 2707 |
| October 2023 | 36 | 3149 |
investigateᛅ 05:15, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
investigateᛅ 05:20, 29 September 2026 (UTC)replyThe following proposal was originally made by IrisChronomia here.
Recently, WP:LTA/SB1 has taken the tactic of sending mass pings after being blocked. However, it currently takes a while to stop them, because we have to manually alert the blocking admin or go to ANI to get TPA revoked, which leaves enough time for >20 pings to come out. AIV would be ideal, but if the user being reported is blocked, the bot auto-reverts.
Therefore, I would like to propose creating a new section of AIV for requesting revocation of TPA and email, where the bots don't auto remove after some time
. (Perhaps a new heading below User-reported would work.) 7amiþ reform · solidarity · 💬 · 📊 23:09, 25 September 2026 (UTC)reply
7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 00:31, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply/usr/bin/owuh $ (💬 | she/they) 04:38, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply/usr/bin/owuh $ (💬 | she/they) 21:40, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Done. Huggle, Twinkle, and Ultraviolet alerted on talk page. Also pinging TonySt (Interceptor), Awesome Aasim (rcpatrol), Ingenuity (AntiVandal), and LuniZunie (WikiShield). Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 03:08, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
|tpa= parameter and avoid insta-archiving the request. FaviFake (talk) 21:21, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 17:40, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
There is a campaign ad that apparently was paid for by the US government. Is it public domain? https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/us/politics/trump-ad-government-campaign.html?unlocked_article_code=1.EVE.LXbW.egxHuypSqGIm&smid=nytcore-ios-share Victor Grigas (talk) 23:08, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I've been on a crusade recently, making my way through the requests at User:AnomieBOT/COIREQTable, particularly those requests pertaining to corporate articles. What I'm finding in almost every case is that these articles, especially those that have been around for any length of time, turn into cruft-laden coatracks because every couple of years or so somebody employed by the company comes along and makes an edit request asking for three new paragraphs to be added about their latest acquisition/merger/divestment/construction project(s), eventually some helpful editor dutifully comes along and adds it, and so we end up with a 20,000-byte "History" section consisting of nothing but "Example Inc bought SomethingCorp for $386 million. The next year, Example Inc acquired Other plc for $700 million. In 2016, Example Inc purchased That & Partners for $1 billion." ad nauseam. Even companies which do meet WP:NCORP and have real, substantial coverage around them seem to fall victim to this same cycle.
It seems to me that this is exactly the sort of thing WP:NOTPRICE tells us corporate articles shouldn't be; Listings to be avoided include, but are not limited to: business alliances, clients, competitors, employees (except CEOs, supervisory directors and similar top functionaries), equipment, estates, offices, store locations, contact information, patent filings, products, sponsors, subdivisions and tourist attractions.
. What does seem to be lacking, though (or maybe it's out there somewhere and somebody can point me to it) is a central piece of guidance telling editors, especially those fulfilling edit requests, to be mindful of letting corporate articles get this way. I know WP:SUMMARY (particularly WP:DETAIL exists), but I do find myself feeling that it would be helpful for me to have a dedicated guideline to point people to saying, specifically, that not only is WP:CORPTRIV not useful for establishing notability, but we should also make sure it doesn't make up the majority of a corporate article's prose. It certainly would've been helpful for example in the case of Verisk Analytics where I had a brief edit war on this same topic with an editor who insisted that me removing a wall of this sort of cruft was inappropriate because the article had been stable like that for a long time, and only desisted when I 'strongarmed' them with WP:ONUS.
Of course, it could also be that this is perfectly appropriate for corporate articles and I'm completely misunderstanding and need to stop what I'm doing, but I think the PAGs seem to be on my side overall, there's just a lack of specific guidance here. If people agree, I'd be happy to try to type up a draft guideline. Athanelar (talk) 00:46, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
corporate articles should not mention acquisitions or split-offs of companies that are not themselves notable,why not? They probably should contain at least a mention of them if secondary sources are reporting on this Katzrockso (talk) 00:57, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Is it, though? The most important thing to cover about companies are whatever independent, secondary sources have said about them; that's our general metric for everything.sure, and that's frequently acquisitions and what companies they own. That is not why CORPTRIV exists. PARAKANYAA (talk) 14:01, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Not every restructuring would be a significant WP:ASPECTIs precisely what I mean here; in just the few corporate articles i've gone through so far I've seen a couple with a dozen or more acquisitions listed with no additional commentary on its significance besides the fact that it happened. I'm not saying all of them are cruft, I'm saying that when a company's history article is nothing but a list of these kinds of actions it's cruft. ASPECT is a good arrow to add to my quiver, though, thanks. Athanelar (talk) 13:44, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Open up the business pages of the WSJ on any given day and it's filled with M&A newsSure, but we're not the business pages of the WSJ? Changes in ownership matter for sure, but to what extent do they matter to an encyclopedic summary? Athanelar (talk) 14:50, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
a $7 billion investment by a company in Syria doesn't make it notable?No, as I pointed out to you there, explicitly not. WP:CORPDEPTH says
arbitrary statistics and numbers (such as number of employees, amount of revenue or raised capital, age of the company, etc.) do not make the coverage significant.CORPTRIV is defined entirely by the subject of the coverage, not by who published it; so it doesn't matter if it's The Times or whoever else, it can still be CORPTRIV. This is anyway a completely separate matter. Athanelar (talk) 16:26, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
that doesn't mean that size alone is a substitute for actually demonstrating WP:SIGCOV in an AfD.Which is precisely the point I'm making, of course. Please don't nit-pick. If you want to see the context of this discussion, check out WP:Articles for deletion/Arada (company) (2nd nomination) where we discussed this at more length. Like I said, I don't want to derail this discussion by relitigating that or getting into the weeds about corporate notability, because I'm not at all talking about notability here. Athanelar (talk) 16:53, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
N Routine coverage sounds like these two sentences:
Y Non-routine coverage sounds like this:
Similarly, not every M&A needs to be listed in a company's article, just the major ones.This is the point I've been making since the very start. And my question therefore was, should we (and if so, how should we) codify that? Athanelar (talk) 17:35, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Nine of them are featured lists Apple, Adobe, AOL, Alphabet, Cisco, Juniper Networks, Gen Digital, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Catfurball (talk) 19:33, 29 September 2026 (UTC) If an article uses reliable sources for these mergers and aquisitions I see nothing wrong with any of them, but if only direct references are used they should be tagged with the better sources template. Catfurball (talk) 19:38, 29 September 2026 (UTC) And may I remind everyone there is Category:Mergers and acquisitions, and its many subcategories which will never be deleted. Catfurball (talk) 21:30, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Capitalization of Internet § Request for comment: Should a capital "i" be used for "Internet"?. Qwerty123M (talk) 02:10, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hello everyone,
I am requesting community feedback regarding a CentralNotice banner for Wiki Loves Peace 2026, an international photography campaign supported by the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) aimed to document peace-related heritage, memorials, museums, monuments, public art, and other sites connected to peace and reconciliation around the world.
As guided by DerHexer on the Meta-Wiki CentralNotice request page, I am seeking community consensus on allowing the banner to run on the English Wikipedia as well. The banner period would be the first week of October and the last week of October 2026, for a total of 14 days.
Peace-related heritage is located in every region of the world, and the English Wikipedia has a global audience. Allowing the banner to run on the English Wikipedia would help inform contributors worldwide about the campaign and encourage participation in documenting places that embodies the pursuit of peace.
P.S. The campaign has also been featured by the Wikimedia Foundation on all its social media channels: Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook, YouTube, Bluesky, Threads.
Comments, questions, concerns, or support are all welcome.
Thank you for your time. ❯❯❯ Raydann(Talk) 08:45, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Comment: As stated on the CN request page, “I have added a limit of 25 % maximum reach (with 5 displays per week)” in order to reduce banner blindness for this new campaign. If you have further questions or wishes for adjustments, I will try to follow the conversation here and on the request page. Best, —DerHexer (Talk) 10:05, 30 September 2026 (UTC)replyen-gb usually has the effect of shortening a lot of software messages?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:22, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply Comment: Traditional outreach channels are already being actively used (mailing lists, community groups, social media, and direct outreach to affiliates and local communities), @Sohom can perhaps attest to that.Regarding banner fatigue, I am willing to compromise on a limit of 25% max reach and 2 impressions per week (4 total across the campaign period) for both logged-in and anonymous users.My reasoning is that English Wikipedia reaches a global audience. Peace related heritage sites exist in every region of the world, and uploading a photograph is a relatively easy first contribution than editing Wikipedia articles. Several of the strongest submissions received so far have come from people who stated that they had never previously contributed to Wikimedia projects.Regarding the neutrality discussion, debating differing interpretations of peace is unlikely to be productive. This nuance was discussed extensively during the development of the campaign with UN staff. At face value, the project is a photography and documentation campaign, similar in nature to Wiki Loves Monuments, with the additional criterion that the subject be connected to peace, remembrance, reconciliation, disarmament, or peacebuilding.Questions about the wider concept of peace are understandable, but the campaign itself is a photography campaign. I would prefer to keep this discussion focused on the proposed banner and its configuration. ❯❯❯ Raydann(Talk) 18:11, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Article advice § Title. This matter started with Talk:Marist School (Georgia)#Requested move 14 September 2026, and has since led to the idea of revisiting Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (U.S. schools)#Reopening Issac I Navarro (talk) 17:22, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
The gadget mw:User:Remember the dot/Syntax highlighter, out of the box, does not recognize valid self-closing tags such as <br> which is the preferred and correct version in HTML without troublesome user config. In fact, the talk page has six threads of people wondering why it is not supported. I am proposing to set up a site-wide default so they are parsed correctly. Northern Moonlight 04:36, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
The read status could be easy to make and implement using Java script. I want it to be 2 features where you can never see them, or when you post a message, others can't see your read status. If accepted, this would be ready to be implemented unless sysadmins have to get involved. Fence127 (talk) 07:32, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Currently, when visiting a Wikipedia page such as fox, the HTML <title> is Fox - Wikipedia. This is not to be confused with the article title, which is an <h1> heading in HTML. MOS:DASH says: do not use one or more hyphens in place of a dash
, and I find this quite annoying that every page title breaks our manual of style, which is fairly standard in this matter.
The reason I brought this here rather than /PR is that I have no idea if or how this could be changed. (please 
mention me on reply) (in solidarity), JacobTheRox(talk|contributions) 16:15, 17 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Just because a good practice appears in the MOS doesn't necessarily mean it only applies to pages where the MOS applies.If the MOS said we need to use correct grammar, saying the MOS doesn't apply outside mainspace is not a valid reason for using incorrect grammar in the HTML headers. FaviFake (talk) 09:54, 15 September 2026 (UTC)reply
What the MOS says is completely irrelevant to what we should put in the HTML header, regardless of what the MOS says
What about another character, like a pipe? Does that have the technical issues an en dash has? It would avoid going against the MoS. Ham II (talk) 08:26, 26 August 2026 (UTC)reply
<title> and strip " - Wikipedia" rather than <h1> which is how the title is stored? (in solidarity), JacobTheRox(talk|contributions) 17:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I asked about this at the Help desk a year ago and it didn't go anywhere: Wikipedia:Help desk/Archive 69#Ping all participants in a prior discussion.
Would it be possible to design a functionality that would allow you to identify and tag ('ping') all participants from an old, closed discussion? For live talk page and discussion posts, I can use the reply tool and type @ to generate a dropdown list of every user who has contributed to the current discussion. I would like to duplicate this functionality for closed posts. It would be great if this worked for archived posts as well as posts that are closed but still on the active talk page.
Potential use case: Say there was a closed RM last year and I want to notify all participants of a new discussion. Or an archived post on an article talk page or noticeboard that is related to a new discussion, possibly on a different page.
Currently my approach is to scan the old thread and pick out all the users. This gets the job done but is somewhat cumbersome and it is easy to miss people. —Myceteae🍄🟫 (talk) 18:43, 17 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I think bot's create lot's on noise on User talk page. Maybe bot's messages should be hidden from public view by default. It should also be excluded from archiving.SideEffect talk to your doctor 10:40, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
While AI is terrible for writing articles or as a source of information, I think it could be very useful for performing advanced searchs in Wikipedia (and other Wikimedia projects). Many information in Wikipedia about a particular topic is disperse across several articles (many of them unrelated), and I think AI could be useful to find all the information related about a particular advanced search. The key points of my idea are:
Of course, this idea would cost time, money and resources to WMF, but maybe these costs could be far less than those of the failed Abstract Wikipedia, while achieving a similar goal (or so I believe; sincerely, I was never able to fully understand the exact goal of Abstract Wikipedia), and in a way that is accessible to the mass public (and, for a part of them, even "cool"). MGeog2022 (talk) 17:46, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
"I would like to know _____. Please use exclusively Wikimedia sources to research and write a summary answer, and provide links and quotes to relevant wiki articles as appropriate."? -- LWG talk (VOPOV) 18:58, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
with no hallucinated garbageAnother fatal misunderstanding of AI. You cannot prevent hallucinations. They aren't a flaw limited to how specific systems are programmed - they're an inherent flaw with the technology itself. Don't you think they'd fix it if they could? Limiting the database to specific sources won't solve it. I've experienced outright hallucinations from a micro AI that was programmed for a single book. The only way to guarantee information is accurate is to verify it yourself, regardless of where the feature is hosted. Why should we waste WMF resources for something that would have no significant benefit over external tools? ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 20:40, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Get links to reliable websites in a quicker way than they would with WikipediaWe're not a search engine. We only provide limited external links for additional context to article content. If people are wanting to navigate to external sites they shouldn't be utilizing Wikipedia for that purpose. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 20:32, 18 September 2026 (UTC)reply
1keyhole (talk) 01:15, 21 September 2026 (UTC)reply
FWIW, from my perspective, the thing needed to help AINB is not administrative support. It's just more bodies helping cleanup, which doesn't necessarily require admin tools. And frankly is a good way for someone to build the experience/credentials if they wanted to be one. ⇒SWATJester Shoot Blues, Tell VileRat! 20:42, 21 September 2026 (UTC)reply
The context this person has left out, as Kowal has mentioned above, is that they have an active AI noticeboard thread about their AI use, which has resulted in a lot of their articles being LLMPRODed as they flounced: I am respectfully stepping away from this discussion and topic to take an extended break from editing.
This suggests that their respectfully stepping away from their previously scheduled respectfully stepping away, in order to vaguepost here about how there needs to be a an appropriate level oversight
, is an attempt to WP:FORUMSHOP/ask to speak to the AI cleanup board's manager. Gnomingstuff (talk)
Hi, I'm a university student doing a coursework case study on MediaWiki's move from the legacy wikitext parser to Parsoid. I'm not a Wikipedia editor myself, just researching for a report. If anyone has a moment, I'd love to hear your thoughts on a few questions:
1. Do you mainly edit using wikitext or VisualEditor, and why?
2. What's the hardest part of wikitext for newcomers, in your experience?
3. Has VisualEditor made onboarding easier, or created its own problems?
4. Any concerns about Wikimedia making Parsoid the default parser (e.g. templates or bots breaking)?
Thanks a lot for your time. Happy to keep this short if you can only answer one or two. BirungiHairat (talk) 12:46, 23 September 2026 (UTC)reply
<ref></ref> tags and citationsFollowing the close of RfC: ITN and sham elections, I have opened a workshop at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/ITN reform RFC workshop. BilledMammal (talk) 01:48, 25 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi! I would like to propose something new: a new process so that people who would like to make a request for adminship could see if they would get approved or not without making a formal proposal.
*The only major change is to make it more lenient.
I am hoping to make a full proposition at the village pump or similar if this gains consensus. Thanks! Robloxguest3 (talk)
00:46, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply
see if they would get approved or not without making a formal proposal, without adding layers of RfA-style formality. —ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email) 00:59, 27 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Attending WCNA this weekend has gotten me thinking about ways to recruit editors. I had a few discussions with people about how many of our go-to methods, like edit-a-thons, are ineffective at getting people to keep editing. Having just moved to a walkable city, I see poster campaigns fairly often, and I am curious as to whether anybody has considered some kind of equivalent aimed at recruiting people to edit Wikipedia. I am not quite sure what this would look like, but I'm envisioning QR-code posters with a graphic and a pitch to "improve Wikipedia's coverage of XYZ," with some basic analytic on the QR code to track how many scans it's receiving.
The whimsical, idealist side of me thinks that this could be a surprisingly effective means of recruitment, but the cynic in me says it would do absolutely nothing. Still, I may try to spin something like this up, even if it's just as a personal experiment. ThadeusOfNazereth(he/him)Talk to Me! 02:52, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
We have the Volunteer Response Team, which responds to emails from non-Wikimedians. I am thinking of the reverse: A way for Wikipedians to send emails from an @wikipedia.org domain. I've sent countless emails to article subjects saying something to the effect of "we don't have an image of you; we would love it if you sent us one under a free license!" or "hey, the photo we have of you is really ugly; can you please send us a replacement?". I have received zero (0) replies. And I can't blame them! I, too, would ignore emails from the @gmail.com domain if they claimed to be an "admin" on a top-ten website.
I'm sure there are other use cases—for example, confirming that a WP:BLPREQUESTDELETE request is genuine. Of course, any uses would need to have explicit community consensus behind them.
It would make use of a shared email address (e.g. volunteer-outreach@wikipedia.org) to contact others, and WP:Volunteer Outreach Team noticeboard (or something like that) would exist to hear requests from all stripes of editors.
Anyone have thoughts? Could we build it on top of VRT? Other comments? Best, HouseBlaster (talk • edits • he/they) 15:24, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
An article I'm heavily involved in (superpower) has been tagged with "factual accuracy is disputed" since July. I don't believe this is accurate at this point, but believe given the state of the articles talk page, removing it would be blocked and cause a big mess. The page has already been to DRN multiple times, and these have failed. It has also had multiple RfCs in the past several months. I was looking for a noticeboard that would be appropriate to have an articles general factual accuracy reviewed, and don't believe it fits any of the existing ones. The closest I've found is Wikipedia:Peer review, but think that process might be a bit more then this requires. The Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard, Wikipedia:Third opinion, and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard all come close, but don't include the focus of broadly verifying the facts/claims made in an article. Third opinion is limited to disputes between two editors, not multiple. Without something specific to this tag, when a dispute happens, it seems impossible to resolve as long as editors continue to dispute it on the talk page. In cases like this, nothing short of fully capitulating to a specific world view is likely to resolve the dispute. If something already exists that I've never seen before, that's great! Please point me there. If not, I think this could be a useful thing that exists somewhere between RfC/3rd opinion/DRN/Peer review and the reliable source noticeboard. Otherwise, I believe this tag is too broad/general to be useful for anything but undermining the faith in an articles content. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 01:20, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
::: Katzrockso
:::: GeogSage
::::: Dw31415
:::: AndyTheGrump
::: Katzrockso
:::: GeogSage
:::: AndyTheGrump
::::: Dw31415
Has there been any work to make it easier to manage edit protection? The good requested edits at Talk:Flydubai Flight 1073 are coming in hot. Is there a template that could help? Use a sandbox? A new button? I know it’s a short term issue for this page but a reoccurring one I’m sure. Dw31415 (talk) 13:50, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
{{Collapse top}}, {{Fake heading}}, or {{text diff}}, but a lot of people filing edit requests don't know how to use them. —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 01:05, 4 October 2026 (UTC)replyHi everyone!
I'd like to suggest introducing content warnings and optional collapsible text for exceptionally graphic descriptions in Wikipedia articles, similar to how spoiler tags work on Discord.
Recently, I was researching the Colombian serial killer Luis Alfredo Garavito and came across the descriptions in the Modus operandi section of his Wikipedia article.
I'm an adult and generally have a fairly high tolerance for graphic material. I regularly research criminal cases and understand that articles covering these subjects will inevitably contain disturbing information. However, the level of graphic detail in this particular section was something I was completely unprepared for. It genuinely shocked me, and I found myself quite distressed afterward.
This experience also made me think about younger readers. Wikipedia is accessible to everyone, including children who might stumble upon an article out of curiosity. While someone researching a serial killer should reasonably anticipate disturbing subject matter, I don't think they would necessarily anticipate descriptions of that level of severity. I'm absolutely not suggesting that Wikipedia remove, censor or omit factual information. I understand the importance of documenting these cases accurately, and I believe readers should continue to have access to complete information.
However, I wish I'd been given the opportunity to decide whether I wanted to read those particular descriptions. Had I received a warning beforehand, I likely would have chosen not to reveal them.
My Proposal:
I'd like to suggest introducing an optional feature for particularly graphic passages that includes:
This could function similarly to Discord's spoiler tags, allowing readers to make an informed decision about whether they wish to view additional details. I believe this would be particularly beneficial for younger readers, people who have experienced trauma and anyone who wishes to research difficult subjects without unexpectedly encountering extremely graphic descriptions. Content warnings wouldn't prevent people from accessing information, they would simply give readers a choice about how they encounter it.
Previous Proposals & Potential Concerns:
I've since discovered that content warnings have previously been proposed and rejected, and that Wikipedia has an existing policy concerning disclaimers. However, I believe my proposed approach is sufficiently different to warrant further discussion.
One reason cited for rejecting previous proposals was that disclaimers may appear too late, after readers have already encountered the material. My suggestion would address this concern by allowing particularly explicit passages to remain hidden until readers actively choose to reveal them. Rather than placing a general disclaimer at the beginning of an article, this approach would provide warnings immediately before specific passages containing exceptionally graphic descriptions.
I recognize that establishing criteria for which passages qualify would require careful consideration. However, I believe this approach is worth exploring separately from general article-wide disclaimers.
Ultimately, I'm not asking Wikipedia to decide what readers should or shouldn't be allowed to read. I'm suggesting that readers be given the opportunity to make that decision for themselves.
I'd be interested to hear whether this approach would be technically feasible and what the community thinks about the idea. Thank you for taking the time to read and consider my suggestion! chrissy <3 (talk) 05:44, 4 October 2026 (UTC)reply
When Simple Summaries rolled out, the overwhelming response from the community was that we do not want AI features. One year later, we are now getting more AI features, e.g., AI-generated edit suggestions. This has been in the works for about 2 months and is due to be announced any time now, so you heard it here first. This is going to be long, sorry, there is a lot of ground to cover.
First: These appear to be the suggestions, because based on how hard that URL was to dig up I assume the announcement wasn't going to link to them in one place. (It's unclear which of these lists if any is the actual list used in production, but there do not seem to be major quality differences based on spot-checking several of them, the newer lists are not obviously better and the larger lists are not obviously spottier). There are three broad problems here, besides the fact that adding new AI features is the opposite of what people have asked for:
We don’t have any plans nor desires to use models to create edits directly), and I agree with that. The problem is that, based on the kinds of suggested edits we've seen in the past (e.g., Newcomer Tasks), people will resolve this ambiguity by using AI anyway.
Political/geopolitical nightmares: I strongly suspect the geographical name suggestions are going to or have run into some geopolitical snarl at some point. But the NPOV suggestions already have, and demonstrate the reason why using AI to "correct" non-neutral point of tone is the opposite of "low-risk" (as described in the writeup) and generally a bad idea.
The original wording presents FreedomWorks' actions as definitively false and misleading, which is non‑neutral. It should be rephrased to a neutral description of the disputed nature of the claims.
The passage uses loaded language that frames the British Mandate support for a Jewish national home as ""Zionist colonization"", reflecting a partisan perspective. It should be rephrased to present the differing interpretations without endorsing one.
The phrase ""Republican senators"" introduces a partisan label that is unnecessary for a factual description of the hearing.The senators who raised these questions are factually members of the Republican Party, all three sources frame it as such, and the partisan breakdown is an inherent fact of the situation.
Suggestions to introduce factual errors:
The sentence contains an emoticon, which is non‑neutral and informal.If someone followed this suggestion they would turn a correct statement into a wrong one.
The word "pyusician" is a misspelling; it should be corrected to "musician".The actual correct spelling here would be "physician".
Parsing errors producing nonsense: This is the same problem Simple Summaries had. The text parsing breaks in many ways, and the LLM generates suggestions based on the broken version.
Remove the nonsensical JSON list and replace it with a brief, readable statement or omit it entirely.(Markazi Jamiat Ahle Hadith)
Overly long sentence with many clauses; needs to be broken up for simplicity): the sentences are choppy and some could be combined. (also there's an obvious comma splice the AI fails to mention)
The lead repeats ""NBA professional basketball team season"" twice, creating redundancy.Obviously, it does not; the culprit is that the sentence the LLM interpreted was "NBA professional basketball team season NBA professional basketball team season The 2019–20 Philadelphia 76ers season was the 71st season of the franchise in the National Basketball Association (NBA)." (See also Boadicea Haranguing the Britons, where it does this for the template)
Redundant repetition of the subject’s occupation; the phrase “Chinese” appears twice.The first "Chinese" comes from the "lang-zh" template.
Extraneous ""[it]"" markup after Mascia Cantoni; it is an artifact of extraction and should be deleted.
The passage contains a run‑on sentence and an incomplete citation phrase ""According to historian Wolfgang Sofsky:"" that leaves the reader expecting a quotation.
The stub template line includes an unnecessary ""vte"" fragment and could be phrased more cleanly.(the "vte" shows up a lot) or
Remove the redundant stub messages that appear as ordinary text at the end of the article.
Remove the non‑encyclopedic, opinionated rant). I don't know how the LLM got hold of a revision that existed for only a few seconds.
Suggestions to conceal the symptoms of a larger problem:
LLM-specific tics: Obviously the suggestion text itself are AISIGNS overload but what I mean here is that LLM edit suggestions/summaries have some consistent quirks. I haven't done an in-depth look for them but two known ones do show up frequently:
The description of Hercules is too lengthy and includes biased phrasing such as ""strongest man in the world"" [...]Or on Trinidad, California, a sentence starting "On December 31, 1914, the largest recorded ocean wave ever to hit the United States West Coast" (in a paragraph with 5 citations) is criticized with
The sentence makes an unqualified superlative claim about the wave’s size, which could be seen as non‑neutral. Adding an attribution phrase mitigates this.
The word 'ithe' is a typo; it should be 'the'. Fixing this error improves the sentence's correctness.
I don't really know what to say at this point. Based on the convoluted phabricator issue snarl it seems that there was some human review done at some point, but nevertheless it took me only about ~1-2 hours to find the above issues, and that was only a spot check. This seems like a reasonable amount of human QA to expect before pushing an editorial feature to prod. It also seems reasonable to expect a full audit of potentially controversial subject matter (by "full audit" here I mean even just the results of CTRL-F "Israel", "Palestine", etc.), and ideally a review by people who are familiar with AI-generated revision suggestions and the general areas in which they get things wrong. (None of this deviates much from the thousands of similar justifications I've seen in AI-generated edit summaries.)
I also think the whole premise is just flawed. LLM and machine learning tools are not only going to have high rates of false positives, but false positives that take time to evaluate. (For instance, there are various LLM tools to scan articles/edit summaries for possible issues, but the point is that they generate lists to be manually reviewed later.) They do not scale to a scenario like automated edit suggestions, where the assumption is that the suggestions are pre-vetted and can be evaluated quickly. Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:54, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
We can dig in our heels and chant "LLMs bad, down with AI, all power to the humans!"is a fair assessment of something that I spent actual time looking into. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:30, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
is due to be announced any time now" is just patently false. For what it's worth, I personally haven't made my mind up about this specific feature, but I'm willing (and would strongly urge other folks) to provide the team with the ability to spend some more time atleast trying to iterate and experiment on the feature to see if some variation of it could be made useful to some Wikipedians. Sohom (talk) 22:50, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
The current content is a series of JSON objects that do not convey readable information to the reader.doesn't pop up onscreen. Arguably it's not even that, but the stage of "go back to square one and rethink because the premise is inherently flawed."
The announcement we publish ought to equip volunteers with the info. they need to answer the following questions.... Like... it's due to be announced. That's... what the ticket... says.....
In T428311 and T431376, we – staff, in collaboration with experienced volunteers across a range of Wikipedias – will have assumedly determined the initial batch of LLM-generated MoS suggestions to be reliable.
both edit more effectively with tools that show promise and contribute to making those suggestions more reliable by using and evaluating them in real editing contexts.This, while technically true, should be clarified to shift the emphasis towards the latter.Now, what gives? Of course, no one wants the current version to be shown to newcomers, given the major flaws pointed by Gnomingstuff and others above. What we can do, however, is twofold. Now, discuss whether this feature could be developed to provide constructive help in theory, not considering its current lack of readiness. This is an open question. And later, once the feature is sufficiently mature and ready for a rollout to newcomers, discuss whether that current state is worth rolling out, whether it needs further development, or if the project should be cut short. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 23:42, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
"American English is preferred on Wikipedia", great so it's not just wrong but will make a bad situation worse. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 09:07, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
The literal WMF coming in and force-feeding AI slop into the mouths of editors is, to put mildly, disgraceful and shameful.is not what is happening here based on reading the rest of the discussion. Sohom (talk) 17:21, 13 September 2026 (UTC)reply
As pointed out above, the current development stage is way too early for a broad rollout. This should have been better clarified, both to reassure the community about the experiment, and to provide clearer development goals.
However, taking a step back, a discussion can still be held regarding the potential of this whole endeavor. Would the community, in theory, agree to an AI model surfacing suggestions to newcomers in such a way, assuming the current pitfalls could be smoothed out in development? More concretely, are these expectations realistic, and is it worth investing further resources in this project?
These are questions I don't, personally, hold the answers to. However, we should be discussing them together, alongside members of the Editing team involved in its development (courtesy ping to @Quiddity (WMF)), if we want them to work in sync with community sentiment, and avoid investing resources in dead ends. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 23:57, 15 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Would the community, in theory, agree to an AI model surfacing suggestions to newcomers. I think a better way to explore this tool would be to make it available to established editors first. People who have the experience and policy knowledge to be able to properly evaluate the suggestions. Maybe the people will say "The suggestions were all spot-on and incredibly valuable". Maybe they will say "Nothing this thing suggested made any sense at all, it's total garbage". More likely, somewhere in between. But let's do the experiment rather than pre-judging it. RoySmith (talk) 00:08, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
I think a better way to explore this tool would be to make it available to established editors first.While it might not have been clear at first, this is, in fact, exactly what the experiment is planning to do. The tool is still in development, and we can't say, in advance, how it will end up in terms of quality. For now, I'm just trying to figure out the proportion of editors who either will find it a non-starter in principle (regardless of the suggestion quality) or are opposed to investing further resources in its development for any other reason. Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 00:20, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Seeing instead a whole slew of new editors making the same llm-prompted changes is harmful to the community in being able to understand and accommodate new editorsI just want to emphasize this -- the English Wikipedia community is not good at welcoming newbies who make mistakes. That is a problem. The English Wikipedia community is actively hostile to editors making mistakes with large language models. If a newbie puts a poor LLM-based reword into an article, an experienced editor is almost certainly going to WP:BITE them off. And a newbie, operating in a system they're unfamiliar with, with a human-sounding voice telling them "This copyedit is right", is never going to have the knowledge and is almost certainly not going to have the confidence to challenge the AI when it presents them with a bad suggestion. That is going to set them up for failure when a grumpy human editor, burnt out from dealing with LLM edits, callously reverts them.I think using machine learning to help with encyclopedia maintenance is a wonderful thing! And I think large language models are really cool -- but they require a high degree of skill to use correctly in the manner that looks like it's being explored here. And, again, the community is so burnt out from dealing with poor quality LLM content that any editor who uses this tool and (inevitably) makes a mistake will be attacked by the community. Does the team working on this understand that, @MMiller (WMF)? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 05:10, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
especially if it takes a year for each model!to be fair to the teams involved the stated idea behind this specific experiment seems to be wanting to try something that won't take a year per task on what the editing and ML teams think are relatively low risk tasks... I'm just not sure that the community and the teams involved have a sufficiently compatible idea of what tasks are low risk. I think it would be possible to develop something acceptable to the community, but unless very sure about it, it may be best to get a vibe check from the community before thinking something is "low risk", and treating things as "high risk" otherwise. Alpha3031 (t • c) 08:36, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Would the community, in theory, agree to an AI model surfacing suggestions to newcomers in such a way– I won't, and if that ever happens I'm gone. Models are bias black boxes, and even if suggestions were 100% accurate this would still be an issue. fifteen thousand two hundred twenty four (talk) 04:37, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
LLMs hallucinate, and those hallucinations are not something you want informing newcomers who are near-clueless as to how Wikipedia works, let alone people learning English who won’t be able to tell when an AI-based edit suggestion system instructs them to insert a grammatical error or something similar, like the above pyusician —> musician.- that's a rather odd example to get hung up on, given that automated spell checkers and their admittedly sometimes absurd correction suggestions have been around for decades (long before the term "hallucinations" came to be used in this context). Many or even most professional writers - journalists, book authors, scholars - use them routinely, and have learned to live with the occasional fail of this type (pyusician —> musician).
Spellchecking software and online tools can be helpful when copyediting Wikipedia articles. [...]
it took me only about ~1-2 hours to find the above issues, and that was only a spot check, i.e. there is informal evidence that these are not very rare at this point. But ultimately I'd be interested in more concrete assessments of how likely editors using this tool will be to encounter each of those failure cases in practice.)
equal [to] or surpass[ing]human-level reliability is asking a bit much of a literal artificial intelligence. Simultaneously, I think spellcheck-level absurdity is far too low a bar for this feature.
Wouldn't it make more sense to focus on basic copyediting suggestions? I just went to a random article, Mircea II of Wallachia, and requested some copyedits from chatgpt.
suggested copyedits |
|---|
|
Lede: “Radu The Handsome” → “Radu the Handsome”. The capitalized The is plainly wrong. � Wikipedia Early life: “first born sons” → “firstborn sons”, unless this is deliberately preserving the exact wording of the translated charter. Since it's presented as a quotation, I'd check Treptow before touching this one. � Wikipedia Reign: “his father's allied stance with the Ottoman Empire” is awkward. Something like “his father's alliance with the Ottoman Empire” is much cleaner. � Wikipedia “forcing the latter to negotiate with the Ottoman court for support, with Mircea II fleeing and going into hiding” is clumsy. → “…forcing Vlad Dracul to seek Ottoman support, while Mircea II fled into hiding.” � Wikipedia “Vlad Dracul signed a treaty with the Ottomans, which stated he would…” → “…under which he would…” or “…which required him to…”. Treaties don't really “state he would” do something. � Wikipedia Same sentence: “as well as allowing two of his sons … to be held as captives” has faulty parallelism with “he would pay.” → “…and allow two of his sons … to be held captive.” � Wikipedia “Radu the Handsome (Fair)” is unnecessary/odd. Unless the source actually uses Radu the Fair, I'd simply remove “(Fair)”. � Wikipedia “Callimachus tells that the leaders…” → “Callimachus states that” or “According to Callimachus, the crusade's leaders…” � Wikipedia “after the defeat, Mircea led the remainder of his unit and the Christian forces across the Danube.” This sounds as though he led all surviving Christian forces. It may be what the source says, but I'd verify rather than copyedit it into a stronger claim. � Wikipedia “allowed the Ottomans to again have control of the fortress” → “allowed the Ottomans to regain control of the fortress”. � Wikipedia The rest of that sentence is especially tortured: “in an effort to retain their support of his having the throne and in an effort to keep his two captive sons safe.” → “to retain their support for his rule and protect his two captive sons.” � Wikipedia “captured by Saxon elite, which were part of the ruling council” → “captured by members of the Saxon elite who were part of the ruling council”. This also agrees with the substantially better wording already used in the lede. � Wikipedia “would also carry out vengeance against the Saxon elite” → “would also take revenge on the Saxon elite”. Carry out vengeance against is unidiomatic. � Wikipedia “Vlad Țepeș would also fight successfully against the Ottomans for a number of years” → “Vlad Țepeș also fought successfully against the Ottomans for several years.” There is a lot of unnecessary historical would in this section. � Wikipedia “Vlad's skilful political maneuverings, his capable administration skills and great tactical thinking, made him…” has an erroneous comma separating subject and verb, as well as some awkward prose. At minimum, delete the comma after thinking. Better: “Vlad's political skill, capable administration, and tactical ability made him a dangerous opponent.” � Wikipedia “…a very dangerous opponent to his enemies” → “…a very dangerous opponent”. An opponent is inherently someone's enemy/adversary here. � Wikipedia |
Most of these seem like pretty decent suggestions, don't dip into npov/tone danger zones, and are simple enough for new editors to review and handle. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 00:14, 20 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi y'all – I'm Peter Pelberg, product manager of the Editing Team. Together with the Machine Learning Team, we've been working on the experimental model-generated edit suggestions. You have raised a range of valid concerns/questions that warrant responses. You can expect those when I'm back online in earnest next week.
In the meantime, I'd like to clarify some aspects of the work and the thinking that's informing it.
First and most importantly: there are no plans right now to deploy LLM-generated edit suggestions as default-on to anyone. The closest thing to a deployment that we've talked about is a potential A/B experiment that would not move forward until we, volunteers and staff, have deemed these suggestions reliable and promising. This commitment is in Phabricator by way of the experiment (T431377) needing T428311 to happen first. For context, T428311 states, "Learn whether experienced volunteers at en.wiki think the experimental suggestions are sufficiently reliable to be shown to newcomers so that we can decide: Will we invest the effort to scale this initial set of LLM-generated MoS suggestions across languages via T431376?"
Now, with regard to what this initial set of 30,000 LLM-generated suggestions is and is not…
Last thing for now: we are aware of the sunk cost fallacy. Thank you for raising it, @Kowal2701. In fact, as I hope the above demonstrates, the whole point of developing experimental suggestions, and making them available in production to experienced volunteers who have explicitly opted into them, is as @Chaotic Enby described: to assess whether they're reliable. Ones that aren't, we will abandon. The ones that are, we'll work together to figure out how and to whom to make them available.PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 05:48, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
as […] “1.” and “3.” demonstrate. This is perhaps not the most important point, but it is bugging me: were the numbers meant to all be “1.”?
Part of the issue here is that a simple glance is all that is needed to identify issues with many the suggestions, so it feels like even that is not being done before these are farmed off to volunteers.
suggestions sent by some central, biased, singleminded entitycontrolled by WMF for over a decade, in form of ORES (or now the "revert risk" models). These AI suggestions (on whether to revert another editor's changes as vandalism) are made available to any editor at Special:RecentChanges even though they might be seen as more consequential on average than those of the new tool under development here, and have a fairly high error (false positive) rate. I have personally implemented many thousands (probably tens of thousands) of those AI suggestions over the years, and survived skipping many more mistaken suggestions.
Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 12:31, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply[...] the scope and timeline of any planned community rollout, and the importance of working with the editor community and respecting a future consensus on whether to deploy it, should be made as clear as possible to avoid a repeat of Simple Summaries.
find that they can be used successfully in identifying overly difficult text and decently enough for suggesting alternatives if one pays attention to subtle changes in meaning.Subtle changes in meaning convert text supported by reliable source(s) to text not supported by reliable source(s).
I'm confident that a tool can be developedYeah, developing a tool is the easy part.
The hard part is ensuring it is a net positive.The big question is if within the limits of a certain budgetThe WMF is not the right party to create such a tool because they are unfamiliar with the challenges Wikipedia editors face and because they have a tendency to waste a lot of time and effort on creating shiny new tools while neglecting decades of tech debt.
Correct the misspelling of the player's first name from "Russel" to the proper "Russell"(which isn't even correct!) to "break up these sentences."
Rewrite the sentence for clarity and smoother flowis not actionable to the majority of people: if someone doesn't know how to copyedit then they don't know how to do that, and if someone does know how to copyedit they don't need those vague directions. It's like prompting people as AIs. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:23, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
You are a strict reviewer. Your job is to find flaws, not to be nice.Really weird feeling to be envious of an LLM, its opinion certainly seems to be taken more seriously and its tone is given much more leeway.) Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:42, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
validand
reliable, there will still exist overall biases. An LLM will favor certain sources, certain topics, certain sides. This will be reflected in what suggestions are and are not made, and editors evaluating and implementing individual suggestions will be entirely blind to any larger systemic issues they would be enabling.
"Humans have issues with bias too of course, but this can be counteracted on an individual level by self-awareness of this fact- Citation needed: "making people aware of their bias doesn't do anything to mitigate it." Levivich (talk) 22:45, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
can. As human beings that are capable of independent thought and self awareness, we can choose to examine our own biases and seek out information and experiences to change how we think about the world around us and the assumptions we make. Large language models are capable of exactly none of those things, because of the very simple fact that they are computer programs. Claude is exactly as capable of herself awareness as MS Paint is of having an independent thought.
mw.loader.load( 'https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:DLynch_(WMF)/alwaysbesuggesting.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );[an efitor's] own writing. ‑‑gurkubondinn 23:44, 17 August 2026 (UTC)reply
default-on or experimental. The latter means that people who have explicitly enabled the soon-to-be-available setting have the space to safely experiment with suggestions. Through that testing, they can decide who—if anyone—an experimental suggestion should be shown to by default.minimumEditCount value to 1000. This means the suggestion will only be shown to editors who have made ≥1,000 edits.I'm pessimistic about this, but I have a very high bar for pessimism/hopelessness to stop me from supporting a low-stakes experiment. Giving this tool to experienced users to try out seems like one of those low-stakes experiments worth trying, in case there's a way to make it work (again, I'm pessimistic, but possibly with certain constraints regarding task and topic?).
But also, just to put a finer point on something, because I think it does good to repeat it now and then: there's the worry about the quality of these suggestions, but there's also the worry about, for lack of a better word, branding. The branding that the WMF has begun using, "knowledge is human", is an echo of a popular sentiment here. At a time when absolutely every company and every project is cramming in as much AI as possible, Wikipedia is mostly headed in the other direction. That's a good thing IMO, but as a result, any pitch someone has for an LLM-based tool is evaluated with a handicap applied. If you'd otherwise be graded on a scale of 1-10 where 1 is harmful and 10 is helpful, start by subtracting 2 or 3 for "we don't want to be associated with that" (or, alternatively, "we see these as detrimental by default"), and it needs to be really useful to get a critical mass of people behind it. But no complex tool starts its life as an 8+ on that scale, I don't think, so super-low-stakes tests are IMO a good way to start working towards it. FWIW. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 22:06, 16 August 2026 (UTC)reply
I know people love to make fun of AI hallucinations, so I couldn't resist posting this fun map (4:38 in the video). Strange spellings aside, Hoboken, NJ has gotten transported to the midwest, Chicago is on the Pacific coast, and Boston has been relocated to Colorado. I want some of whatever it's smoking. RoySmith (talk) 02:12, 17 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Thank you all for keeping the conversation going, and thank you to Gnomingstuff and others for taking the time to look through outputs. @PPelberg (WMF), @SSalgaonkar-WMF, and I have read the whole thread and tried to pull out some of the most important things we heard and questions being asked. Peter and Sucheta, please add if I missed anything (well, for that matter -- anyone please tell me if I missed anything). I'm just going to list these questions/topics for now, and we'll keep working through them and hopefully you'll keep discussing with us (there are many of you and not as many of us!) This is to build on what I posted above and what Peter posted above.
Firstly, I think we're on the same page about something especially important: we're not going to deploy LLM-backed suggestions to anyone unless this community is supportive of it. And if they do become deployed, they'll be configurable via Special:EditChecks the way existing checks and suggestions are (i.e. community could decide who gets to see them, change what they say, what articles they show up on, or turn them off). I hope that in projects like these, we at WMF are bringing capabilities to volunteers so that they can produce the kinds of checks and suggestions that help both newcomers and experienced editors get the most good wiki work done with the least amount of drudgery. There is also a question of whether these suggestions would be a vehicle for content suggestions -- the answer there is no, we are not designing these to propose text to the user; rather they point out places the user should look and what they should look for. The LLM explanations that Gnomingstuff pointed out initially are in those files as a way for us to understand internally why the LLM is making the suggestion; they would not be shown to editors. (But I know there is a more subtle question here -- when just pointing out a sentence that needs attention in some way exerts that sort of influence).
In that vein, I wanted to say that this current project is more about figuring out what it might be like for checks/suggestions to be generated via LLMs, than about what those exact types of suggestions are. If NPOV is not a good one to pursue (volunteers here have given many good reasons why NPOV is particularly tricky), then we should put that one down in favor of simpler ones to try out. (Worth noting that checks and suggestions are being generated via a bunch of other ways, too, like simple rules, text match, simple models, etc.)
Also just a quick nomenclature thing:
You can see all the checks and suggestions and their statuses at Special:EditChecks (note that "experimental" checks are only available to people who have a specific user script installed).
Sorry -- this post is getting long. But on to the list of questions we want to be able to talk about here, raised in the thread above. This list of questions is not something that we just want to provide answers to and then expect that everyone will agree with us. This is a complex area, and we don't have all the answers, but we're trying to figure them out with you.
Alright -- more to come as we get into those questions. -- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 23:53, 17 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Is NPOV appropriate to point an LLM at, given its nuance and complexity?No, and that is a silly question. I don't teach my fish braille and ask it to rewrite the bible. Tools are useful in some contexts and bad in others.
What if communities don't want certain suggestions on their wiki?None of the proposed suggestions in its current form would be an improvement.
Does it make sense for the message to the world to be "Knowledge is Human", but we are also using AI for certain things?No, of course not.
How could the models we use be transparent, open, and have community controls/auditing?That is impossible unless you accept the models are terrible compared to competitors. There are no ethical LLMs available. And making something like that would be unethical and require unethical actions.
Why are we working on projects like this instead of more work on the backlog of bugs and small improvements for editing?Because the important work sucks and nerds think its fun to play around with AI. Also the WMF does not understand its role; it should serve and protect the community. In any well-run company you do maybe 90% important stuff and 10% fun stuff.
. We only bite sometimes. Thanks for taking the time to listen. LittlePuppers (talk) 01:47, 18 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Role: You are an expert Wikipedia Copyeditor and Reviewer.
Goal: Conduct a professional audit of an article's plaintext so it aligns with Wikipedia core content policies and Manual of Style.
Context & Constraints:
- Plaintext environment: non-prose elements may be stripped (infoboxes, references, templates, media, etc.).
- Non-markup focus: do not suggest wiki-syntax, template, link-formatting, or reference-format edits.
- Awareness of extraction gaps: if text appears truncated from extraction, do not flag it unless clearly an authorial issue.
- Focus only on prose, terminology, neutrality, and information structure.
- Neutrality: remove peacock terms, bias, and unnecessary loaded language.
Some policy detection tasks are hard for humans and machines alike. Specifically for NPOV, precision across the three model families is very low. Models overall do better when detecting Peacock behavior. This is because while understanding neutrality requires in-depth reasoning, [bold mine] peacock behavior can be detected via language features.
Special:AbuseReview, which uses an open-weight model called CoPE to flag edits that probably need to be suppressed due to containing personal information.Downloaded the most recent csv, picked an NPOV one at random:
The statement the LLM objects to was in the article for less than a minute and long reverted by the time the suggestion was created. So one can add to all the above problems and errors that it also wastes times and resources by not checking the current version but some snapshot.
Profanity checks in general are a bad idea.
No, we are not going to "omit the explicit profanity" from a quote, and suggesting things like this is a very, very bad idea.
Again, it's a quote, from the creator of the sculpture. The AI should not make statements like "Editors often revise this kind of wording, saying the tone is unbalanced. ", which only works to influence newbies by making a false claim to authority.
And then there the internally contradictory advices, indicating the inherent stupidity of LLMs.
So do we need to combine these two (very short) sentences into one sentence, or do we need to rewrite this using shorter sentences? Or, just perhaps, our readers are perfectly capable of understanding these two sentences and won't "find this text difficult to understand". What a joke. Fram (talk) 09:01, 18 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Again, it's a quote, from the creator of the sculpture.
Hi all, I'm Sucheta, product manager on the Machine Learning side of this work.
Reading everything you all have said, it’s clear we shouldn’t move any further with the LLM-generated NPOV suggestions. We're dropping that type rather than trying to iterate on it.
@Ita140188 said this really well: There is no authority that has the truth about whether something is NPOV
. Makes sense to me – NPOV isn’t just about word choice; it's about the representation of a topic that editors decide on by weighing the available reliable sources against each other and reaching consensus. We had wanted to take a crack at it to see what the LLM would produce, so thank you for looking at these and thinking about them.
I do want to make the distinction between these LLM-backed NPOV suggestions and the Revise Tone suggestions that are in production now on this wiki. Those Revise Tone suggestions come from a model called BERT that we’ve fine-tuned for a narrower scope. The model is trained to notice peacock language, based on 20,000 examples of revisions where the "peacock" template was added or removed. We think these have worked out well, and thousands of them have been actioned by both new and experienced editors on this wiki. Having them available also made it more likely that a newcomer would make a constructive edit, than when they open the editor without some suggestion inside. You can see them on Special:Homepage in the suggested edits feed (if you check these out and have thoughts, please let us know).
What about the other types of LLM suggestions besides NPOV? Well, let’s keep talking here about whether they have potential. Note: we're working on making a spreadsheet available to you all so that you can see all of the suggestions in one place. -- SSalgaonkar-WMF (talk) 17:13, 18 August 2026 (UTC)reply
King's fourth novel, Euphoria (2014), was inspired by events in the life of anthropologist Margaret Mead. It won the inaugural Kirkus Prize for Fiction and the 2014 New England Book Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award. Euphoria was listed among The New York Times Book Review's 10 Best Books of 2014, TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, and the Amazon Best Books of 2014.-- they aren't visible on-page but there are unicode separators between many of the clauses, maybe that's related).
 is actually <ref></ref>). E.g. If you go to the Lily_King page that quote's from and paste it into the VE search box, it should highlight that entire paragraph, covering the citations. As far as I know, that replacement got done as a post-processing phase after the initial suggestion-generation, though I wasn't directly involved so there's a chance I'm wrong.ignoreQuotedContent within Special:EditChecks#tone is set to true. If you'd like to learn more about exactly about how quoted content is detected, T414715 contains more details. Could you please let me know if anything you see (or don't see) brings other questions to mind?Find some typos that can be fixed or copy that can be edited at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mircea_II_of_Wallachia. If I were going to refine it I would probably break results down to things that need review from someone with varying levels of experience so you can filter the output to users based on experience. For instance, checking if the source said first born or firstborn is a great task for someone trying to step up from beginner editing. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 15:10, 21 August 2026 (UTC)reply
The first reason we're working on this is because of the need to get more new people involved in editing. Being a newcomer has always been hard, and is especially hard now that people spend most of their online time on mobile. When newcomers (especially on mobile) open up the editor for the first time, it is overwhelming and they often just leave -- they are like "Wow, scary, nevermind." (here are some interesting survey results about this moment) But we've seen that when we point out specific bits of the article that could use improvement, the newcomers are much more likely to do something constructive and stick around. We've tested many of the checks and suggestions in Special:EditChecks and they have had these measurable positive impacts. We’ve also been inspired by the tools/scripts/gadgets that volunteers have built that do similar things (some examples here).
So this project here (the LLM suggestions) is another way of learning how we might find more kinds of suggestions in the vein of "how can we help newcomers on mobile be more and more constructive and more likely to stick around?" (in ways that align with policies, values, and existing editor workflows). It’s also worth noting that the newcomers who start with suggestions often wander off on their own in the wiki once they get comfortable. The design helps with that, because the suggestions happen inside the Visual Editor, i.e. you have to edit in VE to get them done (as opposed to, say, a separate interface).
Secondly, we also think that this can help lower patroller burdens at a time when those burdens are increasing because of AI slop, as Gnomingstuff has pointed out. (i.e. newcomers making constructive edits in the first place lowers burden on patrollers from newcomers being confused). For example, we are developing a way to deter and label edits when people are pasting content from an LLM.
And thirdly, we think that these suggestions can be helpful for experienced editors, too. A few of you have said in this conversation that experienced editors don’t need help finding improvements to make, but we have also heard from many who appreciate suggestions like these. In my own editing experience, I often click edit to do a specific change, but then discover a few other small things to improve via the suggestions. So we think there is also opportunity here to help experienced editors get more wiki work done with less seeking/searching/effort. It becomes a question of which of these signals to present to which users in which places.
How does this all sound? It would be great to hear from anyone who has seen these suggestions in action with newcomers or has been using them.
-- MMiller (WMF) (talk) 19:49, 18 August 2026 (UTC)reply
writing articles is kind of exactly what we don't want new editors to try, I'm not sure I agree with that. For some new users who don't know how to get started, having them fix typos might indeed be a good way to ease them into editing. But some people will already know what they want to write about. If you tell them, "No, that's too hard, we want you to fix typos for a while", all you're likely to have done is lost an opportunity to get a new editor hooked on the project. The very first edit I ever made was to create City Island Bridge. RoySmith (talk) 01:32, 19 August 2026 (UTC)reply
It becomes a question of which of these signals to present to which users in which places.
Okay. Linked here you will find a spreadsheet that contains the batch of ~6,500 experimental LLM MoS suggestions as they appear in Suggestion Mode for people who enabled experimental suggestions.
Within the spreadsheet are two categories of suggestions: those related to simplifying language and MOS:GEO. We've removed all of the NPOV suggestions based on the feedback y'all have been helpfully sharing here.
How do these suggestions look to you? What are examples of specific suggestions that you find to be unhelpful, confusing, and/or just plain wrong? As you're going through these suggestions, what broader patterns are you noticing/conclusions are you reaching about these two categories of suggestions?
With this feedback in-hand, we're thinking we (staff and volunteers) can take a step back together and decide how and if we should move forward with this particular set of suggestions.
Of course, if you find any part(s) of the spreadsheet are unclear, please let us know.
A couple of notes:
experimental suggestions in Suggestion Mode (see instructions) and offering feedback through the UI, etc.PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 22:35, 19 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Fix the misplaced bracket and punctuation in the parenthetical expression for the maiden name.Which actually is a legitimate fix -- there's a stray curly brace -- but isn't related to simplification at all, see my comment about it being a catch-all.
Is it worth implementing some sort of minimum length check for simplify language?
minimumCharacters value as is currently available for Reference Check. cc @DLynch (WMF) who can say definitively whether this is feasible.The model seems to feel parentheticals are a lot more complex than they are in reality... as well as picking up lists as prose...
If a wiki does not want a certain suggestion to be shown to anyone on their wiki, any administrator or interface administrator can disable it directly, without requiring any code changes/action from WMF staff.
In practice, this would look like someone visiting MediaWiki:Editcheck-config.json, identifying the Edit Suggestion or Check they'd like to disable, and changing ShowAsCheck or showAsSuggestion from True to False. We're of course happy to help out/clarify any confusion. Although, the goal is for this system to be intuitive enough for you all to adjust it based on what you're seeing in practice and the expertise you've developed.
In addition to toggling Checks and Suggestions ON/OFF, there are a range of other ways you all can customize them:
account limits a Check or Suggestion to people who are logged-in or logged-out and minimumEditCount/maximumEditCount enables you to target them based on someone's editing experience.ignoreSections excludes Checks/Suggestions from appearing within specific section headings and includeSections does the inverse, restricting a Check/Suggestion to only appear within the sections you define.ignoreDisambiguationPages makes it so a Check/Suggestion does not appear on any disambiguation pages, ignoreQuotedContent prevents them from appearing on text inside of quotation marks or blockquotes, and inCategory/notInCategory and hasTemplate/lacksTemplate scopes Checks/Suggestions based on the categories and templates present/absent within an article. Note: there's a task for enabling configuration based on properties of an article's talk page too.minimumCharacters enables you to define how much new text someone will need to have added for it to get activated. For inference-based Checks/Suggestions like link suggestions, predictionThreshold enables you to set confidence threshold the model must reach before anything is shown to someone.At any point in time, you can visit Special:EditChecks to see the current set of Checks and Suggestions that are available and how they're configured. This page is updated automatically as code changes are merged. In the future, we'd like to add metrics so that you have even more visibility into how things are working and identify what might need adjustment.
Might there be ways you'd like to be able to configure Checks/Suggestions that we do not currently offer? Is there information that you'd like to see on Special:EditChecks that's not currently visible? More broadly, does how we're thinking about this line up with how you're thinking about it? We're open and eager to any and all feedback. It's important to us that you have the visibility into, and control over, this system to make it work for your wiki (and the same for volunteers at other wikis).
---
i. See the distinction between Edit Checks and Suggestions that Marshall posted above. PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 19 August 2026 (UTC)reply
In a June meeting hosted in the Wikimedia Discord, members of the Editing and Machine Learning Teams shared (discord link) that we were experimenting with LLM-generated MoS suggestions.
In that conversation, we mentioned that this initial experiment would not involve surfacing any actual edit suggestions to volunteers. Instead, we would show edit suggestions in an "experimental" state that invited the people who opted-into seeing them to offer feedback about the quality of the suggestions. Then after that feedback process, we (volunteers + staff) could decide whether any of them were worth actually showing to people via a controlled experiment.
In the time between that call and now, we shared progress updates on the MediaWiki project page and had planned to announce the existence of this work and invite feedback about it on-wiki this week or next.
I appreciate that the above still led us into a situation where many of y'all were caught off guard by this work and as a result, trying to put the pieces together in real-time. This is not ideal for y'all and it's not ideal for us!
In this thread we've seen folks like @Alpha3031, @Chaotic Enby, @SJ, and @Kowal2701 helpfully suggesting that work like this would be better off were we to be in touch about it early and often. This way, we can get on the same page about what ideas might be non-starters and for those that we do deem worthwhile to pursue, to align on when and how we'll evaluate them together.[1] [2] [3] [4]
This all leads me to wonder…
Let's imagine we (staff) have identified a new LLM-powered suggestion that we think would be worthwhile to experiment with. When would you all appreciate us checking in with you all about it? How much information/example/context do we need to prepare before it's useful for a large group to evaluate an idea? Where do you think would be the best place for us to post about this?
Asked as another way: if we could do this all over again, what would you imagine the "ideal" process to be? PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 23:08, 20 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Next week, you can expect me to follow up with the concrete ways we're thinking about integrating the feedback people have shared in this discussion.
suggested by several editors on-wiki. I'm sure you could find more than several who would support any and all LLM implementation across the board. "Consensus between multiple experienced editors" might be better phrasing, but I think similarly to existing tools that have general acceptance is a safer metric for proceeding without additional discussion. Anything that's novel should probably receive community input. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 21:09, 27 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Given the WMF seems inclined to continue developing these tools regardless of what we say, I propose we hold an RfC establishing that LLM tools may not be deployed without an explicit consensus from the community. If editors think this may be a good idea, I suggest the following as the first draft of the question:
Should we require an explicit consensus before the WMF is permitted to deploy tools involving the use of an LLM? The WMF may deploy tools for user testing, so long as all of the following criteria are met:
- A: Testing of the tool concludes after no more than 12 months, after which the tool must be removed unless there is a community consensus for either extended testing or full deployment.
- B: Use of the tool is restricted to editors who have opted-in
- C: Use of the tool is restricted to editors who have been granted the LLM-tool user right. This would be a new user right created and granted by admins at WP:PERM.
Does anyone see issues with this proposed question? Are there any revisions? BilledMammal (talk) 07:42, 21 August 2026 (UTC)reply
I think this conversation has been healthier than some other recent enwiki–WMF conversations. Just wanted to say thanks to the WMFers that are participating here and doing things like compromising (i.e. getting rid of the NPOV model), replying a lot instead of making one polished statement then leaving, and speaking clearly and honestly.
It's tough because on some issues, WMF and enwiki are very out of sync. So even if everyone does everything right, these conversations may still be tough. But doing things like compromising, having conversations with us that aren't just statements, and speaking clearly and honestly are definitely a good approach. Please keep it up. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:23, 22 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi y'all – one outcome of the recent AI-generated edit suggestions discussions was reinforcing the need for us to be in touch with you all early in the process of exploring new inference-based suggestions. This way, we can discuss the experimental suggestion's risks and decide whether en.wiki might be a good place to evaluate its reliability before considering a wider deployment.
We're now at this point with a new experimental suggestion that we'd value your feedback on.
Inspired by the volunteer-authored AI Source Verifier, and how helpful many experienced editors have found it to be in identifying cases where a citation might not support the claim it's attached to, the Foundation's Research, Machine Learning, and Editing teams are working with Alaexis to try integrating this script as a "suggestion", only visible to experienced volunteers who have opted into seeing experimental suggestions in Suggestion Mode.
Below, you will find more information about how this proof of concept will work and the input we are needing from you all. Before that, a note on why we're prioritizing work on this suggestion right now…
We are prioritizing this exploratory source verification work in response to hearing from volunteers:
While experienced editors will remain responsible for evaluating whether a source verifies its associated claim, we are seeking to learn whether a tool like this could make the mechanical parts of this wiki work less toilsome.
And in case you're curious, we did a bit of digging to put some numbers to all of this:
Note: Neither of those sets represents the encyclopedia as a whole, so the real number is not currently known to us.
How it works
This experimental suggestion will:
Note: This suggestion would not make edits to Wikipedia and can be configured, like other Edit Checks and Suggestions, to show/not show based on a variety of conditions.
We need your input
We will soon be ready to generate an initial experimental dataset that volunteers can use to offer feedback about the usefulness and reliability of this suggestion. First, we need to decide which wikis/languages to include in this dataset.
This leads us to wonder:
For anyone interested in seeing a demo and talking about this in a voice call, we will be hosting a meeting in the Wikimedia Community Discord on 14 Sep 2026 from 17:00 - 18:00 UTC. We'll of course be responsive here as well.
In the meantime, you can get a sense for how the suggestion works by installing the user script that User:Alaexis and User:LuisVilla have been maintaining.
References
Based on some of the questions that volunteers raised in the previous discussion about LLM-backed suggestions.
Expand to read the FAQ |
|---|
|
1. What kind of communication with communities has there been on this project so far? This is the first message we've put on-wiki about this work. Note: we've mentioned this work in previous discussions [1][2][3] and have been discussing implementation details in Phabricator. 2. How did we / do we QA lists of suggestions like these? Quality assurance of this suggestion will happen in two phases, both of which will start once we know what wiki(s) would like to participate in this pilot:
How does this sound to you? What (if anything) about the above do you think we could make clearer? Might there be step(s) you think we ought to consider adding? 3. What determines whether suggestions are good enough to go beyond testing? Two inputs will determine whether a suggestion is good enough to go beyond testing:
Note: Prior to beginning the volunteer evaluation, we will share, and invite your feedback about, a concrete proposal for what thresholds we think need to be met for us to collectively consider the suggestion good enough to move forward. Might there be existing gadgets/scripts that have gone through similar types of volunteer testing that you think would be useful for us to learn from? 4. Is source verification appropriate to point an LLM at, given its nuance and complexity? Partly. 10 months of volunteer testing of the AI source verification script is leading us to think that LLMs are well suited for assisting volunteers with the mechanical work involved with identifying claims that may need their attention. Things like:
Through this mechanical work, we believe an LLM can help editors hone in on the claims that need their scrutiny. We do not think an LLM is appropriate for making actual determinations. We see this as nuanced and experience-dependent wiki work that volunteers need to continue being responsible for. What (if any) of this thinking doesnot align with how you're thinking about this? 5. Does it make sense for the message to the world to be "Knowledge is Human", but we are also using AI for certain things? We think so. Reason being, we see a core tenet of the "Knowledge is Human" message being the fact that the information included within Wikipedia is grounded in sources written by people, deemed reliable by people, and verified to support the claims they are attached to by people. Volunteers' time is a finite resource, and editing is a time-intensive process. Our goal is to use AI specifically to reduce the toil that doesn't require human judgement — like information retrieval and pattern matching. We do not see this suggestion as doing anything to change and/or minimize peoples' role in making any of these determinations. Rather, we see it as helping volunteers to decide what source verification wiki work to prioritize. We'd be curious to know how (if at all) this thinking lands with y'all…. 6. What are the known shortcomings of this approach? One of the major shortcomings of this approach is that it can only check inline, URL-based citations. This means there are entire categories of suggestions (e.g. paywalled articles, books, etc.) that are beyond the scope of this proof of concept. Should this initial, URL-dependent approach prove viable, we will explore the feasibility of expanding coverage to include more source types. False positives are another potential shortcoming; the model might flag claims that, upon volunteer review, turn out to be supported by its source. We understand this to be similar to existing on-wiki tools, like Earwig's Copyvio Detector and ORES. Accordingly, we're understanding the key concern is that this suggestion actually saves volunteers time and effort! Said another way: we wouldn't want the false positive rate to be so high that volunteers spend more time finding genuinely unverified claims than fixing them. How does this sound to you? Might there be other shortcomings you can see with this approach?
|
Thank you for reading and thinking critically about this work! PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 19:09, 10 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Is it possible to grab the datasets from those two studies (or any other similar) and cross-reference the pages by article-page categories, talk-page categories, and/or talk-page templates (like WP:CTOP templates), to see if any categories or CTOPs are more error-prone than others? That might help prioritize review of any identified problem areas.
I would think WP:BLPs, which are all in Category:Living people, would be a top priority for source verification.
Also: articles that are new, haven't been edited for a long time...
...tagged with relevant maintenance templates, like {{dubious}} or {{failed verification}}
Articles in the “history” category exhibit the highest inconsistency rate (17.7%), followed by Everyday Life (16.9%) and Society & Social Sciences (14.3%) (Figure 5). The most common error type in history articles is numerical discrepancy. By contrast, categories requiring precise technical knowledge and quantifiable information—such as Mathematics (5.6%) and Technology (9.4%)—show markedly lower rates.
If "We don't want to scan the entire Wikipedia" is the or a reason, then not scanning articles tagged as unreferenced (Category:All articles lacking sources) or lacking inline citations (Category:All articles lacking in-text citations) are obvious ones to not include as (assuming the tags are correct, which is a different issue) they cannot contain references that can be validated in this manner (~143k articles total).
It's also not worth spending the resources attempting to scan references tagged as (permanently) dead, failed verification, or dubious...
re failed verification and dubious...I agree that using them to train the model would be useful.
...re permanent dead links, I was thinking on a per-citation not per-article basis - read the tag and skip the associated without spending any resources attempting to verify it in the source.
Your comment about archive templates has sparked another thought though, that this tool could highlight potential problems with archives. Firstly, if the url-status parameter is blank or live then it should attempt to verify using the live link or both links, if it is "dead", "deviated", "usurped" or "unift" then it should only attempt to verify against the archive link.
.jpg){kind=link}
.jpg#filehistory){kind=link}
#/media/File:LLM-generated_manual_of_style_edit_suggestion_decline_survey.jpg){kind=link}
extractHttpUrl function. It was written to prefer internet archive links, and then the original link, and only then some of the other archive sites. Checking multiple URLs is possible without changing model prompts but it would still complicate the pipeline as it would functionally double the number of URLs to scrape and model requests to make so would slow things down a good bit. I'll leave that decision to Alaexis but the way I've been thinking about it: the core goal here is verifying the claim, which thusfar we've attempted to do that by fetching the "best" URL. As you raise, there are a variety of additional checks you could do at the same time with the goal of improving the citation (and therefore general Verifiability). I've also thought about inferring the language of the source URL to help fill in the lang parameters on citation templates. These additional checks/actions would complicate the core claim verification task though so I would almost prefer them to be separate at least from an interface perspective, but I am taking note of them....beyond "we don't want to scan the entire Wikipedia" - is that the reason? Or something else?
It would be great if all that low-level crud could be done once, properly, correctly, and then everybody else who wanted to build tools in that space could just take advantage of it instead of reinventing it from scratch.
A while ago I built something...which parses a page, pulls out all the individual claims, and matches them up with citations
...everybody else who wanted to build tools in that space could just take advantage of it instead of reinventing it from scratch.
For anyone interested in seeing a demo and talking about this in a voice call, we will be hosting a meeting in the Wikimedia Community Discord on 14 Sep 2026 from 17:00 - 18:00 UTC.
Thanks for the pro-active post on this. I have some reservations based on common things that can go wrong (as well as other things I would prefer be prioritized) but will wait to see the actual suggestions first. Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:09, 14 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I have some reservations based on common things that can go wrong (as well as other things I would prefer be prioritized) but will wait to see the actual suggestions first.
Thanks for the pro-active post on this.
@RoySmith:, you suggested that it would be useful to have the "verify claim against source" exposed as an API endpoint, so I've done it, details here. I've checked it myself, so feel free to tinker with it too. To avoid any doubt, the edit suggestions pilot doesn't use this endpoint. Alaexis¿question? 19:00, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi y'all – below is the criteria we are planning to use to select the initial ~1,000 articles we will generate source verification suggestions for.
If you see criteria that are included or missing from the below that you think is critical to reviewing the reliability of this suggestion, please comment as much.
Article selection criteria
We are proposing to generate an initial batch of source verification suggestions for ~1,000 articles using the following selection criteria. The criteria you see are meant to reflect what we heard from you all: this dataset ought to be representative of where you see these suggestions being most useful and potentially, risky.
| Selection criteria | Description | Motivation |
|---|---|---|
| Evergreen | A set of 100 articles User:Alaexis has predicted are likely to be edited within the next 30 days. | This is a set of popular and frequently edited articles where the impact of inaccurate claims is higher and where the suggestions are more likely to be seen and acted upon. |
| Category:BLP | Biographies of living people | Articles susceptible to mis-attributed/incorrect information and where evaluating all of them might be unrealistic. Automation to help facilitate this process could make this task more feasible for more people on an ongoing basis. |
| Category:CTOP | Contentious topics | |
| Category:History | Historical articles | Articles that are prone to inconsistencies and thus more likely to contain claims that need verification[1] |
| {{dubious}} | Articles where at least one {{dubious}} template is present | Strong signal that unsubstantiated claims may be present; offers a helpful reference to benchmark the model against[2] |
| {{failed verification}} | Articles where at least one {{failed verification}} template is present | |
| {{AI-generated}} | Articles volunteers have concluded to be AI-generated | Articles more likely to contain hallucinated references (read: claims that are not substantiated by the sources that accompany them) |
| Good article nominations | Articles nominated for "Good" article status | Thorough review of all claims within article nominations is necessary and toilsome. |
| NPP Backlog | Articles created in 2026 that are not reviewed yet | There is a long backlog of new articles for review and being able to increase the speed with which volunteers can evaluate verifiability could help decrease it. |
Next steps In terms of process, here is how we see things going from here:
How does this all sound?
PPelberg (WMF) (talk) 16:17, 24 September 2026 (UTC)reply
This sounds like a solid plan. I must emphasize the importance of being honest with yourselves in the internal review – if you're having to, say, regenerate half the suggestions because of obvious errors, that might mean more work is required on the underlying tool before volunteers test it. Please tell us exactly what you find there, with numbers.
I also wonder, if each of these nine categories gets ~1/9th of the 1000 articles, do we have enough statistical power to do whatever analysis you are hoping to do? I'm not a statistician, and 100+ articles per category is still a lot, but that's something you want to check beforehand.
For the NPP category, I suggest choosing only articles that have sat in the NPP queue for a week or two to make them less likely to be instantly reviewed and fixed up by someone patrolling the front of the queue.
I think incorporating this constraint shouldn't be too difficult for this run. Although, if that proves to be the case, we'll let you know as much.
Hi everyone!
I am Kaarel, working with the Wikimedia Foundation, facilitating conversations regarding the future of affiliate landscape. We would love to get your thoughts on the current discussions on recognition and funding of movement organizations.
We’ve heard many times (for example here and here) about problems related to grant funded projects and that's why it’s incredibly important that your voices, ideas, and expectations are heard.
We just published a summary report from our July and August conversations. It highlights what people agree on, where they disagree, and what still needs clearing up. We hope this report gives you a good overview of the chat so far and inspires you to jump in! Your perspective as a project contributor is vital to shaping the future of this model.
Please head over to Meta (general discussion, affiliate model discussion, funding discussion), to share your thoughts. If you have any questions or just want to chat through it, feel free to reach out to me. I am keen to set that up, listen and talk through.
We will also be hosting two public community calls next week and the week after: 1) Thursday, September 24, 16:30-17:30 UTC on affiliate overlaps 1) Tuesday, September 29, 16:00-17:00 UTC on affiliate growth paths - LINK TO THE CALL and 2) Thursday, September 24, 16:30-17:30 UTC rescheduled to Friday, October 2nd, 17:00-18:00 UTC on affiliate overlaps - LINK TO THE CALL.
Thank you for your very kind attention and have a great rest of your week! --KVaidla (WMF) (talk) 08:40, 16 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I think that what the WMF is doing is well thought out and will certainly help to insure that donor money is spent better. On the other hand, I also think that those on the receiving end are very strongly motivated to maximize how much cash flows their way, and will do whatever it takes to accomplish that.
The problem is that I don't see anyone surveying a sample of donors and asking them whether this is what they had in mind when they donated. I think that if you asked them the overwhelming majority would say that the money should go to things like hosting.
The WMF knows this. That's why the latest banner ads say "We hope that [Wikipedia] has given you at least $2.75 of knowledge. If so, please join the 2% of readers who give to keep this resource available for all".
Note that they did not say "...who give to match racial justice leaders with machine learning research engineers to develop data-based machine learning applications."
I am reminded of the many smart people who asked "are we spending money of the right things in Vietnam? Should we fund better rifles or better boots? Should we buy more tanks or more jeeps?" all without ever asking "should we be fighting a war in Vietnam at all?" I think you can guess what the answers from the "stakeholders" who supplied the boots and the jeeps were. --Guy Macon (talk) 17:44, 16 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Scholarship applications are now being accepted for Wikimania 2027, which will take place August 18 to 21 in Santiago, Chile. The final deadline to submit your application is October 31, 2026 (end of day Anywhere on Earth).
Scholarships cover travel and accommodations, registration, and limited travel insurance fees. Wiki project contributors and Wikimedians working to connect our movement with the wider open knowledge and culture ecosystem are invited to apply.
Tell us about your Wikimedia journey, share your vision for “The Internet we want” (the theme for Wikimania 2027), and be sure to include links to your work. All in-person attendees, including scholars, will be subject to trust and safety checks.
More detailed information on the application process can be found on the Scholarships section of the Wikimania wiki, and in this Diff post.
Orientation sessions for potential applicants will be offered starting the week of October 5, 2026. Successful applicants will be notified starting in January 2027.
Best of luck to all! Eureka-WMF (talk) 15:04, 22 September 2026 (UTC)reply
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.
Hello, should administrators on different wikimedia projects like Wikipedia be paid? I think yes. Botaki (talk) 12:28, 25 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Please review:
There is a lot to unpack there, so please post anything you find that seems worth discussing. --Guy Macon (talk) 18:38, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I will start with one that caught my eye:
Was this $42K well spent? Who benefited? What was accomplished?
Was this the sort of thing that the donation banners describe your contributions as funding?
Why are some of the links at dead or useless? Are we not capable of posting these publications on WMF servers? --Guy Macon (talk) 18:38, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
seful? Sure. $42,356 USD of the donor's contributions useful?, that's how research works??? You provide a chunk of funding so that a group of researchers can try different methodologies and techniques and build prototypes to see if any work. If anything, 42K is fairly cheap in the research world for the length of time the project took (2022-2025) actually since if you think about it, a single grad student's yearly tuition and stipend in CS (being paid barely enough to sustain themselves, while also being one of the most funding rich areas) amounts to roughly that number.
I question why only a handful of insiders get funding for doing that from the WMF.. Guy Macon, I would suggest looking at the page for the dissemination of research funds which provides full transparency into who is allowed to put in proposals, how much money WMF is willing to give for research projects, the proposals submitted and rejected, the folks who decide who to fund (who are well respected researchers within the Wikimedia Research community). I don't think characterizing this as "insiders get funding" is a correct characterization. Sohom (talk) 03:22, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Can you name a single governance structure that was maintained or implemented by this research?To this among other research appears to be part of a body of research into policies that eventually led to the establishment of the NPOV Working Group and the subsequent implementation of the global baseline NPOV policy. Sohom (talk) 00:27, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
The problem is that you have offered no examples where having One More Web Page On Meta actually avoided any incident where any Wikimedia project's credibility was called into question- The m:CheckUser policy and the m:UCoC would be prominent examples of the a "page on meta fixes problems" effect. Sohom (talk) 00:21, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
In this edit, Guy Macon wrote, The first two results are trivial and the third is just plain wrong.
I think it would be good if Textaural, who is an experienced enwiki editor, could respond here. The peer-reviewed research paper is technically a WP:RS, so usable in enwiki articles, but peer review does not guarantee correctness.
I agree that the third key result The status of rules [on these 5 Wikipedias is] established largely by individual decisions and rarely through collective decision making
is extremely dubious for at least enwiki and frwiki. The strings !vote and not vote seem to be completely absent from the published paper. In a nutshell: If I'm the individual to first write the enwiki policy that 1+1=2 is a fact and nobody contests that, it's not due to my dictatorial authority; it's due to the WP:!VOTE decision-making algorithm and the nature of 1+1=2 being widely considered as reasonable, without anybody needing to argue about it (leaving aside modern foundations of mathematics). The whole point of not holding a vote on my hypothetical new policy is that getting 10,000 votes (not !votes) with a likely result of 99.9% in favour would be a huge waste of time. @Textaural: How do you justify your extraordinary conclusion that Within the English-language rules, the authority of rules was based on the editorial authority of one user, who may have found support through limited deliberation
without having studied the role of WP:!VOTEs in the establishment of enwiki rules? !VOTEs are a form consensus decision-making, which is a form of collective decision-making. The authority of rules is not based on the editorial authority of one user; it's based (often) on the ability of one user to successfully describe and summarise the current consensus or predict the likely consensus.
Textaural: do you have any evidence for this claim that you and your authors assert in the paper? The Methods section of your paper says nothing about how you quantify the unexpressed non-objections to enwiki rules (a possible method would be to obtain permission to do a survey of Wikipedians to see how much they agree with existing rules and whether or not they have tried objecting to rules they disagree with; but you don't seem to have done that). Boud (talk) 11:07, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Unreliable Guidelines, a project of Reading Together: Reliability and Multilingual Global Communities, is an inaugural Art+Feminism research report partially funded by WikiCred, which supports research, software projects and Wikimedia events about information reliability and credibility.WikiCred and Art+Feminism are together funding the paper with At+Feminism being the primary sponsor and WikiCred being a partial sponsor. The Funding section in particular say
The expertise of the main researchers was partially funded by WikiCred and Art+Feminism. i.e. that this project was a collaboration between AF and WikiCred. Nowhere does it say that the Art+Feminism is funded by WikiCred. Sohom (talk) 00:27, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Can I suggest separating, to the extent possible, the funding question from an evaluation of the paper? The WMF does not read the outcome of a project before funding the project, of course, so really it's a question of "should the WMF invest in research about Wikipedia governance" not "should the WMF invest in this paper". Yes, "was this worth it" is a fine question to ask, and one that the WMF answers internally, too, but any evaluation of the funding question should be based not on "I found one I'm skeptical of" but on a full accounting of related projects. I haven't engaged deeply with this paper yet (open in a tab in my "to read" window for some time, sadly), but the project sounds worth doing to me. We have precious few studies that examine Wikipedia governance anywhere but the English Wikipedia, and a direct comparison between several language editions is very potentially valuable. And NM&S is easily one of the top journals for non-computational Wikipedia research these days. That doesn't mean everything it publishes is perfect, but it has a high rejection rate, intense peer review process, and deep bench of Wiki-knowledgeable reviewers. That said, as with any Wikipedia research, it's also valuable when volunteers evaluate the content and correct the record, if appropriate. A quick search through the signpost archives doesn't turn up a match, so maybe it's a good fit for the next Research Report. — Rhododendrites talk \\ 16:16, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Highlights
Annual Goals Progress on Engage
See also: Growth · Product Safety and Integrity · Tech News · Language and Internationalization · The Wikipedia Library · list of movement events · Wikifunctions & Abstract Wikipedia
Annual Goals Progress on Enable
See also: Research newsletter · WikiLearn News · other newsletters on MediaWiki.org
Annual Goals Progress on Reach
See also: Wikimedia Apps · Readers
Other Movement-curated newsletters & news
Diff blog · Goings-on · Planet Wikimedia · Signpost (en) · The Headword (en) · Kurier (de) · Actualités du Wiktionnaire (fr) · Regards sur l'actualité de la Wikimedia (fr) · Wikimag (fr) · Education · GLAM · Milestones · Wikidata · Central and Eastern Europe · other newsletters
Subscribe or unsubscribe · Help translate
For information about the Bulletin and to read previous editions, see the project page on Meta-Wiki. If you have feedback or suggestions about the bulletin, let us know at foundationbulletin@wikimedia.org. For questions about the Wikimedia Foundation's work, contact us!
MediaWiki message delivery 01:50, 30 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Please for the love of all that is holy, can we either revamp these to require some degree of human oversight in terms of suggestions, or just remove them entirely? My experience both with peeking at them briefly as a newbie myself and reviewing edits made by others is that they give vague and unhelpful suggestions on articles that need major improvements, so we get these new editors with no understanding of the subject making equally unhelpful (and sometimes nonsensical) changes that other editors then have to review and usually revert. It's creating extra work without actually improving the articles. It would be one thing if the tool was actually capable of identifying truly minor edits needed, like spelling and grammar, but that doesn't seem to be the case. We'd be better off leaving newbies to look around on their own and make edits where they feel they adequately understand both the subject and the changes that are needed, rather than trying to guess what some automation has identified. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 02:31, 25 August 2026 (UTC)reply
What I'm suggesting here is just a very brief intro - a popup (with option to skip) with a few slides mentioning the absolute basics– that's exactly what each newcomer task offers? Johannnes89 (talk) 05:47, 27 August 2026 (UTC)reply
25% of newcomers tried to start and article'was provided by Kersin Stoller herself, and the statistics to day are worse. The WMF was presented with a community project several ties and as recently again March this year. They are working on a project led by the language team but it will mot have any impact on the quality of the hundreds of new articles that are submitted daily to the English Wikipedia.The community's project could be rolled out in a couple of months and would stop all his nonsense dead in its tracks.Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 06:48, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
No, the reason all of these edits have not been reverted is because the community did not consider them worth reverting.
link-recommendation. If I'm reading Special:CommunityConfiguration/GrowthSuggestedEdits correctly, I believe that is the "Add a link (Structured task)", which is not defined by templates - only excluded by them. revise-tone is also not mentioned there at all and therefore I assume that one is AI generated as well. For those tasks that are template defined, I'd recommend improving the suggestions by adding a parameter to define the level of work an article needs - maybe a 1-5 scale, with levels 4-5 automatically excluding them from newcomer tasks based on the level of work required, as Template:No newcomer task is meant to (which I've never seen utilized, and I would imagine most editors don't know it exists). Levels 1-3 could correspond to easy, medium, and hard tasks, instead of just assuming that all copyedit is easy. I would also recommend excluding articles with three or more maintenance templates for the same reason. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:58, 29 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Acceptable disclaimers: ... Temporary cleanup templates, such as {{POV}}, {{original research}} or {{cleanup}}. These point to deficiencies in the article that should be corrected promptly.If they aren't for readers to see, they should be hidden. Lots of other things are. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 09:36, 8 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Recent conversation about some newcomer tasks: WP:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 231#We need to get rid of the "suggested links" tool. I'm strongly in favour of using them as an easy way to learn how to make an edit. Many issues mentioned in this discussion can be addressed by slightly changing the community configuration. --Johannnes89 (talk) 19:36, 26 August 2026 (UTC)reply
That's not what it sounds like to me. My read is that it automatically flags edits for patrol based on this internal automated scoring system. Is there some other function of it I'm missing? ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:08, 29 August 2026 (UTC)reply
Community members were involveddoes not equate to consensus. This comes across (yet again) as "We're going to shove LLM down your throat, and if people protest loudly enough we'll consider removing it after the fact." And you wonder why editors are hostile to WMF involvement. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 04:23, 29 August 2026 (UTC)reply
the changes in constructive edit rates did not meet the threshold for statistical significance. ChompyTheGogoat (talk) 10:07, 29 August 2026 (UTC)reply
**Suggested edit-summary (copy-paste into the “Edit summary” box):**chatbot response in one edit summary, an indication of how thoroughly this person reviewed the edits they have spammed out)
or as a flag that pops up to indicate the problematic phrase when someone is already editing the article in question- this exists (as a beta feature) in the form of Suggestion Mode. OutsideNormality (talk) 17:46, 6 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I'm not at all surprised to learn it's also AI
Is it possible that some PendingChanges type of monitor list shows a subset these editsWell, this shows Special:RecentChanges filtered by edits that are tagged with
newcomer task, which one can patrol at will. It's possible to filter further by type of task. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 14:32, 1 September 2026 (UTC)reply
is unlikely to ever do good contributions to our projects imoI think that's rather a sweeping statement. First, the editor may well have had good experiences outside Wikipedia with the accuracy of information on Reddit, so why would they think off the bat that it is an unreliable source? Second, maybe they missed the note on the fifth slide of the tutorial that social media is generally not reliable, or they might not consider Reddit to be social media - it is certainly user-generated, but the tutorial doesn't talk about the unsuitability of user-generated content. In this case, the edit was reverted with a decent edit summary, plus a corresponding talk page message, helping the editor to learn from the mistake. That is, I think, how we encourage and retain new editors, rather than dismissing them out of hand after they make a mistake on their fourteenth edit. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 10:07, 9 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Cottage restoration has led to a renewed urban environment and overall visual aesthetic.is no different in tone than
Most of the old cottages have been fixed up, so much so that the area has a newer look than it did just ten years agoexcept for the "bigger words," and arguably it is worse because it now has an abstract, promotional, real estate brochure-like slickness.
revised language to be more concise) then they didn't understand the task, and any improvements are basically accidental. Gnomingstuff (talk) 19:03, 11 September 2026 (UTC)reply
When newcomers start making...drives a coach and horses through assuming good faith. Cheers, SunloungerFrog (talk) 07:19, 12 September 2026 (UTC)reply
In some casesdoes not translate to "all of the time". It means I have literally seen that happen on some occasions, meaning it was eventually proven. Some even turned out to be LTAs. I'm not assuming anything and I've had quite enough of the disingenuous misinterpretations. Do you have any relevant points to make that haven't already been discussed, or are you just going to continue arguing over increasingly pedantic minutiae? Because I know you aren't trying to imply we should allow AI slop simply because it comes from a new account. Good faith mistakes do happen also (albeit far less often), and my proposals attempt to minimize those as well so such editors don't get discouraged when they're reverted. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 18:42, 12 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Patrolling isn't required for edits to be live, correct? My biggest suggestion would be to show the reviewed status on the feed even if someone chooses not to use it as a filter option. They can still decide whether or not it's something they want to check out for themselves. Nonbinary statuses and/or counts of reviews could be useful too. The concern about backlog is valid, if that's what the tool currently does - I don't think it's reasonable to expect all edits to be reviewed; it should just be additional information to help patrollers do what they're already doing. If a specific newcomer patrol is created (especially one focused on good edits/newcomer tasks instead of vandalism) I expect they'd have a significantly lower workload so it might be more realistic to clear their feed - or it might not. More flexibility for them to implement it however they find the most useful is most likely to be successful. My idea was something very lightweight that would just indicate another patroller has had eyes on it, but given the previous difficulties it may take more work to get RCPatrol into a form that EN editors are willing to pass. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 10:16, 10 September 2026 (UTC)reply@ChompyTheGogoat Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the idea of reducing review redundancy. We have a software feature that could help with this, but it's currently not enabled on the English Wikipedia. On some other wikis, there's a 'patrol' button for each edit, so users can mark an edit as 'patrolled'. Other editors can then filter this edit out of venues like Recent Changes, and focus on unreviewed edits. There have been some discussions here about the feature, but no consensus to enable it. I'm interested in thinking about how we might be able to update the feature so that it could be enabled, if the community wanted to do so. I've been collecting notes at T409165 - would love to know if you have additional thoughts!
— User:Samwalton9 (WMF) 09:57, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
And adding one single exception (when some of them really do need to be fixed) doesn't change the fact that the task is inherently problematic, and even if it does correctly identify a passage that needs work it doesn't offer new editors the necessary support to actually understand how to fix them. This one sounds like it was ripped straight from the blurb on the cover, not actually a proper summary of the sources - which aren't cited in any case, so there's additional legwork needed to figure out what it really should say. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 18:51, 10 September 2026 (UTC)replyI think that plot summaries, particularly in fantasy or other forms of non-realistic fiction, are highly likely to correctly contain phrases that seem to have tone problems. The problem isn't the edit that was made; the problem is that the Revise tone task suggested improving that plot summary in the first place.
— User:WhatamIdoing 18:13, 10 September 2026 (UTC)
Also, what's being done to prevent direct quotes from being included in these tasks?
I also eliminated direct quotes except where necessary to preserve meaning, summarizing statements instead of reproducing conversational language). I suspect this is probably occurring here as well. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:03, 14 September 2026 (UTC)reply
one of the bots told me that I had to change a section on this article.
BERT model, which is usually outdated.
Search engines that are expressly designed for searching web pages, documents, and images were developed to facilitate searching through a large, nebulous blob of unstructured resources. They are engineered to follow a multi-stage process: crawling the infinite stockpile of pages and documents to skim the figurative foam from their contents, indexing the foam/buzzwords in a sort of semi-structured form (database or something), and at last, resolving user entries/queries to return mostly relevant results and links to those skimmed documents or pages from the inventory.
Three years after the events of Ghosts 'n Goblins, the Ghosts have returned with Ghouls for revenge, initiating a mortal holocaust on the Princess' kingdom as beams of light struck through countless villagers. When Sir Arthur returns to the village, his rescue attempt was too late as his beloved Princess Prin-Prin also has her soul taken away from her body in front of his very eyes. Now it's up to the heroic knight once again to slay his way to the hellish castle to defeat the evil Lucifer and his legion of demons and restore the souls of Prin-Prin and every mortal.
patrollers need adrenaline(if I remember properly). However, the point of patrolling is about protecting Wikipedia, not about whether patrollers get that hit or not. Patrollers should not not patrol because it is boring. I am not going to debate this however, as I do not remember the details.
high expectations from volunteers. I know better than most just how steep the learning curve is, considering I've been here less than a year - my underlying concern is that the newcomer tasks don't help people learn. They rarely make sense even to those of us with more experience. I've seen a number of newbies make better edits on articles they choose to edit voluntarily than on newcomer tasks (including some I've used as examples here). And I'm still not against the overall idea of suggested edits; only their current incarnation. I don't believe that retention alone is an acceptable priority if it comes at the cost of other editors needing to do extensive cleanup. WP:CIR in general, and while we all know that newbies (and everyone else) will make some mistakes, any features targeting them should be optimized to help them overcome that learning curve and gain competence as quickly as possible. Some people just aren't ever going to be competent; it's not easy work, and I think it's less frustrating for everyone if those wash out quickly while the ones who are capable of learning make clear progress. A better mentor system might help with this, but overall it's difficult to know how to avoid wasting excessive time while also not being overly discouraging. (There's a reason I'm not a mentor myself.) I do want a better system that will help improve retention of the subset of newbies who have the potential to benefit the project in the long run, and I've made numerous suggestions to that effect. This user said
if I am not sure of an edit, I would rather leave it to others, then to create more workwhich I think is a good mindset to have - it was also my own approach that I think helps with both competence and retention, because I wasn't making tons of mistakes and getting reverted right and left. I hung around discussion boards learning as much as possible and trod lightly in mainspace until quite recently. Some editors want to be more active to feel like they're contributing, and that's fine, but reverted edits usually don't do much in that regard, so we should be giving them functional tools that can help ensure their edits really are improvements. ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 04:55, 26 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Make articles more factual by removing promotional words. If you look at the tooltip -- which I doubt people actually do, but for completeness's sake -- the text is
Help readers access trustworthy information by replacing promotional and opinion-based language with balanced content. Tone improvements are machine-suggested, and you decide whether to revise or decline each one.Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:01, 28 September 2026 (UTC)reply
Please tell me why you think it would be useful to change the description of the task when how it actually works is the issue. Literally what would that solve? ChompyTheGogoat [ Bleat | Munched ] 14:04, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
After you have completed some easy edits." which is completely illogical). Medium mode was not useful at all and was vague. One of the regular users that use this, Idr888, once accidentally inserted a new citation with author "wpadmin", but the tool somehow did not flag it. They were confused but assumed it was correct. I later fixed it, but if I did not randomly stumble across that and taught then, who knows how much more broken citations would be inserted. Hard mode next, and I am not expecting any better. Thanks! LiteGlide (talk) 12:56, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Hallucinating means that the tool puts false information in a page.Both my understanding and the link you added contradicted your point.
a response generated by AI that contains false or misleading information presented as fact.Additionally, the BERT model is not Symbolic Artificial Intelligence.
Tone improvements are machine-suggested, and you decide whether to revise or decline each one.That wording does not read like a warning. It just says that the suggestions are from a machine and you decide if you should fix it or not. That is also tucked at the last sentence of a greyed out paragraph. After you are in the experience, it does not remind the newcomer of the relatively high error rate.
The classifications may well be wrong, but it's based on the type of task (e.g., adding links is easy, adding sources is medium, expanding stubs is difficult). There is no attempt to evaluate an individual article. Adding links is always "easy" (even if it's actually difficult for that particular article), and expanding articles is always "hard" (even if it's actually easy for that particular article).
It sounds like you're expecting it to evaluate your changes to see if you did the work correctly.
the straight-up copy/paste of advertising textAnd I already wrote that in my initial report, if you missed it. Thanks. 16dvnk (talk) 15:54, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Hello. Before I had this account, I used to edit on Wikipedia between 2007-2010 when I was much younger, mostly on IP addresses. I made one account before this in late 2007, but I forgot all about it very quickly, and even after finding it again I can't remember the name of it. Afterwards, I continued to edit as an IP user.
Back in 2010, one of the IP addresses I was using got wrongly tagged as "abusing multiple accounts" after I reported a user for vandalism. I got blocked for one month, even though I had my own edit history, and I wasn't related to or affiliated with that user in any way, shape or form. I believe it was because I was editing in some of the same areas/pages as the registered user, who did get banned/blocked permanently. I used to get annoyed with other IPs over vandalism and revert questionable edits over and over. Anyway, I got unblocked after one month and I was able to edit Wikipedia again on the same IP address. I stopped a few months later after my IP changed. Until I made this account in April 2026, I have not edited at all whatsoever since 2010. I wanted to sort of start over in a way and help out on Wikipedia.
Recently, this old incident has been bothering me a lot, probably more than it should. The IP I used back then was only temp blocked, and I assumed after that I was in good standing from then on, but I'm not sure. I honestly don't know if any of this stuff would still matter/apply to anything or not, or if I should do anything, especially because it was on an IP I used almost two decades ago. Either way I've been very stuck on this issue for a while. All I can say is I've learned to explain myself a lot better than I could many years ago. I can provide the specific IP and more information in email/etc. if anyone is interested, but I don't know If I want to mention it in public for privacy reasons, unless it is necessary. I guess I'm looking for advice if anything. I come in good faith. PuzzleMuch (talk) 04:09, 23 September 2026 (UTC)reply
You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 05:46, 26 September 2026 (UTC)reply
The administrator elections process has officially started! Qualified editors are encouraged to find at least one experienced nominator. Self-nominations are also allowed. Please review instructions at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/October 2026/Candidates.
Here is the schedule:
Please note the following:
Ask any questions about the process at the talk page. Later, a user talk message will be sent to official candidates with additional information about the process.
If you are interested in the process, please make sure to watchlist the appropriate pages. A watchlist notice will be added when the discussion phase opens, and again when the voting phase opens.
You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 00:59, 29 September 2026 (UTC)reply
I've made a page at Wikipedia:Reform RfC to describe a phenomenon that's happened many times but isn't really described as its own concept. I'm throwing it out there for anyone who might be more knowledgeable than me on Wikipedia history and have anything to add. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 03:40, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
I've been reading Wikipedia since around 2004 and I've noticed a lot of Wiki-PR-ization when it comes to the entire site, specifically regarding the citation of sources and Wikipedia's presentation of said sources as a fact.
I'm aware that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and that its job is to present the content in an informative and concise format. The main problem is when certain sources take claims and say they are true without providing any substantial evidence.
Take for instance the Kiwi Farms article. Just to note, I am not defending or supporting stalking, harassing, doxing, pranking, whatever they like to call it. I am basing my critique based on sources I've read to formulate my thoughts.
Many of the sources say the same thing without any variation. A lot of them also also seem to violate WP:NOR, WP:NPOV and WP:V. While these sites are established with years of reporting to their history, the articles relating to the subject feature in my opinion, surface level research with many barely bothering to get the opposing party's point of view; few do but only feature it in a brief sentence or two.
On the topic of supposed suicides the sources mention, it's hard to prove whether the site caused the suicides or not. Factoring in other reasons like personal problems which can range from trouble making friends to having abrasive personalities makes that statement sound more dubious.
Harassment has existed well before the site, even before the darkweb. There are also a lot of harassers who use the site or worse, impersonate someone to cause discord for whatever reason which brings up the problem, how can we verify the sites claim of being involved in harassment and suicide? Even if we consider the "harrassment victim" of which this site grew out of, how many harassers did this on their own intention and how much of what he did was really the result of harassment?
To reiterate. I do not support nor defend stalking, harassing, doxing, pranking, whatever they like to call it. I just think a lot of articles could be less biased/PR based and could be more neutral. BeenHereForYears (talk) 19:44, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Some English writing guides abhor "past experience" as do I. It occurs in the lede of Republicanism, and many other occurrences in articles can be found. I could not find a specific MOS section or essay that covers this (though I did find the pleonasm used at MOS:COMICS). Can I get some feedback on whether this is just a personal preference, or whether it applies to writing standards for Wikipedia? ☆ Bri (talk) 22:59, 1 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Self-nominations are open – now through 8 October – for the Electoral Commission for the 2026 Arbitration Committee election. The Electoral Commission resolves any disputes or problems that arise during the election. Please see Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee Election/Rules § Electoral Commission for more information about the role, including eligibility criteria. This is a single-term position lasting until the end of the 2026 ArbCom election. DanCherek (talk) 02:19, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
How much editing occurs in it? Do readers use it? Where can I find data? voorts (talk/contributions) 19:47, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
Hi everyone. I am not sure if this is the correct place to ask this (or even if it is allowed) but I wanted to improve my editing of articles and occassionally create articles in relation to my dyslexia. I have always muddled through, with just a few coping mechanisms from way back when I was in school. I think I'm 'classed' as a mild to moderate dyslexic. I have created a sum total of one article which I found difficult, not least because of a lack of confidence. I was hoping that any fellow dyslexics or people that are in the know might be able to recommend any tools for mobiles that might help? I realise this might be out of scope for Wikipedia or classed as advertising so please just remove this if it isn't appropriate. Thanks in advance, Knitsey (talk) 22:35, 2 October 2026 (UTC)reply
I'm unsure where to ask this, but:
Where can I get userboxes to place on my user page? (that I didn't create yet)
Or do I have to make them myself? I'm a newcomer and I'm very confused. -)Anypup(- (talk) 20:59, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
unsure where to ask this, I would suggest going to the Teahouse for these kinds of questions. Welcome to Wikipedia, and I hope you have a nice time editing. ✦Inzessin✦ (talk) 21:43, 3 October 2026 (UTC)reply
I once came across an essay that quoted a user who threatened to place a "King's curse" on another user who wouldn't let them have their way, and I think the essay's point might have been that threatening users with dark magic is a silly way to handle content disputes, or something along those lines. A search for the phrase a king's curse no longer returns anything, so I'm sure that essay no longer exists, and I don't remember what its title was. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 01:15, 4 October 2026 (UTC)reply