Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard

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This page is for requesting input on possible original research. Ask for advice here regarding material that might be original research or original synthesis. Include links to the relevant article(s). Make an attempt to familiarize yourself with the no original research policy before reporting issues here. You can also post here if you are unsure whether the content is considered original research. Sections older than 28 days archived by MiszaBot II. (For help, see Wikipedia:Purge) If you mention specific editors, please notify them. You may use {{subst:NORN-notice}} to do so.
Additional notes: "Original research" includes unpublished facts, arguments, speculation, and ideas; and any unpublished analysis or synthesis of published material that serves to advance a position. Such content is prohibited on Wikipedia. For volunteers wishing to mark a discussion resolved, use {{Resolved|Your reason here ~~~~}} at the top of the section.
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personal observations of down websites

I'm quite confident that observing a website being down over a period isn't good justification for adding that the site is dead in the article (see the history of Professor Watchlist for the present example), and was fairly sure that specific example was mentioned somewhere in some guideline, but now I'm not finding it. Pointer? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:33, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

WP:DEADLINK says, In general, avoid removing citations (or cited material) simply because a URL no longer works, especially if the citation is formatted with other information (like a title, author, date and publication name) that could alternatively be used to find the source. is sort of relevant, though I think a better one would simply be WP:V; it doesn't matter what we see ourselves, it matters what WP:RS say. I can look out my window and see that it's raining, but that's not enough for me to modify Weather to say that it's raining right now. EducatedRedneck (talk) 13:06, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

There's https://downdetector.me/?domain=professorwatchlist.org and https://web.archive.org/web/20260504204954/https://www.professorwatchlist.org/ to support the website being unavailable. Fences&Windows 13:32, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Question about the use of colour in infoboxes, OR/NPOV?

Just before I begin: I have not notified any editor from the discussion inspiring this discussion, because my question is more general, and not about their conduct or that of any particular editor. I don't want to bother anyone in particular about this or imply they did anything wrong. If I should inform people even when not questioning their behaviour, then I will do so. I was also not sure if I should ask this question at the NPOV or OR noticeboard, so I just chose one.

My question regards the practice of using, on political party infoboxes, colours as accents (using the colorcode= parameter), when the party does not have an official colour as far as can be established, and there is no (as far as editors are aware) consensus among media to use certain colours with certain parties. The template {{Party color}} is often used for this.

In the case prompting this question, Together (Israel) has a logo. From that logo, editors have derived a party colour to use for the accents. However, most political parties in Israel use blue in their branding, as this is the main colour used in the Israeli flag and other national emblems. The issue I see arises in part because these colours are all so similar, and the editors wish to differentiate them. In doing so, a (in my view) arbitrary choice is made to make one blue different from another, between two pages, or to refrain from using blue and seeking a secondary colour in a party's branding to use instead, to avoid confusion.

An additional issue I see with the practice is that the underlying data for the Party color template is in module:political party. Changes to the party colour, as agreed on the talk page for the political party article itself, affect more than just the article's styling, but the colour used across the project to represent the party, and even beyond the project, as codes outside of this website, and outside the control of our P&G make use of this data for visualisations.

My question:

Is this practice arbitrary, (I would say yes) and does that arbitrary editorial process constitute a violation of WP:OR? Does the arbitrary nature of such a process prejudice off-wiki formation of media consensus in a way that Wikipedia is meant to avoid, and is this a violation of NPOV or adjacent principles?

My answer to all of these is "maybe" and I tend to prefer the Precautionary principle when it comes to this stuff, so I tried, unsuccessfully mostly, to convince editors to refrain from this styling. In part, it was somewhat fruitful in that the editor I spoke to said they understood my arguments when it came to adding the color= parameter (which adds a party colour) to the infobox without a source. I did not recieve a clear answer on a more fundamental part of my concern, however, which was about changing the colour in the module.

Thanks in advance for input, and happy editing,

Slomo666 (talk) 13:30, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

My understanding is that WP:OR applies to claims in articles. Color-coding parties seems more like an editorial decision to make navigation and quick identification easier, similar to infoboxes themselves and categories. Unless the infobox is claiming that the party's official color is the one presented (which seems ridiculous, as most have, at best, a color pallet for their branding, not a single shade) then it's not OR any more than putting Together (Israel) in the Category: Political parties of Israel category "Political opposition alliances" is OR. EducatedRedneck (talk) 14:00, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

To be honest, the infobox was claiming a set of colours as the party's official colours, (as this is the description of the color= param) but I removed that shortly after I posted my question here.

Thanks for your imput.

How do you feel about my concern about wider effects as a result of using module:political party?

Happy editing,

Slomo666 (talk) 14:13, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

I suppose I'm less concerned with that; it's nice to have automated consistency across pages, and if other people use Wikipedia's data for something, they assume the risk inherent in a project governed by committee. I'm not well-versed in that side of things, however, so take my opinion as that of an uneducated layman. EducatedRedneck (talk) 14:21, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Childhood nudity

On the talk page of this article, I have raised specific concerns about content that fails WP:V, relies on improper WP:PRIMARY source extrapolations, or WP:SYNTH-esizes unrelated material. These policy concerns remain unaddressed, so discussion has stalled. To avoid edit warring, I'm bringing this here to get fresh eyes on whether these passages comply with WP:NOR. Similar issues exist in a few other parts of the article as well; I am trying to clean up the more pressing policy violations and stabilize the page for an eventual WP:GAR.

Thanks in advance! Paprikaiser (talk) 22:46, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting, these seem to be valid concerns. I'll opine on article talk & may remove some of the blatant OR. FeydHuxtable (talk) 18:13, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

Wang Yaqiao and The Axe Gang

Hi everyone. I just stumbled across the article about Wang Yaqiao and tried to look into the cited sources, but I struggled to verify the information in it. At first I attributed it mainly to a lack of page references, but when I looked deeper, I found several of the sources don't appear to mention him at all; namely Wakeman's Policing Shanghai, Dirlik's Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution and Duus' The Abacus and the Sword. I tried searching for multiple possible variations on the Romanization, but still couldn't find any mention. The only book that I was able to verify included mentions of Wang Yaqiao was Wakeman's other book, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service, although I couldn't confirm the exact wording that "Scholarly accounts differ on whether the killing was ordered by the Nationalist Juntong or rival political actors".

I then found that the same user who had expanded the article in May 2026, Kawakenkuni (talk · contribs), also expanded an article about The Axe Gang a few months earlier. I attempted to verify the sources here too, but ran into similar issues; I couldn't verify the mention of an "Axe Gang" in Feng 2013, Martin 1996, Wakeman 2003 or Teo 2017. Furthermore, Feng 2013 uses an entirely different title than the one provided in the citation in this article, and attempting to search for the cited title in the article brings up no results other than recent Wikipedia mirrors.

Given all this, I'm now worried that all the content in these articles is either citing the wrong sources, or worse, is the result of an LLM hallucination. I put the text into Pangram, which gave differing results, saying the Wang Yaqiao article was 100% human written, while the Axe Gang article was 50/50 human/AI written. Would someone else be able to take a look at this? Apologies if this is the incorrect noticeboard for this case, I wasn't sure where else to report it. --Grnrchst (talk) 15:43, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

You might try the AI noticeboard (WP:AINB), this sounds like the kind of thing they deal with. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:04, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

I'll have a look at the sources when I have a moment tomorrow to see if there's anything I can do to help validate. Simonm223 (talk) 19:11, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

Annie Stein

Trying to avoid 3RR/edit warring, but an anon acocunt keeps inserting commentary over in Annie Stein and could use some fresh eyes. --ZimZalaBim^talk 03:09, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Eqab bin Mohaya - Use of a hand-drawn photo in a biography

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eqab_bin_Mohaya

I've hypothesized that in the 31st of August 2022, the photo currently used in the Arabic Wikipedia article was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Gdh6, before being deleted by Wikimedia Commons admin FitIndia in a purge of multiple unlicensed photos. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Files_uploaded_by_Gdh6

As a result, the user https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:%D9%81%D9%87%D8%AF_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B3%D9%84%D9%85 uploaded a hand-drawn replica of this portrait in the 8th of July 2025, which is a violation of the no original research rule of Wikipedia.

Ever since, this user has reverted all removals of the photo from the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eqab_bin_Mohaya&oldid=1304499680, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eqab_bin_Mohaya&oldid=1304500306, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eqab_bin_Mohaya&oldid=1374332454), despite all the reverts clearly stating the problem with the edit.

Additionally, while not in the scope of this noticeboard, the article as a whole is of poor quality with citations being "dumped" at the end of the page rather than pointing at specific subsets of the text, which severely damages the validity of the article and makes it hard to take it seriously. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ScorserBiggestFan570 (talk • contribs) 22:42, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

IMO, awful leadimage for a number of reasons including OR and WP:SPS. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 08:21, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Comment I'm confused as to why the original photo got deleted - wouldn't it have been taken close to 100 years ago, or longer? And would it not therefore be in the public domain by now? Is the photo still recoverable, or did that deletion cause it to become lost to the abyss? HierophantOfOmens (talk) 19:02, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

OP is using "photo" for stuff like , which is more recent. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 23:39, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Authoritarianism Updated

I am submitting rewritten and resourced content to be reviewed for WP.OR and WP:SYNTH. Some editors have been casting aspersions about my intentions and my competence, such as that I think authoritarians are evil. I've also beheld a tendency to harshly judge the whole of my work without providing any evidence of either infraction. I do not think that authoritarians are evil. I believe that “authoritarian” is an accurate way to describe such people, and that this is supported by a large body of credible sources. The original page, “authoritarian playbook,” may have been overly reliant on The Authoritarian Playbook by Jennifer Dresden, Aaron Baird, and Ben Raderstorf, whose work isn't academical. This issue has been resolved. Another claim made regarding the original page and the subsequent page “authoritarian tactics” is that not all authors frame these practices as part of a playbook or as a tactic. That issue has also been resolved now that all content will be discussed on the authoritarianism article. The subsequent content may have WP:OVERCITE issues; this can be resolved by converting the citations to the harvp format, if required. Any continued claim of WP:OR or WP:SYNTH needs to be specified now - with evidence - or not at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thalorin/ThalorinDemoPage

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Thalorin/ThalorinAdditions — Preceding unsigned comment added by Thalorin (talk • contribs) 13:10, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

I believe that “authoritarian” is an accurate way to describe such people is very much WP:OR. Evidence has bene provided in in the past. There is no need to relitigate it here. Citation format is orthogonal to number of citations; OVERCITE applies regardless of citation style. If you have behavioral concerns, you should bring them up at WP:ANI rather than hand-waving accusations here. EducatedRedneck (talk) 13:33, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

Only statements that are on either page can qualify for WP:OR. This is typical of you, to misunderstand important things, distort the facts, and then find some way to harass me in the process of doing those things. It is YOU who has, always, been hand-waving accusations. Thalorin (talk) 13:39, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm sorry you feel that way. Nonetheless, I have yet to see any other editor support the inclusion of your mass of material. EducatedRedneck (talk) 13:44, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

You need to look more closely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Authoritarian_tactics Thalorin (talk) 13:47, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

I believe that link proves my point that consensus is clearly against you on this. EducatedRedneck (talk) 13:49, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

Lolicon has an RfC

Lolicon has an RfC for possible consensus. A discussion is taking place. If you would like to participate in the discussion, you are invited to add your comments on the discussion page. Thank you. Issac I Navarro (talk) 21:05, 1 October 2026 (UTC)