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RfC regarding German nobiliary titles

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

There is a consensus towards using the hatnote over the footenote. The main contention between using the proposed hatnote and the preexisting footenote was the lengths of each of these approaches, but I find that those arguing in favor of hatnotes gave stronger arguments that the hatnotes would be more concise than the footenotes, citing multiple articles with long footenotes in place. Additional arguments in favor of using the hatnote include that this is already done for other non-English names, that it would be simpler to edit, and any elaboration on the title could be expanded in the body of the article. Gramix13 (talk) 19:43, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

---

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)

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)

The footnotes vs hatnotes question has come up when discussing the family name clarification template: Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_188#Method_of_surname_clarification. —Joe vom Titan (talk) 19:14, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:German_title shows the 500 pages currently using {{German title}}. Joe vom Titan (talk) 19:32, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Survey (German nobiliary titles)

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)

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)

• Support footnote. Some texts are waaaay to long for a hatnote. --Altenmann >talk 19:47, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

  The longest possible hatnote text with the new template is the following: {{User:Joe vom Titan/German title hatnote|Reichsfreiherr|Herzog|in1919=de}}, rendered as

  This name includes the German nobiliary titles Reichsfreiherr, translated as 'baron of the empire', and Herzog, translated as 'duke'. In 1919 nobiliary titles and particles (von, zu, etc.) became part of the surname in Germany.

That's not crazy long. Joe vom Titan (talk) 20:09, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Not crazy, but longish. And it is not tnat vital for understanding so as to stick it on top. I also do not see why the footnote mark must sit right on the title; it may well be after the whole surname: the footnote starts with "This name includes...", i.e., technically the footnote is about name not about title.--Altenmann >talk 20:18, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Fortunately, few if any articles will use the longest possible example and many contain just one name to be addressed this way. A longer-than-usual hatnote would be an improvement over the the current practice in an article like Karl Ernst von Baer, which opens with: Karl Ernst Ritter von Baer Edler 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)

Crazylong. I support a hatnote, but there's absolutely no need for anything like this much detail. Let the link do the heavy lifting, and craft a tight wording for each of the main cases separately: died before 1919, alive in 1919, born after 1919. Only the second needs any sort of mention of the change from title to name then. ~2026-46260-28 (talk) 22:46, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

• Hatnote. This is in keeping with about two dozen templates that have been designed to represent this sort of information in a standardized fashion. {{Icelandic name}}, {{Spanish married name}}, and {{Bhutanese name}} are a few examples. These German names should be handled similarly. The current footnote produces a paragraph-length description that is far beyond the scope of a biography. It includes details that may or may not have any true relevance to the subject of the article, depending on where they lived, and is actively misleading in cases of Austrian subjects whose titles would have been stripped in 1919. Footnotes are fussy and obstructive, especially alongside bolded names in the lead. If the footnote convention prevails, it should be placed at the very end of the bolded name and the text output should be substantially reduced along the lines of the output of the proposed hatnote template. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 00:16, 26 August 2026 (UTC)
• Support hatnote. As Myceteae notes, this approach would be consistent with how we clarify the structures of other non-English names; I also find it clear and concise for communicating this information. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 13:51, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Support footnote. Prefer over the hatnote because (a) appearance shorter seems better; (b) appropriateness of a footnote at the title as the content is footnote material about the title; and (c) because it would avoid causing change chaos. Transitions are always incomplete and fallible, so when there is enough improvement from a change to justify the issues, then let's just not change. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 16:45, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

  How should the footnote be adapted for the case of Austrian persons? In Austria all titles were banned in 1919. Now the footnote erroneously says that the titles became part of the surname in 1919, as was the case in Germany. Joe vom Titan (talk) 21:08, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  How are we using it on such Austrian persons? The issue only seems to arise if someone is bold-named as having a title they didn't latterly possess. Which could certain arise because WP:COMMON, but it'd seem a little artless if we didn't also give their post-abolition name too. ~2026-48728-16 (talk) 21:29, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

  The footnote at Template:German title only has one parameter for the title, so it always says virtually the same thing. See the template documentation. these are the pages in Category:Austrian people using the footnote template. Let's look at the first ten:

  • Claus von Stauffenberg was not Austrian, so there the footnote (at the end of the name) is correct. However, it does not explain the title "Schenk". The proposed hatnote explains that title too.
  • Helmuth von Moltke the Elder was not Austrian and died in 1891. The footnote (at the end of the lead sentence) needlessly mentions what happened after 1919.
  • Karl von Frisch moved to Germany around 1910, so the footnote (in the middle of the name) is fine.
  • Georg von Trapp moved to the US and dropped the "Ritter von" from his name, yet we show the full birth name in bold. What happened in Germany is irrelevant to his biography, so the footnote (at the end of the name) is wrong.
  • Karl Philipp, Prince of Schwarzenberg died in 1820, so the footnote (in the middle of the name) shouldn't talk about 1919 at all.
  • Alexander von Middendorf died in 1894. The footnote (just after "von" in the middle of the name) is misused as this guy doesn't have a title. He has nothing to do with Austria.
  • Adam Müller was from Berlin and died in Vienna in 1829. His title is placed in parantheses after his name because he only received it in 1827, the footnote is in the middle of it. Again no need to say anything about 1919 but the footnote does so.
  • Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has his title in the bold name with a footnote in the middle of the bold name. He was born in 1909, so lost his title at age 10. He lived most his live in the US, not sure under what name.
  • Karl Mack von Leiberich died in 1828. He was Austrian, so the footnote (at the end of the lead sentence) mentioning the German situation after 1919 is utterly irrelevant.
  • Cajetan von Felder died in 1894. The footnote is given at the end of his name in German given in parantheses. He was Austrian, so mentioning the German situation after 1919 is utterly irrelevant.

  Joe vom Titan (talk) 12:59, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

  For those Austrian persons who lost their titles early in life, IMHO the bold name should be only their latter name and the title can be mentioned in the Early life section. A few pages do that already e.g. Richard von Mises. Joe vom Titan (talk) 13:08, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

  If we stick with the extremely wordy footnote, then it should be removed from articles such as these where it is erroneous and misleading. I've seen some truly bizarre practices in these articles. An earlier version of Claus von Stauffenberg wrote out his full name Claus Philipp Maria Justinian Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and included the footnote at the end. The advantage of the hatnote is that it is simple and modifiable. Where additional information is relevant to the subject, it should be incorporated into the article body. For example, Claus von Stauffenberg § Early life and education explains his family background and includes links to Stauffenberg. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:12, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

  His whole family has the same complicated formatting, e.g. Nina Schenk Gräfin von Stauffenberg. I guess someone reasoned that, if Schenk Gräfin isn't part of her name, it ought to be italicized as a foreign phrase. pburka (talk) 15:27, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

  Dear god. I've cleaned up Nina's article, and Berthold Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, which looked to be the worst offenders at first glance. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:45, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

  This also raises questions about usage such as In 2007, Graf von Stauffenberg voiced concerns about the film Valkyrie … We would not repeatedly refer to someone as President Jones or Countess Smith in 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)

  We should refer to people by the common name in English, even if it is less sensible in the original language. Even if that means repeatedly calling someone "President Jones". – Ike Lek (talk) 23:13, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

  That only works, of course, when there are sufficient recent English-language sources to establish an English common name. pburka (talk) 00:01, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

  True – Ike Lek (talk) 00:57, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

  Agreed, and as far as I can tell the Stauffenbergs are just called "Stuaffenberg". Graf von Stuaffenberg is 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)

• Prefer hatnotes to long footnotes, but the hatnote does not need to translate the name. Leave that for wikilinks (and of course article content if relevant there). CMD (talk) 10:02, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

  I agree with this. Explanation that it is a title (and the type of title) in a particular context, and not a name, is enough for the hatnote. How/when that title became a name can (and should) be explained in the linked article. – Ike Lek (talk) 23:10, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (German nobiliary titles)

• Tangentially related: Talk:Stauffenberg#Requested move 9 September 2026 —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 00:09, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

Notes

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

Can the "link suggestions" newcomer task be disabled for mathematical articles?

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)

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)

@Myceteae Thanks for the link. From what it looks like, it seems unlikely that there is going to be consensus in favor of turning off the link suggestions feature in the near future. So could we expect to see it be turned off for math articles? As jacobolus pointed out, in that very specific context that feature is a nightmare. Malparti (talk) 19:00, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the pointer. (Before posting I tried searching for "suggestions", since "link suggestions" is the keyword used in edit summaries, and the discussion about "suggested links" didn't turn up as a result.)

It looks like more than a few Wikipedians are unhappy with the link suggestion feature in more general contexts, and find that it routinely makes garbage suggestions. If someone wants to disable or dramatically curtail the tool I wouldn't complain.

(The statistics about revert rate don't seem very convincing to me, on their own: I'm sure many page watchers assume these links should be okay and don't bother checking them, and plenty of the links are moderately unhelpful but I often leave them because it seems like a borderline case, and I don't want to go out of my way to "bite" newcomers. If there's a low revert rate, that might just indicate that a lot of dubious links are being added to articles and then not properly reverted.)

But disabling it for mathematics articles in particular might be an easier or less controversial change. As I said, the basic issue is that the newcomers being asked to do this don't, in general, understand either the context or the term being wikilinked, and aren't spending a lot of time and care, which makes it difficult for them to judge whether the link is correct, and they aren't familiar enough with Wikipedia conventions to know whether the link is appropriate.

If some more general solution is desired, the tool might, for example, include an explicit question next to the link suggestion: "Do you have a good understanding of what this paragraph says, and do you know what «linked term» means?" With a requirement that they affirmatively answer "yes" before being allowed to make the edit. –jacobolus (t) 19:34, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

In reply to Malparti and jocobolus, I suspect editors and articles in other specialized areas face similar challenges. I'm not sure this is a bigger problem in math article than in, say, chemistry or philosophy. That's not to dismiss the concern. A more general intervention might help. Regarding revert rates, my takeaway from these discussions is that the precise figures shouldn't be taken as gospel but these tasks don't appear to create more problematic links overall than we see otherwise. Though that is contrary to some editors' experience. It's conceivable that the newcomer tasks invite editors to dense, technical articles that they were unlikely to stumble across or feel inclined to edit on their own. I hadn't paid attention to newcomer tasks until recently so I'm drawing from what I've read in all these recent discussions along with my own experience of MOS:OVERLINKing, which is a pervasive problem. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:05, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

One of the biggest problems is the asymmetry in the burden placed on experienced editors. You have someone who doesn't know or care anything about a topic per se spending a few seconds to confirm a machine-generated edit. Then if the edit is obviously bad, you have 1–2 experts checking it for a minute each and making the revert. If the edit was borderline or good, and the decision is made to not make the revert, you might force an additional 5–10 experts to spend a minute each evaluating the change (there's no way to mark an edit as "this was checked and seems okay"). Plus some overhead, and the distraction of cluttering up their watchlist with stuff that is mostly irrelevant to the projects they care about.

In the best case, the benefit we get is one additional wikilink that with high probability will never be clicked, or at most will be clicked a few times by readers over the lifetime of the page. These newcomer editors aren't being obviously converted to competent writers and experts who can write or make major changes to math articles, so for math articles in particular the side benefit from recruitment is slim to nothing.

Overall, it's not a good way of respecting experts' time. Plenty of the article watchers making reverts here are university professors with PhDs who have lots of other responsibilities, and are volunteering a small bit of their time to working on Wikipedia as a public service. But instead of optimizing their time use getting them to write new articles, we're squandering it with busywork. –jacobolus (t) 20:47, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

I get these concerns but the link task is the least disruptive of all of them as it doesn't deteriorate the actual prose, whereas everything either deteriorates the prose or inserts junk citations or both. Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:02, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

In mathematics articles we don't seem to see many other "newcomer task" edits. Perhaps because the content is technical enough that newcomers with no relevant expertise are discouraged from making changes? So the link suggestions are the ones that are most obviously obnoxious. –jacobolus (t) 21:06, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

That might be part of it. IIRC people choose the (extremely broad) subject matter area and then get arbitrary articles shoved at them to spam out edits to Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:23, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

The most surprising thing here is the claim that the English Wikipedia actually has up to 10 "experts" checking each edit to a math article. I doubt that's true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:29, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

You are disputing that the people who watch math pages are experts, or that they try to check up on miscellaneous changes, or just that there are more than a couple of people who care about the correctness of Wikipedia math articles? –jacobolus (t) 19:56, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm surprised that so many are available in practice. In fact, I doubt that every edit to math articles gets checked by 10 editors at all, much less by 10 editors who understand the subject area. (One can care very deeply, and still have real-world factors that prevent spending all day on wiki.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:41, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

The suggested links tool is just a step towards having an AI take over editing of the encyclopedia entirely. Today it is using newbies as proxies, tomorrow it will be getting rid of the middleman altogether. As it stands, any editor, newbie or not, who follows a suggestion to make a clearly wrong link raises WP:COMPETENCE questions. BD2412 T 20:39, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

I sincerely hope that the WMF is not dragging us down that route, but their repeated secretive introduction of AI against our clearly communicated consensus makes it really difficult to continue assuming good faith. Certes (talk) 20:57, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, but "sincerely hope" usually implies that deep down you know the tsunami is coming but hope it will not. I fully agree with you that it would be a disastrous decision by WMF, but accept that they will do what they like and give us some type of word salad to justify it. Sorry, but that is how it is. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 20:23, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Has Musk secretly taken over WMF? Who knows? Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 20:41, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

The issue is not limited to mathematics articles. A recent edit linking machine to machine when the process was manually carrying a tray of cards from one machine to another. -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 14:31, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

If there's a template on most of these articles, Template:No newcomer task could be added to the template, and thus propagate to all the articles transcluding it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:43, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I think this reeks of elitism. Only those who already know the magic incantations are allowed to participate? People are slowly turning this encyclopedia back into Nupedia. Let people make mistakes. Explain it to them and move on. It doesn't matter if they used this tool or not, it's just people wanting to participate and trying to figure out how to do that. That's the wiki way and the only way a person becomes an editor to replace you (generic you), who are approaching the age of no longer being part of this encyclopedia either. This has nothing to do with competence, and everything with people seeking a perfection that doesn't exist. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:58, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I have no idea what you are trying to say. Magic incantations?

The problem is not "people". The problem is having many wikilinks generated by a "machine learning" tool which is incorrect a large proportion of the time, and even when correct only marginally helpful, with the result that it wastes a whole bunch of human time and attention for not much benefit.

If human readers come across an article "organically", are reading along and think that a wikilink is missing, so decide for themselves to add it, nobody has a problem with that; even when newcomers often make mistakes or don't understand conventions, generally experienced editors are happy to help. Absolutely nobody is saying that new users should be disallowed from participation. –jacobolus (t) 19:24, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Second onboarding screen in Mediawiki "add a link" workflow using the term "machine".

You asked above about what the newcomers are told. Here's a screenshot for one of the instruction panels.

The problem is, in fact, "people". Specifically, the problem is that one group of people is new (and nobody's good at this stuff when they first start), and another group of people (experienced editors) have personal preferences that vary significantly, resulting in differing opinions about whether to add or remove a given link.

For example, how many long-time editors know that WP:OVERLINKING got redefined a few years ago as more than one link per section, rather than the old standard of more than one (or rarely two) links per entire body-of-the-article? This results in some editors claiming OVERLINKING violations for links that comply with the guideline.

We also see experienced editors who think that everybody knows ____ (or at least the most typical/intentional readers of the article), so it's just too well-known to justify a link to that basic concept/tiny country/broad article. For example, does Exponentiation need the link to Addition that you reverted? I don't think so. Is it revert-worthy? I don't know. But perhaps relevantly to this particular discussion, I know that the edit that added that link wasn't a Newcomer task. It was added by a 10-year-old account with >3,000 edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:54, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, we have been having a discussion about that page; after making that revert (to a large edit that made a big bundle of unrelated changes) I immediately started a talk page discussion. I had been in the process of restoring about half of the changes I reverted (as I said in discussion, a few examples gave me an unfairly bad impression of the whole thing, and a wholesale revert was perhaps unjustified), but my re-revert edit got into a significant edit conflict and I had to go do a real-world errand. Some of the reverted changes were restored by the other editor, while others were not. I need to go back carefully through and figure out which of their changes are helpful, which ones that were reverted should be restored, which that were restored should be discussed, etc. This is an example of the Wikipedia process working as intended: a human editor makes a good-faith change, another human editor makes a good-faith revert, and then we have a discussion to establish consensus. The whole process takes a lot of effort: checking, considering, discussing, persuading, writing and rewriting. But the end result is hopefully better than what we started with.

That's entirely unrelated to the topic of machine-generated changes. –jacobolus (t) 20:02, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

(I wish that partial reversions were easier to do. Maybe WMDE's work on the edit conflict tool could be adapted to make line-by-line choices about what to revert possible?) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:13, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

To the point of the newcomer task tool though:

This wording clearly isn't sufficient in practice to get the newcomers to actually follow the direction to "use your judgment to decide whether they are right or wrong". People routinely implicitly trust that what they are directed to do is correct and justified (even to the point of taking clearly unethical actions, cf. Milgram experiment). I think you put far too much faith in a couple words of instructions, easily skimmed past. Has anyone done explicit user testing of this? (No, just gathering summary statistics doesn't cut it.)

Throughout this discussion, you keep flippantly excusing a tool that is, in practice, causing significant annoyance to human Wikipedians. It feels frankly quite rude. –jacobolus (t) 20:10, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Instead of imposing this attention cost on innocent Wikipedians (whether or not you think they are "expert" enough that their time should be valued), how about you can personally volunteer to double-check every machine-generated "newcomer edit"; the edit can be temporarily blocked from application until you have verified that it is correct, then we can let it through. Or if you don't want to spend your own time, maybe you can convince the WMF to pay someone a fair wage to do the checking, so we don't waste volunteers' time until at least one vaguely competent person has checked it. –jacobolus (t) 20:18, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Why do you think that having a newcomer make an edit should be understood as "imposing this attention cost on innocent Wikipedians"? Did no "innocent Wikipedians" look over your own early edits? Let's see: your first edit was to remove someone else's photo and swap in your own. (It's a nice photo; thanks.) It looks like your second edit added about 10 sentences of unsourced and sometimes opinionated content about a game. Your third edit in the mainspace added a link to Jeans – the second link to that article in that same section. What are you having to do for these newcomers that wasn't done for you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:08, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

your own early edits?

As has already been repeated ad nauseam, nobody is mad about newcomers' "own early edits". The concern is with a bad "machine learning" algorithm which is using newcomers as a meatbot proxy for unhelpful changes.

If you want to go spend your time reviewing my Wikipedia edits from when I was a college student >20 years ago, you are welcome to do so, but it is entirely irrelevant and off topic to this discussion. Maybe you can put your critiques on my talk page instead, or you can go manually revert any parts that still persist to today that you think are bad. –jacobolus (t) 22:11, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

This system is how many promising newcomers make their first edits. Most of the edits aren't "unhelpful".

I looked through your most recent 100 mainspace edits. I found several examples of you reverting edits by newcomers (and other editors, e.g., ). But in the last ~two weeks/100 article edits, it appears that you edited just three (3) articles as a result of the newcomer tasks, two of which were reverts (links to quadratic equation and fourth power – IMO reasonable choices that you decided weren't important enough to link to), and the third of which was you refining a correct link to a redirect to the same article.

The math's not working for me here.

• If you reverted two edits, and most (>50%) of these edits are bad, then you couldn't have seen more than three of these edits recently.
• If exactly half of the edits are bad, then you have seen just four of them.
• And if most of them are good, then why are you complaining here?

I wonder whether you are incorrectly blaming the Newcomer tasks software for unrelated edits by newcomers. If you think you're not, then I wonder if you could tell us what percentage of correct suggestions would be necessary for you to feel like it wasn't terrible?

Or is the problem really just that newbies are making edits that light up your watchlist, and you wish they'd leave "your" articles alone? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:59, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Your comments continue to feel really rude and personalized. Since you don't like the message, you are doing everything you can to shit on the messenger.

I came here to make this post because several other people were complaining at the Math Wikiproject talk page. It's causing significant distraction and annoyance. People are frustrated. Judging by the comments of others here, it's also not just editors of math-related articles who think there's a problem. You don't need to deny that experience or feign incredulity. If you don't think that the edits are a problem, I ask you again: why don't you put your time where your mouth is and personally volunteer to double-check them all before they get applied? –jacobolus (t) 01:07, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

I can't "double-check them all before they get applied" because there's no way for me to do that. Edits made by newcomers cannot be checked until after the edit has been made. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

There's no way to do it as the feature is currently implemented, but it's certainly physically possible to implement it differently.

There's currently a Wikipedia:Pending changes feature that blocks certain edits from being displayed until after they have been reviewed. Something similar to that could be put into place for these "suggested links" edits, and a team of self-selected patrollers could be responsible for reviewing them. We could tell everyone else to just ignore those edits and hide them from their watchlists until they had been reviewed. –jacobolus (t) 01:25, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

The problem is, in fact, "people".

This. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 00:18, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Jacobolus, you are 100% correct, alas about 5% likely to succeed on this given the nature of consensus on semi-major decisions. I would have also suggested physics, not just math. Any way good idea, but C'est la vie on Wiki. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 20:15, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Ping @KStoller-WMF – Is it possible to disable this tool for math articles? Or is there some other way that the tool can try not to propose articles/wikilinks to new editors who understand neither the text of the article nor the meaning of the linked term? Or that the tool can be rewritten to make a much lower proportion of unhelpful links? –jacobolus (t) 20:24, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

To avoid links to complex articles you would need a "measure of complexity" for the article. It would be very useful to have that, but also quite difficult to implement automatically. Let us hope they will not try to use LLM for that. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 20:29, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Another idea: perhaps a scraper bot could check up on every "link suggestion" ever made a few times (maybe 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, and 6 months after the initial edit), and for every one where the link no longer remains in the article, could: (a) blacklist that page title from ever be proposed again as a "link suggestion", and (b) could compile a list of other articles where the same link was added but wasn't reverted, so that human editors could go double-check on edits which have a pretty good chance of being wrong. –jacobolus (t) 20:40, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Good, you have just described the first steps in a machine learning approach to doing it. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 20:44, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Ostensibly this whole feature is "machine learning", but there doesn't seem to be much learning involved in the current version, which is more like "machine keeps making the same mistake over and over despite being corrected". –jacobolus (t) 20:46, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

@Jacobolus to answer your specific question, yes I believe Category:Mathematics could be added to the exclusion list for Add a Link task. That's actually already something that is Community Configurable, and 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.

Yesterday I shared a summary of some of the recent & upcoming improvements for Add a Link: Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features#Newcomer Tasks / Add a Link improvements. The TL;DR is that we released a model improvement for Add a Link yesterday, other improvements are planned, and a significant change will be released ASAP: T429417 Add Link should not make a recommendation if one has already been accepted or declined, which will limit each article to a single Add a Link suggestion ever.

I'll be direct about where I stand: I'm taking the concerns in this thread seriously, and attempting to prioritize some quick improvements, and I also still believe newcomers need easy entry points into editing. I hope we can find a balance that reduces the cleanup burden for experienced editors while keeping the door open for the next generation of editors. - KStoller-WMF (talk) 23:49, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Why should the "easy entry point" for a human be enacting a decision made by a machine process?

In my opinion, if we have a bot that we think is correct with a very high likelihood (say, well above 99%), and a consensus among Wikipedians supports its operation, then we should just have the bot make the edit. If we have a bot that we think has a high chance of being incorrect (certainly anything more than 5% errors), we should scrap the bot as being inadequate. Having a bot that has a high chance of being incorrect, and then choosing completely inexperienced passers-by (who with high likelihood haven't even read the article to understand the context) to review the changes is just a recipe for bad edits and frustration by folks who end up having to clean up after. It's also a completely synthetic activity that bears very little resemblance to what we hope those people will do later, if they decide to stay around. Is there any evidence that performing this link suggestion task is effective for recruitment of folks who otherwise would have left, but instead become productive members of the community?

If you want to show people that they can make changes to the wiki, it seems to me like the first step is to help those human editors personally identify a problem, and then show them how to go about addressing it.

Rather than foisting new editors off on a completely impersonal machine-generated idea, we should be trying to help those newcomers more direct feedback/interaction with more experienced human editors. –jacobolus (t) 00:29, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

We should care about an easy entry point for new people because I am going to die. The "old hands" will not live forever. WP:OBIT gets longer every year, and you have already outlived some of your fellow editors. We need to recruit the next generation of editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:05, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Can you point to a single productive author of math-related Wikipedia articles who started with a "link suggestion"? Did you go ask them directly if the link suggestion made them more likely to stick around?

The supposed benefit here seems 100% hypothetical, I don't see any evidence that it is a real non-trivial thing. So basically you're celebrating a concrete and clearly expressed actual problem out of a vague, frankly unjustified, hope about the future. –jacobolus (t) 01:14, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

How many productive editors of math-related Wikipedia articles can you point to, who have been editing for less than, say, 18 months? Because 20 months ago, nobody here had access to this feature, and 18 months ago, only a small fraction of new editors could see it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:20, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

I thought it'd be useful to put some numbers on this. quarry:query/108882 says that over the course of six months earlier this year, there were:

• a mean average of 11 add-a-link edits to articles tagged by Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics per day,
• of which just 4% got reverted (i.e., about three times a week).

This does not seem like an overwhelming flood of edits to me, nor an unusually high proportion of revert-worthy edits from newbies. Even if someone had all 33,000+ WPMATH articles on their watchlist, this would still be a small proportion of math-related edits and an even smaller number that needed to be reverted.

If there is a big problem with bad links being added to math-related articles, I suspect that this is not being done by newcomers using this tool. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:26, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Okay, so there were about 2000 edits. Can you go check them? It sounds like there are potentially another hundreds of errors there. –jacobolus (t) 05:21, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

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?

I could get a list of diffs, but we appear to have different views on what links are desirable. I wouldn't have reverted the link to quadratic equation that you did, and I might not have reverted the link to fourth power. Consequently, I doubt that you would trust my review of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:04, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Arguably Fourth power shouldn't be an article at all, since it's more or less just a combination of the number 4 and the concept of an exponent, and we don't really have much of anything special to say about it as a particular case. But leaving that aside, the link to "fourth power" is clearly inappropriate in the context of the sentence 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 ⁠$\lambda ^{-4}$⁠ 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?

What makes you think there wouldn't be hundreds of errors? Every incentive is to ignore these edits, or, even for folks checking them, to leave them alone unless they are completely egregious. I imagine most of the 2000 edits were never carefully considered. –jacobolus (t) 00:29, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

I notice that today you tell me that "Every incentive is to ignore these edits" and "most of the 2000 edits were never carefully considered".

On the other hand, less than 48 hours ago, you were telling me that "it wastes a whole bunch of human time and attention" and that we're "imposing this attention cost on innocent Wikipedians", and two days before that, you were telling me that if editors don't revert all these edits, then they "force an additional 5–10 experts to spend a minute each evaluating the change".

It is not possible for both of these stories to be true. Either most of the links aren't being "carefully considered" or we don't have a bunch of expert editors collectively spending 10 minutes looking at that each link. It is not credible to claim that "expert" editors can spend that much time looking at a single link without meeting an ordinary standard of "carefully considering" the link. After all, most editors can evaluate the correctness of most links in just a few seconds.

Would you like to pick one of these mutually exclusive stories? Either it's taking a inappropriate amount of time and attention for multiple editors to review these links – in which case, it logically follows that the existing revert rate is correct – or nobody's looking at them – in which case, it logically follows that the math editors aren't being forced to waste their time on these edits. I don't really care which one it is, but I'd like you to commit to one of them. If you can do that, then I'd be happy to do what I can to find out whether there's any reason to believe your chosen story is true. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:25, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Both stories are simultaneously true:

(1) It takes an inappropriate amount of time and attention to actually review these edits properly. To the extent they get reviewed it's an annoying burden.

(1b) Because there is no way to mark a particular edit as reviewed (other than by reverting it), while edits that get immediately reverted are probably only noticed or checked by 1 or 2 people, edits to highly watched pages that someone decides not to revert might be checked, or at least skimmed, by several other people; I speculated 5–10 before, but there's no actual way to count since the data is not collected anywhere.

(2) Because there have been many of these edits, including many to very obscure pages with few active page watchers, a large proportion of the edits are not getting carefully checked. In some cases someone might give it a brief glance, but without carefully reading the context and carefully checking the content of the wikilink. Many edits which are therefore adding incorrect or inappropriate links are going to slip past. You user:WhatamIdoing provided a very good example of what can go wrong: even when you tried to do a check of some edits that were explicitly reverted, because you didn't actually look/think carefully about them, your immediate impression was (wrongly!) that the edits were fine. This surely happens often, leading to a high proportion of mistakes. –jacobolus (t) 05:49, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

In fact, WhatamIdoing, we can notice something stronger from your experience: even a 20-year Wikipedia veteran can't accurately evaluate the relevance of the machine-generated wikilinks when they are looking quickly. And yet, this entire feature is premised on getting complete newcomers to do so! How can a brand new user do a good job at this task if even someone like you can't? –jacobolus (t) 07:59, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Your argument is built on the unproven claim that I'm wrong about those links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:13, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

There are 4 relevant claims involved: (1) The specific wikilinks are not particularly relevant to the context where they were put; this is a fairly straightforward and uncontroversial claim, which we can verify by examining the content of the wikilinked articles and the context where the links were added. (2) Readers who clicked these wikilinks would probably not glean that much useful context about the article they were reading; this is subjective and we don't really have a way to easily test it. (3) Including these wikilinks is on balance unhelpful for the articles where they were put; this is a matter of personal opinion and taste. (For example, someone might make the argument that even if the current article Quadratic equation doesn't at all address 4-variable equations like the one being described by the phrase where it was linked, an article with the title "quadratic equation" could plausibly be rewritten to prominently discuss the more general topic of quadratic equations in any number of variables, and in a future world after that rewrite, the link might eventually become relevant. I don't personally think this is a reasonable basis for adding wikilinks to substantially off-topic articles, but there's no way I can force the other person to agree with me about that.) (4) If polled after a discussion and careful examination, these wikilinks would be rejected by community consensus of the editors who commonly work on math articles; this one is an "unproven claim" but not hard to test: we can directly ask at the math wikiproject if you want. –jacobolus (t) 03:52, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

WPMATH is not "the community", and it is not only "the editors who commonly work on math articles" who are allowed to form a consensus.

I dispute your (1), as a wikilink that is "not particularly relevant" to you could still be helpful to someone else, e.g., if they are not a native speaker of English.

I would add: (5) the specific wikilinks pointed to the correct article; this is undisputed and very important.

So that's 1, disputed; 2, unknown; 3, personal preference; 4, an appeal to like-minded authorities, and 5, undisputed and in favor of the link. For me, that adds up to the link being acceptable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

What do you mean "pointed to the correct article"? I don't know what you mean by "acceptable". Like, would I recommend banning someone for adding such a wikilink? No. Would I revert a change that added it, and start a discussion to establish consensus if the other person disagreed? Yes. As for "like-minded authorities": who do you expect should decide what wikilinks should be included in math-related Wikipedia articles other than the authors and maintainers of math-related Wikipedia articles? Overall, this is one of the more absurd lines of argument I have ever seen put forth on Wikipedia, which is really saying something. –jacobolus (t) 04:08, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

One of the problems that we've seen with newcomers adding links is when they add links to "John Smith", but we need them to add a link to "John Smith (athlete)". Fourth power was the correct article to link, but sometimes people end up linking to the wrong article (e.g., to any article listed in Fourth power (disambiguation) or the business named Fourth Power).

WPMATH ≠ the authors and maintainers of math-related Wikipedia articles, and our WP:LOCALCON policy exists because of a WikiProject deciding that "their" articles should be exempt from ordinary MOS rules. WPMATH does not have the right to determine whether other editors are allowed to follow MOS:LINK. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:26, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand what you are trying to say.

Nobody is claiming that math articles are "exempt from ordinary rules". MOS:OVERLINK is part of the manual of style (a "guideline", i.e. a "set of best practices supported by consensus"). Its guidance covers such cases: "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)

No, none of these is applicable to the links you reverted in your personal opinion. In the personal opinion of other editors, those links are appropriate.

WT:WPM is a good place to gauge editor consensus, if you define "editor consensus" as "the consensus of only a small, self-selected, and non-representative group of editors". If one wants only people editing math-related articles, then there's a list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Directory/Description/WikiProject Mathematics#Active Subject-Area Editors. But the real goal is "editors", which includes those who don't know a lot about math or normally edit in that area. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:24, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

"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)

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"), even if these suggestions are machine generated rather than, say Category:All articles lacking sources or Category:All Wikipedia articles needing copy edit. Sure, they could disable just the "Add a link" features, but certainly not all of the newcomers tasks. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 00:35, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

@User:KStoller-WMF probably should be in the Growth Team talk page, but I have a suggestion: add all the categories in the Help Out section of the Wikipedia:Community portal into the newcomer task system? Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 00:38, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

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")

This is already happening. There's a parallel discussion going on at Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#Newcomer tasks about how this "help" is equally unhelpful.

My sympathies with all the other editors who have now collectively tried dozens to hundreds of ways of explaining the problem in the feeble hope that maybe, just maybe, one of them will actually get through to people. Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:04, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Rather than a "measure of complexity" for the article, I think it would have to be a measure of complexity for the subject. Freudenthal algebra is a simple "article", but a complex "subject".

I believe that the current system looks first for a density of links that is below average. Most articles have 10–50 wikilinks, or about one wikilink for every 20 words. If you don't want the system to suggest adding links to an article (and for whatever reason, you can't put {{No newcomer tasks}} on the article, which blocks it entirely), maybe try to make that article look like it doesn't deserve an {{underlinked}} tag. That should have the effect of making the article invisible to the newcomer task system. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:31, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I didn't realize "No newcomer task" was a thing. Should we just blanket add that to all technical articles? –jacobolus (t) 22:13, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I mentioned it above. I don't think that blanket application to hundreds of thousands of articles is a good idea. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:27, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

A simple bot could do it, but would require an Act of Congress, so to speak. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 04:54, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 05:04, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I sometimes feel like we are being trolled with a big practical joke - "let's build a machine to trick newcomers into making nonsensical links throughout Wikipedia, and then get earnest Wikipedians to defend this machine". BD2412 T 17:50, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

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)

Yes, which is why it's a big problem to have a bunch of the people who could be (that is, routinely do) rewrite math articles to be significantly better instead spend time checking up on bogus links generated by a robot. –jacobolus (t) 17:00, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Assuming that "checking up on" 11 links per week has a significant effect on the workload of all our maths editors. I just checked the last 11 edits for suggested tasks. It took me an average of 30 seconds each, including reverting one, changing another, and creating a redirect. The rest were either good (most of them) or unimportant (do we really need a link to WWII? Eh, it doesn't matter). Even if we assume that math articles are three times as complicated, we'd still only be talking about two minutes per day. But if it's the same, you're whingeing about people "wasting" an average of 45 seconds per day, by making you look at links that are almost always (>90%) kept in place. How many math articles do you think you can rewrite in 45 seconds per day? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:44, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

I dispute that it only takes 45 seconds to check each of these links. You need to at least read the paragraph where the link appears, click the wikilink, and skim the wikilinked article to check what it contains. Sometimes it's possible to immediately conclude the link is good or bad, but other times it might quite a bit more attention and effort than that. Especially if someone e.g. leaves a talk page message for the new editor explaining their decision.

This is clearly the type of activity that you personally enjoy, but many other people don't really. This is why I say you should organize a team of volunteers (or paid staff) to do this cleanup, with these edits gated behind the check, instead of foisting it on innocent Wikipedians.

Every bit of random context switching takes significant attention, beyond the precise time it takes to do. It jolts people out from whatever task they were otherwise planning to do. (As a concrete example, four things I didn't really want to be working on – (a) replying to your comments here, and (b) dealing with the WMF's imminent math rendering change which is expected to break math formulas on most English Wikipedia articles, (c) trying to clean-up after a well-intentioned newcomer who changed a bunch of math history articles to reflect their personal views as cited to some self-published presentation slides they made, and (d) checking changes to articles I am watching – have taken up most of my Wikipedia editing time and attention in the past few days, preventing me from working on the research and writing of the couple of articles I actually wanted to improve.)

In some cases (e.g. fighting vandalism, helping clean up after well-intentioned newcomers who don't yet know Wikipedia conventions, hunting for sources for obvious and uncontroversial claims after someone asks for one on the talk page) an attention penalty is probably unavoidable, though as a community we could probably do better if we put more effort into considering systems/processes. In some cases (e.g. cleaning up messes left by Citation Bot) the attention penalty should be avoidable, so editors are routinely frustrated, but do their best. In this particular case, the cost doesn't seem to be justified by any apparent advantage at all, at least to math articles. We're turning experts into janitors for a robot that makes only trivial improvements with lots of mistakes mixed in.

If you get someone annoyed and they feel like their time and efforts are being abused, and they then leave, they might not write any math articles at all. At best, if you distract them with enough stuff unrelated to their previous train of thought, their progress is going to be significantly slowed down. –jacobolus (t) 21:34, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

It's the nature of an average that some are bigger or smaller, but I reviewed 11 actual edits, with a stopwatch running, and it took me an average of 30 seconds each. I did not rush. I did have to open some of the links to make sure they were correct; I did have to take time to correct or revert a couple. But it did not take much time.

If you don't like doing this work, then you aren't required to WP:VOLUNTEER to do it. You can ignore it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:34, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

As far as I can tell none of the people doing this work for math articles do it because they like it. Nobody wants to be spending their time cleaning up after incorrect or unhelpful machine-generated wikilinks. (Or cleaning up after Citation Bot, or cleaning up after vandals; etc.)

But people want some set of articles to remain correct, clear, accessible, etc., so they feel some obligation to check on changes to those articles and revert mistaken ones.

When people complain, here you come to tell them: "you care about articles now, but have you considered just not caring?" But this is mostly evidence that you personally have not even tried to engage with people's criticism or personal motivations. Instead you are consistently dismissive and frankly disrespectful. –jacobolus (t) 19:49, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

Where's your evidence that it takes significantly longer than about 45 seconds a day, or five minutes a week, to check these links?

I'm not trying to dismiss the concern. I'm trying to inject a little bit of reality. There are more than 33,000 math articles. This newcomer task has produced just one or two edits to them each day this year. One or two edits per day is not a lot, right? Even if you have to do things like "read the paragraph", it's still not a lot of time as measured on a clock, right?

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? WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:33, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

It seems appropriate to put some numbers on this:

Using an old list, I've found that there have been 110 newcomer-task edits to WPMATH's articles during the last week. That's 15 edits per day, including all newcomer tasks, not just the add-a-link task. Exactly 10% have been reverted.

Using that same list, I've found that there were 751 edits to WPMATH articles by newer (<500 edits/non-extended confirmed) registered editors during the last week that weren't using a newcomer task. That's 110 non-newcomer-task edits per day. Almost 12% of them have been reverted.

Newcomers at math articles

Type	Raw count
Organic edits	751
Newcomer task	110

Reverts at math articles

Type	Raw count
Organic reverts	87(12%)
Task reverts	11(10%)

This tells me:

• The newcomer task tool is only a source of a small number of edits. If you randomly select an edit, it's probably not an edit from a newcomer task.
• Newcomer task edits have a lower chance of being reverted, compared to new editors making edits on their own.

Looking more specifically at individual edits:

Five of the reversions were links to If and only if (a problem that cropped up recently and has been discussed at WT:WPMATH). Would you agree with me that those probably took just a couple of seconds to revert, and therefore did not represent a significant time sink for maths-focused editors?

So that leaves us with just a few newcomer edits that got reverted during the last week that might have taken more than a few seconds to make a decision about. Some of those weren't add-a-link edits anyway, and so can't be blamed on the add-a-link task. Here are the reversions that might have taken more than a few seconds: (wrong link), (preference for fewer links, citing the brand-new and WP:PROPOSAL-free recent change to MOS:MATH). And one editor moved a link to the top of the article, which was counted as a reversion but really wasn't.

There are many more non-newcomer edits that got reverted (87 vs 11) – some equally quick to reject; others requiring more work – and some of those (e.g., ) were also adding links.

I see nothing in the data that makes me think that the newcomer task is disproportionately soaking up WPMATH's time and effort. All in all, if you wanted to reduce the rate of revert-worthy edits, you wouldn't turn off the newcomer tasks; in fact, you might make it mandatory for the first few edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:25, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

The "data" you are examining are not statistically meaningful. There was no actual analysis of the rate of "revert-worthy edits": that would require examining all of them or a large randomized sample, and checking them each carefully, something which has never been tried as far as I can tell. The non-machine-suggested edits that get reverted include vandalism, broken test edits, citation spamming, accidental addition of factual errors (e.g. people try to "correct" a formula that was already correct), grammar garbling, etc., but everyone accepts this time penalty as the cost of having Wikipedia, an encyclopedia "anyone can edit". At least (typically) a human made the decision to make the offending edit, not a robot. There is also no reason whatsoever to believe that mandating "newcomer edits" would help anyone with anything. That sounds like a horrible idea. –jacobolus (t) 03:26, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Surely, if someone were just to check everything "carefully", the results would be different? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:45, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand what you are trying to say. –jacobolus (t) 05:22, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I've given you the data that is readily available. That data might not be perfect, but it's what we've got, and there's no particular reason to think that the patrolling that has happened has been biased against your POV. (In fact, since there's been a big discussion at WT:WPMATH and lots of convenient links for patrolling newcomer tasks in this discussion, if the edits were reviewed in a non-random pattern, it's probably biased in your favor.)

You have responded to this data with an assertion that the data is wrong: It wasn't formally randomized. It wasn't done "carefully". Nobody "tried". It reminds me of freshman chemistry labs: Draw the curve, plot the points, and only then take the measurements, because that's the only way to get the answer you want. You (and I, and everyone) know what answer you want. Maybe you should take some measurements now?

Please set a timer and open your watchlist, and tell us how long it took you to review the newcomer tasks you found there. Bring us a few diffs and explain what made them slow and difficult. Above all, please tell us why you're complaining about how time-consuming it is to revert editors doing newcomer tasks, when exactly zero of your last 10 mainspace reverts were editors using newcomer tasks ( ).

From what I'm seeing, you're having a problem with X and blaming it on Y. I'd like to see some data that proves my impression wrong. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:16, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

My assertion is that your numbers are not relevant, and are not being presented in an accurate way. You are giving numbers for revert rate and then presenting it as a proportion of "revert-worthy edits". But you actually have no way of knowing how many of the edits involved were checked at all, or, if checked, how careful that checking was.

Of ones that I have examined there is a very high error rate. Far higher than I think is acceptable for a bot. If it were like 0.1% errors, and those were borderline cases, then people could probably ignore the edits to pages they care about. But my impression is that it's more like a quarter to a third "revert-worthy" links. But even if it were only 5%, that's dramatically unacceptably high for edits being made by a bot.

I only watch a small fraction of all math articles, so I wouldn't have ever seen most of the 2000+ such edits that you say have been done. The only way mistakes are reverted are if people actually double-check them, but many pages have no active page watchers at all.

Bad wikilinks are harmful to readers. They are confusing. They are misleading. They add visual noise to the text. –jacobolus (t) 06:46, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

• You keep talking about this like a bot is making the edit, when that's not true. A human is making the edit. A human decided to link to Quadratic equation in that article. There is no bot involved, and the software only made a suggestion – to a human, who apparently thought it was appropriate and helpful, even though it doesn't seem that way to you.
• I don't think that accurate links (i.e., those pointing to the correct Wikipedia page) are confusing. What could be "confusing" about a link to Quadratic equation in a sentence that mentions that exact type of equation?
• I don't think that accurate links are misleading. What could be "misleading" about a link to Quadratic equation in a sentence that mentions that exact type of equation?
• I don't think that links add visual noise to the text. I have seen a couple of editors over the years say they are very sensitive to the shift in colors. However, I'm not, and I understand that this is a small minority of people.
• I think that the anti-link POV overlooks the idea that links serve multiple purposes. It's not just – or even primarily – that we should have a link if you need to understand what ____ means to understand the sentence. Links also exist because you might want to navigate to the other article. For this purpose, the relevant question isn't just "Can the reader understand this paragraph if they don't know what this term means?" Instead, there are multiple relevant questions, and one of them is "If you're going down a rabbit hole of Wikipedia articles, might you be interested in looking at this one next?" In technical articles, that can mean linking to simpler articles, especially in the lead, so that someone who's in over their head, or not so interested in this article, has a path back to their preferred depth.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:52, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

What could be "confusing" about a link to Quadratic equation in a sentence that mentions that exact type of equation?

Did you actually read the wikilinked article Quadratic equation, or look at the context where it was linked?

Here is how the article starts:

In mathematics, a quadratic equation (from Latin quadratus 'square') is an equation that can be rearranged in standard form as $$ax^{2}+bx+c=0\,,$$ where the variable ⁠$x$⁠ represents an unknown number, and a, b, and c represent known numbers, where a ≠ 0.

The rest of the article continues discussing this type of single-variable quadratic equations, focusing on their solution.

By comparison, the context of the wikilink is:

Descartes' theorem states that the bends of the four circles, $${\begin{aligned}k&={\frac {1}{r}}={\frac {1}{s-c}},&k_{a}&={\frac {1}{r_{a}}}={\frac {1}{s-b}},\\k_{b}&={\frac {1}{r_{b}}}={\frac {1}{s-a}},&k_{c}&=-{\frac {1}{r_{c}}}=-{\frac {1}{s}},\end{aligned}}$$ which are the curvatures of the circles, apart from a minus sign factor for the outer circle, satisfy the quadratic equation $$\left(k+k_{a}+k_{b}+k_{c}\right)^{2}=2\left(k^{2}+k_{a}^{2}+k_{b}^{2}+k_{c}^{2}\right).$$

You will notice that this is not "an equation that can be rearranged in standard form as $\color {PineGreen}ax^{2}+bx+c=0$." So 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.

Beyond that, this is a confusing wikilink to put halfway down the page. The entire article Pythagorean triple is full of quadratic equations, from top to bottom. If we wanted to wikilink this term, the reasonable place to put it would be right near the top, and the link should probably be on the word "quadratic" and go to a target like Quadratic function § Bivariate and multivariate cases. –jacobolus (t) 17:33, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 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 to. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:42, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

You don't find it confusing to wikilink a technical jargon term, and have the wikilink point to an article that makes no mention of the meaning of the term used in the context where the link was? What do you think is the benefit of such a link? –jacobolus (t) 17:45, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

The overall feeling I get from your comments is that "shrug" basically sums up your attitude toward both our technical articles and the human contributors working on them. –jacobolus (t) 17:48, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

On the specific point of the link in question: I agree with jacobolus that Quadratic equation, an article about a single-variable equation, wasn't an appropriate link for the text in question, which was about a multiple-variable equation. isaacl (talk) 21:28, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Update: I removed the word "quadratic" from this place in Pythagorean triple. It is not really necessary. –jacobolus (t) 18:27, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

In any case, the WMF team behind it is well aware on this issue and has pushed changes to the system. I suggest that discussion be continued there (I am considering to close this one, and the other one at the WP:VPMISC to centralise discussions). The erroneous links might not show up anymore with the system update! Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 07:47, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

"Disproportionately" to what? I only claimed that the attention and effort required is disproportionate to the minimal benefit this feature has, and that it's frustrating to spend our time on machine-generated edits that have a very high error rate, instead of on the human activity we come here for. –jacobolus (t) 08:59, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

@Hason-LEK-SIN: (and @WhatamIdoing) FYI, I often try to avoid reverting by clicking on the revert button because I think this is not very nice, especially to newcomers: if one of my first edits had been reverted, I think I would have been mortified and would have stopped contributing. So what I usually do, is if I see that that a person has added 3 links, I'll remove two of them manually and try to see if I can keep at least one. That definitely takes more than 30 seconds. Malparti (talk) 15:27, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

@Hason-LEK-SIN I agree that the discussion has drifted a bit from the original question, so let me sum up the situation:

• the best proxy that we have for whatever consensus might exist among math article editors is whatever consensus might exist on WP:WikiProject Mathematics;
• the overall feeling at WP:WikiProject Mathematics seems to be that the link suggestions features is a pain in the neck. This situation may or may not restricted to math articles; but in the case of math articles, denying it would be going against what pretty much every editor of math articles who cares to exchange with other such math editors thinks.
• jacobolus comes here to report this and ask if the feature can be disabled for math articles.
• many people who do not frequently edit math articles jump in to defend the link suggestions feature (and explain to math editors who think it is an extra burden for them with no real benefit that in fact we are wrong to think it is an extra burden).

Now, two questions: (1) do you disagree with my account of things? (2) Ggiven this state of affairs, what should the next step be? Malparti (talk) 15:55, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I somewhat disagree with it. A quick search through Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics/Archive/2026 found zero discussions about newcomer tasks or adding links this year. The recent one, which prompted this discussion, was about adding a link to a (single) specific article. It is therefore difficult to sustain a claim that there actually is an "overall feeling" about link suggestions, rather than a one-off incident.

I am also concerned about the problem of misattribution. For example, around the time that Jacobolus started this thread, he reverted this edit for having bad links. That single edit has taken a lot of time and effort for him to untangle (because he's tried to preserve the parts that were good). But it's important to note that edit wasn't made by a newcomer, and it didn't use the newcomer task software. This kind of thing can cause people to be upset about "bad links", without realizing that most of the bad links they're seeing have nothing to do with the newcomer task. Preventing that edit would have saved him a lot of time, but turning off newcomer tasks would not have prevented that edit. The (two) newcomer links he's reverted appear to have taken very little time, especially by comparison to that one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:40, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I am not complaining about the links made in the edit you linked here, which is entirely unrelated to this discussion. I have no problem reverting, fixing, discussing, etc. human-generated edits. They don't cause me to "be upset about bad links"; I have lots of patience for interacting with human editors. I just don't like cleaning up after bots. –jacobolus (t) 17:43, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I think that the links added to "the number of grains of sand that can be contained in the universe" were bad, and I understand that you did too.

Why do you keep saying that humans using software are "bots"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:26, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Because the links added by the bot suggestions in "newcomer tasks" are categorically different from the type of links that are typically added by humans. The bot that generates these links works by some kind of text search/matching process that does not resemble the process by which humans pick wikilinks to add, and the resulting wikilinks often don't make any sense from a human perspective. When humans add bad wikilinks, I can understand where they are coming from, and if I talk to them I can say something like "I see why you added this, but that doesn't match Wikipedia conventions, go look at MOS:OVERLINK" or whatever. When a bot adds a link via a "newcomer" human proxy, I can't give the bot any meaningful feedback. It's going to continue to make the same type of mistake over and over until reprogrammed. –jacobolus (t) 18:31, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Which edits are you comparing? What is your sample size? Do you have any data showing that newbies who add links make different/worse ones if they're considering a suggestion vs choosing it themselves? 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, regardless of what software they were using at the time?

I agree that there is an unfortunate amount of repetition in some of the suggestions. We have an existing system that excludes (e.g.,) the names of common occupations and countries, and it would be nice if we could add locally chosen articles to that list. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:15, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm just telling you my general impression. I haven't been keeping careful track of every Wikipedia edit I review.

But again, if you want to have some kind of statistically meaningful data, you need to start with the whole population or a large random sample, and then you need to apply some kind of uniform checking process.

If you can come up with a complete list of all of the suggested link edits to math-related articles, and post it somewhere on Wikipedia, someone can perhaps spend a bit of time reviewing a random sample of them. (Frankly someone should probably review all of them; I expect there are hundreds of edits there that should be reverted.)

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

Yes, which is why we shouldn't have a bot repeatedly recommending newbies add such links, especially to obscure and technically advanced articles they don't understand. Newbies making such decisions on their own happens rarely, and mostly affects popular articles with many page watchers. –jacobolus (t) 02:45, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

If you know of someone who would like to review all of them, then it'd be easy to produce a list of all such edits to WPMATH-tagged articles during any arbitrarily chosen month(s) or year.

Creating a list of comparable non-newcomer-task edits for comparison would be harder.

Blinding the reviewer to the tags should be feasible with CSS.

But there's no point in doing that if there aren't people willing to spend days re-reviewing the edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:15, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

Can you make a complete list? Not a particular month, but all of them, ever? I don't think a comparison to other edits is going to be that useful, since those involve all sorts of random stuff, including a lot of spam, test edits, and vandalism. –jacobolus (t) 03:37, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that can be done via a Quarry query, assuming it doesn't reach the timeout limits. (You might have to break it up, e.g., year by year, to get the whole list without timing out.) See quarry:query/109211: 239 reverted + 6,373 unreverted = 6,612 total. At a reviewing speed of one edit per minute, that's 11 hours' work.

Without a control group, it's not possible to make any comparison to non-newcomer-task edits. The only comparison that would be possible is before/after. If one person reviewed them all, it could be a "How different is my view from ordinary reviewing by the rest of the community?" metric, but it wouldn't tell you anything about whether the newcomer tasks match the community's view. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:38, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

I just don't like cleaning up after bots.

The "add a link" suggestion may be suggested by the bot, but ultimately, it is the editor who will either accept or reject those suggestions, so I disagree on the fact that those edits were made by a bot. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 22:44, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Well, I've got news for you: WikiProject Mathematics is not a talk page whose archives you can easily search. It's a community of people who recognize each other's usernames and exchange in various places and forms: article talk pages, user talk pages, thanks on edits, other wikis, and possibly on other platforms than Wikipedia...

When you have a group of friend where everybody agrees that John is kinda weird, it doesn't mean you'll find it written in the group chat. Malparti (talk) 21:31, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

(In fact, most of what I know about the members of Project Mathematics comes from seeing their edits in my watchlist over the past few years, not from talking to them directly) Malparti (talk) 21:45, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I asked you two very precise questions.

• You answered the first one by saying you "somewhat disagree" with my account of things — more specifically, it seems you disagree with a very specific point. You've explained why, and I've explained why in my opinion your argument isn't convincing. Since then you've not replied. So, to make some sort of progress in that dialogue of the deaf: can we, for now, assume that my account of things is mostly correct, and see where that would take us? If the implications of that assumption warrant it, we can spend some energy double-checking it with a better methodology than Ctrl-Fing the archives of the talk page of WikiProject Mathematics.
• What about my second question? You have not even tried to answer it. My impression is that, so far, you've tried to contest pretty much everything that people in favor of jacobolus' proposal were saying — fine, that's useful. But now assume that most math editors think that in the context of math articles, the "link suggestions" feature is counterproductive. In that hypothetical scenario, what could/should be done?

Malparti (talk) 21:42, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

Here are my answers to your two questions, which were "Now, two questions: (1) do you disagree with my account of things? (2) Ggiven this state of affairs, what should the next step be?":

1) Yes, I disagree in part with your account of things.

2) I suggest that people who want to disable it should provide data demonstrating that:

• There are an unreasonably large number of edits to be reviewed,
• That it takes editors who are interested in math articles an unreasonably large amount of time to review these edits.
• That the WPMATH preference for minimizing links is in line with the broader community's view, which has trended towards greater use of links in recent years (e.g., the community's change to OVERLINK to accept one link per section, rather than one link per whole article).

WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:11, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

There is no such thing as a "WPMATH preference for minimizing links". What Wikipedians working on math articles do generally agree on (with the usual amount of discussion/controversy about borderline examples) is that we should follow the manual of style's recommendation that "words and terms understood by most readers in context are usually not linked". Unfortunately the suggested link bot is not sophisticated enough to follow this part of the MOS. There are plenty of math articles where the same wikilink is included multiple times in different sections, which doesn't cause any problem that can't be worked through via (typically) ordinary editing or (in exceptional cases) discussion. Why should it be up to User:WhatamIdoing in particular to decide what a community of editors considers "reasonable" or not? –jacobolus (t) 22:36, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

I didn't say that it should be up to me to decide what's reasonable. Malparti asked me for my advice on what the next step should be. My advice is that they should provide the kind of non-subjective evidence about the alleged problem that I believe would be convincing to the rest of the community. I suggest this because if (to use my first suggested type of data collection) someone says "Oh, my, there's waaaaay too many of these edits happening to our math articles, so we've got to ban these!", and it's pointed out that in a given week, this so-called "too many" is just one or two per day, out of 33,000 WPMATH-tagged articles – and at a rate significantly lower than the rest of Wikipedia – then the community reaction is not likely to sound sympathetic.

If someone were to conclude that a claim of too many by raw count is impossible to sustain, then it's possible to admit that there are relatively few, but then try to convince people that it's more difficult to review links in math articles than for other subject areas. People generally believe that Math is hard, so they might be more sympathetic to that. But you'd have to build that case, with some evidence.

Finally, the newly created (and non-RFC'd) MOS:MATHLINK may or may not align with the community's view. For that matter, Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking may be out of date wrt the community's view (e.g., UNDERLINK's "An article is said to be underlinked if unlinked words are needed to aid understanding of the article" doesn't mention anything about the use of links for navigational purposes). But if we're going to use the idea that the tool encourages editors to add links that this new section of the MOS discourages as a reason to change the tool, it seems to me that we should first make sure that the community agrees with the new MOS section. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:29, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

The new MOS:MATHLINK section, intended to clarify how the existing MOS:OVERLINK guideline can be applied to math articles in particular since their intended audience is often narrower and their context is somewhat different than a generic other article, was created based on community frustration that was, in my opinion, substantially (but not entirely) caused by the suggested link feature. –jacobolus (t) 23:38, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

The new MOS:MATHLINK is a substantive change to a guideline that was decided by a handful of people on a WikiProject's talk page, without even being mentioned on the guideline's own talk page, much less having an RFC, which would be the typical process for a proposal to create a new section that adds 300+ words to a guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:44, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

If you think there's a problem you are of course also welcome to start a different discussion, e.g. at the MOS:MATH talk page, but the number of people who engage either the content or application of Help:Displaying a formula, Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Mathematics, Wikipedia:Make technical articles understandable, etc. is fairly small and most of those people are (a) watching the pages in question and willing to revert or modify things they disagree with, and (b) notice and engage in discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Mathematics. I don't think I have ever seen an RFC for a change to MOS:MATH (though a search does turn up one in the talk page, about which unicode symbols should be allowed for roman numerals).

Do you also expect RFCs for changes to MOS/Stringed instrument tunings, MOS/Cue sports, MOS/Romanization of Ukrainian, MOS/Road junction lists, etc.? –jacobolus (t) 01:48, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

I expect RFCs for substantial expansions of all guidelines, because that's the ordinary practice of the community. The whole point of an RFC is that the RFC brings more people to under-watched pages. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Feel free to write up an RFC and list it at what you think an appropriate venue would be. –jacobolus (t) 17:30, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Am I correct in assuming that the only thing you disagree with in my account of things is the overall sentiment among math editors? If so, given that I assume you obviously understand the interest of making assumption to make progress on a problem: I've explicitly suggested we assume for now that the overall feeling among editors of WikiProject Mathematics is that the link suggestions feature is a pain in the neck — just to see where that would take us in terms of what should be done. If it turns out that something significant should be done, it will then be easy enough to poll WikiProject Mathematics to make sure that assumption is in fact correct; but for now I don't see a need to invest that much energy in stabilizing this point, because I don't recognize your name among regular editors of math articles and therefore wouldn't expect you to have an informed opinion on the overall feeling among math editors.

Regarding the two other items in your reply (namely that before doing anything else, we should demonstrate that there are an unreasonably large number of edits to be reviewed it takes editors who are interested in math articles an unreasonably large amount of time to review these edits), I find the first one no entirely relevant (what's "unreasonably large" anyway, and if they're almost always nonsensical why should we tolerate even a few?); and the second slightly inappropriate: why should you decide what's an appropriate amount of time for me to invest reviewing and reverting these nonsensical edits? Malparti (talk) 22:50, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

• "Unreasonably large" is any amount that the community (NB: not me) will accept as unreasonable.
• "Almost always nonsensical" has been proven wrong. "Usually kept after review by experienced editors" is an accurate statement. "Unwanted more often than some people have patience for" is probably also correct.
• I never said that I should decide how you should spend your time. 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. I have made two specific suggestions about the kind of edits that might convince the community of the merits of your complaint. For reference, those two specific suggestions are total volume of edits to review and the difficulty of reviewing them (for reference, it took me an average of 30 seconds per link).

WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:40, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing

• "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".

If you look at this discussion, you'll see that here "the community" mostly consists of two math editors (including one who asks you to temporarily accept that his views on this specific question are reasonably representative of a consensus among math editors); and you.

• These two editors — who routinely review links added in math articles through the link suggestions feature — claim that the current amount is unreasonable.
• You — who do not routinely review such links (and probably have never done so, if I base myself on your claim that it would take you 30s to review a link added to a math article) — claim it is. You have a right to think that and to say it here; but I wonder what knowledge relevant to the situation at hand it is you have that makes you think you have something relevant to say about how "annoying to editors vs useful to the project" the link suggestion features is for math articles. Someone here claimed the feature is useful for military history articles, I wouldn't see myself telling them it's not.

• "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 to reply to jacobolus' point about the link to Quadratic equation suggests you don't have).

Second, you say 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 $\mathrm {community} \setminus \{\mathrm {you} \}$ 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?

Malparti (talk) 02:55, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

I also care. I routinely revert mathematics link suggestions as inane. It is annoying to have to spend time doing so, annoying to have to choose between biting newcomers in this way or allowing the encyclopedia to become in this small way worse, and annoying to have a non-mathematics editor here try to gaslight me that it is somehow not annoying. Three recent examples: , , . —David Eppstein (talk) 06:50, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

David, I've not said that it's not annoying, and I've not said that you shouldn't feel whatever emotions you feel about it. In other words, I'm not gaslighting you.

What I am saying is that if someone wants to convince the community to change something, they've got to convince the community that:

• There is a problem.
• The problem isn't Wikipedia:Ownership of content.
• The problem isn't being blown out of proportion. For example, you've provided diffs to three reverts here. However, those three diffs were spread over 8 days. That particular link may be extremely annoying to you, but it's still just three quick reverts in an entire week. The 33,000+ math articles get more blatant vandalism than that in a week.

@Malparti, maybe you could drop a list in this discussion of, say, the more recent ten edits to a math article that added links. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:41, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

It seems to me like "the community" is not at issue. The issue is that you WhatamIdoing, personally, think that there isn't a problem, think that the problem is "ownership", and think this is "blown out of proportion".

Nothing about this links feature has been decided by "the community". The bot in question is being run, unilaterally, by the WMF. At best, there is some community feedback that is considered (this type of discussion is an example of that feedback, where "the community" comes to report that the bot is a nuisance and the practical results are bad). The folks responsible at the WMF could stop its operation or reprogram it if they want. –jacobolus (t) 18:08, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Nothing about this links feature has been decided by the community...if you don't count discussions such as Wikipedia talk:Growth Team features/Archive 9#Should English Wikipedia enable the Suggested Links newcomer task? and repeated announcements on dozens of pages

And, again, it's not a bot. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:30, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, and if you read that discussion, which took place on the obscure "growth team features" talk page, you get a few lukewarm "go ahead and try it" responses, plus a couple of people initially enthusiastic and a couple more who are opposed. For example:

• "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."

Overall, participation was pretty limited, and I don't think the discussion accurately reflects the range or distribution of community feelings either at the time or now. –jacobolus (t) 23:50, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Sure, there are other sources of irritation (blatant vandalism, citespamming, slop, people seduced by slop...), but that's not a reason to make our burden heavier upon ourselves. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 21:35, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing I don't see why I should have to do this time-consuming work, which in my opinion will prove nothing, just because you somehow think this is important. But I won't give you the pleasure of having a "Ha, gotcha!" moment, so I'll kindly oblige. All of the following examples were added through the link suggestions feature, and in the past week only. And even with such a small sample we can already illustrate various reasons why such links can be bad:

• First, there are the dreaded iff's:

• Post's lattice
• Polygonalization
• Locally connected space
• Separation axiom
• Jensen's inequality

• Then come the links that fall somewhere between "somewhat incorrect" to "plain wrong" — in the past week I didn't notice any "plain wrong" examples, but I did find a few "somewhat incorrect" ones:

• Lindemann–Weierstrass theorem (→ here "more elementary" means "simpler, more direct"; not "non complex-analytical")
• Oblate spheroidal coordinates (→ the link should be {infinitesimal volume element}, not {infinitesimal} + {volume element})

• After this, we have links that are useless because they link a basic concept in an advanced article (the equivalent of linking words such as "and", "person" or "sky" in a non-technical article), or because they come way too late in the article. Those are not intrinsically wrong, but like linking iff, they result in (sometimes comically absurd) overlinking:

• Heyting arithmetic (→ very advanced and specialized article, no point of linking "bijection")
• Gerbe → (very advanced article, no point in link "vector field")
• Phase retrieval (→ advanced and specialized article, no point in linking "iterative method")
• Homothetic center (→ the article is actually not that advanced, but linking "division by zero" after what precedes is useless)
• Parity-check matrix (→ the whole article talks about vector, generator matrices, linear independence, etc; so linking "vector space" at the very end makes no sense)
• Total variation (→ somewhat advanced article; here linking parametric curve isn't useful because it is clear from the context what this refers to, and one actually doesn't need to know anything about parametric curves so this is needlessly distracting)
• Polynomial ring (→ somewhat advanced article, no point in linking "infinite set" that late in the article, especially when notion of infinity has already been used in three different places in the article)

the examples above are relatively clear-cut, but it's not always the case; sometimes the usefulness of the links seems OK but is debatable (e.g, Cauchy's integral formula, Gilbert–Johnson–Keerthi distance algorithm). There are many more such "OKish" links, and distinguishing them from the clearly useless links above takes time and energy.

• Next, the links that are a bit silly, either because they are a bit circular or just link seemingly random words.

• Generalized method of moments (→ random word in article title)
• Symbolic regression (→ common word in event name)
• Shape optimization (→ links to something more general too late; a bit like linking "milk" in the body of "pasteurized milk")

• Of course, you also have the links that would be useful, but are too imprecise to actually be

• Generalized Poincaré conjecture (→ a link here would be very nice, but linking this article is not precise enough to be useful: the link should something like infinite special orthogonal group; because all the ingredients to understand what the infinite special orthogonal group is are indeed in Orthogonal group, but technically it's not discussed in that article, and if you don't already know what SO is you have no chance of understanding from Orthogonal group...)

• Finally, you have links which turn out to be correct "by pure luck" but require a lot of time to be checked:

• Hilbert–Huang transform (→ it's not clear from the Wikipedia article which research paper "Phillips [2003]" is — turns out it is Application of the Hilbert–Huang Transform to the Analysis of Molecular Dynamics Simulations — and even if you know what a conformational change of a molecule is, unless you are in the domain the expression "conformational change in Brownian dynamics" could feel a bit strange and make it look like there is a chance the link to Conformational change is not adequate — here it turns out it is so all good; but I spent maybe 10 minutes checking that).

Again: this is just for the past week; these are that would not have been added if it weren't for the link suggestions feature; and this is not an exhaustive list.

Now, I'm going to repeat myself but this list should not be needed to get the conversation moving forward:

1. when several editors on Topic A come report that something specific to Topic A is hindering their work, to the point that they are ready to spend some time and energy to make it stop: why would your first reaction be to question what they say?
2. the time it takes to review these edits is not the only problem here. As multiple people have kept saying: being forced to choose between biting newcomers and letting articles slowly become worse is unpleasant.

I'm not even mentioning other problems posed by this feature (such as the fact that it is frequently used by WP:SPAs to inflate their edit count and gain legitimacy — on the French Wikipedia I've recently had to waste hours reverting hundreds of edits made by bots using the link suggestions and image suggestions features), because these other disadvantages are not specific to math articles; but of course in the end one should not forget to add them up to the other points listed above. Malparti (talk) 22:12, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks Malparti. Ping @KStoller-WMF. I think it's important that the folks from the WMF see the above post. 22:45, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing Your lack of response to the above post is very conspicuous. I'm going to assume that you are conceding the point here. So now, can you help us get this turned off for math articles? –jacobolus (t) 17:14, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

It's on my list, but I haven't had a larger chunk of time to dedicate to reviewing it during the last three days. I want to be able to respond in greater detail than "Thanks for showing that most of the links are accurate" and "Did anyone add links to any math articles last week that didn't use the newcomer task?" WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:57, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

@Malparti, I looked at all the edits during the last week to all Top-, High- and Mid-priority WPMATH-tagged articles by registered editors with fewer than 500 edits via Special:RecentChangesLinked. There were 198 such edits out of these ~5,500 articles.

I found 16 newcomer task edits, of which 11 were "add links". Three of those linked to If and only if. Only one of the 16 edits has been reverted; it was one of the iff links, which gives us a 9% reversion rate specifically for the add-a-link task and a 6% overall reversion rate for all newcomer tasks.

I found 182 non-newcomer task edits by these new and less-experienced editors, of which 27 (15%) have already been reverted. I see a number of significant changes to mathematical formulas. There was very little blatant vandalism, and at least two of the reverts were self-reverts.

Among the 182 non-newcomer task edits, I found some links being added organically: . Some of these (e.g., the last one) do not appear to be strictly "necessary". Two of them ( ) were reverted, which is a 14% reversion rate – in line with all non-newcomer task edits, and lower than the reversion rate. A few edits also removed links, e.g., , and some edits added a link while copyediting, e.g., .

Based on your detailed analysis and my own look at these recent edits, I conclude the following:

• Most of the links added to math articles are not using the newcomer task.
• Edits made with the newcomer tasks are about half as likely to get reverted as the 'organic' edits.
• If it were possible to block all newcomer tasks from mathematics articles, the effect would be:
  • to reduce total edits by newcomers by about 10%,
  • to specifically reduce the addition of links by about 40–50%, and
  • to have almost no effect on the number of edits that experienced editors need to revert.

Do those sound like fair conclusions to you? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:42, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

No, you continue to completely miss the point. The edits made with the link bot have a wildly unacceptably high error rate. Bot edits with 0.1% error rate might be acceptable. Bot edits with 20–50% errors need to be turned off ASAP. I have now reverted 3 more of the 11 edits in your list, so the reversion rate in your tiny sample is now 36%.

For example, one of the added links from your set wikilinked "normal distribution" in the phrase "altered the normal distribution pattern", where the "normal" here is being used in the plain English sense of usual or typical, not the normal distribution.

"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)

Your list of 2 reverted link addition edits is also misleading. One was a link that an editor added in a new section they made; the entire section was removed for being original research. The other was an (accurate?) wikilink to someone's spouse added to a biography, which was reverted for being an "undeclared COI" – I don't think this latter one should have been reverted, maybe you want to go investigate. So of the "organic" links added, the real revert rate is now 0%. –jacobolus (t) 16:09, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Those conclusions do not seem fair because:

1. As has been pointed out several times here (included by myself), the percentage of edits that get reverted is not a relevant metric: first, there is a bias towards not reverting them for editors such as myself, because I don't want to WP:BITE; second, I'm so annoyed by those links that I often don't even look at them (and therefore don't revert them). That doesn't mean they are good: for instance, in the example you linked above, the link on "normal distribution" is actually incorrect and must be removed.
2. How do you explain that you get so few links compared to me in your data? You data suggests that we get about 10 "link suggestions" to math article per week, when mine found 20 incorrect such links over the same period of time. Moreover, if I remember correctly, I had to look at about 60 "link suggestions" edits to find those... So not only is the total volume ~6× higher in my data;I also get that about one link out three was uncalled for.

So (1) you data seem incomplete compared to mine and (2) your conclusion do not seem fair because your rationale still does not take into account legitimate objections that have been repeated over and over again. Malparti (talk) 16:10, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

In response to your two questions:

1. When several editors on Topic A come report that something is hindering their work, my first reaction is to find out whether they have correctly identified the problem. I react this way because Wikipedia editors have a long history of misidentifying the source of their pain. For example, a couple of months before you created your account, our fellow editors demanded that the brand-new visual editor be removed because they thought it was slowing down page loading. It turned out that a completely unrelated piece of software was the source of the page load problem. Removing the visual editor would not have solved their problem. Similarly, in this case, if adding links is a problem, we need to figure out how all the links are being added. It wouldn't be very helpful to turn off 10% of the links; it would be more helpful to turn off 90% of them.
2. You say that the time it takes to review these edits is not the only problem. The choice between "between biting newcomers and letting articles slowly become worse" is a false dichotomy. First, 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). Second, it's not clear to me that adding these links constitutes making articles "worse".

WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:11, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Wait, the newcomers don't even get any feedback that their edits were reverted? How are they going to learn whether what they were doing was correct? –jacobolus (t) 16:13, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

If that's the case, the simplest solution to this would probably be to just run a counter-bot to mass revert all of the 'link suggestion' changes as they happen. Then the newcomers get to feel like they contributed, the errors get fixed, and experts don't have to waste their time with it. Easy peasy. –jacobolus (t) 16:15, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing:

• 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.

Malparti (talk) 16:27, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Sure, I never said that I did a close review of these links. But... 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". This would clarify the sentence in a way that would prevent anyone from mistakenly thinking that this term of the art is relevant. BITE recommends that kind of edit: "Consider improving upon a newcomer's edit rather than reverting it". Reverting itself is not a hostile action; you can revert with a pleasant edit summary instead of a hostile one. And if, when you reverted that incorrect link, you also fixed it to be clearer, then even if the newcomer came back later to check, they'd likely figure out why the link was removed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:11, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

The phrasing "normal distribution pattern" is completely unambiguous in context. The only reason anyone would try to add a wikilink here is because they are a bot following a broken exact phrase search method. No human reading this passage would consider adding such a link.

From the start of the article:

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.

And then later, the part in question:

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.

This bot edit is absolutely, uncontroversially wrong. You trying to explain around it is tiring and makes it increasingly difficult to believe you are engaging in good faith. –jacobolus (t) 19:17, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Jacob, if the words 'normal' and 'distribution' appear in close proximity, I'm likely to assume that the sentence actually is talking about the normal distribution. If it's not, you should not use those words. See also all the confusion we get here when an editor says "This is a notable event", but they don't mean WP:NEVENT, or "we should delete this" when they don't mean to WP:DELETE it. If you choose to use the phrase 'normal distribution' in a sentence, then you are choosing to risk confusion. If that confusion isn't acceptable, you need to change the words. What you don't get to do is tell everyone else that it's their fault that your writing was unclear to them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

You wouldn't assume that if you were a human and actually read the article. But you might assume that if you were a robot doing a text search and incapable of reading or critical thought. There is absolutely no "risk of confusion" here, unless you mean that the bot got confused, as it does in a shockingly high percentage of cases. (This also wasn't "my writing".) –jacobolus (t) 21:00, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

No, I'm telling you that I might actually think that. What you think is obvious is not what everyone else in the world thinks is obvious. There is a risk of confusion when I am the reader, and especially if I'm just glancing at it. Please do not tell me that I would understand that "in context" when I'm telling you that I didn't when looking at that diff, and that I probably wouldn't if I were looking at a similar situation.

I'm sure you've seen Dunning–Kruger effect used as an insult, but I'd like you to remember that there are two ends. The ignorant person who believes he's amazing is at one end. But there also the other end, which includes people who studied mathematics in Boston. That kind of person tends to overestimate their audience's abilities. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:47, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

especially if I'm just glancing at it [...] I didn't when looking at that diff

Yes, that's the point. You, a person "just glancing" at a random phrase taken out of context 3/4 of the way down an article who didn't even bother to read the rest of the same sentence might be confused. Clearly that can happen: it apparently happens constantly to you when you try to quickly judge whether links are correct or not, which is why you have a very high error rate at that task, and also happens to the newcomer bot proxies who are committing these links to the articles, as evidenced by their similarly high error rate.

But if you had actually read even the rest of the same sentence then you would not be confused about this meaning of "normal distribution pattern", which is clearly referring to a "city distribution pattern" following the rank-size rule. If you had additionally read the beginning of the article you would realize that the rank-size rule was explicitly described as not a probability distribution. If you were an ordinary reader, you would presumably start with trying to understand what the rank-size distribution was, on an article titled Rank–size distribution.

This is why it is a really shitty task to give to newcomers (who are apparently not expected to read the whole page or even the immediate context) to babysit a bot that constantly makes somewhat tricky mistakes, and a total waste of time for experts to clean up the resulting inevitable mess, since doing so properly requires spending significant effort, and not just skimming a single phrase and making a snap judgment.

Throughout this conversation you're doing extreme mental contortions to the point of absurdity insist that someone might hypothetically be totally incapable of understanding anything in context. Such a person, who only reads atomized sentences one at a time plucked at random from the encyclopedia and has the memory of a goldfish is not the intended reader, and we should not go far out of our way to accommodate someone who is so severely functionally illiterate. –jacobolus (t) 02:26, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, but you're making an unfortunately false assumption. If I were an ordinary reader, I probably would be look at "atomized sentences", or more precisely, at just one or two individual sentences. The ordinary reader normally spends significantly less than one minute looking at any article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:04, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

If you were an "ordinary reader" of Wikipedia, and you wanted to learn about a topic, you would navigate to the article about it, scroll 3/4 of the way down the page and read the second half of a random sentence, without bothering to read the first half of the same sentence or any of the rest of the page? Is this some kind of elaborate prank? Are you a performance artist? –jacobolus (t) 17:16, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Because most of our ordinary readers are on mobile, they actually do "randomly" skip down the page to a section whose section heading looks promising, and read individual bits without having any of the context or information that is higher in the article.

I think it is difficult for most Wikipedia editors to grasp how different editors' and readers' interaction with the site is. I'm telling you this on the basis of past user research. I have read enough of this research to know that how I use Wikipedia is very different from how most people do. I suspect that is also true for you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:55, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

The best concise description I can think of for what you are doing here is mansplaining. Your gender, and mine, notwithstanding. Please just stop digging any deeper a hole; it's exhausting. –jacobolus (t) 18:03, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing 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.

(also, although that's besides the point: "typical" and "normal" have different meaning, and I don't think you're qualified to say that "typical" is better than "normal" here, at least not without having read the article in detail)

Malparti (talk) 21:57, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

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.

That whole long paragraph is uncited, so we unfortunately can't check what language is used by the source(s).. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:54, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing

• 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).

When I write a report, send it to the director of my institute so that he can approve it and send it to whatever national agency: I made the report, he approved it. You're not going to convince me otherwise, so stop making the same (frankly useless) rhetorical point whenever someone writes that the bot makes mistakes.

• 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 $x$ for them, $-x$ for someone else, and ${\tfrac {1}{2}}x$ for me. What he denotes by $(x,y)$ might actually correspond to $(s,t)$ or even $(y,x)$ 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.

Here, the fact that your first impulse was to look at the word used by the source to find which of "normal" vs "typical" is best suited (instead of simply trying to understand the idea that the sentence expresses and then find the most clear and accurate way to phrase is in English) tells me that you most likely do not know what it means to read a math journal article, and therefore do not have the experience to understand how problematic some of those edits are. So I would be grateful if you could let people who are able to understand the whys and wherefores of those edits assess how problematic they are, instead of asserting that they aren't. Quite frankly, so far the discussion has made me feel like I am back in debating class, where people try to "win" an argument on a topic they know nothing about, instead of trying to understand what is really going on.

Malparti (talk) 12:34, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

It was asserted in this discussion that the words normal distribution in that sentence are merely ordinary, non-mathematical words using the regular dictionary definition. If that's true, then we could replace them with other ordinary, non-mathematical words that do not happen to overlap with a technical term. 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.

As it stands, that paragraph is at risk of a WP:CHALLENGE. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:02, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing 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)

@David Eppstein A previous post said:

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.

Is that something you can do? –jacobolus (t) 22:49, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

There are only 8 pages in that category, and there probably shouldn't be any. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:11, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

If there is consensus for this change, I am capable of doing it. I am not convinced this thread has established that consensus yet. Currently the only categories listed there are Category:Candidates for speedy deletion and Category:Articles for deletion; it does not list any content-based categories. —David Eppstein (talk) 23:12, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

I suspect that the cat restriction is limited to the cat itself, and none of the subcats. I wonder if the template {{math}} would work better. That would pick up 12,000 articles, including 1500 articles containing the words "if and only if" (about 20% of all articles containing that phrase). WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:16, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Any update on this topic? I feel like I've been challenged to provide arguments supporting the general sentiment among math editors that the link suggestions feature is a pain; yet once I took the time to detail them — which took me a significant amount of time — no-one really bothered discussing them and let the conversation die out, and it just looks like nothing is going to change.

So what's the current status? If I want things to move forward, what should the next step be? David said he is not convinced this thread has established consensus yet (which I think is a fair assessment); how do we determine that? Should I summarize the discussion here, make sure that the various protagonists agree with my account of things, and start a RfC? Malparti (talk) 08:23, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

There is also the issue that the technical solution discussed here (adding a cat to the blacklist for the link suggestion feature) would appear not to work, because you would have to add all of its many subcategories rather than just a single cat. So maybe it's premature to start an RfC when we don't know what to propose? —David Eppstein (talk) 01:12, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

@David Eppstein 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)

As I said before, it's possible to reduce the number of articles that are visible to the newcomer tasks by adding the magic word to a couple of templates that are commonly used in math articles. It probably wouldn't cover everything, but it would cover a lot of them. You don't need a category when the magic word is transcluded via a template. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:15, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

If there is a magic word that will keep this task from overlinking/adding nonsense links to articles, I would be inclined to add that magic word to about seven-and-a-quarter-million articles. BD2412 T 01:35, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

I think that would be an overreaction. For individual articles, use Template:No newcomer task. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:09, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Since at this stage no better systematic solution has been proposed, I'll start adding that templates to articles I monitor, and will inform other contributors of the existence of that option. Malparti (talk) 12:36, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

(Apologies for not responding earlier)

1. I really want to agree, but the other earlier comments is making me think otherwise
2. It should be simple: get someone to disable the link suggestions tool if the project is in WikiProject Math for a set period, and then see if this should be the case moving forward after a review.

But alas, the two other editors have started to "comment war" at each other again (which is causing me difficulty in reading/navigating this thread)... this comment was made without caring about what the others have said. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 01:07, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T439922

I think it will require a software change, so I've filed a Phab task for it. Feel free to edit the description. If it's already on their list, they'll merge it up to the older task. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:58, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

RfC: Name of the "Discussion" button

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)

Current label

Default label

Survey (button name)

Yes. And other language Wikis usually say discussion, eg Italian, French etc. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 16:07, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes (ETA: if "Discussion" does not pass, my second choice is now "Talk page". 23:48, 27 September 2026 (UTC)) because:

• More and more of our readers are assuming that the "Talk!" button on our articles takes them to an AI chatbot.
• As was explained below, users are mistaking it for text-to-speech. Most online news articles nowadays have a button that reads the article aloud for them.
• Most people reading foreign Wikipedias probably have a decent grasp of the language, but enwiki is the largest and typically attracts more non-native speakers. "Talk!" is more recognizable than "discussion" and it's also an imperative verb.
• "Talk" is the more opaque of the two terms for newcomers, which further helps to hide its intended function, which is to "discuss" how to improve the article itself, not to "talk" about the topic of the article. "Talk!" also has a broader meaning and can be used in context where "discussion" cannot.

FaviFake (talk) 20:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

I have already seen these reasons, no need to ping in an edit summary please. --ABx11 (she/they) 00:44, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

If it moves the needle even a teensy tiny bit, please god yes. I feel like I am the only person monitoring these, it is one of the few places on Wikipedia that actually DOES have a deadline (since you have to remove it before the archive bot gets it, otherwise you aren't allowed to clean it up anymore, joining the nearly 6,000 instances of enshrined untouchable vandalism), and I am so, so, so behind on it. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:58, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

@Gnomingstuff: re: "you aren't allowed to clean it up anymore" - says who? Where and when was that decided, and was there broad participation? A rule that requires vandalism to be enshrined sounds like a really bad rule and one that should be reconsidered. HierophantOfOmens (talk) 07:12, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Please do not ping me to a discussion I am obviously aware of given that I commented in it 5 minutes ago. If I want to look at a discussion, then I will do so on my own time. If I am not currently looking at a discussion, then I'm probably doing something else that I would prefer to not be interrupted during. In this case, it was doing the cleanup this whole thread is about, and now I am not doing it, all thanks to your ping.

The RfC was here. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:15, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't see how one interprets "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)

The RFC's closing statement begins: "There is consensus that talk page archives can be edited to remove material that breaches policy, such as copyvio, libel, and serious personal attacks..."

The first link in "the nearly 6,000 instances of enshrined untouchable vandalism" adds a racial slur to someone else's comment. That's obviously something that should be fixed (if it hasn't already been).

Mostly, when I see this kind of comment, though, I'm reminded of User:Betacommand, whom we tasked with tagging WP:NFCC violations. Then we left him to deal with the social fallout all on his own, and it turns out that having the technical skills to find and tag various files did not automatically give someone an endless supply of patience and kindness to people who felt entitled to ignore the legal policies, or at least to yell at someone before making a show of how they're grudgingly complying with these completely unnecessary, overly picky rules. It did not end well. I am concerned that we are doing the same thing to our AI defense folks. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

You know, having learned to dabble (a tiny bit) in the site API... I bet you USD $1 that list of 6000 is bigger. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 14:52, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes to simply renaming the visual presentation of the clickable buttons from "Talk" to "Discussion". Very good idea. We have no justification, need or reason to be the weird outlier versus other wikis, and per other arguments here. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 22:41, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

No per Maddy from Celeste and Very Polite Person below. Firstly there is no evidence that this will solve the problem it attempts to - everybody who thinks "talk" means "discuss this article with a chatbot" will think "discuss" means "discuss this article with a chatbot" so we gain nothing. Secondly the 2011 change was made for a good reason and that reason still exists, we will still refer to the page as a talk page and that will still confuse new editors who cannot find a button for a "talk" page, so we will lose significantly here - possibly even more than we were doing in 2011 as we are facing a bigger editor recruitment problem now than we were then. Thryduulf (talk) 22:50, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

No per ... Very Polite Person below.

I'm confused. Very Polite Person has always supported this proposal from the start, saying it's a very good idea. You're the first person to oppose. FaviFake (talk) 22:59, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

That's because I misattributed a comment, my opposition is per Anomie not VPP (my apologies to both). Thryduulf (talk) 23:05, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

How dare you, etc. All good. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 00:16, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

• No - Using a different word (“Discussion”) on the tab we click to reach the article’s TALK page makes no sense to me. I would expect to click on a tab reading “Talk” to reach the article’s TALK page. Blueboar (talk) 23:26, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Which, incidentally, would also be the button you'd expect to click in order to talk with other users (or with a chatbot) about the topic, or to have the article automatically read aloud to you... FaviFake (talk) 23:34, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  If all the other equivalent encyclopedias apparently use their native tongue "Discuss", why wouldn't we want to be doing it how the others are? — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 00:18, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

• Yes per Favi and Gnoming, "discussion" is much more intuitive, and we should be targeting readers' and newbies' experiences here. One of the faults of our decision-making process is that only experienced editors participate and prioritise their own experience. Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 00:14, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  The argument in favor of Talk, both in 2011 and now, is that "Talk" is more intuitive since it's the name of the namespace, and it's what everyone calls it, and that it would be better for readers and newbies to therefore have the button called "Talk." They're not prioritizing their own experience, they're targeting readers' and newbies' experiences.

  So does anyone on either side of this debate have any actual data to present, or are we just voting based on our own personal experience/opinion of what is less confusing for others? Levivich (talk) 01:54, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  True, and it's the latter, no idea if there's a way to request data collection via survey (there should be) Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 02:42, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  Do the however many tens of thousands of prompt junk posts I have reverted count as data? The neverending deluge of stuff like this day after day after day, hundreds per week, thousands per month. Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:58, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  No. I'm not talking about data that people misuse talk pages, anyone that's read some knows that. I'm talking about data about the button label. That edit wouldn't be prevented if the button was called "Discussion." A survey, as Kowal suggested above, and A/B testing, as CMD suggested in the discussion section below, could bring useful data, though. Levivich (talk) 07:12, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

• (edit conflict) Weak no because while talk might suggest that the Talk page is for discussing the subject of articles, discussion isn'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) Hard no. The only reason that has been presented to me via a ping isn't sufficient as I had already seen these reasons. And after seeing the arguments against it presented elsewhere, I'm convinced that this might cause confusion, and frankly, I'm not even convinced that it even helps in this regard. --ABx11 (she/they) 21:22, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
• No per Maddy from Celeste BilledMammal (talk) 00:19, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
• No per Blueboar, Thryduulf, et al, and per the 2011 discussion that lead to the change to "Talk" in the first place. The conclusion drawn then remains very much valid. A tab leading to the Talk: namespace should be labeled "Talk".

Plus I think the idea that somehow "Talk" leads people to think it's a chatbot and "Discussion" will not is an unfounded conclusion. That really would need some sort of actual supporting evidence besides anecdotes, because I haven't seen any such activity. (I have seen many cases where none-too-bright people for some idea think it's a page for contacting the subject of the article, but that can be dismissed as clear lack of competency.)

Finally, what other language Wikipedias do is irrelevant. Each language Wikipedia is a separate entity. Yes, a lot of them use the cognate of "discussion" for that tab. But they also use that cognate for the namespace for their discussion pages. Which circles back to the whole reason the English Wikipedia tab is "Talk". It matches the namespace. To change the tab and not the namespace makes little sense. Either change both or change neither. Changing only one creates unnecessary confusion. oknazevad (talk) 00:41, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Furthermore, Talk and Discuss are synonyms, so I'm not seeing the tangible benefit. --ABx11 (she/they) 00:44, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

• No Way, way too many references to "the talk page" litter the database and help guides. This would make "the talk page" harder to find and I don't see the value. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 03:11, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
• No Fiddling with labels won't help people who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia. Having a discussion button that leads to talk is confusing (absurd, actually). Discussion invites commentary even more than talk. Johnuniq (talk) 06:17, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
• No (summoned by bot) Fiddling with labels won't help people who are unfamiliar with Wikipedia. Having a discussion button that leads to talk is confusing To 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)
• (summoned by bot) No per oknazevad and Pppery. As others have said, what other Wikipedias do is irrelevant, it would lead to more confusion from newbies, and it wouldn't decrease confusion with AI chatbots. Kovcszaln6 (talk) 10:19, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
• Yes "Discussion" is a noun, while "talk" is a verb. Velocifyer (talk) 17:27, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  From the Merriam Webster dictionary: "Talk: noun ... 4: a formal discussion, negotiation, or exchange of views —often plural" - Donald Albury 19:02, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  They probably meant to say that "Talk!" can also be interpreted as a verb while "Discussion" can only be interpreted as a noun. FaviFake (talk) 19:40, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

• No Perhaps a bit counterintuitively, contra some of what is said above, "discussion" would lead new people to think it's a place for discussing the article in general i.e. a forum. Jahaza (talk) 20:57, 4 September 2026 (UTC)
• No I do not see a net positive from making the change. - Donald Albury 23:23, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  I consider "Talk page" to also be acceptable. Donald Albury 18:55, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

• Yes, as a small but hopefully meaningful step in the right direction. I would also be open to changing this for a month or so, and seeing if there was any meaningful difference. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 16:22, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  I would also support Talk page. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:09, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

• No per Thryduulf. —Kusma (talk) 20:49, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
• No. Ain't broke, so don't "fix" it. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 01:33, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
• Talk page. (see ExtantRotations' comment below) I think this is unambiguous and less likely to be confused with LLM slop chatting. I doubt this option will reach consensus, but "yes" and "no" are both bad choices as they have too many drawbacks. --not-cheesewhisk3rs ≽^•⩊•^≼ ∫ (pester) 17:02, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
• No to "Discussion", Yes to "Talk page" per ExtantRotations. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 18:38, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
• Sure we can always change back again. 15 years seems an appropriate time to try something new. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 22:22, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
• No. I don't mind causing confusion/alarm/despondency with a change if there's a clear benefit, but here I think it's just speculation to say that one of these words is better than the other. This would create a lot of fussing and complaining and I can't believe it would be worth it. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 23:57, 8 September 2026 (UTC)
• No. I think that the term Talk describes the intended purpose adequately. GrinningIodize (you just lost the game) (talk) 22:35, 9 September 2026 (UTC)
• This is oddly specific, but I would permanently change the button to "Discussion" for only ChatGPT and the other articles on the AI chatbots. Why are people always Googling ChatGPT when they could use Google AI mode? For the other pages, lean yes as a trial. EDIT 02:41: Actually, yes, per FaviFake, and additionally because that's what Commons does as well. Also, I believe it should be made clear that only the button's name is changed, not the namespace. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 02:38, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

  There are way more of these than one would think, I've been requesting semi-protection on the most common offenders but new ones keep popping up

  worst of the lot are the ones on deepfakes because the prompts are specifically people asking for revenge porn Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:09, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose change to "Discussion". As User:Johnuniq said, the word "discussion" invites even more commentary than "talk", and it'll make it sound for new users like the comments section from a journalism site. Concerns of "talk" implying a chatbot is IMHO weird, because... how? At most, a new user would reasonably mistake it for a recommendations comment thread or help desk. Plus, {{Talk header}} exists and that cancels out most of the concerns with new users not understanding the purpose of talk page. Too many things in the encyclopedia says "talk page" and making a mandate to change that would be time-consuming and we don't need to fix what is not broken. I would support change to "Talk page" as per User:not-cheesewhisk3rs. In solidarity, Brynn Who Likes Editing | talk w/ me! 07:58, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

  Concerns of "talk" implying a chatbot is IMHO weird, because... how?

  I don't know what to say here, if people who actually do talk page patrol are telling you that this is a thing, then it seems at least worth considering that they know what they are talking about

  see also the edit histories of basically any even tangentially AI-related page, many of which (e.g. Talk:Google Gemini) have banners added by people who could tell you that this is a thing Gnomingstuff (talk) 21:11, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

• No The "Article" button takes the user to the page in articlespace. The "Talk" button takes the user to the page in talkspace. Giving more names to this space would likely just add to the confusion, and "Discussion" doesn't make the purpose much clearer either. Would likely support "Talk page" though. FlammablePizza (talk) 01:07, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

  Article and talk aren't the only namespaces though. On 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)

  That being said, "Talk page" is a valid option. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:09, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

• No to "Discussion", Yes to "Talk page". I'm with others here that changing it to 'Discussion' would be unnecessarily confusing re: the discrepancy between that term and the namespace, as well as with all the existing references to talk pages that are all over essays, help pages etc. Changing it to "Talk page" seems to elegantly solve all of the issues that people have with "Talk" without running into the problems with "Discussion". Athanelar (talk) 00:47, 14 September 2026 (UTC)
• No with caveats as per Blueboar and the 2011 discussion, with my caveat being that we try and make sure all talk pages have the this is a talk page notice for new users. I don’t know if there’s a tool for speeding that process up, though I’m sure it’d be easy to implement in tools such as rater, though that is a separate discussion.Edlectro28 (talk) 15:42, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

  Unfortunately that's controversial and we would need a different RfC for that, but, luckily for you, I'm already working on it! Please feel free to comment at WT:RFC § Add the Talk header template to existing article talk pages before the RfC goes live. FaviFake (talk) 15:48, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

  I got carried away! Anyway, my no still stands, and that’s great timing and thanks for letting me know. I’ll be sure to say my piece over there. Edlectro28 (talk) 15:52, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

  Perfect! (To clarify, the actual RfC will happen on this page, that's just the workshop discussion.) FaviFake (talk) 16:06, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

  Thanks Edlectro28 (talk) 16:08, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

  Change to "Talk page" as this can solve the problems mentioned in this RFC and the one 15 years ago. Szxq (talk) 04:08, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose "Discussion" per the 2011 discussion; Support "Talk page". "Talk page" would match the style of tab name used on other Wikipedia interface instances, and would be even less likely to be confused for discussing with a chatbot than either "Discussion" or the status quo "Talk". Regards, User:TheDragonFire300. (Contact me | Contributions). 05:16, 25 September 2026 (UTC)
• Change to "Talk page" – not a major change that disrupts the past 15 years of display, the namespace name, or the edit history and wiki culture; however, seems like a promising way to cut down on people thinking the talk page is a chatbot. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 23:41, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
• No WP:BIKESHED. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 10:47, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (button name)

Presumably, "Talk:Foo" would automatically be created (or maintained) as a redirect to a given "Discussion:Foo"? BD2412 T 16:53, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

No, only the label of the button would be changed, not the name of the page itself. The pagename of the talk pages have always started with "Talk:", even before we changed the button label to "Talk". FaviFake (talk) 17:01, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Wait, so this proposal is JUST changing the visual presentation of the buttons on web and mobile versions of the page from "Talk" to "Discussion"...

...and that's it? If so can you make the RFC a teeny bit clearer that it's a MUCH smaller but impactful change, and as editors there is no actual impact? — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 22:40, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, exactly!

 Done, and i also added a side-by-side image comparison for clarity FaviFake (talk) 22:52, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Why change just the label and not also the namespace? Levivich (talk) 23:07, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

The default namespace is fine. When editors open a talk page, they're almost always greeted by a {{talk page banner}} that immediately tells them in a bolded font that "This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the [Weather] article. This is not a forum for general discussion of the subject of the article." We couldn't ask for a better notice.

The button, on the other hand, is completely ambiguous: it just says "Talk!", which is website design means "talk with our chatbot!" or "chat with the community!". There's a reason "Discussion" has always been the default. Plus, changing the namespace would be a nightmare, while changing the label of a button literally takes 1 second. FaviFake (talk) 23:20, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

It probably isn’t just chatbots — it really started to accelerate in early 2022 (before ChatGPT and derivatives) and some comments show indicators that the users are mistaking it for text-to-speech, Siri, etc. No I don’t have any diffs handy but I have personally dealt with tens of thousands of these Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:38, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

I remember a phase from around then of IP users creating talk page sections containing a short phrase repeated in the heading and body (eg. this where a user posts to Talk:Plain with a heading Structural plain and 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?

The bigger issue still seems to me to be the new thread talk box itself, with its deeply cryptic request that the user enter not a comment but a "Description". Belbury (talk) 17:28, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

If there's a filter, I don't know about it and it's not working very well. Here's an example from 2 hours ago. (The person they pinged has only ever made one edit, in 2021, to their userpage, so there's virtually no way this is a legitimate attempt to ping them.) I've tried to get a filter put into place, but no one ever did it.

The reason you see this stuff less often now is that I have been going through every single edit made to talk pages, every single day (except when I get behind), since 2025. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:54, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Oh, this is the talk page? I wanted the discussion page. I must have clicked the wrong thing. ~2026-47946-04 (talk) 07:21, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

Given that this plan is only to change the display text on the icon, why not change the text to Talk Page instead simply Talk? It removes the ambiguity of being an LLM and is still fewer characters than the current proposal. Plus it remains in line with the existing set up. ExtantRotations (talk) 16:40, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I think one word, without "page", would be more friendly to newbies and readers. "Discussion" and "talk" are words used for discourse surrounding something, so its purpose as a button seems more obvious. If you were new and saw "talk page", I don't think it would be clear that it is for discussion of the article. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 17:36, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

You know what, I take back what I said. I would not be opposed to adding "page". Axolitl (talk | contribs) 20:37, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Contra Axolitl, I think this is a very sensible suggestion with few downsides. "Talk page" is no more or less obviously for discussing an article than either "talk" or "discussion", it matches what we tell new editors to look for and the elision of "page" in casual discourse is hardly unintuitive. Thryduulf (talk) 17:39, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

This is a good idea, and will avoid rewritting years of documentation calling it the “talk page”. Velocifyer (talk) 19:15, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

With the exception of the first, the labels are supposed to be verbs. It's an article: talk about it, edit it, view its history, etc. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:39, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

I would support Talk page as well. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 18:36, 8 September 2026 (UTC)

Re some of the comments above, is there any reason to think clueless people who think "talk" means talking to an AI chatbot wouldn't think the same for "discussion"? Anomie⚔ 22:09, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Language barrier possibly, “talk” is a more recognizable word than “discussion” and it’s also an imperative verb

to be clear I don’t expect this to have an earth shattering effect but literally any tiny improvement would help Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:40, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Would be curious though to hear whether other wikis have this problem to the same extent (proportionate to their size obviously) Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:41, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't think other wikis would have this issue because the default is not "Talk" and, as Yesterday suggested above, most other wikis haven't changed the default. I'm an admin on a smaller wiki myself and we've never noticed editors coming to the talk page to have the article read aloud to them or chat with a bot. I'd guess this is partially due to the fact that we've always kept the default label.

But of course I'd love to know if this problem affects other larger wikis. FaviFake (talk) 23:51, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Talk:Google sees this kind of disruption about once every few days. de:Diskussion:Google about every few months. Google gets 11 times as many pageviews as de:Google. So they're on the same order of magnitude, but maybe we get a bit more problems per pageview than them? There's so many possible confounding factors though that I wouldn't really put any weight on something like this. For one, most people reading dewiki probably have a decent grasp of German, whereas enwiki is typically a top search result for everyone, so it's to be expected that we get a lot more people who can't really understand what these things mean. ;; Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 00:14, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

We should remember that other language Wikis have distinct cultures. The French Wiki crowd often know each other surprisingly well, almost like the usual customers at a cafe in Paris. The Italian Wiki has far fewer vagabond editors and apart from hot topics like fascism is rather stable. The Spanish Wiki is somewhat similar. The German Wiki is highly controlled, more than one would expect and most users know the rules. But they all use discussion as the button text. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 05:06, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

I would encourage people to go and have a look at that 2011 discussion. The consensus there was that having the link text differ from the namespace's name was confusing to newcomers, who were being told to go to the "talk page" but couldn't find a "talk" link. I don't see why this wouldn't still apply. ;; Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 22:43, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• This sounds like something that could genuinely, and without significant collateral, be A/B tested. CMD (talk) 03:04, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  At the very least the placeholder text could be A/B tested (although it would be nice to get a heads up). The reason so much of this stuff has lines like "English", "History", "Social science"/"SST", "MAPEH" etc. is because people who want to cheat on their homework see "Subject" and assume it is a chatbot asking them what the school subject is. Gnomingstuff (talk) 07:02, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

• A point I forgot to make is that this is a very frequent vector for posts requiring oversight. People will post their actual phone numbers, addresses, bank account numbers, you name it, because they think it's ChatGPT. So if we can discourage that even a little, it's a clear net positive. Gnomingstuff (talk) 06:59, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  Speaking as an Oversighter, I see no evidence that prompts for Chat GPT are a common reason for posts being oversighted. I've looked at the most recent 20 suppressions on talk pages and only 1 of them seems likely to be an LLM prompt, people have been posting phone numbers, bank accounts, etc to Wikipedia since long before LLMs were a thing (subjectively I don't think it's increased significantly either). I also see no evidence that suggests changing the label of the page will reduce the incidence of people doing this. Thryduulf (talk) 10:57, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

• Wait, who added this RfC? The signature appears malformed. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 08:12, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  It's normal to end the statement of the RfC question with just a timestamp, since it isn't supposed to express anyone's opinion. ;; Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 08:16, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  I see. Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 08:21, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  This is officially permitted. About 10% of RFCs use that style. A lot of editors never even notice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:44, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

There wasn't any evidence when we first decided to change it and there still isn't any, afaik. FaviFake (talk) 17:02, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

"We never knew what we were doing before, why start now?" -- Wikipedia, in a nutshell. (Somehow, it actually works.) Levivich (talk) 17:57, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

There was plenty of anecdotal evidence from people who dealt with new editors, e.g. , , . The argument in favour of "discussion" doesn't have even that. Thryduulf (talk) 18:11, 7 September 2026 (UTC)

Should we ping participants whose most recent comment here was posted before "Talk page" was proposed as an alternative solution? FaviFake (talk) 15:51, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

New proposed experiment to let readers know about “Google preferred sources”

Hi all,

Maryana from the WMF Product and Technology department here (Future Audiences team), coming to let you know about a new Google feature and proposing a short experiment to get data about it. Tldr: the proposal here is about running a temporary (2-week) notice asking readers who come from Google to set Wikipedia as a “preferred source” in Google. We would see if this causes people who use Google to visit Wikipedia more. More info below:

What is Google Preferred Sources and how does it work?

Sketch of what Google search results look like with and without Wikipedia selected as a preferred source

This is a new feature that lets signed in Google users select “preferred sources” that they want to be used as citations in AI overviews on the Google search results page. Any website can be added as a “preferred source,” and that website will then a) appear as the first cited result in an AI overview and b) get a “preferred” icon added to it to make it more prominent/entice clicking on to read more. Google claims that preferred sources get twice as many clicks as other sources cited in AI overviews. If you have a Google account, you can test this out right now by adding Wikipedia (or any other source you like) as a preferred source and seeing how that changes what you see in search results. It’s important to note that no other search engines offer something like this at the moment. For now this is just a Google thing.

Why does this matter for Wikipedia?

Google is the number one way most people get to Wikipedia today, by a huge margin. About 75% of the billions of reading sessions on Wikipedia start on a search engine, and 90% of that comes from Google. What’s quite scary is that the absolute number of reading sessions that come from Google is shrinking every month. There were about 138 million fewer clickthroughs to Wikipedia from Google in the last week of August/first week of September this year than last year (that's a 17% year-over-year decline). Fewer clickthroughs = fewer readers and editors to support and maintain Wikipedia.

With things changing like this, I think this is a time that we need to try things to see what works. I assume everyone here believes that Wikipedia is a great place to learn, so we want people to keep seeing and clicking on Wikipedia links in their Google search results to come here. And I think if a search engine is offering its users a way to see Wikipedia links more often and prominently in search, this is something we want to make known to Wikipedia readers. Would this feature actually make a difference in terms of getting readers to come to Wikipedia more? I don’t know, but rather than speculate, I’d like to run an experiment to find out :)

What's being proposed?

How this notice could look. It would only show up when someone comes from Google to Wikipedia on mobile and won’t show up on subsequent pages. Swiping away or opening “learn more” and dismissing will make it not show up again. If a user clicks through, they’ll go to their Google source preferences page with wikipedia.org prefilled, and they can then choose to save or not.

I’d like to run an experiment where we show a small notice about Google preferred sources to logged out mobile web Wikipedia readers coming from Google, for two weeks. I’m interested to see if this changes how often those readers come back to Wikipedia in comparison to readers coming from Google who didn’t see the notice (i.e “reader retention”). People who see this notice and aren’t interested will be able to dismiss it, and after two weeks, this notice will be turned off and I will share the results here with all of you. I’d like to run the test fairly soon (ideally in late September/early October) so we don't confuse readers seeing fundraising banners in the coming months.

I just want to be extra clear that this is not a situation where an experiment would be an irreversible precursor to full rollout. The notice will be turned off when the test is complete and then we can discuss results together to figure out how to proceed.

Concerns/Transparency

On the other hand, what might be some reasons that would give us pause? I can think of a few reasons, including:

• It could look like advertising for or elevation of Google (not my goal! And this is why we’d restrict the notice only to readers coming from Google, who are already using it – as well as because no other search engine offers something like this).
• It could look like we’re encouraging people to create personalized information silos (it's pretty clear that people already are doing this, and probably better if Wikipedia is in there, but we could debate this).

This is just to say that while other media sites are jumping on the bandwagon of heavily promoting this feature, I don’t think we’re there yet, or that we definitely should get there, but this feature is an option for us and I’d like us to have data.

Finally, I’m also planning to approach a few other language Wikipedia communities to propose a test, as well, but of course English is the biggest language we have and our fastest way to get statistically significant results.

What are your thoughts and concerns? Are there any other risks we should consider before proceeding with testing? Is there a strong reason not to run an experiment like this to get this data before the end of this year? Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 15:07, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

My two cents here: I heavily prefer the one-click(tap) preferences setting over two clicks(taps). The statistics on source-visual editor switching (which requires even more clicks) show that the longer it takes to get to something, the less likely it is to be used. The Google source preferences page is already fairly explanatory on its own. -- Reconrabbit (talk) 16:00, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

From a security perspective, selecting a link on one site shouldn't be able to trigger a change on another site. Also, if you're counting on users reading the explanation on the Google soource preferences page, then there needs to be one click to reach that page, and then another page interaction to configure the source preference and submit it. isaacl (talk) 17:53, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Yep, exactly this – while it's definitely much more user-friendly from an end-user perspective, behind the hood, a one-click interaction is one that sends data on behalf of the user to a third-party site, and that's something that would require thorough security review (which is outside the scope of a quick lightweight experiment like the one I'm proposing). The Google source preference settings page (not the marketing page about the feature, but where you actually go to select preferred sources) is also very light on information about the feature and what it does, so my worry about just showing a notice that takes readers to that page (not interactive, but without any intermediate explanation of the feature), is that people who click through won't have enough context on what they're looking at to know what to do there or why they should do it. I guess we could link to the marketing page (which does have a link to the settings page) but that still means we'll lose some % of people who won't click through to source settings or know how to select Wikipedia. Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 18:13, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Following The Guardian's example, having the explanation frontloaded on the website before you get sent to a preferences page is preferable; with that site, though, you'd have to intentionally click on the article about preferences before seeing the "Click here" that autofills theguardian.com. -- Reconrabbit (talk) 18:39, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea, a lot of people might not have heard of this (for instance this was how I learned it existed). Gnomingstuff (talk) 02:00, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

My main concern is that Google AI search results are absolute shite, and giving them any credibility, giving any indication that the WMF/Wikipedia things it's a good thing that people use them, if they just add Wikipedia as a "preferred" source, is sending out the completely wrong message. Google AI is something which should be opposed where possible and ignored otherwise, not in any way enouraged. Fram (talk) 08:41, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

Whether it's a good thing or not people do use them. Google itself is shit. We've been integrated with Google for years, I do not think that is an endorsement but a reflection of the realities. Are we going to block ourselves from Google to maintain the moral high ground? PARAKANYAA (talk) 13:31, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

We don't present all readers coming from Google with a "hey, you can use "Wikipedia on Top" to always get Wikipedia as your first Google result either", we don't comment on what search engine people use and don't in any way indicate that we think this was a good choice or how they can make it even better ("hey, you can put DuckDuckgo as your preferred search engine!"). My reply doesn't "block ourselves from Google", plrase don't use such strawmen. My reply avoids us encouraging readers putting a flag on a turd. Fram (talk) 13:44, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

Great care would have to be taken to present this as a dry technical option than something being pushed. CMD (talk) 13:52, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

Disagree, I see no problem with encouraging people to do this. I do think we should be careful not be annoying in the way the option is presented (and to avoid banner blindness). Levivich (talk) 13:55, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea to me, at least to run the experiment and gather the data. I don't agree with Fram that we should oppose Google, or any other search engine. Wikipedia doesn't need to take a position regarding what other tools readers use. Personally, I don't think we should care about clickthroughs, but we should integrate with other software that readers use when it makes sense to do so. This is one of those opportunities, why not make it easier for people who want to find Wikipedia pages to find Wikipedia pages. Levivich (talk) 13:53, 10 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't oppose Google, I oppose the Google AI results which appear at the top of their searches and are among the least reliable LLMs you can find. Fram (talk) 08:02, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, free Gemini sucks. I still think we should try out Google's preferred sourcing setting even though free Gemini sucks. Maybe especially because free Gemini sucks: help those poor googlers out. Levivich (talk) 23:46, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea! (I've seen this previously on Wikipedia:Discord). However, what if people accidentally close the toast, but then decide that they want to add Wikipedia as one of their preferred sources? Perhaps that could be added as a menu item below the page title, or the navigation bar at the left side? Also, how can us logged in editors try this feature out first-hand? And just to clarify, has the "Wikipedia articles showing up on the Google app's feed" started rolling out? Hason-LEK-🇸🇬 ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 02:47, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I think there are pros and cons to different ways of presenting this kind of call-to-action/notice (my intuition is that a toast notice is a little more in-your-face than a menu item, which people might not notice at all and/or tune out, especially if it appears on all pages). I'd like to see how the toast performs and then come back here and have a broader discussion of how/if to proceed, whether that's doing another small-scale/short-term test of a different notice presentation or letting readers know about Preferred Sources in some other more sustained ways.

To your question of how logged-in Wikipedians can check it out for themselves: the notice was relatively easy to pull together using existing Codex components, and we should have a testable version on test.wikipedia.org ready for QA in the next few days. Once it's live there, I can share instructions for how anyone can trigger it there to see it for themselves

RE: "And just to clarify, has the 'Wikipedia articles showing up on the Google app's feed' started rolling out yet?" I'm not sure what this means! Can you say more about this? Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

For the last part, I was wondering if Wikipedia was available as one of the websites to pick as a preferred source from https://www.google.com/preferences/source. Turns out, it is! I've added Wikipedia to my list right away! Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 15:36, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah yes, you can already select Wikipedia (or any other website) as a preferred source in Google!

And if you'd like to see the notice we plan to show in this experiment on Testwiki, just follow this URL on your mobile phone and it should show up. (Note: This URL should always trigger the notice on Testwiki for QA purposes, but in the real experiment it will only show up for people coming from Google, and it won't show again if users click the "don't show again" button.) Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Sounds great! I had already set Wikipedia as one of my preferred sources last month. FaviFake (talk) 08:03, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I do share many of Fram's and CMD's concerns here, and I think we will need to consider carefully whether this is something we want to do long-term. The experiment will supply data that can be useful in those discussions, and the ethical questions are important but not that urgent, so that I do think the experiment could/should go ahead. ;; Maddy from Celeste (WAVEDASH) 19:44, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Big thank-you to all who have weighed in so far! I added a note about this proposal to the monthly installment of Tech News (going out next week) to make sure it's visible to any others who might have an opinion. Surely we can get at least as many participants in this discussion as the spirited debate above about removing Hersheys logos from WikiLove templates... Happy Friday, and thanks again for your thoughts here! Talk more next week. Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 21:46, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

You should let Hersheys sponsor this feature! It will be the discussion of the century! FaviFake (talk) 21:59, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't think this is a good idea. 'Preferred sources' are for the AI overview, and I don't think anybody has ever actually clicked on the sources to read on further from the AI overview (speaking from experience watching others use it, I haven't used it enough myself to tell). This probably wouldn't benefit Wikipedia that much, and on the other hand people who would see this and actually care about reading the sources might think that Wikipedia is AI slop or something. So, I think the cons outweigh the pros. Also this might be a privacy concern? Not sure though. -I sometimes eat bananas, and you can talk to me here: (talk) I sometimes eat bananas, and you can talk to me here: (talk) 22:12, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Google is shaping how people access the Internet, and there are a lot of different uses of the AI overview. In my personal circles, people at least sometimes click on the links to double-check what the AI wrote (and, frequently, learn that the AI was being confidently incorrect). It's actually surprising to me Wikipedia is not already preferred by Google, since it's being scraped by LLMs multiple times a second. This feature seems to me like a strong benefit for general audiences with little downside. It's worth testing out at least. NotBartEhrman (talk) 00:50, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

Support this. I disagree that we shouldn't give recognition to Google AI, because even though we might not like it, the truth is that lots of people use it. And yes, I think some people actually do click the sources in Google AI, albeit not everybody. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 02:57, 12 September 2026 (UTC)

I support this. I do not think the counter arguments hold water to anyone that is pragmatic Czarking0 (talk) 05:55, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Update: It sounds like there's general buy-in to run this as an experiment and come back here to discuss data and next steps, so that's what we're going to do! Once the experiment runs and we've analyzed the data, I'll come back here to start a new thread and ping everyone who participated in this one. Let's see how this goes... Maryana Pinchuk (WMF) (talk) 19:33, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Pinning edit requests

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)

This seems like a good idea. I wonder if this could be built into the templates directly so that the pin is removed when |answered=yes is entered. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:13, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

Not entirely sure that's possible. {{DNAU}} works by placing an HTML comment on to the section so bots know not to archive it. It might have to be a bot. AlphaBetaDeltaLambda(αβδλ)^talk 18:16, 13 September 2026 (UTC)

That, or updating the code of archival bots. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:18, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

• Meh… I think that if an edit request has been sitting unanswered for a long time, it is highly unlikely that the request is ever going to be answered. There comes a point when we should automatically mark it as “not done” and close the request.

We can discuss how long we should wait before such an automatic close, but it would be ridiculous to pin a request that has gone unanswered for (say) a year. Blueboar (talk) 13:40, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

I could support some sort of automatic process for marking these not done. I think the documentation should make it clear that the request has expired, as opposed to an editor making a determination to not implement the change. I don't monitor edit request backlogs and make edit requests infrequently, so I'd want to hear from more folks who are active in this area about a potential change. You're right that it doesn't make sense to leave these open for many months but it would be better to have a default standard rather than depend on the auto-archive settings on each page to determine when to disappear them from view while still leaving the request officially open on the template. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 14:18, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes… Automatically closing (and archiving) as “Expired” is a good approach. Doesn’t come across as “biting” the editor making the request, but allows us to clear the backlog at both the template and the talk page. Blueboar (talk) 14:32, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, not bitey, and just more accurate to reflect the actual outcome (or non-outcome). It could be documented as |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)

Sounds right to me. I was assuming the issue was with archiving requests that were still open… not when archiving takes place. so my suggestion was - IF a request is still open when it would normally be archived, automatically close it as “expired” and then archive as normal. Not faster or slower. I think we are on the same page. Blueboar (talk) 15:43, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm still sympathetic to the nom's initial proposal. I'm not sure where I stand. We tell people that it can take anywhere from a day to several months for an edit request to be acted upon although 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)

(pinging editors who may be active in answering edit requests: UmbyUmbreon, Day Creature, AlphaBetaGamma, Deacon Vorbis, I am bad at usernames, LizardJr8)

Yeah, COI edit requests are really backed up (there are around 900 COI requests, compared to 120 extended protected and 40 semi protected), mostly because very few editors wants to read a wall of text. I don't think a requesting editor would be encouraged though if their request just "expired" though; it seems like pushing our (the reviewers) problem to them. Although I agree that requests can't be left forever. Perhaps auto-expire requests from inactive editors but keep active ones? AlphaBetaDeltaLambda(αβδλ)^talk 16:50, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

I can only speak for protected requests as I don't really touch the COI ones much. Generally, if a request has been sitting for weeks or months it's unlikely that it will ever get answered. Usually this is because of issues like the request being a wall of text, too complex, or requiring specialized knowledge or hard-to-access sources to evaluate. Putting some kind of expiry mechanism in place seems like it could be helpful, both in clearing out the backlog and in letting any of the requesting editors who are still around know that there was some kind of issue with their request and they need to try again. Not sure of what the exact timeline should be or how to phrase the "request has expired" message to be most informative to the requesting editor. Day Creature (talk) 17:23, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Rather than keying it on expiring a time window, my view on the old ones is that there is no consensus to adopt them.

The COI ones are often so long, convoluted and nitpicky that they are terrible to clear. (My fondest wish is that there was something that indicated the level of change, because an updated sentence or two is easier to deal with than "the complete rewrite in my sandbox".) LizardJr8 (talk) 18:11, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Wouldn't a default expiry time window be one way to document this? For any long-unanswered post, a reasonable interpretation is that there is no consensus though determine what to do with it requires some judgment. It's one thing for informal, free-texted proposals to go stale and fade away but for formal processes that generate a backlog it seems desirable to:

1. Not prematurely archive live requests that potentially could our should be addressed;
2. Not mark them open indefinitely and maintain a large backlog of very old requests that are unlikely to be responded to; and
3. Have more clear documentation of the status of such requests.

We have default actions to be taken after a standard timeline for other processes like WP:PROD, RM (WP:RMNOMIN), and XFD (WP:SOFTDELETE). There are a number of important differences here, of course. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:59, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I articulated myself poorly... I was thinking that the closure could be time-based, but the stated reason can be a lack of consensus based on the time elapsed without action rather than just saying "it's old".

I agree with your points. LizardJr8 (talk) 19:20, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

The wording would need to be workshopped. We could adapt it from the current guidance at Wikipedia:Edit requests § Unanswered requests as well as § Response time further up the page. And we could update the wording on the information page to reflect any process updates related to expiration. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:03, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Eh, my general gut feeling here is that the archiving bot(s) simply shouldn't archive a section that has an unanswered edit request template in it. Sometimes this happens for very stale requests that are unlikely to really get addressed. If you want to automatically close those (or bundle that feature in with the archiving bot), that's kind of a separate question that I don't feel strongly about. Occasionally this can be more of a problem on very active pages that have a high volume of new sections and a low archiving delay. That's a problem when it happens, but I only see it very rarely. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 16:57, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Pinging Rusalkii who has given us User:Rusalkii/Responding to COI edit requests. —ClaudineChionh (she/her · talk · email) 00:36, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

Support. If the request is active, it shouldn't be archived. Simple as that. Marking them as inactive, whether in an automated way or not, is a different and irrelevant question. FaviFake (talk) 22:58, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

How can we implement this? Should the archive bots be modified or is there a simpler way to prevent archiving? FaviFake (talk) 09:11, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Redirecting the 'Request edit' template to 'Edit COI' instead of 'Edit protected'

My proposal is that the template {{Request edit}} should be redirected to {{Edit COI}} instead of {{Edit protected}} as it currently does. Edit protected also redirects to {{Edit semi-protected}}, which has the unwanted effect of creating a semi-protected edit request where a COI one is normally used. In the event that this proposal is a success, then it would remove the need to manually replace Request edit with Edit COI. There are other workarounds from this (For example, the last discussion here about it lead to the creation of this user script so that it would be rolled out to create placeholder COI requests and other edit requests, but I think that this would be the easiest solution. Theeverywhereperson talk here ^{In solidarity!} 12:08, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Looking at some history here: up until July 2023, {{Request edit}} was the template that is now {{Edit COI}}. It was renamed after a move discussion based on the idea that "request edit" was being used as a generic "I don't know how to edit, please help me". A few days later the redirect-from-move was changed to a deprecation notice. An attempted redirection in May 2024 was quickly reverted. Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2024 June 22#Template:Edit semi-protected followed, which was closed with a consensus to keep {{Request edit}} but User:Primefac redirected it anyway; looking over the discussion, "non-negligible support" for {{Request edit}} functioning to request an edit was possibly accurate, but I don't think a simple redirection to Template:Edit protected was what that support was supporting. None the less, that redirection seems to have stood since. Anomie⚔ 12:47, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

I opened this discussion so that I could get consensus on whether or not to do that. Since that was what the template was, I thought it would be logical for it to redirect there, as a lot of COI requests often get turned into semi-protected edit requests because of that. Theeverywhereperson talk here ^{In solidarity!} 15:01, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

Argree Chingkonglim452 (talk) 04:27, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Enabling iFrame graphics from Our World in Data on English Wikipedia

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) § Enabling iFrame graphics from Our World in Data on English Wikipedia

 – per talk there

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.

Context

About 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).

Development history

1. The OWID gadget was created by Wiki Projtec Med.
2. There was a pilot rollout on Basque and Spanish Wikipedia in April 2024, which the WMF paused shortly after to address concerns raised at the time.
3. An interim process was created to show images from OWID on Wikipedia, which relies on thousands of files on Commons and many kinds of images are not possible to visualise on Wikipedia using this method.
4. There was a security review where WMF security assessed the risk as low.
5. A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was put in place between WMF and Our World in Data in July 2025 covering how projects may incorporate this visualization method.
6. Implementation on Wikipedia
   1. The OWID iframe has been enabled on Spanish and Basque Wikipedia under the July 2025 MOU.
   2. The method includes a one-time consent prompt: the iframe content is not loaded until a reader actively interacts with the gadget (e.g. presses "play").

Example graphics

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:

1. Current: A current version of the graphic that will remain synced with the latest version on the OWID website
2. Snapshot: Allows users to choose a specific versions of the graph from a specific time period

Literacy rates

Annual co2 emissions per country

Asthma prevalence

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.

Summary of discussion

Previous discussions

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.

1. August 2025 (concerns raised)
2. November 2025 (no engagement)
3. April 2026 (overall support)

Impact (enabling iFrame graphics from Our World in Data)

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:

• It fills a longstanding gap. Editors have wanted interactive data visualisations for years, but MediaWiki has no native way to render them — Wikipedia has always been limited to static images (SVGs, PNGs). This is a persistent capability gap, not a new ask. Using static images from Commons means that there is significant and often undone work to keep the graphics up to date on Wikipedia when new versions are released. The OWID graphics using the Commons approach do not fill this gap because they an only render a limited number of OWID graphics
• The content is built and maintained by a partner who already specialises in data visualisation. OWID already produces and maintains 2,000+ interactive charts as its core mission, with dedicated engineering resources behind them. Wikipedia doesn't need to build or maintain any visualisation tooling itself — it only needs to display what OWID already keeps current. That's a fundamentally different cost structure from the Commons or Wikidata routes, where volunteers have to do the ongoing maintenance work by hand (see John's reply below for a detailed account of why those routes don't scale).
• The usual iFrame risk profile doesn't map cleanly onto this case. The standard objection to embedding iframes is that you're pulling in content from an unvetted, potentially unreliable third party with no accountability. That's not the situation here: this isn't a general allowance for arbitrary third-party iframes, it's a single, named non-profit partner, vetted through a WMF security review, and governed by a signed MOU that constrains what they can do with any data collected through the embed. The generic risks of "working with iframes" — foreign control of content, uncertain data handling, no recourse if something goes wrong — are mitigated specifically because there is a formal governance relationship in place, not because iframes are inherently safe.

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.

Security discussion

WMF security assessed the overall security risk as low.

Summary of concerns

The main concerns raised in the August 2025 discussion centred on two related issues:

• Loss of local control: an iframe embeds content that Wikipedia projects cannot version, vet, or revert the way they can wikitext or hosted media, since it is served live from an external domain (OWID) rather than from WMF infrastructure.
• Reader privacy / IP exposure: loading the embedded graph causes the reader's browser to contact OWID's servers directly, exposing their IP address to a third party.

Summary of mitigations

The mitigations put in place, and discussed by the community, include:

• A Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the WMF and Our World in Data, agreed in July 2025, governing how OWID may (or may not) use data collected through the embed. The exact terms of the MOU have not been made public to editors.
• A consent pop-up shown the first time a reader triggers the gadget on a page — nothing loads from OWID until the reader explicitly agrees.
• Browser storage partitioning (e.g. in Chrome), which limits OWID's ability to correlate a given visitor's iframe activity with their activity elsewhere on the web — noted as a partial mitigation rather than a complete guarantee, since it depends on the reader's browser.
• Version control: OWID has built the ability for us to link to a specific archived version of the content rather than the most recent live version. Therefore we have some version control.

Thanks for your time

John Cummings (talk) 16:04, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (enabling iFrame graphics from Our World in Data)

Support/Oppose (enabling iFrame graphics from Our World in Data)

• Support: Personally I think having this would be extremely valuable, I work in the UN system, helping different agencies share their knowledge and content on Wikipedia. I think my experience is fairly representative of other people I know working with other large institutions. A lot of UN and other Intergovernmental Organization data is shared on Our World in Data.

Before this opportunity there were three options for sharing data visualisations and none worked very well at all and basically weren’t scalable:

1. Sharing graphics on Commons: I do this for a lot of my work and its extremely time consuming to agree licenses, someone has to update the graphics on Commons and exchange them on all versions of Wikipedia, its a huge amount of work and isn’t scalable.
2. Visualise using data from Wikidata: as far as I know no UN agency is willing to share under CC0 and is very unlikely to change this policy. Visualising from Wikidata onto Wikipedia is very complicated and is also risky for the organisation since on Wikipedia it can say the data is coming from an organisation but then anyone can change a value on Wikidata and this isn’t true any more. Also extremely time consuming to keep updated.
3. Use the old OWID in data approach: This approach has over 1.7 million+ svg files, its extremely complicated and fiddly, I’ve read the instructions several times and cannot make it work. I do not think its a realistic option for a long term widely adopted approach.

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)

• Support: This will allow us to use more complicated interactive graphs that are not supported via the current all Commons approach. The current methods also do not support at all or support well, the larger interactive graphs pertaining to COVID. Just to many SVGs I think. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 17:20, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support: This is a great idea! Interactivity makes this vastly more useful than a static image. Wikipedia really needs things like this to keep people visiting articles instead of just reading summaries. I really hope it gets approved! NavinoEvans (talk) — Preceding undated comment added 11:53, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Yearly healthcare expenditure per person (total public and private). See file page.

• Support: Go to Commons:Help:Interactive data graphics by Our World in Data for info on what exists now, the OWID slider. The iFrame version that is proposed is much better, provides much more info, and is much easier to maintain. Go to any OWID interactive graphic at the source, and compare it to the current OWID slider to see what I mean. For example, OWID source versus the OWID slider to the right. --Timeshifter (talk) 12:54, 17 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support: As per above. Battleofalma (talk) 09:19, 18 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support: The functionality described above has multiple practical uses that would benefit open knowledge sharing. EriedgenArc (talk) 08:34, 19 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support Looks reasonable and beneficial. -- GreenC 16:15, 19 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support: The more ways ze can visualise data the better! Octavosaurus (talk)
• support - we know our readers want more readily accessible graphics, especially since sharing knowledge becomes more image focussed due to social media, so I see lots of readership benefits Lajmmoore (talk) 16:00, 22 September 2026 (UTC)

• 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)

• Support as an interim solution: Ideally, the data would be in a .json file on Commons and these map/timeline visualisations would be an option in the Chart extension, giving us automatically-generated interactive images that are redistributable. Then again, we know that the relevant software development on MediaWiki can take years and still be unreliable. The ideal shouldn't be the enemy of the good. If we can have multi-dimensional visualisations relating to health, development, and economics, that are easier to take in than lots of images, and if the right protections are in place for user data, then we should. MartinPoulter (talk) 09:34, 23 September 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose per Izno. VPT is not the correct venue for this, and it being brought up here unstead of the correct venue should invalidate the proposal. - The Bushranger _{One ping only} 22:08, 23 September 2026 (UTC)

  The Bushranger, the proposal has now been moved to the Village pump {proposals) space. Thanks to Timeshifter for moving it. To the best of my knowledge there is no policy to 'invalidate' a proposal if it is initially proposed in a different place. John Cummings (talk) 19:16, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

  You are correct!​ FaviFake (talk) 23:57, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support. This is a step in the right direction. Alaexis_¿question? 13:26, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support I support either and both pulling data directly from OWID or copying/migrating their datasets to the Wikimedia ecosystem and generating this content from here. I get the concern and opposition that this is the first time we are pulling in non-Wikimedia data to serve to readers in Wikimedia platforms. However, I trust OWID as a mission-aligned project to Wikimedia, and also I think that it is critical now that we develop our infrastructure for processing datasets. A major part of the pressure on us is that we lack the infrastructure to host the datasets in the Wikimedia platform; or at least, our data visualization infrastructure is inaccessible and not being used. We need to quickly gain capacity to serve interactive data visualizations. We should accelerate this process, and go beyond OWID to bring in open government datasets into the wiki ecosystem. Now is not the time to make all editorial decisions about what data we want and what data we do not, but as for OWID datasets, yes, we want all of these. Bluerasberry (talk) 18:34, 24 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support - After balancing the benefit to readers (informative, quality data) vs the drawbacks (lack of control of underlying data), this seems like a good idea, because the maps are exceedingly useful. The primary concern seems to be lack of data control (or ability to specify a particular historical version). But WP already permits external data to be linked directly from WP articles, e.g. with template {{External media}}. It is not a black-and-white choice, a balancing is required. Noleander (talk) 12:25, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

  OWID has provided us the ability to link to specific historical versions if we wish. Or the ability to link to the most recent version. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 14:29, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

  Just to make clear for Noleander, when we say 'the most recent version', this is a live version from the OWID website that is automatically updated when OWID collects new data from the data provider. John Cummings (talk) 21:33, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose The community has regularly, and correctly, in my opinion, opposed efforts to make more widespread use of Wikidata because of the complications and confusion that causes for editors and because of the differing standards and practices that exist between the two projects. The exact same arguments and issues apply here. Further, I am flabbergasted that we spent so much time and effort to ensure that the IP addresses of unregistered editors are no longer visible to most editors and we're not suggesting that a third party be given access to the IP addresses of countless editors. Finally, the current implementation has significant UI issues e.g., clicking the "play" button suddenly and unexpectedly makes the video much larger instead of just playing the video/animation as expected. ElKevbo (talk) 13:25, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support i am convinced of what Bluerasberry is proposing. Hence per Bluerasberry i support too. Accesscrawl (talk) 17:38, 26 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support should be allowed on a case by case basis, doesn't have the same vandalism issues as Wikidata. (t · c) buIdhe 17:46, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

  Thanks Buidhe, this is something I should have brought up in my support. If we say to the agencies which produce the data we can share it on Wikidata but anyone can change it at any time, so they need to monitor it, this isn't a very interesting proposition for them. John Cummings (talk) 09:40, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support – This is a good idea! Wikipedia has way too many static images when interactive elements are much better. We're WP:NOTPAPER, after all. FaviFake (talk) 23:58, 27 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support - we are not obligated to use these images, and as long as we can freeze the data to a particular time if we want to and OWID isn't radically changing their UI constantly, editors retain control of the presentation in just the same way as we would using freely-licensed images created by someone else. Wikipedia (for understandable reasons) does very poorly with giving readers images and other visualizations; this would help at least within its area of concern. Rusalkii (talk) 00:02, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support Interactive graphics will better serve readers; it's reasonable to want full control over how data is displayed, but the utility of OWID graphics would significantly improve articles. 🏰 Richard Nevell (talk) 21:39, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Discussion and questions (enabling iFrame graphics from Our World in Data)

• "link to a specific archived version": if you do that, you are right back to the volunteers-have-to-update-manually problem that you seemed to be trying to solve. You can link straight to the OWID, and always get the latest version, no manual updating; or you can go for versioning, in which case the approach isn't solving the problem. You surely can't do both. Best would be to extract the version ID from the (current) OWID ... if it's there: if not, persuade them to provide it ... and not try to do manual version updates. Chiswick Chap (talk) 17:54, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

  Editors can choose which version they want. I would generally go with the most recent version, agree. But even if one goes with an archived version, it is just the one instance that needs updating, not the 100s or 1000s of underlying files. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 18:08, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

  Hi Chiswick Chap, I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, I've put a few lines in the summary above to explain that there are two options, one to have a live version of the graphic that stays synced to OWID and one to have a specific snapshot of the graphic. John Cummings (talk) 08:51, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

  Oh good. Thanks for explaining. Chiswick Chap (talk) 12:19, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

  No problem Chiswick Chap, let us know if you have any other questions and please consider supporting the request :) John Cummings (talk) 22:07, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

• In addition to the "return to article" button at the bottom, I would like to see an X in the upper right corner to close the pop-up window. The bottom button wasn't very obvious to me, since it filling the entire width of the page has a bit of a dark pattern effect since it looks like a footer and not a button. Having an ✕ or Ⓧ in the upper right has become the standard for pop-ups, pop-ins, and modal dialogues across the web such as cookie notices, privacy policies, "special offers", newsletter signups, and even our own MediaViewer. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 18:48, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

  Sure, we can definitely add that to both methods. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 22:02, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: Shouldn't this discussion be held on VPP? VPT is usually limited to technical issues, questions, and answers, and does not usually hold RFCs or proposals. – Jonesey95 (talk) 20:21, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
  • Thanks Jonesey95, I wasn't sure where to put it, its a technical request so I guessed the best place was here. Do you know where any rules for this are? Also do you know if there is a process to move a conversation or is it just a case of copy and pasting the whole thing? John Cummings (talk) 21:57, 16 September 2026 (UTC)
    • Yeah, we should probably have a line at the top of this page that says something about RFCs and proposals generally belonging at VPP. – Jonesey95 (talk) 00:00, 17 September 2026 (UTC)
• Are these meant to work well on mobile? The CO2 one basically crashes the browser page, I'm guessing bots data set is to large for my phone to handle. It's fine if it doesn't work, but it should fail more gracefully. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 00:38, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

  Works for me… but the new approach should work better on mobile Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:17, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

• @John Cummings, I'd recommend viewing this in night mode, where the text is incredibly hard to read. Any ideas for how to address this accessibility issue? Axolitl (talk | contribs) 01:35, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

  The iframe should address this Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 05:21, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

  This actually only affects Minerva dark mode AFAICT, not Vector. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:29, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Should we remove the "location_city" and "location_country" parameters from infoboxes

There is something I noticed that I don't get. While Template:Infobox shopping mall and Template:Infobox building have "| location =" and "| address =" parameters, Template:Infobox venue and Template:Infobox company have these "| location_city =" and "location_country =" parameters. Shouldn't these extra parameters be redundant since we already type the city (or suburb), state and country or just the city and state in the primary "| location =" parameter? That's why I think we should remove and deprecate them. Aspifi (talk) 11:44, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Meh… Nothing says you have to fill in every parameter of an infobox. If the state or town is included in the “location” parameter, then we can leave the “state” or “town” parameter blank (as redundant). But, since there are rare situations where the “location” parameter doesn’t include the state or town, it is helpful to have those “extra” parameters so the infobox can be complete. Blueboar (talk) 13:18, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

But you can still put just the city or state alone in the "| location =" parameter... Aspifi (talk) 19:28, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Why is that a problem? What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Thryduulf (talk) 19:46, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

The problem is there is no point in having them if they are redundant params. Aspifi (talk) 20:22, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

But why is having redundant parameters problematic? Thryduulf (talk) 20:55, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Because there's almost nobody using them meaning there's no point in having them in the infobox if a shorter already used many times alternative parameter is in the infobox. Can you explain why those extra parameters are there then? Aspifi (talk) 21:14, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

I also fail to see how what you are describing is actually problematic. It's conceivable some editor may wish to use those parameters, and if they do they ought to be able to. And if they do not - so what? HierophantOfOmens (talk) 01:07, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm assuming (not sure) that these parameters emit microformats? That would make the most sense on why it exists in the first place. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 22:42, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Page mover–specific move protection

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)

Survey (mover protection)

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T439172

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)

My personal most recent run with this was Talk:Economy of the Haudenosaunee#Requested move 11 July 2026. I see no convincing reason why this should've had to go through an admin.

A comparable user right and protection level would be template editor and template protection. Circumstances are a bit different, but there is precedent for user rights related to specific actions being able to edit past protection of those actions. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 03:03, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

This all seems very sensible to me. Thryduulf (talk) 08:20, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I would support this. Most move-protected pages are from page-move vandalism or page move warring (source: just a guess), and I think by granting someone page mover the community trusts them not to perform page move vandalism. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 22:39, 25 September 2026 (UTC) edited 22:40, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I also was discussing this on Discord too at a different time, though in an unrelated context. I would support this, especially since it means that admins would have a reliable middle ground to not need to default to full move protection when extended-confirmed protection is insufficient, except in the most extreme of cases. Any page mover who can't be trusted to, well, move pages responsibly and in accordance with policy, probably should not be a page mover. I think we should probably at least informally expect that admins do not use this new protection level for edit protection, only move protection, similarly to how template editor protection isn't (usually?) used on articles, since it's inconsistent with why the right was created. EggRoll97 ^(talk) 01:58, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

IIRC I can implement it to be an option for move-protect only. msk 02:06, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Er, are you sure? The array in wgRestrictionLevels (which controls the protection options) is '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)

Nope, you're right. Sorry about that. msk 14:13, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support. Page movers can be trusted to move the mine run of move-protected pages (in mainspace at least), so I'd be on board with downgrading a large number of protections if this is successful. Expectations like "don't use for edit protection" can be documented in a new section at Wikipedia:Protection policy. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 05:56, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Note: Wikipedia talk:Page mover has been notified of this discussion. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:20, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Support I think this could provide a good middle ground allowing for a smoother process. For pages where just EXCON is barely not enough to protect them from bad moves there's not really a reason to directly limit it to sysop and if a page mover abuses their rights to move such a page, imo they should and would loose their right immediately... squawk7700 (talk) 10:05, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Oppose Looking back through Wikipedia:Requested moves/Technical requests#Administrator needed during 2026, I see only 49 requests. Some of these wouldn't be helped by this new protection level, for example this one that needed an admin to delete a conflicting redirect. This doesn't seem like it's enough of a problem to require a whole new protection level. Anomie⚔ 13:08, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

I would expect if this would implement we would be somewhat more free with protecting things at this level, so the current rate of requests is a lower bound but the upper bound is much higher. My personal opinion is that we should generally be much more free with move protections on potentially contentious or high-visibility topics, since unlike edits those should very rarely be done without consensus anyway. Rusalkii (talk) 23:54, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure that more protection would really happen, or that if it did that it would be a good thing. Meanwhile, that "lower bound" is very low. Anomie⚔ 00:48, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Why not? We have an absurd number of bureaucrats, even though they mostly do nothing with those powers. Cheers, _{In solidarity}User:Wikipedian12512(alt) (Talking is fine | contribs) 14:57, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

It clutters the configuration and the protection interface. The comparison with the number 'crats is not a good one, since more or fewer people in that list doesn't affect anything else. Anomie⚔ 23:11, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Support, per my comment above. I participated in at least one of the discord discussions on this topic, but I saw this RfC through CENT and expect I would have ended up here regardless. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rusalkii (talk • contribs) 16:57, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Just a note that this isn't an RfC, although one may come in the future. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 03:29, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Support – Page movers are usually trusted. This is the same as fully protecting templates before the template-protection level was created (just at a smaller but still significant scale). FaviFake (talk) 00:03, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Support have thought similar before, especially with how long such TRs can sit unattended to, ie 24-48 hours unnecessarily. Sometimes it feels like RM closes are undergoing an admin review rather than the move request itself (or that's how it's felt personally), so the additional delays aren't appreciated from a closing perspective either, especially when it only needs brief oversight from another page mover. Per above if page movers can't be trusted to move pages that are extendedmove protected then they should have rights revoked. CNC^{in solidarity} (talk) 06:10, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Support – Page movers should be able to move pages. Being trusted to do so responsibly is the whole point of the user right.

I have on multiple occasions expressed my frustration both on- and off-wiki (although not actually in the discussion that led to this RfC, which I was pleasantly surprised to see in WP:CENTRAL) about being a page mover yet being unable to move pages. It is a regular source of additional work and annoyance (especially for more complicated closes) for page movers closing RMs and the admins who have to stand-in to carry out the moves. On multiple occasions I've had to spend time explaining to editors asking me why the pages haven't been moved that yes, the closing template has a field that explicitly states that a non-admin page mover performed the close, but no, that page mover cannot move the page. Yes, it is relatively rare, but the additional work adds up and there is no good reason for it to be happening at all.

We are trusted with the ability to override the title blacklist, create and edit page edit notices and redlink almost anything by moving without leaving a redirect (and some other stuff), but somehow not trusted to do normal moves for pages that some other editors have been improperly moving. If someone cannot be trusted to deal with the ability to move pages that are move protected they should not be trusted to do any of these other things. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 16:33, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. Just let page movers move all pages. If they can't be trusted with such power, they shouldn't have it. Jessintime (talk) 16:35, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  This is a different proposal than the once considered here. If, hypothetically, your suggestion couldn't be implemented and you were left with only two choices, would you prefer to keep the status quo or create a new protection level?​ FaviFake (talk) 16:40, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  Taken literally that is an incredibly bad idea. Letting page movers move any page would give them the ability to "edit" (replace the contents) of any page, including interface pages, the local global js/css files, etc, pages that even regular administrators can't edit. If a page mover were then to be compromised they could then engage in significantly more disruption. msk 17:27, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  Yeah pages that have higher-level protections should require corresponding permissions to move. Some widely-used templates also break if you move them due to accompanying css modules. We recently had an incident where an RM led to some list templates were moved, such as Template:Hlist to Template:Horizontal list, and that caused a large part of the wiki to break, including the main page, although it was fortunately swiftly fixed. That move also queued so much work for the backend jobrunners that it put enough of a strain on the backend for a WMF employee to take notice and ask that further moves be held off to let the queue be cleared.

  Knowledge of this is not something page movers are expected to have, and the potential for disruption is on the level of "you can break the website doing this". Brings to mind that video of a chimpanzee being handed an AK-47. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 18:02, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  MSK (Monkey Shooting a Kalashnikova) msk 18:04, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Comment how frequently do pages get fully move-protected because XC move-protection isn't sufficient, where the reason isn't a move war (for which full protection should continue to be used should this protection level be created) and why? Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 18:41, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I had a similar question. I'm a fairly new page mover and I've actually not encountered this barrier yet although I am aware of the issue. My understanding is that the practical effect of this change would be primrarily to allow page movers to carry out RM closures for pages that fall under the first two bullets at WP:MOVEP (pages prone to vandalism and frequent page-move disputes). The purpose of page protection in these cases is to force a formal RM discussion, and page movers are entrusted to close and carry out complex and contentions RMs. I would think that the third MOVEP bullet (high visibility pages like WP:AN and Today's featured article) could maintain a higher, admin-only protection level. The discussion above highlights another category, templates and other complex pages where moving may break other parts of the site (although it's not clear if the templates discussed above were move-protected at the time or if the protection level was sufficient). —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:53, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Just to provide some context, the current list of fully-move-protected pages is at , and while I don't have a hard number for you, there is page after page of this. Anything from arbitration enforcement, to vandalism, to sockpuppetry, you name it for the reasons. As for 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)

Weak oppose I like the idea, but I'm convinced by Anomie and BilledMammal that the demand isn't really there. Especially if it does in fact require a patch to MediaWiki core, which we seem to be unclear on(...?)

This RfC looks like it's going to pass, so one thing I will say is that this action should be treated with a certain gravitas like we do with redirect suppression and template editor. The protection policy should say that a page mover should in most circumstances only move a move-protected page when implementing their close of an RM. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 05:47, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Agreed that moving through move protection should not be done lightly and should mostly be used for implementing results of consensus discussions. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 02:07, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I mean yeah, I fully expect of all page movers to understand that move protection is generally a very clear indicator that a move will be controversial and thus require an RM. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 02:49, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Hey @Sohom Datta, is there a reason you made this an RfC? AFAIK, the template shouldn't be added retroactively. It makes the old !votes a bit more confusing in context. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 00:52, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

It was on WP:CENT, and we were already !voting in the RFC style, so I assumed this was intended to be a RFC and the RFC tag just hadn't been applied. (No concerns from my end if there is consensus to not make this a RFC) Sohom (talk) 03:31, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

That's fine, though should we rephrase the opening statement, so it stays neutral? Axolitl (talk | contribs) 04:07, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Pinging @MSK for their thoughts on this, as they were the one who started this discussion. - BlueEleephant (talk · contribs) 02:02, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I did rephrase it as Should 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)

Note that the "it" should have probably been "the page", but it's kind of too late now. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 02:11, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I think the intended meaning is clear in this discussion. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 16:16, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support the idea, but this could end up blocked on the technical side. I think it will require a patch to MediaWiki core, and I am not sure this idea is wiki-agnostic enough to justify adding complexity to MediaWiki core. I've made a phab comment at phab:T439172#12372365. –Novem Linguae (talk) 02:45, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  I've rephrased the issue because of that; this will be enwiki specific. msk 02:47, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  The technical obstacles are not as severe as I thought. It looks like this can be done in config files, without making changes to MediaWiki core, except for some translation messages to be added to mw:Extension:WikimediaMessages. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:30, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  Thinking about this more, could we perhaps just encourage making most move protection extendedconfirmed rather than sysop? Or is there some evidence that there are lots of cases where extendedconfirmed folks are not trustworthy enough but page movers are? –Novem Linguae (talk) 05:38, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

  Good questions. It's also been suggested here that (page mover) move protection might be applied more often if this proposal goes through. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:11, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support. This is good idea. It would allow admins more freedom to move-protect pages and let trusted pagemovers handle more controversial moves. Protection limited to people experienced with pagemoves is fairly similar to template protection for people experienced with templates, which I think is widely recognized as a useful tool. On procedure, I don't see how the presence or absence of an RfC tag has any impact on the validity of the consensus produced here, whatever that may turn out to be. The main point of the tag is to attract people watching the RfC categories to prevent local consensus issues, but VPPROP and CENT are sufficiently high profile to do the same. Toadspike [Talk] 11:11, 29 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support. Page movers are generally not stupid, and similar to when we established template editors, only the highest of the high-risk needs to be kept behind the sysop gate. Please ignore my brazen conflict of interest here, and perhaps consider me an exception to the first clause of my previous sentence. With love from Maryland, charlotte ^👸♥ 09:06, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose. An additional move protection level will almost certainly lead to more protection requests and actions to adjust protection levels, and these requests will outnumber the move requests this would potentially avoid (which is only when a page happens to be at this level and a page mover happens to handle the request). I believe the real issue is that extended confirmed is a poor proxy for trust when it comes to page moves. We should address that issue instead. I also agree with Anomie that this would clutter the configuration and protection interface, and as someone who has handled many page protections, I believe adding another level would make each protection decision more complex and slower. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 20:11, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

  extended confirmed is a poor proxy for trust when it comes to page moves. We should address that issue instead.
  This is an attempt to solve this exact issue. How do you think the 30/500 protection could be limited to more users? I don't understand; if we make extended-move-protected pages require, say, 1000 edits instead of 500, that's no longer "extended-move-protection". FaviFake (talk) 20:14, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

  I didn't propose specific changes to extended confirmed, but I'm ready to join a discussion about other approaches at WP:VPI. I oppose this proposal because it likely adds more work than it saves. An acceptable approach would reduce reliance on sysops for page moves without adding more sysop workload than it saves. Daniel Quinlan (talk) 20:47, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

  Sure, I was just confused about how it could be possible to address this issue by modifying the 30/500 move protection in a way that wouldn't completely change the protection level itself. FaviFake (talk) 20:52, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

  I don't really see why it needs to lead to more frequent requests for move protection, other than perhaps as a result of admins being more willing to use it, and discussions about changing the move protection level would be exceedingly rare – the only situation where you would realistically use full move protection would be on highly-visible templates.

  For article space, I expect things to function pretty much just like they do now but with page movers able to move pages, and potentially with admins being more willing to use move protection on pages (which I don't see as workload as much as more tools to work with). –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 22:04, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (mover protection)

Name

(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)

Since page mover is already called 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)

"Mover-protected"? "Page mover–protected"? "Intermediate move protection"? FaviFake (talk) 00:05, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I would probably name the sysop level full move protection and let this one be move protection. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 23:29, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Surely "Move protection" and "Full move protection" are the simplest options here. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 05:12, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

@Maltazarian Skarmory "Move protection" usually refers to pages that can only be moved by extended-confirmed users. See {{Protection table}}. FaviFake (talk) 07:24, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

I feel like common usage is already for "move protection" to refer to the green lock. Like, sure, technically an ECP page is move protected at an ECP level, but I can't recall hearing anybody talk about it that way.

I'd suggest "extended move protection" as msk did, but then we're causing confusion due to EC not having anything to do with it.

Idk this part isn't all that important to me anyway. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 08:24, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Yeah it's tricky. For now my preference is for "mover protection"; pages will be "mover-protected" FaviFake (talk) 08:28, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Impact

Looking at the past month of requests at WP:RMTR, I see just seven:

1. Template:Abbr to Template:Abbreviation
2. Lion-man to Lion-man of Hohlenstein-Stadel
3. Pakistani missile research and development program to Pakistani missile research and development programme
4. MV Höegh Osaka to Höegh Osaka
5. Template:RFPP to Template:Requests for page protection
6. Palm Beach International Airport to President Donald J. Trump International Airport

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)

I wonder how many times per month template-protected pages are edited by template editors, as a point of comparison. Snowmanonahoe (talk · contribs · typos) 05:14, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Moves of move protected pages, and edits of template edit protected pages, by month for the past three years:

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

BilledMammal (talk) 05:32, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Updated the table. The earlier one was moves of all move-protected pages, included extended-move protected. This one is still a bit of an estimate, as it assumes that if a page is protected now it was protected when the move occurred, so it can miss some moves where protected lapsed or was removed, and counts moves of pages later protected. For example, six moves from March are of Epstein files, none of which was done while the page was protected. BilledMammal (talk) 05:56, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

How hard to we really expect it to be to implement? Anyone got an idea? Also Move+ already has RM/TR capabilities last I checked. Did the recent update get rid of them? –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 05:15, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Move+ lists moves at RMTR, it's never supported (outside of a prototype I wrote two years ago) implementing the moves at RMTR. BilledMammal (talk) 05:19, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Ah, I see. My misunderstanding. –Maltazarian ^{ᚾparley$\lor$investigateᛅ} 05:20, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

50 to 100 moves per year adds up over time, and this project is already over 25 years old. Meanwhile, we have someone volunteering to make the patch, who also happens to be the person who started this discussion, so that cuts down on the needed development time. This doesn't even account for other possibilities for how the protection level could be used; notably, I agree with EggRoll97 above that this would make sense as the standard for protection in case of move wars. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 05:16, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

New section of AIV for TPA and email revoke

The 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)

Support, see my response on the original ANI thread. Beta Beta Beta - talk 00:44, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support, ditto re:ANI thread. LizardJr8 (talk) 01:32, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support, especially as someone sometimes affected by "Porya azizi delete". Axolitl (talk | contribs) 02:28, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support - Surprised this hasn't been done yet. Would be very useful for cases like this. Jdcomix (talk) 03:29, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support as someone who has made several requests at ANI in the past. Lavalizard101 (talk) WP:SOLIDARITY 10:33, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support - Quite reasonable, especially if it's clear leaving those avenues open isn't going to be productive. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{Look out it's Jimothy!} 15:26, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support. ANI should stay open for more important matters than TPA and Email revocations. —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 18:50, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support. Good idea. Or create a separate WP page for requesting such tasks - whichever approach is easier to implement. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:59, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I would prefer it was on WP:AIV, as having it on a different page would give it less visibility. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 22:14, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

As long as it's not too difficult to implement. Maybe Writ's idea below would be the easiest way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:08, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Support ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 22:17, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Support - makes it way more straightforward for the counter-vandalism “crew” (I’ve personally run into this) and helps keep ANI tidy. Netstars22 (talk to me!) 18:19, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support, and make it a transcluded subpage of AIV (like we do now for the bot reports) so that it can be watchlisted separately. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 22:47, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

  +1 —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 00:15, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

  +1 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 00:31, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

  Good idea. Best of both worlds. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 00:31, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Support, this sounds horrifying Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:10, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

Note: Wikipedia talk:Administrator intervention against vandalism has been notified of this discussion. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 00:53, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Support per above commenters. Would make things a bit easier for us admins too, as there wpuld be a centralized place to handle these. Accessedgrant (Epicgenius mobile alt) (talk) 03:51, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Support /usr/bin/owuh $ (💬 | she/they) 04:38, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

• Question – would improving the bot be a better way forward? I agree that there is a problem which needs solving, but I wonder if the bot should simply not remove requests for TPA or email revocation. Best, HouseBlaster (talk • he/they) 17:57, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

  I suppose the issue is just that the bot is unable to tell if a request is for TPA or email revocation. Its why the bot doesn't remove partially blocked users, and I would guess it would be a similar issue for TPA or email. 45dogs (they/them) (talk page) (contributions) 17:01, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

• Question: If implemented, would doing a TPA revoke request require an existing indef block to be in place OR could/would it be set up where one can request an indef w/ TPA revoked right away? Netstars22 (talk to me!) 18:29, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

  I would think that unless its a specific LTA TPA revocation should be a last resort, but I would also say there shouldn't be a specific rule against it. —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 19:29, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

  Yeah, my thought is that for LTAs specifically it makes sense to issue an indef with TPA revoked immediately, so as to save folks time and limit the damage. Netstars22 (talk to me!) 02:35, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  Perhaps TPA revocation should become the norm for socks of the small number of LTAs who habitually abuse their talk pages. Certes (talk) 21:17, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Strong Support. I've seen many instances where this would have been very useful. FlammablePizza (talk / contrib) 17:19, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Support No brainer; these requests are very uncontroversial (which is the whole point of AIV—uncontroversial requests) and don't need to be cluttering up ANI. As for the implementation, we could either create a new section, or update the {{Vandal}} template to include a parameter that indicates it's a TPA request, so the bot won't remove it until the user's TPA is revoked. Twinkle and other tools could then be updated to support whichever implementation we choose to go with. —⁠k6ka 🍁 (Talk · Contributions) 17:28, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Support. This is irritating a lot of people, as well as creating publicity that should be denied. Something should be done, and this is undeniably something. Certes (talk) 18:15, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

On reflection, support doing something, but systematic TPA revocation for certain LTAs might be a better solution. Certes (talk) 21:23, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Those who know will usually do that. It's those who don't know to do that that's the issue, and there's not much you can do about that. It's probably not sensible to default to revoking TPA of every vandal that someone says is an LTA (and even then not every LTA TPA needs to be revoked). Making an explicit request in the AIV report would probably be a useful interim measure. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 21:33, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

• A new section does not sound like the best possible solution to this problem. FaviFake (talk) 19:19, 28 September 2026 (UTC)
• My preference would be for the vandal template to include a TPA parameter, and for the removal-bot to respect that. Yet another admin page doesn't seem too appealing. I just want to mention that the bot operator should probably be advised of any new sections or subpages, as the bots will need to parse one or both pages. Pinging @Mdann52: to the discussion. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 21:33, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

  would also want to inform devs of all the tools to allow them to implement requesting via the new parameter /usr/bin/owuh $ (💬 | she/they) 21:40, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

   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)

  It seems UV is not being actively maintained at the moment, and Twinkle has been slow to catch up (we still don't have LLMPROD handling, for example). I support this. TPA/Email revocation in my limited experience has mostly been prompted from talk messages, which I'm happy to respond to, but in the event I'm unavailable, we have to wait, which is not ideal. ASUKITE 03:42, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  Thanks for the ping. Integrating it into the existing AIV workflow makes sense, whether that's using a new argument for {{vandal}} or a new template altogether. Interceptor would be an early adopter of whatever solution we arrive at. TonySt  04:32, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  I personally would much prefer a new argument, meakes it a lot easier to update and it allows for more variations in what you are requesting. – LuniZunie_(talk) 21:13, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

  Agreed. A new section sounds more complicated. the bots should recognise the new |tpa= parameter and avoid insta-archiving the request. FaviFake (talk) 21:21, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

  In my eyes, a new section should be completely off the table. It just would not be used a lot and would be a pain. – LuniZunie_(talk) 21:22, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

• Comment: I see blizzard-like conditions, but due to the recent notifications of tool maintainers I'm holding off on closing until they've had a chance to weigh in. Toadspike [Talk] 06:39, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  Why would you want to close this? Why not keep it open indefinitely? As you said, the consensus is obvious. FaviFake (talk) 07:22, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  I've seen this AIV phenomenon complained about for years, and no one has ever suggested it's an ideal situation. But the devil is in the detail of the implementation, and that's where further discussion would be most useful. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 10:39, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  Do you think it's worth treating this discussion as a WP:RFCBEFORE and starting an RFC on the implementation? I see at least three opinions on ways we could do this. —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 17:05, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  I'd be okay with that, but I'm a teense worried about WP:NOTBUR; we don't want more vandalism to happen simply because we were working out the nitty gritty. 7amiþ = reform(solidarity).__init__(t, c) 17:40, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  Yeah. and we also don't want to work out the nitty gritty more than is necessary. FaviFake (talk) 20:05, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

  Not much is going to happen without someone writing and implementing the bot code. Well that's not entirely true - we could create a new page which might get automatically removed from AIV if anyone tries to transclude it, and which no one will automatically clear, and few admins will independently watch. Or we could create a new section which will either be automatically removed or just ignored by the bot. Or we could add a template parameter which will likewise be ignored. We need some buy-in from the (volunteer) bot operator, but it may help if we can decide what we'd prefer. RFC or discuss here, I don't really see any difference. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 21:37, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Is this campaign ad public domain?

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)

A good place to ask would be c:Commons:Village pump/Copyright. Johnuniq (talk) 06:45, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

It depends on who made the video. The producer (whether it be a production company or super PAC) may have signed an agreement with the government saying that they would retain copyright status for the work. In this case, not suited for Commons. See this.

If this was entirely done by an employee of the federal gov, it would be public domain.

This is a common issue on contract negotiations. (I'm not a lawyer).

If I'm wrong please let me know.

(As a side note, I'm not prone to voice my opinions on Wikipedia, but holy **** that's an impeachable offense.) EatingCarBatteries _{(contribs | talk)} 02:42, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

Stronger guidance against corporate cruft?

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)

To get a bit more specific here, one thing I would suggest is that we could explicitly note that corporate articles should not mention acquisitions or split-offs of companies that are not themselves notable, similarly they should not mention the launches of products that are not themselves notable, etc; in the same way that town articles have a 'notable people' section and not just a 'everybody who's ever been mentioned as being from here' section. Athanelar (talk) 00:54, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

Well, the "why not" is that WP:NOTPRICE and WP:CORPTRIV seem to be telling us that, in general, corporate articles aren't supposed to be exhaustive lists of trivial, routine business activity. The whole problem is that there's always ample secondary reporting on this kind of trivia, that's the whole reason why the WP:CORPTRIV carveout exists for corporate notability in the first place. There's tons and tons and tons of business media outlets whose entire trade is reporting on this kind of activity.

I'm just spitballing as to a way we can specifically and measurably restrict the number of these sorts of mentions. It's easy to say "we shouldn't include too many mentions of trivial activity" but that'll just lead to a whole lot of headache as to what 'too many' counts as. As a rule of thumb I've been limiting it to activity which is like, obviously significant for the company (like if they acquire a business in a whole different sector which changes the scope of their operation) but I feel like I'm on shaky ground without some specific codified guidance. Athanelar (talk) 01:04, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

It seems like your suggestion is that we should ignore the NPOV policy, WP:DUE and WP:PROPORTION in favor of your interpretation of the WP:NCORP guideline. I think that's a nonstarter. Katzrockso (talk) 01:09, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

This borders on casting aspersions and seems needlessly hostile. If you don't like it, you don't like it. If you don't think it's in line with policy, you don't think it's in line with policy; but AGF, please? Athanelar (talk) 01:13, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

It sounds to me like we need to update CORPTRIV and NOTPRICE to be clearer. Right now, it appears to say that List of iPhone models should be "avoided" as a listing of products.

(I wonder what the original author meant by "Listings to be avoided". List articles? List formatting in articles? Any mention whatsoever? It looked quite different a few years ago.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:26, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

That's also what I'm getting from this, because it seems to be that the community consensus is that such "listings" are actually completely appropriate for company articles. Athanelar (talk) 16:28, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

In 2004, it said Wikipedia is not "A Yellow pages or a resource for conducting business other than the business of creating a great encyclopedia. For example, an article on a radio station generally shouldn't list upcoming events, current promotions, phone numbers, etc (though mention of major events or promotions is of course acceptable)."

By 2014, it said Wikipedia is not "Directories, directory entries, electronic program guide, or a resource for conducting business. For example, an article on a radio station should not list upcoming events, current promotions, current schedules, etc., although mention of major events, promotions or historically significant program lists and schedules may be acceptable. Likewise an article on a business should not contain a list of all the company's patent filings."

In 2015, it said Wikipedia is not "Simple listings without context information. Examples include, but are not limited to: listings of business alliances, clients, competitors, employees (except CEOs, supervisory directors and similar top functionaries), equipment, estates, offices, products and services, sponsors, subdivisions and tourist attractions. Information about relevant single entries with encyclopedic information should be added as sourced prose. Lists of creative works in a wider context are permitted." This was discussed, but it may be relevant to note that the proposed text was written by someone who doesn't speak English natively, so it would probably be a mistake to read too much into the word choice; "Simple listings" probably means Wikipedia:Stand-alone lists.

The most recent major re-write was by @Hydronium Hydroxide in 2022, which rearranges a substantial part of that section, producing these two relevant bits:

• Simple listings without contextual information showing encyclopedic merit. Disambiguation pages (such as John Smith) are not intended to be complete listings of every person named John Smith—just the notable ones. Nor should listings such as the white or yellow pages be replicated. See WP:LISTCRITERIA for more information.
• A resource for conducting business. Neither articles nor their associated talk pages are for conducting the business of the topic of the article. Examples include, but are not limited to: listings of business alliances, clients, competitors, employees (except CEOs, supervisory directors and similar top functionaries), equipment, estates, offices, store locations, contact information, patent filings, products and services, sponsors, subdivisions and tourist attractions. An article should not include product pricing or availability information (which can vary widely with time and location) unless there is an independent source and encyclopedic significance for the mention, which may be indicated by mainstream media sources or books (not just product reviews) provide commentary on these details instead of just passing mention. Wikipedia is not a price comparison service to compare prices and availability of competing products or a single product from different vendors. Lists of creative works are permitted. Thus, for example, Wikipedia should not include a list of all books published by HarperCollins, but may include a bibliography of books written by HarperCollins author Veronica Roth.

For me, the line that goes through all of these is blatant advertising, of the "Buy today for a low, low price!" WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:43, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I disagree with that, this is IMO pertinent information. If I am looking at a corporate article for anything it's probably this. PARAKANYAA (talk) 13:25, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I think unfortunately this can be a tricky area for non-specialists to cover, and I don't see any good way to resolve this within the current English Wikipedia editing environment. Most businesses don't have business biographies written about them providing independent coverage of their histories, including key business decisions. It can be hard for those not familiar with a given industry to identify significant moments. I don't think using notability of an acquisition/spinoff or product should be a hard rule. There are plenty of circumstances where company X acquired unnotable company Y for its underlying assets, using them in a way that is significant to company X's history. Spinning off a business line can also have significant effects on company X, no matter what happens to company Y afterwards. I agree there's a lot of mundane info placed in articles, but in many cases, the community lacks the expertise to sort it out through consensus. isaacl (talk) 04:13, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Surely we could stand to have something more than nothing, though? It doesn't need to be based on notability of the acquired company, it could also be something like "Acquisitions, mergers and divestments should only be included in a company's article if the event meaningfully affected the subject's business beyond the change in management of assets". So something that opens up a new market, changes the company's name etc would be fine, but 10 listings of "Company X acquired Company Y for $Z" would be out. Athanelar (talk) 05:11, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

And who is going to manage this? NCORP is ignored most of the time, or misinterpreted. I have an editor who called an in depth article on a companies growth in a national broadsheet called an insufficient local publication so it didn't meet NCORP! I have also found articles about large companies that had no detail or inaccurate detail. So who is going to decide what is a trivial purchase that doesn't effect the business and those that actually do? Davidstewartharvey (talk) 06:15, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Well, that's precisely why above I suggested putting some specific metric on it that could be objectively applied. I'm not suggesting I have all the answers right now, just feeling out whether the community thinks a guideline on this would be a good idea; if so, then the ideation stage for that can come next. Athanelar (talk) 10:55, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

As an example, I know of an article that is about what seems to me to be a thoroughly unremarkable partnership that occurred between two companies. But it was covered in trade magazines, and I lack the specialized knowledge to distinguish between the truly reliable, independent sources, and ones that are just regurgitating press releases. And even if I did, I'd have to convince a consensus of English Wikipedia editors of this. I don't know how to overcome this problem, given that domain-specific knowledge is needed by enough editors to form a consensus. isaacl (talk) 15:24, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Isn't identifying significant moments and analysing the impact of events the job of secondary sources? I know WP:Notability is meant to be used on an article level and not a content level, but the system seems designed to not rely on individual editor knowledge to be able to assess whether information is important enough to be included. We should be able to tell it's important (notable) just from (critically) reading about it elsewhere. Then the Wikipedia article is a summary of what we learned from reading those sources. ~2026-52043-64 (talk) 08:31, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Sure, and that could also be an option for this guideline; don't include mentions of routine activities like acquisitions unless that event itself has been the subject of significant secondary coverage. Athanelar (talk) 10:57, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Notability does not apply to article content. I don't see any reason to do it that way. Knowing who owns what and since when is one of the most important things to cover about companies. PARAKANYAA (talk) 13:27, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

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. The whole reason WP:CORPTRIV exists as a carveout for notability is, in my understanding, largely because the vast amount of coverage about routine activity like acquisitions is often shallow and based on press releases from the companies involved. So it seems to me that by letting articles get full of that sort of coverage, we're making company articles a unique case where the bulk of the article content is coming from the subject, essentially. Athanelar (talk) 13:41, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

This is the most useful kind of fact these articles supply. 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)

There is a wide variety of contexts for business acquistions that affect their significance. Large corporations can make many, many acquisitions in a year, and it makes sense to focus on significant ones to avoid them getting lost in the shuffle. Even small companies, for example, buy out the inventory of failed competitors, and it's not really that significant with respect to the company's overall history. isaacl (talk) 15:32, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

This is exactly what I'm saying, thank you. Some people seem to be reading my position here as "we shouldn't mention mergers and acquisitions at all because they're WP:CORPTRIV" but my position is that we should stick to mentioning those which are particularly significant so that every article on a large company doesn't just become an endless wall of their acquisitions (which large, wealthy companies do a lot of without it having all that much significance on their structure, scope or operations) Athanelar (talk) 16:31, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I disagree that a business acquisition is a "routine" event, especially for the acquired company.

The wording of WP:CORPTRIV is likely a contributor to this confusion. What needs to be said is that when you're looking at an acquisition (etc.), there are two kinds of coverage: sources that demonstrate notability, and sources that are brief, routine announcements.

For example: Disney's acquisition of Pixar is not a routine event, and there is non-routine coverage of it in reliable sources. However, there were also some brief, routine, two-sentence "articles" published about it.

The CORPTRIV rule is meant to stop people from creating articles about companies when the only source we have is that brief, routine, two-sentence announcement that they're merging. The CORPTRIV rule is not meant to stop people from creating articles when they have atypically long or detailed sources about the acquisition. We could justify an entire article on Disney's acquisition of Pixar. We should definitely not refuse to write Pixar#Walt Disney Studios subsidiary (2006–present) or Walt Disney Studios (division)#2000s just because some other acquisitions by some other companies receive less media coverage than this acquisition did. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:40, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Right, and I'm not looking to remove mention of genuinely significant events like that from company articles. What I'm talking about is articles of otherwise-notable companies that are becoming bogged down by endless walls of passing mentions of minor mergers and acquisitions. I'll direct you for example to the same revision of Verisk Analytics that I mentioned below; in this case I don't think this one is actually a notable company, but it's the perfect example of what I'm talking about. The article has existed since 2009 and in that time it steadily accumulated a 'history' section consisting of very little more than a list of 17 acquisitions over the past 15 years. A similar (but less severe) fate had befallen the articles about Greystar and Humana, which do seem to be genuinely notable companies. Every time I pull a company article out of the COIREQ list and check out the article, I almost invariably find an article in this sort of condition, which tells me that either 1) this is how these articles are supposed to be (which doesn't seem to be the case, at least as far as WP:NOTPRICE is concerned, though I'm interested to see that there's some contention about this in this discussion), or 2) we aren't doing a good enough job of telling editors (especially those fulfilling edit requests) that this isn't how company articles are supposed to be. Athanelar (talk) 16:50, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

It looks to me like those articles are suffering from Wikipedia:Proseline problems: Each individual adds a little bit of information, but nobody takes that information and turns it into a cohesive whole. This happens all over the wiki, e.g., nearly all of the COVID-19 pandemic in... articles. It results in WP:UGLY articles, but the problem is a lack of skillful editing, rather than having inappropriate content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:18, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

Mergers, acquisitions, and other corporate restructurings aren't "cruft," they're major events in corporate history, which is why they're so often covered by RS. Not every restructuring would be a significant WP:ASPECT but that's case-by-case and already adequately covered by PAGs. Levivich (talk) 13:30, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Not every restructuring would be a significant WP:ASPECT Is 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)

I don't see why you're surprised by that, though? I would expect most corporate articles to cover changes in ownership in their histories. So yeah, a list of "was purchased by X... then acquired Y... then merged with Z" is what I'd expect in the history section of an article about a company. Plus a lot of "built product A... then launched product B... then moved corporate HQ from this city to that one..." Who owns the company and what the company sells are important WP:ASPECTs of any company. Just like you'd expect an athlete's bio to list the teams the athlete played for, a politician's would have the offices they held, an artist's would have a list of works, etc. Levivich (talk) 14:02, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Sure, but athletes don't tend to play for a dozen different teams in as many years, nor politicians that many offices. Artists might produce that many works, granted, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. With athletes and politicians, team changes are massive changes to their careers. A company acquiring another company might be a significant event in its history, or (very often) it's more like if an article about a musician had a listing of every time they bought a new instrument.

Take a look at this old revision of Verisk Analytics which I mentioned in my original post. The "History" here consists of;

• 1 acquisition in 2010
• 3 acquisitions in 2012
• 2 acquisitions in 2014
• 1 acquisition in 2015
• 2 acquisitions in 2017
• 2 acquisitions in 2020
• 1 in 2021
• 3 in 2022
• 2 divestments in 2022
• 2 acquisitions in 2025

That's 17 acquisitions in a 15 year period, and it has nothing to say about any of them except the fact that they happened. Now, granted, I have listed this article for deletion precisely because there seems to be nothing available about them except this kind of trivial coverage, but I've also been working on articles that seem to be about soundly notable companies which are in similar condition. This revision of Greystar, this revision of Humana, for example.

It seems odd to me that people in this discussion are saying "yes, this is exactly how corporate articles are supposed to be" when WP:NOTPRICE seems to say exactly the opposite; and if this is anyway exactly the kind of coverage we want to see about companies, then why doesn't it count for notability? Athanelar (talk) 14:16, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't want to go down the rabbit hole of arguing analogies, but fwiw athletes changing teams every year or two is not the norm but also not that unusual, it's common enough that there is a word for it: journeyman (sports); Ryan Fitzpatrick comes to mind, playing for 9 teams in 16 years. And musicians' instruments are more like a company's equipment than a company's ownership; a company's ownership is more analogous to a band's lineup, and we do catalogue lineup changes in articles about bands. I don't see where NOTPRICE says anything about mergers and acquisitions (which are not "business alliances," whatever that is). I don't see a problem with the history sections of those versions of the Verisk, Greystar, or Humana articles. To put it another way: M&A is usually a significant aspect of business. Open up the business pages of the WSJ on any given day and it's filled with M&A news, e.g. right now: . Changes in ownership matter. Levivich (talk) 14:41, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Open up the business pages of the WSJ on any given day and it's filled with M&A news Sure, 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)

As you put it, you're on a 'bit of a crusade' and I'd honestly question it. We've interacted over at the AfD for Arada (company), where you've argued that articles in The Times, Gulf Business and UAE national newspapers as well as Reuters files are WP:ORGCRIT and WP:ROUTINE and I did start to wonder where the barrier lies with you - a $7 billion investment by a company in Syria doesn't make it notable? Articles in UAE and UK newspapers don't pass WP:GNG? I think it's entirely possible you're being a bit too enthusiastic in this crusade against 'corporate' cruft'. Companies company... Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 15:39, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

It's not really. A property development company makes investments of several billions of dollars, develops thousands - tens of thousands - of properties and is the largest in its class/region. And yet it's not notable in your book? Because any media coverage that enumerates its size or influence is CORPTRIV. Like I say, I think you're being perhaps a little literal with CORPTRIV - companies are not automatically cruft because they do what companies do - they grow, they merge, they develop and sell things. Wikipedia:Notability doesn't tell us that mainstream media coverage of companies is disallowed because it enumerates things they do. Best Alexandermcnabb (talk) 16:39, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm not going to relitigate the debate from that AfD here, we can resume it there if you want to; but the PAGs here are very clear that company size has nothing to do with notability and coverage of routine activities doesn't either (and construction announcements are routine for a construction company) Athanelar (talk) 16:42, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

WP:BIG does not say "company size has nothing to do with notability," it says company size isn't, in and of itself, a reason to argue "keep." Obviously size is relevant to notability, because things that are large (companies, countries, websites, whatever) are more likely to have WP:SIGCOV, but that doesn't mean that size alone is a substitute for actually demonstrating WP:SIGCOV in an AfD. Don't confuse (1) notability requirements with (2) inclusion requirements or (3) arguments to avoid in AfDs; three separate rulesets for three separate decisions. Levivich (talk) 16:49, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

This appears to be the disconnect: construction announcements are routine for a construction company.

When CORPTRIV says "routine", we mean the reliable source is treating the event/information like it's boring and not worth much attention. It doesn't matter if the Wikipedia editor thinks that the fact of its coverage was a foregone conclusion.

N Routine coverage sounds like these two sentences:

• "Bob's Business announced yesterday that they will be expanding the widget factory. They estimate that this will result in hiring 75 more employees".

Y Non-routine coverage sounds like this:

• "Bob's Business announced yesterday that they will be expanding the widget factory. The business says that this expansion should allow them to house nearly all aspects of widget production, including their newest product, an iridescent widget, under the same roof. Once construction is completed, they estimate that this will result in hiring 75 more employees, mostly for entry-level jobs. "We just can't keep up with the demand", says CEO Bob Business, "so either we build this new wing on the factory, or we'll have to convert to 24-hour operations during peak season". The local water district has issued the hook-up permit after an agreement that they will convert the existing factory to use gray water for most purposes. Environmentalists, however, have objected because the proposed location will require re-routing a stream runs across the corner of the property.".

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

We have had problems over the years with a few AFD denizens who throw out whole sources merely because they mention such a number in one place. It's wrong, and the last one I saw spent a lot of time at ANI defending his Rigid thinking on this point. I think he ended up with a topic ban from AFD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:50, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

We are not the business pages of the WSJ, but the WSJ and its business pages are WP:RS, and we follow RS. If we want to know what's a significant WP:ASPECT, we look at RS like the WSJ. So if the WSJ is regularly reporting on M&As, that suggests M&As are significant WP:ASPECTs of companies. Another way to look at is to open up books about companies: open up books like The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Everything Store, or Barbarians at the Gate, and there is plenty of coverage of M&As. Another way to look at is that there are M&A banks, M&A law firms, and you can specialize in M&A when getting a MBA. M&A is a huge part of business. Who owns the company is a super-important fact for any company. Levivich (talk) 16:05, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

So, like I asked before; if M&As are all that important for companies, why don't we count coverage of them as valid for establishing notability? Athanelar (talk) 16:27, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Because WP:ASPECT is part of the WP:NPOV policy not the WP:N guideline. Just because X fact is a significant aspect of Y topic doesn't mean that X fact makes Y topic notable--which is true for almost all facts and topics. (There are almost no X facts that make any Y topics notable, the exceptions being WP:NACADEMIC, WP:NAUTHOR, and WP:NSPECIES, each one an exception to WP:GNG created by global consensus.) Levivich (talk) 16:37, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Doesn't it seem contradictory to you that we would say "We don't consider this type of stuff useful to tell us that a company is worth writing about, but it's fine if the article ends up being full of nothing but that sort of stuff in the end"? Athanelar (talk) 16:39, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

No. If the article is full of nothing but that sort of stuff in the end, it should be deleted or merged. To put it another way: if the only coverage about a company is that it was acquired by another company, then that acquired company probably shouldn't have a stand alone article. The acquisition might still be a fact mentioned in the acquiring company's article. Levivich (talk) 16:41, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

So then you agree with the whole point I'm making here, which is that it's a problem that articles about otherwise notable companies are becoming exhaustive walls of M&A coverage over time; because you don't think corporate articles should be full of nothing but passing mentions of M&As. Athanelar (talk) 16:44, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Yes but the solution to that problem isn't to remove M&A coverage from articles about notable companies, it's to add non-M&A coverage to those articles. (And maybe to delete some that turn out not to be notable after all.) It's not a problem that articles, on their paths of development, go through a phase where they're skewed and have an unbalanced portrayal of the topic, focusing too much on one thing and not enough on another. That's 99% of articles. Levivich (talk) 16:53, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I just can't seem to reconcile the position that these articles should contain an exhaustive list of M&As with WP:NOTPRICE (+WP:NOTINDISCRIMINATE +WP:SUMMARY +WP:BALASP plus I'm sure plenty I'm missing). In general we're encouraged to be selective about the sort of information we include about article subjects and it seems weird that this would be an exception where we ought to mention every single M&A regardless of how minor and how little there is to actually say about it. Athanelar (talk) 16:58, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't see anyone saying that "these articles should contain an exhaustive list of M&As". Above you said "don't nitpick," to which I'd reply, "details matter." There is nuance involved here, and it's important. No one is saying "mention every single M&A." And by not paying attention to such nuance, you're confusing yourself and possibly wasting your time.

You're saying: these articles are nothing but lists of M&As.

I'm saying: that's not necessarily a problem, in the same way that an article about an athlete that is nothing except a list of the teams they played for isn't a problem in the sense that we need to discourage people from listing teams that athletes played for.

You're identifying underdeveloped articles, but you're framing them as laden with "cruft." M&As aren't cruft, just like the teams that athletes played for aren't cruft. Should an article about an athlete have nothing except a list of teams they played for? No, but that doesn't mean we should remove the list of teams they played for, it means we should add other stuff. Does being listed on a roster mean an athlete is notable? No, and in the same way, a listing of M&As doesn't make companies notable. If the only information about an athlete is the teams they played for, is the athlete notable? Probably not, just like if the only information about a company is its M&As, they may also not be notable. Should every athlete's bio list every team that athlete has ever played for? No, probably not, but they should probably list the major teams or teams in major leagues. Similarly, not every M&A needs to be listed in a company's article, just the major ones. Levivich (talk) 17:06, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

I agree with the quoted segment there from Levivich too. I don't see why we need to codify it - we already have WP:PROPORTION - if the only reporting on a particular M&A is some one line report on the 5th page of a local newspaper or a press release from the company itself, it shouldn't be included in the article. Katzrockso (talk) 18:12, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

TLDR: in an essay about writing company articles.

I wouldn't codify the exact thing you're raising (edit requests being fulfilled for M&A's that do not or might not meet WP:ASPECT) in a policy or guideline for WP:CREEP reasons, two in particular:

First, English Wikipedia already has too many WP:PAGs; not sure the exact number as of today but last I checked it was something like a hundred bajillion. And the PAGs we have are already too long. Case in point: NPOV is like 2x-3x longer than anything most people will read, and it duplicates content, e.g. WP:DUE and WP:ASPECT are split into two sections that basically say the same thing (and don't get me started on shortcuts: WP:ASPECT, BALASP, PROPORTION are all the same section... don't we all agree it would be less confusing if we all just called it by the same name?). This is already covered by WP:ASPECT.

Second, the people fulfilling edit requests don't need a new rule to learn and follow; that only makes it more difficult to fulfill edit requests, which, for a volunteer activity, reduces the likelihood of, and increases the time for, any edit request to be fulfilled. The harm of a non-significant (but sourced and true) M&A being included in a company's article is so small IMO that avoiding it is not worth placing any extra burden on edit request reviewers, even a small burden. In the end, someone will come along and improve those articles by adding significant aspects and trimming insignificant ones. If, along the way, the article spends some time listing too many M&As, so what?

We do have "how to write an article about X" essays. I don't know if we have one about company articles, but this is the kind of advice (don't include all M&As, just significant ones per RS) that would be useful in an essay about how to write company articles. (But I wouldn't make that essay required reading for edit request responders.) Levivich (talk) 18:46, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

if M&As are all that important for companies, why don't we count coverage of them as valid for establishing notability?

We do count non-brief, non-boilerplate, non-routine coverage of M&As as valid for establishing notability. There are whole books written about some of these. It would be beyond stupid for an editor to find a whole book about a famous merger and then say "Well, I've got three hundred pages on this exact merger, but you know, that's not significant coverage; that's just trivial coverage." WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:08, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm aware, I should have been more specific. Athanelar (talk) 17:36, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

I think it would be more relevant for CORPTRIV to be specific on that point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:21, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

The answer to too much of the article being acquisitions is to flesh out the article, not to not report on acquisitions. Jahaza (talk) 18:00, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Or to use editorial judgement regarding what needs to be kept, what needs to be trimmed, and what needs to be expanded on. However, that is article specific. The problem is right now most of these aren't really being maintained by people with clear vision. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 18:12, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

Exactly. I have helped work on Draft:Gigamon and recommended cutting out most of the M&A material that previously constituted the article, since it was sourced to press releases or sources of dubious reliability. I didn't need to appeal to some guideline saying that the list of things at WP:CORPTRIV shouldn't make up the body of an article. Katzrockso (talk) 18:15, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

That's the sort of issue I'm talking about; the only people consistently interacting with these articles over a long period of time are people at the company. They come along, make an edit request to add the new round of M&As, and an editor who hasn't seen the article before passes by and fulfils the request without taking into account the total state of the article. Those drive-by request fulfillers are the editors I'm suggesting might need some specific guidance. Athanelar (talk) 18:23, 28 September 2026 (UTC)

We have an entire Category:Lists of corporate mergers and acquisitions, and entire lists solely of acquisitions by some companies - List of mergers and acquisitions by Amazon, List of acquisitions by Cisco, List of acquisitions by Disney, List of acquisitions by Electronic Arts, and dozens more. If lists of acquisitions are corporate cruft, none of these should even exist. BD2412 T 02:13, 29 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

Discussion at Talk:Capitalization of Internet § Request for comment: Should a capital "i" be used for "Internet"?

 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)

Wiki Loves Peace 2026

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)

• Support: as proposer

❯❯❯ Raydann^(Talk) 08:59, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

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)

I oppose running these banners for anonymous users; banners are not free. I support an impression diet of at most two per week (for a total of four banners over the campaign period). Best, HouseBlaster (talk • edits • he/they) 17:57, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

I support this, with any ordinary reasonable limits (e.g., as already set by DerHexer). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:23, 30 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. I do not think the number of en-wiki readers or editors who would be interested in "[t]ak[ing] photographs of subjects relevant to the theme of peace" and uploading them to Commons is high enough to justify something as burdensome as a CentralNotice. Advertising the campaign on Commons (the affected project), social media, mailing lists, etc. seems like a more proportionate approach. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 05:00, 1 October 2026 (UTC)
• Provisional support, but what specifically are the metrics (eg number of times it runs) and how do they work? I can't seem to find the details and while I am willing to support projects related to peace, I do want to have the "spam" concerns sorted out before I "lock in" my !vote. Hason-LEK-SIN ● 💬 ● 🧱 ● 🧪 08:34, 1 October 2026 (UTC)

School article titles

 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)