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I'm thinking it might be useful to have a reason for deletion that covers a swath of articles that never improve, but are technically just over the bar of notability. To come under this category, the article:
Must be a barely notable subject, or be reasonably well-covered in other articles. A one-off event, a small subset of a main topic, or fancruft, say.
Must have severe deficiencies in citation or bias
No substantial edits in six months.
Has had at least one nomination for deletion a minimum of six months ago.
Will get three months to improve before a final deletion decision.
Huh? So this is for "articles", that have already survived AfD - then what exactly do you want to happen? Do you want AFD's to be able to close with a result of Up or out? Or do you want to make a new policy rationale that can only be argued on second AFDs? Do you even want this to do through a second AFD, or is this some sort of speedy criteria request? — xaosfluxTalk14:56, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
Only at a second AfD. AfD currently normally acts as a check for potential. This is for articles unlikely ever to improve, after substantial notice - ones that will never reach the theoretical potential, with terrible quality. The kind of articles where the keep rationales are solely down to sources existing, nothing about the article as it stands being sufficient to keep it. It's also meant to be a very slow series of checks, to give it every chance. Also, preliminary suggestion; workshop at will. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.18:03, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
It is not clear to me whether you are seeking to delete these pages so that they never have Wikipedia pages, or you are seeking to delete them with the hope that a healthier and more fertile page will grow in its place. If the latter, I should note that the argument WP:TNT usually is given accepted weight in deletion discussions, even if it's not exactly matched in policy and guidelines. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:54, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
So we want to delete barely notable articles now? Why? Who decides what is "barely" notable? Notable means notable, if we start deleting articles that are notable but that we don't like, there'll be no point in having WP:N. Cremastra (talk) 20:25, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Comment - I am on purpose not going to answer this question, because "what I think" is that it demonstrates what is wrong with a lot of deletion processes (especially AfD) at present, all of which assume the key question to be, "should X topic have an article?" I think this is almost always the wrong question.
I think the right question, almost always, is "does this verifiable information belong in an encyclopaedia?" (content that fails WP:V never belongs). There can be various reasons, set out rather inconsistently in WP:NOT, WP:BLP, WP:DUE, WP:NPOV, WP:FRINGE and even WP:N - which isn't supposed to be a content guideline - why certain content doesn't belong in an encyclopaedia.
For content that belongs in an encylopaedia, the question then is, where should it be placed? WP:PRESERVE and WP:PAGEDECIDE are among the few places that address this question clearly, but unfortunately WP:N has been the tool perhaps most frequently used by editors to argue about decide whether to remove or retain content. I think this is an unfortunate situation - there are very few circumstances in which the encyclopaedia benefits from not having articles on "marginally notable" topics, except when the content of those articles is not encyclopaedic to begin with (WP:POVFORKS, for example).
If we had a way to talk about encyclpaedic inclusion directly, away from Notability, we might be able to defuse some misguided "zero-sum" conflicts and design an encyclopaedia more the way actual editors would design it, rather than allowing the shape of Wikipedia's content to emerge from a series of bar brawls between editors with particular presuppositions about what topic does or doesn't "merit an article". I know that wasn't the question lol, but that is my answer. Newimpartial (talk) 15:40, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
I'd say marginal articles are fine if they're of reasonable quality, but if articles are going to languish in a permanently bad state, that's a problem. There are cases where a very bad article is worse than no article. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.16:08, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
I absolutely know the type of article you are talking about, I recentlty nominated an article for deletion that has been a one-sentence stub for fourteen years. However, I don't think "this survived AFD but we're still going to delete it" has much of a chance of ever becoming policy. Just Step Sidewaysfrom this world ..... today17:04, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
I just want to give articles every chance to thrive before we do delete them. There's other ways - WikiProject notifications, etc - but AfD usually forces a check of the article's potential: is there sources, etc - that I don't think any other current process does. If it has no potential, it gets deleted at the first AfD. If it's already of reasonable quality, this process shouldn't apply: it has thrived. This needs to be a slow process to have any effect. As I see it, though, this would be an argument to raise in a second AfD that would trigger the countdown to the final review. The review would be one admin comparing it to the state at the time of the failure to thrive AfD (which I think is sufficient given the number of steps before this) Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.17:50, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
A way I think this could work: we make a template for something along the lines of "this article doesn't have enough quality sources in it to establish notability (regardless of whether those sources exist out there somewhere)". Then if X amount of time passes and the situation hasn't changed, that's taken as strong evidence in an AfD that, regardless of whether the sources exist somewhere, they can't actually be used to write an article. Loki (talk) 19:38, 30 May 2024 (UTC)
Could you give an example or two of the sort of article this proposal is envisaged to apply to? – Teratix₵11:12, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Note that this is just some things I've found by looking through the articles without sources categories, and some fad categories. These haven't passed through AfD, some of them might be handleable with a merge, and some might be salvagable - but the point of this proposal is to try and save the articles first.
Naked butler: It's possible this could be saved, but it's a lot of text, very little of it cited, so the accuracy and verifiability is very questionable. It's probably a thing, but such a weak article on a marginal subject is more likely to put inaccuracies into Wikipedia than to be genuinely helpful.
Campaign desk: Again, subject probably exists, but there's some oddities that make me concerned. The phrase "at popular retailers" makes me wonder about copyright of the text a little bit: it's a weirdly advert-y phrase. Uncited.
List of Fantastic Beasts characters - fancrufty article. Maybe it'll be saved, maybe not, but there's nothing in here that isn't redundant to the films' articles.
Should these be deleted right now? No, the whole point of this proposal is to encourage attempts to salvage articles in this kind of state. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.13:41, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
There were more citations (four) in the article as originally posted (I have made no effort to see if their removal was appropriate.) However, there is more sourcing to be found, such as this Evening Standard article. I'm not sure how the procedure here would help this article (if it were even eligible, which it is not) any more than standard tagging. With articles this old, we cannot assume that the original editors are still involved enough to be aware if the article was threatened by deletion. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:36, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
And, in fact, finally looking at the talk page of the article, there is (and has been since 2013) a long list of news sources which could be used. Any attempt to delete this article could be quickly laughed away by that list. If there are any good examples to which this proposed procedure should apply, this is not among them; someone who had concern with the quality of the article could improve it much more quickly than creating a deletion argument with the hope that someone else will do so. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 16:44, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
For the record, I'd say that the key type of article this would be good for dealing with is minor fads, advertising, or one-off events long past in similar states to those articles. But I'm not sure it's worth trying to find the perfect exemplar. While I do think articles on such things can be encyclopedic, there is a certain point where you have to say that if an article with only minor notability, especially one where the interest peak is long past, is still terrible, that we need to consider if it's ever going to get better, whatever the theoretical potential. If this results in people actively working on these articles instead, that's all the better. Adam Cuerden(talk)Has about 8.8% of all FPs.16:15, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Well, were I pressed I would say, yes, as a matter of practice having marginal subject articles is a detriment to the encyclopedia because they are often abandoned junk in practice, at best filled with templates for years upon years, at least telling the reader, "if you have not figured it out yourself, which you may well have, this has been bad since 2010, and Wikipedia does not care about bad articles and bad information" (that's a real detriment to Wikipedia). -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 16:51, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Improving existing articles slightly is a much lower hurdle than creating a brand new article. If an article is full of irrelevant unsourced text but has a notable core then it should be reduced down to that state, not deleted. There's no deadline for when Wikipedia needs to be perfect, and an article existing in the first place is conducive to improvement. AlexandraAVX (talk) 18:19, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
If you find an utterly terrible article on a notable subject, be bold and stubify it. I don't see why we need a process specifically for deleting bad articles on notable subjects. If there's no consensus to TNT then there isn't. AlexandraAVX (talk) 18:27, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Let me relate a Wiki tale, although not directly on point to these marginal articles, not too long ago an architect's article was eligible to be featured on the main page for winning an award, kind of like a Nobel Prize, and the article was in poor shape under wiki policies, so seven days it stayed at the news desk while some harried pedians made some effort to improve, and it was not improved sufficient to feature. (and it may still not be good enough). Now, if there were no article and it was written up with the sources that came with the prize and which surfaced in a few days, that would have been easier for the crew, instead trying to source prose and facts when one does not know where it came from. Nor would coverage of the subject have been improved by stubification, certainly not good enough to be in decent shape and probably not good at all (especially when a good number of the world was looking for the topic). So, hope for the more marginal is likely misplaced. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:09, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
If the prose is unsourced it can be deleted. There's nothing preventing someone from being bold and with good reason tearing out unsourced and bad prose and possibly replacing it with entirely new text. If the article really is entirely beyond saving, WP:TNT is a recognised option at AfD. AlexandraAVX (talk) 13:03, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Its not about "preventing someone", its about the doing the work by anyone, which we know through decades of practice is not something anyone apparently wants, coupled with the common sense of past is prologue. You say just delete a bunch in the article or just do other work, but cleaning up, if you care, is about significant work. In comparison, it's easier to create a decent article from the bottom up without having to do the cleanup first. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:58, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
Once again, whether it is easier to create an article from the bottom up or easier to create an article based on someone else's work is a matter of opinion. Thryduulf (talk) 11:26, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
What do you find easier? To write a decent article you have to research and write, to cleanup you have to delete, try to understand what someone else was thinking, rework, test for cvio, etc. as well as research and write. The first is less work. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:50, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
If the existing article lists some sources, then I don't need to spend as much time looking for sources.
If the existing article has some solid sections, I can ignore those and focus my effort elsewhere.
If the existing article has information that wouldn't have occurred to me, then I get a better result.
I usually find it very easy to "understand what someone else was thinking".
On the flip side, if the existing article is really lousy, then a quick little ⌘A to select all and hitting the backspace button solves that problem. Even in such cases, the article 'infrastructure' (e.g., infobox, images, and categories) is usually sound, and keeping the existing ones usually saves time and effort.
I don't pretend that what's easiest for me is what's easiest for everyone, but I personally don't mind working with existing articles. Perhaps you are the opposite. That's okay. My experience doesn't invalidate yours, and yours doesn't invalidate mine (or the experiences of the multiple other people who have disagreed with you). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:35, 7 June 2024 (UTC)
You are mostly off-topic as the premise of the proposal is only dealing in really lousy articles, and indeed ones that no-one is even doing your process of deletion or the rest. You think deleting large swaths is easy but it seems from your telling that is not something you spend much time thinking about it. As for your presumption about infobox and images and categories, your basis is for that is just assumption not evaluation. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:38, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
WhatamIdoing's point is simply that other people have a different opinion to you. Your assumptions about why that be are irrelevant. What constitutes a "really lousy article" is also a matter of opinion, and yours is no more or less valid than WhatamIdoing's or anyone else's. Do you understand that people can have a different opinion to you about subjective matters and contribute in good faith or are you being deliberately disruptive? Thryduulf (talk) 13:47, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
It is you who are being deliberately disruptive and you who are trying to prevent the presenting of opposing views. Somehow others can present opinions (who introduced "easiest" or "lousy") but just because you disagree with my view, you label it disputive. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:52, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
I am not labelling your view disruptive because I disagree with it (see other people whose views I have disagreed with without labelling disruptive), I am labelling your view disruptive because you appear to be either unwilling or unable to distinguish between fact and opinion. Thryduulf (talk) 14:18, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
That makes little sense and I see now how why you disrupt things, I am using words as others use them, and your inability to not read my comments as statements of view is your fault, not mine. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:23, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
No, because Wikipedia does not care. And you are wrong in substance too, it's easier to create a decent article than it is to reform one (and much more enjoyable) . Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:34, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Whether it is easier, and especially whether it is more enjoyable, is inherently subjective and so it is incorrect to say someone with a different opinion to you is "wrong in substance". Thryduulf (talk) 18:43, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
This is not the first discussion in which you have replied using ad hominems and borderline personal attacks to someone who simply has a different opinion to you. I really would like to believe you are capable of listening and collaborating, but nearly every comment you leave makes that harder. Thryduulf (talk) 18:59, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
You came in disruptive, to opine on the finer points of how you believe a phrase on "substance" has to be used. Which is far off-topic. So no, its not me who has shown poor collaboration here, it is you. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:05, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
You are objectively wrong on just about everything it is possible to be objectively wrong about in that sentence. Please engage with the topic rather than with ad hominems. Thryduulf (talk) 19:13, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
Perhaps what we need is a second review process … one that is focused on Non-Improvability, rather than Notability. It would consider articles that are in such poor shape that they (arguably) can not be improved… regardless of whether the topic is notable. Blueboar (talk) 18:20, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
I can't see many cases where a topic is notable without being possible to improve. If the article is irrevocably badly written then it can just be stubified. AlexandraAVX (talk) 18:23, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
I think that's true, but does your proposal really include a reliable and lasting method for overriding a WP:OWN editor's wishes?
Giving editors less leeway on WP:OWN – by significantly increasing the likelihood that engaging in WP:OWN will result in being permanently blocked – might contribute quite a bit to solving your question as well, not to mention several other ones. TooManyFingers (talk) 16:24, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
In principle, we don't want people to get permanently blocked. Also, it's sometimes difficult to tell the difference between "ownership" and "knowing what you're talking about", so some of these would likely be wrong. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:19, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
People who do know what they're talking about, but when pressed cannot show (in the Wikipedia-prescribed way) that they know what they're talking about, are intentionally and specifically excluded from Wikipedia. I don't think that's a good thing, but they are. Isn't that one of the most notable conflicts in wiki history? TooManyFingers (talk) 06:12, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
(IMO some of the best content on here is from real experts who quietly disregard certain rules and do the right thing instead. But also some of the worst content is from ownership fanatics.) TooManyFingers (talk) 06:19, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
While there may be articles covered by this that should be deleted, I don't think that editing inactivity is of any use in identifying them. And some of the other subjective criteria would be practically impossible to define or implement. Thanks for the idea and bringing it up here but IMO this is not workable and also not a very useful way to find articles that should be deleted. North8000 (talk) 18:58, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
I was initially torn between liking the idea of having a way to constructively reassess borderline articles that have not been improved in a long while, but also between being a firm believer in eventualism and the importance of recognising that Wikipedia is a work in progress. However, the more this discussion has gone on, the less I'm liking this. Merging, stubbifying, improving articles yourself (including using TNT), and similar activities that are not deletion are going to be preferable in nearly all cases. If you lack the subject or foreign-language knowledge to improve the article yourself use resources like WikiProjects to find people who do have that knowledge, sharing lists of the sources you've found but not understood to help them get started. If you don't have access to the sources (e.g. they're offline) then there are resources like the Wikipedia Library and at least some chapters offer grants to help you get them. Only when all of these options are unavailable or have failed, which is a small percentage of a small percentage, is deletion going to help and I'm not sure we need something other than AfD for that - especially as in a good proportion of these few cases notability is going to be questionable. Thryduulf (talk) 19:25, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
What if we have a process for quickly moving such articles to draftspace, and requiring AFC review/approval for them to be returned to mainspace? BD2412T20:00, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
I think that would basically be a backdoor deletion in many cases, a lot of the bad articles I come across are sometimes over a decade old and the original author is long gone. A PROD or AfD will let me and others interested in the subject area see them in article alerts, draftifying won't. AlexandraAVX (talk) 20:04, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
@AlexandraAVX: An AfD can lead to draftification, which can lead to deletion for abandonment (or, rarely, revitalization), but at least this resolution avoids keep rationales based on possible improvements that will never actually be made. BD2412T21:13, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure how to ask my question without it sounding weird, but here goes: Who cares if the improvements are never made?
At the moment, the subject qualifies for a separate, stand-along article if the real world has enough sources that someone could improve it past the doomed WP:PERMASTUB stage (plus it doesn't violate NOT, plus editors don't want to merge it away). The rules do not require the article to be "improved", and never have.
So imagine that we have an article like User:WhatamIdoing/Christmas candy. It's two sentences and 100% uncited. Imagine that we all agreed that Wikipedia would almost certainly die before that article ever got improved. Why should that be considered a deletion-worthy problem? Why can't it just be left like it is? Who's it hurting? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:13, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Anyone who reads the article and comes away believing something false or likely to be false?
If there's something false in the article you can delete that. If the subject is a hoax then that's already a speedy deletion criteria. If it isn't a hoax you can remove any information that can't be verified. If the subject is notable then there inherently must be coverage that makes something about it verifiable. AlexandraAVX (talk) 09:09, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Agreed. This seems like an ornate process for which the problem it would address has not been actually identified; the OP came up with no examples that would qualify for this treatment. The standard processes allow for re-AfDing if the material is not notable under current guidelines, or stubbifying if it is. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 20:22, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
One structural note. Since the suitability of the article to exist in main space technically relates only to the subject of the article, technically, the subject of the article should be the only reason to remove it from mainspace. North8000 (talk) 20:32, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
That's not quite true, as there other things that are relevant in some circumstances - copyvios are the most obvious, but also articles not written in English or written by socks of banned editors. However, other than newly discovered copyvios I can't think of any that are likely to be relevant to articles being discussed here (and with old articles the chance of suspected copyvios turning out to be plagiarism of Wikipedia are of course greater). Thryduulf (talk) 20:47, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
@Thryduulf: Well copyvio is a problem with content, though if you have an article that is 100% copyvio there's really nothing to save. North8000 (talk) 13:38, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
I can understand this frustration. All the time I see articles that were poor quality get sent to AFD, the commenters there say that the existing article is crap but (minimal) sources exist, so the article should be improved rather than being deleted. It gets kept, then...nothing happens. 10-15 years later, the article is still very poor quality and essentially unchanged. Whatever original sources existed might not even be online anymore, but a second AFD probably won't get a different result. Sometimes I can stubbify/redirect, if there's gross BLP violations I can sometimes just delete it, but most just exist in this limbo indefinitely. If nobody cares to make a halfway decent article, then maybe we shouldn't have one. I would like it if there was a shift at AFD, especially for long-term poor quality articles, from "should this topic have an article" to "is this particular article worth showing to readers". In 2005, the best way to help Wikipedia was with a pen (writing new articles). In 2024, the best way is with pruning shears (removing bad articles, or trimming irrelevant bloat within articles). I'm not sure the best way to accomplish this, but some sort of draftification for these articles might be a good idea. 6 months is probably too soon, but setting it at 5 or 10 years would cut out a lot of crud. The WordsmithTalk to me21:25, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
The OP ignores fundamental principals like no time limits, deletion is not cleanup, preserve, before etc.. it would be political and contentious. And I'm not sure it would do much to improve Wikipedia, plus alienate and piss off editors. The whole idea of keeping a crappy article on a notable topic is that someone will find it and work on it, "hey look at this crappy article I can make it better". -- GreenC22:54, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
He's not ignoring those ideas, he's trying to gain support for changing them. Sure, it would be contentious but that's not a reason to not discuss it. And yes, ideally someone will find a crappy article and work on it. But for many thousands of articles, it's been years and that hasn't happened. It probably never will. So the few people who stumble upon them are left with an unvetted, unsourced, incomplete or even misleading article about a topic. Jimbo had the right idea in this post[1], which became the foundation of our BLP policy but can apply elsewhere too. It's better to have no information about a topic than bad information. The WordsmithTalk to me00:26, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
I have a single sock that is 30 years old. Nobody makes or sells those ones anymore, and I myself have no others like it. I have a policy of keeping single socks until the matching one is found, so the sock sits there.
Adam, I started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Ready for the mainspace the other day, on what it means for an article to be "ready for the mainspace". This seems to be an idea that some editors have adopted. Back when we were new, the general idea seemed to be that you determined whether something's ready for the mainspace (and almost all of us created everything directly in the mainspace back then) with a two-part checklist:
Is the subject itself notable (e.g., if you spent time looking for Wikipedia:Independent sources, then you could find enough to write several sentences, even though nobody's bothered to do that yet)?
This could, and did, and was meant to, result in articles that said little more than "A campaign desk is an antique desk of normal size which was used by officers and their staffs in rear areas during a military campaign". (BTW, ProQuest374234967 might be a useful source for examples that article, as will this one, if you'd like to add them, and https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/15/archives/now-on-the-home-front.html will be particularly useful if you'd like to generalize from the desk to any sort of purpose-built furniture for mobile military officers.) However, I think that a minority of editors want to expand this checklist to look a bit more like this:
Is the subject itself notable?
Does the current version qualify for speedy deletion?
Would I be embarrassed if someone I respected said "Hey, I was looking at this short Wikipedia article the other day..."? (e.g., the article has fewer than x sentences, fewer than y cited sources, fewer than z links...)
If requiring a certain volume sounds nice, what I think would be more practical is if we talked about what percentage of articles we were really willing to sacrifice to the spirit of "immediatism because I'm embarrassed that someone hasn't already WP:FINISHED this old article". If you're willing to delete, say, 1% or 10% or 50% of all articles to artificially raise the average quality of Wikipedia articles, then we can calculate what x, y, and z would be. NB that I don't think that deleting articles for problems that could be solved by ordinary editing would be a good idea, because I've found some of those old, neglected, even uncited substubs to be of immediate value to me recently, when often what I wanted was an easy way to figure out what the official website was, or a quick definition of an obscure term (19th-century furniture and clothing has ranked high in my searches recently, so Campaign desk is exactly the kind of article that I have been finding helpful). But if you're bothered enough to want to WP:DEMOLISH articles because they're not being developed to your standards, then let's talk about how much is the most you could imagine destroying, and see if we could figure out what we'd be losing as a result. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:57, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Of the three example articles given early in this discussion, viewing them outside of this discussion: #1 Would fail wp:notability #2 is good enough as is, and #3 is in Wikipedia's Twilight Zone: there is no system / mechanism that really vetts list articles. North8000 (talk) 13:50, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
Paul Majendie. “Butlers Buff Up Party Scene Forget the Quintessential Image of the British Butler as the Epitome of Discreet Decorum -- the Latest Fad on the British Party Scene Is Half-Naked Waiters.” Townsville Bulletin.
I based my comments #1 based on a quick guess. The question is coverage of sources on the specific topic. Which in turn needs the article to be about a specific topic. My first guess is that that isn't there. But the overall point is evaluating articles based on things other than lack of development activity, and that the latter is not much of an indicator. North8000 (talk) 16:49, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Well, that's one of the problems with the proposal: it encourages people to seek deletion not on the basis of what sources might be available, such as this article in the Evening Standard (page 2 here) or this Herald-Tribune piece, but rather on their guesses of how the page will develop in the future. I see nothing in the OP's proposal that indicates that the goal is to try to save the article first, it makes no call for the implementer to try to save the article, just allows for the possibility that someone else may do so. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:10, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Huh? When something goes to 2nd AfD it could be "saved" like any other time, indeed that's when people often work on such (yes, yes, 'not cleanup', but that does not mean cleanup by hook or by crook is not good) the 2nd delete participants basically have to agree 'yeah, no one cares' for it to go. Alanscottwalker (talk) 18:39, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, it could be saved then, but it would take an odd interpretation that the goal of an AfD filing is to save an article, when the very point of an AfD filing is to request its destruction. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 18:56, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Indeed starting an AfD with the aim of doing something other than deleting the article could (arguably should) get the nomination speedily kept (WP:SK point 1). Thryduulf (talk) 19:08, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
I did not say goal, I said it is regularly the outcome (including everytime there is no consensus or keep), the conversation is still about the suitability of having this article, nonetheless. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:03, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
You appeared to be saying "Huh?" to a statement about the goal; if you were not "Huh?"ing that statement, I don't know what you were saying. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:09, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
I did not think you were speaking about the goal of AfD, the proposal is for a new multi-factored rationale (like is this adequately covered elsewhere, etc.) that the AfD participants can either agree in or not. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:35, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
Well, I would call it additional rational but yes, when the alternatives given are delete large swaths of the article or just let it continue to sit there in bad shape for more decades. Alanscottwalker (talk) 12:28, 4 June 2024 (UTC)
I strongly suspect that #2, Campaign desk, is a copyvio, and has been so since it was created 20+ years ago, but I cannot yet prove so beyond any doubt. If it is determined that the original text, which is 95% of the current article, was a copyvio, then the article will have to be deleted. Donald Albury16:36, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
It was written by an admin, AlainV. While it's not a perfect indicator, generally speaking, if I were looking for a copyvio, I wouldn't start by suspecting something written by an admin who wrote ~150 articles. It's at least as likely that the article was original here, and got copied over there. We have a copy from 2004; the Internet Archive has a copy of the Wikipedia article from 2005; the Internet Archive has a copy on a different website from 2006. I would not assume from this information that our article is the copyvio. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 2 June 2024 (UTC)
One reason that I haven't acted on my suspicions is the possibility that the website copied from AlainV's articles (all 48 or them, with only three or four desks listed on the website that AlainV did not create an article for). I left a message on his talk page, but he hasn't edited in two years.
Looking more closely at Cylinder desk, I see that AlainV and others modified that article after he created it, and the website matches the state of the article in April 2006 rather than the original state when AlainV created it in November 2003. Given that, I withdraw any suggestion that AlainV copied from the Arts and Crafts Home website. Donald Albury00:08, 3 June 2024 (UTC)
Oppose There is no such thing as an article on a notable topic that will never improve. They always improve eventually if they are left for long enough. We have many articles that were massively expanded after more than a decade of inactivity. If a topic satisfies GNG, there will be people able and willing to improve it. The proposal is incompatible with the policy WP:ATD. James500 (talk) 04:19, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
General Comment I think that the advice at WP:NOPAGE is far too often neglected, and in many cases we would be better off upmerging content. By the same token there are definitely some encyclopedic topics that would be undue detail for a parent article, but will never expand beyond a few paragraphs because there isn't anything else to say about them, and that really isn't a problem either, those type of articles exist in traditional encyclopedias; people who are interested in the niche information can still find it, and it doesn't get in the way of everyone else.At some deeper level of course this is a request to rethink WP:N, especially WP:ARTN, and maybe shift the current consensus a bit as to when no article is better than the existing content. Much more specific criteria than failure to thrive will be needed for that to happen, and in the end we have to confront the fact that most articles simply do not meet the theoretical baseline standard (the small percentage that do become WP:GAs after being checked), and if history is any guide, changes will considerably increase the disruption associated with deletion, at least for a time.That isn't to say the underlying concern is without merit, and we all want better written articles, I'm just skeptical this is the best approach to get there. 184.152.68.190 (talk) 04:01, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Rethinking
I think we should refocus the discussion away from AFD… we DO have a problem with articles that are about notable topics, but are seriously problematic in other ways. I am thinking that we might need to create a NEW process to deal with such articles. Perhaps (for lack of a better name) we can call it “GAR” (for “Gut And Rebuild”)? Please discuss. Blueboar (talk) 14:41, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
I would be for a policy making it clearer that stubifying and similar are acceptable for badly sourced and very poorly written articles. But we already have several projects for rebuilding and restoring bad articles: WP:CLEANUP, WP:REFCHECK and WP:GOCE. I don't think creating a new process for it would help. We already have the BOLD, revert, discuss cycle for that. AlexandraAVX (talk) 14:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
The "problem" is no one is doing it, whether it is because it is relatively harder or just not interested, someone still has to do the research and write, I suppose this GAR could draw attention to what no one is doing and it could help but doubtful it will make the article itself decent, what it could do is produce a list of sources which would certainly be better. It is better to direct readers to RS than whatever so-called "lousy" article we have. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:50, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
So, here’s the crux as I see it… when the issue is notability, we have a fairly clear threat (deletion) we can dangle in front of editors to force them to address the problem (or at least make the attempt). We also have a clear solution (supply sources).
But for other issues we don’t have a threat to dangle in front of editors to force (or at least strongly encourage) them to address the problem. We simply hope that, some day, someone might get around to it.
The question is… IS there some sort of threat (other than deletion) that would achieve the goal? The closest I can think of is: “Gut it back to a stub”. Blueboar (talk) 15:48, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure "threat" is the right word, but it seems to me that criteria for compulsory draftification - and a dedicated noticeboard for that - could serve the intended purpose. Heck, it could even be accompanied by a proposed or a speedy draftification process as well. The trick is to come up with a word that starts with a letter other than D (or B). Articles for Transformation (AfT)? Newimpartial (talk) 16:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
The problem with non-notable articles is that they are, well, not notable, and shouldn't be included in the encyclopaedia.
What is the problem with notable articles that are short that we are trying to solve? We can already remove unreferenced information (after looking for sources and either adding the sources you find or remove it as unverifiable if you can't find any). Why do we want to force people to expand this notable article under threat of deletion after a week (AfD) or six months (draftifying)? What does the encyclopaedia gain from this? Thryduulf (talk) 16:31, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Again, I’m trying to take deletion off the table here, and yet still convey a similar sense of urgency to editors (fix this “or else”). The only “or else” I can think of is: “We will pare this article down to a stub”. Blueboar (talk) 17:03, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Which editors? If we're dealing with old rot articles like discussed above, they are likely not editing Wikipedia any more. If we're dealing with newer problem articles, we're asking the editors to suddenly become competent? If you get into a war over paring something down, yes there are live editors and you can ask for a third opinion or somesuch., but in general, problem articles are better addressed by improving or paring them than in creating another system that relies on others. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 17:24, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
@NatGertler, what if I don't want to do the work? What if my goal is to make other people do the work? I'm a WP:VOLUNTEER. I don't have to do anything I don't want to. But maybe I'd like to force "you" to do the work that I don't want to do. Threatening to take away basically accurate, appropriate information works on a timescale that humans can recognize. Either nobody cares, and the ugly article goes away, or a volunteer drops everything to save the article. I get to congratulate myself on prompting improvements without lifting a finger to do the work myself.
Waiting for someone to notice the problem and feel like fixing it doesn't feel like it works. Sure, some of them might get improved, but I can't see the connection. AFD forces people to do something about the specific article that I don't like. m:Eventualism just says – well, maybe some articles will get improved and maybe they won't, but I'll never know which ones, and it probably won't be the ones that I care about. I feel helpless and like there's nothing I can do, especially if I don't want to (or am not competent to) improve the articles myself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:52, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
@Blueboar, "gut it back to a stub" won't work, because for the most part, the articles that are disliked are already stubs.
I think the desire is to force other people to do this work. "My" job is just to complain that your work is sub-par (sending it to AFD requires three clicks and typing a sentence); "your" job is to put in whatever work is necessary to satisfy me (could be a couple of hours of work, especially if I dislike the subject and so demand an even higher level of activity).
Consider Campaign desk, given as an example above. It's a long stub (10 sentences, 232 words according to ProseSize). Two editors easily found sources for it. It's at AFD now. Why? I don't know, but I will tell you that it's quicker and easier to send something to AFD than to copy and paste sources out of this discussion. I also notice on the same day's AFDs that someone has re-nominated an article because the sources that were listed in the first AFD haven't been copied and pasted into the article yet. Why not copy and paste the sources over yourself? I don't know. Maybe adding sources to articles is work that should be done by lesser beings, not by people who are trying to "improve Wikipedia's quality" by removing anything that hasn't been improve to my satisfaction by the WP:DEADLINE – the deadline apparently being "whenever I notice the article's existence". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Part of an editor’s job is to highlight problems that the author needs to fix. I do get that we ideally wear both hats at the same time, but… sometimes we can only wear one. It is quite possible for editors to identify problems with an article that they can not fix themselves because they don’t know the subject matter well enough to do so. We need something that tells those who DO know the subject matter: “hey, this urgently needs your attention”.
As for why there is urgency… we simply have too many articles flagged as having with serious problems that have never been addressed. We need something that will push those who can be authors into actually authoring. Blueboar (talk) 17:48, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
That model of "editors" and "authors" is based on a hierarchical professional structure that does not exist on Wikipedia. Everyone is an "editor" on Wikipedia; that word doesn't hypothetically grant you power over me. Toughpigs (talk) 17:51, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
@Blueboar, a while ago, I dropped everything to save articles such as White cake. (Please do not blame the innocent AFD nom; he, like 99.9% of people, didn't know the modern white cake is a technological wonder, and finding high-quality and scholarly sources about everyday subjects requires more than an ordinary search.) I had fun doing it, and those articles are much better now. (I'll deal with the complication that is fudge cake later).
I think @Thryduulf is on the right track when he asks why we have such urgency. There was no urgency whatsoever about White cake. There were no errors in it. It had sources. It was, admittedly, much less awesome than it is now, but there is nothing seriously wrong. Ditto for Campaign desk, and almost all of the other "ugly" articles. So: Why should fixing that have been urgent? Did we really need something to push me into improving the article? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:57, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Thanks, but you did not need the article to do the research and write on white cake, and why it matters, is we are not showing our research, after sometimes decades, and thus adding value, rather we are suggesting that someone shared their thoughts on white cake on Wikipedia, when you can look at the rest of the internet and google for people's thoughts on white cake. The reader would have been better off, in the reliable information department, by finding reliable information on their own, then reading the unsourced, unexamined decidedly unreliable by Wikipedia's own disclaimer article. Anything that said in effect go, read this stuff, it is a good source, would have been better. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:17, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Oh, sorry, I thought your story was about it being AfD'd for lack of sourcing, was it that the sources cited were unreliable or irrelevant meaning with no evidence in them of notability? (so yeah, the rest, of my comment would apply to the unsoured parts). Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:42, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, such AfD nominations are always hard to understand, as the inner logic of the nom is 'this is part of a notable topic' (here, cake). That's similar to the campaign desk example, the salient issue is whether to redirect to campaign furniture. Alanscottwalker (talk) 10:28, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
(edit conflict × 2) That doesn't explain why there is urgency. It identifies that you (and some other editors) dislike there being lots of articles that haven't been improved to your satisfaction yet. It does not explain why that many articles needing improvement is a problem, why nominated articles need fixing more urgently than the other articles, why you can't or won't fix it yourself, nor why you get to decide what articles other people need to prioritise. Thryduulf (talk) 17:55, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
Honestly, just the fact that you're considering "threatening" people in order to "force" them to do what you want suggests that this may be more about you than it is about the articles. The AfD process isn't about "threats" and "force", it's about identifying and deleting articles on non-notable subjects. Toughpigs (talk) 18:14, 8 June 2024 (UTC)
I’m just being realistic. “Force” may not be the intent of the AFD process, but it is certainly a product of that process… because we “threaten” to delete articles on non-notable topics, lazy article authors are “forced” to provide sources to properly establish that the topic is indeed notable.
In any case, what I am fumbling around trying to envision is a process that would be “about” identifying and fixing seriously flawed articles on notable topics - a process perhaps similar to AFD, but not AFD. Blueboar (talk) 10:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
The only things such a process could bring that existing policies, processes, task forces, collaborations, etc don't are a deadline and consequences for failure and nobody has yet identified why we need either of those. Thryduulf (talk) 11:09, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
OK… let’s break it down into more bite sized chunks… first: let’s consider articles with serious WP:NOT issues (That might be a clearer example of where the topic might be notable, but the article, as it currently stands, is problematic). Do we have any sort of process that would help us better identify and therefore fix such articles? Blueboar (talk) 11:51, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
In other words… eventually, someday, maybe, someone might get around to fixing the article. But until that eventual day comes (perhaps years after it is identified) we are apparently OK with Wikipedia continuing to contain content that a (somewhat core) policy explicitly says Wikipedia should NOT contain?
I’m sorry, but if that is our “process”, I don’t think it is effective (or at least not effective enough). I think we need a better process. A process that will incentivize our authors to fix WP:NOT issues sooner rather than later. Blueboar (talk) 14:00, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
As I stated the only things our processes lack is a deadline and consequences for failing to meet that deadline and you still haven't identified how having either of them will benefit the encyclopaedia. Policies and guidelines already allow you to remove policy violations when you see them. Thryduulf (talk) 14:13, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Looks to me, Blueboar has done so, 1) effectively disincentivizing long term-policy violations; 2) effectively. reducing long-term policy violations. 3) Wikipedia taking effective responsibility for long-term policy violations concerning the central reason Wikipedia exists, its content, because we can't/don't insist on individual accountability (no one can make an editor source that article they wrote 10 years ago) we need to make process for entire-project accountability, when individualist work has over the long-term failed, concerning its central mission. Alanscottwalker (talk) 14:51, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
I thought the whole point of this proposal is to deal with articles that aren't policy violations? Articles that are policy violations should have the policy violating parts fixed or removed, or (if that would leave nothing viable), nominated for deletion as soon as someone sees them. Thryduulf (talk) 15:54, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
What you're suggesting is a "double AfD" -- if an article has been at AfD and it's been demonstrated that the subject is notable, but you personally still don't like the current state of the article, then you want an extra do-over that gets you the result that you want. Toughpigs (talk) 15:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
And that someone else has to do the work, because if the only point was to fix the article, you could do that yourself. There is nobody in this discussion who is incapable of remedying serious policy violations in any article, including subjects we're unfamiliar with. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:00, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
With English Wikipedia's current consensus being that stub creation is encouraged, and with Wikipedia editors being volunteers, I think the only scalable way to continually improve articles is to build up groups of editors interested in various topic areas—which in the context of English Wikipedia, are WikiProjects—who can work through the queues of stubs. I realize that with most WikiProject talk pages being dormant, this isn't easy. Now that new editors each have their own personal newcomer homepage with an assigned mentor (though at present on English Wikipedia, due to a shortage of volunteers, only 50% of newcomers are shown a mentor on their homepage), perhaps mentors can help point new users to active WikiProjects. (Building a new consensus to manage the quality of new articles is an alternative, but personally I don't foresee a change being feasible in the intermediate term, given the most recent discussions amongst the editors who like to weigh in on this matter.) isaacl (talk) 16:09, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
You know the answer to that already: it's up to each person to decide what they want to work on. A group of interested persons can discuss situations, of course, and that may influence individual decisions. isaacl (talk) 16:23, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Our choices about which backlogs to "advertise" affect the choices people make. If we say "Stubs are bad, so please prioritize expand stubs", then we'll get more stub expansion. If we were instead to say "Improving popular articles is more important than ignored ones, even though they're less likely to be stubs", then we would expect to get more focus on popular articles. Each person will make their own decisions about what to work on, but people will also take official recommendations and nudges into account when making their individual choices.
Some years back, Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine set an official goal of getting all Top-importance articles past the stub stage. (These tend to be rather generic subjects, like Burn and Infection.) I think that was valuable, but I'm not sure that there is similar value in encouraging the expansion of the least-read 50% of Wikipedia's articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:45, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Sure, that's up to the interested editors to decide upon. For better or worse, I can't keep other editors from discussing queues of interest to them. I can raise my concerns about their relative priority, and thus try to influence whatever decisions are made (whether that's tasks undertaken or text on a WikiProject page). isaacl (talk) 16:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
@Blueboar, could you give me an example (preferably hypothetical) of an article about a notable subject that has serious NOT violations? None of the examples above (e.g, Campaign desk) seem to be NOT violations.
I feel like the common objections behind these discussions (which have been going on with some intensity for a couple of years now) don't involve serious policy violations at all. Instead, the objections appear to be:
WP:ITSUNREFERENCED, and I want someone else to add sources right now. We couldn't get a rule adopted to require sources in non-BLP articles earlier this year, but I want this non-BLP article treated as if we did adopt that rule.
It's an WP:UGLY little article. Personally, I prefer that articles be Start-class, or at least long stubs.
Sure… Suppose an article about a relatively obscure regional restaurant chain that does nothing but list every franchise outlet and its address, thus violating WP:NOTDIRECTORY. The chain might well be notable and thus worth an article… but the article we currently have is problematic. It probably needs a complete rewrite, not deletion… So… let’s say someone stumbles upon this article. They can identify the problem, but they don’t know the topic well enough to write about it (and perhaps they don’t really care enough to do so)… so they simply tag it and move on… And then… nothing happens… nothing changes… the article just sits there, tagged as violating policy, potentially for years. I don’t think that is in the best interest of WP. Surely there is some way to better incentivize fixing the article. Blueboar (talk) 18:43, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
The person who needs incentivizing is you. You are the one who's bothered by the article's existence. You can be the one who fixes it. Take out the addresses, look for reliable sources (probably in newspapers, for a restaurant chain). If you don't find any, then put it up for deletion. If you do, add them to the article. The problem is solved. You solved it! Toughpigs (talk) 18:46, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Hmm… Nope… I’m not in a position to fix the problem myself. I don’t live in the area served by my hypothetical restaurant chain, I have never eaten there, I know nothing about it, I don’t even know what sources would help me to write a proper article. All I know is that the article (as it currently stands) is a directory of franchises (a WP:NOT violation). I DO care enough about WP to alert others to the problem, but I am not qualified to fix it myself. The best I can do is tag and move on.
So, I ask again… THEN what? Do we (as a community) continue to just ignore the problems with the article I have identified?… because that is what is currently happening! Surely we can do better. Blueboar (talk) 19:44, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Then you nominate it for deletion. We already have a process for this. If the article is kept, then at least a couple of sources have come up, and glaring problems like the addresses have been fixed. Toughpigs (talk) 20:43, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Nah… If I nominate for deletion, I get told that the topic is notable (apparently there are reliable sources, even though I personally don’t know which are reliable). I get told that AFD isn’t for article clean up (so the WP:NOT violation persists), and I am scolded for wasting people’s time. Blueboar (talk) 21:32, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
So... you don't want to use AfD because you'll be told that you're wrong. Instead, you want a separate AfD process that will tell you that you're right? Toughpigs (talk) 21:36, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Not at all… I want a new process that will better draw attention to problems and do more to incentivize editors who CAN fix the problems to actually DO so. That new process might (or might not) be modeled on AFD… I’m still very open to suggestions and inspiration on that. I simply know that our current “tag it and hope that someone eventually fixes it” system isn’t working. Blueboar (talk) 21:59, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
Is fixing that the right goal for Wikipedia?
I think this point needs to get some direct attention. I agree that the hypothetical article described above is a WP:NOT violation as written.
But: Is this really a "Oh my goodness, that actually violates a policy! Please, somebody do something, quick!" situation? Or could this be more of a "That's unfortunate, but not actually harmful, and frankly an article that only lists the locations is not as important as other problems I could be fixing" problem?
Most of what we do is being done by about 10K experienced editors each month. The available volunteer hours do not expand to accommodate someone's desire to have this fixed on the m:immediatism time line. Incentivizing the editors who can clean up that article "to actually DO so" means incentivizing those editors to leave other problems unaddressed. So – is this really worth the cost? Are you glad that I expanded Cottage Inn Pizza when it was prodded a few months ago? Can that question be fully answered, if you don't consider what else I didn't do, because I spent an hour or so on that "relatively obscure regional restaurant chain"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:34, 9 June 2024 (UTC)
If there isn’t any urgency, perhaps we should downgrade WP:NOT to an essay?… or rename it to: “What Wikipedia arguably shouldn’t be.” Ok, snark there… but yeah, I do think dealing with violations of major policies should out weigh a lot of the other, pettier things we obsess about as editors. Blueboar (talk) 00:20, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Blueboar, you asked, "Do we (as a community) continue to just ignore the problems with the article I have identified?" And for me, the answer is that I would rather have lots of imperfect articles than give you and X other people the power to mass-delete articles that would pass AfD but you still think are kind of "meh".
(Note that you have already said that the articles would pass AfD and that you would be accused of wasting editors' time if you nominated them.)
If your proposal is (paraphrased), "Let's have a system that 'forces' people to improve random articles on notable subjects at my personal instruction or they get deleted whenever I want," then I vote for the system that we currently have. Yes, that hypothetical chain restaurant article is absolutely hypothetically fine with me. Toughpigs (talk) 01:25, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Well, I don't think I'd describe the hypothetical article as "fine", but I also don't think that fixing it is urgent. If it gets done sometime before the heat death of the universe, then that would be great. But if we have more important content to work on, then I'm okay with it still being in its harmless but WP:UGLY and nominally policy-violating state when I die. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:28, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Toughpigs… I’m not sure why you keep bringing up deletion… I opened this section by removing deletion as an option. But just to be clear - I am envisioning a new process to fix problematic articles… and NOT delete them. Blueboar (talk) 10:29, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
So this new process highlights that it is vital that someone drops what they are doing and fixes this article to your satisfaction right now. What happens if nobody does? It's already a stub, so gutting the article isn't an option, and deletion is apparently off the table, so we can't do that. What else is there? Do we pick an editor and stop them doing anything else until they've fixed this article? How do we choose which editor? What happens if they walk away from the project instead? Or do we just leave the article with a different banner on it to let people know that not only is this article is in a bad state but we disapprove of it being in bad state and we were unable to force anybody to fix it in time? Thryduulf (talk) 10:56, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Thryduulf, part of the problem in my hypothetical is that the article (as it currently stands) ISN’T “already a stub”… it’s a directory of franchises and addresses. I could definitely see “stubify” being a step in the process (the “Gut” part of my suggested “Gut and Rebuild” name for the process) but what we really need is the next step… something that will incentivize editors to rebuild. That’s what I am searching for… and I don’t have the answer yet. I am hoping that I will become inspired as we continue to discuss. Blueboar (talk) 11:39, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Fixing the Policy Violation™ 😱 requires ten seconds. You open the editor, blank the list, and save it. Fixing that would be faster than manually tagging it, and approximately the same amount of time as using Twinkle to tag it.
Now we have a substub with less information, which presents two problems:
Nobody who hates having an article with two sentences and a list of locations is going to be satisfied with an article that contains only the two sentences. It's still WP:UGLY and it's still irritating to all the people who want only high-quality articles right now.
"Less information" can itself be construed as a different Policy Violation™ 😱, because the Wikipedia:Editing policy says that Wikipedia should generally have more information instead of less.
@Blueboar, what if it's not so petty? The next major edit I made after that pizza chain was to expand Mastitis. I don't think we have an official policy that says "Improve health-related articles by providing accurate, well-sourced facts about common medical conditions, particularly if misinformation is spreading about that subject on social media", but I do consider that more important and more urgent than nominal compliance with a policy about whether Wikipedia should or shouldn't contain a list of locations for a restaurant chain. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:26, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Sure, there are things that are more important… but there are a lot of things we (as a community) obsess about that are less important. Perhaps we should adjust our priorities? Blueboar (talk) 11:44, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Where does removing a list of locations from a pizza chain article fall in your priority list? What's less (and more) important? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:59, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
The problem isn't "somebody do something quick!", but more that an article can be tagged as "somebody do something eventually", 5...10...15 years pass, and it is still tagged "somebody do something eventually". Meanwhile while the topic itself may be notable, we have had this article where every version wholly or substantially violates WP:V or other core policies. The article could contain wrong information, misleading our readers for years on end. As we grow, the numbers of them are just increasing which is why the problem is becoming more important to fix. This is the exact same circumstance that led to the 2009-2010 BLP mass deletion sprees and WP:BLPPROD, just without the urgency of living people being at risk which is why the issue has quietly crept along. The WordsmithTalk to me16:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
@The Wordsmith, here are a few points I'd like you to consider:
The number of completely unsourced articles is declining each month. It is not true that As we grow, the numbers of them are just increasing. Category:Articles lacking sources is down to 88K. The total number of articles was more than double that five years ago, and triple that 10 years ago. That's also fewer articles total, across all time, than were once in Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2009 alone.
We do not technically have any policy that requires articles to be sourced. WP:V only requires citations under specific circumstances. None of those circumstances apply to a significant fraction of the unsourced stubs that we still have (e.g., stubs that contain very little information).
What's actually wrong with 10 years passing? There is never actually going to be a moment when adding a source to some low-traffic, low-risk stub is a better or more urgent use of my time than updating a high-traffic, high-risk article. If I spend 10 years cleaning up important articles instead of spamming a source into an article about a regional pizza chain, we should rejoice. This is not a failure of anything; this is proof that we are correctly prioritizing our work away from "there's no source in Lake Wobegon Water Agency, which says that it's the municipal water agency for Lake Wobegon *yawn*" and towards "Worldwide, 25 million women will get mastitis this year, so it'd be nice if the article wasn't outdated".
I think what you're aiming for is literally impossible. Not difficult, but actually impossible, without fundamentally changing what Wikipedia is. Wikipedia is not a publication (like a traditional encyclopedia), it is a content platform. There is no way to get the users of a content platform to all work towards the same goal (any goal). The only rule that a content platform can impose -- what you call a "threat" but is more accurately described as an enforcement mechanism -- the only enforcement mechanism available to a content platform is to not allow particular content to be published (what we call "deletion"). If you want to improve the content on a content platform, literally the only possible way to enforce any standards, is to delete (or not publish) content that fails to meet those standards. So: draw a line, delete anything that falls below that line, that's all we can really do. If the content meets the minimum standards, there is no real way to require or even encourage it to be improved beyond those minimum standards. Real money won't work, and nothing else matters to people in the end. You can hope people make better content, you can help them, you can encourage them, but you'll never be able to require it--all a content platform can do is remove substandard content. As analogies, consider how could YouTube possibly get people to make better videos, especially without paying them? How could a community garden get its members to plant "better" flowers? They can rip out substandard flowers, but beyond that...? I think there's nothing. Levivich (talk) 21:40, 10 June 2024 (UTC)
Notable topics with advert/COI "failure to thrive" issues
One thing that I have noticed that I think should be discussed here is the situation with articles tagged as advertisements, COI, or the like. There are some clearly notable topics that have been tagged as such (and indeed, may well have been written as such), for which — in my humble experience — improvement of the article is difficult precisely because editors may be dissuaded from working on the article at all out of concern that adding anything positive about the subject risks accusations of being involved in the advertising/COI issue, even where there is reliably sourced information that could be added. BD2412T03:22, 18 June 2024 (UTC)
Policy on the fair use of photos of children who are only notable for their deaths
Killing of Jonathan Lewis, with that adolescent iPhone selfie becoming the permanent encyclopedic representation of this tragically deceased child, has compelled me to raise this idea:
No "fair use" photographs of children notable only for their deaths. Often these photos surface because the families allow local press to use them—often to raise awareness of their loved one's disappearance or death as they seek resolution or justice. The allowance of this use, for the fleeting cycle of news media, is meaningfully quite different from allowance for permanent use in an encyclopedic project. Additionally, these articles, which are about deaths (not people), do not actually need photos of the victims, who are not the article topic themselves. Another source for photos may be online obituaries—there's one up for Jonathan Lewis, and it is more flattering than the article's photo. I think that would be just as violative to use‚ functionally no different from the news-issued ones.
I think using such photos for an encyclopedia, bringing a private child's face into the public eye to illustrate the worst thing that has ever happened (or could ever happen) to them, is violative, and the apparent "fair use" supposes the granting of a moral right that isn't really there (since these photos are almost always justified as fair use, having been provided by families to the news, but not licensed for everyone to use as they wish). In the absence of a real educational need, and in the presence of a moral violation, I think uses like these shouldn't be allowed.
This particular person was 2.3 months short of his 18th birthday, and likely would have objected strenuously to being called a "child".
Adding a photo helps readers recognize that it was a person who died. Yes, we should all be able to tell that from just the words, but A picture is worth a thousand words, and sometimes the visual helps people understand it better. (As for whether this one is "flattering", the article says he was interested in photography, and he might have thought it was artistic. If the family released that one to news media, they probably had a reason for choosing it.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:27, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
I agree. Discretion is required. If they are only notable for dying then a photo smacks of WP:Memorial. If the family object then the photo should be removed immediately, obviously — Iadmc♫talk 07:50, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
I think it would depend on the child. In this case, (a) where the family have released a photograph of a (b) 17 year old victim, and (c) the family aren't suspects or implicated in the crime, I think it's straightforwardly appropriate to use the image. My answers for other variations of a, b and c might be different.—S MarshallT/C09:17, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't think this is a case where a one-size-fits-all policy is useful, and I believe our WP:BLP / WP:BDP policies already cover it to the extent that it's necessary. Obviously we want to be somewhat cautious about having articles about children, or pictures of children; there is no reason why we would be more cautious with deceased ones (and in fact if they've been deceased for long enough that WP:BDP no longer applies, I'd argue that - well, obviously we should be more cautious for children who fall under BLP / BDP, since the risk of harm is higher. For the historical ones listed above there's no reason for extra caution; neither the Lindburgh baby nor their surviving relatives are likely to be harmed by a fair-use photo of them here. And ultimately, whether we use an image (like the question of whether we have an article at all) has to be decided based on coverage. A lack of WP:SUSTAINED coverage might be a reason to limit what we say overall, but I don't think we need another policy for that; that's already the case. Note that in the example you gave, WP:BDP would apply anyway - by the time BDP expires, it should be more clear what images make sense. --Aquillion (talk) 10:48, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Whether minor or adult, adding a picture of the deceased victim to these type of pages does beg on sympathy and empathy, particularly if there is little else that can be said about the victim (as in the above case). The article is about the crime, not the victim, so the usual NFC allowance to use an image for identification of a nonliving biographical subject doesn't automatically apply. — Masem (t) 11:55, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't know who you are referring to with the word "child" -- the article you linked is about a 17-year-old. Maybe the genetic makeup of Homo sapiens has changed significantly (space alien lasers? quantum consciousness DNA crystals? chemicals turning the frogs gay? etc) but when I was 17 I had a beard and drove a forklift and smoked Pall Malls and would have blown smoke from them directly in the face of anyone calling me a child. jp×g🗯️18:53, 22 June 2024 (UTC)
Haha seconded. Still, on a serious note, genetic makeup did not changed, but the the laws did. There is a legal definition of child/minor and I guess Wikipedia sticks with it. - Altenmann>talk17:25, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
Fair use policy isn't the appropriate place for this. Images of these children should either be allowed or not allowed, regardless of copyright status. Jruderman (talk) 09:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
We have generally not concerned ourselves with censoring morally "violative" content, especially when it serves an encyclopedic purpose (if not a *need* as you put it) Horse Eye's Back (talk) 07:13, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
How to use a master's thesis as a source
I hope I'm asking this question in the right place.
I'm preparing to edit Au Pilori, not as a translation of the French-language version, but as a complete rewrite with more sources. The French version has a source that is a mémoire de maîtrise , a master's thesis, but the link is dead. I tracked down the author and emailed him, asking for the current link to his thesis and he sent me the thesis instead. (His old university recently merged with another, and I assume the theses are not linked yet.) I could, of course, not cite it, but it seems to be a very good source. I could cite it with no link, but that leaves English-speaking readers worse off than I was.
The person who mailed it to me holds the copyright, so how can I contort myself to both respect his copyright and yet make the source available to future readers?
You can't link to an external source that violates the author's copyright. You don't strictly speaking need a link, but you could ask the author for permission to publicly host it somewhere. AlexandraAVX (talk) 06:24, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
I would not use this per WP:SCHOLARSHIP, Masters dissertations and theses are considered reliable only if they can be shown to have had significant scholarly influence. Masters theses vary greatly in quality and there's no real way to judge which are and aren't reliable without doing original research. If it hasn't been published, it's not going to have had "significant scholarly influence", even if it's available from the university library and can technically be cited there. – Joe (talk) 07:18, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
Wikipedia also has an article on Human. Wikipedia:Conflict of interest is the relevant guideline, and it really depends how close you are to the topic, whether you can derive personal benefit from editing, and whether your edits are in the interests of creating encyclopaedic content. If in doubt about specifics, ask for advice. AndyTheGrump (talk) 16:07, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
You cannot make an autobiography about yourself in Wikipedia, except if you are an international famous person, the entire world doesn't know you. And also includes making an article about your friend, your boss or your wife, and you can write about something you're close to, tho don't write as the "best thing in the entire world" or like an ad Emicraftnoob (talk) 22:21, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
True, but the question is approximately like "Why can't Microsoft employees write the article on Microsoft, but Wikipedia editors get to write the article on Wikipedia?"
How it's done is to check what independent sources have to say on the topic and base the article on those, rather than what you know or feel about it. Perhaps every one here has a COI with Wikipedia, but you can check it yourself to see if it is biased, undue, or unreferenced. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 23:29, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Species notability
I don't think this has been formally proposed before. Why do we not have an official policy surrounding species notability? WP:NSPECIES is a de facto policy because all species that verifiably exist (i.e. have a correct/valid name) are always kept at AfD. This is somewhat confusing because everyone seems to have agreed that all species are notable, but no official policy is written anywhere. It's an unwritten SNG.
I think, given how this is our current policy in practice anyway, a new SNG needs to be written specifically about species ― species that verifiably exist (published in a reliable academic publication; can be checked through reputable taxonomy databases like CoL) are inherently notable.
Agreed. It is de facto long standing policy because, so long as the species is officially recognized and categorized by the relevant authorities, there is inherently significant academic coverage of the species itself, which was required for it to be officially recognized in the first place to describe it. SilverserenC18:18, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
NSPECIES as it is, is a very small non-contradictory rule which IMO does not require much explanation. Maybe just add a subsection into WP:SNG? - Altenmann>talk19:05, 23 June 2024 (UTC)
@Clearfrienda There's currently a discussion at WT:Notability about this; to keep discussion in one place you might want to join there. I proposed a similar thing at WT:TOL last year (see this discussion), and I agree with you, but lots of people are interested in this topic and it can difficult to come to a consensus. For example, I have concerns about sub-stubs, which I think should be up-merged per WP:PAGEDECIDE, but some editors are very opposed to that, so it remains a bit of a controversial topic. Cremastra (talk) 13:27, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Controversy is a strong word... in practice, we have hundreds of thousands of standalone articles for individual species and they are rarely, if ever, even challenged at AfD, let alone deleted. And that has been the status quo for as long as I've been editing. That a few people have lately decided to make taxonomy the next front in their Great War on Stubs is completely insignificant compared to that level of implied consensus and shouldn't be a barrier to accurately documenting the existing practice in a guideline. – Joe (talk) 14:27, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Would it be possible to start an RfC on the matter? I don't imagine a proposal promoting NSPECIES to official policy would be that controversial ― as Joe said, this has always been the status quo. In practice, articles — even stubs — are never deleted at AfD. This whole process seems overly bureaucratic when this has been the uncontested policy forever. CFA💬15:03, 24 June 2024 (UTC)
Support, to be recognized as a species inherently requires significant scientific coverage in the form of complex description upon the species being published, and there is also always the potential to add a meaningful picture of the species. This is in no way giving something an article in which there is nothing encyclopedic to say, like for non-notable astronomical objects regarding which almost all of them have almost no unique details and nothing worth photographing (contra a comparison made at WT:Notability). Deleting or upmerging stubs disincentivizes people from expanding these articles. Crossroads-talk-00:46, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
There are estimated to be literally trillions of species of microbes alone. Theyareconstantlybeingdiscovered (56 new species reported between January 1 and March 1 2024, and that's only looking at the ones in Western Anglophone journals that got press coverage on the first page of my google results). Across all domains about 18,000 new species are discovered per year. Are we seriously going to consider every single one of them inherently notable? What makes a new species so much more encyclopedic than, say, a new strain of C. elegans or new minor astronomical body if they're both the subject of significant primary discussion in a research article, get officially recognized and named by an international scientific org, have their (primary) descriptions and potentially hundreds of individual attributes curated in international databases, and then receive zero secondary attention forever after? Why would we afford notability to a new species based solely on its entirely-primary-source discovery article but not to literally any other scientific discovery, the rest of which are required, like every other GNG topic and especially anything STEM, to be the subject of multiple independent sources of secondary SIGCOV in order to have standalones, and in fact are supposed to have secondary coverage to even be mentioned anywhere on WP? JoelleJay (talk) 05:19, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Very often a C. elegans variant will actually have some secondary coverage in dozens of papers as well as continuous new observations from primary research that get added to professionally curated databases. See example phenotype "generally disgusting worm" (assigned to eat-3 null ad426). This isn't enough for the topic to meet NOR, so why would something with even less secondary coverage be acceptable? JoelleJay (talk) 06:04, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
There is no such thing as presumed notability. Period, end of story. If a species is the subject of significant coverage in reliable sources, then it is eligible for a Wikipedia article. If not, then it isn't. For sake of efficiency, it is often useful to cover multiple closely related species in an article about their genus. This is normal. As for the assertion that there are trillions of species of microbes, I care about that fact (if it is true) as much as I care about the fact that there are trillions of individual grains of sand and trillions of individual leaves of grass. If one of those trillions of microbe species has received sufficient coverage in the scientific literature, then so be it. Write an article. If the other 99.999999999% of microbe species lack that coverage at this time, then so be it. Don't try to write those articles at this time. Wikipedia is, after all, a work in progress. Cullen328 (talk) 06:27, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
@Cullen328 So if, say, there was a species of rare worm which was described in considerable detail in its original, open-access description in 1995, but was only mentioned once in the literature since then, and only as part of list of worms found in Myanmar, do you think it would be OK to write an article about the worm? Cremastra (talk) 12:55, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Why is it a problem to have a guideline that confers inherent notability to potentially trillions of subjects without any evidence that the vast majority are likely to have received the required secondary (=not the original discovery paper, not automatic database listings) independent (=no shared authors with original paper) coverage? JoelleJay (talk) 16:40, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Normally when we use independent in this context we mean of the topic, can you explain what you mean by indepedent if you're contending that its based on the relationships of the sources to each other? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:43, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
How can an author ever be "multiple" independent sources? The discoverers of new scientific results are clearly covered by the sentiment of The barometer of notability is whether people independent of the topic itself (or of its manufacturer, creator, author, inventor, or vendor) and by the fact that such people would have an indisputable COI with those results (Any external relationship—personal, religious, political, academic, legal, or financial (including holding a cryptocurrency)—can trigger a COI.. How could someone who has a COI constituting significant vested interest in the subject also be an independent source on the subject? JoelleJay (talk) 17:08, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm so lost here, you're saying that WP:COI somehow applies? Are the discoverers also the wikipedia editors who added the information? Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:36, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
What Cremastra said, but also it is very common for the authors of scientific papers to refspam their work on Wikipedia. One of my labmates created an article on the phenomenon my lab discovered in order to elevate its profile while he was looking for jobs; this was on the advice of another student in the department who had done the same thing. Self-promo in science is a huge problem. JoelleJay (talk) 18:15, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, they can't be considered independent of the results... But the results are not the topic of the wikipedia article in this context. The results are their published work, so its only non-indepedent if the wikipedia page is about the published work. Anything beyond that would be outside what has historically been understood as consensus on the issue. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:27, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
But the context we're talking about is the independence of an author to the subject and their ability to count towards the "multiple" part of GNG. Once someone has written on a topic, additional works on that topic by the same person are not considered independent of each other: Lack of multiple sources suggests that the topic may be more suitable for inclusion in an article on a broader topic. ... Several journals simultaneously publishing different articles does not always constitute multiple works, especially when the authors are relying on the same sources, and merely restating the same information. Similarly, a series of publications by the same author or in the same periodical is normally counted as one source.JoelleJay (talk) 18:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
The quotes only seem to speak about "their ability to count towards the "multiple" part of GNG" not the independence of an author from the subject. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:09, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm not sure I see how someone being a discoverer of a species equals being non-independent and their works being unable to contribute to notability for that species? Would this also mean that, for example, those who do extensive research about previously 'unknown' historical figures would be non-independent for those historical figures? What about a plain journalist who writes an in-depth article about someone previously not having significant coverage? Would that significant coverage be disqualified because the author was the 'discoverer' of that notable person? BeanieFan11 (talk) 18:42, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
The "independence" I am referring to here is in two contexts, the first of which being a scientific paper author's relationship to their research discoveries or novel theories. Because they have a vested interest in promoting their own findings/interpretations, we would not consider a secondary review article that they write on that topic to be an example of "independent attention". For example, someone who discovers a new calcium signaling pathway X would not be an independent source if they wrote a review article (or lay summary, or book) on that particular pathway, even if they were also citing other researcher's results, because their interest in the subject is inextricably linked to their own self-interests. However, if they wrote a review article on calcium signaling in general that happened to include discussion of pathway X, that review article would be sufficiently independent for the topics it covers that don't involve X. I am not familiar enough with non-science research to know how much this would apply to other fields. The second context is the common guideline-supported practice of treating multiple articles by the same author as not independent of each other. JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't think we're ever going to have trillions of articles, for many reasons. But if we did, it would be a tremendous achievement. Even putting aside your highly original interpretations of the words "secondary" and "independent" here, I don't think you need a secondary, independent source to write an acceptable stub on a species and I think that's amply evidenced by the existence of hundreds of thousands of such stubs which are practically never deleted. – Joe (talk) 16:50, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
What part of our policy that scientific article findings are primary is a "highly original interpretation"? And why have secondary and independent source requirements at all if the only criterion that really matters is "can you write an acceptable stub based on RS"? Do you think someone couldn't write a substantial article covering the results of any other scientific research paper? Do you think the journals that publish species discoveries have more rigorous peer review -- to the extent that an identification is being formally validated by someone independent -- than any other journal? If not, why do you think the initial announcement of a species and its acceptance by the governing nom code makes the discovery not need critical analysis or contextualization of its claims when the journals are just as likely (actually, far more likely, given that a discovery does not need to be reliably published in order for its name to be officially adopted) to suffer issues of accuracy, data falsification, etc.? JoelleJay (talk) 23:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
Because this isn't a new idea. Notability on Wikipedia, in practice, is not always based on independent sources — maybe it should be, but that's a different question altogether. For example, WP:NPOL recognizes all politicians with national/state office as presumed notable. There are tens of thousands of politicians on Wikipedia where their only coverage is a mention on the government's website, but are considered notable anyways (i.e. they are not deleted at AfD). We're saying species should also be designated as such, because the discovery of a species requires enough coverage to write an article (there is always significant coverage). CFA💬13:26, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
If the "brief description" is in a primary research article then it still fails our policy requiring secondary sources. JoelleJay (talk) 16:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
But what exactly is a primary research article? I would argue that a paper describing a new species is still secondary; the primary source would be the lab results, field notes, etc. Cremastra (talk) 16:36, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
That is explicitly not what our policy says. a scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source for the outcome of that experiment. and a review article that analyzes research papers in a field is a secondary source for the research. Our policy is based on the academic designation of research articles as primary sources--see, e.g., our citations to Ithaca College which states In the natural and social sciences, primary sources are often empirical studies -- research where an experiment was done or a direct observation was made. The results of empirical studies are typically found in scholarly articles or papers delivered at conferences, so those articles and papers that present the original results are considered primary sources.JoelleJay (talk) 16:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, and I assume "at least a brief description" would be carried up to the SNG. However, the vast majority of species (if not all) will always have enough coverage to write an article. Even your example, Acidobacteria bacterium, which was identified computationally, still has significant coverage outside of the taxon database [3][4][5]CFA💬17:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, this is true. My earlier reply was a bit misleading. Do I believe all of these unclassified species should have independent articles? No, and I think an AfD would result in a redirect because there just isn't enough description. But I don't think this changes anything about this discussion. If we were to turn NSPECIES into a policy, we would most likely state species are "presumed" notable if there is a brief description. This does not apply to these unclassified species, and I doubt anyone would bother creating them because of how little there is to write. CFA💬18:14, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
But why should a brief description in a primary source, with demonstrably no coverage in secondary independent sources, afford us even a presumption that IRS SIGCOV exists? It doesn't work that way for any other topic, since in all cases where notability is presumed the presumption rests on this sourcing actually currently existing. JoelleJay (talk) 18:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
This comment seems to elide two different senses of "presumed". In cases like the NSPORTS SNG, the presumpton is that GNG sourcing exists. Other SNGs, like NPROF, create a direct presumption that a topic merits an article. A SPECIES presumption of notability could be the latter kind, not the former. Newimpartial (talk) 20:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
NPROF is also based on the presumpton is that GNG sourcing exists, it is not a direct presumption that a topic merits an article but a recognition that almost everyone who meets NPROF is going to have sufficient sources even if they're not available digitally. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't think that is true either in the wording of the guideline or in its practical implementation at AfD. In terms of wording, I take the key paragraph of WP:NPROF to be:
This guideline is independent from the other subject-specific notability guidelines, such as WP:BIO, WP:MUSIC, WP:AUTH, etc., and is explicitly listed as an alternative to the general notability guideline ... failure to meet either the general notability guideline or other subject-specific notability guidelines is irrelevant if an academic is notable under this guideline (emphasis added).
The plain reading of this paragraph, I think, is that a topic meeting NPROF does not have to also meet GNG.
In terms of practical implementation, articles about people who are found to meet NPROF are routinely kept at AfD whether or not GNG sourcing (or NBASIC sourcing, which is typically the relevant guideline rather than GNG and which sets a slightly higher bar for sourcing) is available. Newimpartial (talk) 17:53, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
That just seems like a frustrated explanation of what a subject-specific notability guideline is, all SNG are technically independent of each other and the GNG. Can you name a case where a subject was kept under NPROF where the presumption that GNG exists can't be made? Remember that even under GNG the sources don't have to be available, there just has to be a reasonable belief that they exist. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 18:59, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
To answer your question, I'm not going to pretend to be able to prove a negative, especially if you meant "the presumption that GNG exists can't be made even if the decision to keep made no mention of or reference to GNG sourcing". I don't think that kind of proof is epistemologically available.
I was, however, quite readily able to find this discussion, resulting in a clear keep result, where no presumption of GNG sourcing was made by any participant in the discussion and when the resulting article lacks GNG sourcing of the subject. To interpret this discussion as presuming that GNG (or NBASIC) could be met would be a rather tortured reading of the discussion, I think.
As far as your interpretation of the language of NPROF, you aren't really articulating the community consensus about what it means. A wide range of editors from quite varying perspectives on article retention have all agreed that NPROF represents one kind of presumption of notability (independent of GNG) and NSPORT represents another kind of presumption (a mere presumption that GNG sourcing exists). Please see, for example, the extended discussions on this topic that produced the current text of WP:SNG. If your view is that NPROF and NSPORT function in the same way and offer equivalent indicators of notability, I dare say that is not a widely-held view. Even NPROF-skeptics typically accept that the presumption of notability it offers is not, under most circumstances, rebuttable if its criteria are clearly met. Newimpartial (talk) 19:46, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I'm not asking you to prove a negative. The participants in that discussion don't seem to have explained themselves to the point where you would be able to know whether they thought that there were presumptions about sourcing being made and the subject is borderline even under GNG (especially as no check appears to have been made in the native language of a person not born in an English speaking country nor was it listed in Taiwan related deletion discussions). Horse Eye's Back (talk) 20:09, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
What I'm saying, about the discussion I linked above, is that I don't see any reasonable interptetation of it that would conclude that the decision was made based on a presumption of GNG sourcing.
In fact, the only way I could see anyone even venturing that interpretation would be if they made the a prori assumption that all SNG decisions involve a presumption of GNG sourcing - an assumption that is rebutted directly both by P&G language and by what most editors say when they interpret or propose to change P&G language. Newimpartial (talk) 19:06, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
We don't have enough information to conclude that the decision was not made based on a presumption of GNG sourcing either. I'm saying "We don't know" and you're saying "We do know, and we know because you can't prove that we don't know" Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:40, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
HEB, really: just go read the archives from 10–15 years at at WT:NPROF. We know why this guideline was written this way. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
HEB: that's an interesting set of statements, but it doesn't really reflect what I'm saying. I'm not saying "we know nobody presumed GNG sourcing exists" which, given that people don't always communicate their thought process, would be a lot like proving a negative.
I'm saying, "we don't have any evidence that anyone in that linked discussion presumed that GNG sourcing exists" and that, without evidence, it is unreasonable to reach the conclusion that anyone made that presumption. No, this isn't an answer to your original challenge - essentially, "show me a case where nobody made that presumption" - because I don't think that threshold is germane. If there isn't any evidence that decisions are made on that basis for this set of cases, the scholastic postulate that maybe they could have been made that way (without leaving a trace in the discussion) doesn't really tell us anything about how editors understand P&Gs or what they mean.
More relevant, perhaps: I'm also saying, "we have a lot of evidence, from WP:N itself and discussions around it, that many editors interptet NPROF as being satisfied without making any assertions or assumptions about GNG sourcing." That claim isn't influenced one way or another by how many presumptions fit on the head of a pin. Newimpartial (talk) 16:56, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
HEB, I agree with Newimpartial. NPROF is actually based on the idea that GNG-type sourcing will never be available for most worthy/deserving/desired academics, so an exceptional process needs to be carved out that does not require either (true) independent or secondary sources.
"notability in academia comes from influence of one's academic work on the research of other scholars... Academics, even very prominent ones, are rarely written about personally..." [link]
"the WP:N/WP:BIO requirement that the academic be the subject of those reliable sources...would eliminate virtually all truely influential (but not newsworthy) thinkers" [link]
The idea is that if enough people cite your work (e.g., by H index), then the "About Prof Alice Expert" page on your university website should be enough to write the article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:53, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
I hear what both of you are saying... But nobody has been able to point to a case where we have a clear NPROF pass and a clear GNG fail. Even if we're describing outcomes and not intentions if on the ven diagram 99% (well within the "presume" standard) of those who pass NPROF also pass GNG what is the difference between the two statements? On its face "the idea that GNG-type sourcing will never be available for most worthy/deserving/desired academics" is false, the vast vast majority of such academics on wikipedia meet GNG. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:10, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
To answer your question: the difference, of course, is whether the GNG is - as a certain reductionist interptetation holds - a "universal" rule that underlies the rest of WP:N, including the SNGs. Or, by contrast, can an SNG (like NPROF) offer a strong presumption of meriting an article, rather than a weak presumption that can be rebutted by a strenuous search for "GNG" sources?
If you don't like my linked example because nobody seems to have looked seriously for Chinese-language sources, fair enough. But I could just as easily have pulled up an NPROF AfD where all relevant sources would be in English. The fact remains that articles are routinely kept at AfD based on the NPROF criteria without any GNG (or rather NBASIC) sources being looked for or used in these articles - because that isn't the way most of the community understands NPROF to work. Its presumption to merit an article isn't rebuttable in that way. Newimpartial (talk) 17:22, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
All SNG presumptions are rebuttable in that way "Therefore, topics which pass an SNG are presumed to merit an article, though articles which pass an SNG or the GNG may still be deleted or merged into another article, especially if adequate sourcing or significant coverage cannot be found, or if the topic is not suitable for an encyclopedia." Horse Eye's Back (talk) 17:26, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
@Horse Eye's Back, consider Glenn Lipscomb, sourced – and as far as a quick WP:BEFORE search indicates, can only be sourced – entirely to media controlled by his past and present employers.
They're not even trying to find SIGCOV; they're only saying things like "held this post, therefore automatically notable" or "the H-index is this, therefore automatically notable". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:24, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
The passage HEB is quoting actually says that any presumption to merit an article - whether based on SNG or GNG - can be outweighed by other factors. It certainly doesn't say that an SNG presumption can be refuted by a failure to find GNG sourcing, and there are two kinds of reasons for this:
GNG sourcing may not be sufficient to write an appropriate encyclopaedia article.
Sourcing that doesn't necessarily meet GNG may be sufficient to write an appropriate encyclopaedia article.
The passage quoted reflects both of these scenarios, and a typical PROF biography that relies largely on non-independent and ABOUTSELF sources - to add detail about someone who unambiguously meets the criteria of professional standing NPROF requires - may be one of the best examples of the latter case.
I will also point out that as one of the two or three editors most responsible for drafting the sentence HEB is quoting, leading up to to the SNG RfC, I have a reasonably good idea what editors were thinking when it was proposed and then achieved consensus.
Also, to take up an earlier comment by HEB: while I haven't done a systematic survey, I would be very surprised if 99% of academic biographies satisfied GNG/NBASIC sourcing requirements. This certainty isn't true of of the unrepresentative sample discussed (and often kept) at AfD. I am equally convinced that, if we applied to PROF articles the rebuttable presumption (and requirement for independent, non-ROUTINE sourcing) we apply to NSPORTS articles, many, many articles on academics would have to be deleted. Newimpartial (talk) 19:18, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
@Clearfrienda, I dispute the claim that there is always SIGCOV; there are species identified merely by applying an algorithm to genetic sequencing data that may get no more than a mention among many others in one paper. And anyway even if a species does get SIGCOV in its discovery paper, per policy that coverage is not secondary, and per policy articles cannot exist if they can't be based mainly on secondary sources. Also our notability guideline does in fact require that independent sourcing exists for all article subjects, even the ones that are presumed notable through SNGs. JoelleJay (talk) 16:30, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't doubt there are some obscure computationally-identified species that just aren't described enough, but the vast majority of species will have enough coverage to write an article. I don't think it's a problem that some of those articles will be stubs for a long time — Wikipedia is a work in progress. So perhaps species should be "presumed" notable instead of "inherently" notable. As to your other point, essentially all species will have some independent coverage to show notability. In other cases, in practice, secondary sourcing is not always needed to prove notability. Species, politicians, and other SNG-applicable articles are kept all the time at AfD even when there's only primary sourcing. CFA💬17:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Secondary sourcing is required for a subject to be notable. Policies always trump guidelines. And politicians are kept because meeting NPOL presumes notability-conferring secondary coverage exists; the overarching WP:N guideline still asserts that to actually be notable secondary independent SIGCOV must exist. JoelleJay (talk) 17:44, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
What do you think of the article Esculenta created, Astrothelium chulumanense, which relies entirely on the primary discovery paper? If this turned up at AfD, should it be deleted? I've seen many articles like this at AfD that rely entirely on primary sources, but are still kept based on their "presumed" notability. CFA💬18:17, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Maybe we should send it to AFD to gauge community consensus on the issue? It seems to be a good example of the "only a single primary source exists" problem. Esculenta (talk) 18:37, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I would !vote to redirect it to Astrothelium. Articles should not be based on a single primary research paper. AfDs don't represent global consensus, even when there are many going a given direction. There were thousands of AfDs that were kept for sportspeople based on the presumptions of notability of a few dozen editors who !voted at every AfD, but those presumptions were later strongly determined not to align with global consensus and were deprecated. JoelleJay (talk) 18:38, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Am wondering why you would !vote to redirect rather than deletion? Leaving a redirect would result in a bluelink in the species listing, leaving the incorrect impression that an article exists when it does not. Merging the content into the parent genus article also doesn't make sense, as it's much more detailed than what a genus level article should cover. Esculenta (talk) 18:49, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
The species listing in the redirect target would not show the species as a blue link. And you're right, merging all the content would not be appropriate as it would not be WP:BALASP. However a full article on the subject is also not appropriate if it can only be based on the one primary paper, since it does not demonstrate that people independent of the topic itself ... considered the topic worth writing and publishing non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it (it shows only that the authors who first described it have written about it) and the information it provides has not been filtered through secondary analysis determining which aspects are the most relevant (how can we say one particular character described in the original paper belongs in the encyclopedia but another does not? we generally need a secondary independent source to highlight specifics from the primary source to show that its inclusion is warranted, and ideally to provide further context on it). JoelleJay (talk) 19:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
So we can't put the content in the genus article, because you claim it would violate NPOV, and we can't have an independent article, because you claim it is not notable. How very convenient, then; the article is deleted de facto. I have to congratulate you, JoelleJay: I used to consider myself an "exclusionist/deletionist", but you have managed to convince me otherwise, back over to "inclusionism". Deleting the article, for the information it provides, is a disservice to the reader who relies on Wikipedia to reliably summarize knowledge on a given topic. Deleting the article is putting policy before the reader.Cremastra (talk) 20:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I didn't say no content should be merged! I said it would not be appropriate to merge all the content! And anyway why do you believe material only found in a single primary source is inherently worthy of being included on wikipedia? Can you articulate why info on a species is so much more encyclopedic than info on an astronomical body or protein homolog or literally anything else? Can you explain why the guideline text I quote is incompatible with building an encyclopedia but only for species? JoelleJay (talk) 20:16, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Not to mention that you know I support @BilledMammal's proposed treatment of content on non-notable species, including the incorporation of certain basic facts into the genus article, so why you would suddenly escalate to this level of hostility after I've made every effort to be respectful and impersonal in this discussion makes zero sense. JoelleJay (talk) 20:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
My apologies; my tone was not suitable. I will strike the inappropriate parts of my comment.
In fact, if I've gotten to the point where I can't respond civilly, then there is no point in me contributing to this discussion. I've said all I want to say. This isn't out of bitterness or a "rage quit". Cremastra (talk) 20:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Well, yes, this was partly why I started this discussion. I've noticed editors will frequently use "Keep: per WP:NSPECIES" in species-related AfDs. This doesn't make much sense because NSPECIES is just a sentence saying they "generally survive AfD," so citing it in an AfD is circular and unhelpful. Sourcing is rarely looked at; they are usually just kept without any debate. The point of this discussion was to hopefully gather broader consensus on the matter, instead of continuing with the default-to-keep status quo. I think a global RfC needs to be started, but I'll wait a bit before opening one. CFA💬19:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
JoelleJay, while it's possible that over a trillion species exist, this 2017 source from the Quarterly Review of Biology states that most [estimates] project around 11 million species or fewer. They do go on to argue it is higher, dominated by bacteria, but this 2019 study says that there exist globally about 0.8–1.6 million prokaryotic OTUs (or operational taxonomic units; for unaware readers, bacteria are a subset of prokaryotes). It's also possible we could say that only eukaryotic or multicellular species are presumptively notable, similar to how WP:NASTRO uses cutoffs based on things like visual magnitude, though I don't even think this is necessary.
They are constantly being discovered - so? New current events are constantly happening, new people are becoming famous, new movies, video games, and so on are getting made, and so on forever. In fact, these things are theoretically limitless while the number of species on Earth is sadly going down.
and in fact are supposed to have secondary coverage to even be mentioned anywhere on WP? - to be clear, are you saying that species that have never been discussed in a scientific review article should not even be mentioned on Wikipedia? Whether this is a requirement for coverage or for separate articles, I think mandating review articles would be incredibly destructive to our coverage of life on this planet. Zoology, botany, etc. are massively underfunded and under-researched compared to stuff like biomedicine, covered by WP:MEDRS and its strict review article rules. Crossroads-talk-21:53, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Even if the total number of species is "only" in the tens of millions, that should still be an indication that "new species" is not necessarily a precious designation of supreme scientific interest, but rather can in many situations amount to routine gene sequencing discoveries. I absolutely do not think we should be using a single notability criterion for all species across all kingdoms, especially considering the fundamental differences in how species are even defined by the many independent bodies tasked with "recognizing" a species in a particular clade. There is no globally accepted taxonomic list of species, and this paper suggests that while such a database is critically needed, it requires an authoritative consensus on species definitions and taxonomic governance across multiple disciplines that does not yet exist. The paper also references a Nature article that highlighted a major problem with how policy/the general public view "species" and how taxonomists and biologists view them:
Policy assumes that species are unambiguously definable, discrete, fixed entities that can be readily and straightforwardly listed for protection or management. However, in the sciences of species delimitation and classification (i.e., taxonomy and systematics), species are hypotheses that are mutable and contestable in the face of new knowledge and are often based on subjective interpretations of existing knowledge. This is because taxonomy is essentially a two-step enterprise—first, biodiversity and groups are quantified, described, and delimited by means of the best scientific methodology available, and then these results are translated into names and ranks. While the first step is strictly scientific and produces testable hypotheses, the second additionally depends on executive decisions about where to draw the line (e.g., between subspecies and species), and these decisions necessarily depend on subjective preferences such as one’s preferred species concept or the nature of discordance among different data types.
The paper further notes For example, a single authoritative global species list would have in-built quality control protecting users from the confusion resulting from names created through what has been called taxonomic vandalism, referencing this paper discussing the harm created by improperly-maintained species lists. That paper also emphasizes the fact that the "species" designation is not a discrete, stable taxonomic unit and the significant issues out-of-date info present:
It has been understood for many years that inadequate or ambiguous taxonomy and nomenclature for species can have negative impacts on conservation, medicine, and other fields ... This happens in part because taxonomic names are often used as though they are stable hypotheses, when in fact taxonomies often have a degree of uncertainty and flux. Changes to species names or, often more importantly, changes to the concept of what a name means can have far-reaching implications for decision-making, regulation, and policy development. While taxonomic inflation (Isaac et al., 2004) or vandalism (Rhodin et al., 2015) can exacerbate these problems, even the normal growth of taxonomic knowledge can cause problems when not treated carefully. Problems can also occur when new taxonomic information fails to reach some users or when different users interpret taxonomic names, knowledge, or uncertainty in different ways. For some taxonomic groups, this can lead to multiple variants or competing taxonomies in different national jurisdictions or regions or even multiple competing global lists.
If even professional taxonomic orgs have significant problems with lack of quality control, duplicated effort, conflicts of interest, lack of currency, and confusion in the scientific use of taxonomic information, how can Wikipedia hope to curate a gigantic database of mostly primary data that are constantly changing?I'm also not saying a species needs to be discussed in a review article -- only that it must be discussed in a secondary independent context somewhere. This can be in background sections of other primary articles, lay media, or anywhere else that would normally be accepted for every other scientific topic on WP. JoelleJay (talk) 17:01, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I would oppose such a SNG being enacted. Every species name should be a blue link of some sort, but it may be appropriate at times to redirect to a higher level taxonomic class per WP:NOPAGE. Mach6115:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
This discussion is very interesting to me, because one of my long-term goals is to create a page for every lichen species. Many of the articles I create lack the "independent secondary coverage" that seems to be at the root of this argument. Two recent examples (of many): Astrothelium chulumanense, described as a new species in 2023, has not been been mentioned in any other sources (AFAICT), and so has only the single (primary) source; Aggregatorygma lichexanthonicum (new in 2022), has also not been mentioned in any secondary publication, but is "accepted" by the nomenclatural authority Species Fungorum, and consequently, is listed at the Catalogue of Life, which is used as the second source in the article. According to our current rules, the first article shouldn't exist on Wikipedia (and maybe the name of the species shouldn't be mentioned in its genus article?), and it's unclear if the second would pass a completely rules-based AFD. So I would like it if we could assess community support to make WP:NSPECIES a policy; it would help me evaluate if my objectives align with Wikipedia's. Esculenta (talk) 17:51, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Thank you for this helpful, collaborative, non-defensive comment. I also hope that the community will eventually be able to answer your question. JoelleJay (talk) 18:00, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
The fact that a quality, in-depth article based on a "primary" source is possible is evidence that WP:NSPECIES makes more sense than WP:GNG here. Deleting it would be clearly counter-productive, and we put readers, not policy, first. Cremastra (talk) 18:03, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
A quality, in-depth article could be created from any scientific research paper (or autobiography, or live newscast). Yet we still have policy stating articles must be based on secondary sources. JoelleJay (talk) 18:43, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Does a paper about the discovery of a new species really qualify as a "research paper" though? It's not as if they're studying the species' reaction to anything, it's just "hey look we found a thing" Sock-the-guy (talk) 19:22, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Um... yes. They did research to find and describe the thing, and in doing so increased knowledge. See research: "creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge". Cremastra (talk) 19:30, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
By claiming I'm "making a point", by extension ("Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point"), you are claiming I'm being disruptive. How is it being disruptive to determine if an article I created should actually be on Wikipedia (and by learning so, determine if I should continue writing these articles or not?) Esculenta (talk) 20:12, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
You explicitly nominated this article not because you believe it should be deleted, but because you think its outcome will "demonstrate a consensus" that you can use as evidence in this discussion. That is disruptive! JoelleJay (talk) 20:23, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
How exactly do you know what I believe? I want to know if I should continue making similar species articles (I have a couple of hundred similar ones on the backburner that I intend to publish, or not, depending on how that discussion goes). I think your accusations are disruptive. Esculenta (talk) 20:31, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Even if you "don't know what the community consensus is on species notability", bringing something to AfD just to answer that question for yourself is already inappropriate; nominating something for the explicit purpose of using an outcome as evidence in a dispute you are involved in is objectively POINTY and bad-faith. JoelleJay (talk) 20:49, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Nonsense. Bringing to AfD an article of questionable notability is exactly what that process is for. Re: "nominating something for the explicit purpose of using an outcome as evidence in a dispute you are involved in"; I'm not involved in a dispute, but it seems that you are, and you are attempting to shut down discussion about the type of edge-case article discussed above. That appears to be objectively bad-faith. Esculenta (talk) 20:57, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
If articles like these get deleted because of legalistic application of rules, then those rules are not fit for purpose. WP:GNG wasn't handed down from heaven. We have tons of extremely specific and detailed articles on outdated current events that had a burst of editing years ago but that essentially no one cares about anymore (take a deep dive into the cruft in the Category:COVID-19 pandemic tree for an example), that will never be deleted because they were covered in the news back in the day. The thought of keeping and proliferating the sort of ephemeral junk that technically meets WP:GNG and deleting articles on biodiversity is the most compelling case for WP:IAR I have ever seen. Crossroads-talk-22:05, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
But the problem with WP:IAR is that it's subjective and open to interpretation (unlike the actual rules). What if I believe a species article created with only a single source (and no others are available) is "bad" (using Wikipedia's guidelines on significant and secondary coverage), and that removing it improves the encyclopedia? In this case, my IAR conflicts with your IAR, and the established rules take precedence. Esculenta (talk) 22:21, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I think any even mildly contentious content discussion shows that the "actual rules" are very often both subjective and open to interpretation. And regardless, IAR is policy, superior to GNG as currently written (which is changeable if we deem it to demand undesirable outcomes, and is only a guideline). What happens when one person's IAR conflicts with another is that consensus develops, and that has resulted in the status quo described at WP:NSPECIES. Crossroads-talk-22:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Well, if it's that blatantly obvious that we make an exception to WP:SIGCOV for species, and that consensus has built up to do this, can we put put this down in "official" writing, and link to this and similar discussion so as to not use up the communities' valuable time in the future? (This is directed to the community in general, not to you specifically, Crossroads). Esculenta (talk) 22:42, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I think the best course of action from here is to start an RfC. Too much of this discussion has gone off-topic. I'm just not sure about how it should be worded. Should it be kept simple, with a Support/Oppose question like "Should WP:NSPECIES become an official SNG?" or "Should all species that verifiably exist be presumed notable?", or should it have multiple options based on the discussion above? CFA💬23:28, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Before doing this, based on how much microbes are a sticking point in this discussion and the fact that WP:NSPECIES specifically justifies itself based on zoology and botany, there might need to be more attention to how microbial species definition works and if they get published in the literature without saying anything encyclopedic we can meaningfully relay (e.g. if they're just a genetic sequence, that seems too flimsy). Would NSPECIES apply to single-celled eukaryotes, prokaryotes, and even viruses? A codified NSPECIES could be sunk, backfiring on botany, zoology, and mycology, if it doesn't account for relevant differences in how those simpler organisms are published, if there are such differences. Crossroads-talk-02:44, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, I agree. I think the proposal should focus primarily on zoology and botany (as that is what is described in WP:NSPECIES). But I imagine since this proposal refers to "Notability (species)," microbes should be mentioned somewhere. Perhaps they should be subject to a sub-guideline inside of "Notability (species)" that accounts for the microbes with minimal-to-no coverage? CFA💬03:19, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Yeah, it's becoming evident that a simple upgrading of the current NSPECIES won't work. I think if a full NSPECIES guideline is desired, the various biology and taxonomy Wikiprojects (like WP:TOL) should collaborate on developing a new, more detailed NSPECIES that (1) satisfies editors in the field that it won't result in purging or deletion of encyclopedic content, and (2) is thought likely to pass an RfC to become a proper guideline. WP:NASTRO could be a model - another scientific field with a vast number of known objects of study, not all of which have encyclopedic things to say about them. I'd suggest specifying guidance for everything biologically classified, leaving no gaps in the tree of life. Guidance for viruses, bacteria and archaea, single-celled eukaryotes, multicellular fungi, non-plant multicellular algae (like red algae and brown algae), plants (botany), and animals (zoology), with dividing headings as needed. Paleontological species should be covered too. Crossroads-talk-04:29, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I am not convinced that "there are species identified merely by applying an algorithm to genetic sequencing data" is true, at least not in a way that's relevant to this discussion. Genetic data can be used to identify operational taxonomic units that could be described as species, but the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes requires a cultured type and a description to describe a valid prokaryotic species. As in eukaryotic taxonomy, the description provides important context to define the species and diagnose it in relation to others, and creating these descriptions is a major bottleneck in the recognition of species. To quote from the code, "A proposal to allow the use of gene sequences as type material for the naming of prokaryotes was rejected by the ICSP in 2020." So while we may be able to estimate that trillions (billions and billions?) of species exist, the vast majority are not valid, published species under the appropriate Code, due to lack of description, the criterion invoked in WP:NSPECIES, and hence irrelevant to this discussion. Choess (talk) 04:21, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Being identified algorithmically doesn't mean a type culture doesn't exist. It can mean new methods of quantifying genetic identity have been applied to samples in an existing reference library of accepted cultures that affect their species designations. JoelleJay (talk) 18:42, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
The type culture is a side point; the key is the description/diagnosis, which provides the basis for a meaningful article. That said, having dug on my own for a Pseudomonas taxonomy paper I vaguely remembered, the descriptions provided are very pro forma compared to what I'd expect for a eukaryotic species. The current wording of NSPECIES only applies to eukaryotes, and I'd be OK with keeping that scope if it were elevated to an SNG (that is, excluding prokaryotic species). Choess (talk) 19:32, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, we definitely should exclude prokaryotes. But what makes eukaryote species recognition by its governing nomenclature codes an automatic stamp of scientific acceptance and reliability of the discovery and its described characters? The ICZN recognizes as valid species identifications reported in non-peer-reviewed, self-published journals, with the assumption that eventually other researchers encountering those species may individually decide to ignore their official entry in the taxonomic registry and resubmit the species under a new name, and the scientific community will decide which version is "correct" by whichever nomenclature they use in practice. Does that mean Wikipedia articles can be based solely on descriptions in these non-peer-reviewed SPS that may dramatically conflict with existing taxonomic organization and formulation, and may contain egregious errors? What if no other researchers encounter the species or comment on inaccuracies it introduces? If we were to reject such sources as unreliable, why is it that we would draw a line with the RS guideline but not observe the policy requirement for secondary sources? And what level of scrutiny should editors apply to ensure an ICZN-endorsed species was described in RS? JoelleJay (talk) 20:27, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Just in case anyone is trying to figure out where the policy requirement for secondary sources comes from, since notability rules are all guidelines:
The only problem is that when this "requirement" (which is a "should", not a "must", BTW) was written, the main definition of secondary sources in use was "secondhand accounts", which includes, e.g., breaking news and gossip and other things that we would consider independent but primary now. Read more at WT:N if you want a little more history, but our definition at NOR has changed since that sentence was written, and all of WP:N was written with the original definition. It might be appropriate to interpret the policy rule with the definition that was in force at the time this sentence was written. See, e.g., the policy as it stood in 2010.
That is not (only) "where the requirement" comes from. As mentioned numerous times in discussion with you, I am referring to the much stronger policy statement Policy:Do not base an entire article on primary sources, and be cautious about basing large passages on them. Your claim that "secondary sources have a different definition now, therefore all the PAGs demanding we use them must be ignored" is based entirely on what you think one editor who added the language in the location you quote considered a "secondary source", while conveniently eliding the fact that surely someone would have realized that our repeated, explicit statements requiring secondary sources, across multiple different PAGs, conflicted with the "new" definitions of secondary sources, especially things like a scientific paper documenting a new experiment conducted by the author is a primary source for the outcome of that experiment. that were being incorporated directly adjacent to those statements. JoelleJay (talk) 23:26, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
Sure, we've (I've) "realized that our repeated, explicit statements requiring secondary sources, across multiple different PAGs, conflicted with the "new" definitions of secondary sources". I have been talking about it for years, especially wrt to the GNG. The decisions we make in practice (e.g., AFDs accepting recent news articles as proof of notability for current events) do not align with the written rules (breaking news is WP:PRIMARYNEWS). The community sometimes chooses to be aspirational in its written rules rather than accurate. This is an instance of that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:25, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
Exclude prokaryotes? Prokaryote nomenclature has more rigor than botanical and zoological nomenclature, and deals with some of the issues JoelleJay is complaining about. Prokaryotes must be published in a specific journal (IJSEM) that is peer-reviewed. Peer-review was not a thing in the early days of nomenclature; there is a specific list of approved names of prokaryotes published prior to the adoption of a requirement to publish them in a specific (peer-reviewed) journal. Prokaryote types must be deposited in multiple institutions in multiple countries. Botany and zoology do not have a list of approved names nor a requirement to disseminate types widely.
While NSPECIES has a link to correct name (botany), that is a redirect and the actual article has a section Correct_name#Prokaryotes (prokaryotes use the same terms for status of names as botany does).
There are not trillions nor even tens of millions of prokaryotes that have "correct names". There were about 20,000 prokaryote species with correct names as of 2021. There are ~2.5 million species that have correct/valid status that NSPECIES calls for. While Wikipedia does not have an editor base that is capable of creating non-stubs for 2.5 million species (or 20,000 prokaryotes) and keeping them up-to-date, citing high number estimates of all species that exist on earth (most of which are undescribed) is a total straw man. Plantdrew (talk) 19:45, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
I revised my opinion on prokaryotes after reading this paper] on taxonomy of the Pseudomonas putida complex. These names have subsequently been validated in IJSEM (e.g., this one), but I think the case for presenting them in tabular format is a stronger than for the morphological descriptions I'm used to under the ICNafp, which are more difficult to "parameterize" and place in tables. On the other hand, looking at this species described directly in IJSEM, I feel that the description would form the core of a reasonable article, so maybe the information in the first journal article could be digested into encyclopedic prose in the same way as a FishBase entry. I'd be interested in perspectives from editors focused on creating strong articles on prokaryotic taxa; it's unfortunate that your discussion last year didn't draw more interest. (edited to fix my link, thank you) Choess (talk) 21:48, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
What goes into IJSEM's "validation" of names announced via other journals, especially ones by predatory publishers like (as linked above) MDPI? Also here is the proper link to that archive. JoelleJay (talk) 23:34, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
FYI there is al a 19,000 word (so far) 32 day discussion on this same topic in progress at WP:Notability North8000 (talk) 20:29, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
That discussion isn't really about what's being asked here though, North8000. There, BilledMammal is trying to get support for a much more restrictive NSPECIES guideline that would result in a large amount of articles being deleted/merged. And the consensus in that discussion is very clearly in opposition to the idea (though it looks like BilledMammal is trying to force things through despite being against consensus). What is being proposed here is much more straightforward and, due to this broader location and with enough editor involvement, would supersede and override what is being discussed over there anyways. SilverserenC23:15, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
I'll just note that the impression I formed many years ago when I was very active at AfD is that the community had decided what types of articles should be in WP by watching which articles survived AfD. Again, my understanding is that the notability guidelines were developed to codify what had been decided at AfD. We do have policies that are set in stone. I don't think "notability" is one of them. - Donald Albury23:47, 25 June 2024 (UTC)
Species notability you mean? In that case I agree. In many areas we should settle on articles at a higher taxon level, with species with a line or two each, unless some have more to be said. That is already the actual way we do things over large areas. New soil micro-organisms get bar-codes not names - we're not set up to handle that. Johnbod (talk) 01:47, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Yes, if there is a taxon, either it or some higher taxon in the tree must be notable, so the question in each case is where is the notability bar crossed: not necessarily right at the bottom with species or sub-species. Chiswick Chap (talk) 05:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Acknowledging that "notability" decisions take into account considerations other than wp:notability..that we slightly weigh: 1. degree of enclyclopedicness of the topic 2. A bit of wanting articles with real content and deference towards real work towards building them, with real content 3. avoiding deletion fests of long standing articles. 4. We don't want mass created articles. 5. Included sources counts more than a search for un-included hypothetical sources: Here's my "out of the box" proposal for an SNG, in shorthand. For new articles, presumed notable if it meets all of the following criteria:
Has enough suitable sourcing included to have developed the article to a bit more than a stub. E.g. a few sentences or a species-specific image
Not mass created
This leaves the undocumented status quo in place for existing articles. For them, no new restrictions, and no new SNG "green light". I could make several structural critiques of my proposal (#2 and #3 are not normal SNG material or acknowledged to be "notability) which is why I called it "out of the box" but which aligns with "notability" decisions in practice. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 12:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
In my head, this is not a case where we are trying to keep out articles about garage bands that have played a few school or party gigs, or run-of-the-mill CFAs. Now, I am opposed to creating sub-stubs from database entries, but every recognized species has at least one article/chapter in a scholarly publication somewhere describing it, and I think a WP article with content citing such a scholarly source should be allowed to stay in WP. This does mean holding off on creating the article until a scholarly source (either the original description or a review article, not just a database) has been found and read (not always an easy task). There is no great rush to create an article for every recognized species, but I think requiring multiple independent sources would an unnecessary restriction for articles about recognized species. Donald Albury14:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I agree, and I think that your idea is close to mine and maybe less unusual than mine. Need a supplied source which is more than a database entry. North8000 (talk) 15:58, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
@Donald Albury, given that policy considers the results sections of research articles to be primary sources, which are not acceptable to base an article off of and are especially discouraged for science topics, why should species be given an exemption? I see a paper reporting a "new species" as being not much different from any other biology paper accepted for publication -- it undergoes editorial analysis and peer review to assess the quality of data (in this case, how much support there is for the subject being a new species), but the results are still ultimately reliant on the primary observations of a single group which may or may not be accurate or accurately interpreted. The discovery may or may not have any biological or ecological relevance outside of a niche subfield. I'm approaching this as a molecular geneticist familiar with works reporting new microbial species, which are routine and require more than simply "being discovered" for them to get published (e.g. medical consequences, evolutionary importance, particularly novel characters/diagnoses). In many circumstances "species" is an inconsistently-defined and sometimes arbitrary concept that has no more inherent importance than any other topic, even among animals. The romantic idea of each species discovery being a Big Deal probably stems from the era where species distinction was based on significant morphological differences that the general public could appreciate, rather than what it often is now for many taxa: barcoding samples and considering something a new species if a particular genetic region differs by some percent (a cutoff of 97% is common) from anything in the reference library. JoelleJay (talk) 18:06, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
So, it is in your opinion, I presume, that this article, which I added in 2019, should not have been allowed? (It has since been expanded by another editor using a second source, which, it turns out, was available at the time, I just didn't find it.) In what way did adding that article harm the encyclopedia? We are not dealing here with a self-promoting person or organization, with someone pushing a fringe theory or an unproven therapy, or with an attempt to prove the experts wrong. Donald Albury18:45, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
It doesn't matter what I think about a given article, what my questions is is why a class of articles should be exempt from the rules we have for all other science topics. The same argument could be made for creating a new page for any scientific discovery based on the primary paper describing it, so why do our rules explicitly state this is not sufficient for a standalone? And it's not only self-promo or fringe ideas that reliance on secondary sources is supposed to prevent; it is also critical in showing a topic is notable enough for its own article (regardless of whether the topic might be prone to promo/NPOV issues) and is a major facet in enforcing NOTINDISCRIMINATE. But even if it was the only reason, what makes you think the authors of a species publication are any less likely to engage in self-promotion, or that their publication (or the journal's rigor, or the formal acceptance of their taxonomic nomenclature by governing code) is any more reliable for its data and interpretations than any other singular research paper in STEM? What about the Raymond Hoser case, where the ICZN formally stated that it did not reject ridiculous nomenclature and taxonomic theories from Hoser's self-published journals (i.e. it accepted his new species names and classifications as validly published and officially recognized) and merely suggested researchers just voluntarily and individually "ignore" and overwrite his nomenclature as a way to "correct" the many issues in taxonomy he introduced. See the description in this article:
In addition to naming well over 100 supposedly new snake and lizard genera, this individual has also produced taxonomic revisions of the world’s cobras, burrowing asps, vipers, rattlesnakes, water snakes, blindsnakes, pythons, crocodiles and so on. But, alas, his work is not of the careful, methodical, conservative and respected sort that you might associate with a specialised, dedicated amateur; rather, his articles appear in his own, in-house, un-reviewed, decidedly non-technical publications, they’re notoriously unscientific in style and content, and his taxonomic recommendations have been demonstrated to be problematic, frequently erroneous and often ridiculous (witness the many new taxa he has named after his pet dogs; I’m not kidding, I wish I was). In short, the new (and really terribly formulated) taxonomic names that this individual throws out at the global herpetological community represent a sort of taxonomic vandalism; we’re expected to use these names, and – indeed – they’re supposedly officially valid according to the letter of the law, yet they besmirch the field, they litter the taxonomic registry with monstrosities, and they cause working herpetologists to waste valuable time clearing up unnecessary messes...
Should we really be writing articles on species based on their reports in un-peer-reviewed, self-published sources just because the ICZN accepted their nomenclature (even when it literally anticipates members of the scientific community will eventually "re-discover" these species and ignore the principle of priority by renaming them)? JoelleJay (talk) 19:55, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
The requirement of WP:RS still should hold, so something in a crank's self-published journal can still be rejected. Even the current WP:NSPECIES requires a "reliable academic publication". Crossroads-talk-22:07, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
This is probably as good a time as any to remind lay readers of the distinction between biological taxonomy (deciding how to divide organisms into groups and expressing criteria for that division) and nomenclature (deciding what label to put on each group). The Codes govern nomenclature, which is a largely mechanical and somewhat legalistic process. Taxonomy is rather more subjective and decided by the consensus of scientists. That consensus is expressed in different ways in different taxonomic groups. Sometimes it is very centralized and explicit (e.g., The Reptile Database). In other fields, acceptance is more implicit, and we might do more of our usual tests of source reliability (is this a peer-reviewed journal that specializes in the group of organisms, or a self-published source by an expert?)
In practice, this works out fine. If someone self-publishes a monograph describing three new species of gecko from Papua New Guinea and the experts at the Reptile Database accept them, those descriptions reflect the current state of expert consensus, which is the point of RS. If some crank claims to have found hundreds of new plant species in the Irtysh basin (looking at you, Charitontcev) and describes them, those names will be ignored or placed in synonymy. That's taxonomy. The significance of the nomenclatural codes is that they require a description to be furnished, so that if a species is accepted by taxonomists and has a name under the appropriate Code, material exists to form the basis of an article here. Choess (talk) 00:12, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
@Crossroads But if the official nomenclature code is accepting species names from what are essentially the personal blogs of amateur collectors, and continues accepting and listing them even when the discoverer is literally Wiki-notable for taxonomic vandalism, why should acceptance by that code be given any credence at all? Clearly if it does not evaluate the legitimacy of taxonomy recommendations or even indicate in any way that a given submission/discoverer has been flagged elsewhere as problematic, its endorsement of a name is not evidence of even implicit secondary analysis. And since that's the case, what is the justification for declaring that a species discovery published in any RS journal is inherently far more taxonomically valid, properly characterized, ethically researched, and rigorously peer-reviewed than any other research result for any other topic, including ones published by the same journal? Our policy discourages even mentioning on other pages a physical chemistry result published in Nature that has received no secondary coverage; its conclusions have not been analyzed by any independent secondary source, so we have no indication that they are important to anyone beside the discovers and our summary of them would be strictly from the POV of the people promoting it. And yet for a species we should permit a whole standalone article based on unverified assertions of its existence and taxonomic relationships that no one else will ever find interesting enough to even mention? JoelleJay (talk) 00:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
I disagree with this. I don't think there's a problem with species stub articles because they are always able to be improved as more research comes out (which will always happen with species). Merging them up and leaving a redirect, even "temporairly," makes people less inclined to improve them over time. There aren't really any disadvantages to stubs. I also don't see a problem with mass-created articles as long as they are approved beforehand (WP:MASSCREATION). I think as long as a species verifiably exists and has at least a brief description, it can be presumed notable. This is especially easy to check with taxon databases like CoL. CFA💬15:26, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
(which will always happen with species) Citation, please. This might be true for some taxa, but it definitely is not for all of them, and Wikipedia articles must be based on existing references, not on the expectation that new ones will appear someday. If we know a subject has no other documentation than the paper it was described in and its automatic entry into a database, the "presumption" of notability afforded to species by NSPECIES fundamentally differs from all other SNG presumptions of notability where the term refers to the presumption that coverage currently exists. Also, who is going to be maintaining all these millions of stubs? Considering how fluid a species designation is and how often nomenclature or status changes, and the very real harm reported from improperly-curated species lists, why should it be acceptable to host millions of individual articles that we know will not be reasonably updated? It's also much easier to adjust relationships between lineages or add updates about all members of some clade in a higher-taxon article where you can just switch around some objects in a template than it is to edit each of possibly hundreds of stubs individually. JoelleJay (talk) 18:30, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I was previously an advocate of up-merging but now I've somewhat reversed myself. The individual entries would probably end up having redirects anyway (which isn't much different from a stub), and/or the reader would need to understand the overall organizational structure/taxonomy in order to find/navigate (or depend on the search tool to find it within the article). And when the editors aren't knowledgeable on taxonomy, they will be creating a lot of errors. Finally, while the upmerged article is ostensibly about the larger category (e.g. genus) it will be common to have one that is only 5% complete (e.g. listing just one species) in which case the article isn't what it purports to be.North8000 (talk) 15:52, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I think at times it comes down to how much effort it takes to maintain articles. One example that I briefly touched last year is Ichetucknee siltsnail, created in 2007 by a bot from a database. Today, after 38 edits over 17 years, the article is still a stub of 37 words of text. All of the information in that article is also available in the article about the genus, Floridobia. If someone thinks the "Ichetucknee siltsnail" article is too "stubby" and should be upmerged, it would be simple enough to copy content from the Floridobia article to bulk up the species article, but I'm not sure how either upmerging the species article or expanding it with content from the genus article would improve Wikipedia. I think that creating a new stub that has no content that is not also available in an article about a higher taxon would not be an improvement of the encyclopedia. I do think that, if I could gain access to the publication which described the species, or to any other reliable source that discusses the species in some detail, and added content to the article, even if just from one such source, it would justify a stand-alone article for the species. Donald Albury17:17, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
Arbitrary break 1
I would to state the OP in different words to try to move forward. In the fuzzy wp:notability ecosystem, for species, the community has generally decided to set a lower wp:notability requirement than it's only official current one which is GNG. IMO this is because consideration is given to species being a highly enclyclopedic topic (as with ngeo, but it is not documented like ngeo). IMO we should codify it as a new SNG. For folks that have concerns that it might be overly inclusive, I would respond that the conditions of the SNG would make it at least slightly more exclusive than the current defacto standard. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 19:07, 26 June 2024 (UTC)
I genuinely don't think all species are notable, or have enough material written on them for an article. Often, the only records of some species will be in the publication article listing several or even many new species, with only short descriptions for their respective identifying characteristics. In this case, there isn't really much material for a species article that wouldn't be repeated in the taxobox, and the little material that is present would fit better in the genus-level article (for instance, what I started to do with List of Cladonota species).
But these possibly non-notable species aren't even the biggest issue. A lot of the time, one-sentence species microstubs will be created without even reliable sources, only referenced to a database entry. These usually consist of a boilerplate Genus species is a species of treehopper in the family Examplidae, accompanied by an automatic taxobox. This is even the case when the species has been discussed more extensively in literature, which the microstub will not hint at.
Having these virtually content-free blue links misleads readers, while discouraging editors who might otherwise create a better-sourced article (for the same reason we have WP:RETURNTORED for redirects). Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 03:16, 27 June 2024 (UTC)
They also clutter google results due to Wikipedia's significant impact there, taking time away from those who are trying to research said species. CMD (talk) 01:05, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
A lot of the time, one-sentence species microstubs will be created without even reliable sources, only referenced to a database entry.Yes, and I really wish we'd get more discussion about the fact that the governing bodies that officially endorse a species name (i.e. accept a new species discovery) don't require it to have been published in a peer-reviewed or even legitimate journal, apparently do not perform much, if any, independent evaluation of its accuracy, and strictly leave adoption or rejection of the name to the individual preferences of researchers. For every other topic that would be unacceptable, and yet here the proposal is to allow the unreliable publications themselves to be the sole sources in articles. JoelleJay (talk) 01:22, 28 June 2024 (UTC):
My mistake, I meant it as a shorthand for "significant coverage in reliable sources", the kind of coverage we look at for GNG, where databases are usually not considered acceptable. Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 18:11, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
In that case, it will depend both on the database and on your definition of SIGCOV (which, despite multiple efforts, we've never managed to define).
JoelleJay has made a determined argument in the past for only counting prose/paragraphs in determining SIGCOV, with only words strung together personally by a human being acceptable. Wikipedia:One hundred words also assumes that SIGCOV is measured only in text.
OTOH, if the point of SIGCOV is that you can actually write a decent encyclopedia article from it, then sometimes 100 words [or any other arbitrary word count] won't have the desired result, because the source could go on at length about content that is irrelevant to an encyclopedia article, so a word count can indicate notability when the source is functionally useless.
A word count also implies that the only way to get information from a source is for the source to be written in sentences and paragraphs. I obviously did write a decent article with just the Fishbase entry, even though the database entry does not contain a single grammatically correct sentence. This problem has made me wonder whether SIGCOV should be determined by the amount of Wikipedia article content we could write from it, rather than from a mechanical measurement of the source itself. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:36, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
This ignores the places where our PAGs implicitly and explicitly restrict notability-contributing coverage to content directly on the topic and individually written by a human in their own words, e.g. people ... have actually considered the topic worth writing and publishing non-trivial works of their own that focus upon it or provides thought and reflection based on primary sources or rely on primary sources for their material, making analytic or evaluative claims about them.. If SIGCOV could be met by any RS from which "one could write a decent article", we would have zero reason to reject millions of non-notable sportspeople and billions of non-notable astronomical objects with reliable database entries. We would have zero reason to reject articles built from stringing together any number of unrelated facts. Because how could one possibly argue that any given collection of data couldn't somehow, by someone be proseified into something someone would consider "decent"? "Coverage from which one can write a decent article" should only factor into SIGCOV as an exclusion criterion, wherein prose IRS coverage has already been deemed "significant" in length, but what it covers is decided by consensus to be non-encyclopedic. JoelleJay (talk) 01:27, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
I don't believe anyone thinks that "coverage necessarily to write an encyclopaedia article" is a guarantee of SIGCOV, not without factoring in the key elements listed at WP:SIGCOV itself such as source independence, secondary sourcing, and depth of coverage. Being able to write an encyclopaedia article is the purpose of SIGCOV, not a shortcut to meeting it.The formulation underlined is incorrect, as WAID points out; I offer a reformulation below. I don't think this imprecision affects the rest of my comment.
However, SIGCOV is part of the WP:GNG, and in spite of the post-hoc rationalization offered in WP:WHYN, GNG considerations do not necessarily apply to article retention under SNGs, like NPROF, that offer a path to notability based on verifiably meeting specified criteria. If a consensus is reached that a version of NSPECIES should operate as a "standalone" SNG, that wouldn't change anything about how notability works in any other area, and it would align the rules offered under the WP:SNG system with actual WP:OUTCOMES in this area. WP:N (and NOT) already point to more than one set of criteria for deciding whether an an encyclopaedia article can, or even should, be written on a topic.
extended content
So it seems that JoelleJay is raising a red herring when she cautions against new mountains of articles on sportsmen and sportswomen seemingly lurking behind databases to threaten encyclopaedic integrity. The enwiki community has decided that mass-creation of articles is not OK unless pre-approved, and has also decided that articles on athletes must meet a "GNG" sourcing standard that is interpreted in a rather strict way. Nothing the community decides here about species (and SPECIES) is going to change that.
The community also believes, either as a general consensus or as a large strand of opinion among interested editors, that articles about academics, and articles about legally-recognized populated places, and articles about species do not necessarily need to "meet GNG" so long as their claim to fall under the relevant SNG meets WP:V. While some editors would prefer an ironclad requirement that all articles "meet GNG" at some lower or higher standard of proof, there is no general community consensus or support for a new requirement of this kind. And every recent discussion of this topic at any reasonable scale, in any public forum onwiki, pretty clearly shows that there is no clear backing that a new, de facto higher, standard be applied in these areas.
The 2017 NSPORTS RfC was probably the high water mark of this "GNG everywhere" sentiment. Subsequent discussions have made clear that said RfC did not achieve community consensus that academics, species and geostubs should be treated the same way as athletes - nor could the RfC have done so, because academics, species and geostubs were out of scope for that discussion and editors interested in those topics by and large ignored the NSPORTS RfC as irrelevant to their editing interests.
Finally, I'd like to point to a statement JoelleJay made that might seem hyperbolic but which seems significant to me: if SIGCOV weren't applied widely or stricltly enough, We would have zero reason to reject articles built from stringing together any number of unrelated facts. But that ignores both WP:NOT and the purpose of building an encyclopaedia. No article built from "unrelated facts" will survive serious scrutiny under NOT. The positive tool I would rather use for this, a credible claim to significance backed up by a reliable source for the claim, hasn't come into vogue or achieved consensus as a yardstick of encyclopaedicity. However, reassuringly, the negative tool we have at NOT - knowing what isn't an encyclopedia article when we see it - seems to work quite well in excluding anything adjacent to "unrelated facts". This aspect is, frankly, a good example of something WP:N itself isn't very good at - except (ironically?) for the guidance offerered by some of the SNGs. So the idea that the GNG can save us from non-encyclopaedic topics seems to me to illustrate the hammer-nail theorem more than anything that relates to building an encyclopaedia. Newimpartial (talk) 17:13, 29 June 2024 (UTC) Small comment added by Newimpartial (talk) 19:27, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
I have one minor disagreement. SIGCOV says, in its entirety:
"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
The book-length history of IBM by Robert Sobel is plainly non-trivial coverage of IBM.
Martin Walker's statement, in a newspaper article about Bill Clinton, that "In high school, he was part of a jazz band called Three Blind Mice" is plainly a trivial mention of that band.
Words like source independence, secondary sourcing, and depth of coverage do not appear anywhere in it. These "key elements" are not part of SIGCOV; they are part of the GNG.
WAID is entirely correct here. I dont know when or how I got into thinking of SIGCOV as covering all of the GNG criteria - it might be an accidental result of repeatedly contrasting SIGCOV vs. WP:SIRS, where SIRS (for ORGs) places a depth requirement as a minimum applying to each source while SIGCOV applies to all sources presented to fulfil GNG, taken together.
Anyway, that isn't an excuse: my specific formulation at the head of my last comment was wrong. I should have said something like, I don't believe anyone thinks that assembled "coverage necessarily to write an encyclopaedia article" counts as SIGCOV without factoring in the other elements listed at WP:GNG, such as source independence, secondary sourcing, and depth of coverage. Being able to write an encyclopaedia article is the purpose of the GNG, not a shortcut to meeting it.Newimpartial (talk) 19:23, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
If by "assembled coverage" you mean taking a bit from this source and a small piece from that source, or only counting bits taken from independent sources that are also secondary, then it's settled at WP:ORG (i.e., SIRS bans it), and I agree that it's an open question for the GNG/all other SNGs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:28, 30 June 2024 (UTC)
Outline of proposed SNG: (probably needs more details added):
A species is presumed notable if it meets both of these criteria:
Its article has an included wp:reliable source which establishes that it has some recognition as a species by the scientific community
Its article has an included wp:reliable source which has content on the species which is more substantial than a typical database type listing
These criteria refer to the state of the article, not the characteristics of the topic. That's not usually how notability guidelines are worded. More generally, the proposal as I understand it is to recognise the current long-standing consensus (WP:NSPECIES) as a notability guideline, not come up with a new one. – Joe (talk) 16:34, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
Not some much "state of the article" but more the "find a source" work has already been done. And this is deliberate. Without that, anyone can create a zero sources zero content article on any of the millions of aalleged species and then volunteers would have to take it to AFD and prove a negative. So it is is deliberate. `The GNG route remains available, the SNG (with it's additional conditions) is merely a way to bypass the GNG route. North8000 (talk) 00:39, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
Hmmm. I definitely share some of the sentiments expressed above in finding one-line microstubs disappointing, and I think we need a way to deter them if we're going to try to write a guideline based on NSPECIES so that it doesn't provide carte blanche for creating large numbers of them. On the other hand, I also share Joe's unease about intermingling article quality with notability guidance, which could have downstream effects in many other subject areas.
It seems to me that most of the trouble with microstubs comes from their mass creation. Our system can absorb a few of them a month coming from random newbies; it's the editors creating them in WP:MEATBOT-like fashion that really create difficulties. (I should know, having helped clean up after User:Starzoner.) Could we say something like "Mass-created articles invoking this guideline are expected to include text that describes or diagnoses the species."? The 2022 RfC provides for articles "not required to meet WP:GNG", and that implicitly suggests to me that SNGs can set mass-creation standards for those types of articles. (I'm also in favor of some language in the guideline that the species is taxonomically accepted; I would think you would need a source for that if challenged at AfD.) Choess (talk) 01:49, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
It's not necessary for a notability guideline to determine what proposals will be accepted through the MASSCREATE process. I don't think that any of the others do this (e.g., NGEO doesn't). I think that any guideline proposal should say that mass creation requires prior approval, but if you wanted to expand beyond that simple statement, you could perhaps add a hint about how to write a proposal that's likely to be successful, e.g., "proposals that do not do A, B, and C are not expected to be approved". WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:00, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
Because I focus on creating articles for plant species and I am not involved in almost any AfD discussions I do not know about consensus regarding notability. If the current long-standing consensus is that we keep stub articles that are not being expanded to be able to give a useful description of the species, then the consensus is wrong. Stub articles about a species should be deleted because they are not useful and detract from the project. Species should have articles only if, as North8000 suggests, reliable sources establishes that if has recognition by the scientific community and content such as a description or other information about the species. The standard should be to encourage good article creation and to discourage the creation of large numbers of stubs or placeholders to game Wikipedia and get lots of credit for creating articles that are not in fact articles like stubs or redirects. 🌿MtBotany (talk) 21:54, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
I have argued that if mass-created stubs are to be mass-deleted exceptions should be made for those that have a significant number of pageviews. Let's take for example, Anthurium. POWO says that there are 1,325 accepted species, and Wikipedia has articles on 190 of them. A massviews report shows that the very stubby Anthurium superbum gets about 5 pageviews a day, while the equally stubby Anthurium rhizophorum gets 0.27 pageviews a day. Both of these were created by Polbot long ago. But for some reason (it is a houseplant, with some presence on the internet), Anthurium superbum is much more popular. Deleting it would go against the whole point of creating stubs, which is the hope that someone will come along and improve them. It is known that casual editors are far more likely to improve a stub if one already exists than create one from scratch. Abductive (reasoning)23:30, 28 June 2024 (UTC)
@MtBotany, what exactly do you mean by "they are not useful"?
I've looked up some plant and found the very short stubs to be useful to me. Some people, including me, sometimes just want to find the family name (which is in the infobox), so the article itself doesn't even need to exist for me to find the page useful. Other times, I'm looking for what part of the world it's from. Again, a very short stub is enough to meet my actual needs.
We have a rule at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion that says Hint: If someone says they find a redirect useful, they probably do. You might not find it useful—this is not because the other person is being untruthful, but because you browse Wikipedia in different ways. Perhaps you don't find stubs useful for your purposes, but that's not quite the same as nobody finding them useful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:54, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
The existence of other websites with similar information does not mean that it's useless for us to have an article – especially for the majority of readers who don't know about those databases.
NOTDATABASE doesn't mean that we can't have articles whose facts can also be found in a database. NOTDATABASE means that we should write encyclopedia articles instead of database entries. That means we should write something like:
They kinda look alike, until somebody improves the stub. By the way, because you didn't italicise the name of the species, I now know you took very few biology courses. Abductive (reasoning)18:30, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
One general note, I'm guessing that most people would agree that overall what is happening with new species articles is not problematic. I think that the biggest trigger for this discussion is that the current practice violates wp:notability and that we should reconcile wp:notability with that without upsetting the apple cart. And maybe concern about what could happen given that there are millions of species which don't have articles. Right now someone making a new species article is probably going to be careful about having some decent sourcing because they are technically violating wp:notability or else operating in the gray areas of actual in-practice wp:notability. A new guideline has the possibility of upsetting the apple cart in either direction. One would be triggering a deletion fest of established articles, the other would to green light too many new stubs....if not by mass creation, then by completionists. One good hypothetical thought question is: Would we want 2,000,000 new legit stubs on legit species? My answer is that in order to officially bypass GNG, it should be a teeny bit more than a stub or have have a bit more sourcing than a database entry. And IMO, that is the current practice for NEW articles.North8000 (talk) 16:49, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
At the current rate of article creation, Wikipedia will never have articles for every legit species. For most groups of organisms the rate at which new species are being described outpaces the rate at which Wikipedia articles are being written. The main exceptions are birds (we have articles for every species), mammals (we have articles for every species except those listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Mammals/Missing mammal species (and any others described since that page was last updated in 2023)), non-avian dinosaur genera (we have all of those I believe). I think the article creation rate is sufficient to eventually have articles for all the other vertebrates (fish, amphibians, reptiles) in coming years. The article creation rate for plant species exceeds the rate at which new species are being described, but it will take more than 100 years to have articles for all plant species at the current rate.
For just about everything else, species description rate outstrips article creation rate (I'm sure there are a few families and genera scattered around the tree of life that have articles for every species and there is at least one small phylum (Onychophora with 200 species) that has articles for almost every species).
The thing is, we have many articles on species that nobody is reading (<10 page views/month). Most of them are stubs, which makes sense; readers don't visit them, and editors don't visit them to expand them. But there are occasionally well developed articles for species that reader's just aren't interested in (Ichneutica ustistriga got 4 page views in the last month). And yet, there are still articles for species we don't have that would attract a lot of readers if the article existed. Aureolaria grandiflora was my go to example of a conspicuous native plant in my region that didn't have an article. An article was created in December 2023, and it's getting 38 page views/month now, but I expect it will get hundreds in August when it is in peak flower. Plantdrew (talk) 21:40, 29 June 2024 (UTC)
