Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)

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The miscellaneous section of the village pump is used to post messages that do not fit into any other category. Please post on the policy, technical, or proposals sections when appropriate, or at the help desk for assistance. For general knowledge questions, please use the reference desk.

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Article mergers where the content is never actually merged

I've observed a pattern where article mergers never actually result in any relevant content being merged, so the content, while often (usually?) not entirely lost, remains hidden away in edit histories and difficult to access. It's extremely annoying when you click on a link, are redirected to some random article, typically a sub-section, and find nothing about the subject in question, or at most a throwaway line. That's not what a merger is! At least the useful and decently referenced content found on the merged page should be actually merged, and not just a tiny summary, let alone nothing at all. Mergers often seem to amount to (sugarcoated) deletions. This has become a pet hate of mine recently. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 19:53, 24 September 2024 (UTC)

That problem can occur when the content is regarded as WP:UNDUE on the target page, so in theory the merge resolution was wrong, but in practice it becomes, as you say, a de facto deletion. Sometimes it is done with that very purpose in mind. The other form is where the merge is never performed at all, because it would require actual work. In some cases, this results in a de facto deletion; in others, despite the merge resolution, the subject page is never merged and hangs around for years. Hawkeye7 (discuss) 00:58, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

The other problem I see many times..... is there maybe a consensus to merge.... but the content is horribly sourced or not sourced at all.... Thus not suitable for any page let alone the target merge page for those who actually work on the content. Must remember rfc's attract random people that many times have no clue about the topic at hand thus can't help out with any merger..... We literally have editors that just go around from RFC to RFC. This is also the case for deletion talks..... dominated by very few editors who simply can't have expertise in everything they discuss.Moxy🍁 01:05, 25 September 2024 (UTC)

I agree that many "mergers" are in fact little more than redirects, making them like deletions to the vast majority of our readers who don't look in article histories. But very little is likely to happen unless someone champions the issue, and identifies which articles this has affected. I don't have the time to do this (or maybe am too lazy) so we have to look at the OP or elsewhere for a volunteer. Phil Bridger (talk) 22:29, 1 October 2024 (UTC)

There's a bigger point at work here. Very roughly speaking, a merger should occur when two topics shouldn't have been separate articles in the first place because they are too closely related to warrant being separate. Effectively it's to prevent duplicated effort from being made. While merged articles ought to be properly content-merged, once merged, the new combined article should grow organically as articles do. So even if content were not properly merged and lost during the merger, if the content is apropos enough, you'd expect it to eventually be re-added anyway. Jason Quinn (talk) 12:08, 6 October 2024 (UTC)

How is everyone today?

Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not#Wikipedia is not a blog, web hosting service, social networking service, or memorial site

You guys good or bad or whatever? Personally I’m decent. Jasonbunny1 (talk) 20:18, 5 October 2024 (UTC) I'm as good as can be expected thanks, but that's by-the-by. We usually allow a bit of latitude for general chit-chat here, but I think this question strays too far from discussion of Wikipedia editing even for this page. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:53, 5 October 2024 (UTC) Oh, my bad then. Sorry! Jasonbunny1 (talk) 21:30, 5 October 2024 (UTC) Hey, @Jasonbunny1, thanks for your edit to Liliaspis. Would you mind taking a look at these 18 articles or these 9 articles, which are tagged as wanting some work on refs? If the tag's out of date, or if you're able to add some refs, then please just remove the tag when you're done. It would really help a lot. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:54, 5 October 2024 (UTC) Yeah I'm doing well, thanks for asking! —Matrix(!) {user - talk? - uselesscontributions} 15:13, 6 October 2024 (UTC) No problem! Jasonbunny (talk) 21:52, 6 October 2024 (UTC) im sad, because of 7 october massacres in israel, my condolonces to these civilian victims of terrorism. ----modern_primat ඞඞඞ TALK 21:51, 7 October 2024 (UTC) Me too Saankhyareddipalli (talk) 10:44, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

User page design

Hi everyone, I recently redesigned my user page and would massively appreciate another editor (or editors) taking a quick look at it to let me know of any improvements I could make or issues which need to be addressed. Thanks! harrz ^talk 21:54, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Everything looks okay in Firefox on my Mac, and everything except the center-top 'ad' looks good in Safari. (I think the space for the ad might be too narrow.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:58, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Ok, thank you. I'll work on formatting the ad soon. harrz ^talk 15:38, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Donald Trump 2024 presidential campaign

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

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This page was obviously written by opponents of Donald Trump. Do you really want to take a political side with Wikipedia, the results would be disastrous. Especially to the funding of Wikipedia and if he is elected, to your platform and user group. Over half of America supports Trump. I would suggest this article be eliminated and especially with it's woke jargon and criticisms. It is also protected so that whoever wrote it (DNC) has the writes to edit it and not allow peer review by Republicans.. so sad especially because Wikipedia has previously been a fairly reliable source for many. 162.192.94.207 (talk) 14:33, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

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

Indigenous_peoples_in_Canada#Peoples

Where I can get this kind of statistics for Alaska for 2020? Kaiyr (talk) 17:01, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Hi Kaiyr. It looks like Canada conducts censuses every 5 years, so 2021 is the closest you'll get to 2020. For future reference, questions like this would be better suited to one of our reference desks. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs) 17:12, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

I mean for USa. Alaska. Kaiyr (talk) 17:22, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

@Kaiyr, Alaska Natives#Ethnicity by region uses the 2010 census. This article on Census.gov gives figures for Alaska Native tribes in 2020 (table 2). Schazjmd (talk) 17:46, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Too much "Personal life" type detail and trivia in bio "Early life" sections?

The notability of individuals having a dedicated Wikipedia article usually stems from their professional or societal achievements as opposed to their personal lives. Accordingly, "Personal life" sections typically appear later in an article, once professional aspects have been covered. A significant exception to this appears to be "Early life", which often includes extensive amounts of subject matter which by its nature seems better suited for "Personal life".

Is this based on general consensus or simply a tendency of more literary-inclined editors to attempt to establish some sort of a narrative about their subject? Wouldn't it in most cases be more appropriate to keep the "Early life" section as "dry" as possible (born when, where, to whom, educated at school A, university B, etc.)? I'm trying to keep this question as general as possible, so I don't want to link specific articles, but I don't think lengthy coverage of the subject's family situation and especially their parents' pasts should be in "Early life". Except for those whose entire claim to fame intrinsically stems from their lineage, like royals and nobles.

MOS:CHRONOLOGICAL directs editors to In general, present a biography in chronological order, from birth to death, except where there is good reason to do otherwise. However, since "Personal life" is separated anyway, is there a good reason to give special treatment to "Early life"? 186.86.52.215 (talk) 03:05, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

These sections tend to be popular with readers. You might be interested in reading "Obsessed with Wikipedia ‘personal life’ entries? You’re not alone" from The Washington Post.

Sometimes the ==Early life== sections don't connect well with the rest of the article, but often they do. It frequently makes sense to have a paragraph about the subject's family of origin, followed by a paragraph about education. If the coverage of non-subjects (e.g., a parent's past) really takes over articles to the point of cloaking the nominal subjects, then we call those Wikipedia:Coatrack articles. That said, one or two paragraphs wouldn't be a problem, because reading (for example) about the parents' background can help people understand the subject (e.g., Joe Film went into acting because both of his parents were actors). In principle, the amount of time spent on the subject's early life, education, and personal life should be proportionate to the amount of interest in those subjects shown in reliable sources. A CEO's biography might gloss right over those and start with the meteoric rise through the management ranks. A child actor (or the child of an actor) would probably have more about their early life.

(The early goal for Wikipedia's writing style was called Wikipedia:BrilliantProse; to the extent that "dry" means "boring", then that's not really the goal. You'd probably have better success if you argued for "encyclopedic concision".) WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:10, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not against including this material per se, I just don't think a subject's "Early life" section should detail other relationships of their parents, all their half-siblings, other stuff like that. This usually has very little to do with why the subject is notable. If someone went into acting because their parents were actors then of course that has relevance and makes sense to include. But you seem to be saying that if someone is a gossip magnet to the extent that even "reliable sources" feel compelled to cover that more than their professional work, then this proportion should be replicated here? I don't think I can agree with that. Reliability is not the issue here, all of the material may be true and verifiable as well, but it shouldn't be front and center here, I think. "Personal life" can accommodate all those looking for "sizzle". If the only way to make "Early life" not boring is to include extraneous relationship drama and such, then I'm sorry, but I don't find that an acceptable practice for Wikipedia. 186.86.52.215 (talk) 04:45, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

In-depth biographies are holistic: they cover a person's life, and examine interconnections between different parts of it. Most people with Wikipedia articles do not have in-depth biographies written about them, and so this type of info isn't available. But for those who do, meeting Wikipedia's requirements for appropriate independent, reliable sources, their Wikipedia articles can be more inclusive of details in their lives that relate to their significant actions and characteristics. isaacl (talk) 04:25, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Like I said, I'm not against including at least some "in-depth" personal detail about people, but if who the subject dated and married is normally kept separate from the great discovery they were working on at the time, then so should the subject's mother's affair be kept separate from telling the reader what school the subject was attending at the time. For some reason this separation all too often isn't being followed in "Early life" sections, even though it is elsewhere. That's what I have a problem with. 186.86.52.215 (talk) 05:07, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

In short, use appropriate biographies as as guide. If they exist and aren't making interconnections between personal info (beyond some basic family info) and other aspects of the subject's life, then the Wikipedia article shouldn't, and the personal info may then be irrelevant to the article. isaacl (talk) 05:15, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it's necessarily irrelevant as it may still be good for background, but if it's not really a part of the subject's notability, it should be demarcated, and in "Early life" sections it often isn't. 186.86.52.215 (talk) 05:34, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps there's a bit of a Demarcation problem with "the subject's notability". In some cases, "the subject's mother's affair" could be something that gets a lot of attention and thus is part of the subject's notability. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:43, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I’ll say that I have noticed on a few biographies of people that the Personal life tends to be merged in the early life (like religious beliefs for example) when they are less notable than, say, George Washington. It’s a poor comparison I’d admit, but still one nonetheless. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:43, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Internet Archive hacked

For those who haven't seen this yet: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/internet-archive-hacked-data-breach-impacts-31-million-users/ RoySmith (talk) 23:46, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Looks like a registered user email address leak. The passwords are hashed and salted so those shouldn't be useful to a hacker unless the user had a weak password or is reusing passwords. internetarchive.org and the Wayback Machine are up and working as of right now when I tested it. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:16, 10 October 2024 (UTC) Added some caveats. –Novem Linguae (talk) 00:28, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

With that said, it wouldn't hurt for people to change their passwords, especially if they use the same password for their email address (which you shouldn't!). I imagine most Wikipedians are going to have Internet Archive accounts given how difficult it is to write articles without its library. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:21, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm quite upset about this. Not only because this interfered with my work, but because I can't fathom why someone would want to DDOS one of the most useful services on the internet. Speaking of, I hope Wikimedia's own DDOS mitigation systems are solid... --Grnrchst (talk) 14:27, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

"Internet Archive hacking drama: why did they do it?". -- GreenC 16:29, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I read about that GreenC and honestly I find it pathetic. I’m going to refuse to bring politics into this discussion (which while they contribute slightly to this, I infer it is rather unnecessary), but this must be the lowest way I have ever seen someone try to protest; it’d be like burning Buckingham Palace to protest the Monarchy. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:39, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

To alliterate, it’s result will only be in the group you’re demonstrating a “protest” disliking you even more. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:51, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I doubt it. As the editorial says, this kind of attack is done for advertising purposes. They probably hope someone will think "Wow, they must be expert hackers" and hire them. They are probably hoping that potential employers will not think "Seriously? That's the biggest, hardest target you can handle?"

As for results, being unfairly attacked is usually good for a non-profit's income stream in the short term. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:26, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Still down as of 8 43am est oct 11 •Cyberwolf•talk? 12:44, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I’m surprised hardly any Wikipedians are replying to this serious topic. Actually I’ve seen hardly ANYBODY in general (social, news etc) that have gotten noteworthy attention. CNN, FOX, CBC and other mainstream medias aren’t even mentioning the issue. Driving me nots honestly. I wish the masses and higher ups would understand how important this library is, not only because of the Wayback but also the thousands of documents stored on it. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:32, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I’m saying this as someone who has a interest in Lost Media. The Archive being lost in the future could be devastating for that community. Several books that have been out of print and lost to time are stored there. Not every library in the states or elsewhere probably contains that vast of information. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:34, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I think this gets at a pretty gaping vulnerability with centralised infrastructure as a way to preserve information. This is only a problem because we have nowhere else to go for these books and archived web pages; we have the Internet Archive, rather than many Internet Archives (from mirrors to alternatives). If we want to ensure that such things won't be so devastating to our work in future, we need to build redundancy. To some extent, this applies to Wikipedia too. It only becomes the Library of Alexandria if we let it remain so. --Grnrchst (talk) 21:44, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@Grnrchst I certainly agree with that. The problem is that I don’t think many are willing to make alternatives since it takes a lot of time and effort to run one of these things. Then again this situation may open those opportunities… who knows. Wolfquack2 (talk) 17:41, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

As far as mainstream media, I see reports in Newsweek, Forbes, ABC, Times of India, and The Hill. Plus of course the techie places like Wired, The Verge, etc. But, yeah, less coverage than I would have thought. RoySmith (talk) 16:46, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

What I was confused about to @RoySmith. You’d think that 31 million users would develop some type of significant coverage right? Apparently not. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:54, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

To clarify; I’m not saying that the “tech-neck” news (as I like to call them) aren’t real media/news, I’m merely saying that the more, say, “infamous” medias (for a lack of better terms) appear to be not covering such. If you ask me, the Internet Archive is more important than the 2024 Election. Wolfquack2 (talk) 16:57, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Speculation here, but I can think of a few motives, or 'anti motives' as it were, for why the MSM not covering it - first, the claimed source of the hack being 'pro palestinian', and the MSM's tendency towards deference to that side of the political issue. Also, an awful lot of MSM folks have been not just embarrassed, but in some cases 'canceled', due to the existence of the archive as the internet's memory - people who have made egregious statements in the past, and having them dredged up later - long after they were deleted - and weaponized against them. Third - the fact that the MSM is largely a dying concern, and the fact that the archive can in some cases cause a loss in revenue. For example, lots of older news articles are paywalled by the publishers, the largest and most well-known being the NYT and WaPo. Via the archive, a great many of those articles can be accessed without restriction.

As I said, this is all speculation. I wish there was more information available about how the archive manages their data. Considering all of the 'ransomware' incidents that have happened in recent years, that sort of exploit could indeed be ruinous - many petabytes of data encrypted by malefactors who refuse to share the key unless millions of dollars are paid. Unlike the Wikimedia foundation, the archive doesn't have an Everest-sized stack of cash lying around to pay such a ransom. cheers. anastrophe, an editor he is. 17:50, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

It's serious, because all of the Wayback Machine links on Wikipedia are down at the moment, with no clue as to when they might be back again. This is believed to be the result of a separate DDoS attack, but the Wayback Machine will not be back until all of this is fixed. --♦IanMacM♦ ^{(talk to me)} 17:54, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Do we know just how many of our articles have wayback machine links? It would be quite illuminating to understand just how deeply this has affected us. --Grnrchst (talk) 21:51, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@Cyberpower678 and Harej: operate WP:IABOT, so one of them may have some stats on this. RoySmith (talk) 22:03, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Although, I see that User:InternetArchiveBot has 5,338,042 edits, so that may be a reasonable guess at the answer. RoySmith (talk) 22:05, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Some crude searching gives ~44,000 articles[1], ~960 templates[2] and ~5,559,000 files[3]. I may be doing something wrong. NebY (talk) 22:18, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Globally, IABot has added Archive URLs to over 22 million dead links. —CYBERPOWER (Message) 03:03, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

@Anastrophe I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case you mentioned in the latter. And considering that the signatures to possibly overrule the Hacchett vs IA is only 40,000 signs away, I wouldn’t be shocked if this is something that scummy publishers are involved. Wolfquack2 (talk) Wolfquack2 (talk) 19:07, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it's a good idea to speculate about motives or try to uncover grand plots. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 19:15, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Fair point. Wolfquack2 (talk) 17:39, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

“But someday I'll prove (I'll prove, I'll prove, I'll prove)

There's a big conspiracy” -Weird Al Yankovic Wolfquack2 (talk) 17:43, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Only way i think to fix it is shut it all down for a few days implement major security fixes and features. Wikipedia foundation wink wink could y’all help them. •Cyberwolf•talk? 18:42, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Yep, that's exactly what the plan is per their most recent post https://x.com/brewster_kahle/status/1844790609573277792. They have it offline intentionally right now and estimate it will be back up in a few days. I'd love if the WMF were to help—besides the Wayback Machine, losing the IA library significantly affects my ability to expand several articles I'm working on. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 18:50, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Me too race result archives and news papers •Cyberwolf•talk? 18:52, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Not to mention how lost media can now become lost-lost media if this happens to a greater extent. Wolfquack2 (talk) 19:00, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I suggest checking out Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library. I spent a couple of hours earlier this year really digging through the offerings, and it's amazing. It doesn't cover everything, but it covers a lot. The central search bar at the top is nice, but it doesn't search everything, so it's useful to do publisher-specific searches occasionally.

It's probably also worth looking into your local library's offerings. The online resources from my local library, which tend to be more pop culture in nature, complement TWL's offerings, which tend to be more scholarly in nature. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:37, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh, for sure. I can't give enough praise to Oxford University Press and Springer, among others. But unfortunately it doesn't have everything (yet)! Thebiguglyalien (talk) 20:49, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

My comments about this in Wikimedia Commons village pump, if anyone is interested.

Here at Wikipedia village pump, as well as in the Commons one, I've talked previously about the dangers that Archive faces, and I also suggested WMF collaboration to adress that. I hope recent Archive's partnership with Google provides them with the needed money, but its current infrastructure (according to their publicly available information) needs to be improved without doubt. For a collection so critical to humanity, 2 production copies in San Francisco Bay Area, with no proper backups, all or part of it is only one earthquake or one cyberattack from disaster. I would like this to change. MGeog2022 (talk) 16:16, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Heads up for accidental logouts

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T372702

There's a bug that's been going around for a few weeks where users get logged out, apparently at random. I'm aware of a few incidents where people have been logged out (presumably due to this bug), didn't notice, and leaked their IP address. So this is just a heads up to be mindful of your login status. If you're running a non-default skin and/or custom CSS, it might be obvious when you get logged out. If you're running all the defaults, not so much. So just try to be alert to this. RoySmith (talk) 01:41, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

A little more information is at Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Keep getting logged out. Johnuniq (talk) 22:34, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Adding Hindustan Times sources

I do not know if this is the right place to discuss this or seek remedy, but HT sources can no longer be added automatically via ref gadgets like ProveIt and VisualEditor, only manually. Can't this be fixed, the way other websites like The Times of India were? Kailash29792 (talk) 17:29, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Are you saying that Visual Editor -> Cite -> Automatic -> pasting a hindustantimes.com URL and clicking "Generate" isn't generating good citations for that website? There's a procedure for fixing that but I forget the details. I think it might have to do with submitting a pull request upstream to Zotero? Anyway, you might have better luck posting this at WP:VPT. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:37, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Yup, you are absolutely right. Previously it could, but I don't know what happened. Kailash29792 (talk) 00:54, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

There are several possibilities, some of which we can fix and some of which we can't. This periodically happens to nytimes.com too, which is inconvenient. Mvolz (WMF) can usually figure out which kind of problem it is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:16, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

translations

I edit in wikipedia in different languages and I want please 3 things that I do not manage to do from translators:

1. Translate for me to Hungarian the sentence "In October 12 2024 Matip announced his retirement from professional football at the age of 33" to put in Joël Matip's page

2. Translte my english user page that you can see in the link bolow to Hungarian, and put it here

3. Translate Joel Matip's page to Icelandic Latin clash (talk) 14:59, 13 October 2024 (UTC)