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Improper handling of assessment for inactive WikiProjects

First, I want to be clear this is not intended as a criticism of any particular editor, it is more of an institutional bad habit that has developed over the past few years and went unnoticed and unquestioned.

Anyway, TL;DR, at some point a few years ago (nobody I talked to was able to figure out exactly how this started and what policy supports this), assessment categories related to inactive WikiProjects (ex. Category:Start-Class Popular Culture articles) started to be deleted as part of broadly understood "maintance". In addition to not being policy supported, this is not just unncessary make-work with zero purpose and benefit, but I argue that this is actively determintal to the project (hiding useful statistics and possibly even introducing errors into the main assessment statistics).

An example of the damage caused is visible in the following aspects:

• pages like Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team/Popular Culture articles by quality statistics become blanked and are often deleted (leading to red links from inactive projects, like Wikipedia:WikiProject Popular Culture; even if these projects are reactivated, it is needlessly cumbersome to restore this)
• there is no justificable reason to delete/hide such statistics, this is a make-work that does not benefit the project at all and arguably damages it by hiding said statistics. I've seen some statistics cited in scholarly research, I myself became aware of this issue as I cited stats for WikiProject Popculture assessment a while back, wanted to update the numbers - and found that they are gone, and there's no way (that I am aware) to get information such as "list of all start-class articles assessed by that project" - maybe it's doable with Wikidata, I am unsure, but it was much easier before).
• since assessment relies on category system, it's possible that this is producing fake results for assessment statistics, as there are some articles where there is no other quality assessment than that of the inactive wikiprojects. Example: Marquis de Sade in popular culture. Such articles may suddenly become reclassified as unassessed as the perfectly fine former assessments by the projects declared as inactive become disconnected (they exists on article's talk pages, but is no longer tied to the category system). This likely affects thousands if not tens of thousands article, ex. WikiProject Popculture had over 3k assessed articles before the statistics were hidden/deleted (see last matrix before the destruction). I am unable to determine the number of such articles (with assessments only from inactive WikiProjects, no longer connected to categories), but it is likely not insiginificant.

Note that I've also reported this to the WikiProject Council (which ironically seems mostly inactive) and V 1.0 editorial team which deals with assessments, where my reading of the short discussion in which Kusma, Chipmunkdavis, Audiodude, CX Zoom and WhatamIdoing participated being that this is indeed not a best practice. I've also raised this at User_talk:Liz/Archive_8#Why_was_this_page_deleted? (also ping UnitedStatesian), where Liz said: "I just checked Wikipedia:WikiProject#Inactive projects, Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide#Dealing with inactive WikiProjects, Wikipedia:Content assessment and Wikipedia:Assessing articles and they don't seem to have any information about article assessments being altered, changed or removed when the WikiProject's status changes. It's stunning to think that something so fundamental as this could have been going on for years without a discussion about it. I'll check the Village Pump later today to see if there was any debate about this in the past". She also suggested this needs to be discussed at VP, and since other discussions seem to have pettered out, here we go.

As for the practical aspects, i.e. what needs to be done - it's relatively simple. All assessment categories and associated pages of inactive WikiProjects need to be restored, and they should not be deleted without a consensus at VP or MfD. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:46, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The simplest way to do this would presumably be to edit Template:Inactive WikiProject banner so that it produces categories in the same way Template:WPBannerMeta does. A wider point is that a simpler process is needed to shift inactive Wikiprojects into places that receive a few more eyes, perhaps by turning them into taskforces of larger projects. CMD (talk) 07:30, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Or even better, merge the banners. —Kusma (talk) 14:10, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

When WikiProjects are merged, part of the process is to merge the banners. If you're interested in doing that, please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Guide/Task forces#Converting existing projects to task forces. We really would benefit from someone systematically suggesting some merges to long-inactive WikiProjects. (I suggest doing just one at a time, until you know how the whole process works.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

I've tried to merge a project before, but found the process cumbersome. The template merging is a particularly tricky issue given the interactions with categories and the like. CMD (talk) 13:58, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

It is very true, the process is really very difficult. I made so many mistakes in my first attempt. At least, I now know what things not to do. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 15:01, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

I know. That's why I suggest that people do one at a time. It might help if you all banded together (you can use WT:COUNCIL for coordination) to work on this. Category:Defunct WikiProjects has a lot of solid candidates for merging. For example, Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Biology, which never really got off the ground in 2006, could be merged up to Wikipedia:WikiProject History of Science. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

• Thank you for the ping Piotrus. Indeed, the removal of quality & importance data of inactive WikiProjects only help in losing useful stats, with no upside. This also makes it incredibly difficult for an interested editor to reactivate the project because they need to start from scratch, unable to build upon the work by their predecessors as everything is deleted. Merging inactive projects as task forces of larger projects might be a good idea where feasible, see WP:WikiProject Dutch municipalities for example which I merged earlier in the year following a talk page discussion. But outright deletion of such project stats does more harm than favour. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:29, 10 December 2022 (UTC)
  • There are two quite different types of assessment:
    • Quality assessment refers to organization, readability, completeness, citations, links etc. and is project-independent
    • Importance assessment refers to how central the article is to coverage of the project's subject

Removing categories for project-related quality or importance assessments is completely unjustified, assuming the assessments are reasonably accurate. Even is the project is inactive, it is useful to see stats on articles that belong to the project. So yes, all assessment categories and associated pages of inactive WikiProjects need to be restored. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:02, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

The "importance" categories generally are fairly useless and not worth the bandwidth. Arguably tagging a newbie article as "low priority" makes importance assessment a net negative. Quality assessments have nothing to do with WikiProjects anymore (except perhaps MilHist, but that is a fairly active, hence atypical project), so they should be moved out of the project banners. —Kusma (talk) 14:15, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

To return to Piotrus' original point, we should certainly always display article quality ratings, independent of whether the corresponding project is "active" or not. Many projects were founded not because of editor interest, but only to provide a framework for quality assessment. Unsurprisingly, many of these projects aren't very active, but that is no reason not to display quality ratings. —Kusma (talk) 14:19, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Personally I think that importance ratings are okay because it, in theory, helps to streamline efforts to improve an article to FA/GA status. For example, if an editor interested in computer software were to put in effort to get an FA, they may start with the High-importance software article, rather than the low-importance one. So, I'd not want to remove them totally. However, several WikiProjects have a local consensus to not use importance ratings and that is respected, as their templates lack this functionality. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 16:00, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

In theory, Top-Importance helps people focus on the right articles to work on (haven't seen this happen in practice, ever). In practice, Low-Importance gives newbies a kick in the teeth. In the last 15 years, I haven't been made aware of a theoretical or practical use of Mid-Importance or High-Importance. —Kusma (talk) 17:06, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Oh, this does happen, sometimes. I'm not sure how you think you would "see" this, short of a specific discussion on a project talk page (which also has been known to happen). Not that I disagree that that both ratings are little used, and people whio spend lots of time updating them are largely wasting their effort. Johnbod (talk) 18:32, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

While in theory low/mid/high might have some use, they are of little importance and consequence. I think we all however agree that the quality assessments are useuful. Let's not get side tracket into the discussion of the marginal importance of the, well, importance ratings... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:59, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

While in theory importance ratings help editors prioritise which articles they work on, does this ever happen in practice? If an editor is sufficiently interested in a subject to bring articles up to GA, let alone FA, I would imagine that if they are concerned about article importance at all, they will be making their own subjective assessment, rather than relying on what is fundamentally the subjective assessment of some random person often a decade or more ago, some of which are frankly bizarre – looking at articles I have nominated for GA, Neaira (hetaira) is listed as high importance to WikiProject Greece, while Women in Classical Athens is low importance to the same WikiProject! I've never encountered anyone who was put off of writing about a subject they were interested in because someone had tagged it low importance, or who had started improving an article because it was tagged top importance. Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 17:37, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

WP:WPMED has done this in the past; therefore it happens in practice. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:17, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

I support restoring the cats to these banners. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:18, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

@CX Zoom, exactly. please take a look at my contribs history, to see some improvements I made just this week to the assessment pages for WikiProject History. Sm8900 (talk) 12:58, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

I've basically been ignoring both the importance and quality ratings for several years, now. Even when I was adding project banners to talk pages, I never rated an article as anything other than 'stub' or 'start'. GA and FA are based on formal reviews, but the other, intermediate, ratings I have always seen as highly subjective, as are the importance ratings. I only follow the projects I belong to for things like notices of AfDs and discussions about problems with articles within the projects' scopes. - Donald Albury 15:18, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

C- and B-class aren't really arbitrary, but there can be wide variation, some of which seems to be due to a reluctance to make major changes to outdated ratings. Even if it really is a B-class article, if it was previously tagged as a Start-class article, editors worry that perhaps the other guy knew more about it than they do.

I think the stub ratings should be applied by bot (mw:ORES has basically no false positives for stubs, though it does skip a few that are on the border between stub and Start), and that anything currently rated C-class or higher that the bot thinks is a stub should be flagged for manual review. Sending a bot around would halve the unassessed-article backlog. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 10 December 2022 (UTC)

Assessments are often not based on the guidelines. A high quality and complete article will rarely get assessed higher than start/low if it is short. But that is a different issue. The question here is whether wikiproject assessment categories should be removed if the project becomes inactive. I can see no reason to make it harder to find Stub-Class Ruritania articles or Low-importance Ruritania articles just because not much is happening with Wikiproject Ruritania. Aymatth2 (talk) 13:57, 11 December 2022 (UTC)]]

@Aymatth2But wouldn't you just use categories instead? Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 10:33, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

@Wakelamp: The 350-odd inactive wikiprojects may include tens or hundreds of thousands of articles. They were assigned to categories by the project templates, but now the templates have been changed to disable the category assignment, That is the issue being discussed here. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:03, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

FWIW, years ago I took the time to review the ratings of a number of stub-Class articles for one of the WikiProjects, & found about a quarter could reasonably be considered "start" quality, & another 10% even higher quality. So the oft-bemoaned issue that about half of all Wikipedia articles are stubs may be wrong, & the true number of stubs is closer to a third -- not great, but not as bad as many people believe. -- llywrch (talk) 21:22, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

@Piotrus Another thing that might go into limbo is the log file of class changes . It only goes back 7 days though. For academics couldn't they just data mine the last time the article had a project? Or use wikidata?

@Llywrch "So the oft-bemoaned issue that about half of all Wikipedia articles are stubs may be wrong, & the true number of stubs is closer to a third -" Do many articles actually get reclassified? There doesn't see to be anyway to see a project's process in improving class and importance over time? (Aside : I just found out that [[Wikipedia:Content assessment| "assessing an article as "A-Class" generally requires the agreement of at least two editors"]) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:13, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

@Wakelamp Re: "For academics couldn't they just data mine the last time the article had a project? Or use wikidata?". Maybe. If they have the right skills. I don't and for my research I reply on WikiProject statistics, and when they are deleted, I am at a loss of what to do. For example, in a paper I am writing I had some statistics about WikiProject Popular Culture, I wanted to update them - but I cannot. And this can be of interest to readers; in another article I have recently written (see wikiversity:WikiJournal Preprints/Where experts and amateurs meet: the ideological hobby of medical volunteering on Wikipedia), a reviewer just asked for some statistics related to WikiProject Medicine. I was able to add/update those b/c that project is still active, but the paper on popular culture cites a year-old statistics that can no longer be udpated or refined with my skills, not until the system I am familiar with is restored. I hope that gives you an idea of the trouble the current (totally pointless) deletion of data is having on some research. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:16, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

That's a very good reason;I am used to systems which cope with these issues :-) I was also treating researchers in the abstract, rather than as people! Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 11:12, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Improper handling of assessment for inactive WikiProjects – action

@Aymatth2 @CX Zoom @Caeciliusinhorto @Chipmunkdavis @Donald Albury @Johnbod @Kusma @WhatamIdoing The consensus seems pretty clear we want this stoped and done otherwise, but how do we get it done and enforced? @Liz @UnitedStatesian _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 15:58, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

• Some notes:
  • This scan lists 356 inactive wikiprojects, This scan lists 341 inactive WikiProject banners.
  • WP:WikiProject Games is an example, with {{WikiProject Games}}. The template invokes WPBannerMeta/inactive instead of WPBannerMeta.
  • Template:WPBannerMeta/inactive redirects to Template:Inactive WikiProject banner, which displays something like
  • The WikiProject Games template before the change links to 31 redlinked categories: Category:FA-Class Games articles, Category:FL-Class Games articles, Category:A-Class Games articles, Category:GA-Class Games articles, Category:B-Class Games articles, Category:C-Class Games articles, Category:Start-Class Games articles, Category:Stub-Class Games articles, Category:List-Class Games articles, Category:Unassessed Games articles, Category:NA-Class Games articles, Category:File-Class Games articles, Category:Category-Class Games articles, Category:Disambig-Class Games articles, Category:Portal-Class Games articles, Category:Template-Class Games articles, Category:Project-Class Games articles, Category:Draft-Class Games articles, Category:Games articles by quality, Category:High-importance Games articles, Category:Mid-importance Games articles, Category:Low-importance Games articles, Category:NA-importance Games articles, Category:Unknown-importance Games articles, Category:Games articles by importance, Category:Games articles needing attention, Category:Games articles needing infoboxes, Category:Wikipedia requested photographs of games, Category:Games articles needing reassessment, Category:WikiProject Games articles
  • 31 x 341 = 10,571, an estimate of the number of inactive project categories that would have to be recreated
  • Each category would have two or more container categories, such as Category:Ruritania-related articles by quality, Category:Start-Class articles
  • There should be a technical fix to make {{Inactive WikiProject banner}} simply display the "Inactive project" warning and then invoke {{WPBannerMeta}} to display the normal project parameters. I do not see an easy way to recreate all the deleted categories.

Aymatth2 (talk) 22:14, 16 December 2022 (UTC)

One way to get the missing categories is to ask an admin for a WP:REFUND. Given that there are 10K possible pages involved, it would be much nicer if it could be managed by bot.

I find these editors in the history of Template:WPBannerMeta: MSGJ, Wugapodes, WOSlinker, and Happy-melon. Perhaps one/some of them would be willing to work on the change to the banner. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:17, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The easiest way would be to add the |inactive= parameter to {{WPBannerMeta}} and deprecating the {{Inactive WikiProject banner}}. I can add a edit request for it. Although, I was wondering if the language could be improved in a way that encourages the banner reader to reactivate the project, or should the language be kept as it is. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:35, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The easy way to recreate the 10k categories would be to authorise a bot to do it. Or authorise an WP:ADMINBOT to WP:REFUND them to preserve history. ADMINBOT requires Village Pump consensus though, which we can gather in a subsection if needed. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 21:40, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

The entire concept of inactive projects is IMHO wrong, but that's a discussion for a different issue. For now, the key point is that assessment infrastructure should not be affected by the activity of a wikiproject.. Depraciating Inactive WikiProject banner is a good idea, there is no need for asessement banner to inform at all about the status of a project. And yes, we probably need an ADMINBOT to REFUND all these categories. It would be nice if one of the people responsible for creating this, well, problem (i.e. deleting stuff for no good reason and with no policy justification), would step up to help. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 11:07, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

The deleters were following policy. The problem was in the templates. —Kusma (talk) 11:44, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

@Kusma Which policy? See what Liz wrote above (where I quote her). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:52, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

WP:CSD says that empty categories should be deleted after a week. —Kusma (talk) 07:56, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

CSD does not say that empty categories "should" be deleted. It permits the deletion but does not encourage/recommend/require it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:40, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

Perhaps this is a discussion for a different place, but a WikiProject is a group of editors who want to work together to improve Wikipedia (and not, e.g., a collection of articles or other pages). Of course a group of people can become inactive. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:42, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

I would support that. No need to have a separate banner with near identical functionality. —Kusma (talk) 11:41, 18 December 2022 (UTC)

{{Inactive WikiProject banner}} is already a wrapper template for {{WPBannerMeta}} so I don't see the gain in deprecating it? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:32, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

• Suggest reconsider. Many WikiProjects have been set up by a single editor and have never gained traction. Some relate to a single TV programme, game, university or foodstuff. Examples include: Wikipedia:WikiProject Bacon, Wikipedia:WikiProject Warhammer 40,000 or Wikipedia:WikiProject Cal Poly Pomona. That does not mean we need to indefinitely maintain a whole tree of categories. Please do not blindly restore categories of all inactive projects; I believe this would have little value and just add to the clutter of categories at the bottom of the page. Instead we could work on selective restoration, which could be triggered by a parameter in Template:Inactive WikiProject banner? Better still if a group of interested editors want to revive a project, then we can just switch it back to active again. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:03, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

  Those projects should be merged, but all articles covered by them should have quality ratings displayed. Of course, the better solution would be to stop pretending that quality ratings are related to WikiProjects. —Kusma (talk) 10:24, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

  Yes! Absolutely agree with that. One single quality ratings scale for the whole encyclopedia. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 10:30, 19 December 2022 (UTC)

  Agree, perhaps integrate quality rating into {{WikiProject Banner Shell}}. The text could be "This B-Class article is of interest to the following WikiProjects:". We would still need to find a way to aggregate the quality rating from WPBS and the names of individual WikiProjects under it in order to populate the Category:B-Class Foobar articles. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 01:57, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

  PetScan can do category intersection. I think the idea is viable, but it would be a major change for the project and we'd need to make sure all the tools and bots can handle it. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 09:48, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

  @MSGJ: I think that {{WPBannerMeta}} does somehow recognise when input inside {{WPBS}}. That is how it auto-collapses whenever inside WPBS. See Special:Diff/1128534506 v/s Special:Diff/1128534566. Is it possible to deploy something along the same lines, this time to recognise the quality rating within WPBS? —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 17:16, 20 December 2022 (UTC)

  I suspect it will involve moving the classification coding to the banner template instead. For example {{WPBS|class=C|projects=Castles,Netherlands,Middle Ages}} — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:12, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

  @Kusma "Of course, the better solution would be to stop pretending that quality ratings are related to WikiProjects. " A fair point. I rate articles all across Wikipedia (for stub/start/C classes at least), without being a member of most related projects. And for example the inexistence of assessment template Wikipedia:WikiProject Music is quite annoying when it comes to assessing generic music topics, for example (I think we can use assessment for "Music theory" instead, but seriously, that's a pointless split). In either case, my immediate concern is restoring visibility of assessments that have been hidden/disconnected from the main assessment scheme when associated projects have been declared inactive. Btw, a quick check (@MSGJ) shows that Bacon WP never did any assessments, WH40K did some but they have been hidden once the project was declared inactive last year, ditto for the "Cal Poly Pomona". I fully support merge of such projects, but any assessments done under their banners should not be lost. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 12:37, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

  Is this because you are worried that some articles will not have any assessment, if these ones are hidden? For example are there any games articles which are not now in any assessment category? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 14:10, 22 December 2022 (UTC)

  @MSGJ Yes, to your first question (although this is not the only reason, it's arguably the most important for the project). As for the second question, hard to be sure since links backs are broken. If there were game projects which becsame obsolete, it is likely some of them had assessed articles to which nobody added a broader game project assessment, and once they were shut down this became de facto unassessed, just like with that popculure de Sade example. It would take a lot of work to find some examples, as I don't know how to get a list of articles assessed by a defunct WikiProject since the infrastructure that did so (generated such lists) was destroyed. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:37, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

  PS. I can tell you only that WH40K project assessed 158 articles, CPP, 60, and Bacon, 451 (I guess I was wrong with my first assessment). I did, actually, figure out a way to see the list of all articles assessed by a project, backtracking from the still existing WikiProject assessment templates (ex. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:WikiProject_Warhammer_40,000 for WH40K). But to see which ones have assessments only from a given WikiProject would require manual checking one by one or running a Wikidata querry that's beyond my ability to write. That said, here you go: Eldar (Warhammer 40,000), Ork (Warhammer 40,000), T'au Empire - game related articles, assessed within that project, now no longer linked to any assessment categories. I just "restored" the rating for Battle for Armageddon, adding a Board Games WikiProject banner there, but I have no time or will to manually look through hundreds of articles from just three WikiProjects, and the counts by other above suggest we likely have tens if not hundreds of articles to double check for lost ratings... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 04:45, 28 December 2022 (UTC)

  If assessments have been lost then I agree this is a concern for the project. I may seek technical advice on how we can track down any other articles which have lost their assessments due to inactive project banners. I am confident there will be an easy way to do this; then we will know how urgent the problem is. I will be happy to work with you and others on this issue in 2023, but don't underestimate the scale of the task, especially if we push ahead with the "single assessment rating" idea — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:43, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

  I was interested to see if the PageAssessments database still held the assessment. [1] shows that it remembers the project (Warhammer 40,000) but unfortunately does not hold the class anymore. It looks like the database refreshes itself occasionally and if the banner is no longer there, then the class is removed. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:58, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

  @MSGJ Indeed. I think we could get the answer through Wikidata. I cannot write a complex query like this, but wikidata has a query writing volunteer section. Think you could ask there if a query can list the number of articles with assessments only for WikiProjects marked as defunct? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:43, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

  I think the assessment of WikiProject Bacon as never gaining traction when they held multiple yearly installments of competitions with active participants is inaccurate. They may be dead now, but that doesn't mean they were always dead.

  I do think the WikiProject process could be overhauled. I think it's accurate to say most WikiProjects are dead and a lot of "active" ones are simply categories with a fancy coat of paint. I can only name like, three WikiProjects I'd actually consider active. (For the record: MILHIST, VG, and U.S. Roads. But I'm not a WikiProject expert by any means and I'm sure there's more I don't know about.) One minor change I'd personally make is to say something like WikiProjects can't be created without (three, five, some number) people affirming that they'll join it. casualdejekyll 12:42, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

  That is why Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals exist to ensure that dead-on-creation WikiProjects aren't created. Sadly, I've seen many WikiProjects created out of process. Within last 4 months WP:WikiProject Russian invasion of Ukraine and at least one more WikiProject were created. They now lie dormant. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 12:49, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

  Okay the other one was MfDed by the author, see Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:WikiProject Australian transport —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 12:53, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

• I don't agree there's a consensus. A bunch of editors from a particular discussion were pinged, a discussion on VPM (not an active board by any means) was opened up a few weeks ago, and there's a festive period during which a lot of editors are more inactive. I know there have been past discussions on cleaning up inactive WikiProjects, which I think is a pretty supported task. I personally support that cleanup. If we're being realistic, 95%+ of these dead WikiProjects are not getting revived, in line with the general trend that is our editorbase is getting smaller not bigger. WP 1.0 is not really relevant anymore, and aside from a number of well-managed WikiProjects most are pretty useless at this point except from being good topical noticeboards. I think cleanup and merging of inactive WikiProjects is appropriate, although I'm not sure how useful of a task it is, but perceived usefulness isn't a reason against doing a task which is good. As for the comment above about "quality assessments being independent per WikiProject" - while that may be true in theory, because the WikiProject template supports this, it's not really in practice. The same person usually does mass-assessment, and for most articles the quality indicators are the same for all projects, and the priority indicators were set by the same person too and usually arbitrarily. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 22:15, 29 December 2022 (UTC)

  @ProcrastinatingReader I am afraid you are missing the point. This not about restoring inactive WikiProjects - nobody is advocating for that. This about restoring their assessments, which are no better or worse than other assessments. And indeed, some folks have suggested moving such assessments away from WikiProjects, at least inactive ones, which is in line with your reasoning I think. I really don't see what we don't have consensus on? Are you ok with numerous former assessments being effectively deleted, with no policy supporting depreciating assessments done by formerly active wikiprojects? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 06:24, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

  Are you ok with numerous former assessments being effectively deleted, with no policy supporting depreciating assessments done by formerly active wikiprojects? I think WikiProjects are mainly administered through common practice, and not some written rules?

  But yea, I'd be fine with these assessments being deleted, if they were the same as the other assessments which still exist on the article. Then nothing of value is lost, and I suspect this is the majority of cases. If it was an assessment that differs from the existing ones, or if it was the only assessment on the article, then I think there's more of a problem, but I suspect that's a minority of cases. Moving assessment away from WikiProjects is something that makes sense to me, and basically reflects current practice, since assessment is generally done en masse (with few exceptions; MILHIST etc). ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 10:24, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

  @ProcrastinatingReader The point you are missing is that they were not "the same as the other assessments which still exist on the article". There are some articles which had no assessments outside from wikiprojects that became inactive, so obviously, some value is lost. It's hard to be sure how many as nobody has run a wikidata query, but it's likely in thousands if not more. There is no good reason to waste people's effort that went into assessing them, particularly when those people are often not even associated with those wikiprojects, they just used whatever assessment template seemed most relevant (as I did on many occasions, as I assess articles in various areas and I know I used some now-defunct templates; I doubt I was the only person like that. Anyway, I don't think it's fair that assessments I did were invalidated because of a technicality that is not even supported by any policy anyone could locate). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:41, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

  @ProcrastinatingReader: Quality assessments should be independent of projects. I would like to see them put into a generic quality template. Importance assessments are project-specific and belong in the project templates. Winston Churchill was an important politician, not a very important artist. Aymatth2 (talk) 00:03, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

Improper handling of assessment for inactive WikiProjects – break

@Aymatth2 Do we need a vote for that? I totally support the idea, but generally we have a consensus here (for restoring assessments and for moving the quality ones into a single wikiproject-independent template), but how do we implement that?

However, I'll note that even if the quality assessments are split, they should still be connected to WikiProjects, as the active ones like milhist or med certainly care to know how many articles of what quality exist within their sphere. I am sure members of such project would oppose any split that would affect how the system works on their end.

So perhaps the way to do it is to keep the current system, but add a master template that copies an existing assessment if one exists, and if not, it can still host a quality assessment. This way we would avoid the trouble with upsetting the system that works for active WikiProjects, and solve the problem of assessments for articles that are not within the scope of any WikiProject (or active one). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:49, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

@Piotrus: We would have to launch a new discussion to get approval for separating quality assessments from wikiproject importance assessments. The cleanest way, to me, is to move the quality assessment up into {{WikiProject banner shell}}, drop it from the individual wikiproject templates, and make sure that all talk pages with one or more wikiproject templates have them grouped into a {{WikiProject banner shell}}. E.g.

{{WikiProject banner shell |class=GA |1=

{{WikiProject Biography|core=yes|living=n|listas=Churchill, Winston}}

{{WikiProject British Empire|importance=high}}

{{WikiProject Conservatism|importance=top}}

}}

The banner shell could pass down the |class= value to the project templates, which would add categories like Category:GA-Class British Empire articles. But there may be better ways, and implementation would definitely require bot development. This is quite a dramatic change... Aymatth2 (talk) 15:45, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

I proposed this above and obviously support this when RfC is started but we need to ensure that it is technically feasible first of all. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 16:47, 6 January 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom @Aymatth2 We do, but doing requires working, and sadly all of this is outside my competency. Overall, maybe we should first do the easy thing, which is (1) restore the deleted assessment system, and then we can move on to (2) reforming the assessment by giving the banner shell this "backup" functionality so it can host assessment information even if there is no active project associated with it?

What worries me is how we move on from talking to getting something done here... _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:24, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

There are three separate questions. I can start:

• Proposal to fix {{WPBannerMeta/inactive}} so it passes an |inactive=y parameter to {{WPBannerMeta}}, plus all the other parameters, and to change {{WPBannerMeta}} so it displays a note saying the project is inactive, but otherwise shows the assessments and assigns categories as usual. This seems uncontroversial and easy to do.
• Request for a bot to recover all the deleted inactive project categories. But it does no harm to have redlinked categories on the talk pages until that is done. Worst case it could be done manually, 10,000 tedious edits.
• Idea Lab for comments on how best to get the wikiproject assessment categories added to the talk page when the |class= parameter is collected by {{WikiProject banner shell}}. Seems uncontroversial. I may be missing the obvious technical approach on this one.

I can start those. Aymatth2 (talk) 19:16, 7 January 2023 (UTC)

Sounds good on all of those. I think we have consensus for points 1 and 2, as they don't change anything (except recovering some content that was deleted without a policy supporting said deletion). And of course Idea Lab is uncontroversial too. Please ping me when you start relevant discussions so I can support. Thank you! _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 09:33, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for pursuing this guys! And sorry I have not been actively engaged in the last few days. However I am not sure there is a consensus for points 1 and 2. I see significant concern that some (possibly valuable) assessments have been lost when projects have been deactivated. But recreating hundreds of unused categories does not seem to be the best way forward. On the other hand the conversation has moved beyond that issue into something much broader. If I may separate the two issues and suggest ways forward:

1. Inactive WikiProjects: the inactive project template could be made to display the assessment class (if available) but not to categorise. This will obviate the need to recreate all those categories. They will output the assessment via PageAssessments so any tools that use this will start to work again. I can sandbox the code for this and seek comments in next few days.
2. Single Wikipedia-wide quality scale: suggest starting a formal RfC somewhere appropriate on the single question "Should Wikipedia use a single quality scale for article assessments and deprecate WikiProject specific quality scales?" Based on the support shown in this discussion I expect this will attract support across the community and we can then continue with discussion about its implementation.

As I noted above, I am ready to help with the technical aspects of whatever outcome achieves consensus. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:12, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

The above is very much WP:TLDR, but I will offer an example: WikiProject Lincolnshire, marked as inactive in August 2021, was revived a few weeks ago, and its banner template was accordingly reactivated by HJ Mitchell (talk · contribs). The assessment categories immediately began to be repopulated, but the category pages had been deleted some time earlier, so I undeleted all of the categories that I could trace. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 18:16, 8 January 2023 (UTC)

Sounds like the system is working well as intended. Hopefully the Lincolnshire project will be active now. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 19:13, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ Why do you see a problem with restoring the categories? Without the categories the assessment will not be included in the project-wide statistics. Given that the deletion of the categories was done without any identified support in policy or even best practice essay recommendation or whatever, restoring them is a simple reversion of unjustified deletion (abuse of deletion process - deletion without discussion/policy reason), if nothing else. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 03:31, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Piotr: several reasons:

1. These categories were often created without consensus by a single (or handful of) editors. Many WikiProjects were not created via the formal approval process.
2. The topics are arbitrary and correspond to the niche interests of the editor(s) who created the project. They are not necessarily a logical way of organising articles in an encyclopedia.
3. Many of categories have been deleted without comment for several months/years, which suggests the deletion was uncontroversial. I do not think it is helpful to label these as an abuse of the deletion process!
4. We are talking above about divorcing WikiProjects from the quality assessment. The restoration of all these categories seems to be directly opposed to that movement. We could instead be using these articles with "lost" assessments to demonstrate the potential of a new project-wide quality assessment process.

— Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:58, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ

Re: 1. Two wrongs don't make a right. The fact that a WP project was not created via the approved procedure (which I concur leads to many dead-on-arrival-or-soon-afterward dud projects) doesn't mean that their assessment schemes should be deleted. As I noted above, many assessments are done not by the members of a wikiproject, but by editors (like me) who assess articles from all fields they are active in without being a member of a relevant wikiproject, since there is no rule saying only members of a wikiproject can do assessments. Do explain to me why some of the assessments I did are now disconnected from the main assessment database? Why is my effort wasted? Because I used an assessment banner of a WikiProject that has been declared inactive, while no other banner seemed appropriate? This should not matter, my assessment should continue to be piped to the main database.

Re: 2. Yes, but that's not relevant to the issue of restoring assessments. It's like saying we should randomly delete categories because there are some that are very detailed while other, arguably more important ones, haven't been created.

Re: 3. I disagree - the lack of controversy was b/c it was a niche technical action that nobody thought through and realized it affects the wider assessments (as the people most likely to raise an objection were the inactive members of the inactive wikiprojects, and nobody bothered to inform the assessment folks at the other end that some data will be removed, or individual editors doing assessments, like me, that our work is being discarded).

Re: 4. There is no contradiction between restoring the old system and eventually moving to the new one (a move which I tentatively support). We can reverse the damage done (restore assessments) without reactivating pointless wikiprojects, and continue discussion on how to move all assessments to a system that won't care about associated wikiproject's activity. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:20, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Absolutely your assessments should stand. You were assessing on behalf of the whole project, you were not assessing for a niche WikiProject. Therefore the system has been flawed from the beginning. Let's use our energies to develop a proper topic-free template that we can use to properly assess articles, and not waste time restoring dead project banners. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:40, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ I am worried that the latter task will prove too difficult to implant, either due to organizational interia or due to nobody stepping up, and while waiting ad infinitum for this to change, nothing will. Hence why I prefer restoring the status quo in assessment first. Note I am not stopping anyone from pursuing reforming assessment system, in fact I give this my wholehearted blessing - but I want to see my (and others) assessment, deleted/hidden without a policy justifying such a course, restored ASAP (with the additional note that restoration of said assessments, and thus correcting the errors in the project wide assessment statistics, is beneficial to everyone, at least as long as we think quality assessments and their statistics have value). _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:47, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Okay I understand your position - it just seemed to be pulling in the wrong direction! I have indicated that I am willing to "step up", but you are right that project inertia should not be under-estimated. What do you think about my idea of restoring the display of assessments but not categorising? Do you have an insight into which tools rely on categorisation and which ones use the PageAssessments database? A possible idea (which could be quick to implement) is to create a generic banner template which categorises straight into Category:C-Class articles, so not attached to any particular project. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 11:29, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ I'd totally support that, although I think this should be a parent category to others. There is nothing wrong with knowing how many military history or popular culture or Poland C-class articles we have, and in fact it's a useful statistic for said WikiProjects and researchers and folks who are just curious about those kind of breakdowns. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:59, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

@Aymatth2 The discussion seems stalled, so I am ping you as you had some good ideas above and wrote "I can start those". If you wouldn't mind? :) _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 07:06, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

@Piotrus: Sorry for the delay. See Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Display assessments on inactive wikiproject banners and Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)#Project-independent quality assessments. All comments welcome. Aymatth2 (talk) 15:53, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Just as an example, see Talk:Predator (film) which is now displaying its class but not categorising. You can check that it records in the PageAssessments database by checking [2] — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:34, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

@MSGJ That one doesn't seem to be a problem - WikiProject Aliens is inactive but the movie is listed in several other projects, which are active and presumably pipe correctly to the main assessment system. The problem as identified mainly concerns articles which are only within the scope of inactive wikiprojects. Unless I am missing something? _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:33, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes it was just an example to show how we could easily adapt the inactive banner to show the assessments — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 08:17, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Quality assessments should be project-independent, since they refer to how well an article covers a subject, regardless of which projects are interested in the subject. But categories giving quality by project are useful. Category:C class Ruritania articles is more useful than Category:C class articles. It may be hard for a generic template to capture a quality assessment and pass it transparently to all the project templates so they can add project-specific categories. But there must be a solution. Aymatth2 (talk) 14:47, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

@Prokonsul Piotrus, I agree completely with you. I havwe been keeping Wikiproject History going, but there was a period of time when it becamse dormant. it would have been not beneficial at all if we had discarded the wikiproject or its folders during that time. Sm8900 (talk) 12:44, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Planning for RfC

I have drafted an RfC question at User:MSGJ/Sandbox/4. Any comments or copyedits would be welcome — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 21:31, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

Comments:

1. as discussed above, we should only take the quality assessment out and leave the importance assessments with the wikiprojects
2. this proposal will fail as active wikiprojects like milhist will never agree to give up their well-estabilished and functional assessments
3. we should not propose to "This proposal would take article assessment out of the hands of WikiProjects and puts it in the hands of the general community.". We should propose to "This proposal would create a back up system for article assessments that would no longer be solely dependent on WikiProjects, allowing articles to be rated on quality even if there is WikiProjects banner, or preserving such a rating if all WikiProjects associated with the article become inactive (currently such ratings are effectively retired). "

_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:37, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

I agree with most of what is in that RfC, but this is too distracted from what we started this thread with: to restore lost assessments by removing/fixing inactive parameter & restoring categories. This change shouldn't be controversial in the first place. There isn't an existing community consensus to delete assessments and this thread at VPM is more or less unanimously supported. If an RfC has done, it should be done on just this one question. The quality assessment change is a separate question and can have an RfC at a later stage when we figure out how to technically manage it. Bundling multiple questions together also impact the participant's opinion on the other question. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 17:21, 12 January 2023 (UTC)

@CX Zoom We don't need an RfC to restore deleted assessments since, as you note, there has never been consensus to do so, nor a policy to support it. As far as I can tell based on what Liz wrote (links at the very top in my OP), someone just started to delete this stuff for no identifiable reason and it became an action done by some other admins who assumed that it is policy/consensus supported. In other words, it's just a mistake that needs to be fixed.

Now, I do think an RfC for the proposal to reform the system/create backup is a good idea. Personally I support the backup idea (allowing hosting of assessments in a banner independent of any wikiproject), while I don't think the "take assessments away from WikiProject" idea will fly (milhist, med and others will crush it, and why shouldn't they). And yes, I am worried that badly designed RfC will focus attention on the "take assessments away" idea and end up failing, leaving the other, very good idea (backup), forgotten. Bundling all of this with the non-controversial assessment restoration would compound the problem, of course. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:57, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

First can I dispel the myth that the action of deactivating these categories was against policy or consensus. There was quite a well attended discussion at WP:VPR that has been copied to Template talk:Inactive WikiProject banner#Discussion from Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) for posterity. Okay it was a while ago now, but you can see that several people supported much stronger actions including the complete removal of inactive project banners. So this was a compromise that was agreed on. Secondly, can we please separate the two different discussions going on here?? In this subsection I am trying to take forward the idea of a WikiProkect-independent quality scale, but you keep banging on about the inactive project banners. Can I suggest we continue that discussion in a different section as it has nothing to do with the proposed RfC. Thirdly, to the points at hand, I will reply shortly. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:10, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Thank you for the link. I think there was lot of misunderstanding and generalities in the discussion, as well as general misunderstanding of how system works. That discussion was about decluttering the talk page spaces, but it ended up using effectively a nuclear option - and no, I don't see a consensus for that (only for minimizing the banners for inactive projects).

Looking at the few instances the term assessment was mentioned there, I see you were the OP there and you said "If the project is inactive then the assessment data is not being used either", which is clearly incorrect as the assessment data was used through being piped to the totality of the assessment system. One editor (User:John Carter) there already noticed the danger and opposed this: "I would very much regret seeing the removal of a banner if in so doing the possibly sole existing assessment of an article is also eliminated". User:Happy-melon, in my reading of their comment, likewise opposed "losing valuable data" by removing the banners (and only supported rewording them for inactive projects), noting that "It is actively damaging to WP to erase that data by removing project banners from talk pages... The more of the infrastructure of a wikiproject remains, the easier it is to restore and revitalise." Although Happy-melon specifically objected to the removal of the banners, not categories, I think the spirit of their sentiment is obvious and they'd not support destruction of the category infrastructure. The third editor who mentioned assessments, User:JimCubb, again supported adding inactive parameter but also wrote "should the project be revived, all of the assessments are there waiting to be viewed", likewise in my understanding implying they did not wish for the categories to be deleted, making viewing the assessments (in aggregation) difficult. That's for editors commenting on assessment. Regarding categories, likewise, I don't see any consensus for the deletion of the categories. Let's look at mentions: User:JimMillerJr expressed concern that " The deletion of thousands of now empty categories is a little more difficult. If a project is later revived, the recreation of previously deleted catagories could result in a mess at CfD." and later that "Conversion is preferable to outright deletion, especially regarding the categories on those talk pages." I understand conversion as merging or such; anyway, the editors I mentioned have been pinged and can clarify their thoughts (a decade+ later) if they are still active and interested. But, to repeat myself, I see zero consensus or support for the deletion of the category system in that discussion.

As for the RfC, I expressed my thoughts, noting that I think it is flawed in the current version (and will almost certainly fail). Oh, and nobody cares much about inactive project banners here, they can stay they way they are as far as I and I think most participants are concerned. What I believe the consensus for exists, however, is to restore the deleted assessment infrastructure, so that assessments can be repiped back to the global assessment scheme, instead of being invalidated by the project's inactivity. This is the most important and pressing issue at hand (fixing pointless damage done). Reforming the assessment system is frankly off topic here, and I'd encourage you to start a new discussion at WP:VPIL about this. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 05:54, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

WP:NOCONFED

Hello, everyone! Those interested in the subject of the American Civil War, Neo-Confederates and the Southern United States (or in some other related subject) might be interested in WP:NOCONFED as well, a closely related essay that was created relatively recently. — Sundostund mppria ^{(talk / contribs)} 06:34, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

• Meh… NOCONFED is an Essay, not Policy or guidance. Essays reflect the opinion of a segment of the WP community, but not necessarily consensus of the broader community. The only weight they have is that of persuasion.

Note that if there is something in NOCONFED people disagree with, they can always write a contrary Essay to express their opinion. Call it WP:YESCONFED (or WP:CONFED OK or something). — Preceding unsigned comment added by Blueboar (talk • contribs) 14:08, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

• As far as I know, no one ever tried to present this essay as something different than what it is – just an essay, same as WP:NONAZIS and WP:NORACISTS. It is not Policy or guidance. — Sundostund mppria ^{(talk / contribs)} 14:16, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

• Well, as it turns out, some essays are more equal than others. WP:NONAZIS seems to enjoy widespread endorsement by admins and non-admins, so you will often see it frequently used as block rationales or during deletion discussions. It's difficult in history to come up with a parallel to Nazism that is just as stark in its industrial-scale inhumanity and cruelty, even taking the history of the Deep South into consideration. As Hob Gadling said on the WP:NONAZIS talk page: Suggestions about pages applying the same exclusion principle to other groups such as communists or confederates have been roundly rejected on this very page, so this [so-called slippery slope] is not slippery at all. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 15:53, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

• All of the mentioned essays are dealing with very serious issues, and I don't see any of them as being "more equal than others". Also, WP:NONAZIS was created in 2018, while WP:NOCONFED exists for barely six months now. Having that in mind, its not strange that WP:NONAZIS enjoy such endorsement by users, which was steadily gathered over the last five years. On the other hand, despite its short existence, WP:NOCONFED is already endorsed by seven users, as of now. That is much bigger endorsement than for WP:NORACISTS, which is currently endorsed by three users. Can that number be seen as an indicator that WP:NORACISTS isn't relevant? Of course not – over time, the endorsement for that essay will only grow bigger. Along that line, I can say that I am looking forward to see WP:NOCONFED gathering much bigger endorsement in the future, and to see it applied here with the same zeal and strictness as WP:NONAZIS. As for the (completely legitimate) opinion of Hob Gadling, and some other users as well, I can only say that we should agree to disagree on the matter. — Sundostund mppria ^{(talk / contribs)} 07:07, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

  To me, I think the Overton window is not as narrow as you think it is when it comes to Confederates vs. Nazis comparisons, but as we've determined before, you and I are always going to disagree on this. Time will tell if this receives the widespread endorsement that you believe it will. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 21:15, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Should Biographies include audio excerpts of an individual's voice?

For some time now, inspired by articles like Mikhail Gorbachev, Tim Pool, and Vaush, I have been adding audio excerpts to various Wikipedia biographies. Whereas it has largely been received with indifference, my addition of an audio excerpt to Jenna Ortega has appeared to cause some stirr amongst some editors (see Jenna Ortega: Revision history and Talk:Jenna Ortega). Admittedly, there has been very little discussion on Wikipedia in regards to audio files, even with somewhat prominent articles like Richard Dawkins and Jimmy Wales having them, so I seek to initiate a discussion that will hopefully initiate further insight and WP:Consensus. Knightoftheswords281 (talk) 22:49, 16 January 2023 (UTC)

I'm in favor of audio and video files on biographies. If we're excluding video and audio files, then we might as well exclude images; they essentially serve the same purpose. The only difference is that they have an audio aspect instead of just a visual one. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 00:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

There was a project on WikiCommons to get people to pronounce their own names so they could be added to articles. I think we should support other speech as well. Rmhermen (talk) 00:31, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, ping @Pigsonthewing may be interested in this convo. - Fuzheado | Talk 19:09, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Note the referenced discussion is specifically on including audio links in the biography's infobox. There is no disagreement with the standard method of linking to related media at Wikimedia Commons. isaacl (talk) 00:45, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Voice intro project includes the line "Embed that in an infobox if possible". And Stephen Fry, one of the earliest[3], has it in the infobox. Now speech that does not include the person saying their own name is something else again. I would suggest that be included in the article but not the infobox. Rmhermen (talk) 01:05, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

As long as these are free media clips, this seems reasonable, and given our disallowance for non-free images of living persons, the same would be true of voice clips (we'd not allow non-free voice clips on the basis that a free clip is possible). There's a few more gotchas to this, but zero problems as long as we are talking free content clips. --Masem (t) 01:19, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

On the other hand, we allow non-free clips of copyrighted music, per Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Music samples. Why would a famous person speaking a non-free sentence or two instead of singing a non-free verse or two be treated so differently? Cullen328 (talk) 01:31, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

Well the guidelines are within legal parameters governing sample usage and length. It is a good idea I think to make such application universal (i.e. covering both free and non-free sources). There is a possibility that over time 30-second samples of spoken/video materials may proliferate in any single article (there may also be technical aspects to this). I would also strongly suggest that there is clear guidance for media content be properly referenced with citations for attribution and verification just like text content. 172.254.222.178 (talk) 01:42, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

• Should is a funny word here. If you have free or properly licensed media, be it video, audio, or image, you can add it to the article. If you feel it adds value to the article, you're allowed to add it. I don't see any problems, but I also don't see where it's something we should do. You can feel free to do so, but I don't have any expectation that one is compelled to. --Jayron32 02:00, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

  Nor should the expectation be that it is "required" to do so. And there will be plenty of articles where the consensus will be against including it.

  Personally, I don't think anything is added by adding random audio clips – and the same goes for images of signatures – in the vast majority of biographies.

  And they almost certainly should not be in the infobox, as it's a clear violation of MOS:INFOBOXPURPOSE to do so. And if editors are getting instructions to put these in infoboxes, those directions need to change. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 07:09, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

• I quite like these, please do keep adding them! As for "should": not sure there could be consensus to mandate it, so it's likely you'll keep running into this every now and then. DFlhb (talk) 04:26, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

I think you'll want to talk to Andy Mabbett about the Wikipedia:Voice intro project. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:28, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

• I actually quite like this idea, but I think there should be a standard of quality to the clips. I think the Vaush one is very good (no background music or effects and serves as a nice introduction to the person); on the contrary, the ones for Tim Pool and Jenna Ortega are fairly poor (both have excessive music and effects, and are just poor in general). Curbon7 (talk) 19:16, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the various pings. Yes, we should aim to include the voice of the subject of all biographies, where that is possible, and we have ten years of precedence for doing so. Ideally, they would be saying their own name (so we have the correct pronunciation), but otherwise at least demonstrating what they sound(ed) like. As with images, high quality is preferable to low quality, but we must work with what we have. And, as with the main image, the infobox is the place to put it. WP:WikiVIP refers, and c:Commons:Voice intro project explains in more detail why we should do this. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 14:33, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

This is a great idea and project. Anyone who asks living people for freely licensed photographs should be encouraged to also ask for a voice sample. —Kusma (talk) 14:46, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Voting now open on the revised Enforcement Guidelines for the Universal Code of Conduct

Hello all,

The voting period for the revised Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines is now open! Voting will be open for two weeks and will close at 23:59 UTC on January 31, 2023. Please visit the voter information page on Meta-wiki for voter eligibility information and details on how to vote.

For more details on the Enforcement Guidelines and the voting process, see our previous message.

On behalf of the UCoC Project Team,

JPBeland-WMF (talk) 00:13, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

The voting period for the revised Universal Code of Conduct Enforcement Guidelines is still open. If you would like to learn more about them, there is a Diff blog post you can read.

On behalf of the UCoC Project Team,

JPBeland-WMF (talk) 12:52, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Question about film credits

Just came across an IP who seems to be in a mission to add voice acting (VA)/dubbing credits into the articles of multiple Mexican actors and celebrities, while I know this is normal practice for American actors to include VA credits in their filmographies, I'm not sure if this is also allowed for actors from other countries who have VA in languages other than English (afterall, this is enwiki). And if this is allowed, we would then have to start adding VA credits for any celebrity of any nationality who has done VA in any language?

My personal perception was that you could maybe mention these credits in their Career section rather than add it to the filmography, I couldn't find any relevant guidelines in WP:FILMBIO -Gouleg🛋️ ^harass/_hound (she/her) 16:54, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Gouleg, this may not get much attention here. WP:TEAHOUSE may be able to better direct where to inquire, though the talk page of WP:FILMBIO seems as likely a place as any. Slywriter (talk) 06:21, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

2022 vector skin

The new 2022 vector skin is horrible. The lack of a table of contents causes infoboxes to push images down, and the TOC on the left squeezes everything together. Who chose this? Was there an RfC I missed? ~ HAL333 18:16, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

@HAL333 I suggest you (and anyone with other feedback on vector-2022) see Wikipedia:Vector 2022, it's talk page, and the page linked from that talk page. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:30, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, will do. ~ HAL333 18:31, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

I think it's curious that in the RfC for Vector 2022, a slim majority of commenters opposed the change, but the RfC close was summarized with "Overall, there is a positive reception to the changes". It seems the closers misrepresented the oppose votes as "support after X" votes, which they most certainly were not. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:24, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Par for the course. There is a joke here about political systems that feature either people choosing their leaders, or leaders choosing their people. Andreas JN466 23:37, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

The TOC on the left isn't too bad imo, but the subheadings of the TOC need to be indented more. Some1 (talk) 03:59, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Absolute garbage new interface

I don't know where else to put this, but I just want to say that the new webpage design is absolutely, irredeemably awful. I genuinely think that I will stop using this website, and that many others will too, if it is not quickly changed back, because the amount of blank space at the sides of the redesigned page layout is simply obnoxious, not to mention all the other awful features of this sudden and un-asked for change. I highly, HIGHLY suggest at the very least a "legacy mode" option that can be used to return to the previous user interface, because as it is this website frankly looks like trash. (Duplicated because I realized I posted this in the wrong place before) 2601:405:4400:9420:DC22:E380:D2EE:15A9 (talk) 03:27, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

The 'Enable limited width mode' box should be off/un-checkmarked by default. Some1 (talk) 04:06, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

@Some1: Where do you even find this option? (A screenshot would help!)... Thanks. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 07:13, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

IJBall, if you're using the new Vector 2022, it's under Preferences -> Appearance tab (link: Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-rendering) -> scroll down to Skin preferences -> then it should be the second option (Enable limited width mode) Some1 (talk) 12:24, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

The setting should also at least be persistent between pages to make the absolutely dogshit UI changes on desktop somewhat more palatable. It's amazing how these changes are somehow just as bad as Fandom (website)'s browsing experience. 219.89.209.234 (talk) 05:40, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

And there should be a [Set a local exception for this global preference] option in the Preferences too so editors don't have to un-checkmark that mode every single time when visiting other wikis. Some1 (talk) 01:08, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

How does one make this garbage just go away ? (Asking for a friend.) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 12:56, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

To get back to ye olde skin, see near the end of User_talk:Jimbo_Wales#What_happened_to_Wikipedia? - ok "Go to your "Preferences" and then "Appearance ", and then select "Vector (2010)" and save your change". I have to say that (despite usually being as conservative in such matters as anybody), I switched to try the new one some weeks ago, & haven't yet switched back. It does seem to be slower though. Johnbod (talk) 13:10, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

My friend said their watchlist and tabs across the top went away completely so they couldn't even find a starting place; just, Wikipedia went kaplooey. So, the previous default was Vector 2010 ? Thx, Johnbod. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 13:15, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Clicking on the three lines next to the MP globe leads to the dropdown menu - but not the other-language WPs ([Wikipedia languages[ is right at the bottom), and access to the 'preferences' (where one can select the old layout and even Monobook, among others) is only available to signed in users. (There can be many reasons for not signing in, including 'different computer, one minor typo, no point signing in' etc).

A so-named 'click here to show what aspects you want on permanent display/preferences' would be useful. Jackiespeel (talk) 18:25, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Question: how see an editor's contributions? I am willing to give this new interface a try. But how I am to navigate to see an editor's contributions, which I often want to do, under this. There is no longer a User contributions on other editors' User and User talk pages. A too-awkward workaround is to navigate to my own contributions, then edit the URL to put in another editor's username. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 19:31, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Doncram - try changing preferences to one of the other options available.Jackiespeel (talk) 19:55, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

You can also take a non-committal look at the new interface thru one of the other Wikipedias where it has been implemented. After a few minute's poking around, I found the French Wikipedia has been migrated. (I noticed that de.wikipedia.org is still set to the old interface; maybe the Foundation is scared of taking on both en.wikipedia & de.wikipedia at the same time?) -- llywrch (talk) 21:11, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

The links are hidden in the menu that's displayed by clicking the two arrows ( << ) next to the Wikipedia logo on the top left corner. Some1 (talk) 01:05, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, i see that and more now. I was expecting that top left would be about high level Wikipedia, instead, i suppose. It's not immediately intuitive for me, but i think i may like it. --Doncram (talk,contribs) 07:01, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Hey, people, it's different and it's not "garbage" because of that. For one thing, it uses icons/symbols which are universal. It's good for you, probably, to get used to them. I notice that I am more able to navigate this more easily because I had relatively recent experience in a different wikimedia project where the symbols were used. There, at first, I did not understand, say, the symbol with three horizontal lines and a star, but now i am getting it. User:SandyGeorge, User:Some1, do you remember when the bell symbol showed up? You eventually figured out that means "Alerts", I hope. And it is more elegant and better, actually, than a text string which uses up more space and which I bet is harder, perhaps for you and definitely for many others for whom English is not their first language, to immediately grasp. It will help you to understand the symbols when you occasionally go over to other-language Wikipedias and to other types of wikimedia projects.

Also, I am not used to it either, but the left hand side has been freed up for a new purpose, showing the table of contents (TOC) of the current page. I am thinking "having TOC on the left" probably is good, enabling better navigation. Given that is in place for myself and most others, now I realize I could/should adjust to take advantage. For example, on my own Talk page, I think that "TOC on the left" would not be very helpful if there are literally hundreds of discussion sections (as there were until I recently archived a couple of years worth). So it makes sense now for me to curate my own Talk page a bit more, so that "TOC on the left" works better for others. Frankly, the TOC's on many/most noticeboard pages and Talk pages have not worked very well... it is a pain to go all the way back up a Talk page to see them, and generally they have seemed to be less helpful for navigation than they should be. Now, with "TOC on the left", I think i will find it easier for myself to navigate some long pages. Especially if others sensibly curate those pages to enhance the usefulness of "TOC on the left".

And perhaps there are other reasons why the new interface was developed, too? --Doncram (talk,contribs) 21:21, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

I don't think the new design is "garbage." I'm actually using it right now and have no plans to switch back to 2010 Vector. The floating TOC is easily the best feature (well, my favorite feature) of the 2022 Vector skin (though it is a bit buggy and the links don't always bring you to the correct sections sometimes).

I have a few suggestions for the 2022 Vector skin, though:

1. Add a [Set a local exception for this global preference] option for 'Enable limited width mode' so that editors don't have to un-checkmark that mode every single time when visiting other wikis.
2. Unhide the Contributions link and the clock from the dropdown menu.
3. The Preview (when clicking 'Edit source') shouldn't show the article with limited width when 'Enable limited width mode' is disabled.

Some1 (talk) 21:54, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

@Some1, I think you're looking for Special:GlobalPreferences#mw-prefsection-rendering in your first item.

I haven't minded the "hidden" UTC clock. Given how infrequently I use it, I am willing to trade that for no longer getting logged out when the clock finally appears – and shifts all the other items in the bar – just as I try to click on Special:MyContribs. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:41, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, Whatamidoing (WMF). Speaking of the Log out button, I'm not a big fan of having to click three times just to fully log out (the drop down menu, log out button, then submit), especially if I'm in a hurry. I'm not sure if the bar shifting has ever happened to me; I never got accidentally logged out while using Vector 2010. Some1 (talk) 23:33, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

@Doncram, I believe that the limited width is supposed to be much better for the ~10% of people who have dyslexia. It's not my own personal favorite feature, but there are sound reasons to support it, especially on an education-focused site like this one. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 19:45, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Does the new skin fix the crashing issue?

Does this new skin fix the issue with Wikipedia crashing Chromium based browsers, by eating up all memory and crashing the browser, or even the OS? -- 64.229.90.199 (talk) 06:00, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

A memory leak is probably a problem with Chromium, not the webpage it is loading. Sadly, I don't think we can do much on our end to fix that. –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:58, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Except that this issue only affects Wikipedia and not other websites (as reported by several other users over various VP forums over several years now). Therefore there is something in the coding of Wikipedia that is breaking Chromium-based browsers (ie. the majority of browsers in use), by triggering some bug in Chromium. So there should be something that can be done to fix the issue (like many other website workarounds over the years that go to fix other browser specific issues; ie. different code triggered for NS/IE/basic etc) -- 64.229.90.199 (talk) 21:44, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Moving to village pump technical. You'll get better answers there. –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:49, 19 January 2023 (UTC)

Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) § Does the new skin fix the crashing issue?

Does anyone know why many pages with the name 'Index' are so heavily trafficked recently?

For the past week or so, the top read articles have included Index, Index, Washington, and Index (economics), among others. Clearly, an automated service is spamming searches with the word 'index;' perhaps some piece of badly written zombie code trying to fetch an index page? Does anyone know for certain? If not, is there some way to identify the source of this traffic? Ngcouch (talk) 02:50, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Perhaps these articles are where people who are curious to read more about a topic start off, as “index” article are usually full of links to more in-depth articles. Blueboar (talk) 03:03, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I suspect you're right. Index, Washington isn't normally a hotbed of activity according to its page traffic stats, believe it or not, but suddenly on Jan 13 it exploded in activity. Whatever you've found seems to have been going on for the last week. Index (statistics) was hit even harder, racking up over 11 million pageviews since the 13th. Automated view surges like this happen from time to time, but this is an interesting pattern. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 05:41, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

My guess is that it isn't people, it's some AI scraping the web for information; likely some ChatGPT type thing, building an information base, etc. Those kind of routines may look for certain key words like "index" as a likely starting point, so they are hitting those pages harder. --Jayron32 19:44, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I have been told this is tracked on Phabricator as T327525. (It's restricted now but may be made public once they sort it out.) —Emufarmers^(T/C) 09:09, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Contributions list

Would it be practical to have a 'select pages for which one's last contribution is the current one' be feasible? (Would be useful for longer term contributors - I ).have some from 2006.) Jackiespeel (talk) 18:28, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

You should ask on Wikipedia:Request a query. It's certainly possible, but I suspect it would be highly inefficient (i.e. slow). The folks at WP:RAQ are much smarter about this stuff than I am. -- RoySmith (talk) 18:33, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

'Passing thought' (an).d some of us have made many contributions/been around a long time or both. Jackiespeel (talk) 19:49, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Yes, Wikipedia:Request a query is a good place to ask. I recommend you be a little more specific too. For example, which usernames do you want to examine. Which of their edits do you want to examine: all of them, or just certain ones? That info would be enough for me or someone to write a query on https://quarry.wmcloud.org/ –Novem Linguae (talk) 21:03, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

@Jackiespeel: I may be misunderstanding, but can't this be done by selecting "Only show edits that are latest revisions" on special:contributions? — Preceding unsigned comment added by SmallJarsWithGreenLabels (talk • contribs) 23:06, 21 January 2023 (UTC)

Courtesy ping to @Jackiespeel: as above ping was not send due to lack of signature. See WP:PING. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 06:07, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

Why would you want to do that? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:20, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

US Congressional representation of US cities after redistricting

There is a systematic problem that appears in many Wikipedia articles concerning many US cities. I do not have sufficient technical knowledge to propose the solution, but I am sure that there are many within the Wikipedia community who do, once the problem is realized.

As you know, Congressional redistricting occurs after each decennial census. It often is the case that a city that was in one Congressional District will, after redistricting, be assigned to a different Congressional District. Apparently, the current default practice for many Wikipedia articles concerning cities is automatically to show the current elected Representative for whatever Congressional District is shown. The problem that arises is that this process often (typically ?) takes place without an updating, when necessary, of the fact that the particular city has now been assigned to a different Congressional District. The result then is that the article automatically updates to show as that city's Congressional Representative a politician who does not represent that city, but rather represents a District that the city had formerly been assigned to, but is no longer included within. I have in 2023 (now that redistricting under the 2020 census has occurred) edited (after confirming with local elections offices, the Wikipedia articles on Dinuba and Mendota, both cities in California, in Tulare and Fresno Counties, respectively. However, I suspect that this problem has created misinformation for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Wikipedia articles about US cities.

 Is there a survey or editing tool that could determine whether a particular article needs such a fix?  I have a suggestion that might lead to a solution.  I will illustrate with the Mendota article.  After the 2010 census, Mendota was assigned to the 21st District pf California.  That change was made in the article, with a Footnote 6 illustrating the appropriate 2013 website.  (The new districting takes effect in the Congress commencing with the 3rd year of the decade following the census.)  In the 117th Congress, David Valadao represented the 21st District, including Mendota, and was shown as Mendota's US Congressional Representative.  Prior to my editing of this article, the 2023 version of the article showed Jim Costa as representing Mendota in Congress.  This was incorrect.  It happened because beginning in January 2023 Mr. Costa did indeed represent the 21st District and so the formula applied by Wikipedia automatically "updated" the "Mendota" article to show the current Representative of the 21st District, which is now Mr. Costa, and no longer Mr. Daladao. Om fact. the actual Representative now representing Mendota is John Duarte.  The problem arose because the District that Mendota is now part of was renumbered from 21 to 13, and Mr. Duarte is the current Representative for the 13th District.  The current practice of Wikipedia is to "update" the politician who currently represents a District with a particular number, without ascertaining whether there should also be an update as to whether the particular city still is within a Congressional District that is labeled with the same or a different number.

Thanks for considering this problem and a possible solution.

Ray Glock-Grueneich 2601:647:CB03:2A60:EC16:62D4:9A79:1374 (talk) 18:00, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

• I suspect that this is something that is best fixed by hand, and not via a bot or something… because there are simply too many permutations. For example, consider the situation where a city or town used to be in one district has now been gerrymandered and split between two districts (part of the town might retain the “old” district number, but part is now split off and has a “new” district number). Blueboar (talk) 18:49, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Imo, this question should be asked at WT:WikiProject Elections and Referendums, where people interested in similar subjects are more likely to view the concerns raised here. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 20:37, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

Need to find an online source for a 1988 US New & World Report article

I am tired of poking around the internet and just thought I'd ask here... Are past US News & World Report articles available anywhere online? I do not have access to EBSCO, I do have Newspapers.com and some access through stuff at Wikipedia Library. I am trying to find an easily-accessible online source for the May 2, 1988 edition, an article with the title ""Racial tensions, drugs and poverty—an explosive mix in rural North Carolina; There's trouble in Robeson County" by Joseph Shapiro & Ronald Taylor. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 23:50, 23 January 2023 (UTC)

No comment on this specific request, but you may find Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request useful. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 00:32, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I'll try that venue as well. Thanks, Shearonink (talk) 02:24, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Have you tried Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library? Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 23:24, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

NYPL Digital Research Books Beta

Prompted by the immediately preceding item, I took a look at the NYPL on-line catalog. I didn't find USN&WR, but I did find an interesting project they're doing to provide a catalog of freely licensed research materials, available without the need for a NYPL library card. I haven't explored it yet, but mentioning it here because it looks like it might be useful to a lot of editors researching articles. https://digital-research-books-beta.nypl.org/about -- RoySmith (talk) 02:15, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

WP:Users blocked from the IP Information tool

I found this is Special:UserGroupRights. It doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere. Is there a need for this? Is there anywhere this could be useful? If so, should there be any policies/guidelines on it? It's not even mentioned on WP:User access levels 137a (talk • edits) 16:00, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

@137a see meta:Meta:Users blocked from the IP Information tool; this would only be used as some sort of exceptional tool block (e.g. by sysadmins, OFFICE, etc) - in the event of certain abuse or disruption. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:42, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

So maybe limit to WMF? 137a (talk • edits) 13:40, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

I suppose if locally some abuse of that tool was discovered (checkusers can review the log) a community consensus (likely an arbcom order here due to the private data that would be the basis) could result in this being applied to someone - although practically if someone was at that point they likely would already just be getting siteblocked. — xaosflux ^Talk 14:19, 25 January 2023 (UTC)

Update from Wikimedia Foundation

I am back to post a brief follow up message to my November note. Following the close of the RfC, the Wikimedia Foundation set up a co-creation page to seek input from community members on proposed messaging for banners. We posted regular updates on the campaign's performance to this page. In brief, over 450+ banners were tested during this year's campaign, and $24.7M of revenue was raised against an original $30M goal (a shortfall of $5.3 million). During the first few days the new banners resulted in about 70% less revenue than on the corresponding days in the prior year. Additional information on the campaign results are posted here. Next year, the fundraising team will continue to engage with the community on banner messaging. We look forward to building on the process we created this year.

I wanted to provide further updates on a few other issues that were raised:

• Given the reduced revenue from the English campaign, the Wikimedia Foundation has reduced its budget projections for the current year. At this point, we don’t expect to see the same year-on-year growth in the Foundation’s budget next year. We will have more information by April on future financial projections.

• The Foundation’s annual planning this year is being led by the needs of our Product & Technology departments. This will be the first time since about 2015 that these two departments will undertake joint planning. @SDeckelmann-WMF has asked me to pass along this update: "We've made progress on PageTriage issues raised by New Page Patrollers in an open letter. In the last 120 days, 141 patches have been reviewed through collaboration between the Foundation and the community. There have also been several meetings between community members and staff to talk about the future of PageTriage and the newcomer experience, and there is now work planned in Q4 to update the extension. We continue to engage with Commons as we are making critically needed software upgrades to community prioritized tools. The Foundation's Wishathon (leading up to the community wishlist kickoff for 2023) involved about 40 staff contributing time over a week in December to deliver 71 patches and 4 wishes granted. We are working with the community to make Vector 2022 the default skin, after 3 years of development work, feedback and iteration with wiki communities. More to come in March!"

• Some comments were made in the RfC about the unclear role of the Tides Foundation in managing the Knowledge Equity Fund. Over the next few months, we will be moving the remainder of the Equity Fund from Tides back into the Foundation. The Wikimedia Endowment has received its 501(c)(3) status from the US Internal Revenue Service, so we are in the process of setting up its financial systems and transitioning out of Tides. MIskander-WMF (talk) 21:49, 25 January 2023 (UTC)