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Enforcement of topic bans on talk pages

According to this policy, any person who is subject to a "topic ban" is forbidden to discuss that topic on any talk page.

The talk page guidelines don't mention this policy at all; should it be mentioned in this section? Jarble (talk) 20:51, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Personally, I think it's sufficient for this page to cover general guidance for the vast majority of editors who don't have any editing restrictions. The guidance pages for editing restrictions can discuss their scope. isaacl (talk) 00:15, 14 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tagging with small text

Involved in a situation recently where there was someone effectively giving the appearance of !voting more than once, to which another editor struck through the bolded part of the !vote. I can see the reasoning behind it, but WP:DISCUSSAFD explicitly recommends self-strikethroughs so someone else striking it can cause confusion. (The only exception to "Striking out text with <s>...</s> or {{strike}} or marking text as deleted with ... constitutes a change in meaning. It should be done only by the user who wrote it, or as otherwise provided in this talk page guideline." here seems to be the common WP:SOCKSTRIKE.) A method I have seen to address such !votes, as well as similar situations such as SPAs, is to write a small-text tag inline after the signature. Would it be worth formalising some guidance on that practice here? CMD (talk) 04:27, 16 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed enhancement to WP:MULTI

At WP:MULTI, I would like to enhance the sentence

Instead, start the discussion in one location and, if appropriate, advertise it elsewhere via a link.

so that it reads

Instead, start the discussion in one location and, if appropriate, advertise it elsewhere via a link; templates such as {{fyi}} and {{subst:please see}} are available for this.

This is in response to this post. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 16:30, 9 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"Wikipedia:CURRENTSECTION" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Wikipedia:CURRENTSECTION has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 July 29 § Wikipedia:CURRENTSECTION until a consensus is reached. jlwoodwa (talk) 22:22, 29 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Request for comment: Do the guidelines in WP:TPO also apply to archived talk pages?

WP:TPO details several instances of comments that are appropriate to remove from talk pages, such as vandalism, spam, gibberish, and test edits. Does this apply to archived talk pages as well? I will post a more detailed statement and further context in the replies. Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:30, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

This is going to be long, so apologies in advance. For context/rationale, see this protracted discussion on my talk page.
There is a large amount of vandalism to Wikipedia -- much more than one might think -- that has gone undetected for years, often since the early days of the project. I use the phrase "vandalism" here to encompass any unconstructive edit that would be reverted on sight, across the spectrum from oversightable edits to gibberish. I do not use it to encompass comments that are merely uncivil or waver off topic. Essentially, I'm using a slightly narrower version of the definition and precedent from WP:TPO.
My investment in this topic is that reverting undetected vandalism is most of what I do on Wikipedia. My priority was originally to remove this stuff from main article space, but I am no longer finding much low-hanging fruit there, so I am now working on talk page vandalism. I consider this a priority; these comments are not only readable on site but indexed by Google -- which is how I found the stuff in the first place. In addition, they are intended to serve as a readable record of what people actually said. Changing what people actually said, drive-by deleting constructive comments, and cluttering the discussion with nonsense all make it difficult for talk pages to serve their intended purpose and bloat the page for no good reason. As such, WP:TPO is pretty clear that this sort of thing can be removed.
When vandalism stands for 10+ years on busy talk pages, it frequently makes its way to page archives. Page archives have a banner stating "do not edit this page." However, I kept finding hundreds of instances of the stuff in my searching, and it felt wrong to just see them but do nothing. So, in March 2023, I asked a question on the help page for archiving talk pages whether the banner applied to removing undetected vandalism. At the time, I was asking about the most blatant cases of vandalism, since I expected the answer to be "only in rare cases of X," but the response I got from two people (one admin) was much broader: that the banner "doesn't apply at all" to "maintenance edits such as removing vandalism."
So, I went about removing such content for more than a year, generally in bursts, and received no negative feedback and some positive feedback. As before, I started with low-hanging fruit then moved on to the sort of disruptive edit mentioned in WP:TPO. To be clear, I do not intend to revert any edits not encompassed in those guidelines (if anything I think they are too liberal in what can be removed); there is no infinite slippery slope. The thing is just that there is so much undetected vandalism; thousands of instances reverted, probably thousands to come.
That being said, two people have complained about this in recent months, hence the RfC. The arguments against removing vandalism on archived talk pages, according to the complaints, seem to include:
- Reverting undetected vandalism on talk pages is not an improvement to the encyclopedia. I personally cannot think of a single place on the project where this is true, and WP:TPO seems to state that it's appropriate.
- There is no urgency to removing vandalism that has gone undetected for years. I disagree. There is no deadline, etc., but I think removing vandalism of any kind is more urgent than many other tasks on the project.
- People have to check whether the edits are legitimate. I don't even know what to say to this one; these kind of edits, I would think, should speak for themselves. People frequently use rollback to remove similar content on talk pages, which is reserved per WP:ROLLBACK for edits where "the reason for reverting is absolutely clear."
- Removing vandalism makes it more likely for other vandalism to fall through the cracks because it adds entries to watched pages. I find this argument, frankly, ridiculous. It can be applied to literally any of the millions of edits made to pages that might show up in a watchlist; should we stop doing those too? Given the breadth of subject matter of the vandalized pages, I also find it hard to believe that any one person would be watching enough of them for this kind of edit to make much of a difference.
- I make a lot of edits. This is true, and I have tried to take WP:MEATBOT into account. (I do realize that I tend to get locked in on tasks that require going through long lists.) I don't use any bots or tools more advanced than wildcard search, however. (i.e., no regex, per the searching guidelines; I tried regex a handful of times and found it not very useful for this). This is less a policy complaint than a personal complaint, but I am mentioning it for completeness' sake.
- More people might start editing vandalism on talk pages, exacerbating any of the above. That sounds great to me! More people should be doing counter-vandalism (to the extent that anyone "should" be doing anything here).
I am happy to address comments and discussion by other editors. Gnomingstuff (talk) 18:06, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Survey

Oppose. And see AN discussion Striking comments from banned sockpuppets and modifying archived comments. Perhaps participants there should be informed that for some reason this RfC about the WP:TPO guideline appeared. Peter Gulutzan (talk) 18:08, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose. Reverting archived vandalism wastes editor time (of the person searching for it, of the person editing the page to remove it, from watchers of the page, and from those looking through contributions) and draws attention to things that are best just ignored. The alleged benefits are at best trivial and in many cases incorrect. Thryduulf (talk) 18:42, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    • For clarity, I opposed changes to the status quo which clearly does not apply to archived talk pages. Archived talk pages should be edited only when there is some active harm being caused, which is almost never the case. Thryduulf (talk) 19:03, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the link, I was unaware of it. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:41, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To the question Does this apply to archived talk pages as well?, no. Do not edit archives. (And seriously, what value would that work contribute? Surely there are more constructive edits to be made.) (edited to add) Tryptofish's comment made me think of an exception: removing vandalism/disruptive edits that were made after the content was archived. Schazjmd (talk) 19:01, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  • Generally oppose the editing of archived Talk pages, with possible exceptions for libel and copy violations. Mathglot (talk) 19:05, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • General oppose I could see in exceptional circumstances instances where this was appropriate (as mentioned by Mathglot), but in general this seems like a bad practice. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 19:12, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • My inclination is to oppose the editing of archived talk pages. The benefit to the encyclopedia is minuscule in these cases, and I think the risk of confusion or annoyance to other editors outweighs that benefit. There are a handful of exceptions to this general case—for instance, I believe that material that merits revdel or oversighting should be removed, even if it's on an archived page. However, non-constructive yet comparatively innocuous comments (such as test edits or gibberish) are probably not worth the effort to revert. ModernDayTrilobite (talk • contribs) 19:13, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Partial support, at least. Following Mathglot's link, I checked four links (example), all of which were what I'd call "graffiti". I see no reason to oppose edits like my example; they're worthless, and the text gets in the way for anyone who's consulting the archive. This is a constructive edit, so the guideline shouldn't restrict such edits, and if Gnomingstuff wants to do it, we shouldn't say "do something more constructive". I say "partial" because I haven't yet noticed any edits other than anti-graffiti. Nyttend (talk) 20:17, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Never mind, full support, now that I've found edits like [1] and [2] and [3]. The encyclopedia definitely benefits from the removal of outright vandalism like this, so the guidelines shouldn't stand in the way. It's a tiny benefit, but if Gnomingstuff wants to do it, "are probably not worth the effort to revert" is irrelevant; we're not talking about a bot that's using limited resources. Nyttend (talk) 20:20, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    This is a representative sample, I think; from what I have found it's skewed toward the gibberish side of the spectrum (there is a huge spike starting 2022, probably from ChatGPT), but it also extends far enough to the other end that I've emailed oversight multiple times. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:39, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Mostly support. I've looked at the links to previous discussions and past edits, posted here by other editors, before coming to this conclusion. I'm not very sympathetic to the argument that it wastes editor time when it shows up on watchlists, because you don't have to watchlist archives unless you want to see if archives change. And I'm not very sympathetic to the argument that there's a template at the top of archive pages, saying not to edit them, because the intention of that template is to indicate that the discussions are closed, not that the page should be treated as if full-protected. Now the reason that I say "mostly" is that it seems to me that the real goal here should be that editors who might later look back at an archived discussion should be able to see, without being misled, what the discussion was, at the time that it took place. For that reason, if a sockpuppet commented at the time, but the sock comment was not struck at the time, then the comment should be left as is, because that's what the discussion consisted of at the time. But a lot of the vandalism being discussed here has the effect of altering the discussion, as it took place at the time. And that's appropriate to revert. If some vandal comes along and ignores the template saying not to alter the archive page, and vandalizes it, it's silly to scold the editor who undoes that vandalism. Let's say that, long ago, I took part in a discussion and said whatever I said then, and it's long since been archived. Now a vandal comes along and changes what I wrote to something stupid. What's the purpose of preserving the vandalism? What is it being preserved for? All it accomplishes is making my long-ago comment sound stupid, in a way that misleads editors who come along later to find out what happened in that discussion. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Nyttend's diffs make a good case that "vandalism that modified another editor's comments" should be reverted in archives, if current policy discourages that it should be changed. I think that the threshold for "cleaning" archives should be higher than "would revert on an active talk page", reversions like Special:Diff/1251394873 feel unnecessary. Walsh90210 (talk) 23:16, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with Tryptofish that the goal of an archive is to preserve the past conversations. This doesn't mean every literal wikitext source character has to be kept the same, or that the output has to be a pixel-perfect match with the past. (Fixing unclosed elements is a common edit that is done to preserve the original appearance of the discussion, after the MediaWiki software started rendering the output HTML differently.) But it should be possible to look at the archive and experience the discussion as it occurred at that time. So if a banned editor made comments without being detected at the time, their comments shouldn't be deleted from the archive, as that wouldn't reflect what the participants read and responded to. If someone vandalizes an archive, the change should be reverted, in order to restore the discussion to its original archived state.
  • (On a side note, template transclusions are a problem with this goal, since they always transclude the current version. Anyone concerned about this should subst: the template, or find a way not to use it.) isaacl (talk) 23:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Thank you to Gnomingstuff for starting this Rfc.

The use case that actually provoked this Rfc were some edits to archived Talk pages that were archived many years ago. The prior discussion is here. My concern is, that heretofore, I very, very rarely saw archived Talk pages hit my Watchlist, and now I see them sometimes. I have these issues:

  • some of these repair edits occur many years after the page was archived. I do not see how this improves the encyclopedia in any way.
  • in the beginning, I didn't know what these edits were, and went to go investigate to make sure they were not some subtle (or not so subtle) form of vandalism. Having examined them, I now trust Gnomingstuff to do the right thing, and no longer need to investigate them, if I see their sig on an archived page. However, if a few more editors follow suit, I will have to start investigating again, until I am persuaded I do not need to; this will lower my productivity on actual encyclopedic pages.
  • These edits appear on my watchlist, which is long, and that reduces the number of useful article pages in my Watchlist, which then get bumped off the bottom. Each page taken up by one of these archival repair edits, is a page that runs off the bottom of my list, which I am then not aware of.
  • The banner at the top of archived pages say, Please do not edit the page.
  • Who benefits? I understand that Gnomingstuff directly benefits; I have mentored users for whom some types of gnoming edits can be a very rewarding and pleasurable experience, and I don't wish to deprive them of that. However, I think the needs of the encyclopedia must be paramount and take precedence.

Although by no means intentional, these edits feel WP:DISRUPTIVE to me in a very tiny way, but I am very afraid that if taken up generally by more editors, it could become genuinely disruptive in a significant way, to a lot of experienced editors, especially to those with long watchlists they attempt to monitor. Please do not encourage edits to archival pages, except in individual cases approved by policy (libel, copyright, maybe some others we could discuss). The rest of them are simply not helpful, and have the potential for causing harm, or at least, lost productivity. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 18:42, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm trying to imagine a situation in which you want to make such an edit. Are you talking graffiti on a talk page, improper replacement of content on a talk page (i.e. I say something, and then later someone else edits my comment without any good reason), improper deletion of content from a talk page, or what? It would help to have a few examples of edits you've made in this area. Nyttend (talk) 19:27, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Nyttend, cannot answer the 'why' part, but here are 89 examples (out of 500) you can peruse on this page; highlight them by search-on-page (Ctrl+F) for 'archive'. Mathglot (talk) 19:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The "why" is pretty simple - I think that vandalism is bad, that undetected vandalism is worse, and that reverting it is a better use of my spare time browsing the internet or watching reality shows or whatever. I guess the thing that bothers me the most about this whole argument is people deciding for me what is a productive use of my own time. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:50, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]


Can we be sure that such changes do not break links to archived pages? Alaexis¿question? 20:50, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Good question, I don't really have an answer to it. I know that it's possible for vandalism to leave stuff broken -- it frequently messes with subject headers, wikilinks, etc. The only thing I can think of on the other end is restoring ancient markup, which is usually fixed by bots, but more technically inclined people might be able to think of more. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of the archived talk page changes I have seen, I have not noticed any of them breaking links. Mathglot (talk) 21:15, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are people above who are !voting "oppose" or "support", but it's not clear to me exactly what is being opposed or supported. It also appears to me that if rules are made stricter than they presently are, I would be prohibited from reverting vandalism if that vandalism occurred on an archive page: the double-negative fallacy of "two wrongs don't make a right". Similarly, there are people who reply to an old thread after it has been archived, are we to be prevented from reverting those misplaced posts? One thing is certain - archives are not set in stone: for over ten years I have watchlisted each of the WP:VPT archive pages as it was created, and from these I have observed that we have a number of bots that do edit archives on a frequent basis. These include ClueBot III fixing links to archived content, as here; bots that fix "lint" errors, as here; and bots that either subst: or de-transclude templates that are pending TfD deletion, as here. Are we going to prevent bots doing this - or say "bots can do it but humans can't"? --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:13, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have a very broad watchlist myself, and I saw one of these edits the other day, and I thought to myself "that's odd but I recognize this users' name and I'm sure they are doing what the edit sumarry says they are doing" and I moved on with my day. Is it super helpful? Maybe not, but I don't see how it is harmful. I work with archiving a lot and I often remove garbage from talk pages rather than archive it, but I've also noted that others are less careful and will archive talk content that rightly coud have just been removed from the page at any time. Saying it's a waste of time is not a valid argument in my opinion. How a user chooses to spend their time, so long as it is not harming the project, is their own business. Just Step Sideways from this world ..... today 22:17, 16 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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