Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not

Topic: Galleries (Nov 2005 – Jan 2006) Topic: Newspaper Articles (May - July 2007) Topic: "Unencyclopedic" (2003) Topic: Trivia (July 2007 - ongoing; partially archived)

Not a Social Network

I understand that the wikipedia is not a social network. But it may take some time for me to fully understand what the wiki is and what it isn't. Especially given that the other wikipedias I contribute to, apparently allow me to add comments that the wikipedians here would flag as 'social network' comments.

Also sometimes myself (and I bet some others) have the urge to leave those sorts of comments on related pages anyhow. -- C.Syde (talk | contribs) 08:33, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Applying rules judiciously

I think that there should be some clarification in the What Wikipedia is not article to instruct users on how to apply rules in a judicious manner. Some users may consider a WP:NOT rule as a one-size-fits-all application, while others may take deeper consideration as to whether the rule should be applied or whether a particular section or paragraph that the user considers applying a rule actually has merit to the article and should remain as is. By informing Wikipedians as to how to properly judge whether a WP:NOT rule applies to an article, it could alleviate some conflicts with the article's structure that may occur between users. TVtonightOKC (talk) 21:04, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

"Wikipedia is not a technocracy"?

I have been questioning usefulness of templates lately. Templates are supposed to be useful, non-abusive, and simple. I found some to be none of these. Somehow, template-fanatics oppose deletion on any kind, like one template that is transcluded in no more than three pages. (Three pages!!) People are expected to be computer scientists or engineers, especially on templates. Lately, Wikipedia is supposed to be readable to general readers and educational. It is free editing, but it also requires donations. Editors are also expected to be experienced and quick-learners on templates. Sometimes, learning unnecessary and complex templates is frustrating.

As for wikilinking, it is very simple, but sometimes not necessary, unless it is for readers who generally should learn more about one topic or another. And tables have been used for easy editing and great styling. But it consumes more bytes than words alone. Well... people are expected (in a common sense) to format headings, like == Level 2 ==, and to do other HTML codings.

Also, there have been AFDs, TFDs, and other deletion types. Moreover, there have been requested moves and move reviews, prompting us to question stability of Wikipedia. And... how long will libraries stay open, and what will happen to print and online sources? Online articles nowadays require fee for viewership. So should Wikipedia be technocracy? If not, shall there be a policy about technocracy? If not, essay? --George Ho (talk) 06:18, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

• This is something I have been thinking about for a while. I've been registered on here for over six years now and as I've come to be acquainted with the site, this is one of the primary things that has bothered me, despite my ability to learn and understand second languages/code: users are expected to be 100% fluent in wikicode in order to edit here. You're right, by the way, it is basically rocket science, even though WP:Introduction claims "It is a special type of website designed to make collaboration easy." Having complex templates defeats the purpose of the site, which is the beautiful fact that anyone can edit. This should instantly be recognized as a kind of barrier to entry.

To elaborate on the title of this section: there exist tech-savvy users who take pride for one reason or another in being more Wiki-literate than others, and who prize convoluted templates and other features of Wiki markup over simplicity and streamlining. In order to keep our faltering numbers up, it should be a long-term goal of the project to trim not only such templates, but unnecessary and sometimes wordy policies, not to mention condense processes for such things as merging. However, there is also a cabal that exists primarily to write policy, and if it fails to address the many problems that are starting to become manifest, this project will succumb to being copied and/or replaced by its very nature. @FrankDev: I know you haven't been very active this year, but you might be interested in this conversation per your creation of Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a technocracy, and @Folantin and Geogre: for your comments left here. - SweetNightmares 00:56, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

Thank you for your response. While I was reading it, my brain clicked (well, my brain is sometimes forgetful when clicking). Are we suppose to use "cite" templates or simple formatting of references? DYK editors encourage "cite" templates because it seems "readable" to them. I couldn't even remember what styles they were, so I fortunately found them at "citation" article, like APA style and MLA style. I forgot the styles that I learned from colleges and high school, or am I not the only one forgetting them? --George Ho (talk) 01:51, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

George Ho, of course you're supposed to use cite templates; you only need to remember (or look up again) a few parameter names (or use one of the various tools available to insert them for you), and the template will do all the rest. There is no reason at all to go research APA or MLA or Harvard referencing styles and try to get them right. WP has a hybrid style that's auto-generated by the template, and it's much easier to use becuase you can put its parameters in any order at all, while all the external citation style have to be done in a particular order with vary careful attention paid to style and punctuation. Why bother, other than to just be obstinate about learning to use a template? Furthermore, it's not mandatory that you use any citation style at all. You can just type out <ref>Jackson, Pat (2014) The Unlightable Being of Bareness, pp. 23-24. Muleshoe, Texas: Fatbottom Press</ref> and move on. Someone else, maybe even a bot will template-format it later. I spend much of my gnoming time cleaning up citations.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

@SweetNightmares: Why do you feel that telling us about your feelings that complex templates are a barrier to entry, as a technical matter, also requires you to verbally attack an entire class of Wikipedians, maligning them as prideful not just experienced, obsessive of convolution over simplicity instead of simply able to handle simplicity? Is it difficult for you to criticize a system or its results without also scapegoating people and misrepresenting them as a short-sighted actual conspiracy, and it's also lording it over WP policy, too? (Remember at TfD when you said I was wrong to say that you are engaging in conspiracy theories?)

@SweetNightmares: Separately, to get at the non-antagonistic part of your post: Let's be realistic. Ever single activity on WP is performed by people volunteering to do it, and they generally volunteer to do what interests them. For some this is mostly writing new article, for others its improving existing ones to encyclopedic standards, for others its making the encyclopedia more visually interesting, or doing style and typo cleanup, or blocking vandals, or setting internal policies. All of these things are necessary, and you can force people to take interest in aspects of this project that are less interesting to them than others. I've said it before and will say it again: Those who say that some people spend too much time arguing over policy pages and seem like that's all they do here, are almost always people who spend way more time in policy arguments than they think they do or will admit (otherwise it wouldn't be possible for them to even notice who is and isn't spending a lot of time on policy pages). Even the most active, most focused policy editors tend to spend 25% or less of their editing time in "Wikipedia:" and "Wikipedia talk:" namespaces combined.

As for templates, you have absolutely no evidence that the complexity of some templates is a statistically significant factor in editor retention. If it were, we would have known this 10+ years ago. In reality, any of a dozen books on organization life cycles, along with knowledge that most of the important articles have already been written, and WP editing is not the hot Internet fad of the year it was almost a decade ago, can tell you why the editorial pool has dwindled. It's a patently false statement that "users are expected to be 100% fluent in wikicode in order to edit here". Rocket science? MediaWiki parser function code is some of the simplest code that actually does anything, anywhere. And no normal editor needs to ever touch it. They can simply go to the template's talk page and request changes. All they need to know if how to use templates, and if a template isn't properly documented, that's a template documentation problem to fix, not the sky falling down. If you can't be bothered with it, you can still edit. Other editors are apt to ask you to use templates when you add something that is normally done with a template, but no one will ever be blocked for adding content and not bothering with templates. Finally on this subtopic, not all barriers to entry are a bad thing; see WP:COMPETENCE.

On to the other stuff, like policies. Are you unaware that virtually everything in our policies and guidelines evolved into them over time to forestall disputes? This is actually also how internal corporate and university policies evolve, and game/sport rules, and national legal systems. It's how human beings operate. Why would WP be any different? How could it possibly be? The number of actual policies is actually quite low, and understanding the gist of them doesn't take long at all; you only need to drill down into the details if you need to something particular, like disambiguate an article title (see WT:AT policy), or account for differences between conflicting sources and their apparent reliability (see WP:V policy and WP:RS guidelines while avoiding WP:NOR problems like novel synthesis), etc. Style and behavioral guidelines, you'll pick up as you go along. The main, by far, problem in retaining new/recent editors is old hands being hostile to them, not technology. The main bastion of this hostility is questionable; some claim it's policy pages like WP:NPOV and WP:NOR, others think it's insular, WP:OWNy wikiprojects. Truth be told, there's lots of improvement to be made everywhere on this score.

While I agree some processes should be "condensed" as you put it, the merge process is one of the simpler ones. What could be asier than putting a merge tag atop the "to" and "from" page and starting a ==Proposed merge== discussion at the talk page of the "to" page? That's trivially easy.

You and George both here seem to have a "Well, I'm dissatisfied, and the source of my unhappiness is... every possible thing I can think of about Wikipedia!" It's too unfocused to be useful and it's not a WT:NOT matter, really.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

• The intricacies of wiki-code were supposed to be solved by the visual editor, but as you may recall it broke everything and caused a minor revolt when they tried implementing it. --erachima talk 01:58, 16 August 2014 (UTC)

@Erachima: Lots of us saw that coming. It was one of those "the road to Hell is paved with good intentions" misadventure. It might be fixable some day, but it's going to take a lot of work to insulate the underlying code from accidental changes. It's a very, very complex problem. As just one of a thousand examples, take this code:

It was named ''{{lang|es|Cazablanca}}'' ('White-house' in Spanish)

which renders as the following in browsers and in a visual, WYSIWYG editor:

It was named Cazablanca ('White-house' in Spanish)

How does a visual editing program preserve the language tagging when someone goes in to fix the z/s typo, but they delete "Cazablanca" first (which would also delete the language tag) then type in "Casa" where it was, instead of highlighting "Caza" and changing it to Casa? We can't presume the language tag shouldn't be removed, because someone may intend to remove the name and do something else there, e.g.:

It was named White-house ({{lang-es|Casablanca}})

(note the template change as well as the order change), which renders as:

It was named White-house (Template:Lang-es)

and they did this by first removing "Cazablanca" (and presumably its template markup and italicization along with it), then working on the rest of it manually. Problems like this with visual editors are not at all easily worked around. It's not because "Wikipedia is a technocracy" of course, but because we live in 2014, not 2514 with astoundingly awesome brainwave-reading software. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

• @George Ho: Re: original post – To start with, I'll ask you essentially what I asked SweetNightmares (then get to your details): Why do you feel that telling us about your feelings that complex templates are a barrier to entry, as a technical matter, also requires you to verbally attack an entire class of Wikipedians, maligning them as "fanatics", and blatantly lying about their activities (e.g. that they "oppose deletion [of] any kind", when clearly WP:TFD and other deletion venues have plenty of "Delete" !votes and closures)? Is it difficult for you to criticize a system or its results without also scapegoating people and misrepresenting them as a technocratic conspirators?  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

• Separately, to get at the non-antagonistic part of your post: Where do you get the idea that templates must be simple? Many are complex for a reason, because it's easier to have one template, the name of which people can remember, with basic functions people can remember, and many more detailed options people can look up only when the really need to, rather than a separate template for every possible specialty case. Name one template that is "abusive", and describe whom or what it is abusing and how, and where it got its magically anthropomorphic powers. Where do you get the idea that a template must be used a lot to be useful? This is usually the case with stand-alone templates, but is generally never the case with templates that are part of a series or set that is used often, in which some members are frequently used and some are not but necessary for completeness' sake (for various reasons, including because bots parsing them according to a list, e.g. of language codes, will choke if one goes missing because someone didn't think it was used enough. Later editors will naturally re-create any missing ones to patch the hole in the series, so deleting them is futile and WP:POINTy.

  "People are expected to be computer scientists or engineers, especially on templates" is a false statement; no one seriously believes that, and if it were true the entire project would have collapsed before it ever got off the ground. It is by its nature easier to learn WP for people with the ability to pick up nerdy editing skills, but that is true of any encyclopedia operation (the exact skills just differ because our online environment isn't the same as the one used by Encyclopaedia Britannica in its heyday, based on paper book and journal research, editing and revision slowly by post, manual typesetting and painstaking pre-press error correction, etc.

  WP having processes for deletion and page moving and other maintenance is not in any way "prompting us to question [the] stability of Wikipedia". Where on earth do you get that idea?

  "So should Wikipedia be technocracy? If not, shall there be a policy about technocracy? If not, essay?" Of course not, no, and feel free (respectively). For the essay, I would strongly suggest keeping it in user-space, which has more lax rules about content that is curmudgeonly and conflicts with standard practices and policies; you're willingness to verbally castigate entire classes of users for being more technical than you and not joining you in a luddite campaign, and your espoused belief that our entire template system is wrongheaded, along with everything else, don't bode well for survival of your essay in project-space. As with SweetNightmares's followup to you above, your missive here is wildly unfocused, and seems to just express a vague, diffuse unhappiness with everything Wikipedia does, from templates to moves to deletion to table formatting. It's too scatter-shot to come to any conclusion about other than this isn't material to add to WP:NOT.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  07:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

See also

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussions elsewhere

George Ho has been raising related issues in a number of different forums. Participants here may wish to synch their input at these other related threads (most of which deal with {{lang-xx-YY}} templates in particular, while the one at WT:NOT is more general):

• Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2014 August 13#Template:Lang-en-GB and four other TfDs on the same page
• Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not#"Wikipedia is not a technocracy"?
• Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility#Using "lang-x" template or simple wikilinking and formatting
• Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Template:lang-de/sandbox
• Template talk:Lang-de#template:lang-de-AT

 — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  03:03, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

• Oh, I've written him off for forum-shopping already. I simply wanted to point out to him that A. the Foundation is attempting to work on this and B. "attempting" is as far as anyone's gotten yet. --erachima talk 07:13, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

WP:CRYSTAL and the redirect

In terms of "unannounced" products, it is and has always been the general rule to not create an article, or even a section of an article that contains any "unannounced" product. This does not, and should not, be interpreted to include a redirect of the said product, it has been discussed in multiple reliable sources. I suggest that in the section titled "Wikipedia is not a crystal ball" be amended to include this. In my interpretation, the line of that section that reads, Until such time that more encyclopedic knowledge about the product can be verified, product announcements should be merged to a larger topic (such as an article about the creator(s), a series of products, or a previous product) if applicable., already confirms this, but I suggest making it a bit more clear to the reader, so as not to have any major disruption.--JOJ ^Hutton 15:59, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Major change: Journalism -> Original reporting

The use of WP:NOT#JOURNALISM has been imprecise and incorrect for years now, and I'm being bold in changing it instead to "original reporting."

The rationale -- journalism encompasses a much larger set of activities than just "news." The section "Wikipedia is not a newspaper" is valid, but then making point #1 underneath it as "not journalism" is much too broad and contradicts accepted use of that term. Read what our own article journalism says, that it is the "gathering, processing, and dissemination of news and information related to the news to an audience." This is a completely valid description of what Wikipedia does as an act of journalism -- it is a distillation and summarization of news and information for an audience, even though it is not originally reporting info. Therefore, I'm narrowing the section on "Wikipedia is not a newspaper" down to exactly why the sections was created in the first place -- to ensure Wikipedia is not original or a primary source of such news reports. I know this may be problematic for some legacy links to WP:NOT #JOURNALISM, but it's more important to be precise, accurate and consistent on our policy than to perpetuate an erroneous use of terminology. -- Fuzheado | Talk 12:25, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

I've left WP:NOT#JOURNALISM in as a legacy anchor so it can still support old references. -- Fuzheado | Talk 12:29, 17 August 2014 (UTC)

I like that, but I don't know if the consensus agrees. It's neat and clever, but maybe we should regulate people's journalistic skills rather than discourage it. Shall I add the RFC tag here to bring in more people? --George Ho (talk) 17:46, 18 August 2014 (UTC)

Please do. This is a small change in size but a huge one in scope alteration. Few topics are of more interest to more Wikipedians than how we handle sourcing, including estimations of its reliability, biases and intent.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  04:51, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I reverted the good-faith action and tagged "Journalism" as disputed. --George Ho (talk) 05:01, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

maybe we should regulate people's journalistic skills rather than discourage it. - that's Wikinews, not en.wiki. --MASEM (t) 05:19, 19 August 2014 (UTC)