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"Reviewers' attention needed"

If there's anything to show that ITN and RD should be cleaved apart... we aren't even paying attention to RDs anyway. JM (talk) 16:31, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

Even if we split it, I bet that RDs would still go unattended because of the fact the newest default theme eliminates the TOC to that level. The old style allowed one to see at a glance any "READY" or "NEEDS ATTENTION" in one spot, now an admin has to either unfold each date on the left or go through the entire page. I know there's an option to modify the CSS to force this table, but this shouldn't be the solution and won't be friendly to new admins that want to help at ITN.
I am wondering if we have a daily bot that can look for special tags in short templates (like "itn ready" or "itn attn"), or even if just using using simple catches of "(Ready)" and "(Attn)" in the H4 headers to list out ITN items that need admin attention for posting. Masem (t) 01:24, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
I still think the new display theme wastes too much screen space, ITNC or not. I set Preferences->Appearance->Vector legacy (2010). —Bagumba (talk) 01:48, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't think any are being missed from posting, but there do seem to be occasional batches of barely noticeable people that are plucked from Deaths in 2023. Those often remain unreviewed as there's not a great deal of interest in assessing relatively obscure biographies. The blurb nominations get all the interest and commentary. Stephen 03:43, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
  • I don't usually pay much attention to RD as it's just a list of names, like the phone book. Today, these are:
What I mainly notice is that these are all Anglo-American but I've not heard of any of them and have no interest. Bob White is a common name and so needs disambiguation but doesn't get it.
Looking at the latest full day in Deaths in 2023, we have:
This seems much better in that it explains who these people were, provides a reference for each death and is much more comprehensive, timely and global in its coverage. It also includes someone that I've heard of – the prolific SF author, Michael Bishop. He would probably stand little chance at RD because, with many works to his credit, some jobsworth would insist that each of them must be cited.
So, on this evidence, RD should indeed be separated from ITN so that it might flourish as a separate obituary section, as we see on the front page of other Wikipedia languages. It just needs to follow the model above to be far more informative and productive.

References

  1. ^ Basudeb Acharia: প্রয়াত বাঁকুড়ার প্রাক্তন সিপিএম সাংসদ বাসুদেব আচারিয়া (in Bengali)
  2. ^ Mexico's first openly non-binary magistrate found dead at home
  3. ^ Former President Donald Trump's Sister Dies At 86 In New York
  4. ^ Muere el arquitecto Héctor Benavides, presentador de noticias, a los 82 años (in Spanish)
  5. ^ Michael Bishop (1945-2023)
  6. ^ El dramaturgo y director Fermín Cabal ha fallecido hoy en Madrid (in Spanish)
  7. ^ Ex-MP Akram Hossain Chowdhury passes away
  8. ^ Michel Ciment Dies: French Film Critic & Historian Was 85
  9. ^ Fallece exfutbolista de la UCV tras balacera (in Spanish)
  10. ^ Muere Abel Cuevas Melo (in Spanish)
  11. ^ IDF eliminates senior Hamas officials in Gaza
  12. ^ Nie żyje Krzysztof Kamiński (in Polish)
  13. ^ Умер экс-министр обороны Грузии Тенгиз Китовани (in Russian)
  14. ^ Suri Estonia teatri kauaaegne ooperisolist Ivo Kuusk (in Estonian)
  15. ^ Kabar Duka, mantan Bupati Kotabaru meninggal dunia (in Indonesian)
  16. ^ 中国热能工程领域的先行者与奠基人秦裕琨逝世，系哈工大“八百壮士”代表 (in Chinese)
  17. ^ A tribute to Gordon Wallace
  18. ^ Former Fresno State football player Devon Wylie dies, family confirms
Andrew🐉(talk) 09:08, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
How many of those articles at Deaths of 2023 are of quality to post on the main page? Certainly we should try to pull those that are in good shape to post via ITN's RD, and not bring those that are miles away.
But we are not going to change our approach to accommodate for more recognizable names over others. RD is about 1) quality of the article and 2) the death can be verified in reliable sources. Masem (t) 13:16, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
It would be a nuisance to update RD with so many entries a day, especially for the involved admins. DarkSide830 (talk) 15:53, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
some jobsworth would insist that each of them must be cited why should we allow unverified information into articles linked from the main page? Masem is right, RD is about the quality of the article. JM (talk) 15:56, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
Editors, I am thinking more along the lines of "RD is suffering under ITN" because people take more interest in blurbs than in RDs which is why it ends up with someone going through and marking so many of them as "attention needed". I've also noticed since I started this section that people keep confusing blurb standards for RD standards and acting like significance or fame has any effect on whether something is qualified for RD.
I'm NOT saying we should listen to Andrew and have a whole new obituary section and have to reorganize the main page; the RD section on the main page should be left alone, but I do think RD would do better with a separate project page. Those actually interested in RD can go there and see nothing but RDs to review, and there's nothing else on the project page like blurbs to draw people away from them.
(A further development of this would be that RDblurbs would be proposed in ITN as a blurb separately from being proposed for RD; and thus could end up having the same qualifications as normal blurbs (i.e. notable death not notable life, per most recent discussion on that matter)) JM (talk) 16:07, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
ITN overall has an issue where only "popular" or "important" topics get significant attention from those that do not regularly participate in ITN, which affects both RDs and normal non-RD blurbs. A major disaster but not one in the US or Europe? We struggle to find !votes, but make it a much smaller incident in the US and Europe and people !vote from all over. It wouldn't be as bad if these non-regulars were !voting and addressing quality issues, but 90% of the time (my estimate) they are only their to !vote feeling the topic is important to them and ignoring any quality concerns. Splitting off RD will not solve that, you will still only have people flock to popular or important people (eg compare the !votes for Matthew Perry to others of late). Sadly, that's a "WP is voluntary"-related problem that is not easy to correct beyond slapping notices everywhere that quality is a key metric (and effectively the only metric for non-blurb RDs). Masem (t) 00:51, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

RD batching

We need to do a better job of batching these. Matthew Perry was on the main page for barely 5 hours because of how long it took to promote articles of people who predeceased him. The current run has 5 of 6 people who predeceased him and 1 who died on the same day.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:50, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Ideally, a promoting admin should be starting at the bottom of the ITNC list and adding those first, than top down or other "favoritism" reasons. Eg in this case this edit from Ad Orietem jumped to Perry, then Stephan later went through to add several others that were also already ready but just lower down the list when Perry was ready (at the time of this diff). (In this case IAR to get Perry back in line with those other new noms would be reasonable.) Masem (t) 00:10, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Agree with Masem. This rotation was particularly abrupt (and on a Sunday, to boot). Readers will be looking for Perry (far more, I warrant, than any of the other listings), so IAR, reinstate him at the front, and give him another ride on the merry-go-round. Moscow Mule (talk) 00:39, 30 October 2023 (UTC) (But nothing of the above should be construed as anything other than the utmost respect for posting admins' tireless work.)
Perhaps we should create a process that gives us a better idea of how long RDs have been up without having to look at diffs. – Muboshgu (talk) 00:40, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
While we do not date RDs in the template (since they can be posted at any time within 7 days of nomination and are posted in the order promoted), perhaps it would be good if the "first" RD addition of a given day (after 00:00 UTC turnover) should be invisicommented to date that, with all subsequent RDs assumed to have been posted on that same day. Masem (t) 02:41, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps we should codify WP:ITNRD that we can leave extra RD entries beyond the usual six if items have been up for < 12 hours, instead of leaving it to IAR.—Bagumba (talk) 07:08, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
This is a good idea. Curbon7 (talk) 20:40, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
A while ago (I think last year), an admin boldly added an invisible comment after each entry indicating the time it was posted, but this was reverted by another admin. Curbon7 (talk) 07:21, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
I sort of vaguely recall seeing the diff, but don't remember why it was removed. If, as I suspect, it was because it seemed unmaintainable - well, my template-fu is about fifteen years out-of-date, but I've got a prototype template in my sandbox that turns *{{subst:itnrd|[[Matthew Perry]]}} into *[[Matthew Perry]]<!--leave until 05:23, 30 October 2023--> (i.e, 12 hours after the edit substing it). ({{rd}} and {{RD}} are already taken.) I don't post RDs myself; I mostly work with articles in much worse shape, so don't trust myself not to miss something in the quality check before posting, especially if there's only been one or two comments. Admins who do post RDs: would you use this? Would you prefer more elaborate format like *{{subst:itnrd|Joe Schmoe (electrician)|Joe Schmoe|nowrap=yes}} → *{{nowrap|[[Joe Schmoe (electrician)|Joe Schmoe]]}}, or just *{{nowrap|{{subst:itnrd|[[Joe Schmoe (electrician)|Joe Schmoe]]}}}}? (Prototype can't handle either quite yet.) —Cryptic 03:56, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
The readers looking for his article weren't bothered by this. It's spelled the exact same way his name is, can't miss. Those unaware were the real hypothetical victims here. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:36, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
I've restored Perry. We often IAR with a 7th (even 8th) RD item to ensure an entry stays up for 12h min. —Bagumba (talk) 00:50, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
I feel it is a good service to have it restored. I don't know how long restoration to 7th position will help, but it is better than 5 hours.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 03:53, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
It's a shame we can't do some HTML magic where we show 5 or 6 deaths at a time, but then also have a "More Recent Deaths" button or link ahead of that, which would then expand or "unfold" 2 or 3 or however many more qualified recent deaths onto the template, similar to how hats work for expanded content. It'd be useful during surge periods, while also still maintaining balance on the Main Page for the first time that it loads, as the "More Deaths" portion of the header would be collapsed until the user clicks that link. And we'd only need to do that in unlikely scenarios when we have something like 7 or 8 RDs posted within a 24-hour time span. The button could be labeled "Show more..." or "Continued..." or something like that. Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 12:50, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
We already have a "more recent deaths" button. It's the link to Deaths in 2023 which is concealed by the "Recent deaths" title. That page is usually quite up-to-date and comprehensive, listing many notable deaths for each day. And it's usually a top-read article as it averages over 130,000 views every day. It seems to be so effective because discussions are exceptional and its editors are able to edit. ITN's RD is just a fraction of that content. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:28, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
Other language Wikipedias such as German, French and Spanish, include the date of death in their equivalent sections and naturally list the entries in that order. The Spanish one has quite a lot of entries. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:06, 30 October 2023 (UTC)
So as an idea for batching, let's say that we should only post RDs in one batch every 12 or 24 hours. This is up to the posting admins to make sure they are not stepping on other admins' toes. When an admin posts they would be required to go through the entire ITNC page, from bottom up, to add items to the list as one batch. Other editors (not just admins) can mark RDs as ready to help the process here. The "downside" that we will not have rapid updates of RDs of articles that are already in good shape, but that's maybe 25% of the RD ITNCs from my experience? --Masem (t) 01:26, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
I don't think we have enough active admins to ensure a systematic post every 12–24 hours. I've seen RDs marked "ready" that I was WP:INVOLVED with that took a while to post. We don't need more barriers to timely posts. If Perry had been left as the 7th RD, there wouldn't have been an issue. —Bagumba (talk) 14:51, 31 October 2023 (UTC)
As I pointed out, if when Perry was posted that the posting admin started from the oldest "ready" RD and added those before adding Perry, we also would have avoided this situation. We need admins not to play favorites or to rush newer "popular" noms before reviewing the older ones waiting to be posted. It basically boils down to admins taking more responsibility and carefulness when posting. Masem (t) 00:35, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps this suggestion could be added to WP:ITN/A. Curbon7 (talk) 01:07, 1 November 2023 (UTC)
Masem, forgive me if i am misunderstanding you, but i think that, had the posting administrators posted the rds in chronological order, we still would have had the same problem. i believe the only difference is that perry wouldn't have been the one bumped. dying (talk) 18:59, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
Correct, and quite possibly no one would have noticed. Stephen 21:15, 6 November 2023 (UTC)
  • For some reason, I have spent an inordinate amount of time (perhaps more than many others here?) thinking about this topic over the last few (three?) years. At the end of it -- I have come to the conclusion that the better is the enemy of the good, and have made my peace. So, let's start from somewhere, here goes.
  1. Should we at least ensure that an RD stays 24 hours on the carousel? Yes, if we can. Unfortunately a few proposals were made on that front and 'community consensus' did not emerge on this topic. So that failed.
  2. Can we pass this responsibility to posting admins and ensure that they have a look at the RD falling off the carousel and perform an WP:IAR if the falling RD has spent less than 24 hours and allow that one to stay for a few hours longer? Some admins already do that. However, we all know that admin capacity is super hard to come by and we cannot mandate this. A proposal to solidify this approach also failed, iirc.
  3. Can we add a timestamp as a comment in the posting template so that it is easier for an admin to see when the falling-off RD was posted? Seems a simple solution to add a timestamp, but, we could not find out how this was to be done. Conceptually it sounds simple to add a timestamp as a comment next to the article title on the ITN template.
  4. Can we add a couple of extra RDs on the carousel? This proposal failed because we could not align on screen sizes and did not want RDs spilling over to three lines on some screens.
  5. Today (or at least a couple of months ago) we have an issue that our posting curve is not smooth. i.e. we do not post at regular intervals. Even when we have articles marked as a ready, they stay in that state for a very long time. This is primarily because of available admin capacity. We had run the numbers and had seen that the entire ITN project is reliant on a handful of admins. Definitely thankful for their time. So, the answer is a) we need more admins to participate, or b) explore a new role of an 'admin without tools', or c) technology solutions to create a staging / holding area where non-admins move content to and a script posts at a pre-defined interval e.g. 4 hours. Unfortunately none of these solutions have found takers for some reason or the other.
  6. With all of that said, where are we right now? Answer is -- we make do with what we have. -- Admins are encouraged to:
  1. Post more often
  2. Not batch the postings but post one at a time
  3. Evaluate articles from the bottom of the page
To conclude, like I mentioned earlier, sometimes better is the enemy of the good. And, we have something that is working, however flawed. I continue to remain in awe of the number of articles that are improved to main page levels of quality in this project and that is an absolute WIN for Wikipedia at large and there are no two ways about it. Happy Diwali to all those who celebrate. Ktin (talk) 18:29, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
Should we at least ensure that an RD stays 24 hours on the carousel? Yes, if we can. Unfortunately a few proposals were made on that front and 'community consensus' did not emerge on this topic. So that failed.: Keeping them up for at least 12 hours seems to be a common WP:IAR practice. A few mentioned 12h (instead of 24h), because that's the minimum amount of time that DYK hooks stay up. —Bagumba (talk) 07:45, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
iirc that proposal didn't pass either. Ktin (talk) 20:05, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Revising sports recurring items - Motorsport

Hello everyone - I had a look here WP:ITNSPORTS and I was left wondering how could such a specific sport as motorsport be featured most often? There are 150 countries where association football is the most popular sport while there is not a single one where motorsport is [1]. How could they be on equal terms on Wikipedia then, I don't understand. Below is the summary table with all the sports featured more than once per year, and you can see that all of the sports below are Olympic, but not motorsport. Moreover, looking at top-50 2022 sport events in the US[2] you can see that it's comparable to basketball, baseball, hockey – sports that are featured much less frequently on Wikipedia.

Therefore I would like to hear community's opinion on why it is so. I suggest maybe that the allocated spots for Motorsport are revised to 3-4 per year. The freed spots could then be reallocated to some other sports which are never featured at all, such as for example figure skating

Sport Entries per year
Football (ass.) 6.5
Motorsport 6
Golf 4.5
Rugby union 4.25
Horse racing 4
Tennis 4
Basketball 3.25
Football (other) 3
Baseball 2.25
Events 2.25
Cricket 2

demistalk 10:30, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

  • The problem with motorsports is that it's not just one sport. Formula One, rallying and Motorcycling are obvious three completely distinct sports that just happen to share the fact that there's a motor vehicle involved. The one that stands out as being removable is the Indy 500 - yes it's an iconic race, but it's just one of a series of races leading to a championship that actually isn't ITN/R itself! It's always struck me as a bit odd, and I think the nearest similar example is The Boat Race, which we removed not long ago. Black Kite (talk) 11:07, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
  • I'm not sure about other motor sports but Formula One is huge now globally and so there's an argument for reporting each Grand Prix, like the current ballyhoo in Las Vegas. The main problem there is that it would soon get repetitive as it has either been "Lewis Hamilton wins again" or "Max Verstappen wins again" for years.
As such sporting results are so formulaic (pun intended) and there are so many of them, then it would make sense to put them all on a separate line like Ongoing and RD. That's what professional news media usually does – put the sports into a separate section.
Andrew🐉(talk) 11:12, 20 November 2023 (UTC) (edit conflict)
Tried to make it work, here's a preview if you want! ChaotıċEnby(talk) 19:08, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
That looks quite nice! I'd like it if icons were put before each row, but I also get that the main page doesn't have items and this looks good enough. Perhaps the sports section could be put above ongoing or below RD so there is a clear separation between seriousness. Aaron Liu (talk) 22:11, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
Overall, there are too many sports blurbs compared to other news blurbs. Some of the problem may be too many ITN/R sports events, but some of the problem may also be that there are not enough other blurbs. JM (talk) 14:15, 21 November 2023 (UTC)
Yep, the priority should be getting more "other" blurbs rather than removing sports blurbs, although I also like Andrew's plan of putting them on a separate line. ChaotıċEnby(talk) 17:14, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
Something like:
Sports: Grey Cup (Montreal Alouettes) · Cricket World Cup (Australia) · NASCAR Cup Series (Ryan Blaney)
ChaotıċEnby(talk) 17:19, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
That's really diminishing the relative importance of sports blurbs. We can argue there's too many, but we shouldn't try to treat them as substandard. What's next, doing the same for the various awards? or natural disasters? or elections?
The issue is the volunteer problem of developing and nominating quality articles about topics that happen to be in the news (not necessarily groundbreaking news stories) that would be appropriate to post, as to dilute the sports area more. Masem (t) 19:32, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
I support doing both, actually. It's not treating sports as substandard any more than RD is treating deaths as substandard - just cutting through the fluff, as most sports blurbs are formulaic and nearly always structured the same. Plus, this allows us to both fit more sports events and leave breathing space for other blurbs (see demo). ChaotıċEnby(talk) 20:02, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
But the issue is that we aren't getting additional blurbs, and thus when sports events happen back to back, they appear to dominate the ITN box for some time. It would be different if we were rotating blurbs off daily, and still has an excess of sports blurbs, then this solution makes sense. But that's just not the case. Masem (t) 22:10, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
Very good point! Agree that the priority should be getting other blurbs up and running. Maybe get more people on Wikipedia to participate in ITN? ChaotıċEnby(talk) 01:13, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
Somewhat echoing what Masem said, but the problem is twofold:
  • ITN, already not exactly diverse in content, effectively becomes a disaster/politics ticker with the occasional unusual story sprinkled in.
  • As a result of the that, complaints are then magnified further over the already-existing issues of:
    • How it’s just a disaster/politics ticker, even more barren of content than the current accusation of disaster/politics/sports ticker.
    • How blurbs become on average even more stale than they already are, because there’s fewer new blurbs to push old ones off.
I can certainly see the argument for paring down the list of ITNR sports (I myself voted to remove The Boat Race from the ITNR list some months ago), but to reduce it to a singular RD-esque line is to solve a problem that doesn’t exist and in turn make existing problems worse. The proposed solution of “well, just have people contribute other blurbs” is overly optimistic at best and poorly thought out at worst; we don’t control the news, and we can’t just simply force people to come up with new blurbs. The Kip 02:11, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
The solution of "have people contribute to other blurbs" isn't perfect but there is definitely work to be done, especially since important news are often missed by ITN. A few days ago, I proposed a blurb for the first CRISPR gene editing drug being approved, which got exactly one !vote and got stale... ChaotıċEnby(talk) 02:34, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
Also, we can't force people to come up with new blurbs, but we can definitely put up a message to encourage them to suggest unusual blurbs outside of the sports/disasters/politics trio. ChaotıċEnby(talk) 02:36, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
I disagree with this concept. We shouldn't be striving to post news because it's interesting - DYK is a perfect venue for that. Politics and disasters are important. Maybe sports aren't, but I don't think we should be intentionally posting less. DarkSide830 (talk) 23:13, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
  • I agree with Bagumba. Motorsport is a family of sports involving a motor vehicle in the same way as football is a family of sports involving kicking a ball with the foot to score a goal. For better comparison, we expect to post 10.5 football stories a year if you include the American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic variants. Nonetheless, one thing worth discussing is why we’re inconsistent in presenting the ITN/R items on these clearly different sports, i.e. why we use bullets for the motor sports and sub-sections for the variants of football.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 22:03, 22 November 2023 (UTC)
It's completely irrelevant if rugby union should be added as a variety of football or not, and whether we'd have 10.5 or 17.25 football stories per year. The point is that we're inconsistent in presenting the ITN/R items. Separating them in sub-sections is better, but that's not the case with the motor sports. The least we could do is unify the style so that we don't need to discuss this again in the future.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 12:09, 23 November 2023 (UTC)
  • There's probably some changes that should be made to ITNSPORTS – like, do we really need eight rugby events, but only one for American football? I've always found it puzzling that we don't list the college football championship which is regularly one of the most-viewed sports events (no. 2 in the US each year, per chart in the opening comment), even moreso than the college basketball championship which we post each year – at User:BeanieFan11/random notes I've started comparing the viewership of different events listed to see how popular each is. BeanieFan11 (talk) 15:26, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
    I think "rugby" covers a few different sports (rugby league with 13 players and rugby union with 15, plus variants) but you do make a good point. Great job with the viewership statistics, by the way! ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 09:54, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
  • Number is not a reason to pare down ITN/R. Personally, there are a lot of things in sports that seem kinda silly to me, and the motorsport events are not among them. Do we need snooker, darts, handball, volleyball, or yachting? Can't say I know a single person who has ever said they had any interest in watching these sports, or that they did. And if we want to go after quantity, do we need 8 rugby items? The 6 motorsport items are all different types of motorsport. I don't see what the issue is with this. DarkSide830 (talk) 19:31, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
  • Yet snooker and darts are incredibly popular participation sports and the finals of those ITNR entries get big TV audiences; also, they're only contributing 1 story a year so I don't really think they're the problem. My knowledge of handball, volleyball and yachting is fairly minimal, so I'm not going to talk about those. I do notice, however, the one of the biggest participation sports in the world, badminton, doesn't even feature. Meanwhile, I do think we could trim some of the others. I don't think we really need;
  • The three national soccer leagues; yes, the Premier League does get massive audiences worldwide and that would be the one to keep if any, but all three of those often don't get posted because the articles are terrible.
  • The European Rugby Champions Cup or Super Rugby; that would leave us with the World Cup (4-yearly) and the two premier Northern and Southern hemisphere yearly tournaments, both of which get huge audiences.
  • Japan Series Baseball (as per the soccer leagues above)
  • EuroLeague Basketball
  • Do we need the Kentucky Derby and the Triple Crown (which the former is a part of)?
  • The Indianapolis 500, as I said above - yes, iconic, but so are a number of other single races (i.e. the Monaco GP)
  • American college sports, though we all know that's unlikely to happen
  • On a strictly numerical basis, the Triple Crown seems pretty harmless to include. It's only been won 13 times in the past 104 years, with some large gaps. That also makes it a lot less predictable and formulaic than most other ITNR items. 98.170.164.88 (talk) 10:05, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
  • Handball and volleyball are internationally popular Olympic sports. Snooker and darts may not be internationally popular, but there are large audiences in the English-speaking world with growing popularity elsewhere. Yachting is a form of sailing, which is another Olympic sport.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 23:23, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
    I disagree that being an "Olympic sport" makes something worth including. The Olympics have a lot of sports, many niche. I don't think that handball, volleyball, snooker, and darts are not popular, it's more of interest in the professional game. ie, I enjoy playing volleyball and darts and really couldn't have told you for sure without looking at the list that there was a world championship for volleyball or that the professional game for darts was very popular. I'd retain snooker and darts based on Black Kite's analysis though. DarkSide830 (talk) 23:51, 25 November 2023 (UTC)
    I disagree that being an "Olympic sport" makes something worth including. Yes, that line of thinking once made all Olympic athletes inherently notable, which has since been removed by consensus from WP:NSPORTS. —Bagumba (talk) 02:26, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    @DarkSide830 and Bagumba: Olympic sports are globally widespread and internationally popular—that’s why they’re Olympic. The thing is that being Olympic, i.e. globally widespread and internationally popular, isn’t the sole criterion for inclusion. You can make an argument that American or Canadian football are more popular than handball or volleyball, but that’s simply not true unless you live in an area where no-one watches those sports. Handball and volleyball are amongst the main school sports across Europe (except the British Isles), most of Africa, Iran, East Asia and parts of Latin America. Volleyball is also a popular sport in the United States. Those areas have much more population than the areas where American or Canadian football are played. In addition, one of the main surprises at the 2023 World Men's Handball Championship was the United States team primarily composed of US-born players, who were complete underdogs but qualified for the second group stage and scored two wins, which clearly indicates that the sport has growing popularity there. So, your call to revisit the ITN/R status of those sports just because you don’t know anyone who watches them should be dismissed (in the same way, Indians may argue that basketball should be revisited because it’s likely that they don’t know anyone watching that sport).--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 10:05, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    So, your call to revisit the ITN/R status of those sports just because you don’t know anyone who watches them should be dismissed: Except I never said that. What I did comment on is over inflating an ITNR item because the sport happens to be an Olympic sport. —Bagumba (talk) 10:28, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    The quoted line was addressed to DarkSide. I don’t say that the Olympic status should be the main criterion, but it’s an indication of international popularity, which is exactly what weakens DarkSide’s argument above. I personally don’t know anyone watching Gaelic football or even rugby, but that’s not a reason to call for revisiting their ITN/R status.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 10:40, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    I don't think Olympic status should matter - flag football is going to be an Olympic sport: are we going to post the IFAF Flag Football World Championship (something that I, a massive football fan, had never even knew existed until recently)? BeanieFan11 (talk) 02:31, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    Olympic status is an indication that a sport is globally widespread and internationally popular, but it’s most definitely not the only criterion for inclusion. I mentioned it in response to DarkSide’s argumentation above, not that it’s the main criterion that we should hang on.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 10:27, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    But "popularity" is A. debatable and B. does not confer interest by involved parties in related world championships or the professional game. That was the gist of my earlier comment on darts and volleyball. Do most that participate in these sports have an interest in viewing their top-level competitions. Seems to track for darts, I'd say, but the point is general popularity as far as it relates to ITN is debatable. DarkSide830 (talk) 16:36, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
    Breakdancing is also an Olympic sport as of next year, and I doubt there’d be any support to add that to ITNR. The Kip 17:49, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Remove sign parameter from Template:ITN candidate

Currently, {{ITN candidate}} has a |sign= parameter that almost everybody uses. However, I don't see why this should be in the template instead of having the proposer just add their signature after the template (which is what this currently displays as) and handling such signatures that are parameters inside the template is quite harder for many discussions scripts to do. For example, Convenient Discussions would mistakenly reply inside the template. I don't see at all why this exists and I want to remove this. My topic on this at Template talk:ITN candidate got no replies and I'm not comfortable changing such a widely-used template, so I proposed it here based on Cryptic's suggestion from WP:VPI so we can hopefully discuss this and next steps. Aaron Liu (talk) 02:33, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

The "nom cmt" and "sign" parameters to this template don't actually do anything except prefix "Nominator's comments:" to stuff that would appear after the template anyway, and maybe - maybe - make it less likely that very new users forget to sign. I can't see how that's worth the genuine problems it causes with tools; if it means we have to paste in {{xsign}} templates a bit more often, there's enough extremely experienced users watching ITNC to do so. —Cryptic 02:57, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
If it is the case that the signature in the template screws up the newer tools used for replying, then we should get rid of it or change something (I think doing a template subst might be overkill). We'll also need to make sure that experienced users are reminded to add their signature outside the template when nominating. Masem (t) 00:04, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Cryptic also proposed that when/if we make this change, we also update the examples to remove the mention of |sign= and |nom_cmt= since most users appear to be copy and pasting from the examples. Should I do this right now? Aaron Liu (talk) 01:35, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
No, because we still need a way for editors to sign nominations, or at least to make sure they are aware of the steps they need to comment and sign nominations. Masem (t) 01:59, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, I forgot to mention also including <!-- Additional comments go here -->~~~~ at the end Aaron Liu (talk) 02:03, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Ah, yes, in the two copy-paste boxes we have. Yes, I think we can make that change then, but check our guidance doc to make sure that's not also in there. Masem (t) 02:22, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
I would change it, and run it as a pilot, keeping a close eye on new nominations for a couple of weeks to see if problems arise. And be prepared to revert if it causes unforeseen problems. Stephen 02:16, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
(I actually proposed changing the example usage without immediately changing the templates, so the old format still worked. Obviously the examples will need to change if we remove the parameters entirely.) —Cryptic 02:21, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Hm, that brings something else up - we'll need to do something about the existing transclusions. Either leave the parameters there forever, which defeats the purpose to some extent, or subst the existing ones both on WP:ITNC and all the archives. I'd vote for substing, if that works out cleanly, since most of the archives are over the transclusion limit already. —Cryptic 02:24, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
I've just merged the sandbox, which aims to optimize around transclusion limit and also removes altblurbs 5 and 6, into the main template Aaron Liu (talk) 02:37, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
There've been times when there have been five or six altblurbs proposed and discussed before, and you've just made those invisible in the archives. —Cryptic 02:48, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, let's undo this, that's going to cause problems. We may have to make a new template to avoid that. Masem (t) 03:10, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
Preserving the appearance of the archives is the most important thing as they are huge and are often searched and referenced. And I already find it confusing when the older archives don't work properly due to some other structural change. In this case, the signature parameter seems unimportant as it is usually defaulted and so I'm not seeing a good reason to fiddle with it.
Note also that the title for this section currently contains a spelling error: "parmater" while at the template talk it's misspelt "paramter". Editors who make but do not notice such glaring errors should not be messing with templates as they will tend to break their syntax. See The Era of “Move Fast and Break Things” Is Over.
Andrew🐉(talk) 10:07, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
This is relevant, how, exactly? Fixing templates isn't editing articles; two of the most brilliant programmers I've ever worked with couldn't spell worth a damn. —Cryptic 04:39, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
An obvious simple workaround would be to create a new nearly identical template. This preserves the integrity of the archives, and I think everyone just copy/pastes the parameters from the candidates page anyways. Curbon7 (talk) 10:18, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
I have updated the examples. Aaron Liu (talk) 13:59, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
So far, we’ve got one person who did it correctly and one person who didn’t. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:41, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
  • I just created a nomination at ITN/C. I did so by copying the example in the documentation at {{ITN_candidate}}. The main work required was to identify the relevant article, compose the blurb and identify the updaters. The signature required no effort at all. So, my experience is that this isn't a problem that needs fixing and so we should do nothing.
Note also that the template currently says emphatically that "This template should not be substituted." per {{nosubst}}.
Andrew🐉(talk) 15:14, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
I do not understand your argument. Why can’t we change the example? Aaron Liu (talk) 15:20, 13 November 2023 (UTC)
The problem is that, since this is both not substed and the signature appears within the template parameters rather than after it, any attempt to reply using discussion scripts also puts the reply in the template parameters. You using the template isn't the problem. The person responding to you using the template is. —Cryptic 04:36, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
@Govvy @Kiwiz1338 @Golan1911 Is there any reason y’all aren’t signing your nominations and any way we could make the hint more intuitive? Just asking. Aaron Liu (talk) 15:00, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, hiya there, I think I fail to copy the last line from the RD template, sorry about that. Govvy (talk) 18:24, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Hmm, it’s ok. Is there some way we could make it better? I tried making the template close on the same line as the last line, but that evidently hasn’t worked out. Aaron Liu (talk) 18:37, 27 November 2023 (UTC)
Wait a second… I’m crazy! They’re on different lines! I’ll try that first. Aaron Liu (talk) 18:38, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Stale blurbs?

All of the ITN blurbs currently displayed are at least a week old, with the oldest (2023 Nepal earthquake) being 13 days old. Furthermore, there are no new ITN blurbs being suggested/voted on (not including RD). Should some of them be allowed to leave, or is it a matter of the news cycle not being especially eventful this week? ChaotıċEnby(talk) 16:07, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Doesn't seem like anything new of major national or international scale is really making the news lately. Most newsmedia coverage is focused on the current Israel-Palestine War and its periphery covered in ongoing. JM (talk) 16:31, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
There've been plenty of blurbable events, enough in the past week alone to fully replace T:ITN. Some of the articles aren't in good enough shape. More aren't worth nominating given the disfunction at ITNC. —Cryptic 16:45, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Most of these seem to be covered by the ongoing wars (Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and Myanmar), local politics, or elections (like in Madagascar or Liberia) for which the results aren't there yet.
Also genuinely asking, what's the dysfunction about? If it's related to people not !voting for lesser-known topics, I feel that having them at least nominated would be a good first step? ChaotıċEnby(talk) 16:51, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Actually this is a great argument, and I don't even think we have an issue. It might be time to abolish the whole "included in ongoing" argument as it's nebulous what is included in ongoing and to a certain extent, why should it matter? Side note, where is this policy written anyway? I can't find it in ITNCRIT. DarkSide830 (talk) 20:49, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Definitely a point I agree with. If these are the most high-profile ongoing events (unfortunately wars) with many developments, why are they relegated to a small link each with no news, much less visible than "mere" blurbs?
A solution that could work and avoid overflooding while giving a reasonable amount of place to these news would be to give a small update (one line or a few words, maybe just a link) to the last "event" part of that ongoing. Like:
ChaotıċEnby(talk) 21:32, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
IMO I would like this as opposed to the current usage of the bottom half of the box for the traditional "Ongoing" and RD sections. Maybe use the Ongoing section and drop RD down to one line. I know people love RD, but we already link Deaths in 2023, and given the debatable nature of what constitutes an "Ongoing" event, targeting 2-3 key ongoing events as you've described may be more desirable. DarkSide830 (talk) 02:58, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
There needs to be a limit, but yeah, I definitely think we could do with some laxing on the whole “covered by ongoing” point, especially considering that there are certain stories where the community decides is blur worthy even if related to an ongoing event. — Knightoftheswords 17:58, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
The problem is it's gospel to some. Yes, war generates notable events en masse as part of the larger event, but many events within larger conflicts are massively notable, and simply saying that we are "already covering it" is lacking key nuance in my mind. DarkSide830 (talk) 02:55, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
I thought of nominating the Indian bus crash but figured it was pointless because the community just rejected an Indian train crash on the basis that they happen all the time now. JM (talk) 17:01, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
I think we should slowly roll off some of the blurbs if they are around 2 weeks old, but it seems like the current status quo is to keep blurbs until they get bumped by other topics.. Natg 19 (talk) 17:27, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
We cannot control when news happens or doesn't happen. That leads to periods where blurbs may only be on the list for a day, or when we have stale blurbs. There is nothing we can really do about this. Masem (t) 22:42, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
There are stories out there, but I can see them being shot down as domestic politics only (Rwanda asylum plan) or not quite up to main-page quality (2023 Spanish government formation). I'd let them through, but only because the blue-capped NASCAR chap is beginning to Fernando Lugo me. Moscow Mule (talk) 23:10, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
Same, I just want to still submit them because that blue guy being there for over a week is getting annoying. ChaotıċEnby(talk) 23:40, 16 November 2023 (UTC)
And the deed(s) is/are done. OK, let's see how it plays out. Moscow Mule (talk) 00:36, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
There are definitely stories that are also off the normal path of politics, wars/conflicts, disasters, and elections. For example, today the UK was the first in the world to approve a CRISPR-developed medication, which is well covered in mainstream sources, but the only place I see this mentioned on WP is over at 2023 in science. I have enough scientific knowledge to know this is important but not enough to write about this, so I don't see any way it can be promoted as an ITNC. And that's a volunteer problem too. Masem (t) 03:03, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
I'll try to add it to the CRISPR article so it can be submitted as a blurb! ChaotıċEnby(talk) 21:32, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Update: CRISPR gene editing feels like a more natural choice! ChaotıċEnby(talk) 21:44, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Created a nom for the Indian tunnel collapse and ongoing rescue. Surprised this was not nominated, but maybe it is too small scale. Natg 19 (talk) 22:01, 17 November 2023 (UTC)
Per WP:ITNSIGNIF:

It is highly subjective whether an event is considered significant enough, and ultimately each event should be discussed on its own merits. The consensus among those discussing the event is all that is necessary to decide if an event is significant enough for posting.

The community has full control to nominate and allow new items to be posted, replacing older items. However, the status quo has been to be restrictive to the extent of sometimes having old posts linger.—Bagumba (talk) 01:35, 18 November 2023 (UTC)
"The community is in charge" is a complete non-answer to a very real issue: except for sports (thanks to ITN/R), there are very few news actually getting posted on ITN, with even major events being relegated as "local news". ChaotıċEnby(talk) 23:27, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
'The community is in charge' is a complete non-answer... Wikipedia operates on consensus, for better or for worse. What would you propose as an alternative? —Bagumba (talk) 01:27, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
The problem is that no-one is really in charge. Editors can't do much because the key page is protected. And the admins can't do much because there's quite a few of them and so they tend to be cautious and conservative. The discussions which supposedly power and drive the process are hopeless because key issues like significance are based on personal opinions rather than objective criteria and evidence.
There are many ways that this might be done better. These can be seen operating just fine elsewhere and include:
  • Portal:Current events which has much the same goal and works better because editors are free to edit it.
  • Deaths in 2023 which is likewise a page that anyone can edit – the way that Wikipedia is supposed to work.
  • Did You Know which runs so many new articles that it is often overloaded. Its process is based on clear criteria and a checklist. Other key features are that there's usually just a single reviewer per article and the set building doesn't require admin powers – admins push a button to promote the prepared queues in a more automated way.
  • The trending topics pages which are based on readership stats which are readily available. See WP:TOP25, Top Views and the Official App to see some examples.
Of course, these other examples are not perfect but they don't have to be. As Churchill said,

The maxim "Nothing avails but perfection" may be spelt shorter, "Paralysis."

Andrew🐉(talk) 23:45, 20 November 2023 (UTC)
Yes, but consensus is built at different levels, and we have various guidelines and criteria to know what we should or shouldn't do. My point is, the debate shouldn't have to be had from scratch at every nomination. ChaotıċEnby(talk) 18:52, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Dealing with "popular" or "well-known" deaths

Ignoring the question of a blurb or not, and the issue it being pulled and then reposted, the Kissinger death ITNC shows a long-standing problem that we have people that generally don't come to ITNC and !vote support just because the people is someone well-known, famous, beloved, or a whole host of other reasons related to fame and popularity. We can't prevent editors from throwing support votes this way, but we do have the problem is that is all they are !voting on without considering the quality of the article, which in this case, led to pre-mature posting (only 3-4 !votes made comment on quality and of those, they were all warning about CN tags).

What's happened with the Kissinger nom doesn't matter in the end, but it is this pattern that is too too common about drive-by !votes that only want to throw a support for someone they recognize but do not even both to talk quality. It would be different if multiple earlier !votes said the quality was fine, then we don't need every single other vote to point that out, but we need more eyes to look at quality - yay or nay - before the focus on importance for posting. We have the disclaimer in the template box but that's not clearly being seen.

Is there any way we can guide infrequently !voters to say more than just a "Support" and get quality issues addressed sooner than later? I don't know, I'm trying to brainstorm here. Masem (t) 05:32, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

We do have WP:ITNCDO/DONT, but it could be a good thing to add at least a short version of them to the page's editnotice, which for now is only useful for people wanting to add a new topic (i.e. not at all the majority of editors only voting). ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 05:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
How about we just have Admins do their job properly, and ignore inappropriate posts supporting the nomination? As for the blurb, this must also apply to all those posts that effectively said nothing but "OBVIOUSLY deserves a blurb". (MY emphasis.) Obviously is NOT a reason. HiLo48 (talk) 05:52, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Support InedibleHulk (talk) 07:40, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
WP:BLUESKY. nableezy - 15:27, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Also concerning was the nominator's comment, which said nothing but "Been waiting for this day" instead of, you know, actually commenting on the significance of the event or quality of the article. It got no better when they gave a !vote on their own nomination of nothing but "support obviously as nominator". This was followed by, as you said, a parade of !votes all being variations of "support, well known highly influential major figure" ignoring the 10+ CN tags it had at the time. Amazingly, 3 different people !voted support for the blurb with the sole justification being "obviously". The admin was right to pull at the time, consensus was not reached as CN concerns voiced by multiple editors were not addressed at the time. I don't exactly see a way to address any of this except to just have other editors call people out for these things. ITNCDO/DONT is already at the top of the page. JM (talk) 06:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
ITNCDO/DONT is neither at the very top of the page, nor as an editnotice, which may be a problem for people directly skipping to the relevant section without reading the wall of text in-between. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 06:11, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
It's in the lead above all the nominations and the archives. I would call that "the top of the page" but whatever. JM (talk) 06:19, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
It is not in the lead at all? It's in the third section of the article, below the table of contents and a bunch of text, and doesn't show up when you load the page. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 06:35, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I'm confused, are we talking about the same thing? On ITN/C on desktop, I see an introduction followed by a big blue box containing "How to nominate an item", "Headers", and "Voicing an opinion on an item" which consists of ITNCDO and ITNCDONT. Underneath that is archives followed by nominations. Off to one side is the ITN toolbox and template, and off to the other side is the table of contents. Definitely shows up on my page. JM (talk) 06:43, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
The issue is that you're assuming these editors are !voting to support in ignorance of the quality issues, rather than deciding that the quality issues are not sufficient to prevent posting and !voting despite them, which is permitted by the wording of WP:ITNQUALITY.
I don't feel that is appropriate - and by extension, Spencer's decision to pull was, I feel, an inappropriate super vote. BilledMammal (talk) 06:24, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Spencer's pull was fully appropriate. A few CN tags in an otherwise fine article is acceptable, 10+ is not. Curbon7 (talk) 07:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
(edit conflict) If y'all have a concern with my admin actions, my talk page is open and you're free to ping me. There's no need to type obliquely. I've already explained my reading of consensus over at ITNC, but to repeat myself, WP:ITNQUALITY allows citation needed tags to appear in blurbed articles. Moreover, editors are free to !vote support without explicitly declaring their assessment of an article's quality. That comes with the territory of being a free and open wiki. In this case, I assessed that there was overwhelming support in favor of posting, and that those individuals were clearly not concerned that 5% of the article being tagged violated the minimum quality standards as they are written (even if, as became apparent, it did not measure up to what a few editors think they should be written). To the larger question raised by Masem in the OP, I do think it would be helpful to encourage editors to explicitly state their position on the article's quality in addition to its significance, even while !votes that miss one or the other should not be automatically discounted. Rather than adding more content, perhaps a solution may be found in shortening the wall of text that leads the page (nearly 1000 words, by my count). Ed [talk] [OMT] 06:26, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
There's an admin issue too (and not just Ed but for all admins that post these without taking into account the quality issue or when these concerns are raised by a few !votes, hence why I am not addressing that), but the larger issue is non-regular editors that appear when a popular or well-known person is up for RD/blurb, or even for popular blurbs. Maybe a few of these could be read as an implicit support acknowledging the quality is fine, but knowing the typical arguments we've seen in the past from non-regulars and regulars, most support !votes lacking a statement about quality are only considering the significance factor and are not taking into account quality (whether good or bad). Masem (t) 13:07, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
This isnt some walled garden where the "regulars" decide to overrule the wider community. It is good when we get non-regulars involved here, maybe it will turn this place into something that reflects actual consensus instead of the handful of people willing to stomach the the nonsense that happens here. That isnt how this or any other page on Wikipedia work, this is not your fiefdom and you and nobody else gets a bigger role in deciding what gets posted than anybody else. nableezy - 15:33, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I.have no issue with non regular participation, its just non-regulars not being well versed on what we expect from !votes. Its trying to figure out how to make them better informed. Masem (t) 15:47, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Exactly. Nableezy seemed to take that comment completely the wrong way for some reason. JM (talk) 15:49, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
There is nothing in what we expect for votes however. There is no substantive or overriding criteria for this page. It doesnt exist, there are only editors who seek to impose their idiosyncratic views on what must be done. There is, for example, you claiming that the historical reason for ITN was to showcase quality work of the encyclopedia that happened to be in the news, not to present material that people may be looking for more information on because it is in the news (wrong, for the record, it began with an update about 9/11 shortly after the first plane struck, dont believe we had a well-cited and written article at that point), there is elijahpepe saying we must not have US-centric news (wrong for the record, almost everything we post is one-country specific). I have repeatedly tried to establish some sort of objective criteria for this, and Im open to discussing anybody else's suggestions. But that has been shot down, repeatedly, including by yourself precisely because the lack of any overriding objective policy or guideline to help determine how !votes should be weighed allows for their not-based-in-policy-or-fact personal criteria to continue to have the weight of their vote. You want to rule out votes that dont meet a standard? There is no standard here. nableezy - 16:08, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
ITNCRIT exists for a reason and support !votes that do consider all parts of ITNCRIT not already reasonably demonstrated should be considered questionable. We are talking the equivalent issue of ATA for AFD, where editors often pile on keep !votes for the wrong reasons. Masem (t) 20:26, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
There's a large difference between AfD, which operates on policy, and ITN, which operates similarly to a WikiProject. Ed [talk] [OMT] 20:38, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
And whenever Jimmy Carter dies there will be an even larger flood of editors ignoring WP:ITNCDONT. JM (talk) 12:43, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I think the answer is a simple template. Similar to what’s used at the DYK side of the house.
Blurb notability: Y/N
Quality: Y/N
Comment: Additional comments
Signature.
if someone can templatize it - I would say, go for it. Ktin (talk) 20:50, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Makes sense JM (talk) 00:24, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

There’s an easy remedy that I’ve applied once or twice, and other editors followed on a couple of more times. It’s called moderation. Just close the discussion on significance with a note that it’s been clearly established and direct editors to improve quality. By doing it, you give a warning sign that posting would be pre-mature because of article’s quality, and you also guide editors to focus on quality and stop with the drive-by votes based on significance.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 14:43, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

This is a great idea. I participated literally only because there were people saying it wasn't significant enough for a blurb. I wouldn't have bothered to participate if the significance could have been marked as established while we work on the article. Valereee (talk) 14:47, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I think this method can do more harm than good if it ends up prematurely ending a discussion. Not long ago we had that beatles song nomination that had like 10 supports and 0 opposes, was posted, and then had like 17 or something post-posting opposes and was pulled. The point being that you close a discussion on significance it prevents people from later coming in and opposing based on significance, and same for quality, and you end up doing something the community may not want once all is said and done. JM (talk) 14:53, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
That’s not a problem. Once quality is improved and the article is posted, the discussion on significance will be re-opened so pulling wouldn’t be impossible if a number of well-justified oppose votes accumulates. After all, we all strive to improve quality, and temporarily putting significance on the back burner shouldn’t be harmful.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 15:21, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Quality checks I'll note that WP:ITN/A makes no mention of quality. However, I've always done cursory checks (no orange tags, minimal Cn tags, RD with sourced death, etc), and don't post if not met, often posting a related oppose/comment about the finding in the nom as well. The question for the community is whether to codify some minimal quality into ITN/A, which I believe is generally already the de facto practice by admins. For example, ITNA does have explicit instructions on images not to post at Wikipedia:In the news/Administrator instructions § Images—Bagumba (talk) 07:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

This has been my practice as well, and it is not uncommon to have a nomination with nearly all supports or marked as "ready" with significant quality issues that requires some TLC prior to posting. SpencerT•C 16:16, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
It would probably be a good idea for us to discourage some of the marking that is done right now for this reason. Between that and the people making comments such as "the vote is x-y, when is this going to be posted/closed", it feels like there's a lot of attempts almost to supervote and push noms along by prodding Admins. Not that I believe most of it is malicious or anything, but I think attempting to limit these actions may improve the posting process. Given Admins are busy, maybe even having an ITN specific Admin group who can handle this stuff, which means the Admins can just focus on validating consensus and the actual posting of noms. Just an idea. DarkSide830 (talk) 00:15, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Forgive the phrasing here, I wasn't paying perfect attention when I made that reply. Not on my game today.DarkSide830 (talk) 00:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

It might be an exaggeration, but if anyone in a "ministerial" post like State of Secretary could come as close as possible to effectively running a country in terms of its foreign and global policy, that person would be Kissinger. He does fit the sui generis standard, there are very few famous Secretaries of State (save for those who would themselves eventually become President). That being said, I think we did ITN a huge disservice this day. Not because he should not have been posted; he absolutely should have been. But the posting happened about 70 or 80 minutes after nomination when it was far from clear that we had a unanimous consensus on quality and significance. Then it was pulled. Then re-posted. Then closed outright at 07:15 GMT by a non-admin, Curbon7. The silliness could all have been avoided if we had suggested (not mandated, just suggested) at least a 12-hour discussion window considering this was far from a sure shot. Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:09, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

12 hours to post something obviously worthy is a waste of about 11 hours. nableezy - 15:30, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I do get it, though. Time zones, and the general level of feeling that American editors overestimate significance of US-related topics. Valereee (talk) 15:34, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
There is no deadline. We should not be in any rush. – Muboshgu (talk) 15:53, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I get it too, Im the one that raised that UK/EU editors were still sleeping. But the Elizabeth blurb was posted in seven minutes. You really want to say anybody would have demanded twelve hours for that? That there is no deadline and no rush? nableezy - 15:58, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't think Elizabeth's article had unsourced statements regarding the impacts of her bombing campaigns at the time of her death. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
So? Whats that have to do with considering significance? Whats that have to do with Walt's suggestion that we have a 12 hour window? Youre going to say well some cases are obvious for significance? This case was obvious for significance. And by the way, I fixed that, and a bunch of other cn tags, before I suggested it be restored. nableezy - 16:11, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I wasn't talking about significance. I was talking about article quality. IIRC, Elizabeth's was that good that we posted it that quickly. Kissinger's was not that good and the initial post was too soon. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:32, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Sure fine, but that isnt what I was responding to. nableezy - 17:34, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Precisely. If it's a FA, particularly a recently promoted one, and it can be quickly determined that updates regarding death can be added and reliably sourced, then there is no need to thrash around. We have very quickly and rightly so posted death blurbs that were slam dunks/home runs/hat-tricks/7-10 split conversions for that very reason; the process is not required. That was not the case here. Things were far from perfect on both criteria. Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 16:13, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Fine, Diego Maradona was posted in eight minutes. Not a GA much less a FA. Pelé in 23, though that was a GA. Where exactly are you going to draw the line on what is or is not clear. And no, the significance of Kissinger is clear, I cannot take seriously somebody who disputes that. Like I really am trying my best, but I have yet to see a single argument about his significance to take seriously. nableezy - 16:24, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Nor I. Yet we must wait, because of our subjective consensus-finding process and even as you said: There is no substantive or overriding criteria for this page. It doesnt exist, there are only editors who seek to impose their idiosyncratic views on what must be done. Until we have such a criteria for where we can quickly tick off the boxes, subjective arguments must be addressed and considered and at the same time we need to be careful about the quality of the articles being posted, in a fashion that is orderly and not post-pull-post. It's unfortunate but articles for sportsmen tend to be in much better shape for quality and sourcing, partly due to the attention they get, partly because the figures tend not to be as controversial.
I do think it's a little comical how blatantly we tripped over ourselves to post Maradona and Pelé, even considering the shape of the articles. And while I don't disagree with their posting, I conceive just as you do that there is a bizarre standard being applied when the posting of Kissinger, one of the most (I would say the most but someone would surely cite Gandhi) influential politicians of his era, is dogmatically considered to be "U.S.-centric". Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 17:30, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I don't see any reason why we can't mandate a 12 hour (or 6 hour) period for any ITN blurb, regardless of what the topic is, whether it is the death of the queen or Pele, or some other significant event. There should not be a "race" to get things posted. Not sure if the average reader even cares that we "rush" to get things up on ITN. Natg 19 (talk) 19:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I've been thinking of a proposal that relates to my comments below on having a sliding scale of "quality" relating to the relative "staleness" of the event, ie we enforce the utmost quality standards to post something immediately, and maybe tolerate a more lax standard for staler blurbs. That way we get events posted, but encourage continued improvement of target articles. DarkSide830 (talk) 19:58, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Honestly, I don't think this was some sort of absurd crisis. Two Admins disagreed on quality. Ed believed it was there and Stephen did not. If the calculations were true and it was in fact ~5% uncited, I can see how that would be a grey area. I voted against quality at the time the nom was pulled, but it was more or less out of abundance of caution. Personally, I see no need to rush to post an item that isn't of the very best quality. ITN gives you roughly 7 days to improve a new nom's quality. I'm behind what HiLo's putting down - Admins are empowered to ignore a wave of "supports" when quality is not present. I think that principle just needs to be applied more consistently. DarkSide830 (talk) 15:44, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I believe it was Spencer, not Stephen. JM (talk) 15:46, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Deepest apologies to Spencer on that one. Knew I should have made sure I got the right name on that one. DarkSide830 (talk) 15:57, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
@DarkSide830: I used WP:PROSESIZE to get the total word count, and copy/pasted the the text tagged with CNs into a word counter to get to the 5% number. Very manual process, but I'm confident it was correct at the time I said it. Ed [talk] [OMT] 19:06, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I have nothing against your process, results, or even your assessment thereof. I know enough about stats to understand how 5% can both be small, but still also significant. Corrections were made and the result is the posting happened with a slight delay and slight improvements. Personally, I don't think the actual results were much different nor were a big deal. Just pointing out that it is, in fact, a grey area. DarkSide830 (talk) 19:56, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
All good. I thought I read an open question in "if the calculations were true", and figured I should answer it in case others want to do a similar calculation in the future. Ed [talk] [OMT] 20:10, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
It was more that I wasn't going to die on that hill if it were actually, say, 2%, or 10%. I naturally tend to qualify things. It was more about being lawyer-like then anything else. DarkSide830 (talk) 21:21, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Does Wikipedia need to start pre-addressing suitability for ITN (on an individual basis) for "old person dies" blurbs? The quality issues aside, a few editors seem to think it was rushed or inappropriate to post a blurb and are suggesting that "support blurb, obviously" comments be discounted. Which is backwards; the stronger the case for a blurb, the less of an argument is needed. Also, it would be much easier to limit these discussions to "article quality" if the "Not a head of state, not a head of government, so not sufficiently notable" style comments did not have to be rebutted. 217.180.228.138 (talk) 16:02, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Or, if that is too distasteful, there could just be two headings for discussion on "RD/Blurb" discussions; "quality" and "blurbiness". 217.180.228.138 (talk) 16:07, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I raised this earlier in the year as a possibility and other people have raised it since then. Having a quality section and a significance section under RD/Blurb discussions naturally forces people to consider both as discrete issues instead of the jumbled mess we often get with these nominations. The obvious downside is that people will have to make two edits/split their one edit over two sections. -- Patar knight - chat/contributions 19:31, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
This is honestly a great idea, and could even be expanded to all nominations with "quality" and "notability" (except ITN/R, of course). ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 04:55, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
That's a different argument altogether. Arguing the significance of Henry Kissinger is a subjective matter and I feel that consensus worked as it should have there. The issue was regarding the readiness of the article, and I wonder whether posting admin in this situation tend to overestimate the quality of the article if the pull of significance is overwhelmingly strong. Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 16:16, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
This concept was proposed before and voted down for some reason. DarkSide830 (talk) 17:00, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Of what value is any death blurb, and to whom? Can anyone complete this sentence: If we blurb a significant recent death, then ______, but if we don't blurb it, then ______. Because I don't get the point. Seems like one of those things where Wikipedia creates something to argue about so people have something to argue about. Levivich (talk) 22:39, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Same point as any news story I suppose. nableezy - 22:41, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
I mean, of what value is any death blurb, as opposed to an RD? Levivich (talk) 22:45, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Same answer. Some deaths are as big a story as any other class of news stories. RD is for any death of the subject of an article. But unless we want to say that no death merits a blurb, and again I don’t think that is true, or that only unusual deaths like Kobe Bryant merit one, and again I don’t think that’s true, then we need to determine what differentiates between merits a blurb or doesn’t. But Elizabeth brought about a full orgy of royalism across the main page and that was old lady who didn’t do anything dies peacefully in her sleep. So I don’t think that’s what people actually want, unless they just admit they only want it for some stories and not others. nableezy - 23:26, 30 November 2023 (UTC)
Yeah I'm asking why does any death merit a blurb? (Putting aside death-as-events, eg assassination, helicopter crash, etc.)
What is it that blurbing, eg Kissinger, accomplishes? Can you fill in the blank: If we blurb Kissinger then _______ but if we only RD Kissinger then ______? What is the value or purpose of the blurb? Levivich (talk) 15:12, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
In my own personal usage of Wikipedia, blurbing Kissinger puts an emphasis that he has died - featuring the "event" of his death. 90% of the list of names in RD, I have never heard of, and they are in a list format which is harder to notice. The blurb draws much more attention to the death, especially if it is the top blurb listing and the ITN image. Whether this is valuable to others or not (or is the intent of ITN/RD) is debatable. Natg 19 (talk) 18:24, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, that's also all I could come up with--blurbing draws more attention. But we only blurb people who are, for lack of a better word, super famous--the very same ones where we don't need to draw attention because they're already receiving extraordinary attention. So, "if we blurb Kissinger then readers will see it, but if we only RD Kissinger then readers will miss it" doesn't seem to wash for anyone we'd blurb. In which case... what is the value of blurbing the death of a very famous person, and if it has little or no value, why have recurring arguments discussions about death blurbs at all? I'm curious if anyone sees a value to death blurbs beyond "brings more attention [to a person who is already getting a ton of attention]". Levivich (talk) 18:40, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
RD blurbs don't even follow normal blurb guidelines, where people usually call for lasting impact. The deaths of neither Kissinger nor Day O'Connor have lasting impact, neither of them were in charge of anything and both of them have been retired for decades. Whenever someone dies who a lot of people care about, people will start saying "oh well his/her life had such a huge impact on others in the 70s/80s and the effects continue today" ...which in no way affects the significant lasting impact of their death, which remains 0. JM (talk) 00:22, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
So you're saying if the death itself doesn't have some significant impact, it's not a significant death? Valereee (talk) 00:53, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
yes JM (talk) 00:59, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
What kind of an impact are you talking about? I mean, Kissinger was writing a book. It probably won't get published now. Likely many readers in many countries would have read this book. So that's an impact, I guess. I'm not sure it makes his death more significant than it would be if he'd been between books. Valereee (talk) 01:08, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
I wouldn't !vote to blurb GRRM if I was around and he dies writing Winds of Winter, and that book would almost certainly be more widely-read and discussed than anything Kissinger was writing when he died. A book is not significant enough. I mean like "are you a major leader in the middle of major leading, or were you assassinated". Your death itself must be blurbable as a normal ITN blurb meeting normal ITN levels of significant lasting impact, which the lack of a publication of a book does not meet at all. I'm not the only person who thinks this, as far as I know at least orbitalbuzzsawgang is on roughly the same page, as well as a few others. JM (talk) 01:16, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
So then no sports outcome should probably be blurbable? Not really a significant impact on anything, unless there's a riot or something, I'd agree. Valereee (talk) 01:25, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Sports outcomes are ITN/R so I can't really argue against them when they're nominated. (It seems like sports are in a different category than normal ITN blurbs, like deaths used to be before RD. And some people don't even support blurbing riots, see the recent Dublin nomination). The primary target of my meta-arguments on ITN are RDs and death blurbs. JM (talk) 01:32, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Yeah, but sports outcomes are routinely posted as clearly sig enough, by previous consensus. I suspect you'd find yourself in the minority if GRRM dies before finishing the series. Valereee (talk) 01:43, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Like I said, sports outcomes seem to be in a different category, because there are things far more significant which are not blurbed (Russian SC banning "international LGBT movement", George Santos' expulsion from US Congress, Mike Johnson becoming US Speaker, Nicaragua leaving OAS, and Sam Altman's OpenAI drama are all more significant than the outcome of any sports event, and not a single one passed). And really it's irrelevant as to whether I would be in a minority of opinions, ITN has multiple longstanding disagreements. JM (talk) 02:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Yeah but that’s true for almost all stories. The Super Bowl isn’t super famous? The World Cup final? Most of the stuff we post are things people already know of, the point being to give them encyclopedic coverage of what they are interested of because of the news. But then again I kinda doubt most people come from ITN as opposed to Google anyway so what’s the point probably has an answer of "none" for ITN as a whole. nableezy - 00:34, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
Levivich, clearly the reason we blurb some deaths and not others is to have grounds to argue whether we're too US- or western-centric. Try to keep up. Valereee (talk) 00:58, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
What is it that blurbing, eg Kissinger, accomplishes?: As ITN is currently structured, it allowed his picture to be on the MP. —Bagumba (talk) 01:43, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
The two factors for a death blurb that I consider as close to objective as possible, beyond standard quality and being reported, is that the article is at a GA or better quality, and that there is a section dedicated to the impact or legacy the person had on the world. The GA/FA quality would mean we're showing some of WP's best work, and the latter helps the reader why they should care about that person's death. Eg for Kissinger, the "Public perception" is doing that job for a legacy/impact section. This is a distinction between having a blurb for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, while not one for Sandra Day O'Connor (all other facets being equal). Masem (t) 01:59, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
I feel like this might not be as big an issue if some of our regulars didn't also value perceived notability over quality of the update. In my exerperience here, quality is pretty much always the secondary concern after whether something is important enough toeven be worth considering, and any drive-by editors are likely to pick up on that. Though I'll grand that this might partly be a subjective experience coming from me; in looking for an example I'm immediately seeing regulars oppose for quality and newcomers support for importance... so I guess this problem might be right on the mark indeed... ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:51, 1 December 2023 (UTC)
As a means of observation, Sandra Day O'Connor just passed, and I expect this one to also have a lot of these non-regular pile-ons for support, when there are a few quality issues in the article. --Masem (t) 15:16, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

A simple approach would be to instruct admins to consider any vote that does not comment on quality to be considered neutral on the subject (which they usually are), so that objections to quality are given more weight. GreatCaesarsGhost 16:32, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Agree JM (talk) 00:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
As I stated with my "Quality checks" comment earlier, WP:ITNA makes no mention of quality. If we don't want to rely on "common sense", the community should codify guidance there. —Bagumba (talk) 09:59, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

Instituting a sliding quality scale for ITN items

No consensus for the proposal is likely to emerge. ——Serial 16:44, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

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

Recently, ITN has dealt with concerns over when an item is up to the standards of ITN. As noted and discussed in prior discussions, CN tags are one of the biggest concerns. To this end, I believe codifying the allowable number of CN tags that are allowed in an article is in order, but how many is quite debatable, so I believe a compromise between more lax and more strict standards would be a good idea. I believe instituting harsher standards on article quality for recent nominations is a good idea, and then going from there. More or less, classic ITNQUALITY standards would apply throughout the process, but the allowable number of CN tags would increase over time, obviously not to an unreasonable number, but the goal would be to make sure articles posted to the Main Page are of the highest quality, but that articles aren't ultimately missing the cutoff in the end due to high standards. Said process would also further empower Admins to slow down posting noms that have received a wave of notability votes, but very little votes addressing quality, and would allow for a standard for them to point towards when those involved with the voting process are getting fed up that the Admins actually care about quality. Ideally, in my mind, this would involve enforcing a complete citation rule for the time of posting within the first 24 hours of a nomination being created, with the number of allowable CN tags increasing over time (I'd say this is best measured as a percentage of the text, maybe increasing to 5% as a maximum after x number of 24 hour periods), and with allowed exceptions for noms that have been up for less time, but are to roll off soon. I'm more or less just requesting feedback on this plan and the particular parameters that people think would best apply, but I think a system such as this one is a great way to resolve the issue of borderline quality postings, as well as prior concerns of people flooding noms with non-quality votes. DarkSide830 (talk) 04:44, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

  • Oppose per WP:CREEP. This looks like a solution in search of a problem. If the article is poorly sourced, then we don't post it. Why do we need to turn everything into an exercise in legalism? -Ad Orientem (talk) 04:58, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    Various proposals lately have effectiely just been ways to make things way more complicated and difficult than they have to be JM (talk) 05:58, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    Yeah, I'm very confused. All these votes show is that we DO need a rule. There is in fact a "problem" and codifying a generally nebulous role isn't exactly CREEP. DarkSide830 (talk) 16:09, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose We shouldn't be allowing any articles with CN tags pass, though I can appreciate the IAR-type exceptions when an article has hundreds of citations and one or two CN tags on non-contentious statements. As soon as you speak to weakening expectations for certain types of articles, that's just going to be gamed more. --Masem (t) 06:13, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    that wouldn't even be IAR considering WP:ITNQUALITY says one or two "citation needed" tags may not hold up an article JM (talk) 06:17, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    More likely to apply for larger articles as opposed to ones barely beyond a stub. —Bagumba (talk) 14:04, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    Which is why I think applying a percentage is better. This came into play with Kissinger, for example. The 5% of the prose that was uncited included several CN tags. The current standard is biased towards small articles, many of which tend to be borderline NOTNEWS content. DarkSide830 (talk) 16:12, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose verifiability is a founding principle, knowingly accepting unsourced content is a slippery slope. Polyamorph (talk) 06:54, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose There's regular tag bombing at ITN which distorts the number of {{cn}}. The core principle of WP:V is that citations are only required for controversial claims and quotes. The idea that absolutely everything requires a footnote is mistaken. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:07, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    It's an exaggeration that reviewers generally want "everything" cited. WP:ITNQUALITY does say that ...having entire sections without any sources is unacceptable. The actual practice is arguably that each paragraph is often expected to be cited, at a minimum. There's nothing wrong with ITN having higher standards than WP:V, if that's what the community chooses. For example, WP allows stubs, but ITN doesnt. —Bagumba (talk) 14:16, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
    It's no exaggeration. For a fresh example, see Glenys Kinnock where we see a demand that her publications be cited. This was absurd because such publications are sources and so their authorship is self-documenting. They are not controversial but, in any case, were already confirmed by the {{authority control}} which links to numerous great libraries. In this case, an editor was put to the trouble of adding inline citations but those are just clutter because they duplicate and repeat an authority control entry. That's making the article's quality worse rather than better.
    In many cases, such demands cause quite famous people to be omitted from ITN. This year, for example, these include people like Michael Gambon, David McCallum and Joss Ackland. This doesn't have much effect on our readers because they turn out in large numbers to read those articles regardless and few of those readers look at references. But it makes ITN's quality look bad when it chooses to highlight nobodies and novelties while denying the greatest actors, artists and authors.
    Andrew🐉(talk) 16:14, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose the "acceptable" number of citation needed tags will depend on the article. An article of 2,000 characters with 2 citation tags may have a high percentage of unsourced content, but an article of 50,000 characters with 2 citations tags would more likely be fine. This should be done on a common sense basis, rather than setting hard limits which would discriminate against longer, better quality articles. Joseph2302 (talk) 16:20, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose per above and if this is an actual !voting thing then it looks like its headed for a snowclose. JM (talk) 16:23, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppodr per above. It also matters what is uncited - it matters much less if there are a bunch of unreferenced claims about something inconsequential than there being a single unsourced statement about something highly contentious. Thryduulf (talk) 16:28, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Clarification requested on consensus on how to deal with citation needed tags in recent deaths and other ITN

There have been a couple of discussions on the candidates page regarding whether RDs with {{citation needed}} tags are suitable for posting. In the criteria notes WP:ITNQUALITY states "Articles should be well referenced; one or two "citation needed" tags may not hold up an article, but any contentious statements must have a source...". However, this does not apply to RDs per the next sentence WP:ITNQUALITY in "Biographies of living persons are held to higher standards of referencing because of their sensitive nature, and these rules also apply to those recently deceased." Historically, {{citation needed}} tags of RD articles must be addressed before posting. I recall spending a lot of effort sourcing Olivia Newton-John's discography/filmography etc because of this! From my recollection, this was the consensus at least 12 months ago. If this is to change then a formal discussion and update to WP:ITNQUALITY is needed. Personally, any nominator should try and address unreferenced statements on any article, regardless, but that's neither here nor there. What's the consensus for tags in RDs? Polyamorph (talk) 18:27, 2 December 2023 (UTC)

My 2c: I don't see a problem with posting articles that have CN tags, though it depends entirely on what is tagged -- not how many tags. One CN tag might be too much if it's a controversial statement about a BLP. Conversely, I have no problem with 10 or 20 CN tags if they're all for easily sourceable noncontroversial items in an article with hundreds of refs. Conversely, 10 tags might be too much regardless of what the content is if there are only 10 or 20 citations total. So it's a case-by-case totality-of-the-circumstances analysis for me. I also believe that putting something on the main page attracts editors and that speeds up article cleanup. (I don't believe that showcasing quality articles should be a purpose of ITN, so CN tags don't matter to me from that angle.) The guiding principle for me is "are we sufficiently certain that what the article says is true?" I don't care much about quality of articles posted on the main page (beyond a dyk-level minimum), I care more about accuracy. Levivich (talk) 18:41, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
A few thoughts. First, I'd like to mostly endorse Levivich's thoughts above, and I'm glad ITNQUALITY has the wiggle room to allow for CNs. Second, I don't think the second ITNQUALITY quote entirely obviates the first. BLP makes a distinction between "contentious" material and what I'll call regular content. Something like a filmography would fall into the latter category. Third, there's an ongoing discussion over whether BLP automatically applies to recently deceased people, and in my view should go to a RfC. If that happens, ITNQUALITY should track with whatever consensus emerges. Ed [talk] [OMT] 19:07, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
I'll put my views here too (mostly taken verbatim from the discussion which led to this section): WP:ITNQUALITY one or two "citation needed" tags may not hold up an article. There was just an argument about this in Kissinger's RD/blurb discussion, where Vanilla Wizard said the following, which is important context for Polyamorph's citations which seems to invalidate their interpretation: WP:BLP does not apply to the recently deceased when their death is confirmed by reliable sources. Any extension to BLP on such an article "only apply to contentious or questionable material about the subject that has implications for their living relatives and friends, such as in the case of a possible suicide or particularly gruesome crime." In the Kissinger discussion, from what I saw it seemed to be 4v1 in favour of BLP not applying to confirmed deaths, and a 5th editor seemed to have no problem agreeing that ITNQUALITY was not an issue for a few CNs (feel free to look at the kissinger discussion yourselves). And as far as I can tell, BLP doesn't say we can't have any CN tags, just that contentious material must be sourced to RS. JM (talk) 19:19, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Comment I find it a slippery slope not to insist on content being verifiable before posting an article to the main page. @Levivich: you claim to be concerned about accuracy, but how can you ensure an article is accurate without sufficient source. Take the filmography example, by not insisting on each credit to be sourced makes it a lot more difficult for any reader to assess its accuracy. It could be completely made up. I recall in the Wikipedia:In_the_news/Candidates/August_2022#(Posted)_RD:_Olivia_Newton-John several users Masem, WaltCip, Alsoriano97, PFHLai, The Rambling Man insisting on a fully sourced article. And rightfully so. Polyamorph (talk) 19:48, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    By looking it up. If a filmography is not cited, it's still fairly easy to verify (for some, like a mainstream Hollywood actor). Imagine Charlie Chaplin is an RD (I'm avoiding picking any BLP/BDP as examples), and the filmography section just lists three movies: The Kid, Modern Times, and The Great Dictator, with no citations. It's tagged {{incomplete list}} and {{cn}}. I would post it to the main page. It's trivially easy to verify that those three movies are indeed Chaplin movies. It doesn't matter that no one has done the work of actually putting a citation in -- someone should do that work, but it's no reason to keep it from the main page. Same with it being incomplete. If we put that one the main page, the chances that someone will add citations and complete the list go up significantly, than if we don't. So that's an example where, despite being tagged, the article is accurate even if it's not sourced. Levivich (talk) 19:53, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    Who's going to do the verification? Someone at ITN. In which case why not provide that source to save anyone else the bother? The whole point of sourcing is to prove its verifiability. You picked a very simple obvious case, for more obscure biographies with longer credits it's clearly not so simple. Polyamorph (talk) 20:03, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    I would do the verification before I voted, or I might take the word of someone else who said they did (depending on who it was). The reason not to provide a source is because it takes much more time to add the source than it does to know, or even just look up, the information. For example I don't even need to look up those three Chaplin titles, I already know that they're Chaplin movies. But finding and adding a source would take much more time. For more obscure biographies with longer credits, I might think that the CN tags need to be cleared before it's posted. Hence, case-by-case, totality-of-the-circumstances. The whole point being: some CN tags aren't a problem, while others are, it just depends on the circumstances of the particular situation. Levivich (talk) 20:18, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    OK, thanks for clarifying that. Polyamorph (talk) 20:25, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    Are those pings? It would be detrimental to the conversation if this is canvassed, even unintentionally. JM (talk) 19:56, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    You want to know the long-standing consensus. These users will be able to provide this. This is not a poll or RFC. It's a talk page discussion. Polyamorph (talk) 20:06, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    But you explicitly only got the editors who agree with you. I specifically avoided even naming the people who I got my position from, but since it's OK then I'll name them as well so that we can have a full discussion: Vanilla Wizard, The ed17 (who has already expressed his view above), BilledMammal, and Freedom4U all seemed to be in agreement against Masem that BLP didn't apply and ITNQUALITY allowed CNs (as far as I can tell), and Queen of Hearts seemed to agree that ITNQUALITY allowed CNs. These users may be able to clarify their positions expressed in the Kissinger debate I previously referenced on ITNQUALITY and BLP when it comes to RD. JM (talk) 20:16, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    In that discussion, they had to convince me! I have no problem with your pings. Polyamorph (talk) 20:21, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
    That's still canvassing. You can't show the "long-standing consensus" by only pinging users from one side. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 13:20, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
    True, but there was no "other side" in that discussion I was referring to, apart from me! There are now multiple pings to the "other side" in any case. It would be better to concentrate on the discussion at hand. Polyamorph (talk) 15:11, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
    I don't know Polyamorph from Adam, nor do my views at ITN have any synergy with his. If that was an effort at canvassing, you certainly wouldn't know it by me. I don't see why people are kicking up a fuss. We all agree that ITN/C is a highly subjective forum to begin with, and the interpretation of our idiosyncratic guidelines varies from person to person, to the point that it hardly makes any difference who gets pinged or canvassed to which discussion for what reason.
    Chaotic Enby and JM2023: Rather than jumping to assume bad faith, can we not instead focus on the matter at hand; I think Masem's point below is probably the most important one, which is that WP:BLP applies no matter how "important" it is that we post that person to RD, and in some cases, it applies even more knowing the eyes of the world may be upon that person's Wikipedia page. Our careful judgment in adhering to those existing policies should take precedence. Is there a point where it's not reasonable to insist on a citation for every line; yes, I'm sure there is, but take those case-by-case. Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:46, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
    Fully agree on the point that BLP is especially crucial for people we're posting on RD. My apologies to Polyamorph for assuming bad faith. I'm not against you or him in that debate, I just was afraid of the consensus being artificially one-sided. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 16:22, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
    No worries at all, thanks Chaotic Enby. Polyamorph (talk) 16:24, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
    I thought BLP doesn't apply to RS-verified dead people per Vanilla Wizard, The ed17, BilledMammal, and Freedom4U in the Kissinger discussion. Also, me raising the canvassing issue is not meant to read as assuming bad faith, which I why I specified even unintentionally. JM (talk) 09:19, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
RDs are to follow BLP, which means they should be well-sourced. Maybe 1 or 2 CN tags if there are 200+ sources might be reasonable, but we should strive to have all CNs resolved before posting. Masem (t) 20:22, 2 December 2023 (UTC)
  • If inline citations were important then we'd put them right up front on the main page, but we don't – nothing there has a citation. And this policy of treating citations as unimportant continues as one goes deeper. For example, consider the following current ITN headline:

Somalia is admitted as the eighth member of the East African Community

There's no immediate citation for this. If the reader clicks through to the bold article then, in its lead, they will find

The member states are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Federal Republic of Somalia...

There's no immediate citation there either. There is a citation at the end of that paragraph but that is dated 2009 and just seems to verify the date when the organisation was re-established. If the reader presses on, they will next look through the many section headings and are likely to choose the section Partner states. This has a table listing the members and there's an entry for Somalia showing its accession in 2023. But again, there is no citation for that or any of the other members.
So, having drilled down three levels without finding a citation, the reader is likely to conclude that there isn't one and that Wikipedia normally presents such facts without them. If they actually want to confirm the fact, the sensible reader is likely to Google for it instead. That's usually a better way of providing independent confirmation and it gives quick results in this case. For example, if you Google somalia east african community, you immediately get lots of relevant hits and so are spoilt for choice. The top news story is currently Somalia minister kicks up a storm after addressing a conference in Swahili. I identified this important issue of language in the nomination discussion. Does our article say anything about the fact that Somalis don't normally speak or understand Swahili? Of course not. Tsk.
Andrew🐉(talk) 09:30, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you're ultimately trying to say. The fact that ITN blurbs are not sourced in the very articles linked is not good. This should be a basic requirement for ITN entries, in the same way that hooks must be sourced for DYKs.Polyamorph (talk) 09:45, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Fixed. This one really should have had a citation, just added one in the lead paragraph from the EAC website. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 13:17, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
A frequent culprit is mass death blurbs, where the death count in the blurb is updated, but the article source has not been similarly edited.—Bagumba (talk) 15:00, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
WP:LEDECITE does not require the lede to have sources as long as they are in the body. Masem (t) 17:10, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I don't see a problem with the blurb not having a cite and the lead not having a cite when there's an entire cited section in the body. Levivich (talk) 19:32, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
As I suggested in the prior section, a sliding scale may be best practice. ie we will wait to post items that are of less then perfect quality, but maybe if an item is languishing and is good enough then we post then. This comes into play with our deaths blurbs a lot because a lot of content was written years ago and not cited then, making citing harder. This is less of an issue with new content as it can be easier to prove or disprove the veracity of questionable statements, granted, but because they are rapidly being updated, maintaining a lack of CN tags can be hard still. DarkSide830 (talk) 04:27, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
  • Summary So if I can summarize, the historic consensus seems to be that one or two {{citation needed}} tags are ok for ITN provided that they are not for contentious info and the rest of the article is well sourced. This is usually only going to apply to larger articles with many citations. For RDs, we consider WP:BLP still applies and we expect a higher standard of sourcing, {{cn}} tags might still be allowable but only for the most inconsequential statements. Please let me know if I've read this consensus correctly or not. Polyamorph (talk) 09:16, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

ITN checklist

Is there any reason why ITN does not use a checklist, like {{DYK checklist}}? Recently I discovered copyvio in a proposed RD. Despite highlighting this issue prior to posting, the RD was posted anyway and my protestations were ignored by the posting admin until another admin finally stepped in and pulled the article and helped initiate a copyvio case. I think an ITN checklist, representing a minimum standard for posting regardless of support or oppose !votes, will provide greater transparency and help facilitate full copyvio and sourcing checks prior to posting. In particular, as the thread above highlights, all blurbs should be sourced in the linked articles, in the same way that DYK hooks must be cited. Polyamorph (talk) 09:58, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

A copyvio is a quality issue supposedly covered by WP:ITNQUALITY and as such this brings us to the thread above on how to make quality requirement more visible for some. Brandmeistertalk 12:52, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Yes, but if quality issues are being missed then would a checklist not be a good idea? To ensure checks are actually done. Polyamorph (talk) 13:10, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I support that idea, a checklist would make the pending quality issues more explicit for people wanting to participate. ChaotıċEnby(t · c) 13:18, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
  • I like and use the {{DYK checklist}} but its use is quite optional there and many reviewers just post a free-format summary of their findings. The main difference between DYK and ITN is that, at DYK, you have a specific reviewer who is expected to make a detailed and formal quality check covering several aspects – those itemised in the checklist. But at ITN, the emphasis is more on shallow, drive-by voting than reviewing. And so the issues that usually get considered at ITN are the superficial ones which can be established by a quick glance rarher than a careful reading. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:15, 3 December 2023 (UTC) (edit conflict)
  • But at ITN, the emphasis is more on shallow, drive-by voting than reviewing this is the problem. If copyvio issues can get actively dismissed by a posting admin after they've been raised, then ITN has serious problems. Use of the template or a free-format summary are both fine. The important thing is articles are actually subject to some more than superficial (DYK standard) review before posting something with serious problems to the main page. Polyamorph (talk) 13:28, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
Note For reference, the nomination in question was Wikipedia:In the news/Candidates/November 2023 § (Pulled) RD: A. S. Byatt—Bagumba (talk) 14:15, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I have always wondered why we don't have a checklist. Setting aside how the collective interpretation of ITN's guidelines already seems to be a free-for-all, I think one answer lies in the fact that the checklist presumably would necessarily need to cover all three ITN criteria - quality, significance, and reliable sources - and you can't come up with a checklist for WP:ITNSIGNIF beyond just "consensus exists". I tried myself; it was known as the "DICE standard", but it didn't catch on because it's a lot easier for someone to just !vote "I don't think it's significant".
Even outside of significance, it's a bit tricky because the degree to which an article needs to be improved or sourced for a news event varies from article to article. If you wanted to be detailed to cover those scenarios, you'd need a different checklist for a recent death; a different one for a disaster; a different one for sporting events, et cetera. Some may find that to be unnecessary makework. Duly signed, ⛵ WaltClipper -(talk) 14:59, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I think we should. I advocated for it a couple of times including recently upstream. The elements of the checklist should include atleast the following a) notability for blurb (if applicable) b) quality -- copvio check c) quality -- references d) quality -- completeness. Ktin (talk) 18:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
If someone knows how to create a template for a checklist {{ITN checklist}}, I am happy to work with them on this one. I have a few thoughts. Ktin (talk) 22:11, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
The problem with the checklist as used at GAN/FAC or DYK is that usually only one reviewer is updating that. ITN being more of "gather everyone's input" makes the checklist approach far more difficult to do, even if the idea of someone making sure what's there and what's not at the start of the nomination process might be helpful. --Masem (t) 23:03, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
I thought about this earlier and the answer might be that every contributing "vote" should follow the template. e.g. {{ITN checklist vote| vote=support, conditional support, oppose, comment | notability for blurb = Y, N, NA | copyvio = Y, N | references = Y, N | completeness = Y, N | neutrality = Y, N | notes = The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog | Sign = signature}} Ktin (talk) 00:37, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
The more complicated the instructions, the less participation we will get. Masem (t) 03:18, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
I agree. But, what's there currently is not tenable. Once editors get used to it -- this should be a simple copy / paste. For e.g., today the nomination is based on a template, and we do get a reasonable dose of nominations. Ktin (talk) 03:21, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Alternately, we combine copyvio, completeness, and neutrality into a single field. So, there are only three fields (i.e. notability for blurb if applicable, references, article hygiene). Ktin (talk) 03:25, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Agree with Masem we don't want a template used every time someone !votes. My thought was simply let's have an initial checklist, completed by someone other than the nominator. A prerequisite for posting is that this checklist is completed, at some point. If it fails at the start if a nom, it can be updated, but must be by someone other than the nominator. Polyamorph (talk) 06:59, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
There are two items here a) evaluating an article holistically, and b) ensuring that the votes (specifically on popular posts — see thread immediately above) are covering both notability (for blurbs) and article hygiene.
The assertion for b) from above is that when there are popular articles there is a piling on of “support” votes stemming primarily from well-meaning groups of editors who refuse to see that the reason for the holdup is because article quality is not up to snuff. I am sure they are frustrated that an article that by all accounts is “popular” and in their minds ready to go to the main page is not making its place there. And, similarly, the other side of editors / admins who are holding off on getting the article to the main page because quality is not up to snuff are surely annoyed at the support votes not paying heed to the article quality.
The best way, in my opinion, to address both sets of the crowds is to ensure that every contributing vote is chiming in on notability for blurbs (if applicable) as well as on article hygiene. Ktin (talk) 01:29, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
To go back to my OP post - the problem is when we have lots of non-regulars suddenly appear for a popular item, they will simply want to post their support !vote to stress something getting posted and move on. A checklist can do that but I suspect that something that complex will severely harm participation at ITN.
We need something that is clearly visible to remind editors (old and new to ITN) that we judge on both quality of the article (including the update) and the significance of the item (The third branch, that the topic is in the news, is something that should be demonstrated in the nomination header), and that their !vote should make sure both are reasonably addressed, if it is not clearly already addressed by preceeding !votes. But whatever it is, it should not force a whole new learning process to the editor.
The checklist idea is great if you're the admin trying to collate votes and determine whether to post, but it is very very hard on the voters, which there are far more of than admins. Masem (t) 01:35, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
I think the only way a checklist at ITN could work is if it is required to be completed by an admin at the time of assessing whether it should be posted. The items would be something like (I'm explicitly not proposing exactly this):
  • Consensus the story is significant
  • Consensus the article quality is good enough
If either of the above are not true, do not post to the main page. Commenting and/or further evaluation is optional. If both are true then proceed to:
  • No red or orange banners on the article
  • No obvious copyright problems
  • At most a few missing citations, with all potentially contentious claims cited
  • No other major quality issues
If all four are true then post to ITN. If any are not true then post "Not ready" to the nomination with an explanation of why.
Something exactly like that will not work, but something along those lines is about the only thing that could work. Whether it would work and/or whether people think it is worth putting effort into refining into something testable are open questions. Thryduulf (talk) 03:21, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
I agree, a pre-posting checklist is essentially what I was thinking. It can include whether any significant concerns already highlighted by !voters have been adequately addressed (to prevent the copyvio situation I mentioned from happening again). Polyamorph (talk) 09:01, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
Sorry, this is already covered by your second bullet point (although could explicitly include if there is any residual contention). Your proposal is nice Polyamorph (talk) 09:48, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
I suggest that such a checklist be integrated into Wikipedia:In the news/Administrator instructions first. It seems that there should be guidance on how to handle a hypothetical case with say 10 supports which mention nothing about quality, 1 that supports and thinks quality is OK, and 2 that oppose due to too many Cn's. —Bagumba (talk) 09:58, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
I know we have already established that hard and fast numbers for sourcing is CREEPy, but I still think some general numeric guidelines would be good, because "a few" when it comes to CN tags can be very subjective, as we have established with the Kissinger nom. Like a suggestion for a high-end % of the text that can be uncited. DarkSide830 (talk) 21:32, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
I actually don’t think an admin needs to fill this checklist prior to posting. We do have a set of regular admins who are pulling more than their due by posting given our admin shortage. So, I do not think we should be adding to their workload by adding a checklist prior to posting. In fact I am hard pressed to find instances where an admin might not have done their due diligence prior to posting. It is the editor votes and more importantly the pile
-on editor votes that we should be looking at, imo. Ktin (talk) 06:13, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
I don't think it's extra work, as you says admins are doing the checks anyway and so substituting a template instead of simply writing posted is no extra work. But what the template provides is the ability to highlight outstanding issues that are barriers to posting, and provides transparency to the checking process. Polyamorph (talk) 09:06, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
Actually, transcluding a checklist of sorts onto nominations would make explicit the requirements for posting and hopefully make it clearer for non-regulars why a given nomination they are interested in has or has not been published. It could either be posted to every nomination (perhaps as part of the nomination header template?) or only if needed (sort of like AfD's {{not a vote}} template). If doing this I'd expand the list above with a "no unsourced sections" item and a short list of (no more than ~5) examples of common quality issues such as excessive proseline, missing information, etc. If done only when needed, then it could be included multiple times in a long nomination discussion to reflect the (un)changing state of the article. Thryduulf (talk) 11:32, 6 December 2023 (UTC)
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