Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)

 Policy Technical Proposals Idea lab WMF Miscellaneous 

• Table of contents
• First discussion
• Jump to bottom
• New topic
• All village pumps

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

For questions about a wiki that is not the English Wikipedia, please post at m:Wikimedia Forum instead.

Discussions are automatically archived after remaining inactive for 8 days.

« Archives, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89

Engagement

I am not sure where to put this, but here it is.

Several topics related to "user engagement" and the growth team's efforts have appeared in various places lately.

I will keep this short:

If readers spend less time "engaging" with Wikipedia as time goes on, that is a GOOD thing. It means that our information is better written, easier to understand and digest, and the readers are getting what they need here and then moving on with their lives, with new knowledge.

We should not take measures to try to increase the amount of time that readers spend here.

Time spent on the site, per reader, might be a false measure of "success".

Thoughts? David10244 (talk) 05:06, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

I would like to ping some folks from the WMF to hear their thoughts, but maybe they will stumble on this... 😀 David10244 (talk) 05:09, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

It's probably hard to get a clear message of why a reader quickly bounces from a page. Sometimes I am looking for one thing, find it, then leave. However, there are reasons to linger, such as the Wiki rabbit hole (better illustrated at xkcd:214). There may be metrics that better capture different uses. CMD (talk) 06:08, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

You're right that time spent on site could mean many things but I'm hard pressed to see "success" as the best explanation. I know that WMF and the Growth Team look at many different measures and considers various contributors to each of them, though I don't follow this closely. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:55, 1 July 2026 (UTC)

This is indeed a thorny problem: how do we define success? For most websites, the fundamental goal is to make money, and there's obvious ways to measure that. If you're selling goods, it's how much revenue you brought in through sales. If you're selling advertising, it's how many clicks you generated. For a startup, it's often things that are attractive to the venture capitalists such as Active users.

But we're different. Our product is knowledge, and we give it away. As @David10244 points out, the typical metrics like engagement may not make sense for us. While I get the visceral hate engendered by the LLMs getting fat on our work, is that really a problem? If I write an article which gets ingested by a bot and incorporated into a LLM, and then an end user gets to use that knowledge when they ask a chatbot to do their homework for them, have I not achieved my ultimate goal?

I'm not at all a religious scholar, but I have always been impressed with the eight levels of charity taught by Maimonides. CC-BY-SA-NC seems like the first level (giving begrudgingly). CC-BY is level 5 (giving when you do not know the recipient's identity, but the recipient knows your identity). Having your work spat out by a chatbot without proper attribution gets us to level 7 (giving when neither party knows the other's identity). The problem is, it's really hard to quantify that when it comes time to claim credit on your quarterly OKRs, but if you dig what Maimonides has to say, isn't that pretty close to winning? RoySmith (talk) 15:41, 3 July 2026 (UTC)

@RoySmith Interesting comments. I haven't read Maimonides, but I will. David10244 (talk) 05:52, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

I disagree. CC-BY sits more like level 2. CC-BY-SA is around 7. Only CC-BY-SA-NC manages to hit 8. It prevents locking your content behind a paywall for eternity. If you release something CC-BY-SA on your site and then your site dies, or your published works stop being published etc. and the only source is behind payment, then you have stopped giving. It makes it a level 0. It's why things like the GPL are so important in software. It gives people, not corporations, rights. Jerod Lycett (talk) 08:02, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Comment: There is a trend towards people reading less and skimming more, and this is probably an outgrowth of that. Unfortunately, I don't believe we have a new generation of readers that are able to quickly skim and retain information better then previous generations. I would question how much "new knowledge" people are leaving with if they are spending less time engaging with a topic. I've heard several professors complain that students are doing less of the required readings then previous years, and in previous years getting them to do required reading was like pulling teeth. This is a broader societal issue, not one we can really do much about on Wikipedia. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 07:01, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

There's nothing new about students being economical with their time by skimping on required reading. See CliffNotes and others in Category:Study guides. Do we not serve that same purpose? We slog through all the secondary sources and summarize the important points so our readers don't have to. And if LLMs then take what we write and further process it into a form that's more convenient, why is this a bad thing? RoySmith (talk) 12:02, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Sure, but when you have articles like the ones below... It's much more than just "skimping on required reading by using CliffNotes". It's a broader societal issue as GeogSage notes, and AI is only making it worse. There's little Wikipedia can do about it though (unless we completely revamp how Wikipedia articles are written and presented).

• August 26, 2025: Gen Z Is Reading Less. What That Means In The Age Of Ready Answers
• Jan 13, 2026: Gen Z Arriving at College Unable to Read - "It's not even an inability to critically think. It's an inability to read sentences."
• Jan 29, 2026: Professors say Gen Z students can’t read, forcing colleges to lower academic standards - "Professors at Pepperdine and Notre Dame say many college students can no longer read or process assigned texts, increasingly relying on scanning habits and artificial intelligence to get by."
• June 7, 2026: Gen Zers are arriving at college unable to even read a sentence
• June 10, 2026: College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read - "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing." -- Some1 (talk) 15:05, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Maybe, but maybe all those articles are measuring the wrong thing? Do we want people who can read complete sentences, or do we want people who can find the information they need to function well in society? Back when I was in school and dinosaurs roamed the Earth, the ability to write in cursive was considered an essential skill, and one which I was miserably failing to master. It's a bit of a cliché that adults struggling to master modern technology have to ask their grandkids to help them. Why should we judge what constitutes an essential skill set based on what was essential when we were growing up? Do we really need another generation of people who know how to drive a stick, how to figure out where they are with a sextant, and how to find reference material in a card catalog? RoySmith (talk) 15:36, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

More to the point, most of the world's knowledge is still trapped in old dusty books and periodicals stashed away in library storage rooms, effectively lost to the world. Which is a better way to use that material: wait for wikipedians to grovel over a tiny fraction of that material and hand-craft encyclopedia articles from it, or to launch a moon shot project to get it all scanned and made available on line, indexed by bots, so people can actually use it? RoySmith (talk) 15:50, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Do we want people who can read complete sentences, or do we want people who can find the information they need to function well in society? Both, and the two skills aren't mutually exclusive. Some1 (talk) 16:00, 5 July 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Education is harming articles related to Native Americans

Title. I don't know where to put this, so I might as well put it here. Wiki Education is a great idea in theory, but not in practice. Recently, I was editing this article (which I got from Suggested edits): Rezball. It is about a type of Basketball specifically invented by Native Americans. I thought to myself 'interesting, let me do the suggested edit (Fix tone) and be done with it'. I had to remove most of the article and rework much of the content as it was all written like an essay, and not the best worded one at that. The editor who added much of this content was from this Wiki Ed project: Wikipedia:Wiki Ed/University of California Santa Barbara/ENGL 165NJ Native Justice (Spring 2025). Almost every single article assigned to each editor in this project is like this. Practically every editor involved added content that is 1: not neutral, 2: not encyclopedic and 3: written in not the best wording.

I have been noticing a trend lately where articles (especially ones related to Native Americans and other indigenous people groups) have been made exponentially worse by Wiki Ed projects. Most of the time, it seems as if these projects are not supervised or peer reviewed at all, even though peer review is part of most of these project's process. It seems as if people in these projects don't read up well on Wikipedia policies and just give any submitted edits the "A-ok" and move on with their life.

I really don't want to come off as mean or condescending here, but this is a genuine problem I am noticing that, unfortunately, really doesn't have a solution. Any thoughts?

(Side note: when I was starting out, most of my Suggested edits related to revising tone were from articles like this one, I can distinctly remember a really bad one about Native American music) Ilov3gam3z (talk) 17:46, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't think that's entirely fair. Sure, we sometimes have problems with WikiEd projects, but we sometimes have problems with many new editors. It is the nature of learning how to do something that many people will make a hash of their first attempts. If I go back and look at my early contribution history, there's a lot that makes me cringe today. Anyway, @Salo1915 and Brianda (Wiki Ed): who are the two people running that course. RoySmith (talk) 18:08, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Wrong venue. The proper venue for this is the WP:Education noticeboard, where the broader topic of the effect of student edits is already being discussed in this discussion. Mathglot (talk) 18:11, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I already have dropped a small comment there, but not many people go to the education noticeboard (most people probably don't even know about it) and I would like thoughts from a larger variety of editors. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 18:16, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Having this discussion here rather than on the very board dedicated to discussing topics about Wikipedia Education would be an odd choice. And now everyone here knows where the WP:Education noticeboard is. If you have it in both places, it will suffer from thread fragmentation, with people responding in both places, or only one or the other. (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 19:02, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Also, while I would support the discontinuation of Wiki Ed, this is about this problem with Wiki Ed specificly, not anything else. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 19:57, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I did briefly mention the larger problem in my discussion here, but just in passing. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 19:58, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Not a subject I know about, but I guess I'll be the one to ask: what were the problems with the student's additions? Yes, plenty of wording/tone issues, awkward headings, and unnecessary external links, but is the article better without the citations and details like e.g. Native Americans were known to have played a sport that was similar to that of basketball, but were not properly introduced to the sport until they were placed in boarding schools by the BIA.[1] The introduction date is marked as having taken place in the late 18th-century early 19th century.[4] (which constitutes about a third of the student's additions right there)? From the headline and tone of this section I expected, well, more than a single example, and for that example to be wholly deleterious rather than just in need of improvement. But again, it's not a subject I know anything about. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:00, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I just probably picked a bad example, this was my most recent encounter with Wiki Ed-related problems. Take a look at some stubs/start class articles on niche Native American and in general indigenous people and you will see the problem more acutely. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 19:56, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

Sigh. Okay, so we are fragmenting the conversation. Basically, this has already been asked and answered at the other discussion, albeit to the more general question. However, those responses apply equally here. See, for example, this comment by WhatamIdoing, or my comment there. This doesn't mean that what you are seeing isn't real; it just means you are identifying the wrong bogeyman. I support your efforts and all efforts to improve articles on Native American topics. Mathglot (talk) 21:01, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

IMO this is less a fragmented conversation than it is a perennial one, although I agree with your overall point. The conclusion that ultimately always comes forward is that WikiEd provides a scaffolding that would otherwise make this problem much worse. Criticizing the class and asking to follow up with the instructor and their WikiEd point people is worthwhile; trying to pin the problem on WikiEd itself is not the answer. _signed, Rosguill ^talk 21:05, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I placed a notice of this discussion at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard. I don't think it's out of scope here, adding it to the very lengthy, months long discussion isn't substantially better, and OP has already commented there on the broader issue. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:39, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I think that the OP is confusing the WikiEd program with student edits. We are going to have student edits with WikiEd, or without it. And WikiEd is a strong net positive, given that we will have student edits in either case. And I'll put in my perennial and predictable plug for WP:ASSIGN as useful reading. I don't do any editing on Native American topics, but I suspect that more eyes on the affected pages might be helpful there. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:25, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I am not confusing anything. There would be less malinformed student edits if there was no Wiki Ed, as Wiki Ed is the main path for these editors to edit in the first place. There will always be these editors; but there could be less. Also, turning this into a 'lesser of two evils' kind of situation is silly and undermines the discussion. This feels like some kind of fallacy to me. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 23:40, 9 July 2026 (UTC)

I think your blame is misplaced. I've run into similar problems, and it usually (not always) comes down to the quality of sources, not the editors, although that can also play a role in controversial topic areas. Viriditas (talk) 01:37, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

As a bit of an aside as I was reading the OP's question, I've noticed classes with the name "Justice" in them seeming to touch on controversial topics (and the capitalized arbcom Controversial Topics) fairly often. Not saying the students are inherently worse in those classes compared to other classes, but picking topics that fall under a CT designation often mean there's a lot more that needs to be checked just due to the combination of student and CT editing. Generally if I see justice in the class name, it's usually a bit more of a red flag to at least check what articles they've been working on as well as checking for advocacy-style editing. In short, your mention of controversial topics definitely illustrates how it can get messy when students get involved even if it's not the students' "fault". KoA (talk) 15:05, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Yeah. Any Wiki Ed with a loaded word like 'justice' is generally bound to be some form of promotion of a certain view/advocacy. We should really ban Wiki Ed from CTOP, but I digress. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 15:10, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Since we have a problem with Wikipedia:Systemic bias, then having a class that helps us fix our biases would be a good thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:18, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

These classes dont fix our biases, they just add bias to articles the other way. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 19:30, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

When the problem is missing perspectives, then "adding bias the other way" actually gets the article closer to being neutral. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:09, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

Two wrongs make a right? Anomie⚔ 22:25, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

No, no, no. Surely you saw the scare quotes, and got the meaning. Mathglot (talk) 22:54, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

??? That's not how things work. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 23:06, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

I continue to be surprised at how hard this is for some editors to understand. So:

Some articles (e.g., about politics, religion, human values, but not generally about mathematics, technology, or hard sciences) are supposed to be about viewpoints (also called "POVs"). A viewpoint is 'what you see' when your view depends on 'where you stand'. To give a very oversimplified example, imagine that there is a mountain with a large tree on the side. You are going to meet your friend at the tree for a picnic. If you stand at the top of the mountain, then from your POV, the tree is halfway down the mountain. If your friend stands at the bottom of the mountain, then from your friend's POV, the tree is halfway up the mountain. Neither of you are wrong about the tree being "up" or "down"; the view just depends on where you are standing.

Wikipedia articles are supposed to provide all the significant POVs. From the NPOV policy itself: Editors, while naturally having their own points of view, should strive in good faith to provide complete information and not to promote one particular point of view over another. The neutral point of view does not mean the exclusion of certain points of view; rather, it means including all verifiable points of view which have sufficient due weight.

This means:

• It's okay for a Wikipedia editor to personally hold a certain POV (e.g., the tree is halfway up the mountain; the Demicans proposed a law that would promote collective welfare).
• It's not okay for a Wikipedia article to exclude certain POVs (e.g., the tree is halfway down the mountain; the Republocrats opposed that law as infringing individual liberty).

If we end up with a Wikipedia article that (a) only contains one POV and (b) ought to contain more than one POV, then the only policy-compliant solution to this policy-violating situation is to add the missing POVs.

When a Wikipedia editor firmly holds a certain POV, then adding the opposite POV can emotionally and subjectively feel – to that biased editor – like "adding bias the other way". If you are a staunch Republocrat, then adding fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias the Demican POV will make the article actually be neutral and compliant, but it might subjectively feel to you like "adding bias", because you firmly believe that this POV is 100% wrong. Traditionally, we have called this necessary and NPOV-compliant action Wikipedia:Writing for the enemy.

The key point is: even if you believe that a verifiable, significant POV that you disagree with is 100% wrong and bad and biased, the Wikipedia article still needs to include all verifiable, significant POVs. And that means we have to add those POVs, even when that feels like "adding bias the other way". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:39, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

There is a chasm of difference between adding multiple viewpoints in an article vs. writing an article to be biased the other way. I (and the other editors confused/against your claim) thought you meant that 'in order to make an article non-biased that comes from a negative viewpoint on X topic, simply give it a positive viewpoint on X topic to make it neutral and remove the negative viewpoint entirely which is wrong and a case of the two wrongs make a right fallacy. Thank you for the clarity, simple misunderstanding. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 17:47, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I talked about how Wiki Edu class "helps us fix our biases". You're the one that said they "add bias to articles the other way".

Viewpoints aren't usually "positive" or "negative"; that's a misunderstanding of POVs. Viewpoints are usually better described with contrasting terms such as:

• collectivist vs individualist
• progressive vs conservative
• short-term vs long-term
• practical vs idealistic
• moral absolutism vs moral relativism
• deontology vs consequentialism

Negative content ("this is bad") isn't a viewpoint per se, though it may provide information about a viewpoint ("because the ends don't justify the means").

If an article is supposed to include multiple viewpoints, then removing a viewpoint doesn't make the article more neutral; it only makes it more incomplete. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:35, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Let's stipulate for the sake of argument that we would get fewer student editors if Wiki Ed didn't exist. Fine: There would be fewer. But they would be worse. That's not an improvement. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:20, 10 July 2026 (UTC)

This seems completely wrong. Wiki-Ed as a project has teachers force their students to make changes to Wikipedia. If the project didn't exist these same students wouldn't have any reason to engage with Wikipedia at all. The group of students making Wikipedia edits as extra-curricular volunteers are a completely unrelated (and self-selected) group. –jacobolus (t) 01:11, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Nobody forces teachers to do something. Teachers join Wiki Ed to obtain support. Students have been editing Wikipedia long before the existence of Wiki Ed. And I would have asked my university students to edit Wikipedia about meteorology and climatology anyway even if Wiki Ed doesn't exist. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 22:52, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand how you read "teachers force their students" and interpreted that as "forces teachers [...]". –jacobolus (t) 23:55, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Honestly, the pro-WikiEd editors here seem to be misunderstanding many of my points (which all have some valid criticisms and counter-arguments to be made against them!) in a bit of a black-and-white way. To clear up some misconceptions, here: I don't generally work on fixing (confusing wording, i mean i dont fix Wiki Ed student edits with problems generally) Wiki Ed student edit problems not because I am lazy; but because I can contribute more and more efficiently with edits too less-complicatedly problematic articles. I am not anti-newbie; I feel the in-between state of student editors between newbie and non-newbie allows them to create more complex, hard to deal with problems. And no, I am not mixing up Wiki Ed edits and in general student edits. Without Wiki Ed, student edits would be worse, and less of them would exist, and therefore easier for RC patrol members and vandalism-finders to quickly assess and undo them before damage is more severe. Sorry about my wording here, I just got home from camping and am tired so it may be a confusing read. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 00:31, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

You may be right, but see below. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 00:38, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for saying those things. I appreciate that. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:26, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

This is one of the things that I dislike about your framing: It would be "easier for...vandalism-finders...to undo them".

• There is almost zero Wikipedia:Vandalism in student/class edits, ever. Therefore, "vandalism-finders" don't have to do anything with student edits.
• Our goal isn't "to undo" student edits. We're supposed to be working together to improve articles, and not trying to undo other people's work. If the goal was "to undo" their edits, we could have a bot do that.

WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:58, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I more mean LLM work and plagarized work, as that is pretty common among student editors. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 18:25, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Also, @WhatamIdoing, I feel as if your multiple rounds of 'coming back' to this discussion and replying to every anti-Wiki Ed comment with your own argument is a bit WP:BLUDGEONy. This matter isn't life or death; calm down a bit. Personally, I feel someone should simply close this discussion as we are never going to make any meaningful progress, compromise or solution at this rate. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 18:39, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Looks like I've made two-thirds as many comments as you. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:40, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, because I am defending myself, clarifying my points and agreeing with other users. Not attacking that much, honestly. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 18:48, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I am defending myself (e.g., against accusations that I want students to be "adding bias" instead of making articles include all the relevant viewpoints in accordance with the WP:YESPOV), clarifying policies (e.g., that negative content isn't a viewpoint), and providing factual information (e.g., that Wiki Edu screens contributions for LLM use). I'm sorry if supporting and explaining the policies and providing facts makes you feel "attacked". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Edu student contributions are the only edits at the English Wikipedia that are systematically screened and flagged for LLM use, so that should be less common among student editors.

In my experience, close paraphrasing (which is not exactly the same as plagiarism) is a problem with student edits, but I haven't seen any effort to determine whether the key point is "student" or the key point is "any new editor making a significant contribution". Or even highly experienced editors; it was well before your time, but we once lost an ArbCom member due to extensive CLOP violations, including in FAs. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:39, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

@Jacobolus, one of the services that Wiki Ed provides is telling teachers not to force their students to edit Wikipedia articles, including providing information about alternatives. For example, a while ago, one of the classes had a student absolutely paralyzed with fear by the idea of editing the mainspace, and Wiki Ed supports alternatives (e.g., submitting the proposed changes in e-mail).

That said, many students join these classes because they know that editing Wikipedia is part of the class. They don't require "forcing" because they volunteered for it when they picked the "Edit Wikipedia" section of the class instead of the other ones. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:53, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

This seems like very pedantic parsing that missed my point. The students are editing Wikipedia as part of their classwork, for a grade. If they don't edit Wikipedia, then there's not really any point to the project.

If there were no such class projects where students were editing Wikipedia for a grade, then the only students coming to edit Wikipedia would be self-selected volunteers doing so in as an extra-curricular activity in their own time. It seems extremely unlikely that the self-selected group of students editing Wikipedia because they want to is going to be worse than the students doing so because their teacher told them to. –jacobolus (t) 19:12, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't think so. We block about 15% of new editors each year, but less than 0.1% of new Wiki Edu's student editors. While we could probably cherry-pick a small group of new editors that are desirable and happen to be students, the fact is that we block hundreds or thousands of non-Wiki Edu students each year. The {{school block}} template alone is on thousands of pages. It seems that what many (though not most) unsupervised students want to do is add poop vandalism or talk about which of their classmates are gay. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:35, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't think this is a problem about one particular topic per se. All of the Wiki-Ed students that I have seen come to technical (e.g. mathematical) articles have been similarly useless. At best the students write some half-assed essay-like text and dump it onto an article without any discussion or engagement where it either sits indefinitely, actively making the article worse, or eventually is removed or entirely rewritten. More commonly the students make a couple of auto-generated talk page spam sections and then never do any editing at all. I think the fundamental problem is that the teachers involved in these courses by and large don't seem to understand Wikipedia and don't make any apparent effort to engage with the Wikipedia community. In theory these could be valuable contributions and useful training/recruitment .... if the students tried asking for help and actually interacting with human Wikipedians. But since they don't, the entire exercise is basically a waste of Wikipedians time for no practical value. –jacobolus (t) 01:08, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

I want to correct some misunderstandings. Some of the comments in this discussion make it sound like WikiEd behaves as some sort of attractant, that causes instructors to start class projects on Wikipedia that those instructors would not have done otherwise. This is not true, and frankly, it's naive to think it might be true. To my knowledge, WikiEd does not advertise to educators to come to Wikipedia, and if the Wikimedia Foundation does any kind of outreach to educators, they would be doing so with or without WikiEd. Educators don't sit around wondering how to teach a class, and then suddenly get the idea to base the class on Wikipedia because someone at WikiEd contacted them and gave them the idea. I've worked for many years as a college professor, and I have some insight into how educators might get the idea of teaching through us. Wikipedia has a trendy appeal, and at some institutions it may look good to be able to say that you have a class here. And in some institutions, particularly those where there are low-paid instructors who are expected to process large numbers of tuition-paying students with as little friction and as much cash flow as possible, it can be attractive to think that if you just set your students loose on Wikipedia and let regular Wikipedia editors clean up any messes, that can be an easy way to teach a large class. That latter situation is where a lot of the disruptive class projects come from.

But WikiEd isn't acting as some kind of magnet to bring these classes here. They were coming here before WikiEd was created. And they'll keep coming even if WikiEd were disbanded, or banned from the English language Wikipedia. And it's useful to watch the reports of disruptive classes that come in to WP:ENB. Over time, one will notice (as I have) that the ones that cause editors headaches (and believe me, I'm not denying that student projects can sometimes be a real pain!) fall into two groups: the ones that never signed up with WikiEd, and the ones with instructors who ignored the instructions they got from WikiEd. Do away with WikiEd, and we'll still have just as many student projects here, but none of them will be supervised by anyone who understands Wikipedia. Thinking that if we eliminate WikiEd, our problems will be solved is just wishful thinking. It will actually make the problems worse. (And if you are one of those editors who gets headaches from student edits, please know that you are not alone, and be sure to read WP:NOTTA.) --Tryptofish (talk) 21:47, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

I think having students edit Wikipedia as a class project could be really valuable, especially for the students but also for Wikipedia. But it would take some amount of knowledge, engagement, and dedication on the part of their teacher(s), who need to be able to support/mentor the students (either directly, or possibly by recruiting community help). I haven't ever seen an example where that worked, and all of the teachers involved that I have personally come across seem completely disengaged. Has anyone had a positive experience with such student projects? –jacobolus (t) 21:59, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I have, although it's the minority. If this interests you, follow WP:ENB. There was just discussion there yesterday about metrics on students in WikiEd projects who continued to edit after the class was over, and there are some who have stayed on and made thousands of good edits. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:08, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Judging by the comments at Wikipedia:Education noticeboard#Should WikiEd be terminated? there are plenty of Wikipedians who are unimpressed with WikiEd. –jacobolus (t) 22:36, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

That's a single thread that gave rise to the one here. There are plenty of people on both "sides". As here, most of the "unimpressed" are also uninformed. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:06, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

I found the discussion at the WikiEd noticeboard after thinking about starting this discussion, not the other way around. I was looking for other editors who agreed with my complaints of Wiki Ed on Google and found the discussion. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 23:15, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

"Uninformed" seems pretty dismissive of people's complaints. As far as I can tell the supposedly "uninformed" "side" says "this seems like a mess and keeps causing trouble for us" and the other "side" says "you don't know what you are talking about and we can't do anything about the problems so too bad for you". Which frankly doesn't seem like a very solid argument. –jacobolus (t) 23:46, 11 July 2026 (UTC)

Well, if you had actually read what I wrote in my longish comment beginning with "I want to correct some misunderstandings", you would see that your description is unencumbered by reality. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:18, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I read everything you wrote, and you continue to be rudely dismissive. –jacobolus (t) 20:14, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I know. And your only response to my detailed explanation was to note that you think there are plenty of editors who... etc. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:26, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I have just taught a course this winter (January to April) and I asked my students to edit Wikipedia entries on meteorology and climatology. Feel free to vet through any of my mainspace edits related to meteorology/climatology from March 13 to April 12 on my cleanup (or in some cases, reverting) the students' work. I hope that my evidence is enough to demonstrate that there are teachers who have the knowledge, engagement and dedication to directly support the students (and if someone says I seem completely disengaged from the students' work, well that's news to me). OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 23:02, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Wiki Ed does explicitly advertise itself and ask college faculty to consider teaching with Wikipedia. I see their messages a few times a year on one of the mailing lists to which I am subscribed (I'm an academic working at a US university). I don't know how often they solicit faculty participation, how widely they advertise, or how successful they are but they do engage in this activity and do not just wait for faculty to find them. I don't think this is especially important for the (misguided and incorrect, IMHO) accusations that motivated this entire discussion but I think we're all better off operating with more, correct knowledge. ElKevbo (talk) 00:46, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for that information. I'm retired, so I didn't know that they were doing that. And I'm concerned about it. WikiEd has a relatively small staff, relative to the numbers of students in class projects that they have to advise at any given time. A case can certainly be made that WikiEd is overextended. I know, of course, that the WMF just loves the idea of outreach, but asking for more class projects may be a fool's errand. I'm OK, however, with carefully crafted messaging saying that if you do start a class project here, you need to know that WikiEd is here, but that's different than saying we want more class projects. This is something where I think there could be value in having more input from the editing community. --Tryptofish (talk) 16:34, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

with carefully crafted messaging saying that if you do start a class project here

IMO any messaging WikiEd sends out to universities should also include language that actively discourages running these class projects if the instructor is not already very familiar with editing (or willing to spend significant time familiarizing themselves beforehand). If teachers who have never edited before get the impression that a) any class run on WP must go through WikiEd, b) they can't edit in CTOPs, and c) setting one up will be a lot more effort than they're willing to expend, then that would at least cut down on some of the half-assed, one-off, and contentious advocacy courses that cause problems. JoelleJay (talk) 09:52, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

That's an excellent point. I agree strongly with that. --Tryptofish (talk) 19:59, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Do you?

a) Requiring all classes to go through Wiki Ed, which only supports classes in Canada and the US, would effectively mean banning classes in the UK, Ireland, and Australia.

b) Banning students from editing CTOPs means banning them from editing a very large number of articles, including all BLPs and many countries (everything in Eastern Europe, Horn of Africa, Iran, South Asia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, The Troubles in Ireland...), most content about elections (American politics, all historical elections...), and quite a lot of science and health information (alternative medicine, COVID-19, sexuality, pseudoscience and fringe science). The BLP restriction alone would mean: You can't write about your favorite musician. You can't write about your favorite author. You can't write about an important researcher in your field. This does not seem reasonable to me. I bet it doesn't seem reasonable to you, either.

c) I don't think that initial contact should discourage instructors from getting in touch to learn more. "Our way is the hard way" is a way to produce more unsupported, undisclosed classes. What I'd suggest instead is a series of free workshops: Come and learn how to edit Wikipedia. Bring your grad students and your TAs for free, too. Oh, and by the way, while you're there, we'll tell you about how much better it would be if you had proper support and followed our advice instead of trying to wing it on your own. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:16, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't think anyone meant it that literally, but OK, all eligible classes. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:21, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

I find that JoelleJay is normally quite precise in what she writes, so she likely did mean it literally. I also find her to be generally reasonable even when we disagree. Consequently, my first guess – and she can tell us her own thoughts when she has a few moments free – is that she would likely be satisfied with having WMUK support a class in the UK rather than Wiki Edu, but would not be satisfied with a rule that says US and Canadian classes must use Wiki Edu while the rest of the world is allowed to run amok.

More importantly: Why would you ban students from editing so many articles? The winner of this year's Booker Prize will be announced in two weeks. The winner will be a BLP, and therefore a CTOP. Why would you ban students (e.g., those studying modern English literature) from writing something about the winner? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Well, here's what I think. I think we can discourage instructors who have never edited here from starting a class project until after they have gotten that experience. Not ban, not prohibit, but get the message across. I'm not in favor of banning class projects from parts of the world not served by WikiEd, but I didn't read that comment as really meaning that. For classes in the US and Canada, we pretty much do expect them to work with WikiEd, and those that don't are likely to end up at ENB, followed by outreach from WikiEd. So not as policy, but perhaps as a guideline. WikiEd currently monitors classes for whether any students are editing in a CTOP, and they try (although they sometimes don't succeed) to tell those students who start to do that, to select a different page. Telling instructors who lack editing experience that a class project is likely to be more work than they expect is a good idea, because it's good advice, and WP:ASSIGN has been pointing out the ways that can happen for years. That pretty much covers what she said, and she framed the latter points as information that would be good to get across to inexperienced instructors. That's how I see it, and I find it quite reasonable. I think you overreacted, perhaps because you tend to be a WMF defender against the evil editing community. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:12, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

If it helps, here is the text of the message sent yesterday from Helaine@wikiedu.org to a large mailing list of academics (the POD mailing list which focuses on faculty developers, largely in the US and Canada):

Subject: Webinar Thurs, July 16! Free support for an assignment AI can’t shortcut

AI can write a term paper in seconds — but you can’t be sure that it verified the facts and created knowledge readers can actually trust.

With the Wikipedia Assignment, students do the intellectual heavy-lifting: researching, fact-checking, writing, and ultimately publishing to one of the world’s most-viewed sources of information.

This fall, swap out a writing assignment for the Wikipedia Assignment and empower your students to use their human critical thinking skills to make a real-world impact on public knowledge.

Each term, nonprofit Wiki Education provides free support to hundreds of postsecondary courses across the U.S. and Canada for their projects on Wikipedia — yours can be next!

Questions? Learn more at teach.wikiedu.org, reach out to us at studentprogram@wikiedu.org, or join our information session [Zoom link removed] with faculty this Thursday:

High-Impact Pedagogy: The Wikipedia Assignment

Thursday, July 16, 2026

11 am Pacific / 2 pm Eastern

Zoom Registration [Zoom link removed]

Ready to set up your Wikipedia Assignment for the fall term? Visit teach.wikiedu.org to get started today — no need to attend an information session first.

Best,

The Wiki Education Team

(I've removed the Zoom links and the signature line with the Wiki Education URL and mailing address) ElKevbo (talk) 23:39, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for providing that. @Helaine (Wiki Ed): In my opinion, that's much more tending towards flat-out advertising for more instructors to bring their classes here, than it is simply making them aware that, if they are planning to come here and if they are within WikiEd's geographic area, they should be aware that WikiEd exists and is important. For reasons discussed already in this thread, that is problematic. I'm also going to post about this at ENB. --Tryptofish (talk) 20:43, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

I think "provides free support" seems like the wrong pitch. I'd like to see more emphasis on teachers putting in the significant work to help their students have a real impact instead of a pitch that sounds like Wikipedians are going to take care of mentoring the students, unless there's actually significant resources spent on Wikipedia's end (which could be either more Wikipedians explicitly volunteering for this role or could be paid helpers). I don't think the pitch matches current practice. –jacobolus (t) 21:06, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I very much agree. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:12, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

I think that what matters more is what happens after the initial message. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:43, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that's exactly what I meant, thank you. I would also note that my wording was deliberate: teachers should get the impression that certain restrictions/considerations exist, not that we necessarily have or should have hard policies on such things; and this language should be added to any messaging WikiEd sends out to universities, which would only apply to those universities that qualify for WikiEd. JoelleJay (talk) 12:33, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

@Tryptofish, Wiki Edu is not the WMF, and I don't think we have an "evil" editing community. I think that some individuals in the community are worn out (not least due to AI), and that when humans are tired, it's hard for us to extend grace to newcomers when they make the same mistakes and cause the same problems that we did when we were new.

The normal, human, but short-sighted response to such circumstances is to circle the wagons and keep all those newbies who write with "not the best wording" (shocking!) and "in need of improvement" (terrible!) and "essay-like text" (infinitely worse than when I, as a non-student newbie, merged two articles with similar names but were actually separate medical conditions!) out of our wiki – supposedly "the encyclopedia that anyone can edit", but maybe not if you're trying to actually add a significant amount of content.

The problem is that I am going to die one of these days, and so are you, and if we keep trying to run off new editors, Wikipedia will die with us. Wikipedia needs people who are trained on sources and are trying to improve an article more than it needs a system that makes it harder for them to contribute and easier for us to revert them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:45, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

The broader points are already addressed below, but on your last point, I don't think it would be a bad thing at all if WikiEd students were strongly discouraged/prohibited from creating BLPs. JoelleJay (talk) 12:37, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Most student assignments are about updating existing articles, rather than creating them.

If we say "they can't edit in CTOPs", we ban them from editing existing BLP articles. Years ago, I saw a complaint about a GENSEX wiki-enemy vandalizing a BLP. The main problem was that the (American) complainant didn't understand the difference between a university degree With honors (academic) and the Canadian Honours degree. If we ban students from editing CTOPs, they'd be banned even from correcting such errors – even though literally anyone else on the internet, including their friends at the same university, would be welcome to make that same edit. I don't think that's reasonable. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:20, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

If teachers who have never edited before get the impression that ... [their class] can't edit in CTOPs

Literally no one is saying that these students can't edit whatever they want on their own time. I don't know why you're even introducing this straw man in response to my comment about specifically students creating BLPs for a class assignment. JoelleJay (talk) 17:54, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Why would you tell a student that they can't correct a BLP's misstated university degree as part of their class, but they're allowed to do so "on their own time"? Personally, I think that having a Canadian class reviewing, correcting, and sourcing Canadian BLPs would be a significant service to the world. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:03, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Are you deliberately misreading what I'm saying? On what planet is "not assigning students BLPs to create", or even "not assigning students any editing tasks on BLPs", equivalent to "telling students they can't edit random articles unrelated to their classwork"? JoelleJay (talk) 19:28, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

It's the same human. The complaint is that these humans are so bad at editing Wikipedia articles that they need to be banned entirely from BLPs en masse. They don't suddenly get better at editing just because the edit is made "on their own time" instead of "as homework".

If the problem is that these humans are bad editors, then why would anyone think these same humans will be good enough to edit these same articles when it's 6:01 p.m. "on their own time" and not at 6:05 p.m. "when I'm trying to do my homework"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:59, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Can you seriously not understand the difference between an instructor assigning a whole class of students to edit/create BLPs and someone independently deciding to do so on their own time?? JoelleJay (talk) 11:10, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

I believe that quantity can become its own quality. However, I also notice that:

• Students generally pick their own subject. The instructors don't seem to start with a list and say "Alice, you write this. Bob, you write that. Chris, you're assigned this other one." The process seems to be "Let's write about something about related to our class. Pick something that you're interested in, and I'll check to see if it's suitable." For example, the 2025 class that's mentioned at the start of this section had students editing articles about a 20th-century person, a sport, a 17th-century person, two tribes, a religious spirit, a couple of broad articles about mythology, a couple of broad, general concepts, a 19th-century person, a high school, a historic monument, and just one (1) BLP.
• Most Wiki Edu classes don't "create" articles. They mostly "expand existing" articles, and they often expand articles that desperately need work. For example, the OP complains about Rezball, which was created in 2007. Related to the OP's complaint, there are three versions worth looking at:
  1. This is the version that we had before the student took it on. Please actually look at that. It'll make you wince. It's about a thousand words with two citations, long unformatted lists of high schools, and prose like "instrumental in showcasing the talent of the players to college recruiters, most of whom would not travel to the remote reservation towns to recruit. www.nabifoundation.org" (yes, including the non-functional domain name in plain old text). The OP here has wrongly blamed this on the student editor even though it was actually added to the article by someone else 19 years ago. The page history says the page is 12K long.
  2. Compare that lousy "organic Wikipedia" version against what the student produced. At 1,250 words of prose, it's not much longer, but it now cites nine (9) sources, and some of them are very good sources. It's well-structured. There are problems (I see a comma splice, and the section headings don't use MOS:SENTENCECASE) but it doesn't look to me like a significant problem. Wikipedia:Who Wrote That? tells me that 31% of the page is written by this student, showing that they have kept a significant amount of the work done by other editors. For example, they added a section heading to a few paragraphs about the "Schools and Regions Known for Playing Rezball", but they didn't write those paragraphs. I won't say that it's perfect, but I will say that it's a significant improvement compared to where it started. The page history says the page is 16K long.
  3. And now please look at what the OP gutted it to. The long, unsourced lists of high schools have been kept, but the contents are now down to about 150 words. Two-thirds of the sources have been removed. Their copyedits to a single sentence in the first paragraph have already acquired three separate inline tags for being unclear and using weasel words. The lead is no longer a summary of the body, because they blanked the sections explaining the connection, e.g., between assimilation and sport. Important information, including everything about the Native American Basketball Invitational tournament and its historically important NCAA agreement, has been removed. The page history says the page is now just 6K long.

I wonder what you think about these three versions. Which one of those three would you pick as the best? Which one do you think Dale Arnett, an experienced editor who tried to clean up this article years ago, would pick as the best? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

You're right, the student here did some good work and ripping it all out is not a good solution to any issues it may have had. For what it's worth, this is a much more useful effort than most of the Wiki-Ed articles I have seen (but I mostly watch technical topics). –jacobolus (t) 17:43, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

None of that wall of text applies to my comment. You've got a barn full of straw men at this point. JoelleJay (talk) 17:54, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

You wrote: "Can you seriously not understand the difference between an instructor assigning a whole class of students to edit/create BLPs and someone independently deciding to do so on their own time??"

I reply with evidence that:

• Teachers aren't "assigning" the subjects.
• Students generally aren't "creating" articles at all.
• Few students are even "editing" existing BLPs.

I agree with you that if "a whole class" were "assigned" to "create BLPs", then that would be more editing of BLPs than just a single individual editor with a single BLP. However, the worry about "whole classes" being "assigned" to "create BLPs" does not appear to be based in reality. After all, I just looked at every single article that "whole class" worked on, and the "whole class" of students volunteered to create zero BLPs and to edit just one BLP. One is exactly the same number of BLPs edited by that "whole class" as we might realistically expect your "someone independently deciding to do so on their own time" to edit, and I do not agree that one editor editing one BLP (in a class) is somehow more than one editor editing one BLP (on their own time). One is one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:31, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

You didn't provide "evidence" of any sort, but regardless:

• some teachers clearly do assign students the task of creating/editing specific articles, and certainly have a say in the scope of topics even if students can choose their specific page;
• plenty of classes do involve article creation;
• plenty of students do edit existing BLPs

I don't know why you are bringing up classes that are irrelevant to my comment. I am not the OP of the thread, I haven't even said anything about their particular example. You just keep responding over and over with long-winded "rebuttals" to positions that no one in this "advertising" subthread is advocating for (and then insisting that your facile extrapolations somehow do actually follow from our arguments). JoelleJay (talk) 11:30, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

I've raised this issue at WP:ENB. --Tryptofish (talk) 17:09, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

If they don't advertise their existence at all, profs who are planning a Wikipedia class anyway won't know about their existence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:06, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

That's why I said that I think it's fine to have "carefully crafted messaging saying that if you do start a class project here, you need to know that WikiEd is here". --Tryptofish (talk) 22:24, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

In re auto-generated talk page spam sections: Those exist because we asked for them. They're intended to give you an opportunity to object to students editing an inappropriate article (e.g., one that's headed to FAC, as students are warned against editing FAs). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:02, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I appreciate those talk page sections. They give me a shortcut to the instructor when a student editor isn't listening and they link to the class so I can see what other articles I should review. They're also a head's-up for me when an article on my watchlist is going to be edited for a class. Very helpful. Schazjmd (talk) 19:39, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Weighing in as someone who's repeatedly encountered but is not involved in WikiEd.

I've been around here for over 20 years. Prior to WikiEd, there were still instructors teaching courses. It was nearly as common back then for incoming instructors to be uninformed about how Wikipedia works. There was no way to find out about the existence of classes other than stumbling across edits on your watchlist. There was no way to find instructors ahead of time to try to educate them about Wikipedia. There was no way to ensure their classes included at least some material about reliable sources, NPOV, and encyclopedic tone before they let their students loose on the encyclopedia. Student edits were, if anything, a much worse problem.

Is WikiEd perfect? Of course not. Are there still lazy-ass instructors? Of course there are, and there will be with or without WikiEd. But now there's a structure that teaches them about Wikipedia and our policies and norms before they start their class. Now there's a standard curriculum that includes modules for learning about what constitutes a good or a problematic contribution to Wikipedia. And designating experienced editors as supporting wikipedia guides helps ensure there's someone available to mediate with the community when a mess is made, and help understand how to clean it up.

The average student edit nowadays is far less problematic than the average student edit 15 years ago. The really bad edits stand out, yes. But if you browse through the Articles tab of a few courses on the WikiEd dashboard, you're likely to also find large numbers of the small, productive, well-sourced edits that are easily overlooked; and a number of of-course-imperfect new articles on overlooked topics.

Yes, having to revert student edits now and then is annoying. We would have to deal with that with or without WikiEd. Without WikiEd, a far greater percentage of them would require reversion, and it would be harder to trace what other edits might need extra eyes.

I like to think of WikiEd as a safety rail on a steep road people would be driving on anyway. It's not the reason people drive there; and it doesn't prevent every crash. But it does make them, on average, less destructive. -- Avocado (talk) 13:13, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I think this is very shortsighted. Let's put this in a different way.. You found someone making errors on the jobsite. You were able to identify they are an immigrant. It seems immigrants make more mistakes than other employees... Let's get rid of immigrants. The problem is not that wikiedu students make mistakes. All beginners make mistakes. The problem is that we get frustrated helping beginners and have identified a scapegoat for our own problem of frustration. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 21:10, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

I don't know what you have against immigrants, but this analogy is gross. –jacobolus (t) 23:58, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

Yeah. What is this analogy? This might just be the worst analogy you could pick to illustrate your point. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 00:13, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Past the bad analogy though, I see what you are trying to say @TheDJ but I feel your analysis of the situation is a gross misunderstanding of my reasoning. I am fine with newbies; but the half-competent half not state of Wiki Ed students allows them to unintentionally cause much more damage then the average newbie would. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 00:18, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

In my opinion, that is a survival bias problem in the rest of the newbies, not so much an inherent problem with newbies from wikiedu. It says more about us as Wikipedia than about the newbies. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 05:50, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm not sure why you think the analogy is gross and even less why you think i have something against immigrants. If that is your take from that comment then i guess that also explains why people throw the term 'literally' around as if means figuratively. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 05:48, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

You are making an analogy between very mild complaints about teachers not sufficiently mentoring their students with extreme racist bigotry (what you described seems pretty close to ethnic cleansing). This seems super offensive both to immigrants and to people frustrated by poorly organized/mentored student projects. –jacobolus (t) 06:14, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Can we call a truce? Is it fair to say that nothing that supporters of Wiki Ed are going to say in this thread going forward is likely to persuade you to change your mind? Likewise, I believe it is highly unlikely that anything you will say going forward will change my mind that Wiki Ed is doing a fine job, and I suspect others would say the same. If both of those statements are true, then Wikipedia is suffering by having volunteer editors who have other interests locking their horns here, with no apparent movement on either side. That's hardly the best use of anyone's time. What do you say we agree to disagree, and we all go back to improving other areas of the encyclopedia. That is what I am going to do, and I hope that that is one thing we can all agree on. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 00:35, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Agree. Generally not one to agree to disagree but there are obviously very well-entrenched users in both camps who will not budge an inch (both sides included, IMO) on this issue and we would be delusional to think that this discussion will ever come to a conclusion or reasonable compromise. PS. No idea this was such a polarized issue until now though, good to know for future reference. We are getting nowhere here. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 00:47, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

As with all collaborative discussions, there's an opportunity to find areas of common concern and brainstorm ways to improve them. For example, if poorly-supervised editing projects are a concern, can English Wikipedia benefit from a better process to identify them and manage them? Is there some approach to improve the quality of writing that can be adopted from one type of editing project to another (such as from edit-a-thon sessions to course projects)? I think if we expand the range of possible changes, we could come up with some potential improvements. isaacl (talk) 17:07, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

I'm mostly disappointed, because something like Wiki-Ed seems like it has a lot of potential to be great, but if teachers adopting it are ignorant, disengaged, and don't put in the effort to mentor their students then it sucks (wastes volunteer time without providing much value to the project or to students), and it currently seems like that's mostly what we get, that I've seen. I think there are plausible ways to work on these problems, but it's not clear to me that the folks organizing WikiEd are doing anything to make improvements. –jacobolus (t) 05:00, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

About teachers who allegedly don't put in the effort to mentor their students: Something to keep in mind here is that we can't see the effort they're putting in. For many Wikipedia editors, there is only one kind of "effort to mentor their students" that counts, and that is "the teacher reverted it before I saw the student's edit". There are lots of ways for teachers to put in the effort to mentor their students that we can't see, including things like telling students to fix their edits before the next class (which could be a week later, especially if there are any holidays on the calendar). WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:12, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

• I cannot buy into this complaint. We invite everyone to edit -- many/most/perhaps all, of everyone are going to make mistakes, we already know that upfront. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:31, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Number of student edits

• Once again please allow me to express the unpopular view about students who are told to edit. It can not be avoided, given current policies. Although "we invite" everyone to edit, these students are not invited, they are told to edit. Just have to accept it and clean it up and give the goofy professors who do not monitor them well a hard time, so they will be less goofy. Yesterday, all my dreams... (talk) 15:36, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

  Admittedly an interesting article about a 19th century locust plague, but please, no WP:SURPRISE links. (No problem with linking it openly, if you wish to promote that article for some reason.) Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 17:29, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

  The idea of students being a plague of locusts is an interesting analogy, in that there's nothing wrong with having a few locusts; the problem is when they exceed the ecosystem's carrying capacity. I believe that there is a maximum number of newcomers (students or otherwise) that we (or any online community) can handle. The online equivalent of a plague of newcomers is called Eternal September.

  Each year, about 50% of the people who make 1+ edits are "independent" newcomers (~15% of whom get blocked). Most of them only make 1 or 2 edits. Even among non-newbies, about 80% of the editors in a given year make fewer than 10 edits that year.

  Maybe 2% of the editors in a given year are students. At a glance, most of them make about 25 edits (5 to 40 with a sample size of 20).

  I wonder what our carrying capacity is, and which factors it depends on. For example, if 50 newcomers make 2 edits (=100 total edits), and 2 students make 25 edits (=50 total edits), some editors might have the impression that the students are responsible for a third of edits from all newcomers.

  Or perhaps the problem is the type of edit? The article that triggered this was a student substantially improving a very poor article. Most newbies are fixing a typo or reverting simple vandalism. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:39, 17 July 2026 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Request a query#Student edits per year has given us a back-of-the-envelope estimate for the number of student edits from Wiki Edu-supported classes to articles. The answer is that it's less than 1 in 500 mainspace edits.

  About 20% of non-bot mainspace edits were from IPs/TAs. 80% were from registered editors. And a small fraction of a percentage point – basically a rounding error – is student edits, ringing in at just 0.18% of mainspace edits for the whole year.

  To put it another way, registered editors made about 30 million edits to articles that year. IPs made 7 million article edits. And students made just 75 thousand. It's orders of magnitude lower.

  Even if all of them happened on literally the same day of the year, it wouldn't even double the edits for that day. Spread across a month, it would barely be even 2% of the edits in Special:RecentChanges. I don't think we should be worrying that students make "too many" edits to articles. We should probably be worrying that they make too few. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:23, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

  I made some other comments at the query page, but what I'll add here is that we could consider "worrying" about whether there are too many student edits for the existing staff of WikiEd to keep close watch on (even for the purpose of being able to be helpful to student editors). --Tryptofish (talk) 20:49, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

  Hmmm… this has me wondering if there are certain topic areas where students edit more frequently or less frequently. Blueboar (talk) 20:51, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

  I'd expect to see students editing 'serious' articles instead of pop culture fluff.

  Also, a class might happen to overlap with a particular editor's interest area (e.g., the class is on a particular author, and the editor regularly edits about that author). The reality could be that it's "just one or two edits to each of 20 articles", but some people only have 20 articles on their watchlist. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:58, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

  Blueboar, Request a query might be of assistance here as well. If you can translate what you mean by 'certain topic areas' into something concrete and queryable (associated WikiProjects? Categories? Words in the course description exclusive of term and university? a curated list you supply that match any of the above?), and what you mean by 'more frequently' (trickier; maybe, more courses in that 'topic area'? articles in that topic area with more total edits by students than other articles in that topic area? ...than articles in other TAs? articles in that TA with more unique student editors than articles in other TAs? TAs where the average article MTBE (mean time between edits) is higher (literally 'more frequent') than the average in other TAs?) then you could specify a query and post it at WP:RAQ. Please ping me if you do, because I am interested, too. (edit conflict) Mathglot (talk) 21:25, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

  We might be able to compare articles by their mw:ORES/Articletopic. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:57, 18 July 2026 (UTC)

Question

Can anyone provide a link to a discussion about why the edit filter block action is not enabled on this wiki? Font8388608 (talk) 05:40, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

As far as I'm aware it's never been requested to be enabled here. See this Signpost story about the introduction of the edit filter (then known as the abuse filter) to Wikipedia, indicating that the introduction of automatic blocking would be delayed until the community had gotten used to the new feature. Graham87 (talk) 12:55, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

this configuration file, which I found from the AbuseFilter page on Meta, shows the wikis on which the abuse filter blocking action is enabled and indicates the Phabricator tasks where they were requested, demonstrating that blocking has to be enabled on a case-by-case basis for each wiki. Also see the Meta page on Requesting wiki configuration changes. Graham87 (talk) 13:15, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

You could search the WP:EFN archives, and also WT:EF. For example you'll find, this, and this, and this. We have a bot which can report users straight to the admins at AIV when hitting certain filters. This somewhat reduces the need for blocking filters. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 13:37, 12 July 2026 (UTC)

July 2026 Wikimedia Café meetups regarding Wikimedia governance and options for reform

Hello! There will be two Wikimedia Café discussion opportunities in July. Both sessions will focus on Wikimedia governance, including possible follow-ups to the Movement Charter and options for reform. Participants may attend either or both Café sessions.

This month, to deconflict the Café meetups from Wikimania, the meetups will be held one day later than usual.

1. 26 July 2026 15:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to the Americas, Africa, and Europe
2. 27 July 2026 03:00 UTC (timestamp converter), at a time friendly to Asia and the Pacific

Please see the Café page for more information, including how to register!

↠Pine (✉) 03:09, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Template edit broke other template, unsure how best to correct (not technical issue)

An edit two weeks ago to Template:Criminal law seems to have broken Template:Types of crime due to section titles being changed. I do not know whether the latter should be changed to reflect the new values, or whether the former should be edited to undo the changes. If anyone would like to make changes you are welcome to do so. Just something I noticed, and I have nothing to do with the edits etc. SD5 21:14, 13 July 2026 (UTC)

Y The section titles were not actually changed but the tags identifying sections were "lost" as a side-effect of the re-organization of {{Criminal law}}. I put them back and altered {{Types of crime}} to reflect the changes. Please check that I did not miss anything. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 09:59, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

CentralNotice for Bangla Wiktionary Entry Contest 2026

A contest will take place from August 1, 2026, to August 31, 2026, on Bangla Wiktionary to enrich its entries. A central notice request has been placed to target both English and Bangla Wikipedia users, including non-registered users from Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. Thank you. Riaz (talk) 07:10, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Wanted - editor who understands how to work with templates

Hello! I have an idea for modifying the various citation templates, but I also don't know the darndest thing about how the templates actually work. Before I bring it up at WP:PROPOSALS, I'd like to at least have a working example of what it would change (does that make sense at all?) that we can implement quickly if/after consensus is reached. Anyone interested in giving me a hand can reach out to me on my talk page. Thanks in advance! Commandant Quacks-a-lot (talk) 14:12, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

Ideas shy of proposals go to Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab), where you can brainstorm all you want. Another option if they are basic templating questions, is to start out reading Wikipedia:WikiProject Templates#Help pages and then ask your question at Wikipedia talk:Templates. P.S., I have recast your all-caps header in sentence case. Mathglot (talk) 20:14, 14 July 2026 (UTC)

@Commandant Quacks-a-lot, changes to the main citation templates do not happen "quickly"; they happen on a pre-determined schedule after sufficient testing. You should probably take your idea to WT:CS1, where the maintainers will consider your request. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Agreed; that's a better location for your question, Commandant Quacks-a-lot. Another wrinkle: the citation templates per se are not really the issue; they are very short and very simple (check out {{cite book}}, {{cite journal}}, {{cite web}} ), because all they do is invoke Module:Citation/CS1 or a related module. However, the modules are not at all simple. Note also that the CS1 module has 6.5M transclusions, so a mistake would have wide implications, to say the least. So nothing much in this domain is 'quick', other than fixing typos or modifying strings of text. Mathglot (talk) 18:23, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing & @Mathglot - I've moved the convo there. Thanks! Commandant Quacks-a-lot (talk) 23:11, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

AfC reviewers removing old decline notices on several occasions

I've noticed that, whenever any AfC reviewer declines a draft that has multiple older decline notices within the collapsible {{prior declines}} template, they take all the old declines out and make the template empty. In some cases, they move the declines out of the template and put the template below the AfC comments, while in other cases, they just remove the old declines from the draft altogether, which doesn't seem right to do.

Here are some examples of reviewers making these mistakes:

• This September 2025 revision to Draft:Carl Azuz in which 3 decline notices were removed
• This January 2026 revision to Draft:Alphabet Lore in which 4 decline notices were removed
• This January 2026 revision to Draft:Sambucha in which 3 decline notices were removed
• This February 2026 revision to Draft:Inanimate Insanity in which 2 decline notices were removed
• This April 2026 revision to Draft:List of Battle for Dream Island characters in which 3 decline notices were removed
• This June 2026 revision to Draft:List of Battle for Dream Island characters in which 4 decline notices were removed
• This July 2026 revision to Draft:Sambucha in which 4 decline notices were removed

My theory is that mistakes like these have something to do with tools that reviewers like to use to decline drafts in a hit-and-run fashion. To be fair, I can't blame the designers of such tools for being unable to foresee someone inventing a template analogous to {{WikiProject banner shell}}, nor can I blame reviewers for continuing to take (arguably outdated) shortcuts to deal with the 5,000-strong backlog of pending submissions. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 23:07, 15 July 2026 (UTC)

Hi there, AFC reviewer here, as far as I know we all use the AFCH Wikipedia:WikiProject Articles for creation/Helper script official gadget, I don't think there are any custom scripts in regular use. As you can see based on the AFCH tag all of those revisions were made using this gadget. The entire tagging process is fully automated and "very highly recommended" to be used by the reviewers (see WP:AFCR) so the templates are not really engineered to be manually processed (and therefore also not really intuitive to do manually). The prior declines being deleted therefore is a bug by the script which likely as you suggested did not anticipate someone coming up with such a custom template. Given this is a bug caused by the official tool that is in the Reviewing instructions I don't think it would be justifiable to ask reviewers to start manually handling these cases, so either the gadget is adapted to handle these cases or the template should be deprecated. Kind Regards Squawk7700 (talk) 00:34, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Indeed, this is in no way a mistake on the part of the reviewers, and it's really quite unfair to call AFC reviewing hit-and-run. This is simply how AFC reviewing is intended to behave. @MrPersonHumanGuy, I don't understand - why did you create this template in the first place, if you're not an AFC reviewer? What problem were you trying to solve? In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 00:46, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

When drafts are declined many times, it results in there being lots of decline notices that visitors would have to scroll through just to see the draft content. I thought to myself that, if talk page banners could be held in a collapsible template, why shouldn't there be a collapsible template to hold AfC decline notices? – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 01:03, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

I've gone back through several talk page discussions and I can't actually find any that established consensus for this. The closest I could find was this one, where it was determined that the idea did not have consensus. Have I missed something more recent? In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 01:12, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation/Archive 60#Proposing new parameter for Template:AfC submission/declined voorts (talk/contributions) 01:19, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, I'd seen that, but that is not a discussion that established consensus either. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 01:23, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Indeed, so any (mis)use of this template which might break (normal) AFCH operations is not really "our" issue (referring to the AFC members). I also continue to wonder why people raise these sorts of issues at the Pump rather than asking at WT:AFC, since we know about these things and can answer quickly.Primefac (talk) 08:41, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

In my case, I didn't know better, and I had the impression that the idea lab was for suggesting any idea. If other people are prone to making the same kinds of mistakes as I have, it may be necessary to put up a notice there directing users with AfC-related ideas to WT:AFC, unless you think that's like telling people to not stuff beans up their nose. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 12:08, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Yes, the idea lab is fine for suggesting ideas, and then editors there can go hail the editors from whatever relevant project. I do think it's a bit odd that you came back here after having already been directed to WT:AFC, but, really, it's fine. And I'd like to apologize if any of our responses have come off as overly snarky or defensive. But please do understand that when you have a problem with something you made, blaming that problem on the currently functioning processes used by others is going to lead to some irritated responses. In this case, before doing further work on this template, I think it would be a good idea for you to first establish consensus at WT:AFC that such a feature would be desirable in the first place. If you can get consensus that old declines should be folded into a banner like this one, we could work on implementing that directly into the AFC templates. In solidarity, asilvering (talk) 19:23, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

The closest I could find was this [template-protected edit request], where it was determined that the idea did not have consensus.

That one established that the wide parameter would not be added to {{AfC submission/declined}}, especially since I didn't find consensus for it before making an edit request. The requirement to find consensus before making an edit request for a template left me surprised and confused, as the whole point of an edit request is to describe the desired change. I thought it meant that users were required to describe their suggested edits twice:

1. On some different page (e.g. Wikipedia talk:Articles for creation or Wikipedia:Village pump/Idea lab), just to establish consensus for their proposal
2. In an edit request on the template's talk page, if consensus is established

At the time I made the edit request, an early version of the decline holder had the declines inside the banner, which caused the banners to become narrow due to them being {{ombox}}es, so I suggested adding a wide template to {{AfC submission/declined}} so they wouldn't be so narrow inside the decline-holding banner. I later got the idea to have the decline banners be below the holder banner instead, that way, the declines "in" the template would still be just as wide as decline banners above it, so the AfC submission template never needed to be changed at all, and in hindsight, I never needed to make that silly edit request in the first place. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 11:26, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Oh and I've left notice of this discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Articles for creation ~ Squawk7700 (talk) 00:37, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

I have nominated {{AfC notice holder}} for deletion at TfD. voorts (talk/contributions) 01:01, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

None of this could happen if we took a "three strikes, and it's AFD" approach to AFC submissions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:29, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Tendentious resubmissions after Decline, and resubmissions after Reject are welcomed at MfD for review. It’s not automatic, but I guess it could easily be, I suggest with a prompt for the AfC reviewer to trigger it.

One problem is that some AfC reviewers are too timid about selecting the Reject option, and the Decline option explicitly encourages further work and resubmission. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:43, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Since AfC is supposed to accept articles on the basis of notability rather than present quality ("The purpose of reviewing is to identify which submissions will be deleted and which won't. Articles that will probably survive a listing at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion should be accepted. Articles that will probably not survive should be declined. Issues that do not affect the likelihood of success at AFD (e.g., halo effects like formatting) should not be considered"), and a trip to AFD is a perfect measure of whether an article would "survive a listing at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion", I think that it should be AFD instead of MFD. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:04, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

There are other reasons a draft might be declined, such as for LLM use (that doesn't qualify for WP:G15), extremely promotional tone, or failed verification. voorts (talk/contributions) 03:32, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Historical AfC Declines are a blight on drafts being worked on. They belong on the talk page, and old things on talk pages should normally be archived by bot.

I wish that AfC Draft (not talk) page notices came with a button “Decline notice acknowledged and move to the talk page”. SmokeyJoe (talk) 01:39, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Wikidata and Commons links

I see there is no longer any explicit link to Commons or Wikidata from article pages in the UI. Instead there is a link labeled "Edit interlanguage links" that leads to Wikidata and nothing at all that leads to Commons. Is this deliberate or a bug (or somehow an anomaly in what I'm seeing that is not affecting others)? If deliberate, was this discussed, and if so where? If deliberate, this seems particularly odd after we have, for years, had large numbers of editors removing explicit links to Commons categories on the basis that they are provided by the interface. - Jmabel | Talk 20:07, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

I see a link "Wikipedia Commons" as the next to last item on the tools menu (I did have to scroll down the menu to see them). Donald Albury 22:17, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

@Jmabel, which page were you looking at? Obviously, not all articles/pages have links to a Commons page. If one exists, it should be just a little bit lower than "Edit interlanguage links", in a section labeled "In other projects". WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:27, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: Initially The Green Eyed Monster (1919 film); I then checked a few others, though I couldn't say which. But it looks like it was just a glitch. Earlier today, the "Print/export" and "In other projects" sections of the menu were not displaying; now they are. - Jmabel | Talk 22:52, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Working for you now, working for me now. Maybe something just got lost before it finished loading properly. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:12, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

 This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. Jmabel | Talk 22:52, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Looking for a tool that can merge duplicate citations

Hello, I seem to recall there was a tool that can merge duplicate citations? Basically I've realized that a page has a duplication of its best source, and both versions are used in a bunch of places throughout the page, so it will be a bit of a pain to clean up manually. If anyone knows if this tool exists and where I can find it, please drop a page link! Just-a-can-of-beans (talk) 18:05, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

@Just-a-can-of-beans: If you're referring to Cyclosporiasis, an automated tool would get thrown because the citations aren't technically identical (one says "|date=2021-09-02 " in ISO, one says "|date=2 September 2021" in DMY). It's harmless in this case, but a tool can't be sure - sometimes there really are, say, two editions of the same book but with different pagination or heavy revisions where it's not safe to combine them.

I would say a tool would be overkill here. Just go into the source editor, search for { name=":0" }, and do a find-and-replace for { name="Mathison 2021 Cyclosporiasis Microorganisms" }. presto, all citations unified. Then delete the duplicate, and make sure the ref tag is unclosed for the original definition (i.e. <ref name="Mathison 2021 Cyclosporiasis Microorganisms" /> with the slash for the original <ref name=":0"> in the lede which didn't include the / before.

If you truly have a gnarly case of citation duplicate cleanup, it may pay to have something slightly "smarter". Be wary of WP:NOLLM and avoid modifying the prose this way, but dropping the raw source wikitext (NOT the rendered HTML) into a file and telling a coding agent like Antigravity or Claude with access to a local Python env to write some scripts analyzing the refs and suggest de-duplication locations can work. Just... make sure to look at the diff yourself and verify everything personally if you do this, do NOT just copy-paste output blindly. SnowFire (talk) 20:56, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

If you do edit one reference to be identical to the other, then you can use the WP:REFILL tool to combine them. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 22:59, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

If one of you has a few minutes, I suspect he'd be grateful if you just fixed it for him instead of explaining how it might be possible to fix it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:44, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

How do WP:PROMOTION and WP:SPAM apply to hatnotes?

This topic is was duplicated at

• Wikipedia talk:Disambiguation#Quantum supremacy
• Wikipedia:Help desk#Hatnotes and advertisements
• Talk:Quantum supremacy#Hatnotes and advertisements
• Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous)#How do WP:PROMOTION and WP:SPAM apply to hatnotes?

I have moved all of the duplicates to the most active page -- The Disambiguation talk page. --Guy Macon (talk) 23:44, 19 July 2026 (UTC)

Invitation

Appeal to the community with the intention of attracting participants. Cartechnic (talk) 00:45, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! What are you inviting us to? Chaotic Enby (in solidarity · talk · contribs) 00:47, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

I recently created https://carrepair.miraheze.org and I’m inviting anyone interested to take part in its development. I’m looking for people who can create templates and layouts, as well as those who simply want to write articles, car enthusiasts and vehicle technicians. Cartechnic (talk) 00:47, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Oh… drat… I was hoping you were inviting us to a free breakfast buffet… I’m hungry. Oh well. Blueboar (talk) 12:29, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

Could I be able to have a 346-byte signature?

It's not a necessity, but it would be nice to have one. Just to be able to remove the italics, get the parentheses to be colored right, and have some padding and rounding. Is there any chance I could be able to have one? WikipediholicRat (talk) 13:21, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

My recommendation is to concentrate on writing good articles and don't obsess over fancy signatures. RoySmith (talk) 13:30, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

fair, fair. still, would be nice :) WikipediholicRat (talk) 13:35, 20 July 2026 (UTC)

May 2026 Administrator Elections – RFC Phase

Administrator Elections | RFC phase

The RFC phase of the May 2026 administrator elections has started. There are 20 RFCs for consideration. You can participate in the RFC phase at Wikipedia:Administrator elections/May 2026/RFC phase.

Any questions or issues can be asked on the election talk page. Thank you for your participation. Happy electing.

You're receiving this message because you signed up for the mailing list. To opt-out of future mailings, please remove yourself from the list.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:02, 20 July 2026 (UTC)