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Wikipedia talk:In the news/Archive 95

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Latest comment: 1 year ago by Ktin in topic Index?
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Outdated news on main page

Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion

My apologies as I do not understand this process, unless maybe it's better that I'm outside looking in. Today, Saturday November 26, the front page reads:

"NASA's Artemis 1 is successfully launched on an uncrewed test flight to the Moon."

This is old news. The spacecraft reached the moon on Monday, 5 days ago. [1] The way the blurb reads, one would presume it's still on its way there.

All I can find on Artemis In-The-News is the following blurb, proposed for Monday November 21:

"NASA's Orion spacecraft performs a flyby of the Moon, coming within 130 kilometres (81 mi) of the lunar surface before entering into a lunar orbit."

I don't care if this wasn't noteworthy enough to merit a new blurb. It could have replaced the existing one, if that one didn't come down sooner. At the very least, the existing one should have been updated, something like:

"NASA's Artemis 1 successfully launched the uncrewed Orion spacecraft on a flyby of the Moon."

I'm sure this will be dropping off soon, so there's not much point to proposing this change now. The question is more about process.

News items are events in progress. They're expected to be changing. Is there no visibility on when something becomes overshadowed by a more recent, if not more significant, development?

I would expect the scenario to play out exactly as it did here. Someone proposes a news story related to a current blurb. The news story might not be approved for a new blurb, so a replacement is prepared.

Otherwise, you wind up peddling yesterday's news as tho it were still current. DAVilla (talk) 01:23, 27 November 2022 (UTC)

I'd actually argue that it's a common misconception that WP:ITN posts news, as its stated purpose is not actually to be a news ticker as such but to direct readers to substantially updated content of wide interest. However, that's beside the point of what you seem to be asking.
So first and foremost, I do see what you are seeing - which is that the current events portal for November 21st does include a blurb indicating the Artemis fly-by. But that is separate from the nomination process of ITN/C. The integration of the current events portal is to serve as a reference point and as a convenience or courtesy to ITN/C participants, not as an automatic nomination for posting on the ITN template. They have their own process that they undergo for posting items there (if you can even call it a process, it looks to me as if editors just add whatever they want with little scrutiny). For Wikipedia:In the news, a user still needs to step forward with a nomination for that news item, and then a consensus is reached through participation of other editors to determine whether it merits posting per the established criteria on WP:ITNCRIT.
That being said, WP:ITNR does include as a recurring item: "Arrival of spacecraft (to lunar orbit and beyond) at their destinations" This means that as long as the target article is nominated and updated, the item should automatically be posted by an administrator. That this item failed to be nominated does seem to be a breakdown in the process, in that it was overlooked, or nobody was paying attention, or whatever the case may be. Why this happened, I don't know. So in that sense, there is merit to your complaint. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 18:41, 27 November 2022 (UTC)
Feel free to suggest updates to the content of specific existing blurbs at WP:ITNC. It can't change if nobody suggests it first. —Bagumba (talk) 00:59, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Delete article referencing requirement?

Latest comment: 1 year ago30 comments11 people in discussion

Todays posting of the metric prefix article in this condition with the general support of commenters is out of line with our criteria on article quality which state:

"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, and having entire sections without any sources is unacceptable."

The metric prefix article is orange tagged for poor sourcing, has numerous paragraphs (and whole sections) of assertions that are uncited. If we are no longer applying this then it should be deleted from the criteria - Dumelow (talk) 00:00, 25 November 2022 (UTC)

Or you could request that the posting be pulled from ITN. One bad posting doesn't mean we nuke the criteria out of existence. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 03:07, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
No need. I pulled it. – Muboshgu (talk) 03:20, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
@Tone:: Courtesy ping to you as the poster.—Bagumba (talk) 03:44, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The last time I checked the full article it did not have the orange tag. Before I posted, I just checked for the update which was good. So, an unfortunate development in between. I agree with pulling, of course. Tone 08:15, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
It didn't have the orange tag when it was posted, but it did lack sources. – Muboshgu (talk) 13:58, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Such mistakes happen but can easily be fixed. We really shouldn't clamp down on posters, solicit explanations and re-consider our criteria.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 08:03, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Thanks for pulling Muboshgu. I had reported this issue at WP:Errors but it received no response in the 12 hours or so before I posted here. Had it received any support I would have pulled it myself. I, and three others, did also note the article quality was lacking in the nomination discussion. As this wasn't a bar to posting I presumed I was out of touch with our current practice on article quality, I am nowhere near as active here as I was in the past (aside from RD nominations). Based on the feedback above, this doesn't appear to be the case, please consider this proposal withdrawn - Dumelow (talk) 08:40, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
I don't see any of this as trying to "clamp down on posters". Everyone just seems to be want to understand what happened and if there is some disconnect or not. —Bagumba (talk) 10:26, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Yeah I shouldn't've supported this. I was affected by the "Isn't this a ray of sunshine" section above and felt that this was a good subject for ITN, but if I really felt that way I should've just done the work and made the article more presentable... ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:01, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Per WP:V, citations are expected for "all quotations, all material whose verifiability has been challenged, all material that is likely to be challenged, and all contentious matter about living and recently deceased persons." What it doesn't say that a citation is expected for every paragraph, sentence, fact or other such fragment. See also WP:REFCLUTTER.
The article in question contains lots of basic material which is not controversial or difficult to verify. For example, "1 km2 means one square kilometre, or the area of a square of 1000 m by 1000 m" or "5 cm = 5×10−2 m = 5 × 0.01 m = 0.05 m".
So, some common sense should be used in such a case, not a bureaucratic rule.
Insofar as our readership has now been deprived of this news, ITN has failed. If you feel the article actually requires further improvement, then please improve it.
Andrew🐉(talk) 10:19, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Feel free to get consensus to loosen WP:ITNQUALITY:

Articles should be well referenced...having entire sections without any sources is unacceptable.

—Bagumba (talk) 10:35, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
That's the point of this discussion. I support Dumelow's proposal per WP:CONLEVEL, "participants in a WikiProject cannot decide that some generally accepted policy or guideline does not apply to articles within its scope." Andrew🐉(talk) 12:36, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
@Andrew Davidson: with the greatest respect, I think you're unlikely to ever get consensus for the notion that an article in the shape the metric units article was in should be posted. POTD is the only section of the main page where that sort of thing washes, and that's mainly because it's deemed unfair to picture editors to insist they have to get an article into shape as well as working on images. (And by the way, you mentioned DYK being a lot more "relaxed" last week - I don't necessarily agree with that, I think the standards are much the same in both venues; it's just that if someone submitted an article to DYK with as many lacking citations as the above article, it would be rejected or tagged for improvement straightaway and would never get close to the main page; it's merely that the ITN process has less steps along the way, making mistakes easier to make). CHeers  — Amakuru (talk) 12:51, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The article in question was posted and, as far as I can tell, our general readership was fine with it. The idea that some arbitrary level of citations is required purely for appearance's sake is not policy and never has been. Citations should be used when specifically required to verify controversial statements, not sprinkled across articles like decoration. Andrew🐉(talk) 13:06, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
We want stuff on the main page to present the example that newer editors should strive for in creating articles, and significant lack of sources is not what we want to give the impression is being okay. WP:V is one of the strongest policies to at least have WP seem somewhat reputable. Masem (t) 13:56, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
I'm fine with WP:V as it's core policy and I quoted it above. What I'm not fine with is ITN is having its own local verification rules which are different. That's what WP:CONLEVEL is talking about – projects trying to do their own thing per not invented here. Andrew🐉(talk) 14:16, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The rules aren't different at all, it's just that they're enforced here. WP:V may have meant a smattering of cites here and there in the early days of Wikipedia, but for the last decade at least, it's meant that all statements except obvious calculations and WP:SKYISBLUE-type assertions must be cited. There is no formal assessment process on the project from WP:GA to WP:FA to WP:DYK to WP:AFC to WP:PR that allows uncited chunks of text to get past, and that is the standard applied consistently everywhere. Now I'm sure you're about to point out that there are large numbers of articles that don't meet this standard. Well yes, and we don't delete them on the grounds that Wikipedia:Wikipedia is a work in progress and on balance such articles are a net positive even with uncited text, as long as said text isn't defamatory on a BLP etc. But that shouldn't be confused for thinking WP policy is to allow such uncited text. It isn't.  — Amakuru (talk) 16:12, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
The standard {{grading scheme}} does not expect many citations until grade B. The bulk of the articles listed in DYK/ITN/OTD are graded start or C class. Currently, the proportions are 25% B, 50% C, 25% Start. And quality isn't just a matter of counting citations. What matters more is accuracy, neutrality, clarity and so forth. A proper quality scale assesses all these factors, not just one. ITN's rules are idiosyncratic and weak. We should use the standard scale. The SI system is successful because it's a common standard. In the old days, every town had its own definitions of weight and length but such local rules are no longer sensible. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:31, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Most ITN articles are newly created so we don't expect a proper graded review on them by the relevant projects in the time they are created. But we are expecting they are representative of the best work that can be done on WP in the relatively short time of their creation. That means sourcing that reflects what we expect of high quality articles, in addition to the other factors like neutrality, etc. (which has been raised at various ITNCs). sourcing though is usually the easiest to observe if it is incomplete. Masem (t) 17:36, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
My most recent ITN nomination of the Java earthquake went very smoothly because the article was mostly written by an active and effective member of WikiProject Earthquakes. ITN should collaborate with other projects, using common standards, rather than being insular and idiosyncratic. Andrew🐉(talk) 17:57, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
We do; projects that cover quakes and hurricanes know what good sourcing is, and typically those articles come to us in good shape. Also aircrashes too, as well as athletic RDs.
What usually doesn't come to us in good shape are RDs particularly for celebrities/actors, and long-existing articles (like the metric one) that have problem been on WP since its inception but haven't been put through any project quality ringers. And thus the problems are typically exposed by ITN.
Further, I know of no project that would have allowed the sourcing of the type in that metric article be considered passing for even a B-class article. WP:V is that engrained throughout WP Masem (t) 18:14, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
In my opinion, this could be an excellent rule of thumb that a blurb may get pulled if the bolded article gets tagged after posting. I leave it open for further discussion whether this should be written somewhere or not.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 11:07, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
People do very frequently support or oppose ITN blurbs without even looking at (or at least mentioning) the quality of the article proposed. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 11:08, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
True, but it's up to the poster to vet the quality before posting and dismiss support votes overlooking article's quality. Here we discuss that admins should monitor article's quality while the blurb containing that article bolded is on the main page.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 12:24, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
I'm not going to assign any blame here, but we can certainly learn from things for future reference. In this case, looking at the article as it stood at the time of posting, there is simply no way it was fit for posting then, orange tag or no orange tag. Vast swathes of it were uncited including whole sections. What we need is clear instructions for admins that a check-over of the article is required before posting. Even if it has five supports and no opposes or whatever, it might be that nobody has evaluated the quality yet; or perhaps the supporters are newcomers who aren't familiar with the quality requirements. Maybe a commented note in the template or something is required? Not sure how best to communicate this.  — Amakuru (talk) 12:45, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
Tone basically said they made a mistake, not that they didn't know or agree with the quality requirement. I don't think any additional note is needed. It would be obvious wikilawyering to say that quality issues can only be flagged before a post, and not after. —Bagumba (talk) 16:07, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
We are bounded by the requirements of the Main Page that any bolded linked article should represent some of WP's best work. While a few unsourced obvious facts are okay, huge sections are not. Masem (t) 13:54, 25 November 2022 (UTC)
There's no such requirement. Spot checks indicate that most of the bold-linked articles are graded C class and so that's the median level of quality. Our best work is represented by the FA – that's its whole point. The other sections have a different focus and purpose. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:19, 26 November 2022 (UTC)
  • Without placing any blame, in general it is incumbent upon the posting admin to give the article a cursory quality check before posting. Many (if not most) people voting for support make no statements about article quality, which really should be the first, last, and primary criteria for posting anything on the main page, without exception. Significance assessments are of secondary concern to article quality. It doesn't really matter if 1000 people have decided some event is The Most Important Thing To Ever Happen In History, if the article is not up-to-snuff quality wise, it should not be posted. That being said, I don't think that good-faith disagreements over what counts as "good enough" for the main page represent anything wrong here. All guidance on what level of sourcing is "enough" are always going to be rules-of-thumb and subject to reasonable exceptions based on the specific article. While the guidance does say something along the lines of entirely unreferenced sections being a deal-breaker, that usually is true, but like every rule at Wikipedia should not be blindly obeyed without first looking at what is in the section in question. Perhaps the information is all WP:CALC-type stuff, in which case zero citations are fine. --Jayron32 16:15, 29 November 2022 (UTC)

Analysis of recent deaths June-October 2022

Latest comment: 1 year ago27 comments11 people in discussion

Following on from the now-archived discussion about recent deaths entries I've compiled a lot of data about every nomination between 1 July and 31 October 2022. There are some basic statistics below (please feel free to improve the formatting and add more). The full data is at Wikipedia:In the news/2022 ITNRD analysis along with notes and a link to the spreadsheet.

  • 540 nominations were analysed, 441 (81.67%) were posted, 99 were not posted.
  • 124 editors made at least one nomination, 42 made more than one, 10 more than ten and 4 more than 25 (Thriley, Dumelow, Muboshgu and Bloom6132)
  • 18 admins posted at least one nomination, 13 more than one, 6 more than 10, and three more than 25 (Spencer, Stephen and PFHLai). The latter two were responsible for posting 68% of nominations between them.
  • Article subjects of 84 different nationalities were nominated, 73 different nationalities were posted. The top three were American (257 nominations), British (48) and Indian (19).
  • 79% of nominations were male, 20% female and 1% animals.
  • 138 (25.56%) of nominations were of people whose primary notability was related to sports, 74 (13.70%) related to politics, 67 (12.41%) entertainment, and 53 (9.81%) music.
  • The main reason for nominations not being posted was inadequate sourcing (53 of 99).

Thryduulf (talk) 02:38, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

I forgot to link it here last night, but at Special:Permalink/1118334814#Proportion of biographies Cryptic and Andrew Gray crunched some numbers regarding the proportion of all biographies and came up with approximate figures that this would make our pool of biographies 20.4% Americans, 33.1% athletes (!), and 5.1% American athletes, give or take.. Thryduulf (talk) 11:56, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
That would not be surprising given that ITN is still volunteer driven, and athletics is a hugely populated editor space.
Also a bit disappointed in the gender ratio, as while we're still at a tail of where women's contributions may have been minimalized from mid-20th century, I would not expect the delta to be that much, and I don't know if projects like Women in Red are aware of ITN as a valid outlet to help improve underrepresented coverage. Masem (t) 13:12, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
@Masem I had a quick look at this when I generated the original stats, and for what it's worth:
  • All living people on WP, ~23% female (as of 2019, may be a little higher now)
  • RD (both proposed and posted), ~20%
  • Born 1930-1960 (all enwiki, not just BLP), ~15-22%, average ~18%
The latter group are perhaps a bit more representative of the pool of articles likely to wind up on RD, as the overall pool of BLPs skews younger. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:47, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
Speaking as someone not involved with RDs at all, the thing that really jumps out at me about this is the sheer volume of articles involved - 3.5 posted per day, 4.4 nominated. At the moment, there are 8222 articles in Category:2022 deaths, and of those, I think 6030 were created before the end of 2021 - ie they were definitely not created after the fact. Today is day 312 of the year, so (conservatively) that suggests a little under 20 articles per day. It suggests people are listing about 18% of the total "recent deaths", and proposing almost a quarter of them. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:30, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
One thing is that even for RD, the death has to be covered. There are people with notability in their past that then fade into obscurity, and the only note about their death may be a short form obit in a local paper. Meaning that editors may not see that, and then even if they nominate it, the lack of coverage of that item may pose a problem.
Also, its impossible to know the number of people that decide not to post an RD because an article is not good enough quality vs those that don't know about the RD availability when the person dies despite having made updates to a sufficient quality article. It would be interesting to know if there's true unawareness vs true apathy for the process. Masem (t) 13:39, 8 November 2022 (UTC)
I frequently peruse WP:Database reports/Recent deaths to try to find noms, so I can say firsthand that most of the articles I see on there are, in general, very poor quality. Curbon7 (talk) 15:45, 8 November 2022 (UTC)

Notes

  • Thanks firstly to Thryduulf for the painstaking data collection. Lots of good information there that can be crunched to get some great insights. I have taken a stab at going through the data and here are my notes. Best regards. Ktin (talk) 18:06, 13 November 2022 (UTC)

Nominations

  1. During this period, I see a total of 540 articles being nominated, with a total of 126 unique nominators. This is truly reflective of a vibrant project. More power to all of you for doing the work that you all are doing.
  2. There is a level of concentration that we need to be mindful of and should work actively to go past. The top nominator has 127 out of 540 articles (~25%) to their name and the second highest nominator has 68 nominations (~13%) to their credit. The third highest nominator has 6% and then it rapidly thins down. 105 nominators have less than or equal to 3 nominations to their credit and 83 nominators have exactly 1 nomination to their credit.
  3. Of the 540 articles, 257 are of American (~48%), 48 are British (~9%), 27 Canadian (5%) and the next three are Indian – 19, German – 17, Australian – 14. Now, I do not know the overall spread of biography articles on WP. But, we should check our levels of concentration against the overall WP numbers. This might also tie into #2 from above. Our call to action here is that we should encourage more nominators from the lesser posted countries to also join in and help achieve a diverse portfolio of nominations.
  4. Of the 540 articles, 138 are sportspersons (~26%), 120 are from entertainment / music (~23%), and 74 are politicians (~14%). Again, I do not know the mix of general biography articles across WP, but this mix might tie-back to concentration called out in #2 from above. This group should actively think about encouraging nominators from other fields to join-in. However, if this mix is largely consistent with the larger WP spread of articles, we might have limited options.

Postings

  1. Of the 540 articles nominated, 441 articles were posted (a little over 80%) which seems a healthy enough fraction just thinking of the 80:20 thumb-rule.
  2. The geographic mix of these articles is also roughly same as the nominations 223 American (~51%) , 38 British (~9%), 25 Canadian (~6%) and the next three being German, Australian, and Indian in that order. Marginal higher fraction could be attributed to a hypothesis that sourcing for these language articles are better than the others, but that needs to be examined. This might not be an ITN problem to solve.
  3. Categories of posting shows a bias toward Sportspersons (~30% of all postings while ~26% of all nominations), while entertainment / music has a downward revision (~19% of all postings while at ~23% of nominations). This latter point might be due to the whole discography / filmography sourcing problems we have had for some time now.
  4. Gender – we are still at an 80:20 for male to female articles. I am not aware of the overall mix across all of WP, but, this really needs to be worked. Perhaps pass this as a feedback to the kind folks at WP:WIR
  5. Of the 441 articles posted, the top two posting admins posted ~70% of all articles (top being PFHLai ~40% and the next one being Stephen at ~30%). I do not know the personal situation of these two admins, but this is a very high level of concentration. If some alternate priorities were to emerge for any of these two admins, the project will grind to a slow-mo if not a full halt. The admins should consider a discussion among themselves to see if there is a systemic problem here.

Discussions and Participation

  1. Of the 441 articles, ~35% of the articles had one unique commenter, and ~25% had two unique commenters. This tells me that we might not have a wide pool of reviewers. We do not have data on who these reviewers are, but anecdotally I can speculate that it is the same set of reviewers. This needs to improve. We need more reviewers. There is a line of thinking that we do not necessarily need too many reviewers since all they are doing is scanning for hygiene issues, but no one will fault me for saying that more eyes on an article before it goes to the main page. This group needs to ask a hard question – what can we do to encourage more reviewers.
  2. Posting dates – this to me seems alright. ~75% articles are posted within 2 days of the nomination.
  3. ~60% of the articles are posted within 8 hours of being ready while ~75% of the articles are posted within 12 hours of being ready. However, ~10% of articles (46) are posted after 24 hours of being ready. There have been some articles that have spent more than 80 hours being in a ready state waiting to be posted (though not too many). This might be alleviated if we have more admin support. Something to think through.

Next Steps

  1. These numbers have been great. Thanks a ton Thryduulf for performing this painstaking data capture. If there is a way to bake-in some of this information as a part of the meta data for articles being nominated / posted. E.g., category, geography, etc. that might just make this analysis or a better version of this analysis a continuous action.

Update

In an unfortunate set of events, I see that Stephen, who has been a bedrock of our project from an administerial standpoint (e.g. promotions to mainpage), has been de-sysoped at least temporarily. That directly opens up the risk that I was referring to in Pt #5 (postings sub-section above). I think all the admins might already know this -- but, I am flagging this one just so y'all can be prepared for the temporary spike in workload. I am tagging some ITN regular admins just as an FYI. Please pardon the interruption. @PFHLai, Thryduulf, Spencer, Amakuru, and DatGuy: Ktin (talk) 23:51, 14 November 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I've seen that (but didn't get your ping for some reason). Stephen was admin who gave me most concern about potentially premature posting - there were 28 nominations posted with 0 comments from someone other than the nominator and posting admin, Stephen posted 23 of them along with another 12 where they were the one posting and identifying it as ready for posting (00:00 between being ready and being posted). However they did also post many that were unquestionably ready this is a crude measure.
On the main point, yes we need more posting admins. I seem to be one of the first reviewers for many nominations at the moment, and I'm always reluctant to post those. Thryduulf (talk) 00:39, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
I'll start conducting more RD reviews so that you can post, if needed. It may also be beneficial to see if we can find another admin or two who can help out with posting. Curbon7 (talk) 01:46, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Before I post, I generally like to see at least two supports, or a couple of days of no objections. Frankly, I think support !votes can sometimes be based off cursory reviews that some updaters take advantage to game the system—intentional or not.—Bagumba (talk) 06:31, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Yes, my personal standard is generally least two supports in addition the the nominator and at least an hour after the most recent of those before posting. If there have been objections then I like to see those withdrawn and/or people other than the nominator supporting before posting. Thryduulf (talk) 18:39, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
I am pretty sure that in every case of Stephen posting an RD with one or no supports, the article quality was fine, and that is the only criteria for RD so I don't see it as an issue. It's fine to have two supports as your personal standard, but I don't think Stephen did anything wrong there and I'm glad he kept the queue moving along. Pawnkingthree (talk) 18:48, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
I think he vetted them out well; otherwise, it gives the appearance of a WP:SUPERVOTE.—Bagumba (talk) 18:56, 15 November 2022 (UTC)
Yes, I completely disagree with the "two supports" standard. This arbitrary threshold means that a lot of good-quality RDs can easily be ignored and thus fall off of ITN/C, due to limited participation. "Participation" is not one of our ITN criteria, certainly not one of our ITN/RD criteria. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:30, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I don't have the time, interest, or domain expertise to vet out most noms, so I generally rely on consensus from others to post.—Bagumba (talk) 16:05, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
We actually expect those that post stories have reviewed the article for all the standard quality aspects as a secondary check before posting, never taking the discussion itself as assurance. (Though clearly if an article was noted for being poor quality before and discussion shows the quality has significantly improved, that's helpful to speed up the check). Masem (t) 16:28, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
Yes, there are the minimal checks at WP:ITN/A, but I don't consider checks for being "well referenced" to be on par with !voters vetting for verifiability. —Bagumba (talk) 20:02, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
We need more posting admin, indeed. I was frustrated when nobody posted to the main page Robert Morse article which I improved. Stephen is a good admin, and he posted articles that were needed to be posted. Kirill C1 (talk) 13:08, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
That nom was while Stephen was still active. Anyhow, it looks like consensus was formed only hours before it was stale and rolled off the page. Some people leave a note at WT:ITN when action is needed at the 11th hour, and WP:IAR is sometimes applied in these cases. —Bagumba (talk) 16:24, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I was unaware that this happened. I'll try to be more active in posting noms that have consensus. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:08, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
I too was unaware this happened until the recent Admin newsletter. FWIW my personal practice is one support + 24 hours on ITN/C; I find that many noms, especially those at the bottom of the page, frequently don't get more than one. If unreviewed and essentially ready, I typically support instead of post. SpencerT•C 01:10, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

Can anyone help me understand this?

Latest comment: 1 year ago16 comments9 people in discussion

I'd like to nominate one. I prepared it all, but am confused about where to post it. I read the instructions, but cannot see where there "suggestions" location is. Blurb:


Article: Stewart Rhodes (talk · history · tag)
Blurb: ​ Stewart Rhodes, founder of the right-wing Oath Keepers was found guilty of Seditious conspiracy.[1][2] (Post)

CT55555(talk) 22:22, 30 November 2022 (UTC) CT55555(talk) 22:26, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

@CT55555 - You would add it here. ~ ONUnicorn(Talk|Contribs)problem solving 22:28, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
I'd say this isn't significant enough for a blurb anyway. It's one conviction amongst many. NoahTalk 22:30, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
OK thanks, have added and expanded the blurb CT55555(talk) 22:42, 30 November 2022 (UTC)
@Hurricane Noah: It's a moot point, but in the future, please save such judgments for the nomination itself instead of discouraging someone from making a good-faith nom. ITN/C needs more participants and especially more nominations, and the way about that isn't to tell people "oh, don't even bother". 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 17:08, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
The feedback I got in the official process was also very much "don't bother" so if the ambition is to encourage, then I have feedback...
  1. If you want to encourage people, please make the instructions/process easier.
  2. If front page BBC news worthy things aren't important enough, please make it clearer that only utterly world changing events will make it through the process.
From start to finish, this was a discouraging toe dipping into a new part of Wikipedia. CT55555(talk) 17:22, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
@CT55555: The best guidance is at WP:ITN: It is highly subjective whether an event is considered significant enough, and ultimately each event should be discussed on its own merits. Basically, it's pretty open-ended, and decided by whoever is participating.—Bagumba (talk) 17:30, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Do you have any suggestions for (1), to make the process easier and the instructions easier to understand? Re: (2), unfortunately the process is highly subjective and we would need to think of major reforms to change this. – Muboshgu (talk) 17:31, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
My feedback is:
  1. I got stuck on the instructions at the point of going to the "suggestions" part. I could not find "suggestions" so make that clearer, or a link.
  2. Much better would be some sort of less (forgive me if I'm using the wrong jargon here) code or source editing heavy and more visual, some sort of easier graphical user interface.
  3. Maybe some guidance that helps people understand what is out of scope. For example I perceive the first time someone has been prosecuted for a Seditious conspiracy prosecution in USA seems like a really unusual chain of events, in the context of people trying to stop democracy seems very globally relevant right now. But I'm getting the clear understanding that this is insufficient. The comment below says "larger scale ramifications" and yet this to me has larger scale ramifications (it shows that Jan 6 protestors and anti-democratic action can be prosecuted like this (admitted a USA-centric issue), previous use of the charge was around things we more easily see as terrorism). So there appears to be a tension between the people wanting to encourage and the likelihood that things are going to get rejected, leaving people discouraged.
CT55555(talk) 18:10, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Simply being front page news is not sufficient for posting at ITN, as Wikipedia is not a newspaper and ITN is not a news ticker. We tend to focus on events that have larger scale ramifications or represent the finality of a long process. Masem (t) 17:50, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I know that Wikipedia is not a newspaper. I did perceive this to have a larger scale ramifications, admittedly only relevant in one country. CT55555(talk) 18:13, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
A big part of the problem here is that many oppose nominations as relevant to only one country, despite WP:ITN/C#Please do not... clearly saying Oppose an item solely because the event is only relating to a single country, or failing to relate to one. This applies to a high percentage of the content we post and is generally unproductive. Although in this case, I can understand why some would oppose the seditions conspiracy convictyion of a militia leader, without agreeing or disagreeing with them. – Muboshgu (talk) 19:08, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
I do think that the anti-democracy theme of this is relevant to many Western/Northern countries that are influenced by US culture, but to labour the point is to beat a dead horse, so I'll stop. CT55555(talk) 20:08, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
CT55555, As it hasn't been said yet, thank you for making the effort regardless of the result. Curbon7 (talk) 18:53, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
Agreed. We need all the voices we can get. – Muboshgu (talk) 19:10, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

References

  1. ^ Spencer S. Hsu, Tom Jackman, and Rachel Weiner (November 29, 2022). "Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes guilty of seditious conspiracy". Washington Post.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  2. ^ Cheney, Kyle (29 November 2022). "Jury convicts Oath Keepers leader of seditious conspiracy". POLITICO.
I'm always saddened when a new nominator gets a barrage of opposes. In one way it's natural, as the types of articles featured on here are just very limited and fairly rare. I think the social aspect of this forum can be improved and personally I try to respond to most nominations with an encouraging comment (only really getting annoyed when the nominated article hasn't been updated at all ^_^; ). I recognize that this social work is work, though, and will not be feasible for everyone. It's also less clearly structured; strongly binary supports and opposes are simpler, especially for closing admins. I'd be happy to hear others' thoughts on this. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:49, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

ITN isn't DYK

Latest comment: 1 year ago8 comments5 people in discussion

In the discussion "All South Koreans to become younger" about East Asian age reckoning, there is the frequent comment that this item would work well for Did You Know, but doesn't fit for In The News. I see this comment frequently for news story that is interesting and less routine. I believe that there's a misunderstanding going on about what DYK and ITN are about. They do indeed have different purposes, but both are at their core about presenting recently updated information. In particular, most of these news stories wouldn't qualify for DYK unless they were brought to GA status (though new articles or vast expansions can work sometimes, sure), so those comments must be deflating for nominators. More importantly, I believe such articles would function absolutely perfectly for displaying our work as an encyclopedia covering recent changes to encyclopedic material. ITN is not a news ticker, and I think it's important to try to remember this in our philosophy. I was wondering how other editors felt about this, and if some people had an argument against favoring stories like these even in cases where they won't impact individual lives particularly strongly (like with the change to leap seconds discussed last week). ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 10:34, 13 December 2022 (UTC)

It's a shiboleth of the cultural gatekeepers who like to police ITN for things that they don't personally find worthwhile enough to mention on the main page. These people pretty much universally ignore reliable sources, and instead focus solely on weighing the importance of something against their own narrow personal experience. Pay them no mind when they say such things. They are patting you on the head, condescendingly, when they say such things. (For the record, I don't think the "All South Koreans to become younger" should be posted, but I also would never insult the nominator and supporters by saying such a patronizing thing). --Jayron32 19:03, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Regardless of whether they're, uh, cultural gatekeepers; this seems to be a dominant philosophy that will actively keep stories from reaching ITN. The same editor suggested that Decimal Day (1971) wouldn't be posted for similar reasons, for example, while to me this would've been the absolute perfect ITN story for our front-page (if we had existed then). I would like to see more stories like these being published in our ITN section if possible. If I felt confident that updating and expanding the article further would make them more likely to make it on, I might've taken that route, but right now there seems to be strong bias against these types of stories that feels unwarranted. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:05, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
It's everyone's individual decision what they think is worthwhile versus hopeless; however, I think it's only possible to change peoples minds by nominating articles, providing persuading arguments, and gaining supporters over time. Of course, there is no guarantee that it will happen.—Bagumba (talk) 12:08, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
As I noted in my comment on the nom, I would not argue the event is not newsworthy, but there is a serious question of impact here. The change is an administrative one - we do not know if it will have any tangible impact on those who celebrate their birthdays under the Korean Age system in any way besides causing them to have to use the more typical age system on documents. In regards to the comment you made on Decimal Day, I can't say for sure if I would have posted this in part because this event was beyond 30 years before my time, but I think the impact of such an event would be greater. To me, ITN should be discerning in what we post. I think, for the most part, a ITN posting should either be highly impactful to a group of people or somewhat impactful on a great number of people. Obviously not every event follows this formula, but most are. That's why I don't really like the posting of awards shows or the undue favor that ITN tends to have sometimes for postings regarding space exploration - such events have very little impact and in many situations feel more like trivia pieces. DarkSide830 (talk) 19:34, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
Thank you for the response. I have found myself cooling off on award shows as well, also because of their promotional aspects. When it comes to long-term impact, you could say that something like the age change will have an impact on Korean lives "forever," but I imagine that article doesn't hold much water :p – I do wonder if you feel more comfortable posting an article on a less impactful subject if our article on it is a good representation of our identity as an encyclopedia. Is there a balance here? ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:07, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
It's certainly worth noting quality when it comes to a borderline topic. Personally, I just tend to stay out of noms where I don't have a real feeling on the nom either way, but I also think I'm less likely to feel neutral on a nom than most are. Overall though that comes back to the ITN/DYK situation, wherein we also want to be promoting well-written article for DYK as well. DarkSide830 (talk) 00:37, 16 December 2022 (UTC)
  • ITN is for articles which are literally "in the news" while DYK is for new articles. There's been some creep in both places in that ITN has some vague requirement of "significance" while DYK has some vague requirement of "interesting". Both are mostly OR and POV, in practice.
The biggest issue between the two is that DYK is remarkably productive, getting up 8–16 new hooks every day, despite a fairly picky set of requirements. ITN just has to link to the news of the day but only manages to post one new blurb every other day. So, DYK is about 16–32 times more productive than ITN. ITN is like these fusion experiments – lots of energy goes in but there's little to show for it.
In the meantime, our readership mostly ignores the main page and just goes straight to articles from Google. Typically, articles at DYK and ITN attract about 10,000 additional readers on a good day. But topics which are in the news attract millions of readers regardless. For example, the top read article on Wikipedia currently is the Streisand effect. This seems to be because Elon Musk has been tweeting about it. Anyway, that got about 773,115 readers yesterday while the top ITN blurb 2022 Batang Kali landslide got just 3,988. 4K readers wouldn't impress at DYK and it's pathetic for a topic that's supposedly in the news.
The place that seems to get this right is the Current events portal. That seems to fill each day's entry with a good number of news items while its noticeboard is remarkably free of discussion and drama. ITN has way too much of the latter and that's why it gets little done. It's a talking shop not a workshop. Tsk.
Andrew🐉(talk) 15:19, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Add ITN/R: FIFA World Cup (ongoing)

Latest comment: 1 year ago13 comments8 people in discussion

Since the nomination of the FIFA World Cup for ongoing has succeeded on ITN/C, and the final match of the tournament is already considered ITN/R, it's absolutely reasonable to conclude that this sport should now join the Olympic Games as one of the few sports where it automatically qualifies for being an ongoing item on the basis of significance.

Support writing it explicitly. Kirill C1 (talk) 15:44, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
Support Three times in a row with little reason to think consensus will change. GreatCaesarsGhost 20:30, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
I believe the fact that with Morrocco a first team of Africa made it the finals would have been a good ITN, though. How about if we consider remarkable exceptions.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 11:30, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
Inclusion in ITN/R does not equal exclusion of individual outcomes. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 22:46, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

Attention needed for the New Taoiseach in Ireland blurb

Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments3 people in discussion
(NON-ADMIN CLOSURE)
Marking this as closed. Ktin (talk) 19:50, 4 January 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.


What it says on the tin. Blurb rolls off ITN/C tomorrow. Curbon7 (talk) 04:06, 24 December 2022 (UTC)

Rolled off. Curbon7 (talk) 00:30, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
As I commented in the nom both three and one days ago, the target article(s) lacked an adequate prose update. SpencerT•C 02:39, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
Hence why it wasn't posted. Curbon7 (talk) 03:47, 25 December 2022 (UTC)
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Add European Film Awards

Latest comment: 1 year ago6 comments2 people in discussion

European Film Awards are major awards, and are international. There are written that there are 7 expected items per year, but there are only six there. So, after adding this there would be 7 items. Kirill C1 (talk) 15:48, 12 December 2022 (UTC)

Previous ceremonies [2] [3] [4] [5] are covered in the same sources that cover Oscars and BAFTAS. Kirill C1 (talk) 21:06, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
  • Oppose Most categories at ITN/R have 4 or fewer events per year. There is an implied consensus that we post only the most prestigious events in each category, ignoring many major awards/events. Those with more are due to events being largely equal (domestic football leagues) or premier events not being open to all (rugby union). EFA does not qualify for an exception under either of these standards; EFA films are eligible and likely good candidates for Berlin and Cannes (indeed, this year's EFA Best Film won the Palm d'Or). GreatCaesarsGhost 15:23, 14 December 2022 (UTC)
    There are two awards for films in India - Filmfare Awards and Dadasaheb Phalke Award in the list. It is national level. Are they most prestigious Awards? There is scarce coverage internationally on them, and they are largely equal. "Those with more are due to events being largely equal (domestic football leagues) or premier events not being open to all (rugby union)." - but number of sport events in general far exceeds film, or science events.
    Another thing is that European Awards are annual Awards, and not a film festival. These are two different things, so they are not equal, films are submitted for a festival and accepted by those who are in charge, all films released in a given period are eligible for annual awards, I would argue that this makes much difference. And also they are at different time of the year, I think this a plus. Kirill C1 (talk) 19:04, 17 December 2022 (UTC)
    So change the nomination to replace Cannes and Berlin with this. Maybe you'll get some traction. GreatCaesarsGhost 21:23, 21 December 2022 (UTC)
    I specifically write that these blurbs are not mutually exclusive. Kirill C1 (talk) 08:22, 23 December 2022 (UTC)
Latest comment: 1 year ago14 comments4 people in discussion

Not tracking the main conversation here. But, speaking of current events — I think one thing we have wrong is that current events is hidden as an Easter egg link under the ongoing text. We tried fixing that once but unsuccessfully. Ktin (talk) 16:39, 17 December 2022 (UTC)

That earlier system of having clear navigational links in the footer was best: Wikinews – Recent deaths – More current events....
Andrew🐉(talk) 22:59, 18 December 2022 (UTC)
A plain "Ongoing" link has existed since as early as 2014. While not perfect if we were only launching Wikipedia new today, its longevity could suggest that it's good enough at this point, especially without more glaring issues. —Bagumba (talk) 09:37, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
  • At this time of year, the news media usually publish a summary of the year's events -- e.g. BBC; NYT. Wikipedia has such annual yearbook pages and, for this year, the main one is 2022. This is quite an active and well-curated page as, so far, it has had over 1500 editors and over 4.4 million page views. It includes the major events of the year, month by month, and it's interesting to look back on them now. For example, in January we have "China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States—all five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council—issue a rare joint statement affirming that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."" And then in February, "Putin orders Russia's nuclear deterrent forces to be on "special alert"..."
So, that gives a good perspective on the news which we don't get from ITN's more limited, keyhole view. As we're an encyclopedia, ITN should provide links to the current and previous year's pages to help readers find this encyclopedic coverage of the news. The links would be quite short: 2022 ∙ 2023 would be appropriate at this time. Ok?
Andrew🐉(talk) 09:51, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
Perhaps a better topic for Talk:Main Page, as those aren't quite in the news anymore —Bagumba (talk) 14:05, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
As explained, news media normally summarise the entire year's events at this time and so it is in the news. For example, see FT 2022 Year in Review; LA Times 2022: Year in Review; Reuters 2022 Year in Review. Andrew🐉(talk) 14:48, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
I was orginally thinking that you wanted a permanent feature that events can be reachable by year from the Main Page, not just for the last few weeks of a given year.—Bagumba (talk) 14:55, 19 December 2022 (UTC)::::
The feature would need to be dynamic as the years roll by. This is the natural time to make a start and see how it goes. Andrew🐉(talk) 15:03, 19 December 2022 (UTC)
  • Comment. I think there are two ideas that are getting clubbed here and separating the two might be a good idea.
  1. 2022 in Review link: this is not a bad idea and can link to the 2022 summary page. But if this is needed the window to act is now. Any later and the idea would be stale.
  2. fixing the Easter egg in the ongoing link: I think this is simple and should be done. But having attempted once and having failed, I do not know how to proceed. But this should ideally not be difficult.

something to consider. Cheers. Ktin (talk) 04:37, 26 December 2022 (UTC)

Nepal Plane Crash on 14th January is Missing

Latest comment: 1 year ago5 comments5 people in discussion
(NON-ADMIN CLOSURE)
Thanks for the post. We should have this handled shortly. Article has been shared at WP:ITNC and admins should be looking at it soon. Ktin (talk) 16:35, 15 January 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.


I don't really know much about this but there was a plane crash in nepal on the 14th and it isnt in the "in the news" section, i don't have too much information about it since i just heard about it from some people telling me, if im not wrong there were 72 people on board and 40 people dead, i have no idea what plane it was, at what time it happened, where and some other info regarding it, if someone can help me that would be appreciated. UselessDude123 (talk) 08:35, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

It has now been posted. HiLo48 (talk) 09:00, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
And it has been pulled. Like a bounced landing. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:54, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Because there's still a quality requirement that must be met, which is why no part of main page can be automated (such as the Top25 suggestion). It will probably be back up in a few hours given that more details have come out about the crash but that's again why we aren't a news ticket, we have no interest in being as timely as the mainstream media and instead want to showcase quality over quantity. Masem (t) 14:29, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
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2023 Beninese parliamentary election

Latest comment: 1 year ago3 comments3 people in discussion
(NON-ADMIN CLOSURE)
Taken care of. Thanks. Ktin (talk) 01:33, 20 January 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.


2023 Beninese parliamentary election which is listed as ready auto-archives in 11 hours. Curbon7 (talk) 13:01, 18 January 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.

Add College Football Playoff National Championship to ITNR

Latest comment: 1 year ago23 comments14 people in discussion
Closed means closed. Thryduulf (talk) 21:47, 10 January 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.

Closing to save editors’ time before the discussion gets fatuous. In order to consider this for ITN/R, there has to be a record of regular posting in the recent past, which unfortunately has not been established for this event. ITN/R is not a tool to circumvent the failed nominations on ITN/C and guarantee inclusion on the merits of notability.--Kiril Simeonovski (talk) 18:48, 10 January 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.

College football has been one of the most watched sports in years, the last time we had an ITN related to college football was three years ago. The last two haven't been posted. Although the whole world is used to the NFL. I also saw that college football has more fans in games although NFL has more people watching in on TV. 2600:1700:31BA:9410:DDB7:12BD:2FD0:F626 (talk) 04:13, 10 January 2023 (UTC)

This is a perennial request and fails every time. Gridiron football does not enjoy the same viewership as something like association football, and thus the number of events on ITNR properly reflects this. Masem (t) 04:15, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
In America, college football is second only behind the NFL. American football is gaining popularity around the world, especially Europe and Brazil. Even Brazil has an NFL Instagram page. 2600:1700:31BA:9410:DDB7:12BD:2FD0:F626 (talk) 04:21, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
That's fine, but that still hasn't yet justified addition of the amateur college bowl series. It would drastically increase the America-centric problems that the ITNR list already has. Masem (t) 04:23, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Adding one event a year does not "drastically" worsen systemic bias. – Muboshgu (talk) 16:11, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
I think it has long been decided that if a US college championship makes it to posting, it would be basketball - something that can at least be watched in other countries. Kingsif (talk) 05:53, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
Not "would be", the college basketball championships are already at Wikipedia:In the news/Recurring items § Basketball —Bagumba (talk) 16:30, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose Participation is limited to college students only and is therefore a second tier competition. Chrisclear (talk) 12:50, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
    The Boat Race is already at ITNR, as are college basketball championships. Clearly, college/university is not automatically disqualifying. —Bagumba (talk) 16:32, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose domestic sporting events are typically limited to one per country per sport. Thus in English football we have the Premier League but not the FA Cup. Cheers — Amakuru (talk) 13:01, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
    The U.S. is 6x the population of England, and presumably similar as far as WP readership. Why would that not be a consideration? —Bagumba (talk) 16:38, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Strong oppose for the same reasons I opposed the current nomination. It looks unlikely we will even post this year's event, so suggesting ITNR is far too premature. Modest Genius talk 13:02, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Generally you want the current nomination to not be at risk of closing with no consensus, if you want the item to become ITN/R...--🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:29, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose Second-level domestic sports finals should not be ITN/R. If that was applied to (association) football or cricket we would have dozens of tournaments listed. Black Kite (talk) 13:37, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Oppose While we do occasionally post the College Football Championship, such postings are rarely without controversy or opposition. ITNR should only be for events for which we would never expect opposition over the significance. --Jayron32 13:42, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Support - for real, yall think the PDC World Darts Championship is somehow more worthy of mention on the mainpage than an event that gets some 15-20x the viewership? Or the rowing race between Oxford and Cambridge? lol. nableezy - 16:50, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
    Time to raise The Boat Race alarm for TRM! But seriously, both the Boat Race and PDC darts are the top competitions for those sports with otherwise limited player bases compared to assc. football or cricket. It is thus fair to have the singular top event there. For gridiron football, we have a couple that represent the best professional teams, there's no need for another that's sub-level to those. That's why we don't use popularity or viewership to select ITN topic, as otherwise we'd just be repeating the popular headlines. Masem (t) 17:00, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
    The College Football Playoffs is a 2 billion dollar business. I could just as soon say that the Champions League is the only top tier association football championship in Europe and that the national league winners are a sub-level variant. Also, I find the gatekeeping mentality on ITN to stop us from "just repeating headlines" to make little to no sense. What could possibly be the purpose of a "you may have seen these items in the news, click to read more about it" be other than directing people to our articles on popular headlines. nableezy - 17:09, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
    That's because most people vote based on what is personally interesting to them and don't use metrics such as reliable source coverage to assess whether or not an event is significant. For most voters, "significant" means "is this something I personally find interesting enough to me" and not "is this something people are hearing about outside of Wikipedia." Mostly, people use this as their vehicle to enforce their view of how the world should be rather than reporting on what is. --Jayron32 17:20, 10 January 2023 (UTC)
    I think that's a slightly harsh way of putting it. I think the motivation (if not necessarily the execution) of people supporting and opposing certain items is an assessment of encyclopedic value. I mean Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, right? We make no claim to be a newspaper or other purveyor of the latest headlines. And many people that the annual college football championship isn't at a level of encyclopedic interest that would merit inclusion in the rather limited set of ITN blurbs we post. Now personally I do think there's a lot to be said for giving readers easy links to the topics making the headlines. They tend to find them anyway without even using the main page, if the TOP25 report is to be believed, but it would still be valuable to showcase our quality work on such items. If I were God of the wiki, I'd probably add another section alongside Ongoing and Recent deaths, where we just provide simple rolling links to big headline stories that didn't make it for a blurb, e.g. the speaker election or the college playoff final. Not sure if that idea would pass muster with the honchos though.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:36, 10 January 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.

This close is garbage. I had to delete several variations of that sentence before settling on that one. nableezy - 18:51, 10 January 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.

Removal of Death and funeral of Pelé and Death and funeral of Pope Benedict XVI

Latest comment: 1 year ago22 comments9 people in discussion
(NON-ADMIN CLOSURE)
Folks. I am going to be a tad WP:BOLD and close this thread. Do not see this evolving to a solution on this thread. If we need to explore the trending topics idea, there is a separate thread for that. This is one of my more contentious closes perhaps, but, if someone thinks it needs to remain open -- please undo my edit. Thanks. Ktin (talk) 16:41, 15 January 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.


I think that the deaths of Pelé and Pope Benedict XVI should be removed from ITN since it has been 16 and 14 days respectively since their deaths, and neither are in international news much now. greyzxq talk 16:29, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

The customary practice is to let old blurbs roll off as new ones are posted. The news has been in a bit of a dry spell of late. It's happened before. No need to worry. This too shall pass. -Ad Orientem (talk) 16:32, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
I worry. AdO is right of course that the custom is to let things roll of naturally, but it's not a dry news spell, it's that the community is overly restrictive about what to post, resulting in these periods when nothing is posted. I worry because I think it makes Wikipedia look bad when we have two-week-old news in our "in the news" section on the main page, especially when that section omits more recent articles that are in the news, or posts unimportant articles and then leaves them there for two weeks (sometimes longer). This happens several times a year. It's a recurring problem of ITN/C's poor selection process. Levivich (talk) 16:52, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
What non-trivial, long-term influencing world events have there been during the last week? Looking at the US papers, the top stories for the week have been the circus of the first week of the new Congress, which is something we don't cover. Or there's been the flooding in Calif. with almost no deaths, or the torandos in the Southeast with similar low tolls. There's other world stories but all been just ongoing aspects of other stories like the COVID death rise in China or more attempts at nuclear escalation in North Korea. We cannot force the news to generate us usable stories every single day, nor should we expect that. Masem (t) 17:03, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Above is an example of the bias to which I refer: nothing worth posting happened in the world in the past week according to Masem. 😂 Nevermind what journalists or newspaper editors say, Wikipedia editors know better what's newsworthy and what isn't! News happens every day. It doesn't have to be "long-term influencing world events" (whatever that means exactly, it certainly doesn't describe what's in the box now) to be in the news. Levivich (talk) 17:24, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
We cover encyclopedic topics, which means we do need long-term impact to judge them appropriately. Meaning the bulk of what hits the news day to day is stuff we really can't work with until we have a large enough sample to know if the event will be notable. Like the bulk of antics from the US Gov't. If you really want to write about the day-to-day news and not encyclopedic topics, Wikinews is thataway. Masem (t) 17:37, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
I understand how the status quo works, and I'm saying we should change it. Specifically, when editors filter the news by "encyclopedic topics," they're just filtering the news by what they personally think is important--by their biases--and that's what I think should be changed. There is not a day that goes by that there isn't at least one Wikipedia article that is in the news. If ITN were doing what it was supposed to do (helping readers find articles that are in the news), we'd be posting at least one new thing every 24 hours, likely several new things. And don't kid yourself that it's Wikinews, not Wikipedia, that writes about news: a new Wikipedia article about a current event is created much more often than once per day. We cover current events. Levivich (talk) 17:46, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
We'd change it if there was consensus, which might be more likely if we got more participants. —Bagumba (talk) 02:04, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Every other main page section manages to post new content every day so ITN is obviously quite broken. My preferred solution would be to replace or supplement it with the top read articles, like the apps do. FYI, here's the top read article on each day of this new year. They got this top spot by being read by huge numbers of readers. ITN does not control access and so should stop pretending to be a gatekeeper.
Jan 13 – Lisa Marie Presley
Jan 12 – Jeff Beck
Jan 11 – 80th Golden Globe Awards
Jan 10 – Stetson Bennett
Jan 9 – Gareth Bale
Jan 8 – Edgar Allan Poe (who appeared in The Pale Blue Eye)
Jan 7 – Kevin McCarthy
Jan 6 – Gianluca Vialli
Jan 5 – 2023 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives election
Jan 4 – Damar Hamlin
Jan 3 – Damar Hamlin
Jan 2 – Avatar: The Way of Water
Jan 1 – Avatar: The Way of Water
This corresponds reasonably well with the news of the day and there are only two repeats, which is more varied than the current ITN. The only non-news item is Edgar Allan Poe but the occasional surprise like that is good because we're an encyclopedia not a news service.
Andrew🐉(talk) 19:14, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
We are not a news ticker and by the same means, we are not a list of what is popular just because of being in the news. We do not care about how many readers certain topics get because that will represent systematic bias (eg US/UK-topic centric). We are trying to prevent the news ticker from being only about popular topics but what are good encyclopedic topics that happen to be in the news. Masem (t) 19:20, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks Andrew for putting this list together. I took the liberty of cross-referencing to WP:ITN/C :
Jan 13 – Lisa Marie Presley - posted RD
Jan 12 – Jeff Beck - pending RD (on quality)
Jan 11 – 80th Golden Globe Awards - no consensus for proposal to add to ITNR in 2011; posted in 2017; nom'd but not posted in 2018; not nom'd in 2019-2020; nom'd but not posted in 2021 (on quality); the event was boycotted in 2022 but that apparently was never nom'd; not nom'd this year
Jan 10 – Stetson Bennett - nom'd and rejected (after 12 hours) (as 2023 College Football Playoff National Championship)
Jan 9 – Gareth Bale - (Welsh Footballer of the Year) not nom'd
Jan 8 – Edgar Allan Poe (who appeared in The Pale Blue Eye) - not nom'd
Jan 7 – Kevin McCarthy - nom'd multiple (5hrs) times (10 hrs) and rejected (as US House Speaker election)
Jan 6 – Gianluca Vialli - posted RD
Jan 5 – 2023 Speaker of the United States House of Representatives election - nom'd multiple times and rejected
Jan 4 – Damar Hamlin - nom'd and rejected (3.5 hrs)
Jan 3 – Damar Hamlin - nom'd and rejected
Jan 2 – Avatar: The Way of Water - not nom'd
Jan 1 – Avatar: The Way of Water - not nom'd
Despite having multiple opportunities to post articles that were in the news that were nominated and of sufficient quality and that readers actually were looking for, we had two December death blurbs running these entire two weeks, up to and including today. Levivich (talk) 19:44, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
(edit conflict) Actually we are more or less a news ticker, at least for stories in the news for which we have a quality article. Why do I say this? Because it's stated in black and white at WP:ITN#Purpose. The first two reasons given for ITN's existence are:
  • To help readers find and quickly access content they are likely to be searching for because an item is in the news.
  • To showcase quality Wikipedia content on current events.
Thus if we have an article on something and readers are likely to want to find that article, then it belongs in ITN. By contrast, the assertion that "we are not a news ticker" is not stated anywhere on WP:ITN. Now obviously I recognize that the above isn't the actual practice at ITN, with editors routinely rejecting stories even though they're in the news and have good articles. But those editors are going against what ITN is supposed to stand for. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 19:48, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
See WP:NOTNP. -Ad Orientem (talk) 20:19, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
WP:NOTNP is an essay. For the policy, you want WP:NOTNEWS. That explicitly forbids "routine news coverage of announcements, events, sports, or celebrities" but WP:ITN routinely violates this by listing recurring sports events, celebrity deaths, announcements of election results and events such as bus plunges.
Listing the top read articles does not violate this policy because it would be reporting our readership's choices. This might follow the news or it might just be some encyclopedic item like Edgar Allan Poe which happens to have caught the public's attention. This is not a problem and does not violate policy.
Andrew🐉(talk) 20:52, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
In my view, the fact that a "trending topics" ticker (or "most read articles" or whatever you call it) would have included Edgar Allan Poe, but ITN never would have, is a huge advantage for a ticker over the status quo ITN. Linking Edgar Allan Poe on the main page because The Pale Blue Eye was released is exactly the kind of thing Wikipedia should be doing: that is super helpful to the public, it educates, it's timely, it's perfect. We don't do it though. Levivich (talk) 20:56, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Well, there is Prince Harry's book. And someone up in Maine just won a boatload of money. Which brings me back to the fact that we are in a short dry spell for consequential news. It happens now and then and it's ok. ITN is not supposed to be a news ticker. -Ad Orientem (talk) 20:15, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
Those topics are not doing very well compared to the top read. To see how they compare with our current blurbs and the people's choice, see stats. Edgar Allan Poe is really doing comparatively well as he's up there with the Pope and Pele. And note that his article is an FA too. TFA ought to run him again if ITN won't. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:38, 14 January 2023 (UTC)
I simply don't get this. Why do we need to direct readers to an article that is clearly being found quite well already? The problem with an trending-topics section or running ITN like such is improving article quality before interest in the subject has lessened (which, for most news topics is a matter of days and sometimes a single day). I simply think trying to do this would be a mess and provides relatively limited upside. DarkSide830 (talk) 01:47, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Why do we need to direct readers to an article that is clearly being found quite well already? It would be akin to Twitter "trends", which I sometimes use to "catch up". —Bagumba (talk) 01:57, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
I often see the equivalent at BBC News which is "Most read". Right now, the #1 item is "Plane crashes near Nepal airport killing at least 40". The BBC posted it 59 minutes ago and I see that it's already been posted and pulled at ITN. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:39, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Of course they do. That's because they are a reporter of news. That's not how Wikipedia works. DarkSide830 (talk) 16:27, 15 January 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.

Why is the storming of the Brazilian congress back on ITN?

Latest comment: 1 year ago7 comments6 people in discussion
(NON-ADMIN CLOSURE)
Marking this as closed based on answers provided. Thanks. Ktin (talk) 23:43, 21 January 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.


It's been nearly three weeks now, why is it still on? Surely it should've rolled off already? PrecariousWorlds (talk) 09:48, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Not enough other successful nominations, that's all. doktorb wordsdeeds 09:58, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
PrecariousWorlds, sometimes blurbs have to be re-added after they roll off in order to balance the layout of the mainpage with WP:TFA and WP:OTD. Curbon7 (talk) 12:43, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Why...back on ITN?: Did it ever leave?—Bagumba (talk) 11:31, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

I believe it did leave for a while. May be misremembering PrecariousWorlds (talk) 12:48, 20 January 2023 (UTC)
Nope, Croatia joining the euro and Pope Benedict's death came back for balance reasons recently but the storming has yet to fall off.-- Pawnkingthree (talk) 16:38, 20 January 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.

Index?

Latest comment: 1 year ago25 comments7 people in discussion
(NON-ADMIN CLOSURE)
In the interest of keeping the open topics list manageable, I am going ahead and closing this one. There is something going on with Index. It still is showing up as the top read article on the iOS app at least. But, there is nothing that WP:ITN can do. Thanks. Ktin (talk) 01:04, 22 January 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.


 

I was browsing the top read articles this morning (right) and readers seem to be searching for the word "Index". They are finding a variety of results including Index (statistics); Index, Washington and Index (economics). ITN is supposed to be helping readers navigate to articles in the news but it's not clear what they are looking for. Is it inflation, index fund performance, the NFL quarterback index, or what? Andrew🐉(talk) 09:52, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

ITN is not supposed to be helping readers navigate to articles in the news - it's purpose is to highlight quality Wikipedia articles about topics that are in the news (which as repeatedly explained to you is not the same thing). Anyway, what is it you think ITN should be doing here? Thryduulf (talk) 13:35, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
WP:ITN#Purpose, bullet 1. (We should probably get rid of bullet 2, it's past time we outgrew the self-adulation.) Levivich (talk) 16:41, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Well, not to be that guy, but what then should we be blurbing in this situation? DarkSide830 (talk) 17:38, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Well, that's the question, isn't it. I rather doubt that they are looking for Index, Washington but that's where nearly a million of then ended up. We are explicitly here to "help readers find and quickly access content they are likely to be searching for because an item is in the news" and so we should be figuring this out. We are also here to "emphasize Wikipedia as a dynamic resource" and so should be updating our content daily in response to such developments rather than running the same headlines repeatedly until they become painfully stale. Andrew🐉(talk) 23:39, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
No, because you're assuming that because something's being searched heavily, it must come from being in the news, which is not a truism. For example, we see pop culture topics dominate searches buts its not because they are in the news but maybe because the show's at a season end or the like. That type of stuff is not Wiki-front-page news appropriate. Also remember that the search results favor a western bias.
You are also mistaken that our goal is to be an encyclopedia, not a newspaper. We should not be trying to update things daily, but to keep topics up to date when encyclopedic information can be updated or added. If you want to edit like a newspaper, Wikinews is thataway. Masem (t) 23:45, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Do we know why they are searching for index? It seems a weirdly specific search. Not the remit of WP:ITN, but, I am curious. Ktin (talk) 16:37, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
most search engines try to search on "index" at a top level, though I would expect that to then be a consistent hit. Masem (t) 16:39, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Yeah -- has been that way for atleast two decades now. Might be something else, I think. Ktin (talk) 16:42, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Maybe the Consumer Price Index; December numbers released a couple days ago. Levivich (talk) 16:41, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Could be; my suspicion is that this is one of those Cleopatra kinda searches. Ktin (talk) 16:43, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
United States Consumer Price Index was indeed tough to find (and doesn't have any numbers anyway). Levivich (talk) 16:46, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
But even then wouldn't the top result be Consumer price index or Consumer price index by country? These are fairly easily found pages. DarkSide830 (talk) 17:45, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
Wikipedia is failing in this instance (the info is way down at United States Consumer Price Index#Uses), but the significance is that the US CPI is the most-common measure of inflation. (I'm American and have no idea how other countries use their CPI, this could be global or just US, I don't know.) But the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes CPI numbers monthly, and then everyone looks at that to figure out if inflation is happening, and then the US Federal Reserve sets their monetary policies based on that (e.g., raising/lowering interest rates), and so everyone (well, not everyone) watches these numbers to figure out if interest rates are going up or down (which affects buying houses, cars, credit cards, business investments, etc.) These numbers were last released on Thursday, so people on the internet searching "index" might be looking to find out if inflation went up or down in December, and by how much, and maybe what that means for interest rates. [6] is what they probably want to find, or possibly (I think, more likely) they just heard some news about the Consumer Price Index and wanted to find out what it was, how it works, and what it means for the index to go down 0.1% in a month.
To answer your other question, this is pretty routine news, so I'm not sure that we should have blurbed any of this... I mean, I'm sure we wouldn't have under current ITNC procedures... but indeed, United States Consumer Price Index or Consumer Price Index would probably be an example of an article that people would be looking for because it's been in the news (ITN purpose #1), and thus the sort of thing that ITN somehow ought to point editors to. It could be conceivably added to ITN/R and we could post that one day a month somewhere when it comes out, but that might be overkill. There are probably a million other articles like that--not exactly "historical, globally significant news" as is our current standard, but nevertheless an article that people are looking for because the topic or a related topic is in the news (like Edgar Allan Poe)--and we'd do a great service to make it easier for readers to find such articles by linking them on the main page. There's a question about how to populate that feed...editors nominating and voting, or some automatic method like top-edited or top-viewed pages, each of which has advantages and disadvantages. My preference is to turn ITN into an actual ticker of some kind, probably with an automated nomination system subject to editor oversight applying objective criteria (think quality, not significance, similar to ITN/R now)... but most efficient would be to have the main page have a literal list of articles in the news ... possibly with no blurbs at all (although, for some news items, a blurb might help... for example, readers may not have known that the name of the injured football player was Damar Hamlin so just listing "Damar Hamlin" might not help people find it, it might need a blurb like "Damar Hamlin suffers cardiac arrest at a football game", although that could probably also be accomplished just by listing it as "Damar Hamlin (NFL)", so a ticker would still work.) Anyway, I've digressed quite far here, sorry. Levivich (talk) 18:43, 15 January 2023 (UTC)
  • Fwiw, I do not think this might be linked to interest in any variations of Consumer Price Index. See here for a comparative page view report link here. The spike in Index (statistics) does not corelate to any spike in any of the CPI topics. Also, if this was related, there should have been some spillover from past interest in this topic. I do not see that. All of this leads me to believe that there is something like a WP:CLEOPATRA going on here. The folks at WP:TOP25 will solve it when it comes there. PS: Also, nothing great at Google either. link hereKtin (talk) 03:41, 16 January 2023 (UTC)
Perhaps people are searching for article index which is at Wikipedia:Contents/A–Z index, but land at various similarly titled pages instead. Brandmeistertalk 17:54, 17 January 2023 (UTC)
Why now? Did something change? Ktin (talk) 00:32, 18 January 2023 (UTC)
Most likely one of the two happened: either some recent event made "index" a buzzword or people wanted specifically the A-Z article index due to some similar event. Brandmeistertalk 10:34, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Anything more on the indices? How are they doing? Ktin (talk) 01:37, 20 January 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.

Death blurbs in 2022

Latest comment: 1 year ago9 comments6 people in discussion

Following on from the discussion above, I've looked at every nomination where a blurb was suggested and come up with the following data. I've only done very trivial analysis on it so far but:

  • There were 63 nominations where a blurb was suggested, 15 of those resulted in a blurb, 36 were posted as Recent Deaths and 11 were not posted at all (almost entirely due to sourcing issues).
  • Of the 11 not posted, 6 had enough discussion of the blurb to say that it would be posted as RD only if quality improved and 5 had insufficient to judge between RD and blurb.
  • Consensus to blurb or not blurb was reached in 36 (57%) of nominations, 27 (43%) did not reach a consensus.
  • If the 63 proposals, 15 were for females (of which 2 were blurbed, 11 RD and 2 not posted) and 48 males (14 blurbs, 25 RD, 9 not posted). None were proposed for non-binary people.
  • Blurbs were proposed for 35 different nationalities, including 17 Americans (0 blurbs), 5 Brits (1 blurb), 3 Japanese (2 blurbs) and two each of Brazilian (2 blurbs), Soviet and Russian (1 blurb), and Greek, Kenyan, Russian and Ukrainian (all 0 blurbs). Japanese and Brazilian were the only nationality to get more than one blurb.
    • The other nationalities with 1 blurb were Angolan, Australian, Bahamian-American, Chinese, Egyptian, Emirati, French-Swiss, German/Vatican City, Iraqi and Vietnamese.
    • Subjectively, it is far more likely for blurbs that don't stand even a remote chance to be posted to be suggested for Americans than any other nationality.
  • In no case was a blurb posted without a proposed blurb being added to the template.

Thryduulf (talk) 23:11, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

Data

Inclusion criteria and notes
  • Date - the ITNC section in which the nomination is made, usually the date of death
  • Template - was a blurb included in the ITN template (as of the time of archiving)?
  • Active discussion - did multiple editors explicitly consider a blurb?
  • Nationality and gender are as stated in the article
  • Profession categories and country of notability are subjective and based on my reading of the nomination statement and/or first few sections of the article
  • Proposal based on - what was the basis for suggesting a blurb -
    • Life: The subject's achievements or other aspects of their life
    • Death: Circumstances of/surrounding the subjects death
    • Both: Both of the above
  • Blurb if posted? - if the story wasn't posted at all, would it have been blurbed if sourcing, etc had been fixed in time?
  • Consensus - Did the discussion of a blurb come to a consensus (either way)?
  • Summary - my subjective summary of the discussion about a blurb
  • There were no proposals for a death blurb in June
  • Six RD nominations from December 2022 were open at the time data was collated, but blurbs have not (yet) been proposed for any of them.

Only nominations that meet all of the following are included in this analysis:

  • Subject was eligible for a recent deaths entry in 2022
  • Nomination was not speedily or procedurally closed
  • Nomination template and/or discussion includes the word "blurb"
  • One or more editors clearly suggest or support a blurb

Thryduulf (talk) 23:11, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

Discussion (Death blurbs in 2022)

  • There's a lot of ways to interpret the data above. For example, are so many American blurbs rejected because Americans tend to propose too many blurbs? Rarely do countries get more than one blurb, after all. Anti-American bias has also been suggested frequently. I don't think this data is enough to say much about it. While we have a good variation of nationality, the gender disparity is interesting. I don't think we're doing too bad on this (I don't expect many high profile 80-year old non-binary dictators dying, after all), but the percentage of women is definitely low. Could we further track down the cause of this bias, and how deeply is this tied into the news media we base our own rulings on? ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 08:11, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
    In terms of gender, well there are fewer nominated for RD in the first place (see Wikipedia:In the news/2022 ITNRD analysis) and Wikipedia talk:In the news/Archive 95#Analysis of recent deaths June-October 2022; between June and October just under 20% of RD nominations were for women), and fewer of them have a blurb suggested. The most blurbed profession categories are politics, monarch, religion, Islamic terrorism, entertainment and sport. Most of these are very male dominated in terms of BLP subjects in the first place (only 5 of the 138 RDs for sportspeople nominated between June and October were female), and for a sportsperson to get a blurb they really need to have been consistently and widely regarded as one of the best ever in their sport and have name recognition outside that sport - very few women have that. For politics, being a world leader is all-but necessary but not sufficient - one also has to be truly transformative, an incumbent or assassinated. For example the only three living British politicians I could imagine getting a blurb if they died peacefully tomorrow are Rishi Sunak (only as incumbent), Tony Blair and Boris Johnson - and even the latter two would be far from unanimous and might not get posted. Thryduulf (talk) 11:25, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
    Sounds to me like the RD bias might actually be a thing we could do more work improving. Blurbs are largely facing systemic problems, while for RD we could simply have more impassioned editors for specific fields. ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 14:46, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
    At least Tony Blair and Boris Johnson aren't subject to the same inescapable curse Tony Atlas and Rocky Johnson are. Pro wrestlers can transform the field all they want, but it's not going to make their articles any better or pro wrestling's fundamental importance to the entire world any clearer. On that note, I'm not complaining, but think Scott Hall deserves some nod in this section for racking up 2,257,799 points in 2022. InedibleHulk (talk) 14:30, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
    In terms of female sportspeople, you do have to consider that many of the world's most popular sports (notably association football and cricket, but you could add in golf and rugby football) have only reletively recently moved out of the realms of amateur sport for women. It is therefore unsurprising that we don't have female versions of Shane Warne or Pele at the moment. I can, however, think of a number of female sports figures (specifically in athletics and tennis) who would probably qualify for a blurb - hopefully we won't have to worry about that for a while yet. Black Kite (talk) 14:51, 7 January 2023 (UTC)
    I'd argue that the percentage of American RDs should be high, simply because approximately 60% of all English first language speakers on the planet live in the United States, and this is the English-language Wikipedia. (You could use the statistic 25% of all English-speakers if you'd rather, but I don't think that significantly changes the point.)
Regarding the lack of women at RD, I'd suggest that stems from the sexism present in the past that barred women from high-profile positions that would merit a standalone Wikipedia article. The average human lifespan is approximately 80 years. 80 years ago was 1943. A woman born in 1943 was unlikely to enter the workforce due to cultural pressure. Even today, in the United States, men have a workforce participation rate 12% higher than women. I still think it's a good idea for us to counteract sexism by looking for ways to improve the number of women at RD, but I think we should also understand that women did not do as many noteworthy things in the past as men did because of sexism. NorthernFalcon (talk) 02:45, 9 January 2023 (UTC)
I tend to argue that institutionalized sexism still plays a role in the death blurbs as well as the RDs. For example, one person argued that Barbara Walters did not merit a blurb because "meeting a lot of famous people" is nothing special, or she was just a "mere newsreader". Put aside any sort of assessment of Walters's character and reputation and instead just assess the blurb criteria in a vacuum, i.e. whether someone is transformative in their field. The subtext of rationales like these is somewhat gross, even if the individual intentions were not sexist in nature. Of course, neither this nor Vivienne Westwood's nomination was helped by being sandwiched around Pele's death, but my point remains nevertheless. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:55, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Do we feature books at ITN?

Latest comment: 1 year ago8 comments6 people in discussion

I watch the main evening news every day and for the last week, they've dedicated a few minutes every night to the upcoming release of Prince Harry's memoir Spare. Well, it's been released and in the UK The Guardian has just reported that it is the "UK's fastest-selling nonfiction book" (based on first day sales). The sales figures for the first day in the US are about to come out and a reporter for Forbes thinks that it's got a chance of outselling Obama's A Promised Land. Hence my question - do we feature books at ITN? I've had a look at the article and it's in decent order, but the sales record ought to be added because if anything, that's what demonstrates why this might be ITN-worthy. Schwede66 09:26, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

The article looks pretty good, so I would appreciate seeing this subject nominated! I don't expect it will make it through, as we rarely ever feature new releases of media/art here. There might be a concern of promoting it. There's also a gossippy aspect to the content of the book that editors here might not appreciate (as it details his personal experience of his weird upperclass life). But the significance is certainly there, so who knows! ~Maplestrip/Mable (chat) 09:52, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
About the only three topics I can think of that ITN never features are celebrity gossip, sports retirements and announcements that someone/some group intends to do something in the future. Everything else is worth nominating as long as it's both in the news and not routine. I don't know how Harry's book will fare, beyond being amazed if editors are unanimous about it, but its definitely worth nominating. Thryduulf (talk) 11:40, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Also any cycling of ministerial posts at the state or municipal level, meteorological curiosities, U.S. Supreme Court nominations, actors/newscasters being fired or suspended, and (although a bit dated now) anything that Trump tweets out. 🌈WaltCip-(talk) 13:48, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
We tend not to focus on sales or viewership records for contemporary pop culture (for example how many box office records Avatar 2 is breaking), so I don't think we'd do the same with books. Masem (t) 17:35, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Thanks, all. I hadn't considered the promotional aspect of running this. As such, I won't nominate the item. Schwede66 21:15, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
Professional sports are, by definition, all about making money – merchandise, pay-per-view, ticket sales, sponsorship, &c. So, if we can't run books and movies because it would promote them, then it is also wrong to run so much sport at ITN, right? We should focus on purely amateur sporting events like the Boat Race, right? But note that that's not the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race any more. It's now "The Gemini Boat Race". Gemini? It turns out that Gemini is a crypto concern named after the Winklevoss twins. But they did actually row for Oxford and in the Olympics too so that's all good then. What could possibly go wrong...? Andrew🐉(talk) 13:26, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
We have ITNRs that are equivalent to championships for sports: that would be things like the Oscars for film, Booker prize for books, etc. Key with nearly all those events is that while at the end of the day it is about how well a specific commercial product did (whether that be a well-paid sports team or a internationally distributed film), the awards separate themselves from the commercial side, looking at performance (how well a team competes against another, how well a film ranks against others judged by a mostly independent body).
Also, I would not say that we don't run things like the OP suggests (Spare being a best seller in the UK) because of the promotional aspect. Simply that things like viewership or purchase records are very fleeting in today's age, and they are more like superlative fact that would better suited (if possible) at DYK. Mind you, I think we are missing something that sits between DYK (which is meant to focus on new or improved articles) and ITN (focusing on major news) related to new and currently interesting tidbits of existing topics but do not demand a ITN blurb, but I don't know where we'd put that. Masem (t) 13:35, 12 January 2023 (UTC)
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