Misplaced Pages talk:What Misplaced Pages is not: Difference between revisions

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	== Major change: Journalism -> Original reporting ==		== Major change: Journalism -> Original reporting ==

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

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

Applying rules judiciously

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

Agreed, this page is like nectar for the pedants. --Cypherzero0 (talk) 16:07, 27 August 2014 (UTC)

"Misplaced Pages is not a technocracy"?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If one man's skill surpasses another man's, would that be teamwork or competition... or free-willed editing without harmful intent? If the reference is not bare URL, why should references by re-stylized? --George Ho (talk) 15:41, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Separately, to get at the non-antagonistic part of your post: Where do you get the idea that templates must be simple? Many are complex for a reason, because it's easier to have one template, the name of which people can remember, with basic functions people can remember, and many more detailed options people can look up only when the really need to, rather than a separate template for every possible specialty case. Name one template that is "abusive", and describe whom or what it is abusing and how, and where it got its magically anthropomorphic powers. Where do you get the idea that a template must be used a lot to be useful? This is usually the case with stand-alone templates, but is generally never the case with templates that are part of a series or set that is used often, in which some members are frequently used and some are not but necessary for completeness' sake (for various reasons, including because bots parsing them according to a list, e.g. of language codes, will choke if one goes missing because someone didn't think it was used enough. Later editors will naturally re-create any missing ones to patch the hole in the series, so deleting them is futile and WP:POINTy.
"People are expected to be computer scientists or engineers, especially on templates" is a false statement; no one seriously believes that, and if it were true the entire project would have collapsed before it ever got off the ground. It is by its nature easier to learn WP for people with the ability to pick up nerdy editing skills, but that is true of any encyclopedia operation (the exact skills just differ because our online environment isn't the same as the one used by Encyclopaedia Britannica in its heyday, based on paper book and journal research, editing and revision slowly by post, manual typesetting and painstaking pre-press error correction, etc.
WP having processes for deletion and page moving and other maintenance is not in any way "prompting us to question stability of Misplaced Pages". Where on earth do you get that idea?
"So should Misplaced Pages be technocracy? If not, shall there be a policy about technocracy? If not, essay?" Of course not, no, and feel free (respectively). For the essay, I would strongly suggest keeping it in user-space, which has more lax rules about content that is curmudgeonly and conflicts with standard practices and policies; you're willingness to verbally castigate entire classes of users for being more technical than you and not joining you in a luddite campaign, and your espoused belief that our entire template system is wrongheaded, along with everything else, don't bode well for survival of your essay in project-space. As with SweetNightmares's followup to you above, your missive here is wildly unfocused, and seems to just express a vague, diffuse unhappiness with everything Misplaced Pages does, from templates to moves to deletion to table formatting. It's too scatter-shot to come to any conclusion about other than this isn't material to add to WP:NOT. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ≼ 07:06, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm only going to touch on this briefly, as it's absurd. Templates are easy to use when properly documented, documentation is sometimes lacking - feel free to improve it. Templates provide near zero barrier to entry because they do not have to be used. Heck, you can do things entirely in plain text and allow other, more "technical", editors do the wiki code/templates. I'd equate it to complaining about shoelaces because not everyone can tie a bow. The only topic of interest in this discussion is the one about why people are leaving - and I could write an essay about how wiki's become a bureaucracy, how OR/Synth is a policy for traditional encyclopedias and is ruining wikipedia, how the likelihood of meaningful content from new/returning/infrequent editors remaining is crazy low compared to frequent editors, how frequent editors have to justify little but expect perfection/justification for edits from others, how since returning ~80% of my time has been spent on everything but editing (in WP or talk), how I used to edit with 1 wiki tab (I have 53 wiki tabs & IRC wiki help open, only 1 tab is for editing), how consensus doesn't work when there's only 2-4 editors, how the some of the best editors are drown in projects/administrative/culling instead of creation/improvement/cleanup, etc... wasn't going to go on like that but there it is. Templates... they rock. Complicated to create at times but so much simpler for everyone to use to create consistency. I'm particularly proud of that one, 5 core display formats for distinct use cases, list support, grouping support, text to image with dynamic number overlay all in a crisp 3 parameter template. It was even future safe, new game came out all that needed to be done was upload a character image - no template updates needed. Used on 3.34% of pages (wikipedia equivalent of ~153,000 pages) shows how easily a simple template is adopted by those who could never code it (I only added it to fewer than 10 pages) JMJimmy (talk) 13:24, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I guess I should elaborate on how it's a barrier. I find myself striving to find some uber-specific template that I'll only ever use once all the time. It is, for things like lang-en-GB, usually a complete waste of time: for all those minutes I spend using WP's disorganized system looking for unused niche templates like that (or bickering about them, for that matter), I could be doing actual research and writing articles. It is frustrating and discouraging, especially when there is poor documentation or it gets formatted/used inappropriately and subsequently reverted. I seriously doubt that I am the only Wikipedian who is as anal retentive. Regarding @Masem:'s comment below, the only Wikicode that should be required by editors is <ref> tags, to be honest, and for Wiki tables, thankfully we have tools. - Sweet Nightmares 16:15, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

There's lots of wikicode beyond just that, that you probably don't even think about. ":" and "*" in talk pages, "" and "'" for em and bold formatting, etc. This is above and beyond normal HTML markup. There is definitely a good # of exotic and obscure templates, but we never require the bulk of users to learn this. There are wikignomes, for example, that will handle the dialect templates if a new user doesn't. It would be nice if/when the visual editor comes back to have a drop-down to add the more commonly used ones (including the citation templates), but we're still not going to be able to document every single template this way. That's fine. --MASEM (t) 16:48, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

There are a lot of languages that a bot could automate the addition of the template, the languages it can't identify with accuracy could be flagged in some fashion by the bot. If that's too complicated/resource intensive for a bot a 3rd party tool could make a list of pages with untemplated foreign terms so anyone with knowledge of the template can do the addition. In the mean time, if you don't want to look up/learn "exotic" templates, don't. Someone who enjoys that soft of thing will do it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JMJimmy (talk • contribs) 21:34, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

It's not as simple as that. Someone with the goal of completeness cannot just turn a blind eye and do things grandma's way. In any case, with the concerned templates that sparked this debate, are they really even necessary? lang-en-GB? lang-en-CA? It's not like British or Canadian English is completely unintelligible; in fact, "Canadian English" is barely even defined. What could possibly be the use for such a template? It's just overcategorization and making Misplaced Pages harder. - Sweet Nightmares 23:30, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

At some point we could have a feature that says "please format the article in this dialect" , and so when these templates are used, metadata on language can be used to provide the correct alternate name. --MASEM (t) 23:36, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

I'll add that it seems hypocritical about having to learn how to use templates, when you say "well, everyone is familiar with wikicode, right?" At some point, every editor had to learn that, including the more complicated things like wiki tables, so that argument is bogus. Now, on the number of possibly useful templates that one might need to learn, yeah, that can be a bit overwhelming but the few I use on a regular basis become second nature after repeated uses. There's no technology-magic isolating editors from understand the use of templates just as there is nothing to isolate editors how to learn wikicode. (Now, writing templates, that's a whole new story...) --MASEM (t) 13:34, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

The only templates I use regularly are quotation and cite xxx. Tables are effectively a template. That said, you don't need to learn any wiki code. Some users just do basic copy edits and ignore all the wiki code. Sure it helps if you learn, but really if you go to a random article, hit history and skim back through the history you'll find that the majority of edits do not contain any wiki code or very minimal. As to writing templates, a basic template is trivial to write - honestly the biggest problem with writing them is the fact that there's no "code view" to allow you to toggle between compacted and human readable. Such things exist but I've not found with a bug free parser. JMJimmy (talk) 21:34, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

My point is that learning how to implement a template is no more difficult than learning how to write wikicode, but it does take time and persistence to memorize the common ones. That's not a technological barrier, however. We should try to help editors find and implement the more useful templates just as the editor helps with things like special HTML characters and markup, but there's no reason to remove their use on the claim they favor the technocrats over average editors. --MASEM (t) 23:34, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Moving on from templates, I'm becoming infuriated by use of dashes. Right now, this dash (–) is mandatory for titles that have year durations (2014–15 United States network television schedule) or two sovereign states (United Kingdom–United States relations). At least that dash (-) is useful for titles of biographies or nationalities, like Scotch-Irish American. Still, I could not even type in this dash (–), and I'm not a fan of redirects. I'm a fan of typing exact titles. However, other discussions related to dashes have been previously done, but they have not progressed much. I hope this isn't a recycled rehash of dash battles. Actually, I'm using dashes as an example of technocracy. --George Ho (talk) 06:45, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

There is always the normal html way via html entities, – and — (– and — respectively). Both are also in the "insert" line on the editor box along with other common characters that require extra strokes to enter. --MASEM (t) 13:36, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

To whom shall we teach these html entities? Shall which group remember them? I always knew how to type them; I don't use them very often in body articles and search boxes. --George Ho (talk) 15:28, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

It is expected that if you are going to participate at WP, you learn the fundamentals of how the edit box works on your own; we cannot hand-hold at that level. We do provide as much help (eg there is a "Help" right there above the box, there's a menu of "insert" shortcuts below the box, etc.), but to have to expect that we have to teach editors how HTML works is far below a reasonable expectation. Nor is learning the basics of HTML difficult. --MASEM (t) 15:37, 24 August 2014 (UTC)

Major change: Journalism -> Original reporting_Original_reporting-2014-08-17T12:25:00.000Z">

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oppose Fix the Journalism article if you want, but please leave the policy alone. The Encyclopedia Britannica could be considered journalism the way you're applying the definition. We're not reporting on the news, through original pieces or otherwise. The news is one of our sources. --NeilN 05:22, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
I'm going oppose also. Much of NOT, and in particular that section is just another iteration of Misplaced Pages is an (unoriginal) encyclopedia, including it is meant to be a an emphatic tertiary source (nothing original, except several aspects of composition) and not like a primary or secondary source. "Not journalism" gets that across in an accessible manner. Alanscottwalker (talk) 11:50, 20 August 2014 (UTC)
oppose wikipedia is not only NOT "original reporting" , it is also NOT "a lot of other (probably most other) types of journalism". -- TRPoD aka The Red Pen of Doom 01:31, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
Oppose. I find the OP's proposal to be a straw man. OP suggests "journalism" is used the wrong sense whereas I can perfectly assume that "journalism" is exactly what he is saying and journalism is not allowed in Misplaced Pages. What Misplaced Pages gathers, processes and disseminates is certainly not news. In addition, investigating the pragmatic value of the word "journalism" puts this field in connection with: (a) publication of content solely because they are novel, fun, controversial or shocking and (b) content that are occasionally judgmental, unfair, far-from-truth, based on assumptions or otherwise lacking value in a court of law or in science and academia. I'd say the word "journalism" is spot-on here. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 04:44, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
Oppose. For the reasons stated above. The OP should consider contributing to WikiNews, not Misplaced Pages.--Coolcaesar (talk) 11:56, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
Support No matter how much we can cry WP:NOTNEWS - Misplaced Pages, indeed, does gather, process and disseminate news, daily and prominently (heck, we have a "In the news" section on our main page!) -but not as original research. Instead, it collects what other sources have reported. This can indeed be called a type of journalism, even if the notion makes people shiver. Most "oppose" above insist that the are a tertiary source, or that the news are our sources: but this is exactly what this change clarifies: we do nothing original. In fact, the proposed change here is mostly cosmetic: it does not change anything of our current practices. It only clarifies what we do. Since policy is to be more descriptive than prescriptive, I see no problems with the proposed wording, and I consider it a welcome clarification.--cyclopia 15:18, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Question_Original_reporting-2014-08-19T13:13:00.000Z">

What is the proposed change that is being considered? If there is a question on whether to make a particular change to this policy, then the RFC should include a Survey section for !votes. What is being !voted on? Can someone state the status quo and the proposed change so that a Survey can be added? Robert McClenon (talk) 13:13, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Change from "journalism" to "original reporting"? That's the question for you. --George Ho (talk) 15:44, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Profanity censoring

@Lucas Thoms: Does the offensive/profanity language and offensive material on Misplaced Pages can be censored on articles and pages according to WP:CENSORED? --Allen 03:12, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

No, we do not censor profanity at all if it is part of the original source material. Editors are asked to avoid using that in talk page discussions, or to introduce it into article text if not necessary. --MASEM (t) 03:22, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Hi. We don't censor profanity but we do remove it. There is a difference. To censor it means to have a mandate to delete or circumvent it just because it is indecent. But we do remove it because their use is in violation of WP:NPOV. Inclusion of sentiments, passing judgment and WP:PEACOCK are instances of profanity's flaws. Also, an editor's use of profanity on his or her own volition is a violation of WP:CIVIL.

So, to sum up, rest assured that if a politician described another politician as a "cheap whore" and this exact incivility triggered the World War 3, there is nothing to stop you from writing it in the appropriate article.

Best regards,

Codename Lisa (talk) 05:36, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Actually, if the profanity on articles is allowed that way, it's used by WP:NOTCENSORED. But not in their user and talk pages. --Allen 22:23, 4 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes and no. Generally, apart from being profane, profanities have too much problems. Best regards, Codename Lisa (talk) 00:54, 5 September 2014 (UTC)

Can you provide a specific example? There may be other reasons that material was remove that has nothing to do with it being profane or offensive (such as vandalism, bias, and etc.). —Farix (t | c) 18:51, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

On articles contains profanity and offensive material in there, we censor or do not censor that as an unnecessary problem of reading that. --Allen 00:19, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

I asked for a specific example. Instead, i get a gibberish sentence that I can't make heads or tails of. —Farix (t | c) 01:14, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

Semi-protected edit request on 8 September 2014

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Minor grammar error under {{Section link}}: required section parameter(s) missing: “but polls or surveys can impede, rather than foster discussion” either is missing a comma (after “foster”) or has an unneeded comma. 174.141.182.82 (talk) 05:13, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

done Meters (talk) 05:17, 8 September 2014 (UTC)

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