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Medium.com
Has medium.com recently changed its revenue sharing model? I've been noticing an uptick in linkspamming of medium blogs recently. MrOllie (talk) 23:08, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
- Perhaps also worth asking/cross-post on WP:COIN? Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 10:34, 12 November 2023 (UTC)
This template generates content like this: RFC 125 which are often placed in the bodies of articles. This seems to be contrary to WP:NOELBODY and often the ELs should be used as citations and the use of the template leaves sentences without a cite e.g. at WebSocket. I raised this on the talk page a week ago, but there's been no response, so bringing it here for more attention. I fail to see why these links should be treated differently to every other EL. SmartSE (talk) 15:57, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
- We have thousands of external link templates, they are not meant as a replacement for inline citations. They were invented/designed to be used in places where normal citations are overkill or not required, such as the external links section. Probably what should happen in this case is someone write a bot that finds all instances that are embedded in the main text, and convert them to proper CS1|2 citations. In the interim you could update the template documentation about best practice, and provide a boilerplate CS1|2 template, that can easily be copy-pasted in lieu of using the template. -- GreenC 16:38, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
- Hey, @Smartse, the history matters here, so let me give you (and anyone else unfamiliar with it) a quick overview. For years and years and years – before you and I started editing, even, there were three 'magic words' that produced links if you just typed them in plain text (followed by a space and a number). They were RFC, ISBN, and PMID. At the time, this was considered highly desirable and convenient behavior, even though we did have the occasional problem when editors wrote sentences like "Well, this dispute has been spread across multiple pages, and the results of RFC 1 at Talk:Foo and RFC 2 at Talk:Bar are contradictory...." – and it would automagically link the plaintext "RFC 1" to https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1 and "RFC 2" to https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2, whether you liked it or not.
- In 2016, @Legoktm opened the mw:Requests for comment/Future of magic links to start the process of unwinding it from the software. The central Phab task is still open, and based on what I see here in the Reply (visual mode) box, it looks like VisualEditor and/or Parsoid haven't stopped doing this (@SSastry (WMF), is this on your list?), so the software end of this isn't finished. As part of that process, we (i.e., editors here at the English Wikipedia) have bot-replaced the plain text with templates.
- In terms of your concerns, all of this background amounts to a long-standing consensus that IETF RFC links are one of those "rare exceptions" to the general rule in NOELBODY. I do not recommend writing the bot suggested above, as many of these are merely leftovers of links to RFCs that were were mentioned, rather than being intentional uses of primary sources. That said, since you "raised this on the talk page a week ago", and "there's been no response", WP:SOFIXIT applies, if that's what you personally thought best for that article.
- (@GreenC, external link templates were invented/designed to solve maintenance problems in the ==External links== section, by reducing the number of broken links. If a popular website uses a stable identifier and periodically rearranges itself, then we can often fix all the templated links via a single edit to the template, rather than having to edit each article individually.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:10, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
- That rationale of stable identifiers is flawed, because in reality when a website makes a change, the result is some links within a domain are dead, and some are not. I run WP:URLREQ and it's a constant problem. When admins upgrade their website, they almost never migrate every old URL to the new URL.
- Furthermore, sometimes entire sites go dead and the whole template has to be replaced. One might say, well, simply add
|archive-url=
to the template, but this requires bespoke bot code to manage the template, and because there are thousands of these templates, some very complex to parse, added and changed daily, no one is doing that. The best solution is to use standard templates like CS1|2, or square links. All the standard tools (IABot, WaybackMedic, Citation bot, refill, etc) are designed to maintain them. Everything else is not checked or maintained by bots, with a few exceptions, and the result is we have a lot of link rot in these templates that is getting worse with time. -- GreenC 17:43, 14 November 2023 (UTC)- Yes, it's true that websites are sometimes inconsiderate, but many of these were created years before the tools you mention, so the design and maintenance of tools (e.g., IABot) that didn't actually exist at the time obviously did not factor into why and how people made them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:01, 14 November 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks for the ping! I will have to page in all the discussion in those tasks to see where we are stalled. SSastry (WMF) (talk) 00:10, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
- Looks like we will have to address T145590 for read views for most wikis, so my sense is that we are likely to pick that up in the coming months (may be the new year). SSastry (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 15 November 2023 (UTC)
Find a Grave as an External link discussion (on the Perennial source Talk page)
A discussion about Find a Grave as an External link is underway at "Find a Grave -- perennial source (cemetery listings v. grave listings)" – S. Rich (talk) 20:24, 19 November 2023 (UTC)
Justina Valentine
Hi, is this here an acceptable official site for the Justina Valentine article ? I removed it as it is a sales site. The original official site is a dead link. The article makes no mention of her running a boutique site, regards Atlantic306 (talk) 23:42, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Atlantic306, I wouldn't use it. The section of WP:EL about official websites sets two criteria:
- The linked content is controlled by the subject (organization or individual person) of the Wikipedia article.
- The linked content primarily covers the area for which the subject of the article is notable.
- Looking at that site, there's lots of photos of Valentine but no indication who controls the content. In addition, as you pointed out, it's an e-commerce site, and doesn't provide any information about the subject of the article (nor is she notable for e-commerce). That's my two cents. Schazjmd (talk) 23:59, 3 December 2023 (UTC)
- Thanks, I agree Atlantic306 (talk) 00:01, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
Vanessa Marquez
I'm not sure where to bring this, so I'll raise it here. Maybe someone else who frequents this noticeboard will have a better idea of what venue would be best for this type of concern.
It has recently come to my attention that the article for actor Vanessa Marquez includes a police bodycam video featuring her fatal shooting (albeit partially off-camera, towards the end), as well as the events leading up to it; there is also an external link to the same video. The video has been part of the article since May of this year; the external link has been there since March 2020. The footage of her incapacitated body, along with any identifying shots of the officer doing the shooting, are both blurred, and the video comes with a viewer discretion warning at the start and narration throughout, so it's not as if no effort was made to show the situation with respect towards Vanessa and the officers. However, it still feels like something that should at least have community input before it is included in an article.
Thoughts? Kurtis (talk) 13:34, 5 December 2023 (UTC)
- I'm not a regular at this noticeboard, so take my advice with many grains of salt.
- Given the video is in the article, I don't think the external link is necessary.
- I'm not sure what you mean by "community input" – WP:NOTCENSORED reminds us against being touchy on that score. Regardless, I think Talk:Vanessa Marquez would the place to raise issues with displaying the video itself.
- Cremastra (talk) 21:54, 10 December 2023 (UTC)
- @Kurtis, thanks for posting this. @Cremastra is correct that the link should at most be in one place. Either the {{Listen}} template in the section about her death should be removed, or the link under ==External links==; we should not have both.
- For the rest, I think your RFC at Talk:Vanessa Marquez#Request for Comment: Inclusion of police bodycam footage should answer your question about whether editors want to include it at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:53, 11 December 2023 (UTC)
- @WhatamIdoing: You're welcome, and thank you for linking the RfC. I think that's the best place to discuss whether or not the video should be included. @Cremastra: Wikipedia may not be censored, but we should still be cautious about how loosely we interpret that rule. Depicting someone's mental breakdown and fatal shooting in a video is the kind of thing I really think should be discussed so that if it is to be included, it's with community consensus. Kurtis (talk) 00:37, 16 December 2023 (UTC)
VH1 at web.archive.org
2603:6000:d102:a66d::/64 was listed at WP:AIV due to adding external links like this. Any opinions on those edits? Johnuniq (talk) 02:44, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
- It looks like an archived copy of the official website, which would be fine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:17, 26 December 2023 (UTC)
Templates being used to embed external links into articles
I have a question about templates like {{Magic: The Gathering card}} that are being used to essentially embed external links into articles (either in the lede section of body sections). The documentation of Template:Magic: The Gathering card states that the template should only be used in "External links" sections when used in articles, but at least in Odyssey (Magic: The Gathering) that is not the case at all. This template looks like it's being used quite a lot so I'm wondering if the use of this template in general (there are others like {{NASDAQ}}, {{Bibleverse}}, etc.) has ever been discussed and any type of consensus reached as to whether they're OK to use in the bodies of articles. I don't know exactly how many of these templates there are, but I'd imagine many were bodly created very earlier on when Wikipedia was just starting out and probably never were discussed over the years as relevant policies and guidelines started being fleshed out and further developed. All three of the documentation pages for the templates listed above state they should only be used in external link sections or in infoboxes, but that doesn't really seem to reflect how they're being used in many cases. They are all being used so many times that unilaterally going around an changing them all might (even with the best of intentions) might be seen as disruptive. There has already been an RFC for the "NASDAQ" template at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Ticker symbols in article leads so I guess that's sufficient for that particular template, but I'm wondering if the same thing needs to be done for the others individually or whether it can be done for such templates as a group generally. Even with that ticker symbol RFC, though, there's no telling how many have just ignored it or were just unaware of it when using the template. For example, AAON, ACI Worldwide, Alliance Fiber Optic Products and Amalgamated Bank were found by hovering through the first column of "A" listings at Category:Companies listed on the Nasdaq so there might be more. Of the four I found, three look as if they might've just slipped through the cracks during whatever post-RFC clean up took place, but at least one was an article created a few years after the RFC. -- Marchjuly (talk) 21:56, 31 December 2023 (UTC)
- NASDAQ was previously used in the first sentence for many articles, but since the 2012 RFC it has mostly been used in infoboxes. Bibleverse has been generally accepted, although there's at least one editor who objects to it. Similar templates include Template:IETF RFC. Generally, the unifying theme is that the contents are commonly referred to through some standard mechanism (whether that's RFC 2119 or Genesis 1:1 or an Opus number for music), a tendency not to have a matching Wikipedia article (we would link to our article about RFC 4824 but we [weirdly] don't have an article about RFC 2119, so the external link template could be used in that case), and some acceptable website (authoritative or otherwise) that contains primarily the text of that item.
- That said, I do not think that links such as the one found in Odyssey (Magic: The Gathering)#Torment would likely be approved by the community as being sufficiently similar. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:49, 1 January 2024 (UTC)
- Thanks for the input. I've added some {{Please see}} templates to relevant WikiProject and template talk page to try and get more people involved in this discussion. -- Marchjuly (talk) 02:49, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
Bibleverse has been generally accepted, although there's at least one editor who objects to it.
I'm guessing you mean me? I'll just say that my experience is very different from WAID's – I've seen plenty of editors object to it, and very few experienced editors who actually prefer embedded links to footnotes. The Bibleverse documentation says that the template should not be used in the body of an article; this warning has been in place for years, and I don't believe anyone but WAID has ever formally contested it. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 19:37, 2 January 2024 (UTC)
- I think that the MTG card template is closer to {{Bibleverse}} and its usage is generally fine. Bibleverse is fine because very often an article might want to cite a relevant passage, and the reader would want to check for themselves. If a card is being addressed directly along the lines of "CardX was listed as one of the most famous cards from the expansion due to blah blah blah", linking CardX so that it's not just a name is very relevant. In the case of Black Lotus (Magic: The Gathering card), there is in fact an article to link, but that's not that common. Now, I can see possibly not using it for just passing mentions in raw texts, but I think that it's especially fine for, say, bulleted lists or paragraphs specifically about a card. SnowFire (talk) 03:57, 2 January 2024 (UTC)