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February 9

Template:Cite rt

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template(s) or module(s) below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

The result of the discussion was Keep per consensus. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 09:08, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Fixing broken nomination by Darkwarriorblake (talk · contribs) who accidentally nominated the template's talk page in MFD. Their rationale for template deletion was as follows:

It's a template that seems to literally exist for the purposes of citing Rotten Tomatoes, which is already covered by Template: Cite Web. It's redundant and exists to solve a problem that does not exist.

Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 22:32, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Cite Web does all the things these do, without creating a bunch of templates that will inevitably be deleted in time, requiring replacing with Cite Web. WP:OTHERSTUFF, having other redundant templates does not justify this one. Trust me, I would've been nominating each of these in time. The formatting for these is needlessly obtuse and also defies the guidelines of cite web, meaning a user going around doing mass changes is introducing formatting differences on Featured Articles. Maybe my initial argument was less detailed because I thought this was a no-brainer, but this and the other templates have no reason to exist when we already have pretty substantial and robust templates that do everything they do and more. Darkwarriorblake / SEXY ACTION TALK PAGE! 09:37, 10 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).

Template:Expert needed

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the template(s) or module(s) below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the template's talk page or in a deletion review).
The result of the discussion was partially deprecate and remove instances where a |reason= is not also provided. The arguments in this discussion are similar to the 2017 TfD for this template, but this time the delete or deprecate camp has the majority of participation. Primary focus here is the lack of of "necessary" changes in the previous discussions to make this template (more) useful following the previous discussions. The clearest and most persuasive reasoning for keeping this template, however, is for when it is transcluded with a |reason= parameter, i.e. actually indicating why an expert should edit the page, but its effectiveness in these circumstances is difficult to determine.
Moving forward, uses with a |reason= parameter should be kept, and uses with no reason given should either be given one or removed. After these "blank" uses have been taken care of, a more accurate determination of the usefulness of this template can be made. In other words, there is no prejudice against re-nominating this template at some point in the future, though probably not for a year or so or a few months after non-reasoned uses are fully removed. Primefac (talk) 13:16, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

As I posted on the talk page in October:

[D]oes this template ever work? It doesn't seem to have a way of actively notifying WikiProjects or other circles where someone who says "Hey, I know a lot about X, let me help" can actually do so. It just sits there in a category. There is a "reason" field, but I never see that used either. I never see people who use this template bring it up on the talk page. It's just a drive-by tag that's slapped on for no reason because an article is underutilized, and it literally never seems to do any good.

For instance, Music of Arkansas has had an "expert" tag since 2012, but the tagger never said anything on the talk page, nor did anyone else. I sampled a whole bunch of uses of this template, and not a single one had anything in the "reason" field, nor any relevant discussion on the talk page. It also doesn't seem like one has to be an "expert" to improve an article[...]It seems that the mere purpose of this template is redundant; in the Music of Arkansas example, ((tone)) and ((reorganize)) seem to do a better job at explaining the issues in the article.

Is this just my confirmation bias, or is this a valid concern? Is there any proof that its use actually helps in any scenario, or is it just 100% prone to drive-by tagging and superfluous to other maintenance tags? I saw the same thing happen with ((expand)) ages ago for much of the same reasons (excessive drive-by tagging, little to no explanation whenever the tag was used, redundancy to other tags).

In short, Is there a way to fix this template and make its presence more prominent to alert users who might actually be experts in the field, or should it just be deprecated?

Everyone involved in the ensuing discussion seemed to have a similar take to mine: that they've never seen it actually result in an article getting improved, that the template itself is prone to drive-by tagging, and that there are far better ways of notifying relevant editors of an article's need for improvement. Even the addition of a "reason" field does not seem to have helped any, as no one ever seems to fill it out (or worse, as on Alcoholic lung disease -- that one had both ((expert needed)) and ((cleanup)), whose reason field stated "this article needs an expert").

The 2017 MFD, closed as "keep", had similar discussion points:

Nyttend had previously nominated the template for deletion in 2013 based off the precedent of ((expand)) being deprecated, but that discussion also closed as "keep".

In both cases, most of the "keep" votes were WP:ITSUSEFUL, or vague support like "I've seen it work before", "it's used on a lot of articles" (so was {[tl|expand!), or "it might be useful to someone" without any evidence of the sort. The 2013 TFD suggested making the "reason" field mandatory, but this does not seem to have been implemented, and people are still using it without filling in the "reason" field at all.

tl;dr: The issues dictated in the previous two MFDs still seem to be valid, and have not changed one iota since 2013. With all of the above in mind, plus the precedent established by the deprecation of ((expand)) way back in 2010, I think that this template should be deprecated. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 22:27, 9 February 2021 (UTC)|1=Expert needed))[reply]

  • @Pigsonthewing: As many other people have proven in this and the last two TFDs, that would mean removing literally every single instance. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 04:20, 13 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, not "literally". I took a quick look at articles using the template, and there are absolutely instances where reasons are given. And even if 90% were to be removed, what would be the problem? Wouldn't that make the tag more useful by removing instances where it's unhelpful? I think such a stipulation would be a good idea. Prinsgezinde (talk) 06:07, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • The last two TFDs have had people suggesting improvements to its functionality. None of these have been implemented except for a "reason" field, which no one ends up using. I have asked for examples of this template providing the intended result and gotten literally zero evidence. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 16:22, 16 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • For one, the backlog of pages has gone from 6,996 to 4,446 between 2017 and today, so clearly there are people doing things with it. For two, I don't think that unfilled parameters are a reason to delete a template. There was plenty of hemming and hawing about people never supplying subject areas, and a 1,500-article backlog of unclassified ((expert)) tags going back to 2007, which ended up taking less than a day to clear out by adding subject parameters. I think it's completely realistic to think that we can fix remaining parameters, rather than just deleting maintenance tags from thousands of articles (as though this will fix what's wrong with any of them). jp×g 18:14, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The biggest issue is that ((Expert needed)) has no effective means of contacting those experts. This seems to be because this template occupies a weird non-committal space between your average cleanup template and a proper workflow—it lacks the specificity and urgency that would accompany something like a request for comment, for example. There are a handful of processes that fulfill a lot of what ((Expert needed)) is trying to do; I'll list the ones that come to mind first (and please feel free to correct/add on after me):
  • Flagging attention=yes on an appropriate WikiProject template on the article's talk page. This is slightly more useful than ((Expert needed)) because it at least theoretically notifies that WikiProject (more like putting a request in the mailbox than dumping it in the driveway), but it has the same issue of "passing the buck" and hoping that someone is monitoring the "needs attention" category. Other issues: it doesn't show up in the article itself (though that could be considered an upside, considering that burying it in the talk page leads to slightly less drive-by tagging), and it doesn't allow for naming a reason (although that's (hopefully) subsumed by discussion on the talk page). It also is supposed to be used "sparingly," but then again so is ((Expert needed)), so that doesn't mean much for our purposes.
  • Adding a request for comment from an appropriate WikiProject. This has the benefit of actually being tracked by Article Alerts, which means that there's a high chance that someone will actually respond to your query. The issue, of course, is that "query" is the operative word—RFCs are for specific questions and their resolutions, not general issues—and this doesn't end up in the article text itself, either.
  • Submitting the article for peer review. This solicits advice, but from a general audience—not experts in the field.
All this is to say that this template is trying to handle quite a few things at once, in subsuming both general verification and RFC-lite, and without any of the multi-step parts that make those less prone to the sort of spamming and stagnation that this one is. You can make the argument that ((Expert needed)) occupies a unique niche amongst these other processes; you can just as easily make the argument that it doesn't—what's most important, though, is that at the very least we know exactly what we're losing.
The main unanswered question, then, is simple: in deprecating this template, what would take its place?
–LogStar100 (talk) 04:06, 15 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Every maintenance template has a backlog: do you think that the existence of Category:Articles lacking sources from December 2009 is a valid reason to delete ((Citation needed))? jp×g 23:01, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • You're just restating what the template is supposed to be for but ignoring its inherent flaws. It was on an article for twelve years where nothing happened. I get that there is no deadline, but that doesn't mean that maintenance templates can just sit gathering dust forever like this. I have seen zero evidence of any so-called "experts" coming to rescue an article, and no one has ever been able to come forth with a single instance of this template serving its intended purpose. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 23:29, 17 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Articles needing expert attention
Fig. 1: Graph of the number of articles having the ((Expert needed)) tag, by month. Total is 4,474.
Generally I'm mainly trying to use the Wikipedia leads to establish my coordinate system, so the majority of my edits address problems with the lead. But I often come across sorry articles in a terrible state of affairs, and when I can, I try to break the back of what's preventing other editors from chipping in. Some articles are in such a sorry state, the casual editor simply doesn't know where to begin. There are those here who believe that all editor projects begin by starting a homestead on the talk page. Yeah, no. If I did that I would soon be a citizen of Wikipedia, and unemployed in the real world. A wizard arrives exactly when he means to, and then he buggers off ASAP. Maybe I launch a couple of fireworks with my bushy eyebrows to delight the children, but then I'm off to the next page. I do some of my "back breaking" work because I can (there's the comparative advantage term kicking into action). Because I have actively engaged with with ten of thousands of Wikipedia leads, I know a right proper mess when I see one. I didn't pick that number "tens of thousands" out of the air. I maintain my own personal wiki, where I often copy key sentences from Wikipedia leads into what amounts to a shadow wiki. Today I have 24,974 pages in my personal wiki invoking template:Wikipedia, which is what I do to mark the page as a shadow page to (usually) the same page name on Wikipedia.
Sometimes I come across pages where I would like to break the back of the existing gridlock, but I simply can't, because I can't even fake knowing enough to not potentially make the situation worse. For these I often slap on an "expert needed" template, always with a reason, rarely with an associated talk entry. I'm not trying to justify my behaviour, I'm merely offering up honest description. Just in my last 1500 edits or so here on Wikipedia (less than two years most likely), I see edit comments about my use of the "expert" templates on the following articles:
I'm not here to advocate that my judgement is generally steady and sound. On the contrary, my wiki travails continue morning, noon, and night, come rain, sleet, or snow. But I do generally try to do mostly the right thing while passing through. 25,000 pages actively pillaged (countless more visited without the T-shirt), and the six above pages had me entirely stumped as to how to fix the central problem. I think there's a tremendous amount of non-survivorship bias at play in this discussion. The whole point of expert needed is that some pages become mired in non-productive quagmires and that you really do need to pass the torch to some future editor—quite possibly some long future editor, because we don't actually compel participation (though we grind hard on people for not homesteading on the talk pages). You can make these templates go away, but you can't make the underlying problem go away. Think about it. The reason= default text could easily be "this foe is beyond my powers", aka I'm not the right wizard for this mission, aka this ain't my particular Balrog. Without delving into my particular wizardly powers, what I can say at least is that I have impressively bushy browwicks, and generally my browwicks don't sag unless the "wizard wanted" sign is one for the ages.
I've finish off by saying something about "expertise" in general. I've read two book in over the past two years on the subject: The Death of Expertise (2017) and Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts (2012). I don't recall these books clearly now, but the general tenor was that expertise is a complicated construct. Remember how we forked off that otherpedia that never found its wings? It was all about toeing the line of traditional expertise and authority. I think the real problem is that few people want to ride into the fray under the banner of "expert for general hire". And we don't actually need a true expert, what we actually need is someone who is sufficiently immersed in the topic area to be fluent in snipping the right colour wire, so as to put the article back on its feet again, when no-one else dares to pick up the wire cutters; I'm rarely trying to summon an actual "expert" so much as an ecosystem appropriate Crocodile Dundee. G'day mate! Crikeys, this page is a right mess. Toss me a shrimp on the barbie—actually a prawn, but he's not sure we're not American—while I snip a few of the worst wires and trim a few of the worst barbs in this soupy brier patch. If it were up to me I'd rename these template pages "Crocodile needed" and be done with it. Taht's the real problem here, IMHO: we're trying to summon an Oxford bow tie (see The Russia House (film)) when what we actually need is a Bowie knife.
Meanwhile, the bullhorn itself is not the problem. It mainly needs to be pointed better; and even then don't expect miracles, because many of the pages this gets slapped onto are legitimately hurting units. Are you thinking that if we eliminate these templates, people who are now doing template drive-bys are suddenly going to start homesteading on the talk pages and really finally at lost last roll up their sleeves to fix the problem? If so, I respectfully submit that you're completely off your rocker. This whole expert-needed mechanism is orthogonal to homesteader culture, and not in the least antithetical. Just my long-winded two cents. — MaxEnt 21:51, 27 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You should consider making a TLDR summary. - Knowledgekid87 (talk) 21:55, 27 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You mean you can't understand "This whole expert-needed mechanism is orthogonal to homesteader culture, and not in the least antithetical."? Me neither. I'm a "brevity is the soul of wit" man myself. Nigej (talk) 21:34, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
"Homesteader culture" is the fantasy some various proposed change to Wikipedia culture (e.g. nuking the expert needed editorial template system) with result in more constructive volunteer contributions through increased participation and settled discussion on the talk page. These are the editors I referred to as homesteaders: they stay for a drink or two and socialize.
I am very much a tumbleweed editor. I leave comments on the talk page, but I then I blow town, because I have fish to fry in the next town over, and there are in excess of 5 million towns, each with its very own talk page whistle stop (of these 5 million towns, I don't intend to visit more than about 100,000—and in doing so I could feasibly leave an edit on 20,000 of these). I made that comment because I skimmed the other comments before me, and picked up the gist of a certain sentiment cluster that progress is more readily made when people stick around the talk page, rather than flagging and fufarting off.
When a tumbleweed flags a page, it's in the context of tens of thousands of other pages visited. That ought to be worth something, but how to capture it? I know: create a quick and dirty flagging system that passes the torch across the cultural divide from tumbleweeds to homesteaders. We could call it, hmm, "expert needed". Yeah, sure. That might even work. Only is hasn't worked great. I get it. But this is what I'm referring to as the orthogonal issue: that you aren't helping the tumbleweeds at all by removing something that's within their flighty wheelhouse in the expectations that they will settle down and join a different culture. Less brief, perhaps more clear—yet no apparent gain in the wit department for all that.
I really came back to confess that I have again resorted to my least favourite tool, and slapped expert needed computer science on Classification scheme (information science) (which is freshly renamed from something ghastly; see my one-and-done comment on the talk page there). This instance does nothing for my argument keep (already registered above) as computer science is the wrong discipline, but next best is Wikipedia:WikiProject Libraries and that really looked wrong. This is precisely the kind of nasty page where we need some kind of effective solution, yet it's probably out of reach for the average person who drifts along. The overlap with semantic spectrum is conspicuous, yet I haven't the faintest idea of where to begin the surgery.
I pretend not to know much about this sphere, only I'm not quite as clueless as all that. When it comes to something in the JavaScript world (gigantic) you can pretty much count on some intrepid coder who cranks out JavaScript for a living (with a secret fetish for computer science legalese) to come along and sort the subject matter boundaries out with verve and dispatch. But not for this sad duckling: it's simply not ANSI- or W3C- or WHATWG-adjacent enough to attract that kind of definitive attention.
I don't have a solution. But this is another fine example of the problem space, IMHO. Just today I read through the whole of MOS:NUMBERS. It would be heavy going if I didn't already know most of it. I love that document, because it's a fine example of a document written in the aftermath of what people who showed up actually did (every single counterexample has probably occurred in a real edit).
For this debate, the pages to consider are not the ones where expert needed was ill advised (which happens with every mechanism to some degree), but the pages where alternative solutions are far from obvious—without simultaneously presuming that more participation on the talk page solves everything, because that mode of engagement is far from reflecting the whole of the productive culture here. — MaxEnt 01:35, 11 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are plenty of situations in which expert attention is specifically needed, and not references or copyediting or NPOV. A great example is the tag at Pierce oscillator#Operation: this a problem that only an electrical engineer (or an advanced amateur) would be able to even make sense of. I wouldn't expect a philosopher's involvement to help with this section at all. Likewise, I would not expect an electrical engineer to be any use at Subjective expected utility, and I would not expect a copyeditor with no domain expertise to be particularly helpful in either. Having subject-specific expert templates is the only way these articles are going to be fixed; there is a difference between "refactor some paragraphs" and "fundamentally re-approach how the subject is being explained". jp×g 23:13, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Particular expert isn't needed to report what a source says. Unless of course, the expert is meant to provide a synthesis - which would be exactly what policies prohibit. Furthermore, this would only serve to discourage contributions - as it certainlly appears that the expert needed tags currently successfully do. All the more reasons to delete not only as unhelpful, but as a potentially harmful tag. If an article is confusing to read there is ((Confusing)). --Tomobe03 (talk) 23:28, 13 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • I encourage you to go through Category:Physics articles needing expert attention and look at some of the articles. Enhancement or quenching of QD, Q-wire and QW radiations, to pick an example, cannot be fixed with grammar or wikilinking. It's not that it's "confusing", it's that it basically hasn't been written and none of the stuff in it is explained. Sure, a person with no domain knowledge could expand the article (you don't need a PhD to edit), but I'd say that if they did even a remotely good job, they would have domain knowledge by the time they were done. This isn't the same thing as copyediting because an article is confusing. jp×g 17:45, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • @JPxG: " fixing this will probably take me less than a day." Which is why in three AFDs dating back eight years, no one has done it. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 17:35, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Fabrickator: The backlog per se is not the issue. The misuse and lack of attention are. Ten Pound Hammer • (What did I screw up now?) 17:35, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • If it takes less than one day for a single person to clear out a 14-year backlog, it probably wasn't that big of a deal to begin with. This TfD itself has probably consumed more energy than it took me to categorize every unspecified inclusion. jp×g 17:45, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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Template:Skenderaj

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The result of the discussion was keep. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 19:09, 16 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Nearly all people in the main template have no WP article.–Cupper52Discuss! 20:02, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Template:ISO 15924/footer

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The result of the discussion was Delete; deleted by Fastily (talk · contribs · blocks · protections · deletions · page moves · rights · RfA) AnomieBOT⚡ 03:10, 17 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Delete. This navbox does not help navigating: just a list of 200 letter codes and no related info with it at all (expected like: linked names or articles). A better navigation place is provided in mainspace(!) and in template backoffice workspace. Interestingly, already in 2006 deletion was proposed by Evertype [1] ;-) DePiep (talk) 19:50, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

You're right, they do link. Maybe I am detailing too much here ;-)  : The issue I see is: the target article/topic is not visible, nor logically present. For simple navigation, I'd expect texts that actually say, like, "code Xabc = topic PQR in article Abd Def" (linked properly of course). And this is what the two alternatives, even one in mainspace article body, already do. -DePiep (talk) 23:16, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
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Template:Nintendo publishees

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The result of the discussion was delete. Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 19:10, 16 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The scope of this template is not well-defined. At a quick glance, you may think it is a list of Nintendo subsidiaries and affiliated development studios, but no, that's already covered with Template:Nintendo developers. So I'm not sure what the scope of the template is here. It seems to be studios that have had their games published by Nintendo at least once, but that is a weak relationship to build a navigation template around. Navigation templates are supposed to list related articles with that relationship established in reliable sources per WP:NAV. Anything grounded in sources will start to push this template towards being duplicative of the aforementioned Nintendo developers template. So I recommend deletion. TarkusABtalk/contrib 16:53, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Template:Citra Award for Best Actor

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The result of the discussion was delete and then redirect Plastikspork ―Œ(talk) 19:13, 16 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

This award navigational template is redundant to an already existing award navigational template, Citra Award for Best Leading Actor, which User:CalliPatra tried to WP:PROD as a "bad duplicate", [2], when the original template was created eight years ago. Aspects (talk) 13:26, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Template:R from template shortcut

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The result of the discussion was merge to Template:R from shortcut. ((R from template shortcut)) will now be placed in the holding cell where it will remain until namespace detection is implemented in ((R from shortcut)) after which the merge will be performed. (non-admin closure) --Trialpears (talk) 09:04, 22 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Propose merging Template:R from template shortcut with Template:R from shortcut.
I think these templates would work better if merged together. It is pretty pointless to have a separate template just for template redirects, although I am not opposed to keeping the two categories to track all the template shortcuts. In fact, aren't template shortcuts supposed to be from one template code to another template code? Aasim (talk) 10:12, 9 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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Template:State results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election

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The result of the discussion was relisted on 2021 February 28. Primefac (talk) 01:19, 28 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

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