User talk:Clovermoss

Are you a newcomer to Wikipedia? Here are some resources that you may find helpful:

• There's this video that explains some of the basics of how Wikipedia works. It's aimed more towards readers than editors, but it can give a decent foundation of some things to be aware of before you start editing. This video by an experienced Wikipedian provides more substantial advice. There is also this series.
• The Wikipedia Adventure. This is a very basic (and somewhat eccentric) editing tutorial.
• Do you have a conflict-of-interest? Read this guide. It's also important to be aware of an ongoing scam.
• Category:All stub articles which is organized alphabetically and by topic. All these articles could be expanded!
• This is a tutorial for what to know if you wanted to create an article. Our guideline on what is notable for inclusion on the site is a crucial part of this process.
• Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Words to watch – advice on phrasing to avoid when editing
• This page is a glossary of different terms used on Wikipedia that can help you understand what people are talking about if you come across an unfamiliar acronym.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory – this is a list of wikiprojects. Some are way more active than others but it's a decent way to try and find groups of articles that match your interests. I'm particularly fond of Wikipedia:WikiProject Canada and the associated challenge for improving articles.
• This is the perennial sources list, which can be helpful if you're not sure if something is a reliable source. If it's not on this list and you have concerns, try this noticeboard.
• If you are in a disagreement with another editor, you can try asking for a third opinion. There are also other processes for dispute resolution.

I want to create a subpage about the differences of certain community norms across different projects. So far, I have:

• Wikivoyage encourages original research
• Chinese Wikipedia runs banners encouraging use of social media like IRC, Discord and Telegram
• Italian Wikipedia requires editors have a month old account with at least 30 edits to create an AfD
• Danish Wikipedia's equivalent of AfD takes place on the article's talk page (kind've like how we do move discussions).
• The French Wikipedia has a message that freely licensed images are welcome in infoboxes of BLPs that do not have one. I wonder if this increases reader awareness that they can contribute.
• The Chinese Wikipedia requires 50 edits for someone to be autoconfirmed.

Talk page stalkers are strongly encouraged to pitch in if they know of anything. Thanks! Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 22:30, 17 February 2026 (UTC), last edited 12:39, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

I'm not a French speaker (although I learned that in school), but while browsing other-language Wikipedia's, I have noticed that French Wikipedia uses CET/CEST (UTC+1/UTC+2) as their default for times on signatures, as most French speakers live at that time zone. And they have a different layout for talk page discussions saying when the last comment was, how many comments in the thread, and how many people have commented. Additionally, their equivalent of the teahouse also has tags at the top saying (using machine translation with some copyediting:)

• Une réponse a été apportée à cette question. An answer has been provided to this question.
• Requête en attente d'une réponse. (comment y répondre ?) This request is awaiting a response. (How to respond?)
• Cette question est hors sujet par rapport à la mission de cette page d'entraide. This question is off-topic in relation to the purpose of this help page.

JuniperChill (talk) 23:46, 17 February 2026 (UTC)

Some of these comparisons can be found in main namespace articles about various Wikipedia editions like German Wikipedia. The German Wikipedia is the largest edition to use pending changes exclusively and translate Wikipedia articles by importing their edits. There's an old comparison page on them at User:Elian/comparison. There's also an old Signpost series called "interwiki report" which may be of interest to you. Graham87 (talk) 04:27, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

You can also find out more by poking around in Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/Series. Re the Danish Wikipedia putting AFD's on talk pages: that's how the English Wikipedia sometimes did things around 2004, though they've been moved to AFD subpages by now (see for example this revision of Wikipedia:Archived articles for deletion discussions/May-June 2004. But they seem to do deletion proposals on a subpage like us ... like da:Wikipedia:Sletningsforslag/Kristian Rem. Some things that other projects do are similarly holdovers of how we used to do them. Graham87 (talk) 04:35, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

@Graham87: Thanks for the correction! Was basing my original statements off some comments on Discord so I suppose that specific tidbit was wrong. I'll strike it. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 15:09, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

The Meta-wiki pages on the different projects, e.g. meta:English Wikipedia, tend to have a "unique qualities" section. Some of the entries are quite dated, though. Updating an improving them all might be a good place to record the information you're looking to document. Sdkb ^talk 19:16, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

I think what I'm looking for in total is a bit broader than unique qualities, but I'll try to update what is relevant as I come across it between both pages (there and mine). Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:43, 18 February 2026 (UTC)

En-WP allows some non-free use of pictures, many others (perhaps none? Take the language versions of Marian Ewurama Addy for example) WP:s don't. German WP has pending edits for almost everybody, I think. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:25, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

One of the things I notice a lot is that articles from smaller wikipedias tend not to have sourcing. I don't know if this is a desired norm or more like 'beggers can't be choosers', or whether some projects are just in a 'pre-2007' stage where it's normal for people to add their own knowledge to topics and not provide references (or if that's a chosen path given most knowledge in some societies is only recorded orally). Regardless I think inquiring about differences in norms between smaller and larger projects would be fruitful, makes me question whether mw:Reference Check is appropriate for all wikis Kowal2701 (talk, contribs) 02:00, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

hi! i'm not sure if you're still looking into this or you have other norms in mind, but here's some info in case it's helpful. (some references are 'older' so things might have changed)

1. language wikis that skew toward specific countries tend to reflect national norms/values (though this doesn't work for languages common in multiple countries) (Konieczny & Lewoniewski, 2024). differences between language wikis are especially clear in comparisons of the same history articles (Bridgewater, 2017; Kubś, 2021; so many things written by Luyt), current events (Otterbacher, 2014) and the types of content disputes people have (Apic et al., 2011; Yasseri et al., 2014).

2. enwiki biographies usually include more info on people's personal lives and controversies; polish wiki biographies usually include more mentions of communist ideology and polish ethnicity (while omitting other ethnicities, at the time of the study), and polish bios tend to describe how people overcome personal hardship (which reflects certain polish values) (Callahan & Herring, 2011).

3. Jemielniak (2014) sometimes compares enwiki and polish wiki in his ethnography. (imo) one of the more interesting mentions is user talk pages (p. 92–96). on polish wiki, editors respond to each other using the other person's talk page, so conversations are split between those two pages. this is more convenient for the editors, but it means everyone else has a harder time following discussions. on enwiki, all replies are kept on one person's talk page and structured like a forum chat. this contributes to more questioning in enwiki RfAs, compared to polish wiki.

4. i've also been meaning to learn more about namuwiki (Kim, 2023) and baidu and hudong (Zhang, 2014). i think u.s. researchers tend to overemphasize laws and censorship in asia, but i wonder if different encyclopedia traditions are also involved. that's been on my back burner though.

5. i hope this was helpful or at least interesting to read! also, i'm sorry school/research is taking a million years on my end. turns out information infrastructure along with AI and questionable research studies have made things more complicated. but i'm still working through it and trying to think of practical ways to help. it's slow, but i'm getting it done! SmolPetra (talk) 04:31, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

@SmolPetra: I'm definitely still interested. Your observations of actual research done here make me curious if all of this is mentioned on the actual articles for these projects. I did some work on the Wikipedia article earlier this year to incorporate more secondary sourcing. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 12:26, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

hmm... it does seem like the Wikipedia article generally describes content biases under 'language editions' and 'reception'. but it also seems like secondary sources attribute bias more to editors than control of information (eg, book burning, incentivizing 24/7 news, monopolizing orgs...) and unfortunately, articles for other projects are very short (eg, Polish Wikipedia). lemme see if i can update Bibliography of Wikipedia with secondary coverage, and maybe i can expand on some shorter articles as a start SmolPetra (talk) 03:45, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

The kind of conversation that SmolPetra describes, alternating between the talk pages of the participants, was common in English Wikipedia when I first became involved, in 2006, and continued for I'm not sure how many years later. There were some editors who preferred to keep conversations together on one page, but in that situation, if you wanted to make sure the other person was aware you'd posted a reply, you had to go to their talk page and post a message telling them. Many editors, probably most, took the line that if you were going to have to post on the other editor's talk page anyway, you might as well just post your response to their message there. Things changed dramatically when pings were introduced, so that you could alert the other editor to a message on your talk page without needing to go to theirs. Keeping the conversation on one page then very quickly became almost universal. JBW (talk) 08:34, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

@JBW: My understanding of early Wikipedia history is that there also used to be subpages of articles and talkpages? Daniel Quinlan has been around forever, maybe he knows what I'm talking about? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 12:36, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi Clovermoss, you might want to look at Meta:Wikipedia sociology. Additionally, you might reach out to WMF's Movement Communications Team to ask if they're already aware of or have internal documentation which compares wikis. Also, you could look into Meta:Research:Index. And if you're aware of practical real-world applications for synthesizing this information in an easily accessible way, and such a synthesis doesn't already exist, then I could see this becoming a small but formal research project and you might consider looking into requesting WMF grant funding for the work. ↠Pine (✉) 05:05, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

@Pine: I was actually inspired to start this after a conversation with a WMF employee, some initial observations came from them. Still, it wouldn't hurt to ask around to see if anyone knows more. This is more of a casual side-project for me, so I wouldn't really want to request funding for it. If I was to work my way up to requesting grant money for the first time, it'd be for something like writing a book about the institutional history of the English Wikipedia. A lot of changes are scattered all over the place and word of mouth tidbits but I think it's valuable information. As you know, I have my own offline collection of useful links. I also keep track of what people tell me in that sense. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 13:23, 16 March 2026 (UTC)

More Chinese Wikipedia specialties: Without autoconfirmed, you can create pages, but you cannot publish an edit from the source editor without previewing it first. Many projects have very incomplete policies and guidelines when compared to enwiki (e.g. Meta doesn't have a rule against canvassing), but zhwiki doesn't – they've imported nearly all of our policies, with the same shortcuts too! So you can type "WP:CANVASS", with its Latin letters and wrong colon (: vs. ：), into the zhwiki search bar and be taken straight to their behavioral guideline on canvassing. In case you didn't know, you can also find local versions of policies using the Wikidata interlanguage links in the top right (new Vector) or left sidebar (old Vector).

Another point on which Wikipedias diverge is their attitude to orgnames. Some explicitly require them with a verification process, some allow them but have no verification process, some discourage them, some prohibit them, and some prohibit them but have a grandfather clause for accounts created before a certain date. Here's an example of a comparison I did for one long-term editor: Special:Diff/1333533304. Toadspike [Talk] 16:09, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi everyone, I had my first meeting with Bernadette today. It went very well. I'd say her interest in hearing from other volunteers is incredibly sincere and it's very encouraging to see that. She comes across as very approachable, so I'd definitely say it's worth it for other people to reach out if there's anything you want to bring up about the future of the WMF. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:46, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Q: Did you set up a meeting, or rather was it spontaneous (i.e. them reaching out)? Sohom (talk) 19:50, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@Sohom Datta: I set it up. Apparently I was the first volunteer in the movement to reach out to her by email so I had a bit of a headstart lol. I'd reach out at bmeehanwikimedia.org if you're interested in talking with her too. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:58, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

That's good to hear. For what it's worth, she has been replying to posts on her user talk page on Meta. ↠Pine (✉) 20:47, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Hello Hannah,

I am hoping that this is the correct method to reach you? I am researching to create a wikipedia presence with a page and I am hoping that you can please help me to find a volunteer editor to submit the content and references I have created?

I have resided in the Niagara region since 2022. I am Canadian, but as a professional magician I traveled internationally for more than 30+ years. Last year I wrote a book "The Power of Magical Women" which is an anthology including 70+ female magicians. It would be very helpful to have a Wikipedia presence.

If you can please help me or guide me with connections or suggestions about how to be included within Wikipedia I would be very grateful. I have been struggling to understand how to connect with the correct people to obtain this goal. Thanks in advance, Connie Boyd ~2026-18659-35 (talk) 21:38, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi Connie, this is how people generally reach me. If you wish to create a draft, you should read this page. The most crucial thing to be aware of is that Wikipedia has specific guidelines for when someone is considered "notable" and most people do not meet that criteria. You can read more about what is required here, but generally speaking, you're looking at 3 different reliable sources (typically something like newspaper articles) that talk about you/your career in significant detail. Since you are looking for help, I'll also warn you that sometimes people try to scam people, and if anyone ever promises you they can create an article for money, they're probably trying to take advantage of you. Let me know if you have any questions. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 21:45, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Hello.I wanted to make an article about a Micronation that I (made from a neutral perspective ) including its 2 year history I wanted to know how.if. I could do this. Thanks! --Rocksvillewiki (talk) 03:24, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Hi Rocksvillewiki. Micronations are a tricky area to write about. First, what you need is at least three reliable and independent sources that talk about about the concept in detail (see Wikipedia's notability criteria). If that coverage does indeed exist, you'd need to be careful how you write about it (be clear that it's a micronation and that it is legally part of this bigger area, what places recognize it if any, etc). Generally speaking, the notability criteria is the biggest hurdle. Let me know if you have any questions. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 14:33, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Hello, I was wondering how to create a page? --Krazy-Eight (talk) 16:51, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@Krazy-Eight: There's a pretty detailed guide here. Let me know if you have any further questions. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:03, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

		The Original Barnstar
		Thank you for being such great admins for this site! (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 17:38, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@Phlogiston Enthusiast: Thanks. I read your userpage and you seem to find fires interesting, so maybe you'll like knowing I took the lead image at Self-contained breathing apparatus. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 19:50, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

OMG!!! Where did you get that??? Very cool, I need one for myself! I hate it when the smoke gets in my lungs so much. Worst thing about fires is the smoke for sure. Such a cool photo!! (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 20:07, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@Phlogiston Enthusiast: I took that photograph when I was learning how to put out fires. I'm a sailor so we need to be the firefighters if anything goes terribly wrong. We even got put in a completely dark room (to simulate losing power) and finding dummies within the alloted air. It was pretty badass. That said, I think my favourite parts were all the stuff we did at the YMCA with a lifecraft and immersion suit in their pool. So this is basically a really long way of explaining that I don't really own this in a personal capacity. I doubt it's something that's easy to get as a member of the general public. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:18, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Dang. I really would hate to be a firefighter, personally, but I really appreciate you all the more for your hard work. I doubt a Firefighting area would hire me nonetheless, honestly. How did they simulate only having limited amounts of air? Did they actually seal the room? What if you suffocated? (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 20:20, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@Phlogiston Enthusiast: So the place I did all this at had a room specifically designed for this that could easily have the power turned on/off and didn't have any windows. It wasn't "sealed" per se, but we had to use all the firefighting equipment when we were doing the exercises because it's heavy and you need to know how to use it. The SCBA had 30 minutes of air and we had to finish whatever we were doing before it ran out. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:24, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Wow. I didn't think Firefighting equipment would be heavy. Have you ever been in a Fire Lookout Tower? Also, do you have any advice on safe fire dousing? (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 20:38, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

@Phlogiston Enthusiast: Haven't been to a fire lookout tower as far as I know. As for firefighting advice, I'm not really comfortable giving out tips. I'd hate to give you a false sense of safety, you know? It's also one thing to say something and another to do it. Anyways, if you like photographing places like that, you could try doing WikiShootMe. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 20:44, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

Fair enough. I'm real competent in fire safety because I usually set them in safe areas in my backyard and then put them out after I'm done. (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 20:45, 26 March 2026 (UTC)

I should get a campfire. (Talk) PHLOGISTON ENTHUSIAST 20:45, 26 March 2026 (UTC)