Wikipedia:Village pump (all)

Discussion re RfC on removing "Gender" from "Categorizing by ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, or disability"

The WP:EGRS strongly discourages certain types of categories based on an intersection of some other characteristics with characteristics based on "ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, or disability". However, we have countless categories divided by gender, and at CfD discussions, especially about gender, this guideline proves to be problematic or outdated, and seems to indicate that the rule against categorization by gender is not supported or applied widely enough to be in a guideline. In some cases it even leads to sexist different treatment of men and women. See e.g. Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2026_May 28#Category:American male rock singers or Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2026 April 21#Category:Men by role. The times when we removed the category for American male novelists and kept the one for American wome novelists are hopefully far behind us now (Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2013 April 24#Category:American women novelists) Removing it doesn't mean that it suddenly would be always allowed, it would just be treated like any other categorisation, on its own merits but without a prejudice that it probably is wrong. Fram (talk) 10:09, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

• Categories. Are the benefits really worth all the strife? I do sometimes wonder.
  Clearly, sex is more of a defining characteristic for an athlete than it is for, say, a chemist. There's a lot of nuance and I think categorizing people by sex and gender is such a minefield that we ought to have some guidance; this is no task for a newbie. I agree that our current guidance is misleading and needs improvement.—S Marshall T/C 11:12, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  While it may be more defining for an athlete, it was (and in too many cases an countries) is defining in nearly every occupation you can imagine, as evidenced by the many studies and books about e.g. "women in ...". For chemistry, just see the long list of books. Fram (talk) 11:25, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  Categories (other than hidden maintenance categories) are one of Wikipedia's most useless, unused features, and should be retired. Levivich (talk) 13:32, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  I use them occasionally as a reader; though I agree they’re significantly less useful here than on Commons, where they’re the only search feature that remotely gets you what you’re looking for. TonyBallioni (talk) 13:48, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

• :: I disagree. I've always found them infinitely useful for many purposes, including those related to gender. I think the "neutral" ideology is definitely degenerating.Sira Aspera (talk) 10:30, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

  Disagree, as a reader they help you find many topics ~2026-43917-50 (talk) 20:55, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

For another recent poor applications of EGRS, see Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2026 July 29#Category:Transgender characters in video games. Fram (talk) 11:27, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Generally support exporting our categories to Wikidata and ditching it in favor of a more flexible Wikidata-based search. But on the specific question, regarding sexist different treatment of men and women and The times when we removed the category for American male novelists and kept the one for American wome novelists are hopefully far behind us now - are they behind us? As EGRS puts it, the whole reason we create some separate categories is because of special encyclopedic interest, because historically there have been fewer e.g. female heads of government, so we have a non-diffusing category to accommodate people who are interested in that smaller subset while a category for the overwhelming majority of cases isn't that helpful. This is not an issue I've paid attention to in some years, but I only remember a small amount of men's rights outrage about this sort of thing. Is the point of the "American novelists" example that it has expanded to categories that aren't actually so lopsided? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 14:39, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

The categories are less lopsided than they used to be, but the category guideline hasn't followed, and some editors are more strictly following the guidelines than necessary probably. For example, the Category:American male rock singers discussion I linked to. Before this cat was created, we had "American rock singers" and "American women rock singers", with all the women in the gender-specific category, and all men in the "general" one. The only reason given to get rid of the men subcat (without nominating the women subcat) was EGRS. For me, it's not about men's rights (if anything, the result of EGRS is more often sexism against women), but the outdated nature of it (see also the transgender discussion I linked). Removing G from EGRS doesn't mean that we no longer can get rid of gendered categories when such removal would be beneficial, but it won't be the default position and people will have to make a cogent argument instead of just "fails EGRS" or similar. For example, the nom of Category:Montenegrin women medical doctors will still be as valid after G has been removed from EGRS, it's not some attempt to keep all possible gendered categories no matter what. Fram (talk) 15:12, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I would not necessarily recommend *removing* gender from EGRS, but I would definitely recommend a complete overhaul of the policy. To copy my comment from the talk page:

The guidance here for not having gendered categories unless it is a defining topic seems very poorly followed, and somewhat unclear. For example, there's currently a discussion about the category Category:American male rock singers (which was recently created), versus Category:American rock singers (which only consists of men), versus Category:American women rock singers. The issue is particularly bad because while "American women rock singers" is non-diffusing, almost none of the articles are, leading it to appear as if Wikipedia only considers men to be rock singers.

Moreover, for other genres like Category:American male new wave singers and Category:American women new wave singers, we have for several years had two gender categories, which seems to be explicitly against the guidelines.

I'd suggest that we need clearer guidance here about:

• Should gendered subcategories be diffusing?

  My strong assumption is that they should be non-diffusing, and it's also mentioned in WP:ALLINCLUDED, but it seems like it might also need to be mentioned here as well. In addition, we don't seem to be doing a good job of actually assigning both categories to all articles. For example, the first article in Category:American women rock singers, Sharon Aguilar, is not in Category:American rock singers or any other of its subcategories.

• In what circumstances should we have multiple gender categories?

  There are a handful of examples listed, but it mostly covers the extreme cases (sportsperson categories, heads of government), and does not give helpful guidance for these much more common cases. After all, almost every category could have some amount of historical bias - for example there has been some history of bias against female rock singers, but perhaps not enough to make it a separate category?

• As a general rule, should we use "male" or "female" or "men" or "women"?

  There's a wide variety of usage, and it makes navigation difficult. The predominant case seems to be "male" and "women", but this seems to imply that the "male" category includes boys, while the "women" category does not include girls. In addition, some people might take "male" to include non-binary people who were assigned male at birth, while "women" fairly clearly does not include non-binary people who were assigned female at birth.

• How do we cover non-binary people?

  While this wasn't a large category at the time this guideline was written, there are now quite a few people who identify as non-binary. For example, see Category:American non-binary actors. I don't expect that we need lengthy guidance here, but it's worth mentioning the category at all, rather than only having a binary default.

In conclusion, the current guidance often results in being discriminatory toward women (often treating them as a poor second class of male-by-default "chemists" versus the explicit "female chemist"), it is unclear for many cases, and it doesn't properly account for non-binary people who are an increasingly relevant topic. I don't think we should remove the guidance entirely, since that just makes it so that people need to guess on the correct handling and we'll have a mess of inconsistent categories. Instead, we need to rewrite the guidance to handle these cases properly. Gbear605 (talk) 16:43, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Gbear605. What need is clear guidance, not the no guidance proposed here.

In addition to the non-binary people mentioned above need to account for transgender people.

• I presume that those who transitioned before they became notable should only be categorised according to the gender they transitioned to? If so is stated anywhere?
• What about people who transitioned after they ceased the activity for which they are categorised? e.g. should Caitlyn Jenner be categorised as a male decathlete, a female decathlete, or only as a decathlete?
• What about those who transitioned during their period of activity? e.g. should Elliot Page be categorised as a male actor, a female actor, both or neither?
• If we have categories for only one gender, how do we categorise people who transition to that gender? e.g. if we have categories "Chemists" and "Female chemists" how should we categorise chemists who are trans men? Does it make a difference if they were notable before their transition?
• What about people who are gender fluid?

Note that while most transgender people regard themselves as always having been the gender they transitioned to (e.g. most trans woman regard themselves as always having been female) this is not universally true - some regard themselves has previously being e.g. male and now being e.g. female.

It is probably also worth discussing whether the usual size considerations should apply to gendered subcategories, and if not what alternative guideline should there be? e.g. if we have articles about 600 men who were Foo but only 3 articles about women who were Foo, should we still create two gendered subcategories? Does it matter if there is a possibility of more articles about women who were Foo being written (e.g it might be that there were only ever 603 people who were Foo, and no new people will become Foo)? Does it matter if the gender balance is inverted (i.e. there were 600 women who were Foo and only 3 men)?

I don't know the answer to most of these questions, and this discussion is likely the wrong place to answer them. Thryduulf (talk) 17:17, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Per MOS:GENDERID, people should be referred to as their most recent self-identified gender label. I'd assume that would apply to categories as well. So trans male chemists wouldn't be categorized under Category:Women chemists because they are not women. Shocksingularity (talk) 02:46, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Given the asserted impact on women and transgender people, has WP:WOMEN and WP:LGBTQ+ been involved in discussing this? Davidwbaker (talk) 20:03, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

WP:WOMEN and WP:LGBTQ+ were both notified. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 22:20, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you. Fram (talk) 08:57, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2026 August 6#Category:Portraits of men for another just closed problematic invocation of EGRS to get rid of gendered categories. Fram (talk) 08:27, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

It's been 20 years since Wikipedia:Category intersection was proposed which would have solved this. I fully expect to die of old age before it will be implemented.  — Hex • talk 21:20, 15 August 2026 (UTC)

• As others have said, this is a perennial unresolved issue in English Wikipedia. I agree with Hex that implementing Wikipedia:Category intersection could resolve this. Some things are different and new now.
  For lots of reasons, the world is moving to structured data, and I expect that Wikimedia projects will also. Wikidata currently has technical limitations which prevent it from solving anything for Wikipedia, however, it is totally imaginable that Wikipedia categories someday disappear as they get replaced with fact-checked demographic statements in Wikidata, where they could be much better managed. In Wikidata, it is trivial to search for, for example, people by demographic, region, and occupation, without having to pre-define which demographics are socially allowable to categorize. However, Wikidata does have big ethical challenges in fact-checking categories, and if anyone wants to take fuzzy editorial discussion to Wikidata, it would be very welcome there. Wikipedia also does not fact-check categories, but for reasons including the lack of <ref> tags on Wikipedia categories, many dubious or challenged categories go unnoticed, and in any case it is not possible to quickly fact-check them by the thousand like it is in Wikidata where there is technical infrastructure to apply citations to demographic labels. If anyone wants to help set policy in Wikidata for this, then I expect those rules will eventually propagate.
  For anyone who wants to get started, d:Wikidata:WikiProject Personal Pronouns is as good of a place as any. Practically all Wikipedia biographies assign pronouns and it seems easy enough to migrate them, but edge cases arise. The same is true for lots of English Wikipedia demographic labeling, and if we can sort policy for pronouns, then that ought to be an easier case than many others. Could it be possible to translate d:Wikidata:Personal pronouns to race, ethnicity, religion, and the rest? Bluerasberry (talk) 15:16, 18 August 2026 (UTC)

Comment: I wouldn't say that creating categories for women and not men is "sexist" or "unfair". Women are already underrepresented on Wikipedia: only 20% of Wikipedia's biographical articles are on women. Additionally, both historically and currently, it is more difficult for women to get into certain fields and careers. I wouldn't oppose male subcats where men comprise less of the parent category than women, but how many cats is that, really? When 90% of bios of people with a certain profession are male, it makes sense that a cat for women in that career would be useful navigationally, but not for men because it is almost the same as the parent. Shocksingularity (talk) 02:42, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

Comment: I think they should be kept. I think these proposals are born from good intentions, but the ideologies surrounding neutrality or egalitarianism are definitely degenerating, seeking corruption where there is none. It reminds me of how weight data for athletes, models, and actors was banned from the Italian Wiki... for reasons tied to the ideologies of fat shaming or body acceptance. We're an encyclopedia. We shouldn't give in to every new social activism, and we certainly shouldn't indulge it to the point of radicalization. Sira Aspera (talk) 10:30, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

If this proposal passes, how should new PAM discussions be handled?

This issue has been brought up above multiple times but I think it would benefit from a more focused discussion. If these three conditions are met:

• this proposal passes
• a user creates a new formal PAM for a miscellaneous page (defined as using one of the {{PAM templates}})
• the TfD consensus that the PAM templates become wrappers of the AfD merging templates has not yet been implemented

... what should the editors that have been working on shutting down PAM (aka yours truly) do?

A) Remove the {{PAM templates}}, thereby effectively turning the proposal into an informal talk page discussion.

B) Move it to MfD.

FaviFake (talk) 09:42, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Neither. That was not specified in the RfC, which merely permits proposals being brought to MfD. The RfC doesn't specify anything about what to do with the former methods for miscellaneous pages. Katzrockso (talk) 08:56, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Please, can we avoid re-litigating the result of the RfC again? The RfC specifies that PAM is merged into AfD. If we don't remove the PAM templates from misc pages, they will just end up in the AfD backlog once the TfD consensus is implemented, and then an AfD regular will likely wonder why there's an AfD template on a misc page and remove it anyway.

Pick either A or B. Or another option that doesn't make it more complicated for us to implement the consensus. FaviFake (talk) 09:03, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Q1: Removing WP:CREATIVE#3

Q2: Applying WP:CREATIVE#3 only to the creator

Discussion (RfC on WP:CREATIVE)

Survey (AI citations)

• Oppose, LLMs can be helpful to format references (although there are better ways to prompt than the one above), but this should not be a separate point in NOLLM for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the background code of wikitext, including citation templates, is not strictly article content. More importantly, LLMs can hallucinate in this as they can in anything else. LLMs will sometimes generate fake dois, urls, ISBNs, etc., even for citations which are otherwise valid. These sorts of source information mismatches are one of the signs that indicate LLM use, so leading editors to believe these uses always generate good citations is guiding good-faith editors towards being picked up for unchecked LLM use. CMD (talk) 08:18, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• (summoned by bot) Oppose as unnecessary per CMD. I also share the concerns about hallucinated parameters, which are often seen at AfC for things like ISBNs. There are a number of automated tools that can format citation templates without the need for LLMs, and we should encourage the use of these instead. In solidarity, nil ^nz 08:38, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose LLMs are as likely to hallucinate doing this as any other work. Also this takes more time and effort than using the already available tools who's abilities and limitations are known and understood. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 12:01, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Bad idea LLMs are not suitable for this task. Polygnotus (talk) 12:46, 27 August 2026 (UTC) WP:SOCKSTRIKE. Warm Regards, Miminity (Talk?) (me contribs) 11:33, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose: This is something I support in theory but oppose in practice. There are too many cases where someone says they "just used AI to format the article" when the article text itself is also clearly AI, and sometimes they end up trickle-truthing out the rest of it ("ok I also used it to polish..."). I don't even think all of them are lying. I think a lot of people genuinely do not understand that "generating citations" and "finding citations" are different things, or that "pages=848–853" didn't just magically appear. I don't think the prompt you provided is similar to what the majority of people are using -- and I don't think most of them would grasp how it isn't similar.
  If your concern is the "overwhelming clean-up work," meanwhile, then even stronger oppose, this proposal will make the clean-up work harder because it's just one more exception for people to sealion about. Gnomingstuff (talk) 14:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose for all the reasons given in the !votes above (except that I can't see myself supporting it even in theory). If you have the URL, just use the tool that's already in the Visual Editor and check its output manually. Stepwise Continuous Dysfunction (talk) 16:09, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, my experience of LLMs echoes CMD's. They've got a terrible tendency of making small, hard to spot errors when asked to produce references e.g. giving you the title of one paper and the author list of another. Red Fiona (talk) 18:16, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose. I don't think one example of an LLM giving a correct citation should be translated into allowing it sitewide. As already stated above, they can (and already do) hallucinate quite a bit. There's no guarantee that the LLM doesn't just make up parameters or insert hallucinated content into said parameters. Even if they could reliably do one citation, what if someone were to make several citations in a batch? There's no guarantee they would all be good citations and correctly formatted, so human review would be necessary (especially since unchecked LLM-generated content is doubly bad). Aside from my personal dislike of the use of LLM-generated content on Wikipedia as a whole, I just don't get the use to generate something you would have to manually review anyway, just in case it decided to not properly format your citation that one time. SmittenGalaxy | talk! 23:39, 27 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose Even if AI can do some citations correctly, there is a real risk of AI hallucinations, especially when several citations are being generated. A lot of the times, visual editor would work just fine, and if not, filling in the citation manually should only take a few minutes. EaglesFan37 (talk) 07:08, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose. A more convincing lie makes for more work, not less. Tools for generating correct citations automatically have existed for a long time; there is no excuse for instead using a tool that is fundamentally unsuited to the task. In solidarity, Autoinvective (🗨︎ 𓅬) 07:53, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose until they overcome the issue of LLMs hallucinating when they don't know. The example is a easy url to process compared to many and the prompt is more detailed than most would use, so I don't believe is indicative of real use. Until an LLM can admit to not knowing and also prompt users for missing information in requests, such as "What page numbers are you using as a source?", this is a no go for me. KylieTastic (talk) 09:22, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, there's the old adage of hard cases make bad law, but this is apparently one for "easy cases make bad law". Just do it yourself. We've done that for many years now, and we've done fine with that. We do not need chatbots writing articles; we've written millions without them. (By the way, I initially screwed up my link to the article in my comment, but I fixed it, because I'm writing it myself. Write yourself; don't use chatbots.) Yes, I'm sure in some cases, a chatbot can get it right. In others, it will hallucinate or screw up. Write it yourself. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 12:41, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Advise against LLM-generated citations, but exempt from sanctions Fundamentally, generating citations is a lot more like suggestions for "spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, grammar" than it is content creation, and we should treat it accordingly. If a user gives the LLM a fully formed citation and it returns a properly cited Wikipedia citation, that is largely verifiable; the editor should look over and match the fields, and should not be subject to blocking and other sanctions just because they used an LLM to do so. 11WB is correct that this process is now "second-nature" to a lot of people doing academic work, and we should create a policy that avoids biting people for routine, good-faith actions. However, in my experience, this kind of reformatting is prone to two failure modes: "helpful" hallucinatory additions (e.g., the LLM adds a completely made-up ISBN number) and field mismatches (e.g., the LLM adds an editors field when the template uses editor-last1 etc.). The best thing to do would be to connect editors with software-based tools that can handle these things correctly every time (for most cases, VisualEditor; Zotero plus Wikipedia Citation Template; the tools at Help:Citation tools). But frankly, our documentation is not user-friendly at all and should be dramatically improved.--Carwil (talk) 13:40, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

  Amending my own !vote to Support with cautions: I do see use cases, outlined in discussion below, that don't have non-LLM software equivalents and we should separate citations from other problematic edits, while insisting that editors must carefully proofread their LLM output.--Carwil (talk) 15:44, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. Why would you want to do this when both RefToolbar and Visual Editor have robust tools for turning a DOI into a fully formed citation. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 14:48, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Strong Oppose There are already non-llm tools for this, why should we make an exception for something worse than we already have. —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 15:00, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

  Also, writing this into policy would be pointless policy creep, I don't see how it could accomplish anything useful. —Leaf.Sheap ⇖ /.°°.\ ⇗ (They•Them) 16:12, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

  That isn't how Wikipedia works. The project can't just unilaterally decide to ignore a specific RfC because it could get written down. That logic doesn't work anyway as NOLLM is tiny as far as PAG pages go. This isn't a concern. 11WB 💬 16:25, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

  The concept of policy creep, and the corresponding Wikipedia essay WP:CREEP, is absolutely relevant to a proposal to add an additional carve out to the existing guideline. The fact that the current guideline is concise and allows limited exceptions does not render the 'creep' concerns irrelevant. Some editors understandably see adding more loopholes, exceptions, and special cases as a net negative. You may think the concern is unwarranted or that the benefits of the proposal outweigh the concern but —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:33, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

  Your comment looks like it was cut off. Regardless, I don't agree with that perspective. The point of RfCs such as this is to gather consensus so that loopholes can be avoided. That essay is flawed and is obviously not something I agree with or plan to pay attention to. Thanks. 11WB 💬 02:10, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

• Status Quo: as is often the case with these RFCs, one result might feed the sea lions and one result might embolden the newbie-biters. Sometimes it's better to just leave things be and spend your time mentoring newbies or doing cleanup. -- LWG ^{talk (VOPOV)} 18:08, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose: we have deterministic tools for this and should not muddy the waters on AI use NicheSports (talk) 18:19, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, to my experience this is a bad idea. And also not needed as citoid provides a reasonable good tool. Alexcalamaro (talk) 18:26, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Big meh. Either the citation is completely identical to anything a human could have made, has no errors and would be not possible for anyone to tell it was generated by AI (since the content doesn't have AISIGNS), or it has hallucinations. In the first case, the current prohibition from NOLLM is unenforceable and in the second we don't want hallucinations.Katzrockso (talk) 18:28, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Support I often use the Automatic option of the Cite function of the Visual Editor which generates a citation from a URL, as the OP describes. I don't know the details of the technology behind this but it isn't very good as it often garbles the output, doesn't use my preferred format and sometimes fails completely. Editors should be free to use other software solutions if they work better. As software may use a variety of algorithms and approaches, we should not try to micromanage the details; the key thing is whether it works or not.
  Note the background to this is the status quo that we often don't get citations at all because providing them is such a pain. For a fresh example, see Lake Ontario, which is currently in the news and getting lots of traffic. That has been tagged as needing more citations because it has extensive passages without any. But the absurd thing is that the tag required an edit request because the page is fully protected! Wikipedia is suffocated by such constraints and challenges and so some fresh thinking is needed. Andrew🐉(talk) 20:13, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
  • I just say many citation template generators still needs one to double check, and unfortunately LLMs aren't necessarily more reliable in doing so.--ZKang123 (talk · contribs) 09:17, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose. I have nothing to add, however, the concerns previously mentioned are shared. --I sometimes eat bananas, and you can talk to me here: (talk) 23:51, 28 August 2026 (UTC)
• Strongly oppose, absolutely not. Users should not be permitted to delegate one of the most important parts of an encyclopaedic article to their slop machines. This is not only a bad idea, but it doesn't solve any problems and would just create even more problems. This is also constantly used as an "excuse" by users caught using AI, who then claim to "only use it to format references" or something. Legitamising that idea in NOLLM is an awful idea that would just make an already difficult task even more difficult. We have finally gotten somewhere with our LLM guidelines, lets not start watering it down. ‑‑gurkubondinn 01:21, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
• Provisional support Formatting citations is one of the most irritating parts of wiki editing and while Citoid and friends are great, they can't handle all possible forms citations come in. Hand formatted citations are quite error prone - typos, mistaken parameters, missing parameters etc - and we largely put up with that, so I am not sold on hallucinations as counterargument. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 06:39, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
• Support. We should not encourage people to use LLMs for citations, but we should not penalise them for doing so either. We want citations, and as pointed out generating them in this manner is routine for many people now. Thryduulf (talk) 12:40, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

  • Support or Status Quo: Unlike prose, citations are either correct or incorrect. It shouldn't matter how an editor produced a correct citation as the encyclopedia is the priority as described in WP:3P. Incorrect citations are disruptive. In the discussions at WP:Nollm, no one has objected to experienced editors fixing or creating templates with chatbots/agents. I expect we'd be able to find some language that reflects the underlying consensus that edits should be judged on their own merits. That said, I think our policy/talk time should be directed at how to slow the stream of slop. Most of the objections here are centered around avoiding any encouragement to slop edits. Maybe we should focus more on the onboarding of new editors or the volume of edits.

  Dw31415 (talk) 13:22, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose, for the reasons given by Nil NZ and Gnomingstuff above. In my comparatively short time participating in AI cleanup here, I have not been convinced that LLMs are reliable for this task. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Suðurhafsljósæta (talk • contribs) 13:19, 29 August 2026 (UTC)
• oppose per above, there already exists robust tooling for citations and LLM usage runs the risk of hallucinations daysantdev ^talk 03:20, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose I don't think the use of LLMs to generate citations are necessarily more helpful than the existing citation tools we have, and as always regardless we still have to double check and format our own citations. Also, in the said example (about et al.), one can always check the original template and their parameters. To add, there's also a case recently in my country when a student tried to defend their use of AI to format citations.--ZKang123 (talk · contribs) 09:17, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, bringing any exception into the AI ban lessens its effectiveness in presenting a human written, human researched encyclopedia. Randy Kryn (talk) 10:45, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, per CMD et al.^{[pun very much intended]} It's not bad in of itself, but can lead to bad practices with uncaught hallucinations. Anyone that does it does so at their own risk, but it shouldn't be encouraged otherwise people won't be accountable since the rules said they could use AI. Theo wiki user (talk) 18:10, 30 August 2026 (UTC)
• Incomplete RFC - I see a generic description of ability for cites so this RFC seems to be looking in that area, but there didn't seem an explicit and specific question or proposal. It does seem to have gotten a lot of knee jerk rejections, so it succeeded anyway in that it got a substantial response and gives a good sense of the room (that there is wide resistance to using LLM) enough for RFC to close. My impression that the WP rule will become OBE shortly anyway, but time will tell. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 20:07, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

  What’s OBE? Thanks. Dw31415 (talk) 20:38, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

  Presumably "Overtaken By Events", a military term based on that premise that no plan survives contact with the enemy. KylieTastic (talk) 20:55, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

  In another words, yet another attempt to undermine the AI guidelines ("oh they'll inevitably go away, trust me bro") by someone who did not feel it necessary to weigh in when they were being discussed. Gnomingstuff (talk) 01:02, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

  Or rather that the ultimate discussion was rapidly closed as a SNOW close before many editors could opine. Katzrockso (talk) 01:35, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

  Gnomingstuff, please remember to assume good faith. Not everybody who disagrees with you about some aspect of AI is trying to "undermine the guidelines". Thryduulf (talk) 02:35, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

  "Overcome By Events". Basically things are moving fast in this field in multiple dimensions -- capability is getting vastly better, new flavors of AI (so it's not just LLM), adoption making it ubiquitous (more and more folks using it to great extent so such content becomes unavoidable) and adaptation (more ways of using it). I think an analogy is to the early internet where teachers said to not use it as it was too unreliable and covered so little information. With hundreds of companies and trillions of AI development ongoing, I view it as highly implausible for WP policy to stay the same for long. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 02:44, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose at this time. If you check it thoroughly enough so that you're sure there's no error, you're not going to get flagged, and if you don't, you should be. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 17:57, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

  This comment seems to capture the majority: thoroughly checked use is acceptable in practice, even if the guideline appears to prohibit it. I fear that leaving exceptions unwritten makes community standards harder to learn and undermines trust that guidelines mean what they say. If thoroughly checked use is acceptable, the guideline should say so. Otherwise, it has Luddite vibes rather than emphasizing our objections to fabricated content and mechanical prose. Dw31415 (talk) 10:42, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

  Use outside of content/prose elsewhere is not an unwritten exception, but a different topic, and one of not infrequent discussion. There have been many views raised for example over llm use for scripts and templates. CMD (talk) 11:39, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

  (edit conflict) Exactly this. Policies and guidelines should say what they mean, otherwise they undermine not only that policy/guideline but the whole system of policies and guidelines. When a policy says X is prohibited but everybody turns a blind eye to breaches of it, including intentional ones, where then is the legitimacy of sanctioning someone else who, possibly accidentally, does something else that it says is prohibited? Thryduulf (talk) 11:42, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose because of the risk of hallucinations and easily overlooked missing end-block symbols. FineIllDoIt (talk) 19:51, 31 August 2026 (UTC)
• Defer decision. As typing out a prompt to create citations is arguably more tiring than using current tools, the fact that people are using them suggests shortcomings in current tooling. According to the discussions below, we have recurrent issues with certain news sites and PDF files. Some people said batch creation could be a problem. We should gather usage details of citoid to understand how well/fast it works and when it fails, why. If citoid works well, it removes incentives to use LLM and the proposal will be moot. Redwolf Milkshake Fox 🦊 15:30, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
• NO Stop wasting time with LLMs and do it like sane people do it. Use citation bot. Or the Wikipedia:RefToolbar/2.0. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 18:05, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
• OpposeLLMs have a tendency to get small things wrong or just hallucinate things; it also creates a slippery slope where we are using AI to write citations- then let's get them to find them as well. This would introduce an irreparable number of errors. Also, it isn't as if it takes a long time to write a citation compared to the research required in writing, so it just seems completely mad to do so. Also, a blurring of the line makes it more difficult for new editors to fully understand, even if gone down to basics. In short: it is too much risk for zero gain (except for about 1/2 a minute).Equivalent-Text2598 (talk) 20:25, 1 September 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose As written, this RFC is about using an LLM to format the parameters of a citation given a URL. That's using a sledgehammer to drive in a screw. Screwdrivers to accomplish this task as readily available. Changing a policy isn't the answer. A visit to WP:CITETOOL is. Davidwbaker (talk) 20:41, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

  I was already wondering about the proliferation of suggested alternatives and WP:CITETOOL lists over 50! When you add the complexity of WP:CITEVAR, the result is a maze of mirrors. A virtue of the typical LLM tool is that its interface is already familiar and uses natural language. Users will tend to follow the path of least resistance and so, if we don't want people to take that, the alternative needs to be standard, clear and simple. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:42, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose: On balance it doesn’t sound like the benefits outweigh the contras; we have tools that work well enough, and we don’t particularly want to encourage lax attitudes to citations where that encouragement saves people only the smallest of effort. (Does typing into a chat even really end up saving you time in most cases? Call me back when you have a wrapper.)
  I also think it’s worth noting Katzrockso’s point: [If] the citation is completely identical to anything a human could have made, has no errors and would be not possible for anyone to tell it was generated by AI […] the current prohibition from NOLLM is unenforceable. Not that this pushes me much one way or another, but, well… “Big meh”.
  On the other hand, if a specific tool (“wrapper”, “harness”, whatever) were developed, this could easily be re-addressed. — HTGS (talk) 09:15, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose: Wikipedia already has citation tools, such as the tools built into visual editor. While these tools don't work in all situations, they are generally quite effective for most citations, leaving relatively little cleanup. In my experience, this works for about 90% of sources, not perfect, but also not a hallucinated citation. There are also external citation tools, such as the browser based Scribbr Citation Generator, which can be tried in the case that the built–in tools do not work, which can then be easily converted into Wikitext. As even a link is technically considered a citation, and editors can use that link to better format bare citations, making an AI carvout just doesn't seem neccessary. Mitchsavl (talk) 08:39, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• Supporthow is this any different than using the wiki tools (which often don't work)? At the end of the day the editor is responsible for their edits. Sir Joseph ^(talk) 13:47, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• My understanding is that WP:NOLLM forbids only generating article text via LLM, and has nothing to say about using LLMS for technical assistance, including minor formatting tasks of this nature. I oppose adding an explicit carveout (3-2-1 every single person caught for LLM use on the basis of broken citations is now using that as an excuse), but also oppose banning such use. Full disclosure: I have used an LLM for the very occasional minor formatting task; generally the kind that I could in principle write a script to do but which are never worth the effort individually, and never for generating citations. To my knowledge none of the (many, many) formatting errors I have made could be attributed to this usage, and I do check the output. If this becomes an actual problem we can ban the practice, I suppose, but as far as I can tell this was started on the basis of a hypothetical. Rusalkii (talk) 02:50, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, but the suggestion and discussions are revealing that maybe the citation tools aren't well-known. (The difference between things like Citation bot and LLM tooling is the bots are better understood, and don't have risks of adding wrong info as a hallucination — They just won't work.) Silvestertaylor (talk) 07:05, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  The citation tools I've used sometimes garble the first/last name and date parameters, putting incorrect/incomplete information into them. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:06, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  This is also my experience, along with garbled title and publication names. I see no evidence presented that LLMs are actually any more likely to output an incorrect citation than any other tool. Thryduulf (talk) 11:02, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose for literally every reason already stated.  — Hex • talk 12:25, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (AI citations)

Is there a particular reason this was started on its own separate page, rather than at VPP? -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 14:46, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Decided to follow the bullet point under the second point of WP:RFCOPEN. I assumed high influx based on past RfCs on the topic. 11WB 💬 14:49, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

I always think it's best to start at the appropriate page, and then move it off if it grows to big. You get better exposure that way. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 15:18, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

Anyone is welcome to move it back to the main page. I felt it more appropriate to do it this way as the main page is already quite large and previous RfCs for this topic have received a larger number of comments. 11WB 💬 15:27, 27 August 2026 (UTC)

I've boldly done so. I didn't relish the thought of adding this to Wikipedia:Village pump archive § Special discussions, which I sometimes help out with, when there was no need for it to be on its own page. I wonder if this could be closed early per WP:SNOW. It would've been better to propose this as just a straight discussion at the idea lab first. Graham87 (talk) 11:26, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

@Graham87, it's been a day. WP:RFCEND suggests a minimum of 7 days. I expect this to be unsuccessful. This RfC serves a purpose to clarify whether not-strictly article content such as citations are exempt or not from the NOLLM guideline. As for the idea lab, I'm really not one to add extra steps in unnecessarily. 11WB 💬 13:49, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

WP:RFCEND suggests seven days as a typical minimum, but a fuller quote of the surrounding text says: "An RfC should last until enough comment has been received that consensus is reached, or until it is apparent that it won't be. There is no required minimum or maximum duration; typically 7 days is a minimum, and after 30 days the discussion is ripe for closure." The comment subsequent to my last one at 13:40 (UTC) today noted an angle that hadn't previously been considered, so maybe it might be worth having this open for a few more days at the most, but I'll let other editors judge that. The idea lab would most likely have produced much the same feedback without the overhead of an RFC. Graham87 (talk) 15:03, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

I currently put the count at 17o/4s/2n (including myself in the 4 supports). That's just over a quarter that haven't directly opposed. Obviously I'm not saying this should be kept open for a ridiculous amount of time. But I do think pulling the plug after just 24 hours (as you proposed yesterday) would have been extremely premature. AfDs get 7 days minimum, and other consensus building venues get longer. My hope is that something can be added to the guideline to highlight whatever consensus is built here. 11WB 💬 08:12, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

The person starting an RFC is allowed to gracefully admit defeat at any point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:33, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Has anyone been sanctioned for this practice? Is this a topic of recurring disputes among editors interpreting and enforcing the current guideline? —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 17:28, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Don't know about the former but the latter yes Gnomingstuff (talk) 17:30, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

Are there a lot of cases reported to AINB, or massive cleanup efforts, where this practice is the only AI/LLM usage involved? If so, how are these cases even detected? I would not expect a well formatted, error-free citation to raise any eyebrows unless there is something else going on. I feel like I'm missing a lot of context as to why this is being raised. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 17:37, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

LLMs can have tells with how they format references, and of course the references often turn out to be nonsense which kind of gives it away. I don't think this stuff should be discussed anymore, the list of LLM tells that was created was used to help train LLM to hide those tells. So listing anymore is almost a WP:BEANS situation. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 22:53, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

OK. I get the BEANS point. I don't actually want an exhaustive list of tells, anyway. Just trying to understand the background on this proposal, which looks to be failing anyway. The RFC statement says if this exemption is applied, it could take some of the load off. But we don't know if there have been any massive cleanup efforts addressing just this practice. If the references are nonsense, which of course happens, that's a problem in and of itself and would presumably be grounds for a warning and further escalation even if some version of this proposal were adopted. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 23:28, 28 August 2026 (UTC)

The idea, as strange as it sounds, was for this to fail, as it clarifies that non-article content (in this case citations) are also subject to the guideline. An oppose or support close is a win in my eyes. 11WB 💬 01:30, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

the list of LLM tells that was created was used to help train LLM to hide those tells.

this was one guy's viral marketing project to promote his startup, it does not deserve the attention it got Gnomingstuff (talk) 04:50, 29 August 2026 (UTC)

What I'm not understanding is why there isn't more intelligence built into the citation templates? Why isn't the Citoid logic built into the templates? If this were done then the editor would just need to invoke the template with a unique reference such as a DOI, ISBN or URL. The template would then look up and display all the details such as the authors, date, journal name and so forth. There might then be a second stage when all these details are archived, so fixing them.

Or, if multiple parameters continue to be input separately in the current fashion, then why doesn't the template do more to cross-check them and flag any inconsistencies?

So, if the templates did more of the work, this would tend to standardise the process and lighten the load on editors, removing the need for them to look around for ad hoc assistance such as LLMs.

Andrew🐉(talk) 07:45, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

You can draw from archived metadata with Template:Cite Q if you want. The other templates do flag some inconsistencies, but they're not magic and they can't be so broad as to generate copious false positives. CMD (talk) 08:12, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

I just want to point out here, that until somebody tests the various AIs and has each generate a certain number of varying academic or general web citations, we aren't to know what the actual % figure of hallucinations or other LLM-related issues that are outputted is. Until then, this is all based on assumption. 11WB 💬 08:36, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

One of the few things we do have is User:NinjaRobotPirate/LLM, which highlights many different jobs that are undertaken on the project. I trust @NinjaRobotPirate's testing on this, as both an administrator who has experience with mop-specific permissions (which elevates credibility for stuff like this) and a working knowledge of AI in general. 11WB 💬 08:41, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

One thing to keep in mind is that I was testing open weight LLMs on my $3000 desktop PC, which is pretty much the baseline minimum to get things done in the world of AI. To do much of anything beyond the minimum, I'd probably need to double that investment, which is hard to do. Most of these LLMs are pretty weak compared to the proprietary, subscription-based stuff that people usually use. I should probably test them in more practical situations, but I get distracted easily by fun questions like "who's the most moral character in Watchmen". AI is great at drudgery, but it needs to be supervised. The problem, in my opinion, is that too many people treat AI (especially chatbots) like it's a black box that, given any prompt (no matter how poor), it will spit out the truth, and they don't supervise it at all. NinjaRobotPirate (talk) 23:55, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

My comment above was actually not based on assumption, but on personal experience. The inconsistency checks in the current templates are also not based on assumptions, although they don't differentiate between errors caused by LLMs, faulty data, user error, or any other particular cause. CMD (talk) 09:30, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

I referred to many of the comments left in this RfC so far, rather than singling out any one editor individually. 11WB 💬 09:33, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

@Andrew Davidson, you might be looking for m:WikiCite. (Citoid isn't "logic". It's a look-up service that checks hidden metadata in HTML pages and information that can be located through Zotero. And every time The New York Times tweaks their website, someone has to manually re-code the Zotero translator to keep it working – times thousands and thousands of websites, though that's the one that has caused the most problems for me personally over the years.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:55, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I think discussion would benefit from another example (above/side). I just tried this prompt. The current harnesses likely aren't generating the citations from weights. They are searching the web and generating text to fit the documentation. As the technology continues to evolve the LLM itself will play less-and-less a role in the available tools. I don't expect this to change anyone's mind and understand (and appreciate) the slop war we're in. I do hope we can get to something that better articulates the basic point: we don't want slop, we want a better encyclopedia... and how we get there doesn't matter. I guess I suggest the supporters to create some text in an essay. Dw31415 (talk) 16:11, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

On error checking just now, I see that it did the isbn number better than I would (isbn 13 with hyphens) have per docs Hyphens in the ISBN are optional, but preferred. Use the 13-digit ISBN – beginning with 978 or 979 – when it is available. Dw31415 (talk) 16:21, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

we don't want slop, we want a better encyclopedia... and how we get there doesn't matter. the fundamental issue underlying many of these AI-related discussions is that for some people it absolutely does matter how we get there. To the extent that people have argued that fully reliably sourced encyclopaedic information added by a human is OK but fully reliably sourced encyclopaedic information added by an LLM is not, even if the text is word-for-word identical. I fundamentally disagree with that view, but it is one held by multiple vocal participants in related discussions. Thryduulf (talk) 17:04, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

User:11WB - Thank you for asking. I expect the WP broad prejudice will not last, it seemed a bit off from when I first saw this and the tech is just advancing so fast and already become so ubiquitous that the policies look a bit unsustainable. (e.g. what about the forms of AI other than strict LLM ? How do we address no AI imagery when all movies and photos involve AI? How do we avoid AI content at least indirectly when much academic and business production uses it and so the language they use is AI based ?) There does seem to be transition difficulties similar in the coding field - I read Google now produces over 75% of code via AI, and hear AI is flooding Linux as Linux bug patches volume vastly accelerated - which overwhelms human checking capacity. Will see where this goes, but thanks again for asking about this niche. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 23:24, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

p.s. AI might not be judged so bad compared/contrasted to how well (i.e. badly) human citations do, and might have to consider whether we could even tell the source other than by the honor system. Anecdotally, I've seen enough types of flaws in human citation to not think all that well of those efforts. Content with missing cites, vague cites such as to a huge book without page number or quote included, misformatted cites, cites behind paywalls, wrong template cites, cite rot from rewritten or mistaken content, etcetera. Once even a plainly fraudulent cite. (They'd been told repeatedly they had to provide a cite or the content couldn't stay, so they made one up. And nobody spotted it as false for years.) Cheers Markbassett (talk) 23:42, 30 August 2026 (UTC)

So are you going to apologize for accusing people who have well-thought-out stances regarding AI of acting out of broad prejudice? Or are people who do AI cleanup exempt from being shown good faith? Gnomingstuff (talk) 04:34, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't know what you're talking about - there isn't any person accused above, nor intent to do so. "WP broad prejudice" was intended and seems a factual label that is accurately and neutrally descriptive of the general consensus at WP as seen in current WP:LLM and recent discussions: A broad (i.e. general, non-specific, wide-reaching, without detail, lacking limit or cite to individual case, etcetera) and prejudice (judged before having a current case; view from prior experiences; preconceived tendencies not based on evidence; dislike; hostility) stance against use of LLM. Cheers Markbassett (talk) 15:27, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Here's a simple use case where LLMs help and there's no easy alterative: converting multiple citations from an existing text source…

Prompt: Extract the citations included here and convert to Wikipedia citation templates: "see Lawrence Bryant, The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1986); Gordon Kipling, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (New York: Clarendon, 1998); and Roy Strong, Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450-1650 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1984). Les Entrees royales françaises de 1328 a 1515, ed. Bernard Guenee and Françoise Lehouz (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1968), offers an overviewof French royal entries in the late medieval and early modern period.

Response (Gemini Pro): Here are the extracted citations converted into Wikipedia {{cite book}} templates:

* Bryant, Lawrence (1986). The King and the City in the Parisian Royal Entry Ceremony: Politics, Ritual, and Art in the Renaissance. Geneva: Droz.

* Kipling, Gordon (1998). Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph. New York: Clarendon.

* Strong, Roy (1984). Art and Power: Renaissance Festivals, 1450–1650. Suffolk: Boydell Press.

* Guenee, Bernard; Lehouz, Françoise, eds. (1968). Les Entrées royales françaises de 1328 à 1515. Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique.

Now these are all correct. And unlike the one-off cases mentioned above, I've started with a plausible source (a book footnote) and used the LLM to generate four templates. There are no DOI's to shortcut the process here. While technically an editor could use existing citation tools for this, the built-into-Wikipedia tools available involve copying and pasting individual fields 27 separate times. Alternatively (and this is what I would have done before competent LLMs), they could find all four books, add them to a Zotero library, and export as Wikipedia Citation Templates.

Concerns about hallucinations are a decent reason to encourage editors to either use software tools or obsessively check their LLM-synthesized citations, but (1) prohibiting LLM-generated and user-checked citations is objectively bad for the encyclopedia in such cases; (2) blocking a user who adds correct LLM-generated citations is an over-reaction.--Carwil (talk) 15:42, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Usually even LLM users who are caught are just warned to knock it off, and aren't blocked unless they keep doing it over and over. My main concern with this proposal is even just watching the LLM notice boards, the VAST majority of the people who end up there are using middling models and don't check the output carefully, and tend not to exhibit signs that they understand how to responsibly use the tools. FineIllDoIt (talk) 22:32, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Currently we don't do (1), and (2) has never happened (SarekOfVulcan explained this pithily above). CMD (talk) 01:04, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Typing the LLM prompt arguably takes more time than using the citation tool, so when someone uses LLM instead, probably something about the tool is not working for them? Do we have statistics of how often the citation tool fail to resolve the citation from URL or dois? Redwolf Milkshake Fox 🦊 22:16, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Quite often. Biggest news outlet in my country, Yonhap News, blocks Citoid entirely, forcing me to type details manually. Ca ^{talk to me!} 22:22, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Every single PDF. Thryduulf (talk) 23:54, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

I don't how rules like this can be enforced, unless the template is clearly hallucinated, I couldn't tell apart citoid and LLM generated refs.

Removing the incentives to use LLM by improving citoid (better pdf, news site support, batch import) could do everyone a favor. Redwolf Milkshake Fox 🦊 01:17, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

+1 Ca ^{talk to me!} 01:48, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Dumb question: Is there a template where automation will replace an ISBN, Page with a properly formed citation?

or… Have we tried to advance the UI so that adding a citation is as easy as adding an internal wiki link? You say it’s harder to type into an agent which probably reveals how ignorant I am on how to create citations. I’ll look for a how-to but would appreciate a link if anyone beats me to finding it. Dw31415 (talk) 16:11, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Have you tried adding a source in the visual editor? It's very easy in most cases. Katzrockso (talk) 16:32, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Found Wikipedia:INTREF3. Yes, that’s what I’ve used dutifully up until now. Now I guess I understand better the motivation behind {{Cite Q}}. I hate pasting into forms. Dw31415 (talk) 16:47, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I had no idea about Wikipedia:UCB. Thanks Headbomb. It’d be good to make that more prominent an option. Has that been discussed recently? Dw31415 (talk) 19:03, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Okay Wikipedia:Citation expander is very good. I think we should propose a next step toward having that available by default. It handled the Air Traffic book example very well. Just providing {{cite book}} with isbn was expanded to include the other parameters. That said, it was only able to change:

{{cite web|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/dca-plane-collision-faa.html}}

Wikipedia:Citation expander created

{{cite web|website=[[The New York Times]] |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/dca-plane-collision-faa.html}}

Whereas ChatGPT created

{{cite web |last=Kelly |first=Kate |title=Safety Board Blames F.A.A. for Multiple Failures in D.C. Crash |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/dca-plane-collision-faa.html |website=The New York Times |date=January 27, 2026 |access-date=September 2, 2026}}

I don't think the notion that agents are slower and worse will hold up to scrutiny, especially as the technology evolves. I respect the point about keeping the guideline simple. I give this example just to check some of the assertions being madeDw31415 (talk) 01:27, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

I don't understand why is there even a discussion about this. If a tool fills a template faster than doing so manually, I just have to check that there are no mistakes instead of doing it the 1990s way, and the end result is exactly the same as doing it manually... then I see no reasonable reason to be against it. Cambalachero (talk) 17:13, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I think the reason we are talking about this is there's a even faster way with less limitation (at the expense of lower accuracy) Redwolf Milkshake Fox 🦊 17:50, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

• Comment. I share the distrust of oppose voters for simply giving an LLM a URL and hoping for the best, and have also seen LLMs free-form make up citations in tests. However, I could be convinced to support a NOLLM exemption for a more narrow case: converting an already existing text citation into Cite XYZ. No Web access, no URL. Just "transform what you see here into a citation template, exactly as you see it." I've checked the output and it seems like Google Gemini can handle this fine, and the times it raises issues are generally valid ones (e.g. if the citation itself was unclear or requiring feedback). SnowFire (talk) 16:57, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

Survey (RECALL)

• speedy close and workshop a larger RfC around recall. There's no rush to open more limited RfCs, particularly when discussion is ongoing. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:08, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• Of the options above, option A is unambiguously the best but I'm not in love with the wording. I would prefer an RFC that was more along the lines of the one I suggested in the WT:RECALL discussion (or a larger one that discussed RECALL as a whole). Thryduulf (talk) 13:15, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
  • Option F added below is superior to Option A (which is my second choice). I Oppose options B & D and am neutral regarding C. Thryduulf (talk) 19:55, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• Speedy close per above. I think there are definitely some questions to be asked about this process, but I don't think the above options necessarily sum up the meat of what we need to be asking the community. Thryduulf's list at WT:RECALL looks closer to the mark. I think we should workshop a bit more before launching the RFC. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 13:31, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  Since this RFC seems to be running its course and isn't being closed, I'll favour option F. It's clear and explicit, both in terms of what happens at the end and precisely when the end is (720 hours). Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 14:53, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  Per below discussion, I actually favour option F but modified - do not include the option to "revert" signatures after the 720-hour period (unless they're invalid for other reasons). Simply strike them, so that the person who added that signature, and indeed everyone else, is clear why that signature was not counted.  — Amakuru (talk) 10:09, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

• A, but not sure about whether to speedy close or not. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 13:41, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  Currently at F > E > A, oppose B/D. --SarekOfVulcan (talk) 20:00, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• Option A. This doesn't need to be speedily closed. A larger RfC on the recall process is unnecessary.Katzrockso (talk) 19:41, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• Option C - Any signatures added after the 30-day period should be reverted off lest there are questions down the road about whether or not signatures were valid. All other positions are non-starters. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{Look out it's Jimothy!} 19:47, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  That's not actually what option C says, though. It does not say whether the 25th signature should be counted if it was added after 30 days have passed; these kinds of closures do not happen immediately. It sounds like Option A is more similar to what you're looking for, at least in terms of determining the result.​ FaviFake (talk) 20:48, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  I invite you to re-read my comment and then Option A. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{Look out it's Jimothy!} 01:40, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Option C, in conjunction with talk page guidelines, does not permit reverting late added votes. Katzrockso (talk) 04:21, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  With Option F now available I'm supporting that instead of C. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{Look out it's Jimothy!} 14:49, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

• Anything but Option D as that is a drama nightmare waiting to happen. Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:23, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• A without prejudice to a larger discussion on recall. Tazerdadog (talk) 20:30, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• A (second choice: F for the reasons below) The current wording (option C) is super ambiguous and does not say what should happen in the (admittedly rare) case where 720 hours have already passed but nobody got around to closing the discussion. Sure, we can say the discussion "should have been closed", but it has not been closed, and traditionally on Wikipedia late comments are considered by the closers in their closures. RECALL should be an exception to this rule due to it being intentionally deterministic.
  I find this comment in the RFCBEFORE discussion to be very well-written; it explains why this change is necessary:

  [...] I expect that if this ever gets tested, it will be a major drama, because there will be editors with very strong opinions on both sides of whether the petition succeeded or failed. As I also said earlier, the more I see conjecture about situations where the line between 24 and 25 signatures gets crossed late, the more strongly I feel about the need for a firmly articulated deadline.
  — User:Tryptofish 21:41, 23 August 2026 (UTC)

  FaviFake (talk) 20:52, 2 September 2026 (UTC)
• A, and strongly oppose B and D. I think A is an improvement over the status quo (C), because it eliminates ambiguity in cases where the formal close is slightly delayed and the 25th signature comes in during the delay. And this is something where we absolutely should not have ambiguity. When a 25th signature comes in, we cross a very serious line, and the current consensus of the community is 25 signatures within a month – not 25 in however much time it happens to take. I'm not seeing the need for a speedy close, because there has been pre-discussion, linked below, and I think the formatting of the RfC question adequately reflects that. However, I do think there needs to be a formal discussion if anyone thinks that it's OK to extend the petition open-time beyond 720 hours, or to do so depending on whether or not somebody feels like extending it. --Tryptofish (talk) 22:02, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  Update: A and F are both equally fine with me. (As long as late signatures are not counted, I'm OK with either reverting them entirely, or with leaving them un-reverted but essentially ignored.) --Tryptofish (talk) 22:16, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support status quo for now. None of the recall petitions have encountered this late 25th signature issue yet, or anything even close to it, so let's just cross that bridge when we come to it. Some1 (talk) 00:05, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  That sounds more like a disaster waiting to happen. FaviFake (talk) 09:20, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• Support C as clear and unambiguous. This is a detail that should apply to any administrator recall system. Support for the still newish administrator recall system has not yet solidified (see current RFC comments & !votes). — Neonorange (talk to Phil) (he, they) 02:22, 3 September 2026 (UTC) —

  How exactly is that clear and unambiguous? It's the only option that doesn't specify what should happen in case of late signatures... FaviFake (talk) 06:46, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Well they don't count for one. I suppose it would be up to the closer to decide if those comments were moved to a sub-section, stay where they are with the number stricken, or some other option. --Super Goku V (talk) 08:30, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Some editors in the previous discussion have argued that the current wording means that late signatures should count because the discussion wasn't closed when they signed. This is the reason why the RfC was started. FaviFake (talk) 09:19, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I recall that there was a lot of debate over using should, would, could, shall, must, and any other words I missed, but I guess I didn't get the point about it. (Personally then, I think that is silly as the wording is clear that petitions automatically fail at the 30 day mark.) --Super Goku V (talk) 09:45, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  You missed "may"! FaviFake (talk) 10:32, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  That does not make sense to me, it does not say 25 signatures before being closed, it clearly says "25 signatures within 30 days" an explicit timeframe. If you wanted to go with a technicality, it does not stop someone counting any 30 day period so if you had enough last minute signatures to get 25 from day 1-31 instead of 0-30. KylieTastic (talk) 13:53, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  The interpretation was first brought up starting from this comment in the original discussion, in case you're interested. I note that Some1 has !voted for Option C, so I really hope I didn't misunderstand or misrepresent their earlier comments. FaviFake (talk) 14:03, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  To clarify: I don't believe every late 25th sig should count (e.g. a petition receives 24 signatures in the first week, then an inactive EC account randomly shows up to sign the petition after the deadline. In that scenario, that late 25th sig should not count). But I do believe there are certain situations where the late 25th sig should count (e.g. an admin subject to the recall petition does something controversial/questionable hours before the deadline, and because of that, more people start to sign the petition; let's say 5 sigs, including the 25th one, came after the deadline, but before the formal close. I don't think the closing admin should revert/remove/strike all 5 of those late signatures and declare that the petition has "failed", in that scenario). I don't like either options A or F, especially with the word "always". Each late 25th signature petition should be judged on a case-by-case basis, imho, but apparently I'm in the minority on this one. Some1 (talk) 23:21, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Thank you for the clarification! FaviFake (talk) 23:23, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  If that scenario occurred and the deadline passed without 25 signatures, there's a high chance of an arbitration request being filed and a case accepted. I don't think the recall process needs to stretch to cover all eventualities. isaacl (talk) 23:29, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Same here that it doesn't make sense, but it does seem that some people hold that position. --Super Goku V (talk) 20:04, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Having a sliding window of time was rejected during the discussions that established consensus for the current process. Thus the petition ends at the designated time, and a new petition period can't start again for six months. isaacl (talk) 22:10, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• No change (C) per Some1 and Neonorange. If we change the docs for every potential problem that we can imagine, we'll be constantly changing the docs. "Should" is the right amount of flexibility. Let's see how the status quo plays out at least once (preferably more than once) before trying to improve it. Or in other words, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." Levivich (talk) 02:25, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• Support A/C + Oppose B/D: We already have it so that you don't need to provide a reason to sign the petition. If someone really ends up at the last minute signing it, then they have the option to sign it without any comment and can explain it later if they really want to. Once the time on a petition elapses without 25 signatures, then the petition attempt has expired and is not in effect. We don't count late votes at RfA or for elections, so I fail to see why we would count late signers for petitions. (Personally, I don't care if the late signature is reverted or not.) --Super Goku V (talk) 02:45, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Supposedly, C means that someone can try to sign after 30 days has passed and have it count, which goes against my understanding of the Phase II RfC. So, I support A and Option E: "Petitions open for 30 days without receiving 25 valid signatures are closed as failed." --Super Goku V (talk) 10:13, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  As of 17:33, 3 September 2026 (UTC), I am supporting Option A (still), Option E (still), and Option F (new) with no preference between them. I am still opposed to Option B and Option D. I am still thinking about Option C due to what others are claiming it says that I do not agree with. --Super Goku V (talk) 17:33, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• A (edit: or F), which I'll claim as my idea. I disagree with Voorts about the speedy close because I think lots of small RfCs mean that some might succeed, whereas one big fat RfC tends to fail as no consensus.—S Marshall T/C 09:25, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  For record purposes, I note that this unsigned proposal is one of the many, many proposals about our processes recently started by FaviFake. To my despair, the community continues to insist that signing your RfCs is optional, so the obfuscation is within the rules.—S Marshall T/C 09:30, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Yeah that rule is weird, I've never understood why not signing is allowed. However, I wouldn't say I have started many, many proposals; I've only started a few of these, and only the last one was a failure. It seems I did a good job with this one, since consensus to change the rules is starting to form but it wasn't obvious. And yes, I was inspired by your "720-hour" comment for the wording of option A! FaviFake (talk) 10:36, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  As the preliminary statement is a neutral overview, and is copied to the central RfC page up to the first timestamp, some editors prefer just having a timestamp. That does not preclude signing a subsequent paragraph which makes it clear who created the RfC discussion. Most of the time, the creator also immediately expresses a viewpoint, and so their signature is evident there. In cases such as these where that did not occur, a short following signed paragraph would not be amiss. isaacl (talk) 13:32, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• A - For any process that has a clear time limit and a clear vote threshold (not !vote), the time limit should be strict. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:18, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• Option F "A petition always fails if it has not gained 25 valid signatures within 30 days of opening; signatures added after this 720-hour period are reverted or struck". Basically A now tweaked to add entirely; I would say C was OK, but if people really are reading it as votes after 30 days but before closure count I guess not. Strong oppose B & D as unfair to admin being recalled. KylieTastic (talk) 14:14, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• Option F as apparently this needs to be said explicitly, option A is fine otherwise. B/D were rejected in the RFCs that created RECALL. Petitions have 30 days to get 25 signatures, any less and they fail. Petitions are not CONSENSUS based but numerical, just because a petition doesn't have a close doesn't mean it is still ongoing. At 30 days it either has 25 signatures or it has failed, any kind of formal closure doesn't change that. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 17:15, 3 September 2026 (UTC)
• Speedy close. The (surviving) options are all the same, and the difference is cosmetic. Even if A won, untimely signatures could still be struck. If F won, nothing would change because we can already strike and remove untimely signatures, and a not-struck/not-removed untimely signature (in the case that no one has remembered to strike it) has the same null effect as a struck/removed untimely signature. And if this is about a license to strike/remove over objections, that is too trivial an issue to even discuss, since, as stated, it's all the same. And both of these options are the same as C. Waste of time.—Alalch E. 23:15, 5 September 2026 (UTC)
• Speedy close per above. This RFC is a waste of time as there is nothing of substance being proposed. -- LWG ^{talk (VOPOV)} 23:51, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  @LWG and @Alalch E. previous discussions (linked) have shown that these questions are not a waste of time as people have genuine disagreements about what the present wording means. Options A, C and F are not identical and while the differences may seem trivial, in the context that is explained in multiple of the comments above, they are actually not. It is simply incorrect to state that nothing of substance is being proposed. Thryduulf (talk) 09:07, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (RECALL)

• Isn't A and C the same but worded differently?– robertsky (talk) 12:14, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  A is for some reason keeping signatures that are late on the petition for some reason, but they won't count. --Super Goku V (talk) 02:47, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Option C doesn't specify what should happen in case of late signatures, which a couple of editors interpreted as meaning that they should count even if they were posted after the 30-day period because the petition was still open. Option A clarifies that they should be disregarded.​ FaviFake (talk) 10:40, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• Where is the WP:RFCBEFORE discussion? voorts (talk/contributions) 12:38, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  Wikipedia talk:Administrator recall#Closing failed petitions and other discussions linked from there contain extensive discussion about the issue, but not about an RFC with this wording. Thryduulf (talk) 13:00, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  This RfC seems to show a lack of understanding of why a time limit was imposed and open-ended petitions were rejected. voorts (talk/contributions) 13:07, 2 September 2026 (UTC)

  Voorts Since a few editors have disagreed with your suggestion to procedurally close this RfC, could you explain what you meant with this comment? It sounds like you have an opinion on the topic. FaviFake (talk) 13:52, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  The time limit was imposed to prevent open-ended petitions. If you had had an RFCBEFORE discussion, that might have been pointed out to you. Now we've got a few half-assed options to !vote on. I don't get why there's such a rush to start RfCs. Creating a false sense of urgency is not a good way to create or amend policies, guidelines, or processes. voorts (talk/contributions) 14:06, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  What false sense of urgency? The previous discussion was open for over two weeks and couldn't reach a consensus. These options are based on that discussion. The proposal is not "half-assed". FaviFake (talk) 14:13, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I meant half-baked, not half-assed. voorts (talk/contributions) 18:38, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Establishing consensus requires patience, particularly in a global editing community. I do think it's helpful to have that discussion in a broader venue such as this one, but it's possible that an ordinary discussion would have been enough regarding understanding the currently documented process. Now, discussing a change to the process may be worthwhile, but there's no urgency to making a change. I think it's unfair for a process change to take effect in the middle of a recall petition, so in my view, there's no deadline for a change. isaacl (talk) 22:24, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I agree with the last part; the result of this RfC should not affect the currently open petition. FaviFake (talk) 22:29, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I don't agree with that in principle. If the community reaches a consensus, then the community's consensus applies to all applicable situations. This isn't a court of law, and our policy and procedure pages are not statutes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:32, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  How much discussion is necessary to initiate an RfC? Katzrockso (talk) 14:40, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  The answer to that question is the same as always:

  "Multiple prior discussions may have been held, but these can be dismissed as having been insufficiently advertised, having happened on the wrong page, or showing insufficient participation (meaning any number of people not including the threatened power user). For example, the watchlist formatting change in 2012 resulted from an overwhelmingly positive, community-initiated, CENT-listed RFC at the Village pump (proposals), but, when it was implemented, these power users claimed that there was no RFC, no prior discussion, nobody knew about it, and nobody supported it."

  WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:35, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  It felt like we were wrapping things up and were going to decide between an RfC or accepting the proposed wording. --Super Goku V (talk) 18:42, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

• If there had been a WP:RFCBEFORE maybe we would have the missing option with any signatures after the the 720 hours reverted or struck not left. Leaving late signatures not reverted or struck is just leaving it open to confuse people who just look and see 25+ signatures. KylieTastic (talk) 14:03, 3 September 2026 (UTC) strike as I missed there was some discussion Wikipedia_talk:Administrator_recall#Closing_failed_petitions KylieTastic (talk) 14:20, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I specifically crafted the wording "are not reverted" precisely to avoid having to deal with this minutiae. The actual controversial question is whether or not the 720 hour limit should be fully enshrined into the process page or if the current (and imo vague) wording is sufficient. Once we achieve consensus that these signatures don't count, then we can figure out how they should be handled, but that would not be controversial and can be decided at WT:RECALL. (Case-in-point, this was basically not discussed during the RFCBEFORE discussion.)

  "Not reverted" means that they're not deleted outright, as we generally don't do that on Wikipedia. We can then decide that they should be left exactly as-is, struck-through, moved to a different section, moved to the talk page, moved to a hall of shame, etc. But that's not controversial and doesn't have to be decided in conjunction with whether they influence the result or not. Do you think option A could be reworded, like "are not reverted entirely" or "can be struck or moved"? ​ FaviFake (talk) 14:22, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Yes, "are not reverted entirely" would be better. Then the advice to the closing admins could be to strike, move, or add something like "signatures below this point were not counted as made after 720 hours". The whole idea that 30 days does not equal 30 days baffles me. We rely on people to close things and although most such things are closed quickly sometimes there will be a delay, especially if it ends at the least active admin time (I guess around 06:00 UTC?). Or we just use a template/module/bot to mark as closed to new signatures waiting admin closure. KylieTastic (talk) 14:52, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I updated the text of option A and added a note, I think you can now rewrite your !vote comment to avoid confusing the closing editor :)   ​

  I agree, but I think this process is already very controversial (just look at the opposes in the RECALL that's currently open) and the last thing I would want is to have instructions that are not absolutely crystal-clear during the most crucial moments of a petition. FaviFake (talk) 15:11, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  think this process is already very controversial [...] the last thing I would want is to have instructions that are not absolutely crystal-clear This is why in my draft I included those things you describe as uncontroversial and nitpicky - I felt it is desirable to have explicit consensus to avoid as much controversy as possible. Thryduulf (talk) 15:43, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  You think that deciding the precise wikimarkup used to mark a signature that has been discarded by the closer in the extremely unlikely case that a petition receives its 25th signature late would be so controversial that it would need to be decided using an RfC at the village pump? FaviFake (talk) 15:55, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  That's not what was proposed (it was strike, move to discussion, move to the talk page, remove or do nothing) but yes, I do think the choice to do any one of those could be controversial. Thryduulf (talk) 17:09, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Sure. But I'm not saying it's not controversial, I'm saying it's not controversial enough that it needs to be discussed in an RfC at the VPP. FaviFake (talk) 17:17, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  There was a suggestion in the recall archives to use bots to close them which had a few opposes. Personally, I would say that most to all of the issues raised then would be resolved now by having a bot close the discussion for review at the 30 day mark and having an editor confirm if 25 votes were not received at the deadline or if a 25th signature just made it in and the petition had yet to be checked and closed. --Super Goku V (talk) 18:30, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  That doesn't sound like a good idea. Nobody would be accountable if there were procedural errors like a blocked editor, as was suggested in the discussion you linked. FaviFake (talk) 19:43, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Huh? I don't see what you are meaning here. --Super Goku V (talk) 19:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  If a bot closes a discussion, we can't contact the bot to ask it to reconsider its closure. As much as I like bots, we need a human in the loop in this case. FaviFake (talk) 19:59, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  First sentence: That's the idea? Second sentence: We would. The reviewer. --Super Goku V (talk) 20:01, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  So basically we have a bot give its unreliable reading of the discussion and then a second person (how would it be chosen?) would perform the job of the closer? At this point it's best to just have a bot place {{Closing|lock=yes}} on the page so that people can't use the "Reply" button while we wait for a real closer. FaviFake (talk) 20:10, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I was in the middle of giving a second reply, so let me copy and paste that as I bet it will clear this up. (Though, based on your usage of Template:Closing, I think you are starting to get my point.)

  Let me repeat what I said again at the end with more detail. I personally believe that the majority, if not all, of the issues that have been brought up here and elsewhere would be resolved by the following: When a petition is still open at the 30 day mark, a bot closes it per its programming with a note near the top that the discussion needs reviewed. (A brief note here that so far, every petition has closed early and never hit 30 days. All we want in this situation is for a bot to say the discussion is closed and have a notice at the top that a review is needed.) Within the next hour or so, an editor checks the discussion to see the state of the petition at the end. If there are not 25 signatures, then it should be easy for the editor to remove the review text and add a comment near the top that the petition has failed to gather 25 signatures. On the other hand, it is possible that the 25th person to sign the petition did so before the bot closed the discussion. In this situation, the editor will then proceed as normal and review the signatures to confirm that each signature is a valid one. If the editor finds that there were 25 valid signatures, then they validate the petition as normal and the editor is up for RRfA. Otherwise, if there is invalid signatures that brings the total below 25, then the petition is deemed deficient and the editor would add a comment near the top that the petition failed to gather 25 valid signatures. --Super Goku V (talk) 20:15, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Thanks! I still think the closer's job should be to actually close the discussion, but I would support making a bot that just adds {{Closing|lock=yes}} with a custom |comment= parameter saying the timestamp has passed and we're awaiting a closer. Disabling the "Reply" button in this way should at least make it less likely that an editor edits the petition, but it can simply be removed if the closer finds out that a signature was invalid and reopens the petition. FaviFake (talk) 20:31, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Your idea is functionally similar to mine, so I wouldn't mind that. Though, note in my plans that a bot would only run at the 30 day mark. If a signature is invalid, then the petition would not reopen due to the 30 days passing. --Super Goku V (talk) 21:52, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  Personally, I'd rather not incur the cost of maintaining a bot for what has been a low occurrence event, particularly since there's no way for a bot to make an edit at a specific time, so it doesn't really solve the problem of having to examine when the signatures were added. Plus if this situation does occur, I imagine with all the interest there'll be sufficient volunteers checking the eligibility of all the signing editors and just waiting for the deadline to arrive. isaacl (talk) 22:17, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

  I think that we could do something similar with a countdown timer template such as Template:Days left. It won't be perfectly up to the minute, but it should give editors a notion of whether the deadline is close. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:39, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  If it is that much of a cost, then gotcha. --Super Goku V (talk) 05:30, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  If you don't want to strike or revert late signatures, there's always the option of adding an explanatory note. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:36, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

• Seems that 90% of editors are in favour of A and F but the options are almost identical. I suspect we will end up deciding that these signatures should be struck with a small explanatory note after the signature, an option compatible with both A and F (the signature is not reverted, which satisfies A, and it is struck, which satisfies F). Should we start thinking about closing this RfC? FaviFake (talk) 15:13, 4 September 2026 (UTC) —  Signature struck because it was posted after 15:16, 4 September 2026 (UTC). FaviFake (talk) 15:13, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  I personally think it is important that we do strike them (by using strike out that is, not by removing them altogether) rather than just leaving them in place and not counted, because the latter (as is suggested by option A) would be confusing for those looking at the petition after the fact, particularly if the struck votes make the difference between a pass and a fail. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 15:47, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  Yes, that's what I'm saying. A signature that is not reverted (A) can and should be struck (B), so by striking a signature we satisfy both options. FaviFake (talk) 16:01, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  I agree. KylieTastic (talk) 17:23, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  An additional benefit of striking is that it is less likely to be reverted by a confused editor who thought that the signature had been deleted by mistake. --Tryptofish (talk) 18:18, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

  Good point! FaviFake (talk) 09:20, 5 September 2026 (UTC)

  That's fine as long as that's what's implemented, and the new text should make it clear. Option A does not say this though, it says "signatures added after this 720-hour period are not reverted but do not count towards the threshold", which on its own does not give permission for anyone to strike a signature and actually rather implies that they should not. Option A is IMHO clearly not the same as option F for this reason. Cheers  — Amakuru (talk) 09:59, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

  (Incidentally, I think I missed one aspect of option F before - it says "signatures added after this 720-hour period are reverted or struck"... I actually don't support that verbatim, I think the reverted part should be removed, so the new wording simply says "signatures added after this 720-hour period are struck"". I suspect that sentiment is what you guys also favour based on the above comments...)  — Amakuru (talk) 10:05, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

  I actually do support F verbatim, including "reverted or struck". Thryduulf (talk) 10:11, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

  I stand by my opinion that all of this is irrelevant to the actual question which led to the RfC, which has long been resolved. What we do with the signatures doesn't matter, what matters is whether they count or not. This situation will likely never happen in the first place. FaviFake (talk) 10:12, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

  Might be best to let it run at least a full week or two before seeking a closer, but I agree that it appears to be between the two options and that both together might be ideal. --Super Goku V (talk) 21:55, 4 September 2026 (UTC)

SD and ordering

Out of curiosity: Is there a reason why short descriptions aren't set to noreplace by default? My instinct is that not transcluding short descriptions should be the default behavior, with the ability to transclude in specific scenarios. My layman's reading is that transcluding by default makes it easier to write infoboxes that automatically generate short descriptions, but there is probably something I'm missing. Zeibgeist (talk) 13:45, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Seconded. When multiple short descriptions appear in an article, we almost always have a carefully hand-crafted SD on line 1 followed by generic efforts generated via transclusions (normally of templates, but sometimes of article leads). Line 1 usually has the best SD (and should be improved or removed if it doesn't). The only use case I can see for replacing by default is when article A includes firstly the lead from article B and secondly a template; in this case article B's SD may be so specific as to be wrong, so the generic template SD is better. However, almost all templates which produce SDs use noreplace anyway, so that's not an argument for retaining the current default. Certes (talk) 14:01, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

The noreplace option is always used in infobox-generated short descriptions, so that a manual short description placed in an article will take precedence. I don't know what would happen if noreplace were the default and there were two "noreplace" SDs on a page; probably something undesirable. The whole SD system is a pile of hacks, since the English Wikipedia refused to use Wikidata short descriptions (for good reason, IMO) and a system for creating and using them had to be created just for us. Changing MOS:ORDER would fix this technical issue, but I stay away from MOS talk page drama. Changing which SD MediaWiki chooses (currently the last one it finds in rendered wikitext; would need to change to the first one it finds) would also address our MOS:ORDER technical issue, but that would require developers to make a change. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:04, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for the additional details. Intuitively, it makes sense to me to have short descriptions at the top of articles. Modifying MediaWiki to use the first SD it finds seems like a reasonable change given that we place short descriptions at the top per policy. Or we could just change MOS:ORDER, like you said. A chicken and egg problem I suppose. Zeibgeist (talk) 14:16, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

I think the best (and only?) place to change the default is in {{Short description}}. That template currently passes its second parameter (which is "noreplace" or absent) through to the SHORTDESC magic word. Instead, Template:Short description would add |2=noreplace to the magic word by default but would accept a new optional parameter |2=replace (for which I can think of no use case) to suppress that behaviour.

• {{Short description|Type of foo}} → {{SHORTDESC:Type of foo|noreplace}} (second output parameter is new)
• {{Short description|Type of foo|noreplace}} → {{SHORTDESC:Type of foo|noreplace}} (as before)
• {{Short description|Type of foo|replace}} → {{SHORTDESC:Type of foo}} (second input parameter is new)

Does that work? Certes (talk) 14:27, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

This template-specific behavior should be discussed at the template's talk page and linked from Wikipedia talk:Short description so that people who are familiar with the template's intricacies can comment. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:57, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Raised at Wikipedia talk:Short description#Should noreplace become the default?. Certes (talk) 15:38, 1 September 2026 (UTC)

Survey (endorsements)

• Support: With the amount of horserace coverage every campaign gets, if no independent sources are covering an endorsement, it lacks WP:WEIGHT. Dcpoliticaljunkie (talk) 20:36, 29 July 2026 (UTC)
• Support I didn't think the carve-out was a good idea seven years ago when I proposed that RfC. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:25, 29 July 2026 (UTC)
• Support per WP:VNOT and WP:DUE, as other editors have pointed out. A social media post or other statement endorsing a candidate is a primary source for the endorsement. It might be verifiable, but that doesn't make it due for inclusion. Inclusion of endorsements should require secondary sources. It should also require independent sources, because, e.g., a list of endorsements published by a campaign might be secondary and verifiable, but it doesn't establish WP:DUE. We should only include endorsements when reliable, secondary, independent sources (like history books and newspaper articles) establish that inclusion of the endorsement is due. Levivich (talk) 00:19, 30 July 2026 (UTC)
  • Comment. This is not meant to be a put-down: from what I know, WP:VNOT necessitates consensus but not necessarily "sources need to be this type", and WP:DUE does not necessitate source secondariness or independence. DUE only needs sources to be "reliable", and WP:RSPRIMARY separates secondariness and reliability by saying "Wikipedia articles should be based mainly on reliable secondary sources" and even saying primary sources "can be both reliable and useful in certain situations". Needless to say, these issues of VNOT and DUE are quite annoying. LightNightLights (talk • contribs) 01:01, 30 July 2026 (UTC) (edited 02:47, 30 July 2026 (UTC))

  I don't read the current guidance as suggesting an exception to DUE or VNOT. And it doesn't allow for citing a source from the campaign, only sources from the endorsing organization itself. DUE is contextual and can be assessed in a number of ways. For example, only including organizations with blue links to articles would be a reasonable bar to set in national and other high profile races. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 02:29, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  ...and WP:BESTSOURCES if we're going to nitpick over various parts of WP:NPOV (emphasis added): In principle, all articles should be based on reliable, independent, secondary published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. When writing about a topic, basing content on the best respected and most authoritative reliable sources helps to prevent bias, undue weight, and other NPOV issues.

  Wikipedia policies aren't laws. They're not well-written. Just because the words "independent" or "secondary" don't appear in the specific section WP:DUE doesn't mean that one can make a determination about what content should be included in an article from non-independent or primary sources. But in case there was any doubt about this, there's the WP:BESTSOURCES section of NPOV.

  Bottom line: to determine if content should be included in Wikipedia, we must look to the highest-quality, most-reliable, most recent, secondary, independent, published sources. That's what our core content policies and guidelines say when you put them together, even if it's spread out across a bunch of different pages and sections, like WP:VNOT, WP:DUE, WP:BALANCE, WP:BESTSOURCES, WP:REPUTABLE, WP:AGEMATTERS, and a bunch of other places. Levivich (talk) 21:21, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  You can certainly make an argument that that is the case. It is certainly not what is written in the policies and guidelines. I think we should go by what is written in the policies and guidelines, not what words editors wish were in the policies and guidelines.

  That section of WP:BESTSOURCES does not have the 20-year consensus you claim below - it was added relatively recently (a few years ago, if I'm remembering right). It's certainly a good thing, but it's a goal to aspire to, not the end-all of every discussion and certainly not a license to excise every non-secondary non-independent source from discussion altogether.

  WP:BESTSOURCES, despite your allusion to the other WP:UPPERCASE in WP:NPOV, is the only place in the NPOV policy where the word "independent" is contained. WP:AGEMATTERS has nothing to do with independent sources, so it's curious why it's being cited here.

  However, both WP:REPUTABLE and WP:BESTSOURCES say that articles should be based on "reliable, independent, published sources". That is certainly not the same thing as saying that any use of a non-independent source to supplement particular information is not permissible or should be completely banned. I completely agree with the WP:BESTSOURCES statement that articles should be based on reliable, independent, published sources. I do not agree that non-independent sources should be banned, which is probably why that is supported by none of the policies and guidelines you've cited. Katzrockso (talk) 23:58, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  That's a lot to cover: what I quoted from our PAGs is in fact written in our PAGs. I claim no 20-year consensus below. (There's no plausible way to understand the words "20-year veteran" as referring to the age of consensus rather than the age of an account.) Nobody is trying to excise or ban every non-secondary non-independent source. NPOV isn't the only policy that talks about having independent sources, another example is WP:RS. WP:AGEMATTERS was being cited here because the prior sentence said most recent. Based on ... is certainly not the same thing as saying that any use of a non-independent source to supplement particular information is not permissible or should be completely banned, so it's a good thing that nobody is arguing that any use of a non-independent source to supplement particular information is not permissible or should be completely banned. I do not agree that non-independent sources should be banned either, and so I'm glad that's not required by any PAGs.

  And yet I believe endorsements are the type of content that should be cited to the reliable, independent, secondary sources that our PAGs say articles should be based on.

  I don't know why you wrote that long series of fabrications, misinterpretations, strawman arguments, and putting words in my mouth I never said, requiring me to write this long correction, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't do that to me again. Levivich (talk) 00:23, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

  Policy does not support looking to the "we must look to the highest-quality, most-reliable, most recent, secondary, independent, published sources" to establish what is WP:DUE, not only because these are often contradictory and exclusive. We don't look to sources that don't exist, but evaluate those that actually exist and see which ones are the best to base our articles on (which is different than the inclusionary criteria for particular elements of content). Moreover, the policy that determines whether or not we include things remains WP:WEIGHT and WP:BALANCE, which once again do not mention the independence of sources. I once again think that editors should read the words that in a policy, not the words that they wish were in a policy.

  For example, WP:AGEMATTERS explicitly points out that the "most recent" source is certainly not always the most reliable source, so we should not simply look for the "most recent" source, but the WP:BESTSOURCE when evaluated holistically. There are numerous reasons why we might prefer an older source to a newer one. "Most recent" is certainly not a good summarization of WP:AGEMATTERS.

  Adding in auxiliary information like endorsements is certainly not the same as writing the bulk of our articles. Indeed, WP:SELFSOURCE states the great majority of any article must be drawn from independent sources. I don't find any conflict whatsoever between WP:RS, WP:NPOV (specifically WP:REPUTABLE and WP:BESTSOURCES) and using a non-independent source to verify an endorsement, because using a source is not the same as basing an article on a source.

  The argument presented here is effectively one that non-independent sources should be banned - you present no distinctive argument that wouldn't apply to every single use of a non-independent source. Indeed, there is no particularity to the argument here specific to the context in question - political endorsements. That suggests, or rather proves, that the issue is not specific to political endorsements, but with the use of non-independent sources altogether. Whether or not you take your argument to its logical conclusion is no import to me, you can call it fabrications, misinterpretations, strawman arguments, and putting words in my mouth I never said or whatever you like.

  If we are talking about fabrications, misinterpretations, strawman arguments, and putting words in my mouth I never said, we can start with this:

  what I quoted from our PAGs is in fact written in our PAGs

  I never stated or suggested that the quotes you provided were in any way made up. What I suggested was the the accompanying commentary misrepresents existing PAG, which is a charge I still contend is true. Katzrockso (talk) 02:34, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

  You said It is certainly not what is written in the policies and guidelines, but what I'm saying is in our PAGs, is in our PAGs. I'll show you in a moment. But first my Bernie impression: I am once again asking that you not put words in my mouth. Nobody is calling for banning all non-independent sources. Just because someone thinks non-independent sources shouldn't be used to source political endorsements doesn't mean they think non-independent sources shouldn't be used for anything. You can call that the argument's "logical conclusion," but it's actually a strawman argument: you're arguing against something (a total ban) that nobody is arguing in favor of.

  Now, the first sentence of WP:BALANCE, key words bolded:

  An article should not give undue weight to minor aspects of its subject but should strive to treat each aspect with a weight proportional to its treatment in the body of reliable, published material on the subject.

  If no independent RS is writing about an endorsement, if the only people writing about an endorsement are the endorser and endorsee (both non-independent), then that is, indisputably, a low proportion of coverage in RS, it's like 1 or 2 sources out of all sources when only non-independent sources are writing about it and no independent sources are writing about it. Because of this low proportion of RS covering the endorsement, it's a "minor aspect" to which we should not give "undue weight."

  WP:WEIGHT aka WP:DUE analysis is the same:

  Generally, the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all, except perhaps in a "See also" to an article about those specific views.

  If an endorsement is only published by the endorser and/or endorsee (who are non-independent), and no other RS are writing about it (so no independent RS), then it's a "tiny minority" (1 or 2 sources out of all sources) and so that view should not be included at all.

  In sum: if the only place an endorsement is published is in non-independent sources, such as a social media post by an endorser, or a campaign website, then that means the endorsement is a tiny proportion of RS, a tiny minority of RS, and therefore the endorsement should not be included, per WP:BALANCE and WP:DUE, even though those sections don't have the word "independent" in them. Levivich (talk) 04:39, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

• Support It's time that the local tolerance for this be deprecated per VNOT and DUE. Generally concur with the above comments. -Ad Orientem (talk) 00:38, 30 July 2026 (UTC)
• Support Why even would we allow local consensus to override higher level authority? That's stupid. — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 00:53, 30 July 2026 (UTC)
• Mildly oppose Just to give some background information to others here, I'd have to imagine that this discussion is coming from the 'discussion' that we had here? I would like to point out that the provision regarding organization endorsements explicitly says that there isn't a consensus regarding sourcing, so I don't exactly agree that local consensus is overruling the rule. I very much do prefer independent sourcing when available, but there are definitely places where it just won't be. If an endorsement isn't mentioned in an independent article, I don't think it inherently means that they aren't notable, especially in elections like state legislatures that do get far less media coverage than national or statewide ones. These types of endorsements are also helpful in things like nonpartisan elections and help readers get a better idea of the candidates that were or did run. I would go along with the rule if the carve-out does get removed, but I do think that it could remove some important information for a lot of elections that just don't get as much media attention as they deserve.ABlitzz (talk) 01:42, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Thanks, that's helpful. I was about to ask for links to articles that were viewed as including problematic examples and/or to prior discussions about this. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 02:20, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

• Support I do believe that independent sourcing is necessary. --Enos733 (talk) 04:49, 30 July 2026 (UTC)
• Support. If reliable and independent secondary sources can't be bothered to cover an endorsement, neither should we.Cortador (talk) 11:03, 30 July 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose on principle. I'm not fond of the way some people increasingly like to claim that every individual fact (that they dislike) in an article has to pass WP:N-level sourcing to be included, rather than using editorial judgement and consensus to determine what is relevant to the topic. As Myceteae noted below, the opening statement of this RFC itself is already erroneously biased in that direction. Anomie⚔ 14:35, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  What is important to a topic is ultimately determined by reliable and independent sources. Once we as editors start determining that based on primary sources, it's just original research. Cortador (talk) 16:02, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Yes, that's exactly the kind of bogus argument I'm talking about. Thanks for the example. Anomie⚔ 18:21, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Thank you for your clear, policy-based argument. Cortador (talk) 18:38, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  You're welcome. It's nice when someone appreciates what the policies actually say rather than fictions like "OR requires multiple independent sources, not just reliable ones". Anomie⚔ 19:09, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Whom are you citing? Cortador (talk) 20:50, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Anomie, did you seriously just call our core content policies WP:V and WP:OR "bogus"? That's wild from a 20-year veteran. WP:BESTSOURCES literally says: In principle, all articles should be based on reliable, independent, secondary published sources with a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy. So arguing that endorsements shouldn't be included unless they're in reliable, independent, secondary published sources is ... very much in line with very old and very widely accepted core Wikipedia policy. I'm not sure how you can characterize that as "bogus." Levivich (talk) 19:01, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  No, and I think I'll not engage with your falsehoods. Anomie⚔ 19:09, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  "Bogus"? "Falsehoods"? Suggesting I'm a troll? In response to people saying "we should have independent sources"? What's with this ridiculously-unwarranted hostility? What the heck has gotten into you today? Levivich (talk) 20:42, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  You can have an article that is WP:Based upon reliable independent sources without every single line in the article being cited to an independent source. It would, in fact, be quite "wild" to suggest that only reliable, independent, secondary sources are permitted by policy. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

  What is the material—such as facts, allegations, and ideas—for which no reliable source has ever been published in question here? Katzrockso (talk) 20:55, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose per AnomieX. This is just an extension of the primary sourcing paranoia - WP:DUE says precisely nothing about the independence of a source or whether it is primary, secondary or tertiary. Editors often attribute to particular policies meaning that is contained nowhere within them, and unfortunately DUE is in the club. From the original RfC, the point that I find most pertinent is that newspaper endorsements are organizational endorsements that could be of relevance to our articles, but tend to receive less coverage than other types of endorsements. When mandating secondary, independent sourcing, editors must consider whether these secondary, independent sources will tend to produce a bias in their coverage that will tend to affect our coverage. In this case, I don't think this bar has been met.
  As for WP:VNOT, this is of tangential relevance to this guideline, as it is silent on the independence of sources or whether they are PTS. Indeed, it simply says that consensus can decide that a verifiable fact does not improve an article. This applies to everything, including content sourced to independent, reliable, secondary sources.Katzrockso (talk) 20:54, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  I'd be curious if anyone could find even one newspaper endorsement that should be in an article that is not mentioned by any independent source. In practice, the bit we're debating here has nothing to do with newspaper endorsements and everything to do with, say, a barely notable advocacy group that issues two hundred endorsements that nobody reports on but make it into two hundred separate Wikipedia lists. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:31, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  When you define "should be in the article" as "has independent sourcing" and then find that every example that should be in the article has independent sourcing, it's hardly surprising. Katzrockso (talk) 21:44, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  I'm not sure how that responds to what I said. To rephrase: what's an example of a newspaper endorsement that was not covered by an independent source? (because there are an awful lot of the other kind, where we cite social media posts of local advocacy groups to add them en masse). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:46, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Any newspaper from a small region covering an endorsement from another newspaper from that region is, from a certain POV, not an independent source (given that they're business rivals and whatnot). So I'm going to guess... the vast majority of newspaper endorsements can't be covered by an independent RS? GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 22:20, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  I'm not sure I've ever seen the "it's not independent if the subject is a competitor/rival of the source" argument, but certainly haven't seen consensus for that. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:53, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  WP:IIS states that an independent source lacks conflicts of interest (i.e., there is no potential for personal, financial, or political gain to be made from the existence of the publication). Katzrockso (talk) 23:11, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  This is now a tangent. If someone would like to make the case that e.g. we can't use CNN or NBC to report on FOX because they're not independent, or that relationship is somehow radically different at a different geographic scale, that's probably a discussion for another place. I'm happy to be pinged there, but cannot imagine any real consensus for it beyond a "yeah, I sorta guess you could say there's technically a COI, but no that's not a reason to decide they lose their independence". I could be wrong, but again we're getting away from the point here. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:18, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Nobody's arguing that strawman; I hope I'm not putting words in Katzrockso's mouth, but I like to think we've been pretty clear than independence is not the be all and end all when it comes to newspapers reporting on each other. (Though the potential COI is something I do take into consideration when I'm sourcing and writing articles; I hope you're not asking me not to?)GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 23:24, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  The mistake here is thinking that non-independent sources are some "bad" category of sources that we need to completely eschew. They certainly need to be used more carefully, but they aren't supposed to be some verboten evil that needs to be excised from every article, despite the increasing tendency to characterize anything that isn't an SIRS as such.

  I don't see how by the definition of independent sources used by Wikipedia, they are independent. If you'd like to propose a change to the WP:IIS essay or WP:ORGIND guideline, I wouldn't be necessarily opposed. For what it's worth, WP:ORGIND also specifies that competitors are not independent;

  Independence of the author (or functional independence): the author must be unrelated to the company, organization, or product. Related persons include organization's personnel, owners, investors, (sub)contractors, vendors, distributors, suppliers, other business partners and associates, customers, competitors, sponsors and sponsorees (including astroturfing), and other parties that have something, financially or otherwise, to gain or lose.

  Katzrockso (talk) 23:48, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  I don't think that's a good thing, but I also don't think the only remedy to the problem is this proposal. Katzrockso (talk) 22:27, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  +1. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 22:41, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  I would say that this is probably where I'm at as well. I can see the concerns that people have and are bringing up, but I think that, for the most part, the guidelines are fine as they are currently. ABlitzz (talk) 23:30, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  Thinking about some of the past conversations, I don't think this is a case of primary sourcing paranoia. I think it's sometimes a case of promotionalism paranoia (Molly Ivins once told about a Texas politician she despised: "I think the meanest thing I ever said about one of them was that he ran on all fours, sucked eggs and had no sense of humor," she said. "And I swear I saw him in the Capitol the next day and all he said was, 'Baby, you put my name in your paper!'" – only here, it's the fear that some minor political club will say "Baby, you put our name in your Wikipedia!"). Mostly, though, I think it's a case of people thinking that the articles in Category:Lists of United States presidential candidate endorsements just don't belong in Wikipedia, and if we can't avoid them, then we should have them be as short and incomplete as possible. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:55, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

  I have no opinion on whether those lists should exist, but if people are wanting to change a guideline to make articles as short and incomplete as possible because they don't like that type of article, it seems very much like Wikipedia: Disrupting Wikipedia to make a point Katzrockso (talk) 02:14, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

  We prefer to use other words for that, like "defending Wikipedia" and "having high standards". ;-)

  Seriously, where to draw the line is something different people can have different opinions about. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:43, 6 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support Lists of endorsements seem to be a blatant violation of WP:SOAP which is policy and states that Wikipedia is not a soapbox...or a vehicle for propaganda, advertising, and showcasing. The proposal raises the bar and so is a move in the right direction. Andrew🐉(talk) 21:01, 30 July 2026 (UTC)
• Support, this is how we decide whether something is worth mentioning. Things that are not worth mentioning probably aren't worth mentioning. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:23, 31 July 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose (Just to be up front, my opposition stems from my opposition to the rigid applications of criteria #2 generally, eventhough I agree with the principles behind it) Endorsements are, by definition exercises of expression of bias, of advocacy of a subjective opinion. Lists are means to comprehensively present relevant factual information in an organized manner for ease of consumption. Lists of endorsements therefore would by definition conflict with various basic WP principles, but their continual existence are tolerated/accepted/even desired by some of us because they comprehensively enumerate relevant factual information in a succinct, organized manner, allowing reader to draw insights and informed assessment.
  If we accept that premise, then rejecting an undisputed entry that meets criteria 1 & 3 by rigidly enforcing the independent aspect of criteria 2 without any consideration of weighing of other facts (such as the reliability aspect of criteria 2, local context, scale of the contest, substantive relevance or significance of a particular entry to the particular context) is to me quite illogical. 1) Given endorsement is an expression of bias, an unindependent source, such as the endorser themselves, actually is the ultimate reliable source. 2) Existence of independent source is generally an strong indicator of notability but only an reasonably good indicator of relevance. Some inconsequential endorsement get attention because they are unique or interesting or even entertaining, while some clearly consequential endorsement get no little media play because they were expected or boring but nonetheless impactful. For example, endorsements of politicians by celebraties like actors or singers often get covered in the news for their entertainment value, because they are interesting and unusual, but they rarely have meaningful impact on electoral outcome. An endorsement from a former office holder that retired long ago may general little press interest while having huge impact (especially in internal contests like primaries or nomination fights where older voters, and long time party activists are have greater presence.)
  Ultimately, the purpose of this policy is to ensure entries included in such lists are realiable, notable, relevant and consequential. Exisitence of independent sources would be decent indicators for those things but not conclusive proof, and the absence of independent sources certainly does not conclusively disprove any of those things. If the notability of the endorser, the factual reliability of the endorsement, and its relevance to the the subject election are not in dispute, exclusion would arguably amount to censorship. JacobW2 (talk) 15:10, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

  An endorsement from a former office holder that retired long ago may general little press interest while having huge impact (especially in internal contests like primaries or nomination fights where older voters, and long time party activists are have greater presence.) This isn't really germane to this proposal since the current exclusion currently only affects organizational endorsements, not individuals. For what it's worth, I don't think be opposed to a very narrow exception for current (and former) officeholders who represent(/ed) part of the constituency being contested. If anything, the fact that a former elected's endorsement is excluded unless covered by independent media but an endorsement by an organization, however irrelevant, can be included cited to only their website highlights how odd the status quo is. Dcpoliticaljunkie (talk) 19:08, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support per my reasoning at Talk:2026 New Democratic Party leadership election (archive link) and the preceding discussion in that archive page. Goes against multiple P&Gs otherwise, including WP:DUE, WP:PROMO and WP:ABOUTSELF ―"Ghost of Dan Gurney" _(hihi) 21:54, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

  Note for closer - I have changed my username since !voting in this discussion ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 16:12, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support per above. There's a reason local consensus can't overrule global consensus, especially on notability. FaviFake (talk) 22:51, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

  Notability has to do with whether an article should exist for a topic, it has nothing to do with whether content should be included in an article. Katzrockso (talk) 23:54, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose - What to do about noteworthy endorsements by media outlets that are covered by the outlet's competitors is an excellent point. (Plus, there's the issue of organizations and independent sources potentially disagreeing that I brought up below.) WP:DUE would apply regardless and seems orthogonal to this issue. Gnomingstuff (talk) 23:03, 31 July 2026 (UTC)
  • Still hoping for even one (and preferably more) example of noteworthy endorsements by media outlets that are covered by the outlet's competitors, but this is the last time I'll mention it. It's a big flood gate to leave open for a hypothetical. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:18, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

    I can't find any independent coverage of The Detroit Metro Times endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed as an example. According to our article, it's the largest circulating newspaper in the Detroit Metro area, which is the largest city in Michigan. I think that's pretty noteworthy. Katzrockso (talk) 00:02, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

    • Well, largest circulating weekly :) but regardless we have an article about it and I, too, cannot find independent coverage. Thanks for digging up an example. I'm more inclined to support an exception for certain kinds of companies/organizations (like notable media outlets), but still not quite convinced it's in our best interest to include every endorsement by every organization or company, regardless of what they are or how much they're written about. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 00:27, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

      Who said we have to include every endorsement by every organization or company, with or without independent sources? Anomie⚔ 01:07, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

      I completely agree that we shouldn't be including every endorsement by every organization or company. The status quo of guideline doesn't require this, and if that is what happens in practice, I would support any effort to trim non-notable and non-noteworthy organizations. Katzrockso (talk) 03:04, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

      As the person who has added a lot of the endorsements to the Michigan Senate race's article, which is the article that kind of seems to have started all of this, I'm just wanting to give some of my own thoughts here. There have definitely been a lot of endorsements listed in articles that I haven't added simply because the endorsers don't have a Wikipedia page. If they have a Wikipedia page, I'll usually add them because that's a symbol, in my mind, that they're notable enough to be added. If they have no Wikipedia page, then I'll typically avoid adding them to articles unless there's another reason that would make sense (i.e. a local or House election where a candidate is endorsed by a notable person in the city/district but the endorser doesn't have a Wikipedia page). Personally, my opinion is that if there is a source that follows the guidelines and the endorser is notable enough due to having a page here or some other reason, then there's no reason not to add in the endorsement ABlitzz (talk) 13:06, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

      Joe Celebrity might be notable for his movie career… but that does not mean his political opinions are worth noting. Blueboar (talk) 13:45, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

      I can understand the point you're making there, but wouldn't editors be interfering with the neutrality of the page if we're able to just decide who is relevant and who isn't? As long as the endorser has a good source and page, I really don't see a reason why they shouldn't be included. Under your example, it could also show the start of Joe Celebrity getting more involved in the political scene and becoming prominent in both movies and politics. ABlitzz (talk) 15:23, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

      plus Joe Celebrity would probably be covered by outside media anyway by dint of being a celebrity; the WP:DUE concerns would remain unchanged Gnomingstuff (talk) 20:08, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

      The status quo requires independent sources for individual persons endorsing a candidate, so that isn't a question at the moment. Katzrockso (talk) 20:57, 1 August 2026 (UTC)

  By this interpretation, most articles about news orgs would fail notability guidelines since almost other source would be considered a competitor and therefore not independent. This seems to be something to address within that guideline (stipulate that media outlets that are competitors of each other are independent) rather than this one. Dcpoliticaljunkie (talk) 16:13, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

  Notable news organizations tend to get at least some coverage in journals, books, and other newspapers not operating in the same market; for an example, the Weekend Times, a Malawian tabloid that operated for only about 6 years, is primarily based upon such sources. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 18:10, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

  In practice, though, I would also like to note that the community treats newspapers and academic journals very differently than commercial organizations in general. (You can argue that a newspaper as an actual isn't technically a corporation, but that's splitting hairs in most cases). WP:NJOURNAL and WP:NNEWS are essays, but they do emphasize impact/influence as a pathway to notability that we'd never allow under a typical application of NCORP. GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 18:21, 4 August 2026 (UTC)

  I agree that we treat articles about publishers differently from articles about other businesses, but I think it's practical of us. Sometimes we need that information as editors. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:59, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose The inclusion/exclusion of a particular endorsement that lacks independent sourcing can always be debated on the article's talk page, just like with any other disputed content. Some1 (talk) 23:42, 31 July 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose. I'm just not seeing any evidence of an actual problem here that needs solving. At 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan § Endorsements, there are far fewer organizations listed than individuals. As others have noted, celebrity and other "big name" endorsements are prone to garnering at least some media coverage even when their encyclopedic value is questionable. PACs and political organizations, whose endorsements may be less newsworthy, may be a more meaningful reflection of a candidate's ideology and support base. Looking at other articles that were shared at Talk:2026 United States Senate election in Michigan#Organizational endorsements, most have much shorter endorsement lists. Weighting these lists towards celebrities and other individuals is of no value to these articles. The current guidance is in no way an exception to WP:DUE or any other broadly applicable policy or guideline. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:54, 1 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose - current system functions quite well, and WP:DUE doesn't appear to be violated because of it - I don't see a reason to prevent endorsements being sourced to verifiable primary sources. Jishara (talk) 00:53, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support per Rhode and TBUACzarking0 (talk) 07:31, 2 August 2026 (UTC)
• Support I agree that generally primary sources may be used for a wide variety of information. But this provision is so poorly written, it should go. The first glaring mistake was its mention of largely discredited local consensus, when it could of just used "editors may", but even worse it then suggests that verifiability is all you need for content additions, and that is plainly untrue, see WP:VNOT. No editors at any article can vote to ignore the other content policies, and no guideline can either. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:42, 2 August 2026 (UTC)

  Just to be clear, I would also oppose a rule that said only secondary sources count. That's not what DUE requires, in every case, we may use primary sources. I think the rule should still go because of its poor wording. Go back to the drawing board, get ride of "local consensus" and make clear the all content policies not just V matter. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:20, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. This would create a more stringent sourcing requirement than that of most other content where the concern here isn't the veracity of the endorsements, but whether they are DUE. Jessintime (talk) 15:21, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

  More stringent sourcing requirements for content having to do with BLPs is never a bad thing. ―"Ghost of Dan Gurney" _(hihi) 17:16, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

  If it results in a violation of the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy, then artificially higher sourcing standards can be a bad thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:03, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

  "All significant points of view" has never included content limited to primary sources. Cortador (talk) 19:07, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

  Where in the policy does it say that? Katzrockso (talk) 19:47, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

  It's under verifiability. Cortador (talk) 21:11, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

  What part of the Wikipedia:Verifability policy states that significant points of view excludes content limited to primary sources? As far as I am aware, "significant points of view" is a term of art specific to the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view policy and isn't explicitly defined anywhere. Katzrockso (talk) 21:51, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

  More to the point, what do considerations about "primary sources" have to do with a proposal for "independent sources"? Wikipedia:Secondary does not mean independent.

  @Cortador, a simple example of when a primary-only viewpoint is needed is when someone is accused of a crime, and they deny it. We rarely have secondary source material for that (that would mean a source that analyzes, evaluates, interprets, etc. their denial, rather than merely repeating the fact that the accused person denied the accusation), and it is the near-universal practice of the community to mention the existence of such denials, even if they have to be sourced to the subject's social media (which is both primary and non-independent). We can't meet the goals of either the BLP policy or the NPOV policy by removing the accused's POV about his innocence from a Wikipedia article just because there isn't a high-quality secondary source. We need a source that is strong enough to support the claim in the article (the usual claim being "He denied the accusations"), but a fairly weak source is strong enough for that.

  (Undefined words have their dictionary definitions, so "points of view" in the policy is the same as Point of view (philosophy).) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:29, 7 August 2026 (UTC)

  News articles include responses from accused people all the time. I don't know where you get the idea that this "rarely" happens. Cortador (talk) 08:30, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

  @Cortador, most news articles are primary sources. See WP:PRIMARYNEWS. A typical newspaper article is a:

  • non-self-published,
  • independent, and
  • primary source.

  (Also short. The longer it is, the more likely it is to be a secondary source.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:38, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

  No, they absolutely are not. You are confusing how e.g. academics use that term with how it is used on Wikipedia, and so is that essay. Cortador (talk) 19:58, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

  The policy WP:PRIMARY itself says "A primary source is a first-hand account of an event. Primary sources may include newspaper articles...". It specifically calls out breaking news: "For Wikipedia's purposes, breaking news stories are also considered to be primary sources". WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:10, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

  This sort of mess is why I still think WP:PSTS should be moved into an essay, rather than being part of the WP:No original research policy. It's a heuristic that people like to give far too much weight to. Anomie⚔ 23:32, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

  I don't think it should be moved into an essay, but I do think it should be in a separate page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:49, 8 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support As if RS do not care, why should we (see wp:undue). Slatersteven (talk) 12:16, 9 August 2026 (UTC
• Oppose - this is a case where one size doesn't fit all. While with US presidential elections and nominations there are always numerous published sources listing endorsements this is often not the case for smaller contests, particularly with the decline of the media. The recent 2026 New Democratic Party leadership election for example was not closely covered by the media until the last few weeks so even though there were prominent endorsements by current and former politicians these were often only reported on the candidate websites and press releases and did not receive "independent" coverage until very late, if at all. This gave an unbalanced and misreprestarive impressio of the relative support candidates had. Major political parties such as the NDP have strict campaign rules and a leadership candidate who falsely claimed endorsements would have been fined or expelled - but even so we had editors insisting these endorsements could not be listed, even though under the circumstances they were reliable (due to the consequences for candidates for making false claims), due to global wikipedia rules. Some sort of flexibility is required and if there are other reasons why a self-reported endorsement can be considered reliable, then that should be sufficient. Wellington Bay (talk) 15:32, 9 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose: many of the others gave good reasoning. Especially for the smaller cases, not every endorsement is going to be covered by a secondary one. I also believe that wikipedia should in general consider being more open to primary sources though that would probably warrant a separate discussion.
  Also, WP:PRIMARYNOTBAD explicitly states "Primary sources can be reliable, and they can be used. Sometimes, a primary source is even the best possible source", so there should be no good reason to support removing this section. Wikieditor662 (talk) 16:37, 9 August 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose Media coverage varies wildly depending local market and perceived importance of the position. One size fits all fails when most English-language local print media in Canada is owned by a small number of conglomerates that have eliminated local coverage outside major markets. American markets may get horserace coverage; we're lucky to get any mention of equines. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 18:20, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

  That's a failure of the Canadian media ecosystem, not of Wikipedia's policies. Our job is not to provide original reporting or comprehensive lists of data, but encyclopedic content that reflects what reliable, independent sources say. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 02:46, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  Our job is not to ignore valid information when no "reliable, independent sources" are available. One could argue that Canadian English-language media has almost no reliable, independent sources left outside a few major urban markets. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 18:15, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  If something isn't covered at all in reliable, independent sources, then it lacks due weight. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 12:02, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support Endorsement cruft takes up a huge amount of space on election articles, to the point that 5 of the top 50 longest articles are about state-level elections. Requiring third-party coverage would be a great way to cut down on this. I would even propose going one step further and applying the MOS:CULTURALREFS standard of secondary/tertiary sources that discuss the endorsement in depth, not just a brief mention. --Ahecht (TALK
  PAGE) 21:37, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

  In the first 50 entries in Special:LongPages, I see:

  • US elections for federal office: Statewide opinion polling for the 2008 United States presidential election, Nationwide opinion polling for the 2016 United States presidential election, 2020 United States House of Representatives elections in Texas, 2026 United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2024 United States House of Representatives elections in California, 2024 United States House of Representatives elections in Texas, 2024 United States House of Representatives elections in Texas, and 2026 United States House of Representatives elections in Texas
  • US elections for state office: 2021 California gubernatorial recall election
  • UK: Opinion polling for the 2015 United Kingdom general election, Opinion polling for the 2024 United Kingdom general election,
  • Other: Opinion polling for the next Spanish general election, Opinion polling for the 2025 Canadian federal election

  and because Ballotpedia is an independent source that reports all endorsements for all US elections (both state and national), I don't see any effect of this rule on most of these election-related articles. WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:01, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

  That, and, Texas and California are really big and have a lot of districts. I'm not surprised that their election articles are prone to being very long. These articles vary somewhat in the number of endorsements listed per candidate and in the promotion of individual vs. organizational endorsements but it doesn't appear to me that organizational endorsements are driving this problem—to the extent it is a problem that need solving. Maybe some other approach is needed to trim these articles or maybe the size of these articles is acceptable and unavoidable given the nature of the subjects. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 22:13, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

  Just a reminder that the United States is not the only country in the world that has elections. Ballotpedia is useless outside the US. Wellington Bay (talk) 01:04, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  But the US may be the only country that prompts these complaints. It wouldn't make sense to say we have a problem with long lists of endorsements in (e.g.,) 2026 United States House of Representatives elections in California, so let's adopt a rule that has no effect on that article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:08, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  +1 —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:41, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  I compared 2021 2021 California gubernatorial recall election § Endorsements with Ballotpedia's notable endorsements list in the same race, as this is the only true US state-level race in the list of long pages. For the recall question, I count 38 organizational endorsements on our list and 36 on Ballotpedia's. This is not a meaningful difference. Our article contains many more individual endorsements than organizational, despite already requiring a higher standard for independent sourcing. If we look at the section sizes, § Endorsements is up there but the big problem is § Results. Again, this is just a result of having a very large state. I suspect that the table formatting and markup is increasing the bytes but this is an attempt to make a massive amount of data digestible. If the size of this article is truly a concern then some intervention besides removing (at most) two endorsements is needed.

Section sizes in 2021 California gubernatorial recall election More information Section name, Byte count ... Section size for 2021 California gubernatorial recall election (55 sections) Section name Byte count Prose size (words) Header Total Header Total (Top) 7,261 7,261 419 419 Background 4,200 60,559 216 3,436 Newsom recall petition (June 2020–March 2021) 8,244 25,132 340 1,074 Party at The French Laundry 9,226 9,226 363 363 Reactions 3,043 3,043 118 118 Certification 4,619 4,619 253 253 Recall campaigning (March 2021–September 2021) 5,435 28,147 360 1,860 Newsom under recall 8,862 8,862 566 566 Partisanship 13,850 13,850 934 934 Recall election (September 2021) 41 3,080 0 286 Election administration 1,482 1,482 155 155 Larry Elder's unsubstantiated fraud claim prior to election day 1,557 1,557 131 131 California's recall process 7,085 32,277 389 2,021 Changes to state recall election laws 1,044 25,192 97 1,632 Recall election timeline (SB 117 and SB 152) 2,774 2,774 174 174 Election cost 5,517 5,517 404 404 Incumbent's party preference (SB 151) 1,812 1,812 129 129 Misapplication of tax return disclosure law (SB 27) 4,643 4,643 287 287 Constitutional legal challenge 5,074 5,074 309 309 Proposed changes to state recall election law 4,328 4,328 232 232 Fundraising 6,201 6,201 496 496 Campaign 13 125,856 0 521 Qualified replacement candidates 3,165 11,353 197 197 Top candidates 8,188 8,188 0 0 Debates 5,599 9,972 237 237 Participation 4,373 4,373 0 0 Endorsements 21 67,324 0 0 On recall question 49,614 49,614 0 0 For candidates 17,689 17,689 0 0 Predictions 1,538 1,538 0 0 Polling 16 35,656 0 87 Newsom recall 12,051 12,051 4 4 Replacement candidates 23,589 23,589 83 83 Results 16,255 311,670 103 230 By county 18 31,984 0 48 On recall question 11,306 11,306 23 23 On replacement candidates 20,660 20,660 25 25 By congressional district 34 17,845 0 79 On recall question 8,266 8,266 38 38 On replacement candidates 9,545 9,545 41 41 By city 16 245,586 0 0 On recall question 245,570 245,570 0 0 Aftermath 14 5,394 0 328 Turnout and participation 1,184 1,184 72 72 Commentary after election 4,196 4,196 256 256 See also 284 284 0 0 Notes 12 131 0 0 General polling notes 44 44 0 0 Polling sponsor notes 47 47 0 0 Other 28 28 0 0 References 30 30 0 0 External links 565 5,142 0 12 Anti-recall campaign 274 274 0 0 Recall campaign 237 237 0 0 Official candidate campaign websites 4,066 4,066 12 12 Total 554,805 554,805 7,463 7,463 Close

—Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:56, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

• We both responded to your similar sentiments about Ballotpedia below. The only examples of 'problematic' articles provided have been US elections articles. (For the record, I don't find the endorsements sections of these articles especially problematic.) I offered an alternative explanation for why California and Texas elections articles are prone to being so large. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:50, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. Not all media in every country is created equally. Certain places are going to cover endorsements more than others, and I think that is in of itself biased, as it will result in certain regions having better coverage than others.-- Earl Andrew - talk 02:36, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  Comprehensive lists of endorsements are inherently promotional and if the media in a certain region don't bother to point them out, that's no one's fault. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 02:56, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  It's the media's fault, not no one's fault. We shouldn't be slaves to large corporate media that chooses to ignore most local news. G. Timothy Walton (talk) 18:18, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  I disagree with the notion that listing endorsements is strictly promotional, or that it has no encyclopedic value. It's supposed to tell readers something about the candidate's support base, affiliations, and affinities, and is often relevant to campaign finance. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:32, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  Systemic bias is an issue on Wikipedia, but there's not typically consensus to lower standards to the level of "include it because it exists, regardless of whether anyone has judged it worthy of note". — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 16:20, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  I agree that we wouldn't want to lower standards, but my concern about this problem is:

  • we're talking about requiring higher standards, not the ordinary ones, and
  • the point is to deal with lists of endorsements in US, and this proposal will have no effect on lists of endorsements in the US.

  A proposal that would address the identified problem would sound something like this:

  If there is a reasonably comprehensive list of endorsements at Ballotpedia (or a similar site), then link to that webpage in the Wikipedia:External links. When a comprehensive external list is available, articles should contain only a high-level summary of endorsements in the article, e.g., "The candidate has been endorsed by anti-tax advocacy groups and law enforcement agencies^[1]" (when reliable sources directly support such summaries) or information about endorsements that produced significant media attention, e.g., "The Abrasive Activists club announced an unsolicited endorsement and donation, causing the candidate to disclaim the endorsement, return the money, and announce support for raising taxes^[1]" or "The candidate was endorsed by the prime minister, and the election result was widely seen as a test of the PM's political influence^[1]".

  WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:26, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support. If the endorsement isn't reported on by independent RS, then it's not passing the bar for BALASP (and if the candidacy/election itself has so little sourcing that an endorsement announcement from 1-2 non-independent sources actually is proportionally weighty coverage-wise, then either the subject itself is not notable or there's a pressing case for IAR). By policy, Wikipedia articles about a person, company, or organization are not an extension of their website, press releases, or other social media marketing efforts. Endorsements are inherently promotional, self-serving, and (when sourced from the endorser as an individual person) are SPS with claims about third parties. They should be contextualized, or at the very least noticed, by independent RS.
  I also don't see how a political campaign shouldn't be held to the same standards as Listings to be avoided include, but are not limited to: business alliances, clients, competitors, employees ... equipment, estates, offices, store locations, contact information, patent filings, products, sponsors, subdivisions and tourist attractions. JoelleJay (talk) 20:13, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  One way that political endorsements differ from these other listings to avoid, as I said elsewhere is that they may tell readers something about the candidate's support base, affiliations, and affinities, and is often relevant to campaign finance. There is some superficial similarity between political endorsements and business business alliances or (corporate) sponsors but there are meaningful differences. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:22, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  If an endorsement actually tells readers something meaningful about the candidate, then that especially deserves to be validated as real and attention-worthy by an independent RS and ideally contextualized. What's stopping malicious announcements by bad actors or self-promo ones by businesses hoping to have their name associated with a candidate? JoelleJay (talk) 11:35, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  This is the kind of case-by-case assessment that can be made on the article talk page. I'm not seeing evidence that this is a real-world problem. Primary sources are almost always reliable for statements about what the source itself says. Effective self promo will, by definition, be picked up elsewhere so this doesn't necessarily address that, anyway. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 14:46, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  These considerations should not be applied case-by-case according to whether editors think an endorsement carries some implicit meaning, they should be the default. JoelleJay (talk) 15:49, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  What part of BALASP says that things can't be sourced to non-independent sources? Katzrockso (talk) 21:45, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

  The part that says coverage should be proportional to how the topic as a whole is covered in RS (so something being citable to only source will almost certainly be proportionally trivial), and also per V Self-published sources may be considered reliable if published by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications.[g] Be careful when using such sources: if the information in question is suitable for inclusion, someone else will likely have published it in independent, reliable sources.[1] with note [1] stating Self-published material is characterized by the lack of independent reviewers (those without a conflict of interest) validating the reliability of the content. Further examples of self-published sources include press releases, the material contained within company websites, advertising campaigns, material published in media by the owner(s)/publisher(s) of the media group, self-released music albums, and electoral manifestos:. Press releases, social media, and company websites are SPS and thus considered non-RS by default, but even when they are RS (topic experts) we are still cautioned against using them because if the information in question is suitable for inclusion, someone else will likely have published it in independent, reliable sources. ABOUTSELF, being roughly equivalent in reliability to expert SPS, should be interpreted in the same way. JoelleJay (talk) 11:53, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  Notwithstanding your contentious interpretations of other parts of the policy, so something being citable to only source will almost certainly be proportionally trivial seems to be false. Why would an endorsement reported by one reliable independent source be a higher WP:PROPORTION of the reliable sources that an endorsement reported by one reliable non-independent source, according to WP:BALASP. I'm not asking about other policies, I'm asking about what BALASP says. It seems to be a common occurrence here to cite policies for things they don't say. Katzrockso (talk) 13:19, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  Because an endorsement reported by the endorser and endorsee is less coverage of that endorsement than the endorser's and endorsee's reports plus an independent source?

  Our policies on acceptable SPS use explicitly discourage including information that is not published in independent RS even when it's by an expert; why would this be treated differently for political endorsements? JoelleJay (talk) 15:06, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  Most reports of endorsements are primary sources that merely report what the endorsement itself says. We are often told to treat primary sources that offer no transformative commentary as the same source as the original - why is that any different here?

  Joe Schmo endorses Linda Lesson for local office. She announces it on her campaign website.

  Local outlet FOX11 publishes a short story that is essentially just the endorsement.

  I don't see why the presence or absence of the story from FOX11 has any impact on the PROPORTION. Katzrockso (talk) 15:13, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  I don't either. A PROPORTION issue would arise if we wrote a lengthy paragraph quoting extensively from a press release and no other sources, especially if this is done to the exclusion of other endorsements in the same race. But I don't see the problem with list entries where the organizational endorsement list is a relatively short part of the article and endorsements for all candidates are subjected to uniform criteria such as only including blue-linked wiki-notable orgs. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:31, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  The calculus is ≤2 pseudo-RS vs ≤2 pseudo-RS + 1 independent actual RS.
  Why should the organizational endorsements have a lower requirement for reliability than the individual endorsements? Also we don't limit the endorsers to just blue-linked orgs... JoelleJay (talk) 15:48, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  WP:ABOUTSELF sources aren't "pseudo-RS". They're actual RS. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:19, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  There isn't any question about reliability here - reliable sources are still required for adding endorsements. Also, we do require that the listed organizations are notable. See WP:Political endorsements, point #1 under organizations. Whether or not they need to be blue linked is something the guideline says can be decided at an article level, but that's a distinction without a difference, as Wikipedia should eventually cover all notable topics. Katzrockso (talk) 17:55, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  I wrote "blue-linked" rather than "notable" specifically because there is a difference here. JoelleJay (talk) 12:20, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  What's the difference? Editors can, by consensus, create more restrictive WP:LISTCRIT than required by policy. Katzrockso (talk) 13:15, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  There is a practical difference. Blue-linked is an objective, binary status. This criterion can prevent disputes about entries that some editors argue are "probably notable" or "likely to pass GNG soon" or whatever. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 14:58, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  Blue-linked has trinary status: blue article, blue redirect, and red link.

  It's also gameable (Oh, you require an article to exist? Okay, here's a three-sentence, two-source stub article). I would not recommend using it as a blanket recommendation. That approach works best when we have very long lists and need an arbitrary way to shorten it. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  Blue-linked is binary (red or blue). Whether it's a standalone article or a redirect and the quality of the linked article are additional considerations. We could drill down even further on redirects—does it target a list entry that just names the org or a multi-paragraph section describing the org in detail? I'm not suggesting "blue-linked" is a good universal criterion for endorsement lists. Merely disagreeing with Katzrockso's assertion that "notable" and "blue-linked" is a distinction without a difference. To be clear, I mostly disagree with JoelleJay. But if the organizational endorsements list in a particular article is really out of control—something I've yet to see convincing evidence of—both the current wording of WP:ENDORSED and the broadly applicable WP:SELCRIT guidance permit additional requirements at the article level. The tools and guidelines are already in place to manage these endorsement lists. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 18:13, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  Start with Donald Trump endorsements (a dab page) for the lists that I assume triggered the creation of the guideline. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:28, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  Good grief. Still, probably a better argument for trimming individual endorsements and consolidating state party endorsements. I did chuckle at:

  • Taliban^[ref] (endorsement rejected by Trump)

  —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:10, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  Well, for one, I would also support a requirement that endorsements have secondary coverage in addition to the current proposal that the coverage be independent. But that's not what's under discussion right now.

  An independent RS reporting an endorsement verifies that it is considered genuine and noteworthy enough to mention by an RS. It does not involve editors combing through (and validating identities within) social media to hand-curate endorsements themselves and requiring it would preempt editors trying to interpret the equivalents to RECs in non-Anglophone countries and non-American political systems. JoelleJay (talk) 15:36, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  I don't think we need to have a requirement for independent sources to prevent social media being used as sources. We could simply ban social media as a source, if that were deemed necessary. Katzrockso (talk) 16:44, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  The issue isn't social media, it's being an SPS. JoelleJay (talk) 12:23, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  The issue isn’t either of those… the issue is whether the specific endorsement in question is meaningful or trivial. The issue WP:VNOT and WP:DUE - not WP:RS. Blueboar (talk) 12:43, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  VNOT is not a license to exclude content, it simply says we don't have to include verifiable content. It's a bludgeon to use against newbies who think that since they have a source it has to be included. This is about creating a higher requirement for adding endorsements than our policy on RS requires - VNOT doesn't mandate anything of the sort. Katzrockso (talk) 13:14, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  You invoked the picture of editors scrounging up social media posts to find endorsements and the issues of identity validation. Those are not issues with campaign website endorsements, despite being self-published. What are the issues with self-published sources (generally and not specific to social media posts) in this context? Katzrockso (talk) 13:12, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  I think that social media was given as an example because social media is one of the few kinds of self-published sources that we (almost) all agree are SPS. If you look at an article like Cass Review (warning: CTOP), there are a number of sources that I'd say are self-published, but which reasonable people could disagree over the application of the WP:SPS rules, such as a white paper from a think tank, open letters from advocacy organizations, and even a Google Doc organized by two professors as part of a larger project. I think the community does sometimes make a distinction between levels of self-publication (in addition to the WP:EXPERTSPS exemption). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:02, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose. Obviously by WP:PRIMARY we can trust an organization's own attestation of support. And we do not require independent sourcing of trivial material. (For instance, if Joe Biden tweets out "I had a dog named Wooper as a child", we would generally not require anything else to include that in the childhood section of his article.) A requirement of independent coverage for a couple of words in the latter half of an article is overkill. Red Slash 03:14, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  If Joe Biden's tweet about having a dog in childhood is the only mention of that dog, then it absolutely should not be included in his article because it fails DUE and BALASP. JoelleJay (talk) 11:20, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  Having a dog isn't a "viewpoint", so DUE is not very relevant.

  BALASP asks editors to use their judgment. If the tweet were the only source for having a childhood dog, we would omit this, because editors do not judge the possession of a childhood dog to ordinarily be basic information for a biography in an encyclopedia; if the tweet were the only source for the names of his parents or his birthdate, we would include it, because editors do judge that information to ordinarily be basic information for a biography in an encyclopedia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:24, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  I've always wondered why DUE seems to be overused to apply to everything except actual viewpoints. Katzrockso (talk) 17:56, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

  Because it has an easy, memorably shortcut? Also, because you see someone else use it this way, so you assume they're correct and repeat their usage. To be fair, NPOV's organization was pretty bad for years. We've made some progress with stepwise rearrangements and the occasional clarification, but we've been taking it in baby steps, once or twice a year, to make sure that we're not accidentally breaking anything. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:07, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

• Support: This isn't really about primary vs secondary - its more about whether coverage is WP:DUE. Can we really say that endorsements are due if independent sources can't be bothered to discuss them?Nigel Ish (talk) 20:21, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  The proposal requires only that an WP:INDY source mention the endorsement in passing (not a full "discussion" of the endorsement). WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:22, 12 August 2026 (UTC)

  As I read it, the proposal isn't to do anything but remove the present project guidance. This would just throw it back to general policy. If a better, more subtle, project guidance can then be written and gain assent, that's another discussion to have later. Alanscottwalker (talk) 13:22, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

  True, but the section heading is ==Proposal to require independent sourcing for all political endorsements==, so I suspect that it will be interpreted as requiring INDY sources, rather than merely removing the sentence and reverting to standard rules (which permit the use of non-INDY sources). WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:48, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

  Any closer should not mangle policy, nor can they change policy, when all that is being proposed is to remove a sentence in a local guideline. All it can mean is the sentence won't be there. -- Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:43, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

  I'm not really concerned about the closer. I'm thinking about people linking to it later: "See? There was an RFC at WP:VPP#Proposal to require independent sourcing for all political endorsements, and it was successful, so independent sourcing is now required for all political endorsements." WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:12, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

  I'm concerned about all of it. A closer will have to make sense of the actual opinions expressed in the RFC and future editors will have to interpret and implement the RFC outcome. And if participating editors thought they were !voting on something meaningfully different this is likely to lead to more disputes and frustration. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:49, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

  I'm not that "concerned" because, we often have quite good closers that separate the wheat from the chaff, and any overstep or irrationality in the close is subject to call-out and review. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:38, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

  The editor who started the RfC said:

  With the amount of horserace coverage every campaign gets, if no independent sources are covering an endorsement, it lacks WP:WEIGHT. Katzrockso (talk) 17:27, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

People make confused or confusing statements or arguments regularly, an argument does not change policy nor any guideline. The local guideline is poor, beginning with its use "WP:Local Consensus", as if agreement in a project guideline can override any general policy. Alanscottwalker (talk) 17:46, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Do you think that any closure of this discussion that ends with consensus in favor of the change would not immediately be followed by an addition to the guideline requiring independent sourcing for organizational endorsements? Katzrockso (talk) 19:41, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

The local guideline may be poor, and the wording of this RFC certainly is—as I and others have pointed out from the beginning—but many editors have (reasonably) interpreted the intent as requiring independent sources and many !votes and comments have been on this basis. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 20:11, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

You can't require anything by removing the sentence. Practically, all these discussions on Wikipedia wander around hither and yon. That's just the way is.

To answer the above question, if anyone else wants to require anything new, they need to get agreement on a new sentence and it needs to align with policy, which this sentence does not. It is bedrock principle that verifiability does not end the issues of whether something should be content. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:01, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

But you can require something by having a discussion in which many editors agree that it should be required, even if the first post does not propose exactly the thing that the discussion formed a consensus for. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:05, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

This project is not an experiment in anarchy. Write down in guideline how to guide people and conform that guidance with policy, otherwise there is no consensus on it, that's one of the lessons of WP:local consensus. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:13, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

This is a consensus-based project. It is not a parliamentary system, in which proposals have to be voted on as-is. If someone proposes "X", and the community forms a consensus for "Y", then "Y" is the winner. There is no law that says "Oh, but it can't be "Y", because that wasn't the original wording, and letting editors form a consensus without a formal proposal and a !vote is too chaotic for some people". Indeed, the law of the wiki is the opposite: Whatever the community agreed upon is what the community agreed upon. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:07, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

This is a consensus based project that formulates its consensus in words that it writes down in policies and guidelines. To the extent it makes people search through random pages for maybe what people thought ten years ago, it is a failing. But now you are demonstrating my earlier observation that these discussions go all hither an thither.Alanscottwalker (talk) 23:17, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

I agree that this is a consensus-based project that documents most of its consensus in words that it writes down on policy and guideline (and help and info and essay) pages. However, my point is that when consensus is formed in a discussion, the consensus is not constrained by the OP's first comment. We could have an RFC with a question "Shall we say that this BDP is a rapist?" and end up with a consensus that the image in the infobox needs to be changed. It's true that discussions sometimes go hither and thither, but the fact that a discussion has wandered into unplanned territory does not invalidate any consensus that was formed in that discussion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:40, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

How does this sentence not align with policy? You can certainly disagree with it, but it doesn't say that verifiability is sufficient to include something. Katzrockso (talk) 21:43, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

Ah well, even if everyone agreed with you on what it is trying to do (which they don't), it obviously has created confusion due to its poor writing. Again, that means it has no consensus. Alanscottwalker (talk) 21:54, 13 August 2026 (UTC)

We have no consensus on the ONUS question, yet it remains in policy. Katzrockso (talk) 19:21, 14 August 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose: Endorsements are often of encyclopedic interest. There been a significant decline in local news coverage in many communities. In cases where the race is of encyclopedic interest, the candidates meet notability guidelines, and the endorsements are themselves of encyclopedic interest (which admittedly is probably not something that can be decided categorically; some endorsements, e.g. by novelty groups are not) we can rely on WP:PRIMARY. Pudelpointed (talk) 19:29, 24 August 2026 (UTC)

Discussion (endorsements)

• As was pointed out in the "BEFORE" at WP:RSN, the framing that the current guidance allows local consensus to overrule our general policy that facts be sourced to independent reliable sources is not quite accurate. A "dependent" primary source is often reliable for a statement made by the source itself, such as an explicit endorsement on an official website or social media account. WP:SELCRIT provides some general guidance but more or less allows for local consensus at the level of individual list articles. All that said, I can imagine these lists getting out of hand. WP:WEIGHT, WP:PROMO, WP:INDISCRIMINATE, and other general principles apply to endorsement list articles. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:45, 29 July 2026 (UTC)
• Yup… while a selfpub source can reliably verify an endorsement, WP:VNOT and WP:DUE apply. We need independent reliable sources to demonstrate that the endorsement matters enough for us to mention it. Blueboar (talk) 21:57, 29 July 2026 (UTC)
• What happens if an independent source claims Organization A endorsed Candidate B, but Organization A says it isn't an endorsement (and it's not a clear-cut case of either side being wrong)? Gnomingstuff (talk) 22:30, 30 July 2026 (UTC)

  I recently opened a discussion about this sort of thing at Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons#Subject correcting misunderstanding of their own words. There wasn't a clear consensus on what to do, but there was a slight preference for assuming Organization A is dishonest. Make of that what you will. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 01:38, 31 July 2026 (UTC)

  Has that actually happened to a significant degree? Cortador (talk) 12:10, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

  I would think that endorsement lists generally include uncontroversial, uncomplicated entries. Beyond that, this has to be a case by case determination and is not something a general guideline can address. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 16:51, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

• Given that WP:BALLOTPEDIA is a WP:GREL source and WP:INDEPENDENT of all the candidates, and given that they collect long lists of https://ballotpedia.org/Political_endorsements : What practical effect do we think this will actually have? We're literally going from "you have to have a reliable source" to "you have to have an independent reliable source and BTW https://ballotpedia.org/Political_endorsements is an independent reliable source that includes nearly all of the bona fide endorsements for US candidates", which at least as far as US articles are concerned, means that we're pretty much wasting our time here. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:12, 5 August 2026 (UTC)
  • Ballotpedia is a great source for US elections, perhaps, not so much for the rest of the world. This looks like a case of making rules suitable for the US based on US conditions and assuming they should apply worldwide. Wellington Bay (talk) 15:42, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

    I think you're right. I also think this was probably prompted by the upcoming US elections. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:36, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

    There is an ongoing debate in Canadian politics articles where some editors argue that self-published social media posts or campaign websites are sufficient for inclusion in endorsement lists, regardless of independent coverage. On local talk pages, this frequently leads to attempts to establish a WP:LOCALCONSENSUS for inclusion of these into a "list of endorsements" which closely resembles the tables used in AP2 articles (see 2026 Ontario Liberal Party leadership election#Endorsements for the most recent example of this debate coming up). Requiring independent secondary coverage, even for organizations and at "local" talk pages ensures that Wikipedia endorsement lists reflect encyclopedic WP:WEIGHT. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 18:23, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

    Ordinary discussions about how to best apply/comply with our policies and guidelines are not LOCALCONSENSUS violations. I suggest reading WP:LOCALCONSENSUS, especially the bit that says:

    • Y Desired outcome: A small number of editors arrive at an agreement about how to best apply sitewide policies and guidelines to a given Wikipedia article.

    If it is not clear enough that this "Desired outcome" (emphasis in the original) is not a LOCALCONSENSUS, then let me know, and I'll see about clarifying that, possibly by adding a sentence that says "Doing this is not a 'local consensus' and does not violate this policy." WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:35, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

    I would opine that some editors are arguing to be allowed to decide that N relevant sitewide policies and guidelines should not apply to particular articles, on account of "poor" or "slow" secondary coverage. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 21:19, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

    There's no policy or guideline that requires secondary coverage for a small detail, such as whether a candidate was endorsed by an organization. Arguing that primary and/or non-independent sources should be allowed within the confines of the relevant sitewide policies is the opposite of arguing that relevant sitewide policies and guidelines should not apply. The WP:PRIMARY policy says "Primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia". Why are you arguing against the long-standing sitewide policy? WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:14, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    If anything, I am arguing that a simple tweet or candidate website is insufficient sourcing for inclusion of endorsements of individuals on Wikipedia per WP:ENDORSE/WP:DUE. If they have not been covered by independent, secondary sources, why would Wikipedia, if Wikipedia's purpose is to be a reflection of what is written in reliable, secondary sources? ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 00:45, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    Wikipedia's purpose is to be an encyclopedia that fairly represents all the sources, which sometimes requires including facts that are not written in secondary (=analytical, evaluative, interpretative, etc.) sources.

    Note that WP:ENDORSE doesn't even mention WP:SECONDARY sources, much less require them. ENDORSE says editors working on an article can choose to use sources connected to the organization itself, such as its website or official social media accounts for endorsements by organizations.

    Remember that Wikipedia:Secondary does not mean independent. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:57, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    The arguments in Canadian politics articles centre around individuals, not organizations, which are specifically covered by WP:ENDORSE. I am aware that this specific RfC is in regards to organizations only. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 01:06, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    Even for individuals, ENDORSE does not require secondary sources. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:10, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    The text on WP:ENDORSE literally says This means endorsements should not be sourced solely to a Tweet or Instagram post by the endorser, endorsee, or an affiliated individual or organization, for example. If my semantics are poor, I apologize, but editors are arguing that a simple tweet or a link to www.JaneDoe2026.ca/my-endorsements should be enough for inclusion of individuals. ―"GraveDragon-X" _(hihi) 01:22, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    That's under "2. Lists of endorsements should only include endorsements which have been covered by reliable independent sources" in ===Endorsements by individuals===

    The difference between WP:SECONDARY and WP:INDEPENDENT sources is not mere semantics. It is the difference between a source that analyzes an endorsement ("The ____ endorsement of my esteemed opponent has proved an embarrassment to his campaign; I should be appalled to think that such a deplorable organization approved of my platform") and one that has no vested/financial interest in the outcome (e.g., a news outlet). WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:52, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    In fairness, which definition of primary source one uses and how it categorizes news articles is a semantic issue. A mess that's been acknowledged earlier in this discussion. Of course, our house definition is what ultimately matters in assessing the application of P&G. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 01:59, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    True; there's a quite traditional definition that says anything published within a few years of any event is automatically a primary source, which would mean that "must have a secondary source" would mean "cannot be included until the election has been over for several years". But that definition is mostly people writing about pre-modern history, and 'our house definition' does not require that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:20, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    And you have resources like this and usage in different disciplines and contexts. Most descriptions I've seen, including ours, will say that newspapers (and by extension, online news articles) can be primary or secondary depending on various factors but the factors differ as do the determinations based on a particular factor. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 02:38, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    anything published within a few years of any event is certainly the definition I was taught, and it's the one I use for anything pre-2016 or so. (This is a viewpoint which does not make you popular at AFD) GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 02:39, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    Because it would mean we can't write about anything that happened recently, which I think is a viewpoint that would garner very little support in a community wide discussion. Katzrockso (talk) 02:42, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    Only because there is further confusion that reliable = secondary (or tertiary). Even though our P&G don't say that, it's no surprise that this is a source of conflict and confusion. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 02:51, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    If our notability criteria specify secondary sources are required and we say that recent coverage (ie within the last few years) is all primary, then nothing in the last few years is wiki-notable. Katzrockso (talk) 03:11, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    But we already have tons of articles on ongoing infectious disease outbreaks, natural disasters, elections, upcoming films, etc. built almost entirely on news articles and other sources we define as primary. Maybe some of these are able to scrounge up two or three secondary sources. I agree that GreenLipstickLesbian's definition would be unworkable but there already seems to me to be a disconnect. Anyway, this is increasingly off-topic… —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 03:54, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    And now hopefully you see why even I, a bit of a hardliner of this, have a built in post-2016 exception clause for anything not excessively contentious. (If you can't find a source 5 to 10 years after the event with sigcov and everything, is the event notable? I say no, obviously not, other editor say yes, obviously yes. ) GreenLipstickLesbian💌🧸 03:55, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    Back when the word secondary was first added to WP:N (in 2007), we had a different definition of WP:SECONDARY. When it spread to the explanation of the GNG (you may have noticed that it's not in the GNG sentence itself), the notion of "secondary means secondhand" was very popular. If a house burned down on Monday, and a journalist interviewed an eyewitness for Tuesday morning's paper, then that was "secondary". It's wrong, and we've moved firmly away from that during the last decade, but I think that anyone concerned about secondary sources at AFD should remember that 'secondary' back in the day was a very low bar indeed. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:31, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

    You're right that our guidelines and practices should take a global view. A relatively small number of articles have been provided as examples in this and the other linked discussions to illustrate what exactly the problem is, and all of these have been US elections articles. If we were to adopt the proposed rule and follow the guidance that Ballotpedia is generally reliable, the likely outcome would be that US election articles remain largely unchanged—or expanded, as Ballotpedia likely catalogues endorsements that aren't in some of our articles—while endorsement lists for other countries' elections are trimmed unless there is a similar source that can be used to catalogue endorsements for every either country. Or if we wanted to limit/down-weight Ballotpedia endorsement lists, we'd have to impose an even higher bar that at least two independent sources are required for organizational endorsements. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 22:30, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

    Out of curiosity, I looked at Ballotpedia's Abdul El-Sayed page. I count 58 "organizations" under his endorsements in the 2026 senate race. Our article on the senate race lists just 37 in the primary (8 labor unions, 25 organizations, 1 political party, 2 newspapers). —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 22:35, 9 August 2026 (UTC)

    I also looked at the size of 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan. The Democratic primary endorsements section is indeed huge. If we require independent sourcing then it would be reasonable to pick Ballotpedia as our standard bearer. Nearly doubling the number or organizational endorsements would only worsen the problem. Size aside, I don't think the article would be improved by including non-notable orgs like Cat Ladies For America. I suppose we could come up with additional criteria to duplicate the output of our current practice. This is an awfully convoluted fix, to the extent there is even a problem here.

Section sizes in 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan More information Section name, Byte count ... Section size for 2026 United States Senate election in Michigan (48 sections) Section name Byte count Prose size (words) Header Total Header Total (Top) 2,821 2,821 154 154 Background 3,601 3,601 160 160 Democratic primary 104 120,762 0 1,084 Campaign 15,960 15,960 629 629 Analysis 7,705 7,705 372 372 Candidates 18 8,106 0 0 Nominee 1,004 1,004 0 0 Eliminated in primary 476 476 0 0 Not on ballot 365 365 0 0 Withdrawn 1,418 1,418 0 0 Declined 4,825 4,825 0 0 Endorsements 58,720 58,720 0 0 Debates and forums 3,593 3,593 0 0 Fundraising 1,108 1,108 5 5 Polling 22,472 22,472 2 2 Results 2,994 2,994 76 76 Republican primary 23 17,354 0 153 Campaign 1,513 1,513 146 146 Candidates 17 6,710 0 0 Nominee 541 541 0 0 Disqualified 814 814 0 0 Not on ballot 1,286 1,286 0 0 Withdrawn 301 301 0 0 Declined 3,751 3,751 0 0 Endorsements 5,043 5,043 0 0 Fundraising 725 725 7 7 Polling 2,955 2,955 0 0 Results 385 385 0 0 Third-parties and independents 35 1,553 0 0 Independents 19 921 0 0 Not on ballot 497 497 0 0 Fundraising 405 405 0 0 Libertarian Party 24 349 0 0 Nominee 325 325 0 0 Green Party 18 176 0 0 Nominee 158 158 0 0 U.S. Taxpayers Party 27 72 0 0 Nominee 45 45 0 0 General election 21 56,721 0 137 Predictions 3,719 3,719 0 0 Post-primary endorsements 14,705 14,705 0 0 Debates 2,726 2,726 0 0 Fundraising 663 663 0 0 Polling 33,922 33,922 137 137 Results 965 965 0 0 Notes 69 69 2 2 References 28 28 0 0 External links 547 547 0 0 Total 203,456 203,456 1,690 1,690 Close