Wikipedia talk:Reference desk

Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/February 2025 has a link to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2025 February 17, complete with links to the sections that are transcluded on it, but there's no such page, and it has no deletion log. Any idea what could have happened? Its bot-created talk page is a redirect here. Nyttend (talk) 04:30, 14 January 2026 (UTC)

@Nyttend: Nice find. Checking the logs, there was indeed an error during the archiving run on 2025-03-04, which I must have overlooked at the time. That page was simply never created in the first place, although the per-month index page was set up to point at it, as you observed.

It was a bit tricky (the archiving scripts try to be general, but they do nominally assume that "February 17" means February 17 of this year), but I believe I've successfully rerun that pass and belatedly created the missing archive, complete with your contribution. Thanks for reporting this. —scs (talk) 12:09, 14 January 2026 (UTC) (edited 14:03, 14 January 2026 (UTC))

I really like the "skip to bottom" link at the top of every RD page. Can we get a similar "skip to top" link at the bottom of every RD page? --Viennese Waltz 08:32, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

I asked for that many years ago - more than a decade at least (it was long enough ago that the RefDesks were active enough that navigation was actually a concern) - and someone pointed out that you can just press your <Home> and <End> keys on your keyboard to get the same effect. So, that's what I do now. Matt Deres (talk) 14:35, 3 February 2026 (UTC)

Huh. I had not noticed that feature until now. It goes to "Humanities#footer" or whichever desk you're in at the time. I wonder if there's a technical issue with putting something like "Humanities#header" at the bottom? [Actually #top, as it turns out.] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:36, 4 February 2026 (UTC)

Ah here it is. However, instead of "Skip to top?" I used the infinitely better subject line of "Skip to the top" Matt Deres (talk) 16:53, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

We'll have to check back in 2042 and see if this idea has been implemented. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:37, 14 February 2026 (UTC)

I’m curious why it isn’t stated that the “pirates” were extremist Muslims ? This is part of our history with them. ~2026-17311-33 (talk) 15:50, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

Have you brought this up at Talk:Barbary Wars where it belongs? —Antonissimo (talk) 23:56, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

What were the pirates who raided the Spanish Main? Extremist Protestants? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:42, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Dear Sir, It has been noticed that the name of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj has been mentioned only as “Shivaji.” This is highly inappropriate and disrespectful. I kindly request you to please correct it at the earliest and ensure that the full and proper name, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj, is mentioned. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Regards, Sachin Madhukar Kadam. ~2026-19774-46 (talk) 02:37, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Where? If in a Wikipedia article, bring this up on that article's Talk page. —Antonissimo (talk) 05:19, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

And now I have looked at Talk:Shivaji, where this request has been rejected fourteen times in six weeks. —Antonissimo (talk) 06:44, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

He died 400 years ago. Maybe the OP will get his wish within the next 400. 😛 ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:04, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Way back in the mists of time, there was a single reference desk and it itself was an offshoot of the help desk. Over time, the refdesk was split up to help keep things organized and to reduce page load times. Those days are long behind us - I suspect almost none of the visitors to these pages are doing so via 56k modems any more and the desks have only a fraction of the usage they once did. Compare the Humanities desk today with the one ten or fifteen years ago. In those halcyon days, even the Math desk got multiple questions a day. So, title as topic: what would the pros and cons be *if* we were to go back to a single desk? For the record, I don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other, but having multiple desks is overkill and having one desk would, I think, improve the experience for both questioners and respondents. No more worry about "which desk" to place a question at, less clicking through desks with no activity on them, that kind of thing. Matt Deres (talk) 23:11, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Overall, I would say it's not a bad idea. Thanks for bringing it up. Anybody else, please chime in with your own opinions! —scs (talk) 01:01, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

It could be worth a try. Maybe start by redirecting all the desks to the Misc ref desk for a day or two and see how it goes. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:05, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I think it is not a good idea. At present it is feasible and attractive for Ref Desk volunteers and specialists to have one or a small number of Ref Desks on their watchlist. When there is no question on a specialist’s Ref Desk, that specialist doesn’t get distracted by questions on other Ref Desks because no alert appears on the watchlist. If all the Ref Desks are combined into one, specialists will need to peruse that Ref Desk closely every day to see whether there is a question in the area of interest or expertise. In contrast, I don’t see any advantage to combining the Desks. Dolphin (t) 11:39, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Dolphin51's points. I never even look at the math and computing desks and would not like to be distracted by queries on those topics. Perhaps, in the dear dead days not entirely beyond recall, one reason for splitting the desk was "to reduce page load times", but it also allowed responders to focus on topics on which they were likely to supply informed answers. Deor (talk) 14:26, 6 April 2026 (UTC)

Another +1 to Dolphin51 here. I don't want the pointy heads from the math and computing desks littering up my watchlist lol. --Viennese Waltz 08:19, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

The watchlist folks have a valid concern, and, without impugning on their POVs in any way: The Comp desk has three questions on it and the Math desk has five - and that's over the last two weeks. A lot of the activity on them is by the scsbot doing things like adding date headers and then removing them because nobody asked a question that day. You're not exactly going to be deluged with edits that you're uninterested in. I think at one point years ago a suggestion came up to trim the desks down to two: Arts (Humanities, Language, Entertainment) and Sciences (Science, Math, Computing) (or something like that; it was probably different names, but you get the idea). Would that be more appealing? Matt Deres (talk) 13:33, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

You forgot Misc. To your point: I only watch Humanities, Ents, Language and Misc. As of now those desks have 18, 10, 16 and 12 questions respectively, which seems like a manageable amount. I'm not sure I'd enjoy navigating a single desk with 56 questions on it, it seems too long and unwieldy for me. You could compare this suggestion with the French and German desks, both of which have one single desk, to see how it looks – see Oracle and Auskunft. They have much less traffic, so the one-desk approach works fine in those cases. --Viennese Waltz 13:49, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

I deliberately avoided Misc as I figured the smaller number of desks would make it easier for people to not need an "other" bucket. With consolidated desk(s), we could also have scsbot archive more frequently again. It was only about two years ago that it got extended from 7 days to 14 days. Matt Deres (talk) 15:53, 10 April 2026 (UTC)

It could be instructive to try to find why and how the desks were actually split up. I had thought it was more for categorical convenience rather than load times, but I could be remembering wrong. And I expect the category about Travel would have to be kept as-is, being a different animal from the other desks. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:32, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

At the risk of beating a dead horse, interested parties might wish to check out the "all" page (Wikipedia:Reference_desk/all, which is virtually an orphan with essentially no active links to it. Anyway, that tells me that there are sixty-one questions at the time of my writing. If we assume a more-or-less even split between the two proposed halves that would be thirty questions on each. If we reduce the time to archive from two weeks back down to one again, we'd be looking at fifteen questions on each, about two days' worth of questions back in the day. Matt Deres (talk) 12:46, 24 April 2026 (UTC)