Wikipedia talk:Reference desk

Anybody remember this thread? I certainly didn't. But evidently old User:Clask went and implemented those templates, and they've been sitting under his user page ever since, until the day came that someone noticed their antiquity, and proposed them for deletion. On the (very!) off chance that anyone cares, head on over to this discussion and let them know what you think. —scs (talk) 21:09, 1 December 2025 (UTC)

Wow, that's one from the history books; half the folks in that thread are banned now. Matt Deres (talk) 15:54, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Two banned, seven inactive, five active. —Antonissimo (talk) 01:50, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

We've discussed, at great length and over many years, our policy of not providing medical advice on the Reference Desks. In that light, I found this Guardian article interesting: "Google AI Overviews put people at risk of harm with misleading health advice". (To be clear, I'm posting this link as food for thought, not to try to make any particular point.) —scs (talk) 03:34, 4 January 2026 (UTC)

And that's why we don't do it. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:25, 4 January 2026 (UTC)

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)