Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not

Topic: Galleries (November 2005–January 2006) Topic: Newspaper Articles (May–July 2007) Topic: Unencyclopedic (2003) Topic: Trivia (July–October 2007)

Can we remove the "And finally" section?

it has no place in wikipedia and it shouldn't even exist in the first place 37.210.71.142 (talk) 12:35, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

makes no sense to remove. It's a catchall that NOT cannot enumerate everything WP is not. Masem (t) 13:00, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

its just unfunny jokes if you checked it out, humorous essays shouldn't be part of main policies 37.210.71.142 (talk) 16:45, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

Not sure about removing the whole "And finally" section, since it has been on this page for at least a decade now (though I don't think anything of value will be lost if the section does get removed). But I agree that policy pages shouldn't link to "humorous" essays or essays that haven't been thoroughly vetted by the community, so I've removed the links from that section. Some1 (talk) 00:22, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

Notice of a requested redirect from Wikipedia:Misuse of Wikipedia to here

The redirect request can be found on Wikipedia:Articles for creation/Redirects#Redirect request: Wikipedia:Misuse of Wikipedia. 67.209.128.136 (talk) 03:45, 26 December 2024 (UTC)

Request for comments: in cases of a large numbers of religious celebrations in a religious calendar (e.g., feast day of saints), can they all be listed in a non-list WP article?

This RfC concerns the WP:NOTDIRECTORY and WP:NOTGUIDE policies.

Presently, there are numerous WP articles of religious calendars that list the full list of celebrations, feast day of saints, etc., without those articles being WP:Stand-alone lists.

The pages concerned, from what I have found, are: Tridentine calendar, General Roman Calendar, General Roman Calendar of 1954, General Roman Calendar of 1960, Institutional and societal calendars of the Roman Rite, National calendars of the Roman Rite, Personal jurisdiction calendars of the Roman Rite, Calendar of saints (Lutheran), Calendar of saints (Episcopal Anglican Church of Brazil), Calendar of saints (Anglican Church of Australia), Calendar of saints (Anglican Church of Canada), Calendar of saints (Church in Wales), Calendar of saints (Scottish Episcopal Church), Calendar of saints (Armenian Apostolic Church), Calendar of saints (Hong Kong Sheng Kung Hui) (and previously Mysterii Paschalis).

My question for which I request comments is: is putting these long lists of religious feasts in those articles a violation of WP:NOTDIRECTORY or WP:NOTGUIDE, and if it so happens that they are a violation then what should be done with these lists? Veverve (talk) 18:25, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

• Comment. In my opinion, this isn't a significant problem. It looks to me (I haven't checked every page listed) like the pages are about encyclopedic topics that are reliably sourced. They are not unreasonable when viewed as embedded lists, as opposed to standalone list pages. As long as there is also paragraph-based text that is sufficiently sourced to establish notability, and to provide a context for the information that is listed, that takes those pages out of the realm of stuff that is simply an indiscriminate list of information of unclear encyclopedic relevance. I see that some of them have only a very brief lead section, and are tagged for needing improvements; these are the most problematic, but they can likely be fixed by further editing. (Those should either be revised into actual list pages, or be revised with more context in the form of paragraph text.) --Tryptofish (talk) 23:18, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
• Can't really see a problem. They are certainly list-like, and could be converted to lists, but what's the gain? I don't see either policy being breached. Johnbod (talk) 04:35, 4 January 2025 (UTC)
• They are functionally lists based on their current content. They don't have to have "List" in the title. Adumbrativus (talk) 07:51, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Addition to WP:NOTDICTIONARY

I propose to add the following bullet (4) to the WP:NOTDICTIONARY entry:

• Wikipedia is not a multilingual dictionary. Articles should not include lists of translations of the topic into multiple languages, whether the topic is an object (apple = French pomme), a concept (wisdom = French sagesse), a culinary dish, or a proverb (You can't have your cake and eat it = French Vouloir le beurre et l'argent du beurre). If there is something encyclopedic to say about the different versions, such as etymology, then of course the name in other languages is relevant. Variants of the meaning should not be grouped by language, but by meaning. If a culinary preparation has no common name in English (e.g. kashk), then it is reasonable to include the variant names in the lead.

Discussion? --Macrakis (talk) 19:55, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

To some extent this seems to stand in contradiction to Wikipedia:Gazetteer, which would suggest that we should list the names for places in languages significant to that place as a gazetteer would be expected to do. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:23, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

I've never met a gazetteer, and I guess I should be glad I don't, right? There's also Wikipedia:Wikipedia is not a gazetteer, but both are essays anyway. Drmies (talk) 02:49, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I think maybe you're thinking of a gazebo? —David Eppstein (talk) 03:06, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I don't see a contradiction with WP:Gazetteer, which is about what places to mention. But MOS:ALTNAME is relevant for placenames. It says that we should include "significant alternative names", although that isn't elaborated on there (I think it is somewhere else, though). The significant names certainly include the name of a place in its own language (Deutschland), the name of the place under significant previous rulers (the Ottoman Turkish names for most places in Greece and the Balkans), and the name of the place in the languages of large populations which have lived there in the past (e.g. the South Slavic and Judeo-Spanish names of Thessaloniki). On the other hand, we don't include the German names for Poland (Polen) or Greece (Griechenland) despite Germany's occupation (and partial annexation in the case of Poland) of those countries during WWII.

In any case, those policies are about placenames. For other topics, other approaches make more sense. For example, the Beef_Stroganoff#Around_the_world section mentions local names along with the local variants in Brazil etc. In the Straw that broke the camel's back, article, we say (I admit that I wrote this): "The image of the last drop is also found in many other languages", leaving the exact words to the sources in the several footnotes. This contrasts with You can't have your cake and eat it, where User:Drmies removed -- correctly in my view -- a long list of translations or equivalents of the expression (many without sources). --Macrakis (talk) 21:02, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Are there any examples showing how this change would have a practical effect? I presume the aim is to limit text appearing in an article? Or is to limit what articles should exist? There can't be a policy that lists every bad idea. Johnuniq (talk) 01:22, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I'd agree the removal on You can't have your cake..., but I disagree with the Beef Stroganoff example. Discussion the various national varities of a dish - as long as its sourced - seems completely appropriate, and in line of talking about those, the local name that the dish goes back makes sense. It would be a problem if we just has a list of translated names without any discussion of the unique aspects of the national variety, as was the case with the You can't have your cake... article. Masem (t) 01:37, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I think the content in Beef Stroganoff makes more sense, even if poorly sourced. An obvious difference is of course that Beef Stroganoff deals with an actual physical topic and Cake deals with words--precisely the thing a dictionary should treat, which is why I directed the latest disruptor (who I suspect of being a sock of an earlier SPA in that article) to Wiktionary. I think I agree with the proposal, mostly--though I think that if we didn't have Oliebol already, a section in the Doughnut article makes sense. But then, as Masem indicated for Beef Stroganoff, there's much more there than just a translation of a word. Drmies (talk) 02:49, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Should WP:NOTDIRECTORY be more specific about phone numbers, etc.?

I came across an {{Infobox school}} recently that was misusing free text parameters to list the school's phone number. "As we all know", contact information such as phone numbers, fax numbers and e-mail addresses is not encyclopedic, so I removed it "per WP:NOTDIRECTORY". This prompted me to look if there were more cases of such misuse, and indeed there were dozens. I was going to remove them with the same explanation, but unfortunately I took time to read through WP:NOTDIRECTORY before doing that... and I don't think I can use it as my basis, because I don't see anything in the text explicitly forbidding this. There used to be an unambiguous statement (the green one), but it was removed almost exactly three years ago ([1], [2]). Right now, anyone could argue "None of this applies to me. I'm not replicating any listings, it's just one phone number. Nor am I conducting business, we're talking about a school here." and I haven't been able to find anything in current policy wordings to definitively counter this (the BLP ban obviously doesn't apply to institutions). Am I missing something obvious (entirely possible :) ), or should the wording be changed (back) to remedy this? I'm tempted to be bold and just add it back, but it's probably better to double-check the consensus on this first. Gamapamani (talk) 13:40, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

It still states contact information is to be avoided under #6. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:42, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but the way that's framed, it seems to be limited to the context of "conducting business", which arguably wouldn't apply to something like a school. And even if we say it does apply, It would still be helpful to spell this out more explicitly, as "phone or fax number and e-mail" would be clearer for non-native speakers than "contact information", and a more obvious search term. Gamapamani (talk) 05:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

RfC on WP:NOT and British Airways destinations

Do the following violate WP:NOT? A) List of everywhere British Airways has flown over its history, and B) list of everywhere it flies from Heathrow Airport as of today.

• Option 1: Only A violates WP:NOT
• Option 2: Only B
• Option 3: Both A and B
• Option 4: Neither A nor B

Sunnya343 (talk) 00:26, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Context

• A-type lists: In this deletion review some people proposed a new RfC.
  • I chose to do an RfC here at WT:NOT to focus on whether this policy applies. This is not meant to serve as a deletion venue.
• B-type lists: This RfC closure review closed as no consensus, and some argued to relist the RfC with a different question.
• No prior discussion has jointly addressed the two types of lists.
• RfC planning done here. I acknowledge that I've begun many discussions on this topic, but I hope this one clarifies the main dispute about NOT which has arisen in debates going back to 2007.

Sunnya343 (talk) 00:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Survey

• Option 3. The lists of current destinations and routes from Heathrow have lots of references, which is fine, though you could just as well cite BA's website for each city. It's a reliable source for this info, and indeed has already been cited for most of the current destinations in list A. Sites like Flightradar24 and FlightsFrom.com organize the data more conveniently and could be used as well. So there is no problem with verifiability here, but just because info is verifiable, doesn't mean it should be on Wikipedia. We aren't supposed to host a directory of airline routes, or a repository for data reorganized from flight databases.

  In regard to past destinations, I agree with discussing the development of BA's route network over time. For example, in History of British Airways, people have written about the impact of a 1970s government policy, and the Heathrow-New York route on Concorde. On the other hand, recording every place that BA no longer flies to, from its maiden flight 50 years ago up to today, strikes me as airline trivia. Sunnya343 (talk) 00:28, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

• Option 3. Basically, listcruft is listcruft is listcruft. We want notable information, not indiscriminate information. - UtherSRG (talk) 01:13, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
  • The destinations currently flown is a narrowly-defined, discriminate list. Most destinations are covered in reliable sources so it's notable, though notability applies to articles, not specific facts. Reywas92^Talk 05:08, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• 3. We just had a lengthy but conclusive RfC about this, with a WP:NOT#DB conclusion. There is no reason to make an exception for a particular airline or airport.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:27, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Neither Neither of these violate WP:NOT. This is an absolutely ridiculous evergreen proposal. SportingFlyer T·C 01:55, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

  I'm actually livid right now. Putting this at WP:NOT is just another tactic to try to ensure that completely valid encyclopedic information cannot be included anywhere on the site. SportingFlyer T·C 01:57, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

  In order to violate WP:NOT, the information must not be encyclopedic. This is the flaw in the argument of those who are trying to rid our encyclopedia of this encyclopedic information.

  In terms of the airline destination lists, there is no need to specifically exclude them under WP:NOT. Analysis under WP:NLIST should be just fine, as it is for all other lists. Some airlines do have long histories with well documented historically flown routes or destinations. Looking at the British Airways list shows a well sourced article, and some air routes have been the subject of discussion as early as 1933.

  The airports table especially is one of the things I use most on the site. There are many wiki gnomes who keep them up to date. Almost all routes are be announced in the press, are easily verified, and do not need to rise to the level of notability to be included. They also do not violate WP:NOT per all of my arguments at other RfCs. The thing I specifically use them for the most is to determine how an airport or region is linked to the rest of the world, similar to how you can see which passenger routes operate from a given train station. I've seen the argument that yes, but rail infrastructure is fixed - it does not matter, the air routes can also be properly sourced. The information is also encyclopedic - for instance, one of the most important things in the history of a commercial airport is which routes were served first. Other airports have routes which are subject to academic analysis such as [1].

  This entire attempt to rid the website of this information is based on a complete misunderstanding. NOTDB? It's not a database, it's a list! NOTDIR? It's not a directory, these aren't simple listings without encyclopedic merit - otherwise we wouldn't have list articles at all! NOTTRAVEL? It's not a travel guide! If this passes, it will make Wikipedia worse, and there likely won't be any going back. And I'm exhausted from trying to defend this over and over again, year after year... SportingFlyer T·C 02:26, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

• Option 3 Same for others, we want to have information from both past destinations and the present destinations, but if only provides a reliable reference if that route is existed in the past, or else removed it automatically. Drcarrot.phd (talk) 02:02, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
  • This comment does not address the two different things asked about here and further indicates that reliable sources would justify inclusion, not that the content is inherently a violation. Reywas92^Talk 05:08, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Neither. These tables have been around for a long time and should remain as they are. However, I believe we can discuss the criteria for including or excluding a destination in the table, specifically airport articles, as this is the part that often causes confusion among editors. Cal1407 (talk) 02:25, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 4. These lists provide a way for readers to understand the connectivity of an airline or airport in a way that a vague summary does not. They could certainly be improved to add more context, e.g. by adding maps, more sourcing, or more discussion, but they can be very informative and are not inherently listcruft. CapitalSasha ~ talk 02:29, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 3. NOTDIR failures do not belong on the site, regardless of what the airline is. Locations merely being verified in primary sources do not constitute BALASP coverage. JoelleJay (talk) 02:34, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
  • BALASP refers to balancing viewpoints in order to maintain a neutral point of view. In no way are destinations reached from an airport minor aspects of an airport nor do they represent an imbalance in views or content weight. Reywas92^Talk 05:08, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Neither of these are inherently policy violations. This is not a case of a directory of everything in the universe that exists or has existed. It's not a case of Simple listings without contextual information or loosely associated topics or anything else. It's not a case of an indiscriminate collection of information or Excessive listings of unexplained statistics. There is no policy violation here, and I suspect that if people had to quote the exact sentence that supported their claims, instead of waving at a potentially misleading WP:UPPERCASE shortcut, they would be hard pressed to justify claims of a policy violation. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:40, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 3 I will simply repost what I said in the 2023 RfC with edits to be more generally applicable:

WP:NOTDATABASE, WP:NOTTRAVEL ... Wikivoyage exists ... there is no reason [lists like this] cannot be created and maintained there with a cross-wiki link in the enWiki article (i.e. [[voy:British Airways destinations]]). I presume the purpose of Wikivoyage is to serve as the very travel guide enWiki is not supposed to be.

— Jkudlick ⚓ (talk) 02:46, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

• • This is not a good faith argument because no lists like this exist on Wikivoyage and there is no indication the community there seeks to maintain them, certainly not as well as the community here does. Reywas92^Talk 05:08, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Neither. I can somewhat understand how airport destinations may be problematic under WP:NOTTRAVEL but I've never understood why airline destinations fall under the same criteria. Firstly, as Whatamidoing pointed out, none of the WP:NOT criterias are able to cover the airline destinations. Secondly, if I want to go somewhere, I will already have that somewhere in mind. I don't need to figure out that somewhere on Wikipedia before buying the ticket (even though that is entirely possible through the airport article, which is why I can put a weak support for option 2, but that’s very unlikely). Thirdly, even travel guides like Lonely Planet don’t list the airlines that fly to and from a city (usually they do have the airport, but even that’s covered under the #Transport/Transportation sections of almost every major city in the world). So this isn’t even a travel guide because travel guides don’t do that. Fourthly, when I look at the airline destinations article, I know where they fly to, but from where? China Eastern, for example, has flights from Wuhan (focus city) to Singapore, but not from Ningbo (also a focus city) to Singapore. The airline destination pages do not tell me that. There’s no way this can be used as a travel guide without knowing the exact flights from where to where, so why are we worried about this becoming a travel guide? S5A-0043🚎^{(Leave a message here)} 03:06, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 4 (Neither). This area has been discussed ad nauseam and I share the same frustration as SportingFlyer. It is the second large scale discussion initiated by Sunnya343 on the same page in 9 months and a thinly disguised forum shopping. "AfD discussion didn't go the way I wanted? Let's try Deletion Review. Oh no the community endorsed the closure? Off we go RFC!" By my count, we have discussed this area 8 times (in various venues) since 2016, most of which were initiated by the same individual. We really need to put these discussions onto Perennial proposals page and stop wasting community members' time. After this RfC finishes, I intend to start a TBAN discussion on Sunnya343's forumshopping behaviour. OhanaUnited^{Talk page} 03:37, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 4 and suggest withdrawal per below discussion. Discussing two types of lists simultaneously without a strong rationale for doing so is not conducive to a productive discussion. In my view, the destinations tables for airports are exceedingly notable due to their coverage as both a group and individually when routes are announced/launched/dropped/delayed. The major newspaper of a given metropolitan area will have dozens of articles about these route changes. To fulfill Wikipedia's goal of being comprehensive, one cannot remove a critical element from an airport article, lest readers believe that planes simply stop at an airport and fly off into the void. SounderBruce 05:12, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 4 Neither. I see people have raised a few points about NOTDB, NOTDIR, or NOTTRAVEL. But I think those policies are pretty clear. NOTTRAVEL pertains specifically to travel guides with some explanation of what that means, and these very much are not such a beast. Also, these lists are not indiscriminate collections of information, and in fact are very specific in what they cover; these lists also have context to explain what the information means. Train stations and lines are vital to rail travel. Highways to automotive. Similarly routes and destinations are vital to air travel. There is no commercial air travel without routes and destinations, so it would be a mistake for us to exclude it simply because it's presented as a list. —siroχo 05:30, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
• Option 3 (both). Both lists appear (to me) to fall under the category of an indiscriminate collection of information. I think maybe the telltale sign here is that the information (data) is taken from primary sources, instead of from secondary sources that should discriminate for us and summarize the essence and what's important in the data (e.g. hypothetically "British airways has 850 destinations, the most out of any airline, spanning all 5 continents" and then a reference to that source). There is infinite data on most of anything, and it is the secondary source's job to determine what in the data is of essence, and it is our job as a tertiary source to summarize what extracted essence is so emphasized by secondary sources that it becomes notable enough to write about here. Adding these lists here bypasses this filtering structure and just feels arbitrary (hence indiscriminate). spintheer (talk) 05:32, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Discussion

Jointly discussing these two types of lists is ridiculous, by the way. They are two separate pieces of information. The first focuses on airlines - many airlines will not be eligible for stand-alone articles, but especially historical airline routes have been the subject of study and discussion: [2] or books such as Mapping the Airways. If the list or article passes WP:GNG, there is absolutely no reason we cannot have that on Wikipedia as it's encyclopedic information. The second focuses on current routes served at airports, which almost always will have some sort of article when new service is announced or dropped. These are two completely separate topics, both are encyclopedic, and both require their own RfCs. SportingFlyer T·C 02:14, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

The Wikivoyage argument is also completely wrong, considering travel guides do not normally include lists of destinations. SportingFlyer T·C 02:50, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Object to Malformed RFC. In one case we have standalone articles, in the other case we have sections of articles, and the information is presented, maintained, organized, and sourced differently. Following previous discussions, there was also an understanding that yet another RFC would be discussed first. The proposer needs to make productive edits besides proposing to delete this informative content from Wikipedia over and over and over at various venues – it's poor faith to indicate this has "arisen in debates" when he is the one constantly trying to get rid of it. Hundreds of users contribute this content for hundreds of thousands to read, who are interested in this encyclopedic content. Reywas92^Talk 04:54, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Notifications

• A-type lists: Participants in the 2018 RfC, Mar 2024 AfD
• B-type: Participants in the 2023 RfC
• WT:AIRPORTS, WT:AIRLINES

Sunnya343 (talk) 01:33, 8 January 2025 (UTC)