Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 184

(de-facto) discussion on if we should change the wording

Relevant: Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 164#RFC: "Committed suicide" language

I am not looking to reignite the debate on whether or not it should be banned, I am proposing to change poor wording in a MOS document.

Proposal

• Replace "The phrase committed suicide is not banned at the English Wikipedia, although many external style guides discourage it as being potentially stigmatising and offensive to some people. There are many other appropriate, common, and encyclopedic ways to describe a suicide, including:..." to better reflect the consensus of the RFC, removing any argumentation in a MOS page using external (non-wikipedia) guides running contrary to a supermajority RFC, and without the carefully worded comments preceding the alternatives, and the alternatives themselves.

Example proposed change (open to, and highly encourage alternatives):

• "The phrase committed suicide is not banned at the English Wikipedia, and usage of the phrase should match the tone and consensus of the article. Usage (or non-usage) of the phrase should not be changed without first establishing a consensus, and should never be changed to, or from, in mass or tendentiously."

This has become an example of the "every rule, someone broke" axiom.

Despite the overwhelming majority agreeing the phrase was not offensive, the choice verbiage implies that you should describe suicide in another way on a Manual of Style page. This is being used has historically been used to enforce a de facto ban on the phrase through edit warring by multiple editors[1][2] heavily implying without stating that using the phrase better follows wikipedia's guidelines. I would also like to point out that the RFC ruling says "I would urge editors not to tendentiously remove "commit suicide" everywhere it is found.". The alternatives given are either extremely informal and inappropriate for wikivoice, overly stiff or

Saying external style guides discourage using it because it's "offensive" on a MOS page effectively means you should not use it either. Juxtaposing "offensive and stigmatizing" with "appropriate, common and encyclopedic" implies that the phrase is not appropriate, common or encyclopedic. This is basic psychology, and many people are, be it intentionally or unintentionally, using it to argue that regard. This would make an excellent and highly intriguing opinion essay, especially if extrapolated upon, however, this is extremely inappropriate for a manual of style page. DarmaniLink (talk) 23:43, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

I'd been thinking about how precisely to phrase this section since long before the current dispute. My rough formulation looks something like:

There is disagreement over the ideal way to report a suicide, and the subject can strong stir feelings. Common phrasings that may be encountered in articles include:

• committed suicide
• died by suicide
• killed oneself
• took one's own life
• died by one's own hand
• death was ruled a suicide
• cause of death was suicide
• in some contexts, the exact cause of death (e.g. "died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound")

Some editors have strong opinions about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of different phrasings, both in general or for a specific article. The issue can be emotive, and changing existing phrasings risks controversy or dispute. No phrasing is unilaterally superior to any other across every article. Articles may use multiple phrasings as a natural matter of grammar.

When writing a new article, editors can use the phrasing they are comfortable with. Some editors recommend using the specific phrasing that reports of a subject's death use. This should be balanced with the risk of close paraphrasing. Vaticidalprophet 00:24, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

The prior RFC specifically avoided mentioning any alternatives to "commit suicide" because not all of them are widely accepted. It was deemed best to only mention "commit suicide" as the one that can be seen as problematic but acceptable, but any other phrasing that is agreed on by editors is also acceptable. Masem (t) 00:46, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

This is being juxtaposed with the disputed

MOS:SUICIDE

wording, which both specifically mentions alternatives and describes them as superior to "committed suicide":

The phrase committed suicide is not banned at the English Wikipedia, although many external style guides discourage it as being potentially stigmatising and offensive to some people. There are many other appropriate, common, and encyclopedic ways to describe a suicide, including:

• died as a result of suicide
• died by suicide
• died from suicide
• killed himself
• The cause of death was suicide.

I'm certainly not wedded to a list of terms, but what we currently have is a list of terms that actively end-runs around the RfC, so "list of terms that doesn't do that" seemed like a reasonable starting point. Vaticidalprophet 00:52, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm trying to track down where followup discussion about the LANGUAGE based on the RFC was discussed (since I led that but its been a couple of years), but my memory was that it was not to include alternate terms. However, the current language of at least the first sentence is what I recall was agreed to. And based on Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Medicine-related articles/Archive 16 there looks like there was discussion or disagreement that fell outside the original RFC and the immediate followup discussion on the language to be included. Sadly I cannot remember what board that language discussion took place, I do know it happened though. Masem (t) 01:02, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

There were also long discussions at

WT:MED. WhatamIdoing (talk

) 01:04, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

@Vaticidalprophet, the number of editors who don't read this text closely, and then make up POV-pushing statements about it, is really starting to bother me. The dispute that led to this, Talk:Marie Sophie Hingst#Describing suicide, has two editors claiming that this guideline explicitly endorses their preference, when it does nothing of the sort.

Now you are here saying that the words "There are many other appropriate, common, and encyclopedic ways to describe" something is "describ[ing] them as superior". For the record: "other appropriate way" means the options are equal, not that one is superior. If I wanted to describe one option as superior, then I'd use a word like better, preferable, or even superior. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:02, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm sorry about the misunderstanding. I definitely thought, as soon as the wording was established, that it was an attempt to present the alternatives as superior (when I made this edit I expected the section to be gone in about six months, and am genuinely surprised it's still there). It seems that the idea it's trying to present those terms as superior is a common interpretation by both people who support use of 'committed' phrasings and people who oppose it. Vaticidalprophet 01:06, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

That probably says more about Wikipedians' ingrained habit of following reliable sources than about anything else; when we go against the sources, some of us feel like we are inherently doing something wrong. The external guidelines, suicide prevention groups, medical associations (especially the British ones), etc., would probably all agree that the "alternatives" are superior. However, many Wikipedia editors do not happen to agree with the reliable sources, and our guideline does not say that any of the options are better or worse than any of the others. (For the record, it also does not say that these are the only possible or acceptable options.)

One of the main reasons that I wanted alternatives is so that we wouldn't set up a false dichotomy between the "offensive" committed and the "grating" died by options, which is how a lot of these discussions have run in the past. For example, in the Marie Sophie Hingst article, I'm quite happy with the bit you wrote that runs "Hingst was found dead in her Dublin apartment on 17 July 2019 at the age of 31. Her death was ruled a suicide". It provides more factual information than either of the disputed options (e.g., that this is the outcome of an official inquiry, not just the best guess before the investigation completed), and it cannot be accused of having any of the alleged faults of the disputed options. I think it is extremely well done. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:11, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I've definitely been careful re. terminology throughout that article. The lead requires somewhat less depth than the body, so had to go for a shorter phrasing.

I made the comparison on the talk page of the

person-first language controversy. I think this is an apt comparison -- person-first language was for quite a while "the thing all major style guides enforced", and still is for many of them, out of a good-faith attempt to combat ableism and stigma. Eventually, disabled people who found person-first language markedly more ableist and stigmatizing managed to say this loudly and consistently enough for it to be occasionally listened to. For various reasons, Wikipedia has tended to have more people who are in a position to have strong opinions on that language question than the general population; it seems to me that it also does for suicide terminology. The equivalent of changing all uses of "committed suicide" feels to me like somebody going through Disability Day of Mourning find-replacing that article to person-first language; they would almost certainly be doing so in good faith, and feel completely justified by mainstream style guides. They would also quite drastically miss the point. Vaticidalprophet

06:10, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm a huge fan of this proposed change, and I think we should start moving forward with ironing it out to be appropriate for a MOS page. DarmaniLink (talk) 17:19, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I think we need to keep the reference to external style guides, because we need to acknowledge that they exist (and are important to some editors). Darmani seems fairly new to these discussions, so they might not have seen the pattern, but most of them go this way:

• Alice: Why is this offensive, stigmatizing language in this article? Don't you all know that external style guides strongly advise against it?
• Bob: You can't tell me what words to use on wiki.
• Alice: Experts have issued guidelines about the best way to talk about this subject. Wikipedia should follow the reliable sources!
• Bob: I don't care. This is absolutely normal, everyday English in my personal experience. Wikipedia editors decide what words we should use, not reliable sources.

MOS:SUICIDE has said, for a couple of years now, basically that "Wikipedia editors say it's not banned, but external guidelines say they disapprove." By acknowledging that external guidelines exist, and that we are deliberately choosing not to follow them, we can sidestep this whole bit about editors assuming that this language (where it exists) was chosen out of ignorance of the guidelines. WhatamIdoing (talk

) 00:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

While I can certainly see WhatamIdoing's general point, I have to agree with DarmaniLink's finding that the material as presently written is clearly psychologically manipulative. Even the phrasing "many external style guides" rather than, say, "some external style guides", is attempting to lead the editor by a ring in the nose.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  01:55, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

AFAICT it would be factually accurate to say "all of the external style guides and similar recommendations published during the last 5–10 years that say anything about the language used to talk about suicide in the news or online", so I don't think it would be fair to imply that it's only a minority of them. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:14, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

If we're going to mention the external guidelines, we need to explicitly state that wikipedia is not beholden to them, not simply imply it. As you acknowledge with the number of people who take it out of context, its an "every rule, someone broke" case DarmaniLink (talk) 05:44, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, "psychologically manipulative?" The whole point is to affect how Wikipedians say things, so the intent of all policy, guideline and style pages is manipulative, if you like.—S Marshall T/C 08:33, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Most guidelines are written like an instruction manual. This is trying to tell you that an acceptable way to do things is actually unacceptable, because of the editor's preference, which goes decisively against the overwhelming community's preference (roughly 90%, if you look at the relevant RFC), and doing so in an indirect/slimy way. That's the problem at hand. DarmaniLink (talk) 13:26, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

We already explicitly state that Wikipedia does not choose to follow their advice, in the first half of that very sentence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:59, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

That's not the problem, merely stating its "not banned" means most people will still claim its inferior, or "not banned" means its discouraged. As we have seen by people twisting the wording to mean exactly that, it needs to change. DarmaniLink (talk) 16:46, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

So... you're saying that the sentence accurately informs editors that reliable sources believe that this wording is inferior? WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:54, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Per the consensus on the previous RFC page, the overwhelming majority of people have disagreed with this assertion. This is precisely why this wording needs to be changed by someone without a bias towards the side that went against consensus. We as a community, collectively decide through consensus whether or not a source is reliable or not, and the collective opinion - the consensus, has been that the sources calling the phrase "(to) commit suicide" "offensive" are unreliable in this regard. DarmaniLink (talk) 16:58, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Exactly.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:40, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I wonder whether that say anything about the language used is a form of selection bias. How many that find either wording acceptable have a need to say so? We do because otherwise people will edit war over it, but most publishers don't have any opportunity for edit warring in the first place. Anomie⚔ 13:30, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Having spent hours (weeks) on this subject a few years ago, I don't think this is a significant factor. This is a widespread norm now. I suppose that someone could dismiss the whole thing as merely being "the current fad", but at this point any such source would be so out of step with the others that it would feel like a publication recommending homosexual instead of gay or same-sex – you would wonder if they were pushing a political agenda.

This is one of the weird things about this discussion:

• If you went to a Wikipedia editor and said, "Hey, calling this gay man a homosexual is generally considered offensive by all of these gay groups and media organizations, so let's not do that", you'd expect the editor to stop doing it.
• If you said, "Hey, calling this Black American a colored person is generally considered offensive by all of these African-American groups and media organizations, so let's not do that", you'd expect the editor to stop doing it.
• If you said, "Hey, calling this person with mental illness crazy is generally considered offensive by all of these self-advocacy groups and media organizations, so let's not do that", you'd expect the editor to stop doing it.
• If you said, "Hey, calling these people Gypsies is generally considered offensive by all of these cultural groups and media organizations, so let's not do that", you'd expect the editor to stop doing it.

The fact is that even when editors personally don't agree that these words should be considered offensive, we care enough about Wikipedia's formal, encyclopedic tone to not give unnecessary offense, and we respect the reliable sources enough to accept that they know what's offensive.

But when we say:

• "Hey, saying that someone committed suicide is generally considered offensive by all of these suicide prevention groups and media organizations, so let's not do that" – we find a a bunch of editors who insist that the people it's perfectly fine to upset other people, that no possible alternative is acceptable, and even that I'm not upset and therefore the people claiming to be offended aren't actually bothered by it, or that they don't matter, and the so-called reliable sources are all biased and should therefore be ignored in favor of our personal opinions.

I have found publications (e.g., major US newspapers, but not UK ones) that still use the committed language, but there is a tendency to use the committed language in, say, book reviews, rather than in obituaries or current events. In the instant case of Marie Sophie Hingst, not a single cited source uses the committed language. I don't think that should be an absolute barrier, because I think we should Wikipedia:Use our own words, but it is jarring to see some editors loudly proclaim that we should follow the sources in every area...except this one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:44, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Faulty analogy. There are no suicides who object to the phrase "committed suicide", by definition. There are living people whose lives have been affected by someone else's suicide (and I'm among them), but this same group of people also tend to favor death euphemisms in general, as do all survivors of a death in their circle. See

MOS:EUPHEMISM – WP does not allow it.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  21:45, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Personally what bugs me is how often it seems people push their political agenda by demanding everyone change language to avoid the latest term they've decided offends them. I have trouble keeping up. But we're getting off topic. Anomie⚔ 22:07, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm tempted to just create a new section specifically dedicated to how, exactly, we should rephrase that section and see if we can come up with something we agree on. DarmaniLink (talk) 22:22, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

If you said, "Hey, calling these people Gypsies is generally considered offensive by all of these cultural groups and media organizations, so let's not do that" -- well, no, to the point it's itself a great example of the problem with working out language top-down. Gypsy is considered a slur by a lot of non-Travellers/Roma and some Travellers/Roma, and a self-ID by many Travellers/Roma. Wikipedia, obviously, has quite a lot more people who aren't in groups that are affected by this than people who are, so we tend to break the former way because it's the way better-known to "people who aren't Gypsy/Traveller/Rom and don't know any Gypsy/Traveller/Rom people", but it's a substantially more complicated term that makes up many people's Anglophone self-ID, or equivalent in non-English. The organization linked is, as it happens, one that goes out of their way to use "died by suicide" and is run mostly by Gypsy/Traveller/Rom people, so you'd imagine if the term was inveterately offensive they wouldn't use it (also speaking from personal experience^{[original research?]}). This is a microcosm of the problems with external guides that aren't actually formed by representative-community consultation, rather than "a minority of people able to jump through the social hoops that lets them become sensitivity readers for the NYT". Vaticidalprophet 02:19, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes. What is often missed in discussions like this (at least until I get into them) is that "style guide" or "stylebook" is not one thing, but a broad catch-all for very un-like publications. When people say "lots of style guides recommend [X]", we have to find out whether they mean style guides that MoS cares about, that are written for academic-leaning writing and curated by a body of editors whose primary agenda is clear writing, or whether the editor is pushing a piece of activism literature published by a group of "reformers" along with some journalism style guides that (through the activities of the aformentioned "sensistivity readers", a pool of people with deep ties to the activism bodies) closely reflect the wants of the activism bodies. Most often it's the latter, and they are not reliable sources on English usage, but are politicized works trying to change English usage. If they actually succeed in that change goal, as reflected across pretty much the entirety of contemporary professional writing in English, then WP's MoS will adopt a conforming change. (Thus, e.g.,

MOS:JR wasn't changed to remove the comma in constructions like "Sammy Davis[,] Jr." until long after it was common to drop the comma, because advice to do so did not yet appear in the academic-leaning style guides like Chicago that MoS is based on. Same goes for using -'s in possessives the root noun of which ends in -s; until the latest editions, Chicago and Garner's still were okay with writing "Jesus'", but when they changed to "Jesus's", so did we.) On this particular topic, no amount of thumping of style guides from psychological associations with an agenda to push or journalism style guides who have bought that agenda is going to make MoS change faster, because the style guides MoS actually develops from doing agree with them.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  23:11, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

As I recall, most of the discussions around LGBTQ style questions over the years have been settled by invoking the media guide for

CMoS, but I don't think it's ever been consulted over a question like which terms are offensive to which marginalized communities. WhatamIdoing (talk

) 01:17, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I've been here for the entire span of those debates. GLAAD was pushing for years and years for changes in the kinds of language that is now, finally, covered in a very limited way by MOS:GENDERID, and MoS still has not changed to conform to GLAAD's viewpoint on various things. The changes that have been made here were not because of GLAAD's or any other activism source's advocacy wording in their own style guides, it was because real-world usage had provably shifted, across the entire swath of English-language writing. (One could of course say that GLAAD's effect on those publishers probably ultimately led to the MoS changes, but it was not a direct GLAAD→MoS pipeline.) Several other MoS changes have come about that way, through aggregate analysis of language shift, because (yes) sometimes the academic style guides don't cover something at all, or they adjust on something too slowly. But advocacy-based style guides are not where we get the impetus to change from; rather, it is overwhelming evidence of usage change in news, recent academic book publishing, aggregate journal searches, and other independent material. That (plus the recent change in Garner's, a style guide MoS is heavily based on) is going to be how the WP consenus on "committed suicide" will change. I guarantee it. People have already been pushing the advocacy sources for years now, without any consensus movement.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:12, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Looking at discussions about individual articles, rather than discussions about the official guidelines, I'd say that GLAAD's media recommendation has had a pretty significant influence over the years.

I don't really care whether Wikipedia's consensus on committed changes (e.g., during this decade; during my lifetime). My goal is for editors to accurately understand that we currently don't ban either adding or removing it (except for mindless mass changes – in either direction – or changes – again, in either direction – to a particular paragraph/article when you have specific knowledge that the wording there has been intentionally chosen or is supported by consensus for that particular paragraph/article), and that some people disapprove of it (because it's not nice for editors to be surprised by changes to what's considered socially acceptable). WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:25, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Re: "all of the external style guides and similar recommendations published during the last 5–10 years that say anything about the language used to talk about suicide in the news or online" – Yeah, that's a self-selecting-group fallacy. No style guide has any reason to mention this topic at all unless they have a language-change-advocacy position to push against "commit suicide".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:39, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

The idea that a style guide only mentions topics that are a source of current language-change activism is nonsense. I do wonder sometimes if people read what they write and even stop for a minute to ponder if it holds up for something else they aren't themselves an activist on Wikipedia about (which includes language conservativism extremists). Style guides offer advice on all the things WAID listed above about gay/black/mental illness/Roma and the very old advice about not being bloody sexist. Can you imagine writing the words "No style guide has any reason to mention that you shouldn't refer to doctors as "he" and nurses as "she" unless they have a language-change-advocacy position to push against this so-called sexism".

What MOS:SUICIDE says is accurate and fair and balanced. To downgrade "many" to "some", for example, as SMcCandlish thinks would be an improvement, isn't evidence based. There are no guidelines looking at how suicide should be written about that say "committed" is absolutely fine and what's more there are no reasonable alternatives. The idea that nobody ever thinks and writes about how to discuss suicide unless they are some kind of extremist language-change activist is simply untrue. It is a hugely sensitive topic that deserves sensitive discussion and isn't served well by language conservatives writing any old crap that seemed to advance their position. -- Colin°^Talk 09:24, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

You're putting words in my mouth. I never suggested that style guides only include advice on things they want to change. (Some style guides like Chicago are almost overwhelmingly comprehensive, yet still do not address this question.) What I'm saying is that style guides don't include advice on this particular matter unless they have an advocacy position about it. It's because there is no reason to mention it otherwise. Style guides also don't include advice on whether to write "cats and dogs" in that order or "dogs and cats", because no one cares. If there suddenly became a socio-politicized reason to care among a particular camp, then various style guides that align with that camp would stake out a camp-aligned position on the matter, while other style guides would probably remain silent, not caring about it (in theory some might take the opposite position, if they cared, but cared from the opposite socio-political perspective). What's really interesting here is that the style guides that do (pretty uniformly against) address "committed suicide" are either a) explicitly being activistic about it, or b) are journalism style guides, and the latter are positively overflowing with "how to avoid ever even unintentionally offending anyone for any reason" advice, because newspapers and news sites and news shows have an excessive concern about this (they get lots of hate mail/calls if they even accidentally offend one "class" or another). These rationales have little to do with encyclopedia writing, and MoS explicitly rejects this "someone somewhere might get upset" reasoning at every turn (see, e.g.,

MOS:DOCTCAPS). Another interesting thing: One of the most comprehensive style guides that MoS is actually based on is Garner's Modern English (current ed. that I know of is 2016). It has a detailed entry at "suicide", and excoriates the "self-killing" and "self-murder" synonyms as "charged with extremely negative connotations", but not "committed suicide", despite the author and editors clearly having thought about what is and isn't negatatively connotational. (Probably because they understand that it can be and probably usually is intepreted as the "commit" in "committed to a course of action" not the "commit" in "committed a crime", though of course I can't read their minds.) This demonstrates clearly that other style guide authors than the ones you like have weighed in on the matter without agreeing with your preferred writers.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  22:41, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

@SMcCandlish, a new edition of Garner's Modern English was published about eight months ago. The new edition adds, in between the old line (which appears to be unchanged) about the verb suicided (item "C") sounding trendy and semiliterate (which @Dhtwiki will be pleased to note has survived to the fifth edition), and the old note (marked "*") on not talking about suicide victims (also apparently unchanged):

D. Commit suicide vs. die by suicide. Since about 2000, style manuals have come to avoid commit suicide, which is now considered insensitive because of its whiff of criminality. The trend is to prefer die by suicide, kill onself, or take one's own life.

So if the argument is that Garner doesn't mention it so it's not important, or that style manuals in general don't have an opinion, or that they have a diversity of opinions – well, Garner now says that style manuals haven't supported this particular wording for the last two decades.

As a side note, we can also rejoice that with the fifth edition, Garner has finally stopped using

mentally retarded (except in one unnecessary quotation). That change, too, appears to have taken about two decades to come to his attention. WhatamIdoing (talk

) 02:01, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

That is actually important, since Garner's is one of the style guides MoS is actually based on, and (importantly), the change is based on observation of a shift in practice, not on advocacy that such as shift should happen. I think this will go a long way to convincing editors to change their minds on this the next time there's an RfC on the matter that proposes a specific language change to the guideline. (I think this current discussion is rather a dead stick.) As my own side note, I'm faintly irritated that there's already a new Garner's edition, since it's more money I have to spend on books that don't last long enough.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:10, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

It's US$30 but it looks like it'll be £40 for you, with basically the same prices for the used market. Maybe WMUK could buy it? WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:48, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

OH, I'm over here in YankeeLand. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  06:35, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

The problem however, boils down to that we as a community have rejected those style guides on the grounds that the justification for the new stylistic guidelines is untrue. You are conflating something that can be demonstrably proven false (all doctors are male and all nurses are female) with something, that ultimately boils down to social taboos/pressures, offensiveness. Whether not something is offensive is up to a community to decide. I'll reiterate this, that we decide as a collective whether or not a source is reliable, and through a supermajority, we decided that the phrase is not offensive - meaning we have rejected the style guides, ergo, they are not considered reliable in this regard. Whether or not is offensive, or isn't offensive is no longer a question. Whether or not the guides are, or are not relevant, is no longer a relevant question. The RFC has already rejected both those propositions, and we now need to move forward with how to change it. DarmaniLink (talk) 09:39, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

No the community has not rejected those style guides. What happened was the community did not agree to ban "committed suicide" (i.e. endorse editors to scan all of Wikipedia for that phrase and replace it with another, which is an extremely extremely big ask on this project). So that is not the same thing. And there certainly wasn't even a majority view that the justification in those style guides was "untrue". And no, whether or not something is offensive is not up to this community to decide. The RFC did not decide that the phrase is not offensive. The RFC did not determine that the style guides are "not considered reliable in this regard". No, the matter is not settled for all time. If you have a discussion, like this one, and like future ones, we aren't compelled by previous discussions for all time. Considering that every single claim you just made is wrong, I really can only repeat that you should not be driving this change and this is an inappropriate time and place to discuss that.

We have a situation where a number of language conservatives take the view that they themselves, personally, have to be convinced of the negatives or positives or some phrase or word or other. While they remain unconvinced, they will write just about anything, even and especially things that they really are bright and clever enough to know are total nonsense. It is frustrating because it isn't an intelligent way to discuss a topic. And we have a situation where this publication is wide open to mass edits, which makes us generally reluctant to endorse that specific words should never or should always be used. That the project cannot currently find a resolution, is not the same thing as saying the language conservative viewpoint has won (editors can never change "committed suicide" once it is inserted in an article, and further more, no guideline can ever suggest that there might be ways of writing about that that don't offend some of our readers). It means we have not reached an agreement on the best practice and no more.

WhatamIdoing achieved a remarkable degree of balance and fairness in what was discussed and inserted into MEDMOS. There will always be editors who misunderstand guidelines and misunderstand RFC results and make claims on article talk pages, as what sparked this off. Those editors have been gently told they were wrong. That should be the end really. To continue on with incorrect claims and falsehoods is disruptive activism, and I advise you to stop. -- Colin°^Talk 11:29, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Every other editor in this discussion except for WAID and you has taken issue with the current wording. I never said they can never change it, I said they should not tendentiously change the wording, such as the two examples in the first proposal. Certain phrasings are vastly inferior or terrible english, and mentioning the style guides endorses one phrasing. If you read through the RFC, people stated their experience with suicide, and stated the term is idiomatic. The problem comes down to that ultimately, we are being asked to abide by the letter of the guideline and not the spirit of the guideline, which is obviously worded in a certain way to tell editors how to think/edit, and suggest that the primary example of phrasing is inferior. It has been used to this regard, and as I have said time and time again, "every rule, someone broke". If a rule is unclear, it should be clarified. You do not wish to clarify it, because you are on the side which can abuse the poor wording. The fact that you use the term "language conservative" is indicative of this.

I have suggested that we should not include any examples, and that is my preference. To give a blank statement, endorsing no specific phrasing. Some people will be offended by explicit mentions of death, some muslims will be offended by depictions of Muhammed, some jewish people will be offended by the use of "god" and not "g-d". Don't misrepresent what I have said by implying I have said no alternative is acceptable. I am not an activist, nor do I engage in activism. Attempting to prevent activists from doing exactly what they have tried to do, is not activism. Its keeping things smooth, and preventing further similar disputes from occurring, wasting everyone's time. I do not understand why you are so obsessed with not improving an inferior wording which has already led to problems. DarmaniLink (talk) 12:10, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

DarmaniLink, VaticidalProphet was already at your Talk:Marie Sophie Hingst dispute with their opinion. Masem watchlisted Robin Williams for years, reverting anyone who changed the "committed suicide" wording. And SMcCandlish is so thoroughly hostile to style guides that he's written essays about how they are a fallacy on Wikipedia. So nobody is in any way surprised that those two turned up at the mention of suicide and style guides. Indeed, if they hadn't, someone might be concerned for their health or wonder if they'd retired. S Marshall didn't offer an opinion, just a comment on SMcCandlish's claim. And I can assure you that the entire rest of Wikipedia is rolling their eyes and going "not this again, please make it stop". I have read the RFC. You are taking the bits and comments you agree with and supposing those are the only views. Agreeing that we don't agree is an outcome. It isn't that I don't wish to clarify it, and accusing me of not wanting to clarify it "because you are on the side which can abuse the poor wording" is not civil. I actually wish the wording said other things but I think the compromise WAID came up with is what we have to live with right now. Wrt activisms, generally people think the activists are the other guys. If you find yourself thinking that when filling the village pump with text about how wrong everyone else is and how right you are.... I'm going to do something more interesting now and strongly advise you do to the same. -- Colin°^Talk 12:55, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

your Talk:Marie Sophie Hingst dispute with their opinion -- for clarity on the possessive. (It was >99% before Citationbot.) My view of that dispute is that I am perfectly happy for people to use whatever terms they want in articles they write, and would appreciate the same. Vaticidalprophet 13:00, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

As you say, you wrote the article and I do think that's worth something in terms of opinions that count, for that article. -- Colin°^Talk 13:10, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

That's dangerous thinking around here (

WP:VESTED).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  22:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

This is an open forum for anyone to state a disagreement if they think it should not change. Silence is not agreement, nor is it disagreement, it is a null vote. I looked through and found people have previously suggested issues with you being believed to be dominating the MOSMED space, so there's no surprise that you turned up here either. I was suggesting we change the wording, however, you and WAID are opening the door to reigniting the debate I said I do not want to reignite in the opening proposal. If you think it should not be changed, that's your choice. However, the current discussion is that we change it, and if we do, how. Rather than shut out any conversation, argue that you think it should/shouldn't change. You clearly think it shouldn't, but have not responded to the questioning as to why you would like to preserve a wording that needs to be abided by the letter of, and not the implicit spirit of where others have also said that it suggests one phrasing is inferior, when the writer itself in this thread has said "i was trying to weigh them all equally, see, I said other". Everyone has their own biases, including you, and attempting to discredit them on the basis of that is hurting any future argument you might have in this discussion. DarmaniLink (talk) 13:12, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Um, a proposal generates debate. That's the process, pretty much by definition. And there's no point in vaguely casting aspersions at people for "turning up in" debates that are within their scope of interest.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:41, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't have a problem with him engaging in debate, my problem is the thread derailing back into the same old tired argument on if its offensive/not offensive, if it should/shouldn't be banned, etc. It's his choice to argue this, and his right to, however, I did say I wanted to avoid this. I'm trying to keep this conversation moving, so we can hopefully reach an outcome. I'm trying to keep this on topic, so I hopefully don't have to waste an admin's time, and every one elses, with involving the obnoxious bureaucracy of a DRN, because allowing the same old tired debate to rear its ugly head again devolved into the exact back and forth and heated emotions I knew it would. Everyone seems to agree its unclear, and needs are careful reading, but the implications of it being unclear are disagreed upon. I want to discuss this and hopefully have something productive come out of this discussion that expanded on a previous RFC. DarmaniLink (talk) 22:53, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I do not agree that it is unclear, and I don't think I'm the only one who believes that it is clear. Every now and again we have to remind people (who want to remove it) that it's not banned on wiki, and every now and again we have to remind people (who want to keep it) that it's not required to be kept in any article, but most experienced editors can keep in mind two things at once, whether that's "Wikipedia doesn't ban it, but basically all the external guidelines disapprove of us using it", or "Wikipedia is not censored, but basically all the style guides think websites open to the public shouldn't show actual photos of people having sex".

I agree that it needs careful reading. Sometimes that is inevitable. When the subject matter needs to balance competing interests, the result sometimes requires Close reading, or at least a willingness to ask questions. Wikipedia:Policy writing is hard. We know that, and that's why we're willing to answer your questions. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:09, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

See

WP:WL

- We are told to abide by the spirit of the rule, not the letter of the rule. Telling people to look at the letter of the rule and read it over carefully is telling them to go against what they *think* it's trying to say. If the letter of the rule is taking precedent over the implied spirit of the rule, then its awfully written, especially if it's become a perennial problem.

It would be EXTREMELY productive to, even if we have to make the rule more verbose, rewrite it in a better way, and if you no longer wish to revisit this every time someone finds this and says "yeah, no this is horribly written", then it would be beneficial to participate in a conversation to rewrite it so you can say "hey, i was part of the effort to rewrite this", rather than attempt to shut down any conversation that seeks to change it

so you don't lose your additition to the MOS. DarmaniLink (talk

) 09:42, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

That's actually pretty well said, but I don't think any of the proposals floated below (including mine) are going to fix this wording.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:15, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

how should we change the wording?

As the previous discussion got off topic, I would like to restart the discussion here. I would like to use Vaticalprophet's rough draft as the starting point. This is more or less going to be set in stone (as its going in a manual of style page to be cited in relevant discussions), so lets ensure its not going to be

There is disagreement over the ideal way to report a suicide, and the subject can strong stir feelings. Common phrasings that may be encountered in articles include:

• committed suicide
• died by suicide
• killed oneself
• took one's own life
• died by one's own hand
• death was ruled a suicide
• cause of death was suicide
• in some contexts, the exact cause of death (e.g. "died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound")

Some editors have strong opinions about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of different phrasings, both in general or for a specific article. The issue can be emotive, and changing existing phrasings risks controversy or dispute. No phrasing is unilaterally superior to any other across every article. Articles may use multiple phrasings as a natural matter of grammar.

When writing a new article, editors can use the phrasing they are comfortable with. Some editors recommend using the specific phrasing that reports of a subject's death use. This should be balanced with the risk of close paraphrasing.

Lets brainstorm some clarifications/wordings we feel are better, or decide this is good enough for a MOS page. DarmaniLink (talk) 22:33, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

• suicided — short, direct, unambiguous, neutral. Mitch Ames (talk) 00:10, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Personally, in my opinion we shouldn't list examples at all, as to avoid influencing people or giving people a way to

  WP:WL into shoehorning an alternative, but if the consensus is to keep the examples, we should add this as an option, being extra careful not to allow the list to become large. I'll let the others weigh in. DarmaniLink (talk

  ) 00:14, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  When we didn't give editors a list of alternatives, we had problems with people thinking that died by was the only option endorsed by external guidelines. We need this list for practical reasons. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:31, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• If nothing else, I think we should remove from any list of alternatives the phrases (currently in
  MOS:SUICIDE, with my emphasis here) "died as a result of suicide", "cause of death was suicide" as they are inaccurate. Suicide was the act, not the cause of death. The cause of death was (for example) asphyxiation/hanging, gunshot etc. Mitch Ames (talk
  ) 00:34, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Some editors have strong opinions about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of different phrasings over the ideal way to report a suicide, and the subject can strong stir feelings, both in general or for a specific article. The issue can be emotive, and changing existing phrasings risks controversy or dispute. No phrasing is unilaterally superior to any other across every article. Articles may use multiple phrasings as a natural matter of grammar.When writing a new article, editors can use the phrasing they are comfortable with. Some editors recommend using the specific phrasing that reports of a subject's death use. This should be balanced with the risk of close paraphrasing.

  How does this look? If you (or anyone else) thinks anything could be worded better, please say so. We could also keep the list with only "committed suicide", "died by suicide", "killed (one's)self" and "suicided" DarmaniLink (talk) 00:47, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Since, at the previous RfC, "committed suicide" was objected to because for some the word had connotations of sinfulness or criminality. It might do to warn editors that this widely used, and to me quite neutral, phrase has become contentious and has been deprecated by some influential style guides. Other than making that clear, we don't need to offer a menu of substitutes. "Died by suicide" has become common, but it seems redundant, if not illiterate, as "suicide" implies death. "Suicided" seems even more clumsy, and it is quite informal and unencyclopedic in tone. There are more graceful and informative ways of stating how such deaths happen. We don't need to present a list that seems to limit the ways by which it can be expressed. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:14, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  "Suicided" seems even more clumsy, and it is quite informal and unencyclopedic in tone — How is a single word "clumsy"? How is a single, neutral, unambiguous (when used

  SOED (6th edition, 2007) says since mid-19th century, and Wiktionary lists usages of suicided in 1917, 1953. Mitch Ames (talk

  ) 06:49, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  I heard "suicided" as movie dialogue I heard somewhere, although I couldn't find the movie, which was what made me think of it as too informal for use here. Add to that the fact that the stem is felt as a noun, and I remember injunctions against using nouns as verbs when something, anything, else will do. Dhtwiki (talk) 05:59, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  Just based on what I've seen, people use suicided to mean something different nowadays; see the first 3 definitions of 'suicided' on Urban Dictionary. Some1 (talk) 23:03, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  The problem with mentioning anything about the external guides at all is that other editors have used this to bully other editors into conforming to their preferred terminology by implying the other choice is inferior for that reason. It could be on an article mentioning the phraseology of suicide, but MOS pages follow the consensus of wikipedians, not, and especially not external guides. DarmaniLink (talk) 07:20, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  "Suicided" and "died by suicide" are both controversial on wording/readability grounds (and have additional, different controversies attached for each one of them). I tend to think of "suicided" as a term people are not willing to use in wikivoice, like "completed suicide", on opposite ends of a spectrum. (I'm sure there are articles using both, though.) The paragraph by itself is probably fine, though I'd add a parabreak before 'when writing a new article'. Someone on my talk queried whether "unilaterally" should be "universally", which, sure, make any necessary readability changes. Vaticidalprophet 07:55, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  On "suicided", Garner's Modern English (one of the style guides MoS is genuinely based on) says "these verb uses sound trendy and semiliterate".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:41, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  When writing a new article, editors can use the phrasing they are comfortable with is true, but will provoke

  WP:OWN concerns. WhatamIdoing (talk

  ) 02:13, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Mitch Ames, I have a lot of gut-level sympathy for this understanding of the "as a result of" wording, but I think if you think it through, you'll see that it is accurate. Consider the case of a swimmer jumping into a river, and dying because they misjudged the depth of the water. They "died as a result of jumping" – jumping is obviously an action – and even though the death certificate will list the cause of death as some version of internal trauma (or head and neck trauma, if they dove in) as the immediate cause, it will go on to say (if it follows modern standards) that the injury was precipitated by jumping into shallow water. Even without seeing the official ruling, everyone will intuitively understand that the death was "as a result of" jumping into unexpectedly unsafe situation.

  As for suicide not being properly a cause of death, I think that if you wanted to be precise, you would say that it is the

  Death by unnatural causes (mostly accidental death, suicide, and homicide). But since the two sub-types of "manner" are called "causes", and since the language varies by jurisdiction, it is perhaps not surprising that the "cause of death was suicide" is the much more common, idiomatic phrase. WhatamIdoing (talk

  ) 18:44, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Vaticidalprophet, while I appreciate your effort consider this matter, I don't think right now and this forum is the place to discuss changes to the guideline. Right now we have editors who are engaged in a battle and that's a bad time to modify MOS. What is proposed above guts what the guideline has said. The very proposal that started this is flawed. I think also it is important to remember that MEDMOS is a style guide, not an editor behaviour guide. I'm not over-keen on even the existing behaviour advice in the text and oppose writing even more as suggested above. Nor is MOS a "RFC closure", where we discuss what "some editors" believe. Some editors believe (when it suits them, and ignore when it doesn't) things that are wrong, such as the idea that we are compelled to use the language of our sources: Wikipedia:Use our own words. People will say anything sometimes, invent policies and mythical guidelines, when it seems to fit their argument, but it doesn't hold as a general argument. I think for matters where Wikipedians cannot agree on the best words and language, offering information about the issue and, yes, referring to external advice, is exactly in keeping with our mission to educate. -- Colin°^Talk 09:39, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Well said.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

How about some behaviour advice

The problem with all these issues of language is that people confuse behavioural advice with content advice. Whether our article text is better written this way or that way is content, and we are all such different people that we write differently. Here's my thoughts on behaviour, which doesn't belong on a MOS page.

• Making mass similar changes to articles had better be very much uncontentious and better still have a clear consensus in its favour. Editors who make mass contentious edits (or continue after they've been told the edits are contentious) usually find themselves topic banned or worse.
• If you think an article would be improved by changing a word or phrase
  be bold
  .
• You are far far more likely to find word-changes accepted if you are also improving the whole text. For example, many paragraphs on Wikipedia are badly written, uncited or cite old sources. How about entirely rewriting the paragraph with new sources and better English overall. Then nobody can see you secretly removed "whilst".
• If someone reverts you, discuss on the article talk page.
• You might find that other editors share your enlightened views or at least are happy to accommodate your opinion. Not every page on Wikipedia is watchlisted by Neaderthals.* If you have consensus to redo the change or some compromise wording, go ahead. (* this is humour. Also, Neanderthals were very intelligent).
• Don't edit war.
• If other editors disagree then you don't have consensus. At this point you may find or be informed about some big RFC. There's a very very strong chance that the person citing that RFC is not being entirely honest or accurate in their interpretation of the outcome. For example, an RFC that closes with no consensus to change or add some rule is very very much not the same as an RFC that closes with consensus to add entirely the opposite rule.
• A "no consensus" RFC or the lack of formal recommendation at MOS means editors can come to their own agreement. Don't be bullied by anyone claiming there is an agreement when there really isn't.
• People make mistakes and misinterpret MOS or RFCs. Assume good faith and be ready to apologise if you got something wrong.
• Some topics have repeated RFCs. That's a sign the issue is very contentious and the community cannot find agreement.
• In these cases, do not assume that the community must stop what it is doing and have yet another of these big RFCs just so you can get clarity on the wording change you made (or opposed) on that one article. *cough*
• Similarly, if the issue has been the subject to thousands of words of discussion by dozens of editors, then banging on about it endlessly on the article talk page is just as likely to be fruitless. Know when to give up.
• Some battles over wording are a reflection of real-world culture wars. Whether that is specific culture wars about transgender, say, or more general progressive vs conservative and anti-woke politics. Such battles are inevitable on Wikipedia and generally don't advance the project.
• Editors who find themselves on either side of these culture or political wars are activists. The conservatives are activists. The progressives are activists. Nobody likes to think they are the activist.
• As already pointed out elsewhere, if you find yourself in a content dispute and want to change guidelines in order to win that dispute, Wikipedia regards that as Wikipedia:Gaming the system.
• MOS:SUICIDE
  (as currently written) offers some advice for editors to discuss the best text for the topic of suicide. But with all guidelines, it is up to you guys to take that information and see if there is a consensus or try to work towards one, and know when to accept there isn't or it isn't the one you wanted.

I hope this advice helps editors at Marie Sophie Hingst resolve their dispute. You really don't need to change policy or guideline to achieve that. None of this advice will be new to anybody here. Most of us have been-there-done-that-got-the-scars-to-prove-it. -- Colin°^Talk 13:39, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I would really appreciate it if you do not frame this as attempting to change policy over a dispute, I saw a guideline being misinterpreted, twice, which told me this needs to change, and ask that you would stay on topic without leaving snarky edits to the discussion. I'm going to ask that you voluntarily remove this derailing sub discussion. DarmaniLink (talk) 13:54, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I didn't note that you originally were disputing at Otoya Yamaguchi and only joined in the dispute at Marie Sophie Hingst. I read the dispute here which mysteriously you blanked after you became uncivil. I don't see any misinterpretation by Damien Linnane. In fact, I see you make multiple mistakes, some of which you wouldn't have made if you read the above. DarmaniLink, looking at the dispute on that talk page I can only repeat my strong advice that you abandon this because being agressive, rude and offensive towards others and then trying to get MOS fixed so you were "right all along" is likely to end badly. Oh, and don't remove other people's text. -- Colin°^Talk 14:28, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

You were derailing the thread and this is slowly approaching

WP:BLUDGEON territory from you and the other editor, where we are trying to move forward with a discussion that developed into an argument. I am trying to keep things moving, per the original proposal. You added something irrelevant, so I took the executive action to remove it, to prevent this from derailing further. Kindly, be productive in this discussion, or leave. DarmaniLink (talk

) 14:45, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

The misconception I see in the Talk:Otoya Yamaguchi discussion is that DarmaniLink appears to be understanding "is not banned" as indicating that it "must be preserved". If you dislike killed himself, and the other editor dislikes committed suicide, then why can't the two of you pick a different (i.e., a third) word, instead of insisting that your version must be the one? Is the spirit of collegial editing so far gone, and our skill at copyediting and compromising so weak that we can only hit the Undo button and can't think of other words to use? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Because other proposed alternatives break the flow in the given context. In every instance i have seen them replace the "committed" language, it has sounded unnatural and out of place. Flow of encyclopedic prose matters above all, and shoehorning in an alternative, making an article worse, over someone's feelings is to be blunt, stupid. The onus is on them to make the edit fit the prose, and if they did a good job, nobody would even notice. But they don't, its why it gets reverted.

You, yourself have admitted people have taken this section out of context or interpreted what it said, and others have also said that they thought what's written is discouraged. This means it must change, because its current state is leading to drama. DarmaniLink (talk) 22:29, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

So you've only seen poor writers on wiki? I'm sorry to hear that. I've seen some quite good copyediting done.

Darmani, I have written a lot of policy over the years, including a good deal of our policy on writing policies and guidelines. There is almost nothing that I haven't seen quoted out of context or misinterpreted.

It is actually true that the committed language is discouraged. I want you to imagine that you are taking a reading comprehension test at school. Here is a page from the test:

Do you think you could pass this test? I hope that most editors could. If you can pass this test with a perfect score, perhaps the main problem isn't the wording, but the behavioral response of editors who see this wording being removed from an article. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:29, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Here's the problem - you are asking us to abide by the *letter* of the guidelines when the *spirit* of the guidelines discourages it. Other editors have voiced that it implies its discouraged, and others have stated that same interpretation. Rather than keep something ambiguous, we should change what is written to be unambiguous. Is it more worth it to quibble over semantics and have to pull up RFCs with someone misinterpreting a guideline than it is to clarify the guideline? DarmaniLink (talk) 02:46, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I am asking you to believe that I can write clearly and specifically, yes.

I wonder if you understand yet that the English Wikipedia does not encourage this wording. We don't ban it; we don't even officially discourage it – ourselves. But we do not encourage it, either. In all of the previous discussions, there has been very little support for making the committed language be preferred to options like "killed himself" (which you dislike, but which most editors approve of, and have used almost twice as often as the contested "died by" language). We want editors to be aware that external style guides pretty much universally do discourage it. We want editors to be aware of this so that they can make well-informed choices and also so that if they choose this language, they won't be blindsided if someone tries to change it on the grounds that these other style guides discourage it.

If an editor reads this guideline and takes away the message that "Wikipedia is neutral, and pretty much every external style guide is against it", and decides that this adds up to "I feel discouraged from using it", then that's IMO not actually a problem. If another editor does the same calculation and decides "Wikipedia's neutral, and I don't care what the rest of the world thinks, so I can do whatever I want (within the bounds of other policies, including consensus)", then that's fair, too. But the reasonable conclusions are kind of in the "neutral-to-discouraged" range of the spectrum, not in the "I'm going to win a prize for brilliant prose" part. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:44, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

The problem is the ordering of phrases, has a psychological effect that de-facto leads the reader by a ring in the nose. We're looking to clarify, to remove that, and have editors not have it implied its inferior. If it was implied to be perfectly acceptable, alternatives would not be listed following it. This requires abiding by the letter of the document to get the message you claim you are trying to send. These are common word games, to suggest to ignore what something implies to look at the letter of something. If you were to say "X isn't banned here, but outside of here people people find X offensive. You can also to Y, Z, A, B,C." You are de facto telling someone not to do something, in the spirit of the rule. This requires WP:WL to get the truth of the statement, to avoid the manipulative BS written now. We abide by the spirit of a rule, not the letter.

This needs to change, and this is starting to feel

WP:OWNy from you. DarmaniLink (talk

) 03:54, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Here are the key facts:

1. Wikipedia editors did not ban it. (Mind the gap between "allowed" and "preferred".)
2. External style guides discourage it on grounds of offensiveness.

Do you think you can write a non-manipulative sentence that tells editors that this phrase is not banned by the community, that does not imply that this phrase is preferred by the community, that this phrase is discouraged by non-Wikipedia sources on grounds of offensiveness, and also does not leave editors feeling like if they use the language declared to be offensive by those external guidelines, nobody, not even the authors of those same guidelines, will think they have used potentially offensive language? WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:54, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

The problem is the ordering of phrases that de facto has a psychological effect on the reader. You are breaking down the *letter* of phrase, not the implied spirit of the phrase, and asking people to lawyer the phrase to get its true meaning. See

WP:WL, we're supposed to *not* go strictly by the letter. DarmaniLink (talk

) 00:02, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

That's twice now that you've said the problem is the ordering of the phrases. We can rearrange the order of the phrases, but I don't think that putting the fact about external guidelines first will make it less prominent.

• Current order: "The phrase committed suicide is not banned at the English Wikipedia, although many external style guides discourage it as being potentially stigmatising and offensive to some people."
• Opposite order: "The phrase committed suicide is discouraged by many external style guides as being potentially stigmatising and offensive to some people, although it is not banned at the English Wikipedia."

If you like this better, then I'm not going to object very strongly, but I suspect that you meant to complain about something other than the order of the phrases. (It's not Wikipedia:Wikilawyering [an essay] to say that editors should follow both what is written and intended by a guideline.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:34, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

That's not what i mean. It's the juxtaposition thats a problem.

Sometimes, its easier to see what I mean with an alternative example.

"Drinking while driving isn't banned in Liberland, but other nations discourage it as being dangerous. There are other safe, acceptable, and delicious drinks like: Soda, Water, Tea, Coffee"

Other can mean "additional" or it can explicitly exclude the previously mentioned item. Its ambiguous, and up to the reader to guess at the context.

The wording is de facto discouraging someone from doing it. DarmaniLink (talk) 22:34, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

"The wording is de facto discouraging someone from doing it." Yes, it is, unmistakably, and this doesn't seem to agree with a semi-recent RfC (even if I think that a new RfC with additional evidence is likely to run the other direction.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:23, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

"Do you think you could pass this test?" With just those available answers, I think the test is meaningless and basically a trap. The correct answers (to that specific proposed wording) would be "1. committed suicide is effectively banned at Wikipedia; and 2. effectively both, though Wikipedia is using weasely wording to imply otherwise." So, "asking us to abide by the *letter* of the guidelines when the *spirit* of the guidelines discourages it" is clearly correct in taht instance.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  21:25, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

This list is all very sensible, but if you put it in an essay, it'll be Wikipedia:Too long; didn't read, and people will only refer to it by a (probably misleading) WP:UPPERCASE instead of reading the words anyway. This might be the kind of thing that people have to learn for themselves, though experience. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:53, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

But Colin should put up the essay anyway, as it will be useful at more places than Talk:Marie Sophie Hingst. SandyGeorgia (Talk) 22:38, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Proposed change

We need to keep this conversation moving, and try to reach an outcome, because this has been a repeated issue. I'll propose this change to be voted on. If consensus agrees on an improvement, we can start a new vote with that, or just agree to substitute that in without the procedural beurocracy, whichever we decide. An alternative option would be to delete the problem section in its entirety, if its going to continue causing issues. It may not be worth to keep it, especially if its something as obvious as don't edit war, don't tendentiously change phrasings, take what terminology to use on a case by case basis.

Some editors have strong opinions about the appropriateness or inappropriateness of different phrasings over the ideal way to report a suicide, and the subject can stir strong feelings, both in general or for a specific article. The issue can be emotive, and changing existing phrasings risks controversy or dispute. No phrasing is unilaterally superior to any other across every article. Articles may use multiple phrasings as a natural matter of grammar. When writing a new article, editors can use the phrasing they are comfortable with. Some editors recommend using the specific phrasing that reports of a subject's death use. This should be balanced with the risk of close paraphrasing. Ultimately, this should be taken on a case by case basis and any changes should follow consensus. DarmaniLink (talk) 14:09, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• Drop this please. You are/were in an uncivil dispute at
  MOS:SUICIDE at Marie Sophie Hingst, this is not the case at the article you were arguing over. Such misunderstandings can be resolved through civil discussion, not stirring up battles we are all sick to death of at VP. -- Colin°^Talk
  14:32, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I am not attempting to change this to win a discussion, I am attempting to change this because multiple people have misinterpreted the section, and another editor has agreed with me that this is psychologically manipulative. I was not aware this was even a point of contention until just yesterday, and I am brand new to this entire discussion. Other editors have taken issue with this, and you have your own tonal/civility issues as well. We, are currently attempting to move forward with a new change, that we can agree upon. If you do not want to move forward with a change because you are sick of discussion with someone who is new to this entire issue, the door is there. DarmaniLink (talk) 14:41, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• Go make articles. Come back when you've spent some time in the trenches. You've spent less time actually contributing to articles than you have talking about articles. Go fix that. GMG^talk 15:10, 24 July 2023 (UTC)
• There's a germ of a good idea in that, but the material is a bit too tumid, and it erases too much of the original guideline material.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  It could be generalized to Wikipedia:Believe editors, with the general point being "When someone tells you that they find ____ offensive, stigmatizing, unclear, or whatever, you should believe them. When you tell them that you aren't offended by it, they should believe you. But as Garner's Modern English Usage says, 'If plain talk is going to provoke unnecessary controversy—if talk about illegitimate children or sodomy will divert attention from your point by offending people—', then when you learn that someone's unnecessarily offended or confused by the way you wrote something, you might want to consider re-writing it to avoid this distraction. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:39, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  Here's the thing - This isn't offending anyone other than language change activists who got told it was offensive by activist groups.

  Master/slave (technology)

  is still called that, despite activist orgs telling us its offensive nomenclature. Alternatives were proposed that people did not like as a general replacement, and this whole fad was dropped. These are false equivalencies as well, as has been previously pointed out, nobody who killed themselves is going to object to this terminology, and people survived by people who committed suicide generally prefer euphemisms for death as a whole, which we do not use.

  If someone finds a word offensive, they must first state their basis for finding it offensive. If it is grounded in reason, for example, Shina (word) was deemed to be offensive due to it being used by Japanese occupiers in China, and gaining that reputation. The general public accepts that as a legitimate reason.

  In this instance, people claim the connotation behind "commit" is offensive. They explained their reasoning, and their reasoning has been rejected. If we don't want to offend anyone, we better remove all paintings which depict Muhamed while we're it at it. Better ensure the wikipedia page for any racial pejorative is only written by people of that group, as to not offend activists. DarmaniLink (talk) 15:19, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  their reasoning has been rejected - The reasoning didn't convince enough people that it should be banned. That's not the same as a rejection of the reasoning. Your dismissal of the perspective of so many of the people and organizations who actually work with issues like self-harm and suicide as language change activists (which is a rather culture-warsy way of saying "people trying to consider the implications of language we otherwise take for granted") is not persuasive in terms of wikipolicy. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 18:54, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  Do you *really* want to go through an entire RFC just to decide if the usage of the term "commit" is offensive, when multiple people in the previous in the last RFC said that it outright said it has no criminal connotation?

  This implies it isn't offensive

  , per the argument of the "advocacy groups".

  This is exactly the same stuff we heard during the whole "whitelist/blacklist" debacle where the line of thought was basically "Whitelist is things allowed, blacklist is things blocked, this must mean they want to allow white people, and block black people!", and aside from a few activist groups desperate for donations, had everyone simultaneously roll their eyes so hard they were looking inside their skulls.

  "Culture warsy", i'm registered to no political party and have not voted once. I'm a programmer.

  "If "commit" has criminal connotations, then it is offensive in the phrase 'commit suicide'"

  For an

  demonstrate the counterexample is false, in other words, you must show the opposite to be true.

  I frankly do not care about what these activists feelings are, because they have no basis in logic, which can be demonstrably proven false in this instance. DarmaniLink (talk) 23:39, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  The problem, and why I've changed my stance on this since yesterday, is that mainstream style guides like Garner's Modern English, that don't have an agenda to push [that anyone can demonstrate – I can't claim to read minds], are now slowly coming to agreeing that the term can be seen as offensive. Even if a case can be made (and I've made it myself) that the commit in commit suicide is like unto the commit in commit to an irreversible course of action (which rather accurately describes a "successful" sucide attempt), not the commit in commit a crime or sin, there is clearly room for confusion and reader assumption of offensiveness, especially as various religions and legal system have actually defined suicide as sins and crimes. I don't really see a way around this. MoS is not written in a vacuum, but based on academic style guides like Garner's and on evidence of usage change across the English-writing world, and we have more of that every day. (That this change is spurred in large part by activistic sources MoS doesn't directly rely on is largely irrelevant or, e.g., MOS:GENDERID would not say much of anything that it says now. Regardless of the original impetus of the change, once the change has actually taken root, MoS is not in a position to ignore it – if it's something that applies to encyclopedic writing, anyway.)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  00:01, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  This sounds very similar to the "whitelist/blacklist" debacle where for 2020 some guides came out and said "use allowlist/denylist". Some major companies changed, my company didn't, except for changing "slave" to "worker" in jenkins.

  This seems more like the kind of thing that applies to the people who get secondhand offended over everything, who if they had their way, we would be speaking Toki Pona. When everything becomes offensive, its impossible to tell when they're being genuine or just looking for donations. DarmaniLink (talk) 00:09, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  As my "LOL" post below surely indicates, I agree with your general take on this. But as said already, when MoS's own main source material starts changing on this, then we have to more seriously consider doing it as well. Not because the advocates were "right" but because whether they were right or not the usage is nevertheless demonstrably shifting. The flip side of "MoS is not here to push language-activism agendas" is "MoS does not exist as an ultra-preservative platform for language-shift resistance". We should be writing in the same general "tone" or "sensitivity" as the majority of other major publishers (not just newspapers, which are "offense"-shy and kowtow quickly to activistic busy-bodying, but across recent academic and other material). Whether the shift in question has actually reached that point is really the central question, Garner's aside, and is going to be a matter of a lot of aggregate-usage research (which I'm not willing to do; someone who wants to RfC this again can do the homework).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  02:08, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  LOL. A '

  MOS:DOCTCAPS, or a zillion other policies and guidelines if such influences were even vaguely determinative of how WP operates.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

   😼  23:54, 25 July 2023 (UTC); rev'd. 04:31, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  I am absolutely loving this. That the styleguide SMcCandlish kept banging on about actually says in its current edition:

  D. Commit suicide vs. die by suicide. Since about 2000, style manuals have come to avoid commit suicide, which is now considered insensitive because of its whiff of criminality. The trend is to prefer die by suicide, kill onself, or take one's own life.

  I particularly love the "Since about 2000". So much so, I'm going to say it again. "Since about 2000". SMcCandlish, I know you are one of the biggest exponents of the fallacy that Wikipedia does not lead, when it comes to language, but being 23 years late to the party is a tad embarrassing.

  SMcCandlish, the above TLDR post of yours amply emphasises that your comments about what "Wikipedia" respects and what "MOS" does are hugely filtered by it actually being about what SMcCandlish respects and what SMcCandlish believes should be so. You are the most voluminous contributor to such discussions and by far the most opinionated, to the point of writing essays and, cough, Signpost articles that are best forgotten. Some humility please. Wikipedia is not written with MOS open in another tab or second monitor, consulting it before writing and after writing each and every paragraph. The English that Wikipedia is written in will naturally reflect current usage by editors, coming up with their own words to summarise what they read in sources, or what they already know in their heads, that is verified by the sources they cite.

  I'm also enjoying the contortions wrt association of "commit" with criminality. Yes I know some (you yourself above) kept claiming that all those people who were offended due to "commit suicide" being associated with criminality were just plain reading it wrong and the they should sort themselves out. But as most of us already know, and The Guardian article I linked earlier points out, Suicide really was a criminal offense and still is in 17 countries. The article Suicide legislation goes into the technical details of what the law actually said and what was actual practice. The association with criminality (and crime against God, or sinfulness, as with committing adultery) is not imaginary and was never ever a result of people just reading it wrongly. At least now your favourite style guide admits such.

  WhatamIdoing's mythical Wikipedia:Believe editors essay is believing them when some editors find something offensive and believing them when other editors don't. But the same could be made for what editors feel is important wrt the values that influence their writing style and word choices and what they want Wikipedia to contain. Some editors believe Wikipedia should be very conservative and only respect longstanding style guides in dusty hardbacks. Other editors believe Wikipedia should reflect contemporary values and beliefs and writing style. They believe that being a wiki (== quick) and being eternally updated, it is not great problem that in 2010, say, we reflected 2010's style, and in 2023, we reflect 2023's style. These two editor groups provide the tension we keep seeing and will keep seeing. These two editor groups exist and writing as though one group doesn't exist or should be quickly dismissed is unhelpful.

  I'm going to say it one more time. "Since about 2000" :-) -- Colin°^Talk 11:39, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  One more thing. The above quote refers to these "style manuals" that have "since about 2000" "come to avoid commit suicide". It does not do dismissively. There is no abusive mocking comment about them being written by woke social justice warriors, no rejection of them being merely activist literature or no value. Instead, they are regarded as playing a role in documenting the "trend" about how one should write about suicide. This idea that the opinions, say, of Samaritans should be dismissed as activists, rather than experts who might know a thing or two, more so than some random Wikipedian, is uncalled for. -- Colin°^Talk 12:21, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  There's nothing faintly "embarassing" about external style guide writers doing the research to demonstrate a shift in usage and changing their advice to accomodate it, then MoS regulars coming to agree to support changing MoS to move in the same direction. That is how the entire MoS process works and always has worked. But thanks (not) for vindictively individually personalizing a style dispute, taking a battlegrounding-against-"enemies" stance, and going after people who've actually come to your side of an issue. Very appropriate and effective. [sigh] This kind of "stab my neighbor in the back for not sharing 100% of my doctrinal positions" behavior is why the left is always tearing itself apart and has much to do with enabling the rise of the far-right. This is a point I raise dozens of times a week on various platforms, but it rarely seems to sink in with anyone, probably because it's easier and more fun to get into "someone is wrong on the Internet" fights than to examine and adjust one's own behavior and accept that one has an opinion instead of a Truth.

  Moving on, I never once suggested that people edit with MoS open in another tab, and I've frequently written, for over a decade now (including in essays you seem to categorically deride, or maybe you just mean ones I had something to do with), that no one has to read MoS before editing here; what they do have to do (with regard to all our

  WP:NPOV cancer, even when you agree with the position being advocated. Many activists have difficulty internalizing this, because they uniformly believe that advocating their stance is bettering the world; that's pretty much what activism is. But these editors still badly need to compartmentalize more and come to better understand their own issue-specific involvement/emotion/temperament limitations.
   — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

   😼  21:19, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  Let me first address the concerns you posted on my talk page, that my post may give the impression that you are a politically conservative in a battle with "woke social justice warriors" and that I've brought that political and culture-war battle into a discussion on language usage/advice. Let me be clear that when I wrote "woke social justice warriors" I was randomly picking an activist group, and activists of whatever flavour are, in your opinion (as I understand it), instantly dismissible wrt language concerns on the basis that they are activists, and not, say, because they believe certain things about how we might treat others or get along with each other or fund healthcare or control borders or whatever. If I were to guess your politics, I wouldn't be far off what you wrote above, and certainly not right-of-centre or anti-woke or whatever.

  For example, on this very page:

  • "the editor is pushing a piece of activism literature published by a group of "reformers" along with some journalism style guides that (through the activities of the aformentioned "sensistivity readers", a pool of people with deep ties to the activism bodies) closely reflect the wants of the activism bodies."
  • "The changes that have been made here were not because of GLAAD's or any other activism source's advocacy wording in their own style guides
  • "What's really interesting here is that the style guides that do (pretty uniformly against) address "committed suicide" are either a) explicitly being activistic about it, or b) are journalism style guides"
  • "this change is spurred in large part by activistic sources MoS doesn't directly rely on"
  • "MoS is not here to push language-activism agendas"
  • "newspapers, which are "offense"-shy and kowtow quickly to activistic busy-bodying"
  • "We already have an epidemic of extremist activists, on virtually every subject one can be activistic about, claiming they find offense, stigma, etc"
  • "many of the issue-pushing activists escalate the hostilities on purpose"
  • "which is language borrowed directly from far-left-activism rhetoric"

  Throughout this page, we have several lengthy lectures where we are left in no doubt about your dim view of editors seeking social language changes on Wikipedia while citing what you call activist sources.

  Nearly all of MOS concerns the aspects of "style" that are unconcerned with social matters. In these areas, you may well be right that Wikipedia is aligned with a core set of well known guides. Advising editors to avoid contractions (like "don't") is quite a different thing from advising editors how to sensitively write about suicide, or describe people with epilepsy or who are deaf, or whether we should deadname actors in the lead sentence. I don't think there is any good reason or five-pillar reason or policy reason why Wikipedia must restrict its sources of advice on such matters to books published by a university press in hardback (yes, I know many textbooks are online, paywalled often). I also don't think anyone would disagree with me that you are by quite some way the most voluminous and persistent voice dismissing sources of information on the grounds that the authors are surely activists. This very page, and the nine quotes above are evidence of that and are not atypical. SMcCandlish, that your voice is heard loudly and often influential does not mean you speak for Wikipedia. But you often write like you do. I don't think that is helpful when we are discussing policy changes. It gives a false impression that anyone with a different view is somehow not Wikipedia, and never can be, and can therefore be dismissed for not being Wikipedia. -- Colin°^Talk 09:34, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

  I'll go back to writing relatively short, since everyone probably finds this tiresome. Quoting me making the point, in various wording, that WP isn't a platform for advocacy (even when we may agree with the PoV) doesn't refute that point. A fairly trivial style matter like contractions being qualitatively different in seriousness from some others doesn't mean that our sourcing. consensus, and other methodology magically changes (and MoS addresses many matters that are of "sensitivity"; much of the entire

  MOS:WTW page is about such). Stridency of desire to make a change doesn't mean the change is more deserving; it's usually a reason to suspect PoV-pushing. Observation of real-world usage shifts and the consistent advice of sources that don't have a social-political language reformation PoV to advance are what indicate we should change our own style guidance – and they do, just not as quickly as you and some other editors might like. Me having the gumption to speak up about all this, in a sphere wallowing in cancel-culture behavior, and to not back down when people seem to want to paint me as right-wing (not just seemingly in here on this one topic, but everywhere I dare to resist language-reformers), doesn't make me wrong. If people repeatedly play "I can't hear you" games and keep dodging the substance of the concern, that tends to cause the ignored to restate their concern until it is addressed. When you post a screed the bulk of which is repeated mockery of another editor it is apt to make the accused post a defense. PS: If I'm "influential" here it's for the reason of making arguments that other editors find compelling (more often than they think I'm full of crap), but I never pose as being somehow special here; when people try to make me out to be, I disabuse them of the notion (e.g. here). I've just been here a long time is all.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

   😼  11:03, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

  When the RFC was held on this (not too long ago), the current state of the style guides were reviewed, and only a few had shifted; the primary driver of change was coming from medical / mental health studies that established that "committed suicide" could be problematic language. As such, there was not a clear need from following style guides to make the change. Maybe a style guide or two implemented a change in 2000, but at the time of the RFC, it was not the case that all style guides had stated the need to avoid "committed suicide". So I don't think this is an accurate assessment of the style guide issue. Masem (t) 12:09, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  I don't see that in the RFC. I see a thorough mocking dismissal, usually by SMcCandlish, any time someone mentioned a style guide that discouraged "commit suicide". And as we see above, SMcCandlish was using a guide from 2016 that itself admits to only documenting a recommendation that's been clear from "about 2000". The idea that a wiki should be solely constrained by dead-wood guides that only get updated every seven years, and when they do, admit to being 23 years late, is for the birds. -- Colin°^Talk 12:32, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  @SMcCandlish, in what way would "When someone tells you that they find ____ offensive, stigmatizing, unclear, or whatever, you should believe them' be a disaster? If you tell me that you find bad grammar to be offensive and unclear, should I say, "No, you don't – I know you're lying, and you think bad grammar is wonderful"? Or would you appreciate it if I believed that you find bad grammar offensive and unclear? Mind the gap between "you find something offensive" and "it is universally considered offensive". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:41, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  I think what I've already written clearly addresses this already, but I'll drill down a little: The tone/stance of this "you should believe them" instruction for lack of a better term strongly implies that you should accept their reasoning as valid and change your wording/behavior in response, when in any given actual case the reasoning may be absent or badly faulty or just too idiosyncratic to be meaningful to anyone else. Of course you should "believe" them in the much more general sense of

  assuming that they are not blatantly lying to try to score a point, but we all know this is not the intended meaning of the "you should believe them" stuff (which is language borrowed directly from far-left-activism rhetoric I bet everyone here has already encountered many times, that comes from the world of pushing language-usage and thought changes from an "offense is only defined by the reader/listener" perspective; I've already addressed this above, too). The obvious and entire purpose of this draft instruction is to induce change in wording/behavior in response to complaints; it is not to induce more belief that people are not blatantly lying, since there is no evidence that editors are interpreting other editors as blatantly lying when they make such "offended" arguments. The gap you say to mind is entirely the point I'm trying to make, and it is a gap that the "you should believe them" idea tries to make invisible. PS: I didn't say anything about "bad grammar" much less finding offense or inclarity in it. Using or not using "committed suicide" isn't a grammar matter at all.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

   😼  21:19, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

  So... I wrote that comment above, and now you are telling me what my stance is?

  Is there any chance that you could believe me, when I say that I just want to stop editors from having this kind of exchange?

  • A: I feel offended by this.
  • B: No, you don't. I've rationally analyzed it, and it's not offensive; therefore, nobody's offended by it.

  Or this kind, which I had just a couple weeks ago at a different village pump?

  • A: That doesn't help anyone edit articles.
  • Me: I found that it made it easier to edit this specific article.
  • B: No, it doesn't make it easier to edit articles.

  I realize you can't unilaterally solve all communication problems, but do you think the two of us could agree that I am the expert on my stance, and you are the expert on your stance, and not the other way around? WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:05, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

  On the subject: I don't mind you saying something like "If we write 'If an editor says they're offended, you should believe them', then some troll is going to claim that it means 'If an editor says they're offended, everyone is morally required to believe something the editor never actually said, and it is especially incumbent on you to twist a simple, personal statement that 'I'm personally offended' into a claim that the editor has conclusively proven that every single human on the planet is extremely upset with you and that if you are not equally offended, then you are a horrible, shameful excuse for a human'."

  Because, you know, everything gets quoted out of context eventually, and the amount of stupid on the internet is vast and deep. It might even be pointless to hope that an explicit sentence 'If an editor says they're offended by this, you should believe that they actually are offended by this, and the way you show that you believe that is that you don't say stupid things like 'nobody is offended by this'" could address the problem. But I would still like it if experienced editors stopped telling me that my own view is the opposite of what I've just told them my view is. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:39, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

  Of course I believe you on what your stance is. But this looks like a solution in search of problem, and there is great danger in its weaponization and other unintended consequences, especially in abetting the clever attacking of progressives by other progressives when there's a doctrine fork. I'll respond more fully in user talk rather than post long again in VPPOL. My concerns have more to do with aggregatate behavior of our left-leaning userbase under the influence of farthest-left agitators and their go-to smear tactics, than anything to do with trolling in the usual sense or just "I can't hear you" behavior outside of culture-wars topics.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  08:01, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Alternative proposed change

I would suggest instead something like the following (which borrows a little from the long-winded proposal above, keeps some of the original guideline language, and aims to address every problem raised in this discussion, including the psychologically manipulative wording and the thumping of external style guides):

Some editors have strong opinions about the appropriateness of particular terms. For example, some object to committed suicide while the community largely accepts it;^{[extisting footnote here]} others object to the verbal usage suicided. Changing existing phrasing in an article without first establishing a consensus to do so risks editorial conflict, but articles may use multiple phrasings as a natural matter of writing non-repetitively, and there are other appropriate, common, and encyclopedic ways to describe a suicide, including: [existing list here]

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose all of these changes (not sure where to put this -- too many subsections now). The current language does not conflict with the RfC. There are a great many specific phrases for which there are many reasons not to use them, but which the English Wikipedia wouldn't say should be "banned". That doesn't mean there's consensus that it's preferable language, or that other terms aren't preferable. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 23:04, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Rather that just saying "no", it would be more productive to make revision suggestions.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:15, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  Don't see any reason for a change. If someone wants to run the RfC again, go for it. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:03, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

• Support the nominator and SMcCandlish, but I don't see a version yet I can get behind. Maybe the one with a list of suggested phrases. Cuñado ☼ - Talk 23:37, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

  @Cuñado: This one has the list of suggested phrases that is already in the extant guideline; that's what "[existing list here]" refers to.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:50, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

• I would oppose any endorsement of "suicided", or any such construction using the "cide" Latin derivatives. Somthing like "died by suicide" is fine. Something like "suicided" is just gramatically wrong. GMG^talk 00:14, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  Ok, I can agree with no "suicided". I'll support not listing this as an example DarmaniLink (talk) 02:19, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

• Oppose as I already noted above, MOS is neither a behavioural guideline nor is it the closing comments of an RFC, which the above proposal is an attempt to achieve (and badly, tbh, as it really doesn't represent "the community"). It does the same "trick" as seen so often in language discussions, of offering a terrible and rarely suggested option ("suicided") as though that's the only alternative and no, the community does not "largely accept" "committed". That suggests the community were asked if "committed suicide" must be retained once written into an article, which isn't the question of any RFC. The community did not agree to ban it, and that extreme proposal is all that got rejected. Interpreting any more than that is dishonest. -- Colin°^Talk 07:52, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  Part of this rationale is non-operative. MoS in many places warns editors of types of changes that may be controversial and urges caution. That doesn't magically make it masquerading as a behavior guideline. See also

  WP:NOT#BUREAUCRACY. It is perfectly fine for a style guideline to do this, or (for that matter) for a behaviorial guide to mention something about style (which some of them do, specifically about style of editor interaction). And content policies and guidelines do the same thing, about style of writing in a broad sense of "style".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

   😼  22:53, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

• Self-oppose: Despite having argued against an oppose above for a questionable rationale, I'm now going to oppose my own proposal. I think the fact (reported above) that Garner's Modern English, one of the style guides MoS actually is based on, in its brand new edition has shifted to recommend against "committed suicide" is good evidence that MoS's own guidance on this should be revisted more substantively. I.e., I think the old RfC's consensus is now questionable. Given the years I've spent tracking advice changes in style guides, I predict it is likely that other style guides MoS is actually based on will do likewise in their next editions (especially Chicago Manual of Style, the usage material of which is also edited by Bryan Garner). I also expect Scientific Style and Format to do likewise, because (on med/psych terms) it is heavily dependent on the recommendations promulgated by professional med/psych organizations, and we already know they are on the side of this change. I feel a bit less certain in predicting Oxford/Hart's and Fowler's changes, becuse of outright editorial chaos at these Oxford University Press publications over the last 15 years or so. NB: The Garner's change was made because of evidence of broad usage shift, not because the author and editors have a language-change advocacy point to push – it is actually a fairly preservative/traditionalist volume. If the shift is broad enough to convince Garner, it is likely broad enough to convince Wikipedia, if someone knows how to put the evidence together well.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:25, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

  So long as you correctly understand the RFC outcome as "not banned" rather than "every existing use of this phrase must be preserved, and every person who changes it must be accused of malign intent and/or political motivations", then I don't think this really brings the outcome of the RFC into question. It's still "not banned". WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:51, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Note I think it worth pointing out that this whole discussion is predicated on the false claim that the current

That's why this post has been up for days. So it can be fixed, eventually. This discussion isn't for them, its for future new editors not to be confused. DarmaniLink (talk) 09:19, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the problem, DarmaniLink, is that your definition of "to be confused" is "doesn't fully agree with me". When Otoya Yamaguchi was changed to "killed himself" (two months ago), the edit summary was "ce". After another editor reverted that, with summary "I don't understand this campaign against the word suicide", it was changed back again with summary "Nobody has even campaigned against the word 'suicide', the issue is the word 'committed', which is both inaccurate (suicide is no longer a crime, and is therefor not 'committed') and stigmatising. See

MOS:SUICIDE

was written. All MOS:SUICIDE does is give editors some facts and ideas with which to debate with other editors about how to write the article text. It is entirely up to those editors to do so intelligently and respectfully. Behavioural issues are not the principle concern of MOS.

Btw, you may be interested in This recent article in The Guardian. It opens with "In at least 17 countries, suicide remains a criminal offence – a ‘huge barrier’ to mental health care." If you press Ctrl-F and type "commit" into the search box of your browser, you will find the only time "committed" is used is when describing countries that are committing to decriminalising suicide. Attitudes towards suicide are an ongoing battleground in the real world. It is therefore no surprise at all that it is a battleground on Wikipedia. The best we can do is describe the facts about terminology, and let editors work it out for themselves. -- Colin°^Talk 10:01, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

This is a personal attack, so I'm not even going to entertain this with a response. DarmaniLink (talk) 10:03, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

No, it's not. See

WP:NPA and the definitions there.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  22:59, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the problem... is that your definition of "to be confused" is "doesn't fully agree with me"

If he wants a response, he can start off civilly. DarmaniLink (talk) 23:48, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Observing what seem to be logic problems and bad debate habits in someone's post is not a personal attack. Again, actually read

WP:NPA. "I didn't like that comment" and "I was attacked" are not synonymous.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  00:05, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

No, this is fundamentally an incivil way for colin to continue a discussion.

They're free to find it offensive - on their own. As I have said before, external guides should not be a factor on wikipedia, in any instance. People may make proposals from external guides unto wikipedia, but the argument should never be *because* an external guide, that has not already been accepted via consensus on wikipedia. DarmaniLink (talk) 00:17, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

For the third time: actually read

WP:CIVIL and covers different things. [sigh]  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  01:58, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

This is splitting hairs but I meant "personal attack" more in the colloquial sense than the wikipedia-policy sense DarmaniLink (talk) 02:04, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, pretty much zero other editors are ever going to interpret a reference to something we have a policy-page about as being instead a reference to some other meaning. And in particular, accusing other editors of making personal attack when what they said is not within the scope of

WP:NPA is itself considered hypocritical incivility.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  02:13, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I use the term "personal attack" like "adhom", which it is. I understand there's different jargon here but you have to understand, not everyone has been here for 15+ years and have become well versed in all the terminology and minutia that's used, and the implications certain phrases may have to that minutia. I'm very much an outsider to this community, and only contributed to a small number of articles DarmaniLink (talk) 02:18, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, if you continue to use the phrase that vague way, no one but you is going to intepret it that way, and you will be interpreted in turn as engaging in a form of incivility yourself. And ad hominem isn't synonymous, either; it's a very specific fallacy, of injecting irrelevant claims about the maker of an argument to try to distract from the argument they are making.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:02, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not going to, now that I know, I'm just trying to explain *why* I used that term. It opens with an incivil strawman, and an attack on character/what I (am assumed by him) to think. I'm not giving someone who speaks like that the time of day. DarmaniLink (talk) 04:12, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I understand the emotional response (don't we all)? I'm saying how to get your message across better here, without confusing people into thinking it's you that's the problem. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:43, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeah, I appreciate it and I'm still trying to learn the ins and outs of the different moving parts in how interactions on this site work, didn't know "personal attack" would be interpreted as

WP:NPA or even that the page existed until you told me. Thanks. DarmaniLink (talk

) 05:07, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I asked the admin who topic banned me on his talk page (see this) but he has avoided answering my question.-1Firang (talk) 18:22, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Its like you can edit Marriage but you cannot edit the sentences or add new sentences that concern India or Pakistan. Editorkamran (talk) 18:43, 22 July 2023 (UTC)

Can I add paraphrased text to an article citing a source that mentions many countries, perhaps even India or Pakistan (but not mention India or Pakistan in the paraphrased text)?-1Firang (talk) 10:23, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

If you are using a source, that mentions India or Pakistan, for the information that does not concern India or Pakistan then you are fine. Editorkamran (talk) 13:16, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

To be more specific:

Y You could write a sentence like "Marriage is an institution that is recognized by the laws of every country on Earth." Even though India and Pakistan are two of the larger countries in the world, this sentence only "incidentally" includes them, and it is really about the global or international fact.

Y You could write a sentence like "Marriage is an important social institution in Africa." This area is completely and obviously separated from the subject of your topic ban.

N You should not write (or change) a sentence like "Marriage is an important social institution in India and other South Asian countries." This names one of the subjects of your topic ban, and even if you left out the name and just said "South Asian countries", the two countries in your topic ban represent more than 80% of the people living in South Asia. WhatamIdoing (talk) 01:14, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I've received a good reply here.-1Firang (talk) 03:49, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Now archived here: Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Archive 1195#Topic ban. @1Firang: You are attempting to add the same sentence about slavery in Islam into multiple articles, now avoiding India and Pakistan, but insofar as the sentence also applies to Pakistan, you are also violating your topic ban and you are likely to be blocked. Find topic areas that are independent of Islamic law. ~Anachronist (talk) 14:22, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

@

WP:TBAN says, "..... if an editor is banned from the topic "weather", this editor is forbidden from editing not only the article Weather, but also everything else that has to do with weather" which means I can't edit anything related to India or Pakistan, even if it is a subsection and cannot edit anything related to Pakistan under Islam related articles, that is all. Have I missed anything more?-1Firang (talk

) 17:01, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

This is simple… if trying to add something to one article (or group of articles) is so disruptive as to earn you a topic ban… you should stop trying to add it anywhere. It will probably be seen as disruptive no matter where you add it. Blueboar (talk) 17:19, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Hi, I’ve come across a few users who like to blank their own user talk pages rather than archiving them. I know it’s not an official policy or anything, and merely just a guideline, but one of these blanked pages had a lot of discussions, and if any of these discussions were linked to elsewhere, it would be nice to have them still around as reference. Thoughts about possibly changing this guideline/policy? Or possibly a bot that could monitor page blanking, and automatically archiving these discussions? Fork99 (talk) 23:52, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

Example: User talk:MetroManMelbourne. Fork99 (talk) 23:54, 16 June 2023 (UTC)

All the discussions are still there, just in history rather than in archive. A bot that moves things to archives would be breaking any wikilinks that were to the talk page anyway. The idea that people cannot actually blank their own talk page, that we have to keep every drive-by insult to them in an archive page, is a bit of a problem. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 01:14, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Fair enough, I meant things other than warnings and notices though. Or instead of automatically archiving, a bot could just suggest doing so? Fork99 (talk) 01:18, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

It probably could end up being a strain on the Wikipedia servers and possibly an eyesore on user pages, I do understand. Possible exclusion criteria for a bot not to add a notice would be IP user talk pages, and/or pages without many discussions. Maybe a cut off at say x number of bytes or depending on how old the talk page is. I don’t know, just some thoughts. Fork99 (talk) 01:23, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I am one of those who routinely blank my talk page. I think of it like I do voicemail on my phone. Once I have read a message, I rarely need to keep it… and if I (or someone else) needs to refer to it in the future - it’s in the page history. By routinely blanking old messages, new messages are highlighted and I will respond to them quickly. Blueboar (talk) 11:19, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

Yes, there are some things that are more convenient for others if they are left on the talk page or archived, but creating rules around them, and especially any automated procedures, would be overkill. It's better just to say that anyone can manage their userspace as they see fit and to get on with creating an encyclopedia.

Phil Bridger (talk

) 11:38, 17 June 2023 (UTC)

I set up archiving of my talk page so long ago, I've long since forgotten how it works. I get the occasional drive-by insult, but it's easier to ignore them than to delete them. Sometimes they get deleted by some {{

tps}}, which is fine too. RoySmith (talk)

21:12, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I too am someone who feels disappointed by the choice to blank user talk pages. If I were to view a user's talk page, it would provide helpful insights into their style. However, the deletion of talk pages remains a personal decision within their realm of freedom. The idea of automatically archiving valuable discussions is excellent, but it may be challenging to implement realistically, as it is unlikely to be widely embraced by many individuals. Meloncookie (talk) 07:50, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

My only comment is about obligations to check if an editor is CT aware and whether they have simple deleted a notice without otherwise acknowledging they are CT aware for a particular topic. Cinderella157 (talk) 10:55, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

Cinderella157, there is an edit filter, 602, that can see if/when a user was given a DS/CT notification, so that makes it fairly simple to check even if the notification was not archived. Curbon7 (talk) 20:20, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

Nope, if you need to link to a discussion for some sort of documentation somewhere else, use a diff or permalink. — xaosflux ^Talk 18:18, 19 June 2023 (UTC)

My problem is that s blanked talk page looks like a new user’s talk page which is confusing.Doug Weller talk 20:43, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

A blanked page has a page there. A new user has no page there and asks you if you want to create a page. Unless the user is forced to include an archive indexing on his talk page, an archived talk page would look like a blanked page as well. -- Nat Gertler (talk) 21:15, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I've certainly seen new accounts given several first-level warnings by vandal fighters who might have acted more strongly had they noticed that the editor had already removed previous warnings. Certes (talk) 21:27, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I always check the page history… just for that reason. Blueboar (talk) 21:46, 21 June 2023 (UTC)

I think there's a decent point to be made that searching a complete archive is at least ten times easier than searching the history. I'm overwhelmingly sympathetic to the argument that the horse is already out of the barn so to speak, there is no way to retroactively standardize the thousands and thousands of unique ways in which people have handled their own talk pages. On my own talk page I've more or less tried to model what I think should be the best practices under current conditions but I want to stress that its just what I do and I don't think that we should be imposing any one standard on the community. I do wish there was a tool which would allow you to see a "master page" so to speak which could present everything which was ever present. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 19:46, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I recently encountered a user who used the (now out-of-style) approach of periodically moving their talk page to an archive page. At some later point, they blanked their archive pages. So to find a conversation, you have to search multiple talk page histories. isaacl (talk) 02:36, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Cunning, and you'd have to check the move logs in case the old version had gone somewhere less obvious than User:Vandal/Archive_1. Certes (talk) 08:36, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Very clever, a common one I've encountered is removing the text with the edit summary "Archived" (or similar) but never actually putting it in the archive or only putting some of it in the archive. I would note thats its been my experience that users with a more... lets say creative approach to their talk pages generally have more to hide. Horse Eye's Back (talk) 16:53, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

Not to mention an account rename or two. RoySmith (talk) 17:07, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

If Twinkle offers to add a level 1 warning then I'll play along unless I suspect foul play, and a cunning blanker will give me no reason to be suspicious. Certes (talk) 20:17, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

I have never written anything that interfaces with Wikipedia, but it seems to me that it should be relatively easy to write a tool that displays such a "master page" dependent on a page's history. Dealing with moved pages appears to be more of a challenge.

Phil Bridger (talk

) 08:49, 29 June 2023 (UTC)

In response to searching a complete archive is at least ten times easier than searching the history: for me it is ten times easier to scan a talk page's edit history than to search anything. All the anti-vandal tools I'm aware of leave a fact-filled edit summary that gives a concise history and helps you to decide if you need to dig deeper or not, and blanking doesn't impact that. And while it's true that there are baroque ways a LTV can get around all of this, those are edge cases and shouldn't impact something as fundamental as the right for a user to maintain some flexibility over their own talk page. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 19:55, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

A policy against talk page blanking would harm and confuse new users who don't know what archiving means, much less how to do it. For example, I previously would blank my talk page after I read the comment. Now I have a bot, but I'm not sure that it's working. If we want to prevent talk page blanking, it should be through having an archive bot on as a default, but changeable setting, instead of making it against the rules to blank your own talk page (especially when links to versions of a page exist). Chamaemelum (talk) 07:35, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

I've been blanking my page for years, I only archive material that will be useful later, much of what is posted to talk pages is niff naff and trivia. Those of us who clean up vandalism or work in an area of some controversy inevitably attract abuse on their talk pages. I remove it on sight, as do my friendly talk page stalkers. Being forced to keep abuse would be the inevitable consequence of a policy change and that is plain wrong. As more than one poster has pointed out, the messages are still there in the history. WCM_email 08:32, 12 July 2023 (UTC)

I believe that the current COI rules are not advantageous to the so-called expert editors, especially to those associated with universities, cultural institutions, and other non-profit organizations, an association that is often inevitable for said experts.

The definition of COI relationship is the same for business people as it is for academics (Any external relationship—personal, religious, political, academic, legal, or financial (including holding a cryptocurrency)—can trigger a COI), despite a dramatically different potential for benefit and fundamental (in my view) differences in their respective motivations. Per

I am not saying that academics or "experts" can't have a conflict of interest (they obviously can), but they are, by and large, motivated by a passion for research and for sharing knowledge. I am saying, however, that the current rules are not encouraging for SMEs and can lead to such absurd (again, my view) COI noticeboard reports as this one. Someone tried to out me earlier this year and even though my conscience is clear (I have never had any personal benefit from my editing), it made me paranoid and resigned, thinking that if it ever happens again, my only "solution" is list every single organization I've been affiliated with, people I have met, etc. at which point I might as well post my full name. How that is fair is beyond me. We are all volunteers, which makes the lack of nuance in COI policy feel even more overwhelming and mind boggling. Ppt91^talk 21:20, 30 June 2023 (UTC)

I've worked with a few experts, including at least one Pulitzer winner, and one particular archivist where I just adore their enthusiasm for obscure subjects.

The issue isn't whether you're paid. Presumably most of us are employed somehow. But I don't disclose my employer for obvious privacy issues, and my employer has never directed me to change content on WP. Anything I do related to the subject area is just because that's where I work, and so I'm interested in it, and have knowledge of it. But that can get murky sometimes with academics especially, where we've seen instances of people doing things like spamming their own papers and it gets hard to tell the difference between enthusiasm and something like

SEO

, which means they have basically a COI to themselves. I've written some things, but I've never cited myself on WP.

And...honestly...if you're an expert, I'd like to know, because in my experience you have to hold their hand a little bit. Even with the best of intentions, they're used to writing original thought and don't know the rules. They don't know that "Wikipedia's voice" is supposed to be kinda dry and boring and to-the-point. GMG^talk 11:47, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

the current rules are not encouraging for SMEs and can lead to such absurd (again, my view) COI noticeboard reports as this one: given that there's pretty much unanimous consensus in that discussion that there's no COI I don't see what the problem is here. No matter how carefully we frame our policy it's possible for people to bring spurious reports, and academics absolutely can have COIs – I've definitely seen accounts which are very keen to promote the views of particular academics way beyond the amount of acceptance their theories get in other scholarship, for instance. I'm also not exactly sure what your issue with the word "interfere" is: I don't see that it presumes anything about ulterior motives. What alternate wording would you suggest? Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 13:01, 1 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree strongly with Caeciliusinhorto. Subject-matter experts are valuable to the project but kind of "dangerous", in that they tend to treat their own voice as a reliable source, and we have rules to protect the project that have to apply to experts (sometimes especially to experts, in particular academics who have their own primary research to advance as if it were secondary source material).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  23:34, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Having a general and bright-line definition of COI is very difficult, especially since the appropriate degree of separation is informed by (not always universal) cultural/political assumptions. I suspect the COI notice Caeciliusinhorto cites was advanced on the assumption that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases itself is a biased actor. That's not an assumption that many editors share, but distrust of the objectivity of Fauci/NAID is a common enough trope on the American political right that I think it's perfectly plausible that the report was made in good faith. Clear rules like requiring disclosure of paid editing are useful because they help avoid that kind of confusion. But I think it's important to remember that the main mechanism for COI enforcement is self-regulation, so the most important question is not how the rules will be interpreted by the average editor, but how the rules will be interpreted by the average person with a COI. 〈 Forbes₇₂ | Talk 〉 21:36, 9 July 2023 (UTC)

If I may I would like to comment on the area of COI as I have personal experience with running through this hoop. I am a professional taxonomist and paleontologist. I have named multiple species and genera, on many pages of interest to me from an editing perspective my own research work is cited. Not by me generally, it has to be as I am the original discoverer of these species. I think the COI policies are necessary but are poorly worded in places. I think the intent is right but the wording lacks clarity. For example I write or edit an article about a species I named, in the taxobox if no where else I must cite my work. The way I deal with these issues is I only use my own work if it has been published (ie past tense) in peer reviewed literature. I have reams of information I could use but I do not because I have never gotten around to publishing it. I also acknowledge my COI issues (and NPoV by the way) by often listing what I intend to do on a talk page prior to actually doing it. In other words because of my COI being Bold is not usually a good idea. I have to be a little more accepting that for a community project I should take it a little easier.

So what are the problems, well for one your policy spends a lot of time talking about what COI is and what not to do but does not offer genuine experts in their field any advice on how to best deal with the situation. If you want experts to contribute, and it would be foolish not to, they need to know how to do this without falling foul of COI and NPoV. It took me a long time to figure out the best way to handle this issue without rubbing people the wrong way.

This leads to the next issue. Most people who are experts in whatever their field is are proud of the effort and work they have done and do not like being dragged down by what is essentially a dose of wiki-lawering with policies that make it impossible for them. It is normal to be proud of your work particularly if you are good at it. I personally know the lead editor of one of the biggest animal checklists in the world who on wikipedia was told by a kid he knew nothing about the animals he had spent 50 years working on. It is of course impossible to realise you are talking to a university professor in an environment where everyone is entitled to use a pseudonym. (On that note its one of the reasons I do not use a pseudonym. Anyone working on turtles has read my work it has been easier for me here since I dropped Faendalimas and used my real name in my signature. Yes by the way I kind of had to do that. Why because people who misread my work were citing it to me to prove I was wrong.

The COI policy needs to acknowledge that genuine experts do exist, that they will if they write about these areas cite their own work, and explain how they should go about it the best way. Its a policy you need to get right because at present it does drive experts away. Experts have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to weave the editing nightmare particularly in hot topics. My suggested recommendations to experts are 1. dont just cite your own work, 2. only cite published work, 3. use the talk page to pre-empt issues, 4. if you can cope dont be anonymous. Cheers Scott Thomson (Faendalimas) ^talk 22:07, 14 July 2023 (UTC)

That's really good feedback, though I raising it in this general way may not produce any change. It would probably be more effective to draft some specific changes to the COI policy wording and propose them here or at its talk page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:49, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

I bet you had to look it up, or at the very least, think about it for a few seconds, and you probably weren't sure about the exact days. Me too! Anyway, in our article, we say that it was from the first day of 600 BC to the last day of 501 BC. Okay, sure.

But I think it is probably bad for us to be saying stuff like this all the time when it's so confusing. For example, Draco (lawgiver) says Draco (/ˈdreɪkoʊ/; Greek: Δράκων, Drakōn; fl. c. 7th century BC) and that most of his laws were repealed by Solon in the early 6th century BC, et cetera. What does that mean? Like, he was around in the 700s? Or the 600s? And then his laws were repealed somewhere around a hundred years later, or maybe 150, or maybe almost 200 -- who knows?

Now, the idea of going through and replacing every single instance of the phrases would be so massively onerous and disruptive to article flow -- to be blunt, such a pain in the arse -- that I don't think it is worth talking about. I mean, maybe some people would like to do this (and if everyone agreed to this I wouldn't object), but I don't see it as being a very popular choice.

So what I propose, instead, is something like this:

Elements of the Animal style are first attested in areas of the Yenisei river and modern-day China in the 10th century BC.

Founded by the Phoenicians in the ninth century BC, Carthage reached its height in the fourth century BC as one of the largest metropolises in the world.

It is a tooltip, so it is not so intrusive as to disrupt the text; for example, simply replacing it in this case would have produced the bizarre "in the from 1000 BC to 901 BC". I think that it greatly aids readbility, since people who already understand it have no extra text to deal with, while on the other hand, there is no need for anyone to open up a second tab or count on their fingers or whatever to figure out what the heck we are talking about. What do we all think of this? I think it would be good, and it has some precedent; note that we already use a similar template for "circa" (i.e. "c. 570 BC") jp×g 20:02, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I like the tooltip idea. There are times in my life where I was immersed in BCE history and parsing decade/century/millenia references came naturally. It's shocking how quickly that goes away, and I'd be greatly assisted as a reader (at least when on desktop) by those tooltips. A dedicated template and some guidance at

WT:DATE to this discussion. Firefangledfeathers (talk / contribs

) 20:11, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't work on articles that this would apply to, but as a reader, I would really appreciate that type of tooltip. (I confess, the backward-counting of BC/BCE dating hurts my brain.) Schazjmd (talk) 20:11, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I don't think a template for this would be hurtful in any way, but I have to point out that deploying it would require "going through and replacing every single instance of the phrases" which was said to be "so massively onerous and disruptive to article flow -- to be blunt, such a pain in the arse".  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:12, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

I like it, but I'd use it sparingly; it would look bizarre if many centuries in an article were underlined (especially as the AD/CE ones wouldn't be). I imagine a template (or pair of them for BC and BCE?) could be very easy to use. NebY (talk) 22:33, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Might it not be even more helpful to say something like "Founded by the Phoenicians in the ninth century BC, Carthage reached its height in the fourth century BC five centuries later as one of the largest"? The exact years for the century are kind of irrelevant. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:39, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

That would be asking the reader to do a calculation to understand when Carthage was at its height, though that's more significant than the time of its founding and far more important than the time it took to peak. NebY (talk) 10:12, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

If the date at which it reached its peak is more important, then we could do it the other way around. I don't realistically expect to need to know that Carthage's peak was in the fourth century BC, but I can imagine someone (e.g., a student) looking for that date. But I can't really imagine why that student would then need to know that this century ended in exactly 301 BC. Carthage's peak didn't start in exactly 400 BC, and it didn't end at exactly 301 BC. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:00, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I agree; the precise century endpoints don't matter in these situations. I think jp×g's intention now – despite that heading – is to save us the brief pause in reading while we do the math to convert "fourth century" into whatever else works in our own minds (I think mine is something like "3xx", or it might be "the century after the Peloponnesian War" - it varies). Whether we do pause and do that math probably varies too; for me, "fourth century BC" is often meaningful without such conversion, being the same century various other things were happening elsewhere (and if you're interested in Carthage or ancient Mediterranean history, that's worth knowing), but I might do the math on ninth century. NebY (talk) 18:33, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Prefer c. 900s BCE, to avoid ordinal–cardinal fencepost errors. Folly Mox (talk) 05:05, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

That's very ambiguous; does that mean any time in the 900s, from 999 to 900, or circa that time eg from 1020 to 880, or around 900, or what? It's not as if we're bothered to include or exclude 900 BCE as a possible date anyway; this is more broad-brush and ultimately unknowable. NebY (talk) 10:21, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

To my brain (which is dumb; see below), "900s BCE" is exactly as ambiguous as "10th century BCE", and carries the exact same meaning, but skips the step of accidentally thinking the date is in between 1100 BCE and 1000 BCE because of how the counting is handled differently for time periods of different lengths. Folly Mox (talk) 02:04, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I think the question is about the c. "Founded by the Phoenicians in the 800s BCE" means the same thing as "Founded by the Phoenicians in the 9th century BCE". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:02, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I like this idea as it makes understanding BC time more intuitive. As others have said, I think it should be used sparingly and, when possible, replaced with explanatory prose. Thanks for encouraging us to think about how we can make Wikipedia easier to read (instead of leaving me to shamefully google...) Wracking ^talk! 05:05, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

A tuesday. I went to college. You can trust me on this. It was definitely a tuesday. That's why Pope Gregory said "Screw you Caesar. We're doing this thing on the weekend, because trying to start your New Year's resolution on hump day is depressing."

But in seriousness, at some level, the weird backward dating system we have that starts...for some reason...several years after Jesus was born...is just a necessary evil. It's a historical artifact that we've just learned to live with. It's like having to constantly look up the French Republican Calendar because freaking nobody remembers the difference between the months of Thermidor and Brumaire. GMG^talk 11:00, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

I prefer the numerical system, which IMHO, is always more precise and understandable, than the centuries system, which I think opens itself up to subtle misunderstandings in a number of ways. If I say something happened "in the 1700s" than every reader knows that it happened at a time when the year digits went "17XX", i.e. between 1700-1799 inclusive. It is easily understandable, impossible to confuse, and well defined. If I say something happened "in the eighteenth century", there is too many chances for misunderstanding (because most of the years in the eighteenth century don't have the number 18 in them!) and issues with fencepost errors as noted (sensu stricto, the eighteenth century and the 1700s are not identical; one goes 1700-1799, and the other goes 1701-1800), and I'd rather not play those unnecessary games with the readers. If we just used the "in the 1700s" as a style choice across the board, we lose nothing, but gain both consistency and improve the experience for the reader. --Jayron32 16:31, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Except "the 1700s" also means 1700–1709. There's a reason we avoid it. :-)  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:43, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

It can also mean that, in an extremely limited number of cases. Whenever I have to deal with that problem I clarify the prose like "the decade following 1700", or "between 1700 and 1710". Folly Mox (talk) 02:00, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Yeps. It can get frustrating when you run into it in an article and actually have to go dig up the original source to see what range was originally intended.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:59, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I am inclined to agree with you, more or less in toto. As far as I can tell, centuries were invented by Dionysius Exiguus (?) under rather different constraints than we have nowadays (for example, there had only been like five of them at the time, and

who knows how many more there were going to be). I do not think we really gain anything from saying "the seventeenth century" and then meaning 1650. Why would seventeen mean sixteen? Because a monk from five hundred wrote it in a book? In twenty-one? I think Dionysius would agree that this was stupid (indeed, a few hundred years ago monks did realize that the dating system was stupid, and change it, at great expense and through great effort). Anyway, though, I don't think we are going to have much success trying to get every Wikipedia article to eschew centuries completely. Even if it were possible to get buy-in, it'd be quite hard to adjust (and to account for sources that routinely use century notation). I figure this is a neat little stopgap until such a time as the Pope can officially fix the off-by-one error, or whoever the hell is in charge of that nowadays. jp×g

05:35, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

It's not an error, though, it's technically correct. The 1600s are the 17th century since (the traditional date of) Jesus's birth, in the same way that a person is 1 year old in the 2nd year of their life. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:15, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I wonder about the visual clutter from special tooltips across every mention of a century, but when looking to see what might help our readers I was surprised how little our articles explain these common points of dating confusion. Unhelpfully for our readers, neither 21st century nor 3rd millennium explain the common off-by-one error that saw worldwide celebrations on 1 January 2000. On the other hand, Century does have a brief explanation, and for some reason Millennium is entirely about this off-by-one confusion. CMD (talk) 06:17, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Cute little template

In light of all this, I have written {{century BC}}, which implements this automatically for everything between 1 and 40. Like this:

• {{century BC|24}}

24th

• {{century BC|24th}}

24th century BC

• {{century BC|24th-}}

24th-century BC

• {{century BC|twenty-fourth}}

twenty-fourth century BC

• {{century BC|Twenty-fourth}}

Twenty-fourth century BC

This isn't perfect -- and it occurs to me now that it might even be nicer to have one that gives a range (i.e. "14th – 13th centuries BC" having a single tooltip rather than two separate ones) -- but I think it is a decent starting point. I am not sure whether it's better to tooltip the whole phrase or just the digits (i.e. 24th century BC versus 24th century BC). Let me know what you all think. For an example of it in action, I give a demonstration at Trojan War. jp×g 22:28, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

User:JPxG, can you make a binary flag for BCE? Or just copypaste the template .gsub("BC","BCE")? I'd do it but I don't have mass string replacement in my phone's text editor. A flag for smallcaps would be pretty premium as well, since there are many articles which like to format their dates e.g. 1046 BCE.

As an afterthought, I know the beckwards-counting BCE era is more problematic for people, but personally my major problem as I alluded to without explanation due to sleepiness above, is the one-based enumeration of centuries versus the zero-based enumeration of years. I've known since smol how it's supposed to work, but one of the many dumb parts of my brain always thinks "the 17th century" means the years 1700–1799, because math. So honestly an AD / CE version of this would be kinda just as helpful. Folly Mox (talk) 01:58, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, you can do it with {{century BC|twenty-fourth}}E:

twenty-fourth century BCE

although it does rather stupidly leave the "E" out of the underline. If there's no way to fix that, I suppose it would take about two minutes to copy the template over, although inelegant (further changes would need to be made to both templates). I really half-assed the code as it is, so it'd be no great loss to start over with something more intelligent anyway. jp×g 05:00, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I also get confused by BC dates, but I think this tooltip is too distracting for the little benefit it provides. First of all, don't forget that most readers are on mobile; looking at the mobile view of Trojan War, I see a lot of underlined dates but I can't interact with them in any way. It gives the impression that they're only underlined for emphasis. Secondly, I suspect that the vast majority of readers would simply read the phrase "12th century BC" to mean "a long time ago", and wouldn't care about the exact date range. I don't think it's worth confusing or distracting a large number of readers for the benefit of a small minority. I'm also concerned that the addition of date ranges may introduce a false precision in some cases; when a historian says that something happened in the 6th century BC, it's not always because they know for a fact that it didn't happen in 601. Sojourner in the earth (talk) 06:12, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I was pleased to see it wasn't as distracting as I feared on my desktop, but then I looked at Trojan War on my phone and found underlinings with no function and no way to discover their meaning; pressing them doesn't help at all. Unless and until that can be overcome, this is a nice idea that works out badly. NebY (talk) 18:39, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

As a reader, I really rather strongly oppose this. Looking at the Trojan War example, having all the centuries underlined is distracting. Even more so when it's on mobile and I can't use the tooltips anyway. I'm also concerned about the false precision mentioned by Sojourner above. Also, having a template transcluded for every mention of a century in a page might hit the transclusion limit.

Additionally, it's not an error. There is no "off by one" error in centuries. The range isn't a mistake, it's math, it's by definition. A "century" is 100 years. The first century was the first 100 years, years 1-100 (there was no year 0). The first century ended at year 100. The second century began in 101 and ended at 200. The third century ended in 300, and so forth. For BCE, it's the same in reverse. The first century BCE began at 100 BCE and ended at 1 BCE. The second century began in 200 and ended in 101. The 21st century CE will end in the year 2100, and includes 2001-2100. The 21st century BCE was 2100 BCE to 2001 BCE. Personally, I don't find that confusing at all, it's perfectly logical, I mean it's math, it's arithmetic.

I also don't think the world at large -- our readers -- would find "the century system" confusing, either. And my evidence for this is that we've used this century system in English for like 1,000+ years. I don't see any other websites providing tooltips or even explanations for centuries. Like The New York Times doesn't write "in the 20th century (1901-2000)," do they? So I don't think this is a problem that needs to be solved. Levivich (talk) 23:16, 27 July 2023 (UTC)

Although I'd support it if it was something that readers/editors could turn on/off. Levivich (talk) 01:22, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

See also mw:Just make it a user preference and https://archive.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/09/14/do-users-change-their-settings/ It's possible that those of us who change our preferences are not normal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:14, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Well, there is nobody I know of who uses parenthetical clarification for the 20th century AD. Centuries AD, in general, are fairly simple: (n - 1) * 100. What I mean to say is that, for centuries BC, this already-annoying convention becomes baffling. Sure, one may say, people who want to learn about Homer's epics ought to just learn to read centuries BC before trying to start reading the article -- but by the same token, why translate them at all, why not just soft-redirect to el:Όμηρος?

As for the issue of the tooltips, I have looked a bit at the documentation for {{tooltip}} and I have not seen any slam-bang solution for hiding them on mobile. It seems like it's obviously possible to do this, since stuff like navboxes are completely invisible to mobile users, but perhaps it's beyond my reach for today. jp×g 08:03, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

There is an RfC at

Is the page basically the same as it was before, or is it different? If it has changed, then G4 no longer applies, even if notability is not still met, since G4 excludes pages that are not substantially identical to the deleted version. Why? I Ask (talk) 23:17, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

I didn't participate in the original deletion discussion, and so wouldn't know. If I were reviewing a draft at AFC that had previously been deleted by AFD, I would ask to have the deleted article restored in my user space. (I did that with a different draft yesterday.) Okay. So I will let the deletion discussion run, and at some point an administrator will probably compare the article and the deleted article. By the way, it's Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Simon Minter (Miniminter). Robert McClenon (talk) 00:19, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

@Robert McClenon The article being discussed currently is sufficiently different to the article that was deleted that G4 does not apply. Thryduulf (talk) 08:59, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Thank you. So the AFD should run for seven days. The gaming of titles after AFD is a common problem. Robert McClenon (talk) 16:58, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

If the article is basically the same, it may be speedy deleted regardless of title. If the article is different enough, it may not be speedy deleted, also regardless of title. Having the same name makes detection easier, but once detected it's irrelevant for deletion. Animal lover |666| 18:33, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

This was discussed in the latest GENDERID RFC (and possibly the previous one, I forget), but very briefly and I don't think it got fleshed out enough. I think this is a good idea – we should be extending the same courtesy we are to trans people to other people who have changed their name. It may need more fleshing out – cases like Kanye West are probably not ideal to fit under this – but some level of workshopping to make a proposal that tries to give as much courtesy as is reasonable to these people would be a good idea, in my opinion. A pure version just by cutting out parts of MOS:GENDERID would result in something along the lines of:

Refer to people by the name that reflects the person's most recent expressed self-identification as reported in the most recent reliable sources, even if it does not match what is most common in sources. This holds for any phase of the person's life, unless they have indicated a preference otherwise.

I'm not sure where to go now, either on improving the proposal or taking it from here – this is well out of my element. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 09:16, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Holy crap. The Signpost needs to add a separate section, parallel to "In the media" and "Recent research", etc., so we can keep track of the multitude of GENDERID RFCs and other discussions every week. And I'd like a function to reverse-subscribe to any page or section that wants to roto-till further into the subject. And sure, I'd be glad to tell you where to go. ^[FBDB] I have grown so weary of the topic.

The obvious place to go (seriously) is the

MOS:GENDERID, where, by my count, only four of the sixteen sections do not focus on GENDERID. You could throw another section on the pile (with a pointer from here to there), and see what you get. — JohnFromPinckney (talk / edits

) 11:34, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Isn't that how we got the current mess though? A bunch of activists make a local consensus there, and when it comes here they run into differing views and we wind up with no consensus. I'd expect the same thing to happen: the activists would be all for the straw proposal written above, then it comes here and enough people would find it ridiculous and we'd get no consensus. But a proposal there that would step back from the current extremist wording would likely be shot down by the activists. I note none of his is particularly new or specific to this topic, over the years there have been many similar situations where "MOS warriors" have conflicted with the wider community. Anomie⚔ 12:56, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I would not characterise the current state of GENDERID as a local consensus made up by "a bunch of activists".

WP:CENT. The current phrasing of the guideline with respect to living people seems to be fairly representative of the whole enwiki community. Sideswipe9th (talk

) 23:15, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Sure. So many RFCs, over and over and full of badgering, until they got the result they wanted by wearing out everyone else. Any gain is vehemently defended. Anomie⚔ 11:42, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Rather than starting with the wording, I think it's better to start with the objectives.

Any wording that doesn't account for all the following principles is guaranteed not to get consensus:

• Articles about notable people should include all names under which they were notable, absent exceptional circumstances
• Names that are not verifiable in reliable sources must never be included
• A name that a person was not notable under, and has no relevance to their notability, and which they have expressed a desire not be used should not be included.
  • A name that someone was not notable when they were using can sometimes be relevant to their notability (e.g. criminal aliases)
• A trans person's deadname under which they were not notable should be treated as private information (and thus not included) unless they have made a clear statement to the contrary.
• There is no single, objective definition of what a person's "real name" is that applies to everybody.
• People use different names than their birth name for many different reasons, and consequently people's attitude towards their birth (or other previous) name also varies.

I would hope the following could be included in the above set, but there are sufficient people who seem to think differently to me that I don't know what community consensus is.

• Former names of notable people, used only before they were notable, are not automatically notable and are not required to be included.

If we agree on all the above, and that guidance on when to include or exclude a former name is desirable, then we should start with examining what names we want to include and what names we want to exclude and importantly why. Thryduulf (talk) 13:52, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

While I think that's a good start, I note that none of that is at all what the proposal here is about. It's not about whether articles like Hillary Clinton or Cat Stevens should mention those names, rather it would have us stop referring to Clinton as "Rodham" in pre-marriage sections of her life and change Cat Stevens#Musical career (1966–1978) to refer to him as "Yusuf". Anomie⚔ 15:12, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

My view was that the proposal will become what people want it to become. I mainly included the wording as an idea of what we'd be looking at purely adapting the wording we have currently in GENDERID (I tried to make that clear, but I probably didn't make it clear enough), with the expectation it could be changed as seen fit. (I don't think the wording I propose up there is great; whether even the second sentence of "any phase of a person's life" is helpful at-large is a fair question.) Skarmory (talk • contribs) 22:12, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

If we do such a thing, it should be part of a content policy (

WP:BLP is the obvious one), not the manual of style. The MOS should describe how content is presented, not whether certain content is included. —Kusma (talk

) 14:38, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

There's two strands to this, which can be asked as two questions. When do we include the former name(s) of a person? Which name do we use to refer to a person? The first question is one that should be part of BLP, as it is as you say a question on whether certain content should be included. The second should be in the MOS, because it's a question on how content should be presented. Sideswipe9th (talk) 15:15, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Separating the two aspects is a good idea and might reduce some of the drama and irrelevant comments. I'd suggest starting with the inclusion question would make sense (if we don't include a name, whether to refer to someone using it is not a relevant question). On that question I think there are only two (near) absolutes: If it's unverifiable it should never be included, if they were notable under that name it should (almost) always be included. For names that fall into neither of those categories, I firmly believe discussion should start from the position of "sometimes" not "always". What that "sometimes" is needs discussion, but if the subject has expressed a clear preference we need to have a really good encyclopaedic reason to not follow that.

Regarding the second question, if high quality reliable sources published after the change of name (almost) always or (almost) never use the latest name when discussing the person pre change of name then we should follow that lead. Similarly if the subject has expressed a clear preference we should follow that absent a really good encyclopaedic reason not to.

These discussions are likely to get long and involved, so it might be a good idea to have them on a dedicated page that is advertised here and at multiple other relevant venues. Thryduulf (talk) 15:45, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I like the idea of a subpage or some other dedicated venue for this discussion. There is a lot of different strands to work through with such an undertaking.

Though I realise this is something better suited for the subpage if we create one, on your reading of the second question if high quality reliable sources published after the change of name (almost) always or (almost) never use the latest name when discussing the person pre change of name then we should follow that lead, this is one area where we might still need a separate clause for trans and non-binary people. Due to transphobia and enbyphobia, even in high quality reliable sources, it is not unheard of for sources not to respect a name, pronoun, and/or gender identity change. It's also not uncommon for our only sources about a person's change of name, pronouns, and/or gender to be sourced entirely to

themselves, as depending on when they announced the change reliable sources may no longer be covering their lives (eg someone who has largely retired from the public limelight). Sideswipe9th (talk

) 16:25, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

There's two strands to this, which can be asked as two questions. When do we include the former name(s) of a person? Which name do we use to refer to a person? The first question is one that should be part of BLP, as it is as you say a question on whether certain content should be included. The second should be in the MOS, because it's a question on how content should be presented. The downside of relegating it to the MOS is that editors can dismiss it as "not policy" and come up with arguments why the MOS should be ignored. E.g. in an ongoing RfC the idea that including a deadname is mandatory under

MOS:GENDERID meaningless. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk

) 19:49, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

where we might still need a separate clause for trans and non-binary people Isn't the whole point of this proposal to not continue to have separate guidelines for different groups of people? I also note that it's also not unheard of for publications to rush to erase all traces of a previous identity even where it would make sense to acknowledge it in appropriate historical context. Anomie⚔ 21:58, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

I wouldn't support completely folding in the guideline for names of trans people into some kind of general guideline on names. There really are some trans-specific parts of this situation I don't think we can incorporate into a more general guideline.

But I would support making some sort of general guideline on names and offloading some of what's currently in

MOS:GENDERID over there. Loki (talk

) 00:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Would you apply this principle to middle names? What would happen to articles that presently begin with "Matthew John David Hancock (born 2 October 1978) is a British politician"? Would that become "Matt Hancock"?

Would you apply this principle to people known by a name that isn't their legal name (e.g., a stage name, a married woman using her maiden name professionally)? What would happen to articles that begin with something like "Tupac Amaru Shakur, born Lesane Parish Crooks, also known by his stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, was an American rapper and actor"? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:51, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing AIUI gathering the questions that need answers and working out the answer them is the point of this being a workshop rather than a proposal. In the case of your specific questions, they're relevant to whether we include names at all rather than how we refer to them in the prose. Thryduulf (talk) 16:07, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Distilling it, I think there's two good questions in there for a workshop. How do we handle the inclusion of the names of people who are primarily or overwhelmingly known by only a hypocorism (ie Matt Hancock)? And how do we handle the inclusion of the names of people who are primarily or overwhelmingly known only by a pseudonym, stage name, or some other form of nickname (ie Tupac Shakur)?

I've thought of a third question from this as well. How do we handle the inclusion of the names of people whose pseudonym or stage name is derived in part but not in whole from their birth name (eg David Tennant, Natalie Portman, John Legend)? Sideswipe9th (talk) 16:16, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

But an RFC based answer to all these questions, which are not currently problematic is just instruction creep. Jahaza (talk) 04:24, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

IMO, which means very little, this is not needed and could lead to erasure, particularly for women. For example: "A name that a person was not notable under, and has no relevance to their notability...should not be included" means we would erase a woman's identity if she was born with one name, married and took another, divorced and remarried, etc. I've written notable academics who used up to four names, but whose notability was primarily under one name. Do we just omit that whole part of their life, or call them someone they were not? Marilyn Monroe wasn't born (Norma Jeane Mortenson was); Monroe was created. This seems like bad policy aimed at a small segment of society to address a particularly difficult question for living people and expanding it to distort the historic record for everyone. We are creating an encyclopedia, which should be verifiable. I totally understand why deadnaming is harmful for living people, but if our work is to have historic value, we cannot create policy that makes verifying facts muddy. We have policies restricting what can be and cannot be in BLPs, expanding that to cover all time, is completely illogical. Bottom line, in naming people use common sense, we don't need this rule. SusunW (talk) 16:57, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

We should also seek advice from someone familiar with non-English naming conventions, like Yngvadottir. Icelandic uses both patronymic and matronymic naming systems. Spanish usually retains both parents' names, and your everyday name might not be your proper name (e.g., there are so many "Marías" that someone named María del Pilar <middle names> <mother's family name> <father's family name> will be called "Pilar <father's last name>" in everyday life.

Also, the common name may not be enough to figure out which person the article is about. Imagine how many "Bob Smiths" we might have in English, and then think about how few surnames some languages (e.g., Chinese) have. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:41, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Exactly! SusunW (talk) 20:02, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Shouldn't this just be applied to people who don't want the prior name used? For trans people, it is generally implied that they are against their deadname being used, unless we have explicit sourcing to say otherwise on the person's stance, such as with

Suzy Izzard. As for everyone else, if we're going to extend this usage, shouldn't we only apply it to people who we have evidence they don't want the previous name used? That will get us around problems like what SusunW brought up. Silverseren^C

19:55, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Precisely! Why are we making it so hard? It is rare that someone wants to omit their history so why would the rule default to the exception. SusunW (talk) 20:02, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

That makes perfect sense. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 20:20, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Agreed with SusunW and Silverseren here. JoelleJay (talk) 01:22, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

This is exactly right. It's reasonably inferred, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that a trans person who changes their name would not want their deadname from before they were notable mentioned in their article. But the same presumption doesn't exist from other people who have changed their names for various other reasons. I would say there should be a rebuttable presumption to not include deadnames of trans people, but a reputable presumption to include the previous names of other people. Rreagan007 (talk) 00:33, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I think that on privacy grounds alone this is correct, but that privacy grounds are not the only reason why we wouldn't want to use a name in an article.

So for instance, the Japanese ruler Tokugawa Ieyasu was born Mastudaira Takechiyo, took the name Matsudaira Motonobu when he became an adult, changed it to Matsudaira Motoyasu one year later, then about six years later changed it to Matsudaira Ieyasu, and then finally made changed his family name to Tokugawa to reflect a complicated claim about his ancestry about four years after that. And we track all of that in detail, including using whatever the current name was for the period we're talking about.

Contrast with Marilyn Monroe, where we acknowledge the previous name but don't actually use it ever. Loki (talk) 18:50, 31 July 2023 (UTC)

I would be fine with this. I also would note that before workshopping, I was considering the type of full name changes that trans people often undergo, rather than a simple married name change (which should probably still be avoided if there's an expressed distaste for that name, but I can't think of any cases of that off the top of my head). I guess the main thing I was looking at was which name we should be primarily refer to the subject as; I would be fine not applying most of GENDERID (particularly the parts that say to remove mentions of the old name for people who have no distaste for it) to these cases. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 21:55, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

There is no such thing, in my experience as a simple married name change. It's expensive, tedious and very, very time consuming. For the record, people who change their names because of marriage or divorce go through the exact same process as transgendered persons. You must obtain a legal record of the change or court order and then change social security, driver’s license, identification cards, financial records, insurance records, passport, and notify your employer, people you do business with, etc. etc. The only thing that is different, as far as I can tell is that trans people have the option of changing their birth certificate. I've lived in 3 different countries and the process for a name change was similar in all of them, but maybe there are places with a "simple process"? I'm also pretty sure deceased persons won't have an opinion, but again use common sense. If when they were living it was an issue, best don't include it unless it is widely reported. SusunW (talk) 23:03, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

The "simple divorce name change" could be a bigger issue. I assume that there is a range of feelings among divorced women (or, for the multiply divorced, a range of feelings about their exes), but perhaps one of the underlying points is that we have had editors whose hobby (obsession?) is documenting full names and all known variations. It might not always be the kindest thing we can do to the BLPs, and in some cases, the name of an ex-spouse might be trivia rather than relevant information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:18, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

There is no such thing, in my experience as a simple married name change. It's expensive, tedious and very, very time consuming. That's not entirely true. In the UK and Ireland, changing your name is as simple as printing a deed poll at home, and then applying for new ID. There's a multitude of websites that provide templates for this, and there's no necessary payment or registration. You just print a document that basically states "I [blank] relinquish use of [former name] on [date] and will only use my new name from this date forward", and get two people who know you to sign it. There's no fee, no need to enrol it or get it notarised, and the only hassle is waiting for your first piece of new photo ID to arrive so you can start updating any services you use. Whenever I did this in the UK, I found it easiest to apply for an electoral ID card and updated passport, and once I had those getting everything else was straightforward. The entire process took maybe 6 weeks before I got my first piece of ID, and that was because Covid slowed down the electoral ID office. Sideswipe9th (talk) 04:41, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Interesting. That must apply only to folks living in the UK. I've know British people who lived abroad that had to jump through all kinds of hoops. But as I said there may be places where it's simple. I love learning things, so thanks for that. SusunW (talk) 15:16, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

That must apply only to folks living in the UK I think so yes. The electoral ID card was (at the time) also specific only to Northern Ireland. If I'd lived elsewhere in the UK, it would have been my passport as the first changed document, and maybe a driver's license if I had one. If you're a Brit living abroad though, you should be able to do a remote passport application after a deed poll, though what impact that would have on any visa entitlements or EU settled status I wouldn't be able to tell you. Sideswipe9th (talk) 19:20, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

I think we could resolve all of this, and in the process simplify

WP:BLPPRIVACY

, by replacing it with:

Personal information related to an individual that has not been widely published by

contact the oversight team so that they can evaluate it and possibly remove it from the page history. To reduce the chances of triggering the Streisand effect

, use a bland/generic edit summary and do not mention that you will be requesting Oversight.

The aspects that go into detail on how to resolve disputes about an individuals date of birth seem out of place in BLPPRIVACY and so could be split off into a separate section:

If multiple independent

reliable sources state differing years or dates of birth in conflict, the consensus is to include all birth dates/years for which a reliable source exists, clearly noting discrepancies. In this situation, editors must not include only one date/year which they consider "most likely", or include merely a single date from one of two or more reliable sources. Original research must not be used to extrapolate the date of birth.^[2]

A verified social media account of an article subject saying about themselves something along the lines of "today is my 50th birthday" may fall under self-published sources for purposes of reporting a full date of birth. It may be usable if there is no reason to doubt it.^[3]

BLPPRIVACY currently lacks an overarching definition for what sort of personal information should generally be excluded, instead relying on a number of examples that editors then extrapolate from. By adding such a definition his would, in my opinion, resolve that problem and neatly add a reasonable and

WP:NPOV-compliant basis for excluding most names that individuals object to including, including deadnames. BilledMammal (talk

) 02:57, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Most if not all of the con arguments in the last RfC (still at the top of this page as of this writing) apply even more strongly to making a general rule about this instead of a TG/NB-specific one. And I warned that people would try to do exactly this. WP is an encyclopedia

public record; deadnames of trans/enby people are a consensus-built rare exception, and not always an exception. As a former professional privacy and civil-liberties activist, I have to observe that proposals like this reflect muddled thinking about what "privacy" is and means (just like a lot of "censorship" debates do, e.g. when they cry "censorship" if a commercial platform has terms of use and moderation policies).  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  21:59, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

That's fair. I mainly saw a discussion I agreed with initially, that wasn't explored as much as I would have liked it to have been. The main goal was to get discussion started, and see where that went. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 22:16, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Yes, I agree. I don't see how at least in the case of people no longer with us, we should hide their birth name, trans or not. It is basic information in any encyclopedia. Maybe there could be certain exceptions like some sort of danger to their family or something. But an ideological reason is really stretching it. Regards, Thinker78 (talk) 22:23, 23 July 2023 (UTC)

Why is somebody's birth name so encyclopaedically important? In some cases I'm sure its relevant, but in many maybe most it's just trivia. Thryduulf (talk) 09:27, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

That's a bit like asking "Why are humans so into pattern recognition that the human brain will sometimes invent patterns that don't actually exist?" It just is as it is. Maybe someone could do an academic study on why people care about birth names (and birth dates and other personal demographics) in biographies, but the clear fact we have to work with is is that they do, and biographical works by other publishers respond to this cultural need by including the information.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:48, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

On a related note, I made a draft that starts over with GENDERID and tries to make it clearly aligned with policy, while trying to maintain reasonable concerns for transgender people. I got some useful feedback so far and if I can refine it a bit more I'd like to take it here for an RFC. I understand the fatigue of the issue, but I think many of the RFCs were driven by trans-activists that made unreasonable proposals. If this revision goes through, I think it will get a lot less attention in the future. Cuñado ☼ - Talk 00:25, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

but I think many of the RFCs were driven by trans-activists that made unreasonable proposals

Well, that seems like an inappropriate statement. And makes you appear very unreliable to be involved in any of this, Cuñado. Silverseren^C 01:04, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Personally I think a

WP:TNT would be a good idea, but that's not what I see there. If we really want to TNT it, we should start with something like what Thryduulf posted above. And later we should reexamine other assumptions too. Anomie⚔

01:47, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

On the one hand we have trans people, who typically want or need to leave behind their previous self, and on the other hand we have people who use alternative names for other reasons. If someone's taken their partner's surname, or changed their name because it could be confused with someone else in the same profession, or just happen to have a

name that's very common, then that doesn't represent a change of identity. Where someone's left behind a previous self, there are issues of dignity and respect that we need to consider, but where someone hasn't, giving their previous name is simply giving out encyclopaedic information that won't do any damage.—S Marshall T/C

07:59, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Indeed name changes happen for various reasons and guidance needs to (unlike some editors) acknowledge that multiple types exist and that different considerations exist for the different types. Broadly I think we can categorise name changes into the following top-level types (numbered for convenience only):

1. Multiple public names used in parallel: There are no privacy or similar concerns with any of them and which to use is mostly a style matter, although some subjects may have a preference for one over the other.

   For example, nicknames and shortenings - someone might prefer to be referred to in their article as "Matt" rather than "Matthew", "MJ" rather than "Michael" or "Michael James", etc. (or vice versa) but doing it otherwise is not normally a BLP failure.

2. Consecutive public names: Different names are used at different times in their life, but there are no privacy issues with previous names.

   Changes of name at marriage are a typical example. Which name to use for times prior to the current name adoption is a style matter where we should follow the subject's preference if they have expressed one, but doing it a different way is very rarely going to be a BLP issue.

3. Role-based names: Different names are used for different parts of their life. Some subjects may regard one name as public and another as private, others will regard both/all as public.

   Stage names are probably the most common (but not only) example. Generally only public names should be used to refer to the subject, but which to use if there is more than one and whether private ones should be included at all will vary.

4. Deadnames: Former names that are no longer used for any purpose and are often very private.

   While trans people are possibly those who most commonly have deadnames, and the most likely to use this term, the concept is not exclusive to them. Deadnames should only be included if the subject was notable under that name or has expressed a clear preference for inclusion. A clearly expressed preference by the subject is only time deadnames should be used to refer to them, even for times before the name change.

5. Unused names: Names that are (part of) the subject's legal name but which they use only when necessary.

   Examples include middle names and where a nickname is used for all aspects of daily life, public and private. Inclusion may or may not be encyclopaedic but they should never be used to refer to the subject.

The same person may have more the one name in the same category (e.g. two nicknames) and/or names in more than one category (e.g. a deadname and a stage name). There are also likely names that don't fit (neatly) into any of the above categories and even ones that do will need to be considered on a case-by-case basis to determine details. Thryduulf (talk) 09:39, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

If where someone's left behind a previous self, there are issues of dignity and respect that we need to consider is what we want to apply to writing about someone who was notable under a previous identity, then why should that "dignity and respect" stop at anachronous use of name and pronouns? Why don't we have an article at the old name that covers that identity's life and ends with that identity ceasing to exist at the time it was left behind, and a separate article on the new identity at the new name that covers only that identity's origin and accomplishments? Anomie⚔ 11:16, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

If both are notable then in some cases we should. In other cases it would not be what the subject would consider respectful. Thryduulf (talk) 12:19, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

Why should that matter? I'm fine with excluding previous identities per

WP:BLPPRIVACY when they don't contribute to a subject's notability, but when they are relevant I think we should report the history clearly and accurately. As we do for other things people may not want known about themselves that don't happen to be a current focus of the culture war. Anomie⚔

11:42, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

For the non-trans "deadname", I think a useful example might be people who change their family names to disown a traitor or other infamous family member.

I know that some indigenous groups change names frequently (e.g., a new name when you become an adult, or after a life-changing experience). I don't know how any of them feel about the prior names, but that's something we could look up. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:36, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Oh, and there's the Taboo on the dead#Taboo against naming the dead, which I suppose is another way of changing your name. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:56, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

No… we do not need a one-size-fits-all “rule” for how to present name changes… because every name change is a UNIQUE situation.

That said… My own pet peeve is that we often overload the opening sentences with prior names - which can highlight them unnecessarily.

Sometimes it is better to “downplay” a prior name by NOT mentioning it the lead - and instead introducing it later in the article (for example, in an “early life” section), where it can be presented in a historical context. Blueboar (talk) 15:42, 24 July 2023 (UTC)

No… we do not need a one-size-fits-all “rule” for how to present name changes... which is exactly why one is not being proposed. The aim is to come up with some guidelines for how to present name changes in different scenarios that editors can work with to apply best practice to the situation that applies to a specific subject. Thryduulf (talk) 09:31, 25 July 2023 (UTC)

Having had more time to think about this from multiple angles and through tangentially related discussions at

WT:MOS, I end up concluding that trying to "borrow" the deadnaming idea from TG/NB/GQ subjects and apply it to anyone, ever, who has changed their name and would rather never hear/see the old one again, like the entertainer Teller, is basically subcultural appropriation of a certain type of wrong that affects the real subcultural class very differently and much more potently, then applying it in an aggradizing way to something else, trivializing the concept in the process. It ultimately reminds me of bogus arguments that have been made about "Celtic" indentured servants in early America being "the same as" enslaved Africans, or mockery of satiric pseudo-religions (Chuch of the SubGenius, etc.) being "the same as" attacking someone for being Jewish or Amish or whatever, and several other false-analogy arguments that people make involving a real sociological class with a shared social experience, and something else entirely that is only similar in a superficial way. I don't mean to imply any wrongful motivation, mind you; I think this is just a case of one sort of very narrow and rather dubious "sensitivity" colliding headlong into a broader and more obvious and well-defined one.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢

 😼  04:49, 26 July 2023 (UTC)

2nd opinion requested

I have this going on:

Moved from Wikipedia talk:Village pump (policy)

There are good reasons for disallowing anonymous users from editing through open proxies and web-hosted services, but blocking the IP addresses has the side effect of also locking out established logged-in users. This does not serve any purpose I can think of. Is it technically impossible to implement blocking IP addresses for anonymous editing while atill allowing editing by logged-in

Just log in from a different location. Blueboar (talk) 15:50, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Realistically, no one is going to travel to a different location to edit; they'll just donate their time to some other cause instead. Allowing registered users to edit from blocked IP addresses is technically possible and is already done for many addresses and many accounts; see

WP:IPBE. One problem with always doing it is that sneaky vandals can create new accounts. Certes (talk

) 17:39, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Agree that just log in from a different location is practically unrealistic for many users. Even I, a sort of nerd, cannot just simply log in from a different location when I'm mobile, and the methods that I could use without paying for a VPN are

already blocked for various reasons. I once spent a week in a rural place where the one local ISP subnet was blocked and that was it for me; rather than deal with the process I just decided to not fix things that week. Yet Lambiam's question specifically suggests granting automatic exceptions to extended confirmed users, which IMO does present a decent enough barrier for many bad actors. Yes, I'm aware that some LTVs jump this hurdle, but if we took all the what if some hardcore vandal does this arguments to heart, nobody would be able to edit at all. Orange Suede Sofa (talk

) 21:26, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

True; allowing EC editors to be IP block exempt seems very useful and almost harmless. I'd be interested to hear from those more familiar with blocking why it's not done. Certes (talk) 22:07, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

This is a weird place to have this discussion. Why it's done is simply the reason you've identified above: sockpuppets and banned users evade IP blocks and/or conceal their 'real' identity, either by using proxy IPs or (with IPBE) by using their own blocked IPs. I want to add that changing a location is not always practical, I get that, but sometimes just not using a proxy is a reasonable compromise, like if you're sat in your own home. At other times, IPBE might be appropriate. Other times the block may need re-visiting. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 22:20, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

While all of that is true, it still doesn't address why extended confirmed users can't be automatically exempted. If we trust EC users enough to edit through EC protection, then why not through certain IP ranges? (And where would be a more appropriate place to discuss this? The implementation would be technical but it's still a policy issue IMO.) Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 22:44, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

This is the talk page of the VPP project page. Like most talk pages, this type of talk page is more for talking about the page rather than talking about other things. You're welcome to move this discussion or start a new one on the policy page, as far as I'm concerned (you could even continue here and it won't bother me). To answer the question, we don't trust automatically trust every EC user with many things. -- zzuuzz ^(talk) 23:07, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

Ah, whoopsie regarding the talk page vs. the project page. Pinging

WP:OTHERSTUFFDOESNTEXIST, but I've given my thoughts on this issue and won't push any more. Orange Suede Sofa (talk

) 23:18, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

If an EC user makes abusive edits, whether through an open proxy or from a regular address, they can be blocked without blocking the IP address. This is a fundamental difference with anonymous users, who can only be block by blocking the IP addresses they are known to use.  --Lambiam 22:51, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

why extended confirmed users can't be automatically exempted We already have LTAs who game extended confirmed for the sole purpose of disrupting bluelocked articles. Making IPBE something that's granted automatically to EC editors would have

impacts elsewhere

as zzuuzz has implied.

That said, not all IP blocks are the same. For disruptive IPs we already distinguish between

hard and soft blocks. As the blocking policy states, the most common type of IP block is a softblock, that prevents only anonymous editing while still allowing already created accounts to edit. Hardblocking, which prevents all edits except for IPBE editors and admins, are typically used for proxies, and colocation and webhosts, due to the higher risk of disruptive editing those services come with. Sideswipe9th (talk

) 23:19, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

I can see how being exempt could help a determined vandal, but raising a sleeper account to EC is hard work and blocking it isn't. Certes (talk) 22:12, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

Can't creating new accounts be blocked while still allowing extended confirmed users to edit?  --Lambiam 22:45, 29 July 2023 (UTC)

Most IP blocks that aren't of open proxies should actually already be

softblocks (anon. only, account creation blocked), only those ranges that get substantial disruption from throwaway accounts should have the block applied to logged in accounts also. Of course, for those non-open-proxy but source-of-sock-disruption ranges, IPBE is supposed to be granted fairly readily, and it may be worth allowing EC editors automatic exemption from those if it happens a lot, but I do not believe this is currently technically possible. Alpha3031 (t • c

) 14:05, 30 July 2023 (UTC)

• Did we abolish
  WP:IPBE? For registered users who have a legitimate reason to edit through a blocked IP address, a mechanism exists to allow them to do that. What's the problem, exactly? --Jayron32
  12:48, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

FYI

 – Pointer to relevant discussion elsewhere.

Please see: