Wikipedia talk:Patent nonsense

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Renaming: patent nonsense -> obvious nonsense

I really know what is meant, but due to nonsense patents being around so much I always get it wrong at first each single encounter of the term ... Are there others with the same sentiment? -- Tomdo08 (talk) 14:25, 24 October 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose. For historical reasons, I oppose moving the page; this is a reference to one of the earliest edits to Wikipedia, especially because the term "patent nonsense" is used together with "brilliant prose." In fact, it appears that the term "brilliant prose" refered to what are now
TALK/CONTRIBS) 07:44, 15 January 2011 (UTC)[reply
]
I agree with Tomdo08. We shouldn't keep an ambiguous term for purely historical reasons.
WP:PATENT really shouldn't redirect here, but changing it, e.g., to Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_sources would break existing uses. (Although, since there only appear to be eight such links, they could feasibly be changed.) Feezo (send a signal | watch the sky) 18:51, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply
]
Oppose. "Patent nonsense" is a well-established expression in our language. Any confusion is immediately cleared up on reading the lede. Secondarily, it creates havoc when WP policies are renamed; it's difficult for anyone to master the policy spaghetti we necessarily generate here, and changing our jargon on fairly cosmetic grounds means users have to give effort to relearning something without improving overall comprehension. Laodah 07:33, 3 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Disambiguation

The

WP:PATENT short-cut links here. I want to put a hatnote on this page to disambiguate with patent (legal) meaning help i.e. link to the essay Wikipedia:Reliable_source_examples#Are_patents_reliable_sources.3F . Any objections? Widefox; talk 13:04, 18 October 2012 (UTC)[reply
]

 Done. It should also help disambiguate the subcase of the nonsense patents above. Widefox; talk 12:29, 19 October 2012 (UTC)[reply]
After a bit of research, I understand patent nonsense has here an established meaning, but as a novice here I expected it to mean something like nonsense in patent (legal protection of intellectual right) material (which I have sometimes encountered).
For novices like I was when I first came here, a concise explanation of that meaning would be welcome (but I can't provide, or propose, it yet, because here I mostly see what it is not). For the first idea, maybe to be added (possibly to the beginning of the section Not to be confused with ...) something like "not to be confused with nonsense in patents" (see here the rest after the first) "or patented nonsense" (a lot of mumbo-jumbo in publicity industries seems to be copyrighted and protected), which is both related, but far form the meaning here - until something better can be written here. Another addition of "what it is not" is not what I'd like to see; hopefully someone else shall have some better idea. --Marjan Tomki SI (talk) 21:53, 5 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This isn't some obscure, Wikipedia originated definition of the phrase "patent nonsense". This is the accepted definition of the phrase in the language as a whole. "Patent nonsense" meaning "obvious nonsense" has been part of the English language for far, FAR longer than the internet has been. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Khajidha (talk • contribs) 16:43, 30 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Adding PN to existing articles.

The way that this page is currently written excludes instructions on what to do if a user adds patent nonsense to an existing article. I would think that in such cases the user should be warned with the uw-test series of templates and that such instances should be reverted (undone or rolled back). Could someone add this to this guideline with easy to read and understand language? I'm not as good at wording things like this as I thought I was based on my experiences attempting to modify wordings on other guidelines. Thanks. Technical 13 (talk) 14:09, 7 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Adding random characters to the middle of an article is just garden-variety vandalism. You handle it like you would any other edit. The only time patent nonsense requires special handling is when the whole page needs to be deleted. WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:30, 12 June 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I came here looking for tips on what to do if a user adds an entire section to an existing page ( [1] ), and I agree that this guideline is not clear on what to do in that case.
I added a few words about UNDO. What else should we say about undoing nonsense added to normal, no-nonsense articles? What other parts of this guideline can we trim down to Wikipedia: avoid instruction creep? --DavidCary (talk) 13:25, 29 May 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Brilliant prose=featured article?

Something rather confusing about this project page is that brilliant prose is linked to

Featured article. First of all, "brilliant prose" is made to sound like a popularly used phrase to describe good articles. Second of all, are "brilliant prose"s only featured articles? Anyway I find this nomenclature weird and the Wikilinking even more baffling. The Average Wikipedian (talk) 13:28, 3 May 2015 (UTC)[reply
]

It's a hangover from the early days of Wikipedia, when
WP:Featured Articles was called 'Brilliant prose'. It was renamed back in 2004 for precisely the reasons you've identified. The link here should really be renamed as well, since Featured Articles do not necessarily contain 'brilliant prose' (whatever that peacock term is meant to mean, anyway). Robofish (talk) 22:00, 30 June 2015 (UTC)[reply
]

Edit request re: Featured article link

In the section "Dealing with patent nonsense", the first bulleted item is "Replace it with a well-written article." with the "well-written article" linking to

WP:How to write a great article. This seems more in keeping with dealing with patent nonsense and encouraging editors to replace it with non-nonsense. KDS4444 (talk) 01:55, 4 September 2017 (UTC)[reply
]

Done. I find it amusing that someone could have a
WP:COI in patent nonsense. Keira1996 06:49, 8 September 2017 (UTC)[reply
]
As do I, Keira1996, but it has been suggested that I not attempt to directly edit any policy or guideline as I have disclosed participating in paid editing and am now considered to have a conflict of interest with regard to pretty much anything, including patent nonsense... as nonsensical as that may sound to both of us! Such are the costs of disclosure, it turns out. KDS4444 (talk) 04:16, 9 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I'm aware, and I heavily pity your situation there. I understand the rationale behind the decision, though... I'm going to work through the quicker portions of the COI requests backlog over the next few days, so hopefully your editing won't be too hindered by the waits. Keira1996 05:16, 9 September 2017 (UTC)[reply]

The Not to be confused with ... section

How could anyone confuse copyright violations, plagiarism, defamation, or underlinked content with patent nonsense? They do not resemble patent nonsense. If we are going to list everything that is not patent nonsense—as opposed to problems that one might plausibly confuse with patent nonsense—this section should grow to approximately the size of Wikipedia. In my opinion, we should remove these items because they detract from the guideline.—Finell 21:44, 2 March 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It maybe could be that the person in question had no idea of such material being copyrighted. But yes, i do agree it cannot be some sort of nonsense, unless in some extreme cases — Creesperings (talk) 22:04, 28 May 2019 (UTC) (reformatted  :-) SquisherDa (talk) 10:11, 30 September 2019 (UTC))[reply]
It seems sensible to clarify tht "patent nonsense" isn’t a catch-all bucket for any-/everything an editor disapproves of? And maybe editors reading the piece occasionally confuse "patent nonsense" with "patently unsuitable"? and condemn (eg) underlinked articles under the wrong heading? The admins on
New pages patrol would be the ones to know, I guess. But the point about diverting from / diluting the guideline topic seems probably important. And of the various listed types of duff copy, copyvio is probably the least likely to give classification problems like that - and therefore a rather baffling first item, as at present, in the list. (That bullet is also least clear on what the editor should do in such cases.) So I’m moving that bullet to the end. - SquisherDa (talk) 14:11, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply
]

cos as presently positioned, at the top, it must be unnecessarily baffling. - SquisherDa (talk) 14:11, 30 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

We've had problems with people calling any kind of unwanted content "patent nonsense". It's an incentives thing: if I say "Ugh, that's stupid", then all I can do is revert it. But if I say "Ugh, that's patent nonsense", then I can tag it as {{
db-nonsense}}, and maybe an admin will delete it, which is far more satisfying, and then I can claim I'm an important Defender of the Wiki™ who protects the public from people who make test edits. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:03, 16 March 2023 (UTC)[reply
]

Super crazy idea: demote to info page

Is this really a guideline? I feel like this is already covered by

WP:BADIDEA? HouseBlastertalk 02:44, 28 August 2022 (UTC)[reply
]

This is one of the oldest content guidelines. I agree it may seem obvious. However, I am uncomfortable with the idea of demoting something simply because it is obvious. Is there a reason why demoting this would help the encyclopedia? I don't think proposing to demote things reduces creep - I think that is actually increasing creep because we're spending time quibbling on distinctions without differences. Sure, in the end you're left with arguably less creep, but you've increased the aggregate creep over time value x, the area under the line of creep if you will. So, aside from it being a bad idea to go around reducing the emphasis on the idea that the encyclopedia can act with extreme prejudice when something is blatantly nonsensical - why is this a good idea? Andre🚐 03:12, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I am not really arguing that it should be demoted because it is obvious (even though it is obvious). I am arguing that benefit provided by this guideline does not outweigh the institutional creep it creates. creates does not outweigh the benefit it provides to the PAGs does help the encyclopedia, and this guideline does little to actively help the encyclopedia. This is obviously anecdotal evidence, but when I started editing, I was slightly overwhelmed by the number of times I would click on a blue link on a policy page and being was greeted by another massive box with a green or blue checkmark. I imagine I am not the only person with that feeling. Making it just a tiny bit easier for newcomers to learn the rules would help the encyclopedia. From the second sentence of
WP:CREEP, "the longer, more detailed, and more complicated you make the instructions, the less likely anyone is to read or follow whatever you write." It follows that decreasing creep makes people more likely to follow other, less obvious rules, and therefore be constructive contributors. That would help the encyclopedia. Finally, if you need to read this page to know that adding "dsafhialsdjflks" to the end of an article is a bad thing, I would rather you operate under the assumption that it is okay and be CIR blocked just a bit faster. That would help the encyclopedia.
I also respectfully disagree that simply discussing this increases the complexity of the rules, especially when this particular debate centers around simplifying then. Even if it this discussion would only decrease creep in the future, that still means that this would eventually result in a net decrease in creep under the line.
Sure, we would only remove one PAG. But I believe that we cannot let perfect be the enemy of good. We all know that Wikipedia changes at a glacial pace. This would get the glacier moving in the right direction. HouseBlastertalk 04:21, 29 August 2022 (UTC) edited for clarity 05:06, 30 August 2022 (UTC)[reply
]
I appreciate your good faith argument and reasoning, and I will concede the point that a simplification of a complex system, even a small one, is a good thing. However, I think having a clear bright line rule against obvious nonsense simplifies the operation of the project, so for this reason I oppose your proposal, but I will grant that you have legitimate reasoning for coming here. I am all in favor of moving the glaciers and whatnot. This one doesn't feel like it does actually move in the right direction. I don't think the right direction is "fewer polices and guidelines." We might need fewer in some areas, and more in other areas. Andre🚐 04:30, 29 August 2022 (UTC)[reply]

RfC on "demoting" to information page

PAGE NOT DEMOTED
There is a slight consensus opposing demotion. Combined with the fact that a clear consensus would be required to change the status quo means that I feel comfortable closing as "not demoted". Gusfriend (talk) 11:27, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Should

information page? HouseBlastertalk 02:29, 12 September 2022 (UTC)[reply
]

  • I should add that the mere fact the community agrees with it doesn't mean it should be a guideline. By that logic you could create a project page with any obvious statement and it would have to be declared a guideline. Guidelines are supposed to be useful as well as accepted. Hut 8.5 18:53, 12 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
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