Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/5/Archive 21

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VA5 quota now 50,075. Reduce Countries and subdivisions by 50? 1348/1400 to 1348/1350

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Per Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5, VA5 quota is currently 50,075 articles, not 50,000. Countries and subdivisions is currently 1348/1400 articles. Shall we reduce the quota by 50? Making it 1348/1350. starship.paint (RUN) 08:07, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Per nom. Makkool (talk) 11:42, 12 April 2024 (UTC)
2. As nom. starship.paint (RUN) 09:51, 13 April 2024 (UTC)
3. We have too many pointless country subdivisions, so we could and should reduce it even further. Vileplume 🍋‍🟩 (talk) 21:11, 14 April 2024 (UTC)
4. Per nom, rightsizing. Hyperbolick (talk) 08:55, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
5. Even if there would turn out to be demand for more of this category it can be increased again, and for now quota can be taken from under-quota pages.--LaukkuTheGreit (Talk•Contribs) 08:48, 29 April 2024 (UTC)
6. I agree that this could be reduced even further. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 22:35, 3 May 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

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Add List

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Super-basic and fundamental topic. List should be under Information, as a list is one of the most common types of/ways to organize information.

Support

1. BD2412 T 01:13, 3 April 2024 (UTC)
2. Hanif Al Husaini (talk) 05:00, 16 April 2024 (UTC)
3. Per nom. Don't think it’s true that these lists are just for improvement. FAs don’t get kicked out. Hyperbolick (talk) 08:53, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
4. We should definitely have List on the list. QuicoleJR (talk) 21:21, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. The purpose of the VA project is to identify a list of articles that we should devote more editing resources towards to make them high quality. We don't need that for list: there is no specialized history to them (the article itself mentions that the scholarship on lists is fragmented) and their purpose and existence is straightforward; it's basically a dictionary term. Almost everything on the article seems fairly obvious. It also establishes a dangerous precedent. Where do we stop? Should we add paragraph for example? Aurangzebra (talk) 06:50, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Neutral

Discussion

What is the process from here? We have more than four participants and four support votes (80% support), and the discussion has been open for six weeks, with over a week since the last comment. BD2412 T 22:24, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

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Level 5 proposals must run for at least 15 days?

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Currently, L5 proposals must run for at least 14 days. But, all higher level proposals must run for at least 15 days. Propose to standardise L5 to at least 15 days as well. starship.paint 07:57, 29 May 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. as nom. starship.paint 07:57, 29 May 2024 (UTC)
2. Vileplume 🍋‍🟩 (talk) 01:40, 31 May 2024 (UTC)
3. LOL-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:30, 1 June 2024 (UTC)
4. Barely makes a difference, but why not. Consistency is good. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:39, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
5. Makes sense to align with Level 1-4. Aszx5000 (talk) 11:08, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

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Proposed new rule: while nominating an article, also list the proposed location in the vital article list

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The purpose of this new rule (to support a nomination, the location to where it should be added it must be listed) is to lighten the burden on closers, who are working without reward. They have to figure out where the article should go, despite not necessarily having any expertise in the topic. The burden of effort should be on the nominator and the supporters, not the closer. Ideally, the nominator should provide the location. If the nominator does not know the best location, they can provide multiple potential locations and the other supporters can chime in on which is the best one. This will apply to all nominations made after this proposal passes. starship.paint (RUN) 01:34, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. per nom. starship.paint (RUN) 12:56, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
2. Seems fair. Hyperbolick (talk) 22:14, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
3. I have seen the wave of terror that is User:feminist's proposals in the society section. I don't envy you at all when you close their discussions. SailorGardevoir (talk) 06:52, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
4. Sometimes the nominator does not know (speaking from experience), but most of the time this should be done. Would make closing things that aren't removes much easier. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:41, 16 June 2024 (UTC)
5. Yes, harder, but makes sense. Is this a proposal for all Levels? Aszx5000 (talk) 22:48, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

   @Aszx5000: - higher levels are less of an issue now that we are mandating that nominations must be included at lower levels. Thus there is already a clue on where the nomination should go at higher levels. starship.paint (RUN) 08:51, 6 July 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Discuss

If you need an example of a nomination where the potential location is not immediately obvious, see Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/5/Society#Add Self-defense. starship.paint (RUN) 01:36, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

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VA template in edit summaries

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I know this has been brought before but surely there is a way for the template to work in edit summaries, because its extremely annoying to not be able to simply click on the proposal; most of the time it doesn't work but I have seen some instances were it did work. The Blue Rider 21:56, 10 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, it’s annoying to me as well. Not sure how to fix this, but willing to get some ideas. Interstellarity (talk) 21:11, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I have also found this really annoying. Maybe we could try asking at VPT? QuicoleJR (talk) 17:25, 15 March 2024 (UTC)

me too.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 15:01, 29 April 2024 (UTC)

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Clarification that early modern period ends in 1815

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For as long as I can remember, the cutoff between early modern and modern on the vital articles page. However, recently another editor has been moving articles around to split early modern at 1800. The significance to 1815 is the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna that defined the world order for the next 99 years. 1800 is a 00 year but has no additional historical significance. _pbp 21:35, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Support 1815

1. _pbp 21:35, 8 April 2024 (UTC)

Support 1800

1. Based on our early modern period article, which generally supports a 1500-1800 date. SailorGardevoir (talk) 22:34, 8 April 2024 (UTC)
2. Rounder number. Hyperbolick (talk) 08:54, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

   So? Aside of being a "round number", there's no watershed event that begins or ends that year. _pbp 20:47, 17 April 2024 (UTC)

   Sure you could find something. John Adams elected president, marking the tradition of transition of power in the American democracy. Hyperbolick (talk) 02:32, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

   John Adams was elected in 1796... _pbp 01:00, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

   Election of Jefferson, then, ushering in the principal that an electorally defeated incumbent head of state gracefully leaves office. Hyperbolick (talk) 03:47, 19 April 2024 (UTC)

Support something else

Discussion

FWIW, the article (which is trash, BTW) states, "There is no exact date that marks the beginning or end of the period and its timeline may vary depending on the area of history being studied." _pbp 00:10, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

@SailorGardevoir: Without saying "it's what the article says", can you defend why 1800 is a good year for that split? What watershed event occurred in that year? _pbp 00:10, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

It’s a nice round number that’s close to the end of the French Revolution, which is what most people consider the main event that divides the modern era into early and late periods, not the Congress of Vienna. SailorGardevoir (talk) 00:44, 9 April 2024 (UTC)

Another reason for just having 1800 be the starting date for the early modern period is that it downplays the Eurocentricity of dividing time into these specific periods. What's the main divider for the Ancient and Post-classical periods? The Fall of the Western Roman Empire? What's the main divider for Post-classical and Early modern? Either the Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire or the Discovery of the Americas. What's the main divider for Early modern and Late modern? The French Revolution (or apparently the Congress of Vienna). With the exception of the Discovery of the Americas and arguably the French Revolution, these events mostly just affected Europeans. SailorGardevoir (talk) 20:46, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

I haven't read thoroughly on the topic, but I have for a while, in and out of Wikipedia presumed or believed that 1815 was the cut off transition year for the modern period, just like A.D. 467 is the cut off from Ancient to Post Classic. In general, we use worded titled eras on the vital project from level 2 and down, with Ancient, Post-Classic, Late and Early modern at lev2, followed by Stone, Medieval, Iron, Bronze, Renaisance, Pre-Columbian at lev3 and more at lev4. We list the worded eras and list other things under them, we do not list numbered centuries and/or decades until level 5, the majority of the project uses eras not centuries. Eras are marked by significant events or technologies not coincidental arbitrary calendar round numbers, otherwise we would end up with odd cut offs like splitting Ancient Rome into before and after A.D. 1 or something, which would make little sense.  Carlwev  13:07, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

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User:DannyS712/DiscussionCloser is useful for closing discussions

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Thanks Hanif Al Husaini, I followed your example in using this, and it is helpful! All can try it out! starship.paint (RUN) 12:43, 26 April 2024 (UTC)

Is it just me or the "Close" button doesn't show up anymore. Already tried to install and uninstall multiple times and no success. The Blue Rider 17:34, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

Often happens to me. I don't have a fix other than to keep reloading. J947 ‡ ^edits 09:46, 22 July 2024 (UTC)

@J947 @The Blue Rider @Starship.paint uninstalling the script and installing User:DaxServer/DiscussionCloser.js fixed the problem for me. Hope this helps. feminist🩸 (talk) 06:48, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

@Feminist: - thank you! I think I already did that :) starship.paint (RUN) 12:46, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I just copied DaxServer's discussion closer.js and made my own adjustments. Thanks. The Blue Rider 20:17, 26 October 2024 (UTC)

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Shutting off automatic archiving

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Can someone please disable automatic archiving? Unclosed discussions with a clear consensus are getting auto-archived, and this is bad. QuicoleJR (talk) 21:16, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

+1. J947 ‡ ^edits 23:50, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

We need more prompt closures. Perhaps there should be some form of a qui pro quo requirement that to nominate something you must close something. Plus we need to do everything we can to make closures easier, that chiefly includes telling everyone from the start of the nomination where you want the nominated page to be added to. We should not be making closers do extra work on figuring out where things have to go. The nominators or supporters should figure that out. starship.paint (RUN) 03:06, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, I think there is a reason removals get closed before additions. However, I still think we should turn off automatic archiving and just archive things manually after closing them. QuicoleJR (talk) 14:15, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm fine with turning off automatic archiving. starship.paint (RUN) 14:49, 11 May 2024 (UTC)

I am not sure how to turn it off without retaining the ability to automatically create new archive pages once the current archive page is too big. I've set the automatic archive to a year in the meantime. starship.paint (RUN) 01:39, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

That should work. Thanks! QuicoleJR (talk) 22:28, 15 May 2024 (UTC)

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Too much of a focus on U.S. removals?

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In cities, there's been at least 30 removals or proposed removals... ...when the U.S. is NOT the most overrepresented (looking at cities per million of urban population, most of Oceania, Europe and the Caribbean, and more than a few countries elsewhere have more VA articles than the U.S. does).

In politicians, there's been a whole of of removals or proposed removals... ...when the U.S. is NOT the most overrepresented there either

What's also ironic is that entertainment personalities is one of the areas where the U.S. is most OVERrepresented and it hasn't received as much attention as cities and politicians. _pbp 19:16, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

A few editors have begun working to trim down that section. I agree Questions? four Olifanofmrtennant (she/her) 01:13, 4 June 2024 (UTC)

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Premature closures

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I noticed and reverted two discussions were closed with a nominator support and a single oppose vote based on time (see [1] and [2]). Although the time indicates that the nomination is not a subject of high interest, time does not seem to indicate a consensus having been achieved. Is there an interest in adding a rule to close based on time without a consensus regarding vitality.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:06, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

If there's less than four votes after 60 days, it seems fine by me to close as "no consensus" _pbp 05:37, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

I see lots of subject that just do not get attention of our discussants that still need active consideration rather than people who can not be bothered by a subject. We do not even require 4 voters. 4 discussants is a very low threshold. We have lower thresholds than level 1-4. If we are going to time things out it should not be until 90 days since last comment. However, I don't think we should do that.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 11:20, 5 June 2024 (UTC)

90 days sounds about right, but I agree with TonyTheTiger that I wouldn't like see votings closed en masse just because they didn't find enough attention in time. The pages get very long, and stuff in the middle isn't seen by everyone. Too early closings before enough people have considered would mean that subjects that get less interest would not improve and stay the way they are. It would be better if we closed and archived the votings that are ready in due time. That would move the ones waiting for votes higher on the page, where they would get noticed by more editors. Makkool (talk) 13:27, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

I would also agree with 90 days; these pages are very long, and I don't think it is helpful to have discussions open for more than 90-days. The Level 1-4 have a time limt for a no-consensus, so Level 5 should have too. I would suggest that this is proposed at the VA main page for decision? Aszx5000 (talk) 11:07, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

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Notification

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I was going to post this notice a few days ago when I found out, but better late than never.

Hanif Al Husaini, a major contributor to the VA5 project, passed away on May 27, 2024. There is a section on his talk page for comments of remembrance. May he rest in peace. QuicoleJR (talk) 20:00, 16 June 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the notification. May he rest among the stars in peace. The Blue Rider 13:20, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

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Bad bot edits by @Cewbot:

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Hello,

I just noticed that Cewbot recently removed all the Level 4 tags from Level 5. This means that, on the vital article template on article talk pages, Level 4 articles are instead listed as level 5 articles. _pbp 15:53, 25 July 2024 (UTC)

I don't know if it's the same set of issues, or it just runs less often, but looks like Cewbot has been on holiday for a couple weeks now. I have other things to do first, but I can check if Kanashimi is OK, and maybe help with this eventually. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

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Redirect this talk page to the new VA landing page talk page

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Shouldn't this talk page be redirected to the new VA landing page talk page? It feels that we are having discussions about Level 5 processes and procedures that would be best hosted at the overall VA talk page level (which used to be one the Level 3 talk page), and not outside of that. Better to have one single page for making such suggestions at VA? thanks. Aszx5000 (talk) 11:03, 20 June 2024 (UTC)

I'd actually keep this one separate, at least for now. The regulars here can probably tell you I'm a broken record on this, but I think Level 5 will always need to work differently from at least Levels 1-3, purely because of scaling issues. I'm usually very for consolidating pages, but VA5 is sort of an exception. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

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Proposal: Splitting the society subpage

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The society subpage is way too long and was thinking that it should be split into multiple subpages. Not sure how to split the subpages, but was hoping to get some input on how we should split it. Interstellarity (talk) 12:27, 27 June 2024 (UTC)

After closing and archiving a lot of proposals, the society page isn't particulary bloated; less than 200k bytes - the People subsection has more as of now. The Blue Rider 17:41, 19 July 2024 (UTC)

For some context, with our first-year anniversary of the separate proposal pages coming up, XTools now reports the following (approximate) sizes:

Proposal page sizes

Subsection	Size, end of 2023 (kB)	Current size (kB)
People	195	150
Hist & Geo	305	130
Society	580	210
STEM	165	180

So while Society is still the largest, it was relatively massive in the beginning and has trended down in size the most. STEM on the other hand is the only one to trend up. So if we do decide to split Society, which I personally support, we should also discuss splitting Math & Science from Tech (which dominates the discussion page). -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Just to update, the STEM page included a lot of very stale proposals. Tech still dominates the page, but now that the cruft is closed out, it's at a much more manageable ~135 kB. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 18:39, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

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Improve a random Level X article

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The button seems to not work. Pressing it will either just reolad the page or take to some category like which is clearly not random and makes the editor choose. ExclusiveEditor _{Notify Me!} 07:29, 21 November 2024 (UTC)

Good find, it kicks me to the maintenance category for VA articles by quality rating. I'm already building up a decent backlog of projects here, but if nobody else gets to it, maybe I can look into making it a genuine "I feel lucky" button. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 18:39, 23 November 2024 (UTC)

I just looked into it, and it was a simple fix. The service on Toolforge only needs URL parameters, but the catch is it's not smart enough to descend through a container category. You have to feed it individual ones from the bottom of the category tree.

I've currently set it only to return Stub, Start, and C class articles, along with Lists (Lv5 still has about 110 and we've never officially discouraged them). My thinking is the lower-quality articles are easiest to improve quickly.

Also, I didn't make changes to the button on any of the sublists. Those already worked since the "Vital ... by <topic>" categories are leaves in the category tree. Those buttons don't filter at all on quality though and may return even FAs. AFAICT the service on Toolforge only allows adding categories (i.e. union / whitelist), whereas it would need parameters for intersections or complements (i.e. blacklist) to filter on topic & quality simultaneously. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 15:31, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

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Batch move: specific facilities, tech -> geography

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I've been thinking, how about we move all of the articles for specific facilities and infrastructure projects to Geography? They could be allocated to Region or City based on scale: e.g. an airport goes by the city it serves, while an out-of-the-way facility or something regional (like a road network) goes to the region / country.

Some other arguments for:

• We have some topics (like urban transit authorities) that otherwise fall into a gray area: they use transport technology like buses and solve logistical problems, but they're really organizations and their technical artifacts alone aren't that noteworthy.
• Even if they have a technical orientation, geography is how we primarily differentiate them on the Tech page anyway
• It will arguably be easier to balance and track them this way
• As individual projects, they're bound up with their surrounding history and culture
• While Tech is over quota, all the Geography sections are currently just below or more than 2% under.

On the quotas specifically, I'm completely neutral on whether they should change to reflect this move or not.

Support

1. Support as nom. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 21:39, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

Neutral

1. Case by case basis I'd support or oppose this. Geography is currently missing a lot of the core geographic/cartographic theory pages, and has kinda just become a place to dump places/regions. While that is certainly a component of geography, there are many topics like Central place theory  5, sub-fields like Time geography  5 or Spatial analysis  5, and concepts like Activity space  5 I'd rather see included in that 2%. Tech can and should be trimmed, I'd rather see us make the painful choice to cut away a lot of these facilities and transit authorities rather then push them into another category. As a professional geographer, less then 1% of my coursework has involved place name memorization but that is the vast majority of the category. It's one of the areas I'd like to see improved, but need to write up large explanations for why these are vital, as the average person might not know about them dispite interacting with numerous technologies that are based on them daily. In 1,000 years, the concepts are likely to still be vital, a particular cities transportation authority is less so. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:58, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

   That's not a bad point at all; if you're trying to add theory on the Geography talk page, maybe I should swing by. My first thought is that we should definitely add the topics you mentioned, but we may be able to include both. If the Geo sections start going way over quota, then we can evaluate whether they deserve slots from somewhere else, or whether specific sites should be cut.

   I just posted a tweaked version of this proposal to the main talk page and will probably close this one out as "superseded" in a couple days. If you want to add your thoughts there too, we'll see how people that work at Lv 4 feel about it. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:21, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

• This doesn't involve only articles from level 5. Some bridges and observatories are level 4. Should we discuss this move on the general talk page instead? Makkool (talk) 17:19, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

If it touches on Level 4 too, I guess we should. I can post a modified proposal there before closing out this one. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 18:32, 8 December 2024 (UTC)

@GeogSage: I was thinking some about the technical geography topics you mentioned. It may actually be worth doing some reorganization around those too. If you think there are enough articles, we could do a "Basics & Methods" section under Geography (similar to what we do for Science). After looking over the Central place theory article though, I realized another possibility for now is to propose some topics under Science (for empirical methods) or Applied Math (for formal models), but that does scatter things a bit. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 20:13, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

Sorry for the late reply. I had worked on the Geography topics template a while ago (while working on the main page for geography)and think that it can give some ideas for how we could organize stuff. I've been trying to put some thought into how to approach this here, and with Winter break might be able to help more (although I have several publications that need my attention at the moment as well, so not just endless free time). Specifically, there are many topics that are vital in my opinion, but most people have been using geography to mean places, and broad topics aren't as interesting to them. My view of what geography is vs what the average person thinks of is likely to be vastly different, and it is honestly hard to look at the state of Wikipedia or hold discussions sometimes on the matter, which is why I'm trying to be cautious and think about how to approach this problem. I've organized my thoughts below, please pardon the length:

To demonstrate, first start with the geography topics at VA level 2 which has 11 articles. This is where I believe the problem starts. Vital articles level 2 lists City  2, Country  2, Sea  2, Land  2, as well as Africa  2, Asia  2, Europe  2, North America  2, Oceania  2, South America  2. To be blunt, as a geographer, this looks like it was compiled by people with a (Western) 5th graders understanding of geography and confirms that it is mostly a place to put Location  5s and Place identity  5, two topics that are not included as vital articles at all. Continents are a really bad way to organize information, especially if we are going to push the weird notion that Europe is somehow a continent by any definition of the word. Country  2 is so ambiguous as a term that it is essentially meaningless, but less useful then Territory  5 which is broader and crosses species. Also, not that people know the difference between a Nation  4, Sovereign state  4, or Nation state  5, but at least those are defined in some literature fairly clearly. I'd drop this completely in favor of place. City  2 is another one I'd flay someone on, and would suggest Human settlement  3 as a replacement. To many people think Cities are the be all, end all of human civilization.

Now look at the geography topics template (below). Quantitative geography  5, Qualitative geography  5, Time geography  5, Philosophy of geography  5, Geodesign, Geoinformatics  5, Geographic information science  5, Statistical geography  5, Spatial analysis  5 are all major "fields" that aren't included but probably should be. Techniques like Geostatistics  5, Geovisualization  5, Computer cartography  5 (and Web mapping), forms of Geographic information system  5 (such as Distributed GIS, Internet GIS, and Web GIS) are all missing. Heck, while Remote sensing  4 is thankfully inlcuded, Photogrammetry isn't.

Note, that there is almost zero overlap between the template and the way vital articles are organized. The discrepancy between how I believe geography should be organized and how it is approached by how much is missing is daunting and disappointing. Trying to discuss this with editors is discouraging, but it seems that geography is only being considered vital in the sense that it is useful to organize peoples home towns, at which point we should just name the section Toponomy. The glacial process of VA articles is annoying, but honestly I'm not sure if there is a way to salvage the organization of geography that is in line with any literature, which is even more daunting as I find people are highly defensive of the status quo.

A "Basics & methods" section would be a start, but it is still original research when it comes to organization. If the organization is actually about geography, an not just places, then I'd go with the three branch model at level 2, with categories Human geography  4, Physical geography  4, and Technical geography  4. I'd swap city with Human settlement, and country with Territory  5, and put them under human geography, and I'd drop all the nonsense continents (seriously, including Europe as a continent should be viewed as backwards as all the other racist Eurocentric nonsense that polluted early science. If Europe is a continent, so is Florida, and model is completely useless for anything but explaining the racist European view of the worlds organization. There isn't an argument that includes Europe but doesn't add several other locations, like India). Plate tectonics  3 at level 3 is fine, and we can put them at level 4 under there...maybe. Technical geography could start with just quantitative and qualitative geography, which would satisfy the "basics and methods" section. I'd keep "basics" under the broad heading of geography, or use "key concepts" which is used in the outside literature. Methods is just technical geography, broken into quantitative and qualitative geography.

So my ideal 11 articles for VA 2 would be:

• Geography
  • location
  • Scale (Geographic)
  • Human geography
    • Human settlement
  • Physical geography
    • Land
    • Sea
  • Technical geography
    • Quantitative geography
    • Qualitative geography

I think we could use that organization at VA level 2 to fix all the other issues in the organization of the discipline. Due to the size of this issue, I'm struggling to think of where to even start. It's actually hard to even look at how bad the current organization is. BTW, Those blue links are all VA link templates, so if they're missing a number it is because they aren't listed as vital... Core concepts listed on the main geography page like Scale (geography)  5 are ignored.

GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 19:10, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

Note: Moved this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Vital articles#Broad reorganization of geography GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 21:19, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

I'll go ahead and add any other thoughts I have over there. I think we can consider this discussion at Lv 5 closed out. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 23:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)

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Swap Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi with Senusiyya

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I'm bringing it here rather than the people talk page since the Senusiyya will be placed under history if they get added. If anyone has seen my proposals lately, I have been pushing for the removal of articles that I personally feel are never going to escape stub-class. I will admit, that kind of the reason I want to get rid of al-Sanusi, although now I'm starting to think that his article can improve after all if we transplant some of the info from the Senusiyya article to him. However, even if we can improve his article, we have also been removing people who are chiefly known for finding a royal dynasty without actually being rulers, and I ultimately think that's why he's here. Instead, we should swap him out for the order he belongs to. Although only one of them end up ruling Libya, they still seem to play a big role in resisting Italian colonial rule.

Support

1. SailorGardevoir (talk) 07:32, 14 May 2024 (UTC)
2. Hanif Al Husaini (talk) 02:55, 21 May 2024 (UTC)
3. Support adding Senusiyya to History. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Oppose removing Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi from People. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

Discuss

• All of the relevant sections (whether you put the man under Religious figures or Rebels) are technically still under their quotas so I say why not have both for now? A personal theme of mine at Level 5 is that it's arguably even more useful for stimulating mergers / splits than improving single articles in isolation. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

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vote recount needed

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Please check Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/5/STEM#Remove_{{VA_link|_Bowie_knife}},_or_swap_with_{{VA_link|Fighting_knife}} which was closed by User:Makkool.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 13:24, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

I think it all checks out: the proposal was open > 15 days, > 7 days since the last vote, and the numbers seem right when swapping and removing are each considered distinctly.

While my vote was primarily to swap, I said I would also prefer removing over keeping if that choice was on the edge of passing. The one strict oppose vote also counted in both options. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:14, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

I had misread your vote as not including the remove vote too (only a swap), and tallied the total wrong. It's fixed now. Makkool (talk) 17:31, 14 December 2024 (UTC)

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Propose quota change: Culture +100 Biological and health sciences -100

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There's clearly work remaining, but I don't think there are that many easy cuts in the Culture section (Universities? Museums?), which is almost 200 entries over quota. On the other hand, Biology has taken too long to fulfill (nearly 400 under quota), and a similar proposal was made for Level 4 months ago. This one would be:

• Culture 1750 ---> 1850 (currently has 1946 entries).
• Biology 5815 ----> 5715 (currently has 5412 entries).

1. Biology, biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology 1200 ---> 1150 (currently has 1062 entries).
2. Plants, fungi, and other organisms 1075 ---> 1050 (currently has 968 entries).
3. Health, medicine, and disease 1140 ----> 1115 (currently has 1005 entries).

Support

1. As nominator. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 16:37, 5 October 2024 (UTC)
2. Support, other cuts could definitely be made to Television articles for example Makkool (talk) 14:29, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

   Support, although I have been trying to improve the Health section. The problem is that nobody votes on the more technical proposals. QuicoleJR (talk) 14:20, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

3. Questions? four Olifanofmrtennant (she/her) 15:39, 6 November 2024 (UTC)
4. Regardless of current potential cuts (and this increase wouldn't even take Culture under quota as it stands), "Culture" is extremely broad, and there are some areas such as ethnic groups that are still lacking. Iostn (talk) 00:21, 23 November 2024 (UTC)
5. Support. Some comments: 1. I also the think the television section is a little too big. 2. We genuinely do need to add more biology articles instead of only shrinking the biology quota. If this takes a while, so be it. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 15:19, 27 December 2024 (UTC)

   @Mathwriter2718: Your comment seems to support not making this change. Why did you support this proposal? QuicoleJR (talk) 23:49, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

   @QuicoleJR I support the proposal. I think the quota for culture is a bit too low and the quota for bio is a bit too high. These comments are additional remarks I wanted to say. Maybe it would have been clearer for me to put them in the discussion. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 02:38, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

6. I rarely weigh in on quotas, but this just makes us look better by reallocating overages.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:19, 28 December 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. oppose. I think we could likely trim plenty from both sections, and we should emphasize reducing the list rather than shuffling stuff around. For example, while I love academic journals, I think half could probably be cut from the list. We could likely cut half the magazines, TV, and Radio articles while we're at it. I struggle to believe WWE Raw is one of the most important articles on Wikipedia, and while King of the Hill might be among the greatest animes of all time, I think it probably could be cut as well. While an argument could be made that Sports Illustrated is impactful, I don't know if Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue needs to be included as well. Biology and health sciences probably could be expanded tremendously, but I'm sure there are cuts to be found there as well. I look through Public health topics, and pages like Infant mortality and Birth defect are not included. In short, I believe that Wikipedians have been a bit overzealous about getting their favorite TV show or publication listed while slacking a bit on Biological and health sciences topics.GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 02:20, 21 October 2024 (UTC)
2. Strong oppose, on a few counts. I'll be slowly coming back from a hiatus & doing some other things (like a mark-1 vitality estimator) before proposals here. I'm against removing slots from the biology section for now though because: 1. I don't think its current size reflects the subject, just a bias in the interest level by proposers. I'm not a botanist, but I have 45 plant nominations alone that I didn't get around to earlier this year. So we could probably exceed the current quota with more participation. 2. I know it's not an agreed convention for now, but I think we should also move away from overly-tuned quotas with more than 1 or 2 significant digits. 3. If any of the Society sections gets a quota bump, I would actually like to see it go to Religion & Philosophy. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 11:58, 31 October 2024 (UTC)
3. After thinking about it for a bit, oppose per Zar2gar1. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:00, 6 November 2024 (UTC)
4. After looking closer, biology is only 331 under quota, and I think it is missing a lot of articles. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 14:43, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Discuss

If Biology is 400 below and Culture is 200 above, who are we not just shifting 200 from Biology to Culture? BD2412 T 15:40, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

1. I may propose something similar if this one passes, but I think there's a decent amount of cuts for an outright +200 increase. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 16:37, 5 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't support that, since I think there are certainly enough additions to get at least the Health section to the quota. I also think enough cuts can be made to get Culture down to the new quota. QuicoleJR (talk) 14:23, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

What are your more technical proposals? GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 02:26, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

• This proposal is close enough that one oppose vote would put it in jeaopardy. It is now overlapping with another proposal below. This proposal no doubt got a lot of support because the sciences had spaces to spare. Below we eliminate those spaces. I think if both of them pass it might not be clear that the voters support the outcome of any science sections being put in an over quota situation.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 23:41, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

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General quota proposal: larger denominations

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Hi everyone, how about one quick process proposal? It's a simple one: from here on out, let's restrict all Lv5 quotas and quota proposals to rounder numbers, specifically multiples of at least 200 (or 300, 400, etc.)

If this passes, we can round the current quotas to the nearest multiple, and if those wind up summing to less than 50,000, we'll add extra slots to the most over-quota sections (or subtract from the most under-quota if wind up over 50k). This won't supersede the active quota proposal above either; if that one passes, we'll apply the 100 slot change, then round the updated sections appropriately.

We've actually discussed this before, but I've never brought it for a formal !vote. I can think of several various reasons to make our quotas chunkier though:

• We already use soft quotas at Lv 5 so smaller changes take up energy without much benefit
• Round numbers are much easier to subdivide (especially if we ever re-introduce header-level quotas within lists)
• Round numbers make it easier to read and audit our tables & data reports
• Round numbers make things easier to swap when we do have quota proposals

Perhaps my main reason though is that I think we all agree the quotas (even if they're soft) are meant to discipline the lists and proposals, not just reflect the current size and proposal activity. If they become the latter, they're largely an exercise in box-checking and should arguably be done away with completely. By restricting quota changes to significant amounts though, we force ourselves to better justify the quotas, which also improves the list quality.

And as for the exact multiple, we can do multiples of 100 if everyone prefers. I honestly think Lv 5 is large enough for bigger chunks though, plus sections with prime multiples (e.g. 1700) can cause minor hiccups with subdivision. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 13:42, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

Support

1. Support as nom. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 13:42, 26 November 2024 (UTC)
2. Support multiples of 100 per nom. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:14, 26 November 2024 (UTC)

   I would also support doing away with quotas entirely outside of the main 50K quota. In my opinion, they do more harm than good. Additions and removals should be decided based on how vital something is, not what section the article goes in. QuicoleJR (talk) 23:52, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

3. Support multiples of 100 per nom. (Anything which improves list quality is good.) Makkool (talk) 15:41, 5 December 2024 (UTC)
4. Support multiples of 100 per nom. I also agree with Makkool's stance that some of these new slots should go to Arts (if possible, I'd say at least a couple hundred). λ NegativeMP1 19:35, 31 December 2024 (UTC)

Oppose

1. This will restrict us unnecessarily.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 18:24, 31 December 2024 (UTC)
2. Per Tony _pbp 22:50, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Neutral

I can't support this when it might put Health over its quota. Consider this a support if moving slots to Culture fails and an Oppose if it passes. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:09, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Hmm, this was what I was trying to avoid, that we'd get bogged down in short-term implementation. I don't normally horse-trade over votes like this, but we're on the undecided margin now, and it unfortunately looks like we're not getting much input.

What if I start up separate proposals to add 100 back to Health and another 100 to Arts? If you're OK with the main goal of the proposal, to stick to round 100s, would you be willing to go back to supporting it? Like the others that want to see slots shifted to Arts? I think I can find a couple sections people will be OK pulling from.

As you know (from the proposal above), I personally don't like seeing the Biology sections cut back at all. I think I've mentioned before that I'd also like to see People cut drastically. Unfortunately, this project has to work effectively by committee, which inevitably means we all wind up disappointed about something. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 16:43, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I am willing to support this proposal as long as Health's quota is not reduced by 100. I agree with the multiples of 100 idea, but I think that reducing the Health section's quota that heavily would be very problematic. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:48, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Consider it done then. There's a specific proposal below to shift 100 from Animals to keep Health at 1,100 (it almost definitely looks like the shift to Culture is going to pass). I also started a proposal to move 100 to Arts since others expressed some interest in that. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:44, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Discuss

• Could we also consider potential gaps, when dividing extra slots to over-quota sections? There's a need for more articles to Arts, because there could be possible vital films still missing that haven't been considered yet. It would be good to leave room to add, in addition to covering over-quotas. Makkool (talk) 15:41, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't see a problem if the slots ultimately wind up with other sections; I just wanted to separate this proposal from any debates over specific sections. Shifting to the most over-quota sections seemed like the least controversial way to handle a potential remainder for now.

I suppose if everyone wanted to, we could hash that out in a sub-proposal here. I was really hoping we could just start up separate quota proposals though, in parallel or after this one is settled. Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:12, 7 December 2024 (UTC)

• User:Zar2gar1, could you present a table with three columns, 1. the current quotas, 2. the rounded quotas you propose, and 3, the rounded quotas, if the currently active reallocation discussion passes.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 07:41, 1 January 2025 (UTC)
• I noticed Countries and subdivisions quota gets bumped up to 1400. We have purged the section down over the year, and I think there's still many non-vital subdivisions from before in there. Could we instead decrease this section down to 1300 and move the hundred articles elsewhere? I'm not sure where they would be needed though. Could they be necessary for something else in Geography? There hasn't been support for metropolitan areas, but they could be used to fill the space. Or maybe there's enough basic geography topics that GeogSage has been proposing. Makkool (talk) 07:43, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

  Sure, like with the other ones though, I'd just ask that we make it a separate quota proposal. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:06, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

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Proposal in table format

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This is my first pass guess at what you are actually proposing This table is the future of quotas if the votes pass.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 22:34, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

Sublist	Current	Old Target	This passes	Both Pass	Complete?
People	15,144	15,185	15,300	15,300	Yes
Writers and journalists	2,053	2,000	2,000	2,000	Over quota
Artists, musicians, and composers	2,193	2,175	2,200	2,200	Yes
Entertainers, directors, producers, and screenwriters	2,168	2,175	2,200	2,200	Yes
Philosophers, historians, and social scientists	1,337	1,360	1,400	1,400	Yes
Religious figures	493	500	500	500	Yes
Politicians and leaders	2,390	2,400	2,400	2,400	Yes
Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists	873	900	900	900	No
Scientists, inventors, and mathematicians	1,270	1,275	1,300	1,300	Yes
Sports figures	1,205	1,200	1,200	1,200	Yes
Miscellaneous	1,162	1,200	1,200	1,200	No
History	3,263	3,300	3,300	3,300	Yes
Geography	5,164	5,250	5,300	5,300	Yes
Physical geography	1,846	1,900	1,900	1,900	No
Countries and subdivisions	1,331	1,350	1,400	1,400	No
Cities	1,987	2,000	2,000	2,000	Yes
Arts	3,359	3,300	3,300	3,300	Yes
Philosophy and religion	1,437	1,400	1,400	1,400	Over quota
Everyday life	2,425	2,400	2,400	2,400	Yes
Everyday life	1,207	1,200	1,200	1,200	Yes
Sports, games and recreation	1,218	1,200	1,200	1,200	Yes
Society and social sciences	4,398	4,100	4,200	4,300	Over quota
Social studies	504	500	500	500	Yes
Politics and economics	1,940	1,850	1,900	1,900	Over quota
Culture	1,954	1,750	1,800	1,900	Over quota
Biology and health sciences	5,484	5,815	5,600	5,500	Yes
Biology, biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology	1,068	1,200	1,100	1,100	No
Animals	2,397	2,400	2,400	2,400	Yes
Plants, fungi, and other organisms	974	1,075	1,000	1,000	No
Health, medicine, and disease	1,045	1,140	1,100	1,000	Over quota
Physical sciences	4,789	4,850	4,800	4,800	Yes
Basics and measurement	354	350	300	300	Over quota
Astronomy	898	900	900	900	Yes
Chemistry	1,178	1,200	1,200	1,200	Yes
Earth science	1,187	1,200	1,200	1,200	Yes
Physics	1,172	1,200	1,200	1,200	No
Technology	3,230	3,200	3,200	3,200	Yes
Mathematics	1,208	1,200	1,200	1,200	Yes
Total	49,901	50,000	50,000	50,000	Yes

My question is whether I am interpreting things correctly (especially with the plants, health and measurement sections).--TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 07:20, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

@Zar2gar1: Am I interpretting your nomination correctly.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 14:44, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I appreciate you running the numbers; I wasn't planning on doing it unless the vote passed.

But yes, I get almost the same results running the procedure. I just realized I wasn't super-explicit that we should round first, then check which sections are most over/under quota, but that looks like what you did.

For the math, I got that...

1. The initial rounding creates an extra 300 slots we have to trim
2. The most under-quota sections after rounding, as a % and in order, then become...
   1. Basics & measurement (and full disclosure, I am so glad this one gets cut back)
   2. Plants, fungi, and other organisms
   3. Biology, biochem, etc.
   4. Health, medicine, etc.
   5. Military personnel, etc. (literally just 1 or 2 articles closer to quota than Health)
3. The first 3 sections then each lose 100 slots, and the 4th would too if 100 are shifted to Culture

So the only differences in my results are that

• Biology, biochem, etc. will drop to 1,100 regardless of the other quota proposal
• Health, medicine, etc. will drop to 1,000 to make up for the extra 100 to Culture

Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:46, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

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Consensus building

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@TonyTheTiger and Purplebackpack89: And anyone else that's on the fence about this. First off, I apologize if this blew up into a much bigger conversation than planned. I don't want to take up much of anyone's time. Since this is an either/or change, it needs to be a vote, but I was actually hoping to find as much consensus as possible.

Since you both oppose for the same reason currently, I thought I'd get a little more feedback. You mentioned that it would "restrict us unnecessarily", but to clear things up, can you paint me a picture where this becomes an issue? I'm having trouble seeing any situation like that in the foreseeable future, at least until the list has become very stable years from now (if ever). Before then, I don't think we can say the lists are anywhere close to a hypothetical "correct" size, when we could say something like the "75" in a quota of "2,175" represents actual significant digits.

It obviously is a restriction we're placing on ourselves, just like the other rules, and it isn't 100% absolutely necessary either. But I think the self-discipline would be good for us. It will at least put a floor on proposals that scrape off small amounts from other sections, which are well-meaning, but I think if you look closely, almost always one-sided: lots of enthusiasm for the section adding slots but little concern for what's actually in the sections the slots will be pulled from.

Hopefully, this may even let us have fewer, more focused quota debates in general. I know that's not what happened so far, but I think it ironically makes my point. Just trying to reallocate a potential overage in our total triggered so much debate, which if you look closely, is mostly just us arguing over which topics we like most or least. As long as we have quotas, we probably do need more guardrails around setting them. This would be a small step in that direction. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 15:47, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to quotas at all, merely opposed to them being in multiples of 100. 100 is a lot of topics. I think there are enough situations where forcing us to ONLY choose between 200, 100 and 0 would be unwise. _pbp 16:23, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Just to clarify, I wasn't concerned about supporting or opposing quotas absolutely. I only alluded to QuicoleJR's discussion because I am truly sympathetic to anyone that finds them annoying.

But you got right to my point: you mention situations where having to handle quotas in 100s would be unwise, but I honestly can't picture them, at least at level 5. Can you give me an example? The closest I can see is a really small section like we have with Science Basics now, but the fact we even have a rump section like that is arguably more an organizational problem than how much we fine tune the quota. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 16:58, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Look at anything that's 1,000 or less and how significant a change of 100, or even up or down to the nearest 100, is. _pbp 17:25, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Fair enough, and I don't want to keep bothering you. I see what you mean that if you interpret as a percentage change for the section in isolation, it can be large. That's an inevitable statistical artifact of a smaller population.

I guess I just don't see why percentage change matters much in this context. At the very least, whatever the section size, we definitely don't have a problem coming up with additions or removals once we actually focus on it. I think we're largely just limited by bandwidth and lack of participation around certain topics.

Anyways, thanks again for replying, and we'll see how the vote turns out. If you do think of any informal guideline or spin-off idea that would ease your concerns though, feel free to bring it up. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 04:49, 7 January 2025 (UTC)

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Recounts necessary for Dwelling

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Closed as 4-1 pass. Seems to be a 3-2 fail after 5 months, Dwelling:

+:Interstellarity, Kevinishere15, TonyTheTiger

-Zar2gar1, Big Blue Cray(fish) Twins

-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:16, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

My bold formatting may not have been the best, but if you read my vote closely, I actually only opposed adding it to Tech. The article clearly describes a legal concept so I supported adding it to Society -> Law, and Kevinishere15 also mentioned putting it there. Since the other votes were unqualified, I put it there. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 05:51, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Resolved

-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 07:40, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

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Should we get rid of the quotas?

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This isn't a formal proposal yet, but I want to bring this up for discussion. I don't think that the page quotas are good for the project. Either they limit the number of listings we can have for a topic, potentially barring vital topics from being added, or they get shifted around based on where the listings already are, making them an effectively useless exercise in box-checking. Either way, they are not helpful and should be removed. Any thoughts? QuicoleJR (talk) 23:58, 2 January 2025 (UTC)

I think they are more of a guideline then a rule. They help to keep the project generally organized and well rounded. Without them, it might be challenging to see what areas are over represented, under represented, or whatever at a glance. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 05:07, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

They are essential in terms of keeping the project well rounded. Without quotas, we would probably restore all US Presidents and half of the politicians we purged last year. They are all more important than half the biographies we include. However, If we try to maintain a broad and diverse set of bios, we have to figure out who is most vital from all professions.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:25, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

i think they're useful for avoiding overrepresentation in certain areas. I think it's a good thing that we can change the quotas later if we realize later that they were off. Mathwriter2718 (talk) 13:09, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

I think we could probably tell which sections are overrepresented without the arbitrary article limits. Removing all of the subquotas didn't change our ability to see which sections within the pages had too many articles, and which didn't have enough. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:12, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

The quotas are tedious, bureaucratic, and annoying... but I think they're unfortunately the only thing that keep VA5 disciplined at this point. So if the choice is between keeping or dumping them, I say we keep them.

Now, if anyone has any better ideas of how to regulate the separate sections, I might support replacing them. Even then though, you'd want to factor in some of the advantages the quotas do have:

1. They allow the lists to evolve independently for the most part. Without them, arguments over balance will likely devolve to comparing individual items across sections.
2. They add a little protection to sections with less participation. Not much, but at least now, people have to create a proposal to shift slots based on sectional arguments, not just articles. Without them, I expect what will happen is the popular sections will just steamroll ahead, and people may even start brigading removals in the unpopular ones.
3. As numbers, they're simple to work with and some tasks can be automated. We may not be there yet, but I plan to work up a bot myself that will do some of that.

To your first point about them barring vital topics from being added, I'd actually disagree with that. If a topic is presumably vital and an item that isn't vital is on the same list, the quotas don't prevent swaps. If such a swap fails, that's on us as participants. And if the problem is that one section has a higher standard of vitality than another, the quotas actually make it easier for us to rectify that with a single proposal. If that fails and one section is tolerated at a lower standard, again, that's on us as participants.

To your point about box-checking if we just shift them where the articles already are though, I agree with you 100%. And yes, my above proposal does that in the short-term as a practical measure. My hope though is that if we lock in some general rules for the quotas, we can start holding quota proposals to a stronger standard, which should rebalance things for the best in the long-run. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:15, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

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Quota proposal: move 100 from Animals -> Health

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This is mainly to decouple concerns about individual sections from the above proposal to round all quotas.

I actually agree with QuicoleJR above that we've been cannibalizing most of the Biology sections for a while now. Health in particular is almost definitely incomplete; we just recently added Birth defect  5 and off the top of my head, we still don't even list Skin condition. Participation on health topics has actually been decent in the past few months too so we can definitely hit the new quota.

As for why we would cut from Animals, it's clearly over-represented: more than double any other Biology section, despite only representing one kingdom of life. Many of the items there are just taxonomic place-holders too that I think we added almost mechanically, which is fine for initial brainstorming. But now we could probably cull the section a bit.

There are non-Biology sections I'd personally suggest cutting even more, but when possible, I think shifting quotas within a category is simpler and steps on fewer toes. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:29, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Support

1. As nom. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:29, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
2. QuicoleJR (talk) 18:17, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Oppose

1. Weak Oppose. Can we see which of the earlier proposals pass first.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:18, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

   Sure thing, both will be open for at least another week, though I think the shift of 100 slots to Culture will almost definitely pass at this point. I saw your comment there too, which is considerate. From my experience trying to work on the Science lists though, I doubt the Biology section shrinking more (I hope only temporarily) from the rounding will change many minds. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 04:26, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Neutral

Discuss

Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:29, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

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Quota proposal: move 100 from Military personnel -> Arts

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This is mainly to decouple concerns about individual sections from the above proposal to round all quotas.

Multiple participants in the above proposal were interested in shifting slots to Arts. I'll let them provide detailed arguments if needed.

As for where to take the 100 slots from, I'd definitely suggest People / Military personnel, etc. In the general quota proposal, we calculated it's actually the most under-quota non-science section. I've also been trying to fill it out on the People talk page myself and can personally attest that:

• There isn't much interest in the section, so even if it should ideally be larger, it won't happen anytime soon
• Even some of my proposals were a bit borderline and more what you would see in an initial brainstorming

Support

1. As nom. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:39, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
2. Per nom. And to offer my own rationale, I personally believe Arts is at the point where I don't know how many articles could be removed, despite my best efforts of trying to find stuff like movies or musical works to get rid of. However, I can definitely think of ones that should be added. This proposal would give us room to allow for the ones we already have that I think should be kept, and 41 more. λ NegativeMP1 19:33, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
3. per NegativeMP1. QuicoleJR (talk) 19:46, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
4. Support, and not only for adding new works to movies or music. There's surely still some basic articles that are missing from the Literature section for example. Currently, it feels less broad than the Music section when it comes to general topics. Makkool (talk) 19:58, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

Oppose

1. I think relevant Wikiprojects could/should be notified and brought in for comment. That said, from a historic perspective, military leaders are often extremely influential on the course of world affairs. Vasily Arkhipov  5 personally decided to not launch nuclear weapons against the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and likely a nuclear war, for example. Looking at the guidelines for vitality, it says it should not have a western bias, and that "Individuals within the People section represent the pinnacles of their field with a material impact on the course of humanity, such as Albert Einstein 3 in "Inventors and scientists", William Shakespeare 3 in "Authors", and Genghis Khan 3 on "Leaders." Based on this, I think we could remove all articles related to American Football and football players if you need broad room for "Arts," as the emphasis on American Football is definitly a "Western Bias," and virtually no athltete has a material impact on the course of humanity.GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:04, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

   Actually, I agree with you completely in the long-run. If you look on the People talk-page, I probably have over 30 active suggestions for Military personnel or Rebels to add. Unfortunately, there just doesn't seem to be as much interest in the section.

   Plus I've accepted that Lv5, if you'll pardon a military metaphor (without the connotation of conflict), is somewhat a "war of maneuver". Maybe it's for the best if we give everyone that works on the Arts list a bit more breathing room for now, let them refine their own system for ranking things. And to be fair, the Military & Rebels section probably could use some pruning: ~1/8 of the entire section is still American activists, and I'm really not sure how notable some of the other non-American ones are. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 04:49, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

   When the United States has 330 million people, some representation of the most popular sport in the country is warranted. The real Western bias is that India and China don't get the same treatment. QuicoleJR (talk) 15:51, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

   I'd much rather see American athletes get the same treatment as Chinese and Indian athletes. Very few athletes actually fit the projects requirements to be deemed "vital" in my opinion. They are popular, but that is not the same thing as vital. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 23:31, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

2. Weak Oppose. Can we see which of the earlier proposals pass first.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:18, 3 January 2025 (UTC)
3. Military personnel is actually the military personnell rebels, and activists section, which was already cut a while ago from 1000 > 900 and saw a lot of removals (this is when subquotas where still a thing and the cut was actually for specifically the US activists section, so that's where everything that was removed was from). Since I was waiting for my proposal to go through on moving bandita and pirates etc to Misc > Criminals, I was planning on afterwards adding more primarily non-US activists and revolutionaries that have been overlooked. Iostn (talk) 00:18, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

   Not looking to change your mind, and I actually hope to see this section bumped back up in the medium-term. Just to clarify, you don't have to drop any of your addition proposals even if this passes. We'd just need to give the list a more critical once-over and propose removals to balance it out. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 04:52, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Neutral

Discuss

Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:39, 3 January 2025 (UTC)

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Reopened Add Atlantic hurricane

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The reason we went back to the queue system was so that all nominations could get 4 voters. If it is open a year, then we can close it. Otherwise let it sit until it either gets a 2nd oppose + 7 days of no votes or 4 supports. TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:25, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

If you want to reopen it, that's fine, but we talked about it on the main page: WP:VA#Level 5 closes

Nobody wanted to make it an official rule, but the other 4 levels officially time out proposals, and almost everyone seems to agree that if the talk-page starts getting too large, we don't have to wait forever to retire the proposals that don't get enough interest.

It's not something we've really discussed much, but most of the talk pages are way past what's normally recommended: WP:TALKSIZE. They may still be trending down overall since we started them, but they definitely still haven't reached an equilibrium. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 06:07, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

The 90-day statement seemed more appropriate when we had a few more voters and almost things weren't hanging around so long without 4 votes. Too many subjects would not achieve quorum with 90 day closes. I'll probably try to reopen almost anything that has not gotten 4 supports or 2 opposes unless there is another reason other than 90 days. Something like a rehashing of a previous consensus might mean people are tired of debating a topic. However, if it has not been discussed in over a year, I am not sure what else could waive giving the nominator and subject a chance to get at least three feedbacks. Possibly something like a page merge/split/move could also give reason or a page being more of a dab than a specific subject. I'm just likely to try to give a subject a full hearing if it still has a chance. The irregular regs who come by every few months or during certain seasons, may get around to something that has been listed for months. Also, the queue will increase the prominence of the subjects most in need of discussants. This subject will be the very top discussion when an archiving update happens. It'll probably get votes in the next few months at the top.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 07:51, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

No worries, I agree with you 100% that a lot of us come and ago over several months. I'll keep in mind that we discussed this and dial back on closing proposals as stalled for now (that's the nice thing about the informal guidelines).

That said, while I don't think now would be a good time (let's let all the quota stuff settle out first), we probably should discuss the talk-page sizes at some point. While more participation would help, I wouldn't be surprised if the people already here vote less and slower sometimes because we don't have the mental bandwidth for all the proposals. I know that's true of me. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 14:38, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

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Trying to improve the nav bar in level 5

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I'm trying to improve the nav bar at level 5 to make navigating through lists a lot easier. The link is at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Nav bar/5. Because this list is broken down into many sublists that are difficult to navigate, I'm trying to figure out the best way to organize this navbar. The level 4 navbar seems to be OK, so I am looking for some advice on how I can improve navigation with the navbar. Right now, it is a bit of a mess so any advice and editor improvements to it are welcome. Interstellarity (talk) 23:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)

It the table on Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5 useful in this regard. I think the table is trying to break up into equivalent sized sections? Aszx5000 (talk) 22:52, 22 June 2024 (UTC)

Let's bump this discussion a bit longer because the nav bar is cluttered for sure, especially when you get into sublists. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:55, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

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Add a button that makes it easier to nominate vital articles according to the new rules

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I think it would be helpful to have a button in each of the subpages that makes the nomination process for adding and removing articles a lot easier. I was thinking a template could look something like this. The format proposed is commented in the edit source screen. Please let me know your thoughts on this. That way, we can have more nominations that are rule-binding. Interstellarity (talk) 21:10, 6 August 2024 (UTC)

• I like it, if you can make it, sure. starship.paint (RUN) 14:29, 11 August 2024 (UTC)

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Quota proposal: move 100 from Countries and subdivisions -> Technology

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This is another tweak to individual sections in the above proposal of rounding the quotas.

Like I mentioned above, we have been culling the Countries and subdivisions section over the last year and we could bring it down even more significantly, as there are still articles of non-vital provinces and states. I suggest that instead of increasing the section quota up to 1400 we would move 100 articles to Technology.

There is a lot of interest in adding articles to Technology on the STEM talk page, and this quota increase would serve that purpose. I agree with the idea expressed in this discussion that getting support for removal proposals in hard, and if we increase the quota we wouldn't have to find stuff to get rid off (and we wouldn't need to consider pausing tech additions).

Support

1. As nom. Makkool (talk) 19:39, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

Oppose

1. There are othersections we can remove from. Culling the countries and subdivision section makes room for more subdivisions. There are other sections that we could cull and move around if needed. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 23:27, 5 January 2025 (UTC)

   If you think we can find other country subdivisions to replace the ones that would be need to be cut, then that's a good optimal solution. But this section is going to get 50 articles more, when the quota is will be rounded up. I wonder if we can find that many more, and that's the rationale for this suggestion. Makkool (talk) 08:20, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

2. Very strongly oppose adding to Tech, but support moving to Arts. While I'm ambivalent on cuts to Countries, the Tech section is extremely imbalanced and lacking in depth right now, on top of other issues. I won't get into ranting about examples unless people want me to. We can let the current Tech addition proposals wrap up, but I really think we need to hold at the current quota, rethink what we're trying to do there, then prune & reorganize the section. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 05:46, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Neutral

Discuss

@Makkool: I don't know how much support there is for cutting the Countries section you mentioned, but I was surprised how much push-back cutting Military Personnel & Rebels got. I mainly started the proposal as a courtesy since I know you & someone else expressed interest in moving slots to Arts, on top of the other concerns about Health. Truth be told, I was really hoping we could avoid haggling around the round 100s proposal, then re-evaluate the quotas on their own terms later on. Anyways, I'll probably withdraw the Military -> Arts proposal for now, but I'm not opposed to moving 100 to Arts from here or several other places (including Math actually, I think it could handle the pruning). I just feel very strongly that we need to start keeping Tech on a short leash for a while. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 05:46, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed military personnel has had push-back. If the community feels that it can be worked on without a decrease in quota, a move of 100 articles from Countries and subdivisions to Arts would be a doable compromise. Makkool (talk) 08:20, 6 January 2025 (UTC)

@Makkool: Hi there, I was just thinking about this proposal. It seems to have withered on the vine for now, but I had an idea. Things seem to be pretty non-contentious at History & Geography for now, and there already seems to be a consistent push to trim cities. Do you think we could just start trimming marginal Countries/Subdivisions too? If we manage to get Cities down to ~1,900 and/or Countries to ~1,300, then we could just vote on the subpage to unilaterally donate slots to the unallocated pool. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:53, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

We definitely could, there's room on the talk page space, yes. I wouldn't be able to take part too deeply at the moment, but go ahead and look around the subdivisions list. Makkool (talk) 14:52, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

I hear you, I'll probably be pulling back from Wikipedia before March starts myself. I'll try and get around to pruning that section in Geography, and in the meantime, if you want to withdraw this proposal, I can close & archive it. Then we can start a fresh one on the sub-page. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:50, 26 January 2025 (UTC)

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Reopened John Sentamu

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This was closed as "not added" by original nominator at 3-1 with original nominator stating a weakened support. I was the oppose. If original nominator wishes to change to oppose, that would make this eligible for a close after 7 days. Otherwise, I think it should stay open until it has 2 opposes or 4 supports. 3-1 is not really a verdict.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:13, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

I won't change to oppose as for the moment, and keep it as weak support. I got a bit impatient with the closing. I agree that 3-1 is an unsatisfying way for a proposal to end. I didn't think I could suggest a rules change, but I'm glad you did so. Makkool (talk) 21:13, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

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Removal of List of rice dishes from Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Everyday life

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Removal of List of rice dishes from Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Everyday life was complicated because it parented and grandparented many articles while Rice is level 3 at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Biology and health sciences/Plants. Although I unlinked it, I left it in its parenting position.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:12, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

I was thinking Cooked rice  5 could become the new parent articles instead of the list. I boldly switched it around, but I'm open to some other solution too. Makkool (talk) 20:57, 18 January 2025 (UTC)

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Tweak to VA5 table layout

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Hi everyone, since I wasn't changing any actual data or procedure, I went ahead and boldly made a couple changes to the layout of the VA5 landing page. Mostly, I just applied some CSS styling so that:

1. The Total line at the bottom no longer moves when sorting the table
2. A fixed, blank line now separates all non-sorting rows at the bottom from the body of the table

However, my one other change probably deserves some explanation because it does implicitly give us a new option for quota proposals. Above the Total line, I also added a line for "Unallocated quota slots", with a non-applicable article count and quota indicator.

My thinking is that much of the friction in quota proposals to date has come from trying to agree on the donor and recipient categories in one proposal. Just as article swaps are almost always more convoluted than separate additions & removals, this muddles up our quota proposals in several ways. By separating proposed quota cuts from quota increases though, we can evaluate each step on its own merits, and also pace out quota changes more.

I'm hoping that even if we don't start adopting that approach right away, people will at least be OK with leaving the table changes in place. Obviously if anyone has any concerns or decides to revert, please let me know here. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 02:46, 19 January 2025 (UTC)

Not a bad idea, gives us time to figure out where the 100 from Athletes should go. (probably Culture) QuicoleJR (talk) 17:39, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm hoping the separate steps smooth out the quota changes at least a little more. Besides simplifying the proposals themselves, I'm also thinking maybe we should take breaks between quota proposals. Like for the Sports figures, assuming a cut passes, I honestly hope we let things rest for at least a couple weeks before discussing where those slots go. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:35, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

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Small victory lap: talk page size

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Hi everyone, this isn't really a big thing, but I thought it deserved mentioning. After staying on top of the proposals, we were recently able to push the Lv5 History & Geography section down to under 52 kB, and even now it's still under 70 kB.

If you're not aware, the general Wikipedia guideline at WP:TALKSIZE is to start archiving threads when the talk page reaches 75 kB. We obviously see a lot of activity here so we may not be able to stick to that exactly, but I think slimmer talk pages really do make a difference. As a participant, it's easy to miss proposals on a sprawling page, which leads to proposals dragging on longer, which leads to a vicious cycle. Closing on a big talk page also becomes much more draining, with a higher chance of mistakes slipping in.

I've been thinking about this part of our process, and for now, I don't think we should worry about formalizing anything. But going forward, if everyone checks the talk page size now and then, it probably would be a big help. If the page is still really large, consider throttling back new proposals some and voting more in the existing proposals; that way we can close things out quicker and turn the vicious cycle of a large talk page into the virtuous cycle of a lean one. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:04, 20 January 2025 (UTC)

Sounds good and thank you for being so on top of closing and archiving discussions! Aurangzebra (talk) 01:42, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

No problem, I appreciate that. There are a few of us that close out proposals pretty regularly when we're available, but we can always use more help.

More importantly though, and partly why I mention it, is there's only so much flexibility on the back-end in how quickly proposals can be closed. If people start proposals too much and vote too little, proposals will hang around until someone is willing to consider them stalled out / no consensus. Since we've agreed no hard deadline though, even those are limited.

If we absolutely had to, I have ideas for rate-limiting on the front-end that should still let everyone add proposals regularly. I don't know if many would support that though, and even if they did, I'm happy to take a break from proposing rules after the quota discussion. I really prefer not adding rules in general if we can work out issues informally. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:51, 22 January 2025 (UTC)

Could we try to coordinate pinging relevant Wikiprojects about a stalled project? I've tried doing that on proposals a few times and I think that has brought some interest, but if it was a more common practice we might be able to get some movement. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 03:27, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

That's not a bad idea, especially since it helps actually advancing proposals between the start and close. My main concern would honestly just be annoying the other wikiprojects; maybe we just post a periodic notice, say every 3 or 6 months? And if there are no relevant stale proposals, we skip the notice for that period?

Whether contacting other Wikiprojects is legit has been discussed too, and it's totally fine as long as nothing manipulative is going on. WP:CANVAS only applies if you're plausibly trying to bias the outcome, like selectively contacting others you expect to vote a certain way, riling up a brigade vote, quid-pro-quos, etc. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 05:33, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

It may annoy some people, but I doubt it would be a problem. If you look at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Aviation has several notices from other projects, including articles for deletion, and Good article reassessment. I know articles for improvement also pings the project pages. If we can have it consistent, like "any project the article is a part of on the talk page can be pinged." Maybe we could get a bot to post the notice when they become extreme, like 3 or 6 months as you said. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:51, 23 January 2025 (UTC)

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Move Fireplace?

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I think Fireplace and Chimney should be grouped together. So I think fireplace should be moved to Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level/5/Technology#Heating_and_cooling and thus Wikipedia:Vital_articles/Level/4/Technology#Infrastructure.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 12:34, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

I would support moving Fireplace  4. But the discussion should be had on the Level 4 talk page. Makkool (talk) 13:58, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

I have opened Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/4#Move_Fireplace?-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 14:41, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

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Change quota on Sports figures

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Arguments that athletes are generally over-represented, also add Western & recent bias

I believe we have not been really looking at the project wholistically, and I believe the sports sections are the best example. The table for quotas under the "people" section is below. When it comes to meeting the criteria of vital (also listed below), we have a serious bias in favor of athletes. First, most of our athletes are from either the 20th or 21st century, and this represents a substantial recency bias. There is also a bias towards athletes and sports popular in the West, which isn't in line with the criteria. People like sports, obviously. They are popular, and it is easy to think that popularity is the same thing as being vital. Because sportsp9figures are prominent in entertainment, they get nominated at a disproportional rate compared to other types of people. Based on the criteria in the project, for a person to be "vital," they have to be the pinnacle of their field with a material impact on the course of humanity. Just being good at a sport does not make a person the pinnacle of their field, nor does it make them have a material impact on the course of humanity. We list 54 people under the section "Political scientists, theorists, and writers," 55 United States Military personnel in Modern history (after AD 1800), 60 articles for photographers, 32 "Heavy metal and hard rock" bands, 33 "Showrunners, television writers and producers," 99 articles in the Artists, musicians, and composers section for "Non-Western art." In sports figures, we have 62 basketball players, 60 Cricket players, and 109 Association football players. Are there really more people in each of these respective sports who have had a material impact on the course of humanity then Political scientists, theorists, and writers? Are there really twice as many Association football players then U.S. military personnel in modern history that have had a material impact on the course of humanity? Are there more vital Association football players players then people who can be placed under "Non-western art?" We aren't thinking from a top down perspective and considering the project as a whole when sourcing vital articles, at least I'd like to think that's the case.

Comparison to Military/Rebel and Religious Figure sections

Looking at the project overall, military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists has 900 slots. Religious figures has 500. Scientists, inventors, and mathematicians COMBINED are allocated 1270, just 70 more then sports figures. I struggle to believe that if this was a print encyclopedia of 50,000 articles, we would want 2.4% of the book to be on individual athletes and sports figures. I struggle harder to believe that across all the worlds religions, through all of history, we have fewer notable people then individual athletes. According to Encyclopædia Britannica Roman Catholic Saints, there are more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Roman Catholic Church alone. I suggest we trim Sports figures to have the same number of articles as Religious figures. We can do this by invoking the Pageview criteria, and cutting the 700 least viewed sports figures pages. Discussion can be had on fine tuning swaps afterwards. The extra pages can be spread around the project. I have a few other proposed changes listed, including making it equal to Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists, and lowering it to 1,000. Lowering it to 1,000 means we believe as a project there are more vital athletes then "Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists", and twice as many as "Religious figures."

Restatement of vital criteria and current article counts

If there are other proposals for how we can dramatically cut this section besides pageviews, I'd support just about anything that makes this section more balanced in its portrayal of people who have had a vital, material impact on humanity. The key criteria in determining whether an article is vital are: Coverage: Vital articles at higher levels tend to "cover" more topics and be broader in their scope. For example, Science  1 is a Vital-1 article, while Scientific method  3 is a lower level of vitality. Determining which articles are vital at lower levels often involves looking at the articles at higher levels. For example, since History  2 is of high vitality, World War II  3 is also a vital article, just at a lower level. Essential to Wikipedia's other articles: While Scientific method  3 may be less vital than Science  1, since it is such a critical topic regarding science, covering many science-related topics in Wikipedia, it is undoubtedly a vital article. Notability: Individuals within the People section represent the pinnacles of their field with a material impact on the course of humanity, such as Albert Einstein  3 in "Inventors and scientists", William Shakespeare  3 in "Authors", and Genghis Khan  3 on "Leaders". No (Western) bias: While the vitals list is for English Wikipedia, the focus is on the world. For example, the current consensus for Level 3 is to list two cities in China (Hong Kong, Beijing) and India (Delhi, Mumbai), but only one in the United States. Pageviews: The number of views a page receives should be considered (i.e. it is a proxy on its importance to Wikipedia's structure), however, pageviews should be treated with caution as they can be driven by WP:RECENTISM, which is a particular concern at Levels 1-4. Sublist Current Target Complete? People 15,144 15,185 Yes    Writers and journalists 2,053 2,000 Over quota    Artists, musicians, and composers 2,193 2,175 Yes    Entertainers, directors, producers, and screenwriters 2,168 2,175 Yes    Philosophers, historians, and social scientists 1,337 1,360 Yes    Religious figures 493 500 Yes    Politicians and leaders 2,390 2,400 Yes    Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists 873 900 No    Scientists, inventors, and mathematicians 1,270 1,275 Yes    Sports figures 1,205 1,200 Yes    Miscellaneous 1,162 1,200 No

Voting

Support change in quota to 500

1. As nom. I believe this still might be a bit much, but am willing to believe there are as many impactful sports figures as religious. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:04, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Support change in quota to 900

1. If there isn't support for 500, then we can say there are about as many important sports figures to the course of humanity as ALL Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists.GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:04, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
2. _pbp 18:36, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
3. 750–900 is my preferred figure: which still means a slightly higher proportion of the pie for athletes at VA5 compared to at VA4. J947 ‡ ^edits 06:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
4. I'm admittedly not that passionate about my opinions on sport figures. However, I kinda view this as similar to me wanting less vital musicians, where even if I've never heard of a musician I'm willing to accept that they could be vital if they're particularly important to specific fields or genres as long as it's not on the lines of trivia. And I suppose sports figures can be viewed similarly. I can definitely see why some might be important even if I've never heard of them. But with that being said, I don't really think that sports figures should have any higher of a quota than Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists. λ NegativeMP1 22:06, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

Support change in quota to 1,000.

1. If there isn't support for 900, I think we should at least bring the number down to 1,000.GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:04, 8 January 2025 (UTC)
2. Weak support, I'm broadly sympathetic to this in the long-run, but especially for now, I wouldn't want to make any drastic changes. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 22:44, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
3. Anything 900+ _pbp 00:40, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

   Compromise is how concensus is made. I still struggle with the idea 1 in 50 vital articles is an individual athlete, but this could be good for now until future discussions. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 01:15, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

   @GeogSage: You supported this one twice. QuicoleJR (talk) 13:54, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

   Thanks! I must have messed up placement of this and didn't catch that I double placed. Sorry about that. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 14:57, 13 January 2025 (UTC)

4. 750–900 is my preferred figure: which still means a slightly higher proportion of the pie for athletes at VA5 compared to at VA4. J947 ‡ ^edits 06:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
5. If 900 doesn't work out. λ NegativeMP1 22:06, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

Support change in quota to 1,100

1. Support, there probably should be deeper cuts in the future, but I feel most comfortable with a 100 slot cut for now. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 22:44, 12 January 2025 (UTC)
2. Anything 900+ _pbp 00:40, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
3. Compromise is how concensus is made, so I'd rather this then the status quo. I still struggle with the idea more then 1 in 50 vital articles is an individual athlete, but this could be good for now until future discussions. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 01:15, 13 January 2025 (UTC)
4. It has not been especially difficult to come up with reasonable removals but I would prefer a slow cut and see how it holds up. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 03:08, 17 January 2025 (UTC)
5. 750–900 is my preferred figure: which still means a slightly higher proportion of the pie for athletes at VA5 compared to at VA4. J947 ‡ ^edits 06:20, 23 January 2025 (UTC)
6. I am willing to weakly support this as a compromise, since there are definitely athletes we can cut and there are definitely some other sections that could make better use of these slots. There are a good number of films, video games, politicians, etc. who I would rather include than some guy who has good stats and won some championships. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:20, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

   For the record, I oppose all proposals that would bring it down to less than 1,100. QuicoleJR (talk) 22:47, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

   Of course, and in a proposal like this, I think your opposition (not just neutrality) is implied on other options anyways. More generally, while I'm not sure we've ever formally discussed it, I think all proposals need to be closed according to the outcome with the clearest margin. Even if another option manages to clear the minimal 60% bar, to affirm that one at the close is just favoring the proposer or opposition through creative interpretation. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:41, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

7. If 900 or 1,000 don't work out. λ NegativeMP1 22:06, 28 January 2025 (UTC)

Oppose changing quota

1. We are under quote in biographies and many readers find athletes to be important subjects of interest. WP:VA is an attempt to focus on which subject should receive prioritized editorial focus. Subjects of interest to readers should be a priority.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 21:19, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

   Per the discussion section, I think that these cuts are too drastic. QuicoleJR (talk) 21:24, 11 January 2025 (UTC)

2. per discussion below and per Tony. I would be open to concrete proposals of athletes to remove and others to add in their stead. If there are enough athletes that people want to remove, we can then change the quota. I think it's impractical to do so now. Aurangzebra (talk) 04:21, 16 January 2025 (UTC)

Debate on vitality as historical depth vs. current mindshare

I don't believe most athletes are vital based on the criteria set in the vital articles. I'd propose setting a quota, and removing the lowest viewed pages until we reached that number. If someone proposes a swap, then we can vote on that. Very few athletes have a material impact on the sport they play, much less society as a whole. We don't nominate all the side characters in Star Wars, or the producers/directors/actors of all the movies we list, and trying to get a scientist past level 5 is like pulling teeth. The sports fandom shouldn't be given any higher priority then fans of comic books. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 04:31, 16 January 2025 (UTC) I've said this on our other threads and I'll say it again here. This is just your interpretation of the VA criteria. It is not the definitive gospel. I think athletes are vital and it seems like, based on the fact this quota exists, most people on this project agree with me. I understand that you don't seem to personally value athletes as vital people. What I don't understand is how you can't seem to possibly fathom how athletes could be vital. You keep saying that in the grand scheme of all of society, athletes don't matter. The facts are against you on this. The revenue made from sports alone globally is over 2 trillion dollars [3]. Compare that to music which has an entire global market cap in the billions [4]. Juan Soto, a player in the MLB, recently signed a deal for $765 million dollars. This may be the largest contract for any individual in any profession ever. Almost a billion dollars for one player. Who isn't even VA5. For a sport that isn't even really considered a global one. Clearly, society values athletes and finds them notable. And Society  1 is just as VA1 as Science  1 or Human history  1 is. As someone mentioned above, these criteria were written for VA3 so in order to extend them to VA5, we have to make a leap in judgment and interpretation. Everyone interprets each criteria differently and we have discussions according to our own such personal interpretations. Some of these criteria straight up don't make sense on VA5: the notability criteria would eliminate almost everyone from the past century besides politicians during major world events. We would have to delete almost all our fiction writers besides maybe Shakespeare because it is very hard for fiction to have a sizable effect on human history. Same with most musicians. Most politicians during peacetime. Basically our entire miscellaneous section besides some of the business tycoons. The list goes on and on. To end on a more theoretical point, I've mentioned on another thread that my personal interpretation of notability is those who accomplish outlier achievements in their respective fields with some sort of impact on culture, society, or the physical world. Athletes are physical outliers, which are just as rare and impactful as academic outliers because they set the bounds on what humans can achieve physically. For that reason alone, I would think athletes deserve spots. But when you combine that with the outsized impact sports plays on culture and society, it becomes a surefire guarantee. Aurangzebra (talk) 08:03, 16 January 2025 (UTC) Sports are definitely a thing that our society spends a lot of money to subsidize, and people do spend a lot of money on the fandom. The Mario (franchise)  5 is one of the best selling franchises of all time, with over 879.41 million copies sold of various games. Mario  4 is added to level 4, but I imagine trying to add Luigi would get pushback. When Halo 3 was released, it made $170 million on its first day of sales and was blamed for a 27 percent decline in box office sales, yet trying to get Master Chief (Halo) added has been opposed for a wide range of reasons I think should apply to sports. Look at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Arts "Fictional and legendary characters," and we have 128 pages. That is about where I think sports figures should be, and in the proposal to add Master Chief someone stated they wanted that list trimmed. The sport might be vital, there might be one player to include, but adding lists of people like we do is like listing the Poke'mon. A sport or franchise can be vital without the individual people or characters being vital. Overall, I think that having 15,144 individual people on the list of the 50,000 "most vital" pages (roughly 1 in 3) of all time is not the best, and think we need to make major cuts in many of these sections. The sports figures are the most extreme situation though, which is why I think they need the deepest cuts. A similarly bloated section might be "Actors" and "Actresses" where we have 481 and 466 people. Even with such a long list, Zendaya isn't included, and has 61,686,261 views over the past 10 years, compared to 35,369,723 for Tiger Woods  4, 29,196,771 for Michael Phelps  4, 28,893,277 for Usain Bolt  4, and 3,944,242 for Juan Soto. I don't think any athlete in the past decade has had the same cultural impact as her, and I don't think she should be added. There is very little consistency with how we add people, and how we add other topics. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 05:49, 23 January 2025 (UTC) I do not think it's not a good comparison to compare sports with video games or even recent media franchises. That might speak to a recentist bias. Video games were invented in the 1970s and do not have complete global reach, they are not an a inherent aspect of humans. Ignoring the Ancient Olympic Games - there is Cuju for Ancient China. Mesoamerican ballgame for indigenous Americans. Marn Grook for Indigenous Australians. Engolo for pre colonial Africa. Camel racing for Ancient era middle east. Humans have continously participated in sports. It's more inherent to human history than film or acting (which we cover just as much to no objection like this). Sumo and Hurling and Buzkashi are just as inherent to their countries culture life. Sports are also inherently tied to the local community in all of these countries too. The high school football team in the US. The local association football team in the UK. The local sports team anywhere. Where is this in video games? Australian rules football, a target on the level 5 list has teams that go back to 1858 Melbourne Football Club and still retain supreme importance to the local community. How can Halo or Dune compare to that? Where is the expectation that all of this local history will be forgotten or better, should be forgotten in a encyclopedia? How does film tie into social history like this? How does popular music?? On that measure, i don't see the harm in covering athletes on a similar level of film or popular music and there is more sports to cover than film genres or anchor popular music main genres. As long as a sport is played it's greatest performers will be remembered in that sport. Just like popular music. Just like film. Rock music's contemporary public interest is dead, but Basketball isn't. There's no rock music equivalent like Basketball in China or Basketball in the Philippines. It's a massive prediction to just say all of these local communities are going to by and large drop sports and forget all of it's history. I think it's more reasonable to presume that now that global media exists and sports are a fundamental part of modern media that there will be some aspect of sports history developing. It's only post-war that this has happened largely. Babe Ruth is just as notable as ever, as is Joe DiMaggio etc. The Zendaya comparison is inaccurate. Can't use athletes whose peak is over a decade ago to compare to a modern, 2020s actress - it's also impressive that out of peak athletes hold up to a modern celebrity, that speaks to the worth of sports history and swimming, track and field and golf all have a long history, longer than film or tv. Modern athletes beat her. [5]. That's just a quick grab too. Mixed martial arts as itself doesn't have the cultural backing of film and yet a fighter of it has higher numbers than Zendaya. That's because there's a global sports media. When you compare the global pageviews of both; [6] and [7] it stands out more. That's ignoring the global numbers of Cristiano Ronaldo [8] which shows how global the max of sports can be, at nearly 400 million views. It tops Minecraft [9] the most globally viewed videogame at 83 million, despite having a tech accustomed audience. I don't think there's a comparison. TLDR; sports is embedded into local communities globally and has a ancient, global history more than video games, film, popular music or any other recently prominent thing. 1000 is the lowest it should go, but popular music and film should be cut just as much and video games should be down to 5 or 10 people if sports has to be. 118.210.28.183 (talk) 00:08, 24 January 2025 (UTC) This isn't the sports hall of fame. If you want to talk about recentist bias, please tell me what percentage of our athletes are from less then 50 years ago, or less then 100. Sports are vital, athletes within the sport are not necessarily vital just for being good at it. A person being good at a sport doesn't even necessarily impact that sport. I do object to the coverage we have for actors and actresses, and think that should be on the chopping block as well. Looking at the question you asked about Dune (franchise)  5, here is an excerpt from the page: "Dune has been widely influential, inspiring numerous novels, music, films, television, games, and comic books. It is considered one of the greatest and most influential science fiction novels of all time, with numerous modern science fiction works such as Star Wars owing their existence to Dune. Dune has also been referenced in numerous other works of popular culture, such as Star Trek, The Chronicles of Riddick, The Kingkiller Chronicle, and Futurama. Dune was cited as the prime inspiration for Hayao Miyazaki's manga, and later film, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1982–1994)." I really don't think there are many individual athletes with this much impact attributed to them, and the Dune franchise is level 5. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 00:50, 24 January 2025 (UTC) It is frustrating how you take your sweeping generalizations as objective fact. You claim that athletes have no impact on society. You also claim that most times, an athlete doesn't even impact their sport. And yet, on another VA5 thread, you mention that you don't watch sports and you barely even know some of the VA4-level athletes. How does your confidence in your assertions square away with this? You constantly propose geographers and geographic concepts in VA5 presumably because that's what you know and that's what you're interested in. None of these things have had any objective impact on my life and I haven't heard of a single geographer you've proposed. And yet I support some of these proposals because I understand that geography is a respected academic discipline that I just don't usually come into that often. No matter how you slice it, sports are important. They are a trillion dollar industry. Pro athletes as a class are the highest paid individuals in the world. As the user above mentioned, almost every school and town has a sports team. Almost every child has a component of physical education and sport in their curriculum. The most 'international' event in history is the Olympics since 206 NOCs participate (versus 193 UN members). You argue that there's a sports bias but I argue that you have a strong anti-sports bias because you are unwilling to even engage in arguments about the importance of sports to people who are not yourself. As a side note, using ballpark calculations, music has around 1100 people from the last century. Entertainers probably has somewhere around 2000. These numbers are derived from the fact that most modern forms of entertainment (the film industry, TV, comedy, pop music) only originated in the last century. Why don't you pick on those? The same exact arguments could be applied there and both the film and music industry are smaller than the sports industry. Aurangzebra (talk) 01:22, 24 January 2025 (UTC) Sorry it's frustrating for you. I know the rules to most sports, know some of the basics when their history spills out onto the real world, and know the big names that are commonly referenced in outside media. I just don't care to watch them, or spend my time memorizing the names and stats of people who are ultimately not very important unless watching the sport is your hobby. I know enough about sports to know we don't need 1,200 athletes to represent it. I don't really appreciate this being characterized as "picking" on sports, if you look on other proposals of mine, I have focused on musicians, like where I proposed we Remove Musicians and replace with musical concepts on Level 3, I've nominated removing or demoting several major film related pages, fighter jets, TV shows, Peer reviewed journals, American Universities, U.S. states, and other topics. Today, I nominated trimming one of my top 10 favorite franchises of all time as I thought it was adequately represented with one piece of noteworthy media. Looking through the articles, I think they have trended towards slow unchecked growth for years, and think that large cuts are necessary in multiple categories. Sports is just the latest of the sections I've looked at, and after looking at it, I believe sports is extremely bloated on levels 4 and 5 because people who are fans of sports want to treat the vital articles list like the hall of fame. This isn't the Sports Hall of Fame though, the Guinness World Records, or a contest to discuss who has the most obscene taxpayer subsidized salary, it is an attempt at selecting 50,000 of the most "vital" articles based on the project criteria. I don't think that consistent criteria are being applied to athletes as other topics, and believe sports fans interest in the topic makes their assertions more bias then my absolute disinterest in it. The Circus Circus Las Vegas hotel and casino is the largest permanent circus in the world, has 3,767 rooms, and could sell for as much as $5 billion dollars. It isn't included, and I don't think it should be included, because we don't need to include every Circus  4, Casino  4, or Hotel  4 to capture the concept of a Casino or Hotel. Sports figures are not likely to have lasting impacts on the course of humanity, but they are products advertised by major corporations and used to sell products, so of course they can have name recognition among the sports fandom. Based on the vital article criteria, including the GOAT for each sport should be adequate, if a person is needed at all. The names of scientists, engineers, and others may not have marketing teams behind them, but they are making the discoveries and contributions that are built upon by later generations to advance our species. You mention the geography articles I nominate, so I'll use an example from them. Waldo R. Tobler  5 is someone you likely haven't heard of but who likely impacted your life. He published the first peer-reviewed paper on Computer cartography  5, and made major contributions to the discipline. Look at his name on Google Scholar and check the citation counts on his publications. Building on his work Roger Tomlinson created the first Geographic information system  5. If you've ever used a smart phone to navigate, or any map made in the past 30 years, the technology that made that happen was based on their work. If you look at the page for American Association of Geographers, one of the major awards is the "Geographic Information Science and Systems Specialty Group Tobler Lecture Award." The Austrian Academy of Sciences has two awards named after Tobler. Within the discipline, Tobler hasn't just won awards in geography, they are named after him at the highest level in multiple countries. When he died, at least seven peer reviewed journals published memorial articles or issues about him, including one titled Waldo Tobler: Remembering a genius. This is evidence for a major impact on humanity in my opinion, backed by academic sources, but I couldn't get Tobler past level 5, and couldn't get Tomlinson added at all. I don't think many athletes have had such an impact on their sport, much less broader society, and few have made such tremendous waves in their discipline that the highest awards are named for them. You'll find such individuals in most if not all of the academic disciplines, they don't have multimillion marketing teams using their likeness to sell shoes, so you will have to read up on the topic themselves to learn about them. A person or topic being "vital" should be easy enough to determine even if you haven't heard about it, and I struggle to read the articles for most of our athletes and find contributions that have made bigger impacts then scientists we don't include at all. Most of the sports figures pages are so mundanely similar to each other that I'd need some really advanced analysis to pick out which ones are uniquely boring enough to propose individually cutting. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 07:05, 24 January 2025 (UTC) "popular music and film should be cut just as much and video games should be down to 5 or 10 people if sports has to be." I do agree that we probably list too many musicians, and I've been trying to find ones to remove, but it's fairly difficult and less clear cut to figure out which ones should go in comparison to sports figures. As for video game designers, we only list 19. I agree that comparing video games and media franchises to sports figures is somewhat flawed, but to say that 19 video game designers is too much and is a number in need of reduction when we have 1,202 sports figures (about 63x more than video game designers) is absurd. Maybe there's a few video game designers we list that we shouldn't, but that's most definitely an issue that can be easily resolved. λ NegativeMP1 01:16, 24 January 2025 (UTC) Respectfully, while sports are very popular, arguing that if sports needs to go down to 1,100 that video games need to go down to 10 is absurd. There are 100 athletes on the list who could be removed, and I can't think of too many who need adding. The same doesn't apply to films or video games. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:30, 24 January 2025 (UTC) Agree that video games are already at a point where cuts are difficult. I have been going through those sections a bit and have struggled to single out individual ones for removal. Cutting one would seem arbitrary, and could justifying most if not all being cut. If I applied that criteria to consistently cut those sections to sports figures, I think only some of the ones currently at level 4 would pass scrutiny. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 18:27, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Neutral

This consensus building section is a bit awkward. I feel like it was a hey the vote is now 5–3 does anyone want to give up and switch to the winning side. We know how to vote and the results are the consensus. No extra consensus building section is really necessary.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 20:58, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

In one sense, yes, I started the section to see if we could get a clearer margin; like we've agreed elsewhere, quota proposals should probably find an even clearer result than article ones. Honestly though, my #1 motive is just to close the proposal out. It's taking up a lot of bandwidth, and I feel like much of the discussion is just arguing in circles about things we aren't going to change our minds on. That's another reason I started the new section; the existing voting area is already getting hard to parse, and I wanted to state my PoV fresh in a way we could hopefully compromise further on.

I wouldn't really look at it as winning or losing sides though. From where things started, we've converged on the most incremental cut, and there have already been several good-effort proposals to trim the most marginal athletes from the section. I know you don't like the cut, but I was hoping that even then, maybe we could come up with something you would feel better about: say balancing representation across sports or coming to an understanding on where things should go in the long-run.

And funny enough, we kind of did. Even though I didn't post it below, your mention of Lv3 vs. Lv4 vs. Lv5 got me thinking about how large I would like to see Sports figures long term. I realized I'll probably oppose cutting Athletes any lower than 1,000 long-term. I still want to see Religious and Military bios both at that size too, but by bumping them up (which I believe can be done), not cutting Athletes. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 03:21, 25 January 2025 (UTC)

Proposal signature

GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:04, 8 January 2025 (UTC)

Initial discussion

Various discussions on vitality, practical considerations, and biases

@GeogSage: There is a reason that the pinnacle criteria mentions VA3 people. That criteria was written before there was a VA5, so it doesn't apply as strictly to this level. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:24, 11 January 2025 (UTC) The criteria uses example, it should apply or we need to amend it. Fundamentally, very few athletes have a material impact on humanity, they are just popular. The list we have is has a major recency bias. For example the Gladiator Flamma is described on the page as "He was one of the most famous and successful of his time." He is not vital, and most of the athletes we list are much less. Crixus was a Gladiator and military leader under Spartacus  4, leading an army of 30,000 formerly enslaved people against the Roman. Spartacus is level 4, but how many of our contemporary athletes had as large and memorable an impact as the Crixus who is not included? Looking across the lists, starting at level 3 individual people tend to be more represented then more broadly notable topics. For example, we have 85 articles at level 3 in "History," but 112 people. At level level 4, this trend appears to be worse among athletes then other groups of people. We have 95 "Sports figures," and 52 "Military leaders and theorists." People who lead armies and theorize about how to lead armies have more material impact on the course of humanity then soldiers in their army, but there are many on the List of Medal of Honor recipients who are not considered "Vital." These individuals likely have more material impact on the course of humanity then an athlete. Another example Vasily Arkhipov  5 personally stopped a Russian nuclear strike on a U.S. ship and is level 5. We have 2000 cities at level 5. However, we have 1,200 sports figures, 2,392 Politicians and leaders, and 2,168 Entertainers, directors, producers, and screenwriters. I struggle to believe there are more vital individuals then vital human settlements in the entire world over the entire course of human history. Another example from List of United States cities by population, Arlington, Texas is the 50th most populous city in the US, with an estimated 398,431, and Aurora, Colorado has a population of 395,052. These two cities are not included. Los Angeles  4 is the 2nd most populous city in the U.S., has 3,820,914 residents but is only level 4 while more then 10% of level 3 is dedicated to individual people. How many people are more "Essential to Wikipedia's other articles" then Los Angeles? We have a lot of creep in our coverage of people which forces us to cut other vital topics to make room. People on level 3 need to be more vital then Los Angeles. People on level 4 need to be more vital then Indianapolis  5 or El Paso, Texas  5. Level 4 people should be more impactful then the person who stood up and stopped a nuclear torpedo from sinking a U.S. warship. People at level 5 need to be more vital then someone who won the U.S. Congressional medal of honor, or any of the cities we exclude. A contemporary athlete we include should be more impactful then Crixus. I don't think we are thinking of the lists with this in mind. Athletes are heavily marketed corporate assets used to sell stuff, and people get caught up in that marketing and confuse it with being vital. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 20:58, 11 January 2025 (UTC) Maybe Flamma and Crixus should be on the list. Regardless, I don't agree with the position that we need less people on the VA lists. For example, I would argue that every person at VA3 is more vital than LA, and most (not all, but a large majority) of the people at VA4 do deserve to be there. There are definitely a decent number of VA5 athletes that could be removed, but most of them are vital enough to make the list. QuicoleJR (talk) 21:22, 11 January 2025 (UTC) I might be able to support adding Crixus, and I'd support Flamma more then most of the people we have, although not strongly. How do you define "Vital?" Do you have a set of criteria you're using for evaluations? Based on the criteria in the project, I can't honestly say I think most of the athletes actually qualify at all. The fact we have more then twice as many athletes as Religious figures, and more athletes then Military personnel, revolutionaries, and activists, is extremely problematic. I'd support each sport we list having one person at level 4 per sport that represent the "pinnacles of their field." We have more then 10% of level 3 dedicated to individuals, but the disciplines these individuals represent are much lower, like Musician  5 Artist  4, Scientist  5 and Engineer  5. The professions of Cartographer, Geographer, and Geologist aren't even included on the list at all (I'm going to nominate these after this). Whithin my narrow discipline, people who revolutionized cartography like Gerardus Mercator  5 and Waldo R. Tobler  5 are level 5, while people who were good at a sport are level 4. Each inclusion needs to be evaluated based on the vitality criteria, or this whole project is just a popularity contest for different fandoms. I'm struggling with finding any sort of consistency within the lists. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 00:13, 12 January 2025 (UTC) @GeogSage: I'm adding some more details down here in order not to clutter up the voting area. I actually agree almost completely with all your points here. While I've come around to giving a little space for popularity / mindshare at VA5, I think it does create a lot of severe imbalances in the list. I can't think of any good reason to have almost as many athletes as religious & military figures combined either. So I'm very sympathetic to this proposal, but for practical reasons, I don't feel comfortable with cutting sports figures by more than 100 or 200 incrementally. Beyond finding a compromise, I feel like a drastic cut all at once may not actually help much, unless it somehow also balances proposals and participation. Also, if this does pass, then we have to figure out where to reallocate the slots, which is another discussion. Then there are the deeper issues that you mention, a big one being we still don't really have an effective consensus on what actually makes an article "vital", despite WP:VACRIT. Until we're more on the same page about that and other process details, I worry heroic quota changes will only lead to a lot of bad feelings and churn. And yes, I realize the irony of me saying that after I wound up kicking off several quota discussions. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 22:44, 12 January 2025 (UTC) Fair enough. I've found that proposals like this work 60% of the time, every time. Compromise is better then nothing, and I'm wondering about some statistics that might work on this project. For example, page views. If we break each level into chunks with "quotas" assuming that different types of pages are not comparable, we could look at page views over 10 years for each article and plot them. Assuming a normal distribution, we could look at outliers to try and sort out what should be at higher or lower levels. Like, if a level 5 is 3 standard deviations higher then other articles in its category at level 5, it can be nominated for level 4, articles 3 standard deviations below the mean for its category could be dropped. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 01:31, 13 January 2025 (UTC) A brief comment: the editors making decisions here are largely male, and largely from countries where sport is a big deal. This major bias is the cause of VA's perennial problem of overrepresenting sports figures. I care more about improving this list by like-for-like–style improvements than fine-tuning quotae, but I do think that this particular quota is an issue. J947 ‡ edits 06:47, 23 January 2025 (UTC) Name a country where sport isn't a big deal. Even in the world's most impoverished nations, where professional leagues aren't feasible, rich sporting traditions exist. There are 211 member-states of FIFA and 206 NOCs. Compare this to 193 UN member-states. I could see an argument being made that more of our quota should be allotted to athletes from outside the Western world. But an argument that implies that there are a significant number of countries where sports isn't a big deal does not hold up. I get where you are coming from with the argument that sports skews male but I think even this is false. There are documented studies that show that women are forced to drop out of sports more often than men due to social expectations, lack of funding and infrastructure etc. etc. (one such source is [10]). This doesn't mean that women don't consider sports valuable. It's especially wrong when you consider that many sports we provide athletes for don't have any specific gender coding (e.g. tennis, swimming, gymnastics, athletics, figure skating, archery etc. etc.). Aurangzebra (talk) 07:21, 23 January 2025 (UTC) If you fail to see the bias then so be it – trying to convince you is unlikely to work. But it is simply reality that sport fandom skews heavily male and I don't see how one can avoid acknowledging this fact. J947 ‡ edits 08:46, 23 January 2025 (UTC) I agree with you that sports fandom skews male. What I don't agree with you on is that there is a 1 to 1 overlap between sports fans in the traditional sense and people who value sports. I think that's a very unfair comparison and is doing a huge disservice to women. Aurangzebra (talk) 21:09, 23 January 2025 (UTC) It's not one-to-one, of course, but there is a trend. For context, IIRC the number of sports biographies at VA4 used to be 125 instead of the current 96 – that figure was viewed as fairly astronomical and this figure is IMO similar. J947 ‡ edits 23:22, 23 January 2025 (UTC) Thanks for this. This is fair context and a justifiable argument for reducing the quota. Aurangzebra (talk) 01:27, 24 January 2025 (UTC)

Consensus building

Search for further compromise and request that undeclared participants vote

I partly want to start a new section so further comments are easy to follow, but I'm also hoping to keep this short & sweet. @NegativeMP1: Since you have replied in a thread, I'd really appreciate your input (even if it's neutral), but otherwise, I figure any regulars that haven't participated yet are probably aware of this proposal and simply wants to skip it. We've talked about making consensus around quotas stronger, and even have a live proposal meant to encourage that. As someone that supports a more incremental cut, but maybe for different reasons, I wanted to reach out to the current opposers to see if we can come to an agreement & wrap this up. @TonyTheTiger, QuicoleJR, and Aurangzebra: Is there anyway you would be OK with the 100 slot cut? I don't want to get into how vital athletes are relative to other people, but I am concerned with the amount of energy we put into adding or keeping them compared to most other sections. Personally, even more than the relative proportions between bios, I'd like to see People eventually trimmed overall. At VA4, Biographies are only 20% of the entire 10k articles; here they balloon to 30.6% of the 50k. Also just for reference, as J947 pointed out, the 96 sports figures at VA4 take up a mere 0.96% of the full 10k; even if we cut by 200 slots to 1,000, VA5 sports figures would be more than twice that at an even 2%. I'm actually fine with both People in general & Sports figures specifically having a somewhat bigger slice at this level. But some of our other sections are so incomplete, and I think VA5 is reaching the point we have to start making hard choices. I won't get into details just yet, but I can come up with lots of specific examples. Unless we're OK with a seriously deficient list, I think we're going to have to trim this section sooner or later. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 05:26, 24 January 2025 (UTC) Level 1 and Level 2 don't have bios. Level 3 has no sports bios. So comparing level 5 to level 4 is not relevant. At higher levels concepts and fields are more important. At lower levels bios can take greater share. We should not aspire to level 4 proportions. If we vote out 100 slots, I'll accept it. I don't like it. -TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 06:51, 24 January 2025 (UTC) Oh, I'm not saying we should try to match Lv4 proportions. My point was that we could prune almost all the People sections (except maybe Religious Figures) from where they are and still be giving biographies way more weight at Lv5. And I think we will need to trim some eventually. I didn't want to get bogged down in details, but if you want an extreme example, just skim the Religion & Philosophy section. It's currently over-quota with only 1,400 slots (just 200 more than Sports bios), and it still doesn't even list very basic sects / schools like Platonism, Hasidic Judaism  5, or Alawites. Or abstract concepts like Pattern. If that doesn't make people step back and say, "Wow... we really need to rethink our focus here", I'm not sure anything will. To your point about Lv3 not having any Sports figures though, I'd actually take that as a point for GeogSage's argument. Lv3 does list 7 religious figures so while I agree Lv 4 & 5 should open up room for new categories, and the ratios should change, I honestly don't see the logic for one flipping from 7-0 to 5-12. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:13, 24 January 2025 (UTC) I'm glad you started this section, thanks. I've been going through the full list, and agree we are rapidly approaching a point where we need to make tough choices. I realized looking at the fact there really isn't enough room to add a substantial amount of the WHO Model List of Essential Medicines  5. I had thought to make a proposal to go through and add the majority if not all of these 500 medicines to level 5, as each has been declared vital to the health of our population by a reputable organization. There just isn't room though, not in the section but the entire project, so I have scrapped that idea for the foreseeable future. The Drugs and medications section under Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5/Biology and health sciences/Health only has 151 articles in it, and the entire health section is only 1,047 articles, which is entirely inadequate in my opinion (My research is largely in public health, so I asked some of the medical doctors I work with about this, and for what its worth they agree). Sports figures having 1,200 pages, Actors having 481, Actresses having 466, while the health and science fields are woefully incomplete seems like we don't have our priorities in order for "vital" articles. Entertainment in general is what people get excited about, and it shows on this project. I believe that the project has grown more reactively and organically then with a top down master plan. Cuts are going to hurt, because every page was valuable enough for someone to include, but failing to clean it up now and free some breathing room will leave people in 10 years with a much more difficult situation, as the articles may be more entrenched by the amount of time they've been on the list. The average editors are going to reflect the population, and I think the experts we need to flush out some topics like medicine or philosophy would struggle to find room to add the topics they believe are vital even if they could convince their fellow editors to vote for something they've never personally heard of. I strongly agree we should trim the people sections back significantly overall for some house cleaning. The project is feeling very cramped, in a perfect world I think biographies should only account for roughly 5K at level 5 (10% of the project), but understand that isn't going to be easy with ~15,000 articles included for biographies and would be happy to get it down to 10K. I've already gone through most of the stuff I have knowledge of for low hanging fruit, like academic journals, universities, American TV shows, large franchises, etc. . The next section I'm moving into is Actors and Actresses for heavy pruning, but I struggle with this one more because they have noted references on subsequent actors/actresses, and I honestly only keep track of maybe a dozen or so A list actors/actresses. The point of making this post was mostly to get eyes on trimming athletes though, as I don't have the baseline knowledge to sort through 1,200 sports figures, and really needed help on it. Stirring the pot with dramatic proposals is often the only way to shake off rust and get momentum. Thanks for the help in keeping things on track! GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 18:19, 24 January 2025 (UTC) I am willing to support the 100 slot cut, and have changed my vote to reflect that. It wasn't an option when I originally voted. QuicoleJR (talk) 17:31, 24 January 2025 (UTC) I have offered my input on this matter as you have requested, supporting a cut to 900, and maybe 1,000 or 1,100 if either-or don't work out. My only question is: what will determine where the freed up spots go to? Will a separate discussion be held when the time comes? λ NegativeMP1 22:21, 28 January 2025 (UTC) Thanks for swinging by again and giving your input. As for where the spots will go, nobody has complained about the new "Unallocated" line in the table yet. I was hoping we would just let them percolate there for a little bit. Then when everyone's ready, we can start a clean proposal to reallocate them. My only suggestion for the actual proposal is let's not fix the destination upfront. Similar to the multiple options in this proposal, it would probably be better if we let people nominate their preferred category, everyone votes on each option, and the most supported gets the slots. Also, while it's up to everyone else, I'm really hoping we wait at least a couple weeks before starting the reallocation proposal. Not only has this one taken a lot of energy, but we should probably have a cooling-off period so everyone can rethink how they want to balance Lv5. I know I'm coming across as a stickler on page-size too, but we should almost definitely let this thread go to the archives first. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:57, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

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.