Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale

Support (Create noticeboard)

1. Thryduulf (talk) 19:04, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Per what I wrote in the pre-RfC stage, especially the process described here. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:38, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. --Enos733 (talk) 20:13, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
4. This is very needed, article creation at scale has highly disruptive potential.Lurking shadow (talk) 20:56, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
5. I suspect it's the only proposal that will achieve consensus here, effectively punting all this nonsense to a new location. Nonetheless, there are situations where it will be necessary, and it ought to be a net positive. Vanamonde (Talk) 21:01, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

   Re-affirming support. Yeah, we have an overabundance of noticeboards, but there isn't a place where someone can ask "hey is mass-creating from this list a good idea" and have a meaningful discussion about it. The closest we have is perhaps WT:N, which isn't very active. Vanamonde (Talk) Vanamonde (Talk) 15:11, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

6. Worth a try, though I'm uncertain of how much good it will in practice do. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:11, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Open to giving this a try. HouseBlaster^talk 21:18, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
8. A good start NW1223<Howl at me•My hunts> 22:52, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Per Seraphimblade. Not sure how much it will help, but it can't hurt. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:58, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
10. More community eyes will lead to better results. Pinguinn 🐧 04:55, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

    Decent idea. Not sure why we need a mega-RfC to create a new, optional noticeboard, though? – Joe (talk) 10:20, 4 October 2022 (UTC) Moved to oppose. – Joe (talk) 10:11, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

11. Echoing Seraphim. Don't have high hopes but its worth a shot. --WhoIs 127.0.0.1 ping/loopback 12:27, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
12. A centralized place where consensus can be established and referred to for each mass creation sounds like the proper way to ensure that article quality is met. Each case will inevitably be unique no matter how well concerns about scale, rate or notability are codified. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 15:51, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
13. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:00, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Sounds like a good idea. If mass creations are then questioned the noticeboard discussion can be referenced. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:25, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
15. Anything to help tamp down the eternal firehose of article creation. Even if mass article creations are a small percentage of it, that would still help ease pressure on AfC/NPP. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{a little blue Bori} 20:52, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Beyond My Ken (talk) 03:51, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
17. JoelleJay (talk) 05:41, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
18. It's worth a shot. –dlthewave ☎ 21:40, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
19. It would be low-traffic of course, but I do think that it would be really helpful for, in a centralised location, mass article creation to be beforehand discussed. To have multiple people look over the source(s) used and the notability of the to-be-created articles would resolve most of the problems around mass creation. It could turn into some consensus-less hell what with the dichotomy on the merits of mass creation, but I reckon it's worth a try. J947 † ^edits 22:24, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
20. Not sure how effective it would be but worth a try. Rlendog (talk) 14:59, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
21. Support --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:22, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
22. While I agree that current noticeboards may be able to handle this, there should at the least be a standardized method for notifying the community about mass creation requests. Reywas92^Talk 21:41, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
23. While the noticeboard itself may be another venue for "taking the wiki", those editors who actively avoid the place when creating articles at scale can more easily be considered not having the projects best interests at heart. Also, I disdain the suggestion that the creation of noticeboards at scale has any bearing on whether any one noticeboard is of practical use. LessHeard vanU (talk) 15:56, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
24. Could be useful but may not always be needed though. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:22, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
25. Support Almost certainly we will need a centralised location for discussion. It will be massively disruptive at the beginning and a board is one way to manage it. scope_creep^Talk 16:36, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (Create noticeboard)

1. Wikipedia already has 39 noticeboards and we should avoid adding more. A noticeboard related to something niche probably won't attract a broad audience and will be of limited usefulness. Hut 8.5 12:03, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Let's consider how the last time we tried adding a new noticeboard went. Article creation at scale is a problem, but do we really have distinct events often enough to justify a separate noticeboard? Why can't this be handled at AN or ANI? Trainsandotherthings (talk) 14:02, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
3. We already have more noticeboards than we can keep track of. Any discussion about whether or not to embark upon a particular spree of article creation can be conducted at an existing page (e.g., Women in Red) and advertised centrally. Moreover, "article creation at scale" is sufficiently ill-defined and fuzzy around the edges that we'd only be inviting meta-arguments and wiki-lawyering about what belongs on the new noticeboard. XOR'easter (talk) 02:11, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. The sort of topics which tend to be done at scale have quite different themes -- minor planets; species; athletes; settlements; &c. These all have existing projects which cover these specialist areas and so the particulars of the topic are best discussed there. If there are technical issues then these are addressed by existing discussion forums such as WP:BOTN. Per WP:NOTFORUM and WP:BIKESHED, we really don't need yet another talking shop. Andrew🐉(talk) 09:57, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Moved from support per XOR-easter and Andrew D. I do think it's a good idea to discuss mass creation projects with others before embarking on them, but they're absolutely right – it's better to have that discussion with editors who have subject-matter expertise. On reflection I can see how a mass creation noticeboard could easily be dominated by an unrepresentative subset of the community that is opposed to mass article creation in principle, much as Wikipedia:Village pump (WMF) ended up being dominated by people who have an ingrained dislike of the WMF. – Joe (talk) 10:11, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
6. It's a good idea to discuss but we already have too many noticeboards. Projects or already-existing noticeboards should be preferred. RSN is a particularly good venue for discussing sources (CF the discussions we have already had there about GNIS, GeoNET Names Server, which are some of the worst sources for mass-creation). FOARP (talk) 12:24, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
7. As to my knowledge there are only a few editors who masscreate not so much informative stubs. The issue was more that there has not been presented a viable solution to deal with it. To temporarily prohibit those few to release articles into mainspace and instead allow them to create drafts and submit them for review would be a better solution.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 12:41, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
8. I'm not convinced the number of mass-creators is high enough to warrant a separate noticeboard and its incumbent bureaucracy. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:25, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
9. I am leaning in opposition to this proposal because, while this question is in scope of this RfC, I think we're putting the cart in front of the horse. A noticeboard might make sense in the case that we have a special deletion procedure that relates to mass-created articles, or if we expect mass-creations to happen so frequently that we need a user conduct noticeboard, but I don't see evidence that ANI is unable to handle user conduct issues that pertain to mass creation. Absent a change in deletion policy or guidelines, the current proposal would essentially create a fork of ANI to deal with conduct issues that pertain to mass creation, and I'm not sure that a board that's going to only be visited by those who have an active interest in mass creation (or opposing mass creation) would be a good idea in terms of its ability to deal with conduct issues, especially since WP:CBAN generally restricts the discussion venues for community sanctions to AN and ANI, which I think is wise given that we want the general community to view proposed sanctions and discuss them before imposing sanctions in the name of the whole community. However, if there are changes in deletion policy, then a discussion to create a noticeboard might be apt at that time. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 17:25, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
10. We should be reducing the number of noticeboards, not increasing them. Article creation at scale can be either good or bad, depending on how it is done, but current procedures andnoticeboards should be able to handle this. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:43, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
11. I'm worried that this would create a little-frequented corner where it would be easy for a small number of regulars to dominate, as occurs at some of the more-specialist deletion arenas. Given the breadth of opinion on this topic that seems unwise. I also agree that topic or source-specific expertise is more useful than an all-purpose board. Espresso Addict (talk) 19:30, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Please don't; the creation of WP:XRV comes to mind. Which was an idea I enthusiastically supported, and now not even I'm watching it regularly. There's one noticeboard I regularly visit (WP:AN) and one I occasionally stumble upon (WP:ANI), and that's about it. I do post to WP:BLPN when I feel it's needed, but I don't visit BLPN to help with other cases there. That's unfortunate and suboptimal of course, but probably not unusual. The existence of a separate noticeboard for an issue is more likely to be noticed by those who currently need it, rather than those who are currently needed by that noticeboard. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:31, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Per Hut 8.5, XOR'easter, Joe Roe and David Eppstein. We already have too many notice boards. We do not have the manpower for an additional noticeboard with such a narrow focus. James500 (talk) 00:25, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
14. As Hut 8.5 noted, we already have 39 noticeboards with varying levels of traffic, and I think there's a high risk that the only regular contributors to a new noticeboard will be the same editors who have already been arguing back and forth about the mass-creation/SNG debates for the past several months. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 02:51, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
15. As others have noted, we have too many noticeboards already; the last thing we need is another one. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 04:03, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Others have put this better than I could. We already have many noticeboards and the numbers of "mass creators" isn't that high to warrant a separate noticeboard. A noticeboard with less reports would be on fewer people's watchlist, and would be prone to gaming by a small subsection of the community. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:27, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Per others. "Wenn Du nicht mehr weiter weißt, bilde einen Arbeitskreis" ("If you're ever stuck, just form a committee") is among the more infamous problem resolution strategies the German-speaking world has produced, and this very distinctly feels like the WP version of it. Dr. Duh 🩺 (talk) 08:50, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
18. Per Espresso Addict and others above. In addition, I'm concerned about the lack of specifics here: AARV floundered partly because there was so much bickering about how to flesh out the details, and this proposal has even fewer details than that one did. Noticeboards that aren't well thought out ahead of time turn into drama sinks, and I'm afraid that's what would happen here. Extraordinary Writ (talk) 06:26, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
19. Existing noticeboards should suffice. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 12:32, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
20. There are existing places these issues can be raised - ANI for example. Those are preferable to having another obscure location that no one can find. I can see the point of this, but don't think it's, right now, necessary. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:18, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
21. Weak oppose - as above, but in particular because of the likelihood that it would be too easily dominated by a small group of editors with a particular agenda. Ingratis (talk) 09:34, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
22. Unnecessary as it would rarely be of use and there are other forums available. BoJó | talk UTC 09:40, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
23. I would oppose this proposal, unless such a noticeboard also encompasses mass actions in general. NotReallySoroka (talk) 05:22, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
24. Noticeboards are magnets for drama and unnecessary fights. We already have bot noticeboards for the kinds of software-assisted creations that there is clear consensus to ask permission first. Otherwise, it's not necessary and will just deter good editors who end up having their every move stalked by people who have a problem with articles about a particular subject. Steven Walling • talk 21:00, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
25. I would much rather we have a set of rules around the mass creation of articles. A noticeboard would instead allow a small group of editors to become the gatekeepers of new content. Supertrinko (talk) 02:00, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
26. Oppose per Hut. When broader community input is needed WP:VPR is the correct location. BilledMammal (talk) 03:52, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
27. Per Trainsandotherthings: Article creation at scale is a problem, but do we really have distinct events often enough to justify a separate noticeboard? feminist (talk) 17:00, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
28. WP:VPR is more conducive to peaceful discussion. I strongly oppose taking it to WP:ANI, (supposedly) a noticeboard for urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems (emphasis in original). A subpage of some sort could be created indexing mass-creation-related discussions for easy reference, which I feel is the only benefit of a separate noticeboard. Ovinus (talk) 01:00, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
29. We already have too many noticebords, no need to add yet another one. Per Joe Roe, this noticeboard is unlikely to be watched by a broad spectrum of editors. It is better take input from a general forum like WP:VPR. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:35, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
30. Absolutely not, we have VPR for that.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:40, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
31. As other editors have said, we can use VPR for the occasional mass article creation, and its other purposes. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:23, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
32. Oppose all aspects of policing article creation like until after WP:BOLD is abolished. There's no reason to presume someone is acting in bad faith merely because they do a lot of work. --Jayron32 18:22, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
33. As stated in the introduction, current policy mandates that mass creation of articles is treated as a bot task. We already have a noticeboard for considering bot tasks. WaggersTALK 11:45, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
34. It is unnecessary. Mass creation already requires bot approval. BAG will not give approval unless community consensus is first demonstrated. We don't need to regulate where that discussion takes place. The appropriate place will vary depending on circumstance. SpinningSpark 18:22, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (Create noticeboard)

Comments from Editor Scope_creep (Q1)

VPR is not the place to discuss. We don't even known the types of problems that will raised, never mind finding ways to fix, update code, discussion to reach consensus, approval and so on. There are so many unknowns. A noticeboard is an ideal way to centralise these things. With AI going to be used to generate all these new articles, where do you record that information, for example, during an approval process. On the talk page. Not a chance. On some other board. Its not specific to that board. Not having a board also means a complete lack of focus, with a lack of participatory action by interested editors. We have seen this in the past with NPP dissapearing in 2021. There is no reason that I can think of that would be net positive, if it not used. Lastly, the number of boards is irrelavant. It is the centralised recording of information, where everybody knows where it is and is easily accessible, that is important here. scope_creep^Talk 16:49, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Statements (Require GNG-quality source(s))

Please rank your choices by listing, in order of preference from most preferred to least preferred; ranking all options you don't consider completely unsuitable will assist closers in determining consensus. Sign as usual with 4 tildes.

1. D only (I don't think change will improve things, especially given the very significant variety in SNGs) --Enos733 (talk) 20:16, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. C2 > C > A2 > A > D > B2 > B. Much of the conflict that led to this RfC is driven fundamentally by a mismatch between criteria used for creation and for deletion. This is primarily the result of SNGs that do not independently confer notability being used to justify mass-creation using databases and lists. Neither such SNGs nor such sources are, at present, admissible as evidence for keeping at AfD, where such articles inevitably end up. Requiring the articles to include sources supporting GNG addresses this mismatch. I would prefer two sources to one, but requiring it of every single article is a bit of an over-reach. Vanamonde (Talk) 20:53, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. B2 > B > A2 > A > C2 > C > D. Vanamonde's point about the disconnect between creation and deletion is a good one, and requiring editors to create articles that meet some (very low) quality standards will improve the quality of the encyclopedia while also naturally preventing problematic mass-creations of articles without affecting highly productive editors that also produce high quality articles. BilledMammal (talk) 00:08, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
4. D (only). This proposal conflates two fundamentally different concepts: notability and verifiability. We cite sources in articles so that our readers can verify the information in them, not so that editors, and the best sources for verification are not always the sources that show notability. If there is doubt about the notability of a topic, it should be addressed with cleanup tags, talk page discussions, and/or an AfD nomination, not by shoehorning sources into articles where they're not needed and have no value to our readers. Notability is a property of topics, which does not depend on the state of sourcing of the article. I also have significant misgivings that options A and B are valid outcomes of this RfC (see below). – Joe (talk) 10:40, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
5. D only. A and B are an attempt to make large changes to notability guidelines by the back door and are frankly not valid outcomes of this RfC. An RfC about large-scale article creation should restrict itself to proposals about large-scale article creation as people who have no interest in large-scale article creation probably won't participate, so support for these proposals here does not indicate there is community consensus for them. A and B will make big changes to numerous SNGs, including some which have always been understood to be independent of the GNG (such as WP:PROF and WP:GEOLAND). The GNG also does not require multiple sources. I could get behind Vanamonde's suggestion below that mass-created articles only should have evidence that the subject meets the GNG or a criterion which is independent of the GNG. Hut 8.5 12:12, 4 October 2022 (UTC) Amend per Vanamonde93's comment below: not opposed to C if it means something similar to the 4A proposal. Hut 8.5 17:57, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
6. B2>C2>B>C>A(2). Two sources should be a minimum to show sufficient coverage. Although at the end of the day I'd support any of these changes. --WhoIs 127.0.0.1 ping/loopback 12:31, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
7. C-# > D. For C specifically, the number of sources should be sufficient and varied to write an article. This is how all GNG works and I don't see why mass creation should lower this bar. From my experience, AfD sees 3 in-depth sources as barely enough. A and B options sound like they are outside the scope of the RfC and change how all articles are approached, so I cannot see how those are valid options here. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 16:01, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
8. D > C > C2. I don't think change will improve matters, but C is acceptable. A and B are not. Thryduulf (talk) 16:08, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
9. C,B,A,D (don't really care whether the requirement is 1 or 2 sources). This seems to have worked for WP:SPORTSCRIT, so it would be beneficial to expand it to here. I concur that A and B are kind of outside scope, so prefer to C to them. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 17:58, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
10. C,B,A,D I don't see that having one reference that supports GNG is onerous, and should take the some of stress of AfD. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:29, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
11. D only - the other options are tempting, but we the community should have no appetite for a repeat of the Pending Changes "trial". That that page even exists should be telling. —Jéské Couriano v^_^v ^{a little blue Bori} 20:56, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
12. B2 > B > A2 > A > C2 > C > D. If an editor is creating an article that needs to meet GNG, then presumably they've already found sources (otherwise, how would they know that it meets GNG?) so simply including these sources in the article is not a big ask. This would take a lot of pressure off of the creation and deletion processes, both of which currently require other editors to search for sources to prove that it's not notable before challenging. –dlthewave ☎ 23:01, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
13. D only. I'm extremely uncomfortable with this question as noted below and particularly per Hut 8.5 above. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:45, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
14. D only, with a trout to whoever decided to insist upon ranking "all seven options". (Bikeshedding should not be obligatory.) This entire discussion is predicated upon the idea that the GNG is objective, unambiguous, and easily applicable, when really all it does is transfer the ambiguity to questions about what counts as "significant" coverage. Let's not make things worse than they already are. XOR'easter (talk) 02:17, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
15. D only. WP:N notes quite explicitly that It meets either the general notability guideline (GNG)... or the criteria outlined in a subject-specific notability guideline (SNG provided the article is not barred by WP:NOT, so SNGs generally do confer notability except when they explicitly state that they don't (or, like WP:NCORP, explicitly state stricter-than-GNG source requirements per community consensus); WP:DEL-REASON#8 explicitly refers to consensus to delete articles whose subjects fail to meet the relevant notability guideline, rather than simply articles whose subjects fail some notability guideline. We have notability guidelines that do not so much as require significant coverage of the article subject to exist, such as WP:NGEO's guidance legally recognized populated places and WP:COMPOSER#1. Requiring GNG-quality sources is not warranted based on our current notability guidelines; if there exist guidelines that don't require SIGCOV, then requiring evidence of SIGCOV is not a good measure of whether mass creation is appropriate or not. Rather than looking for "GNG-quality sources", it would probably be better to frame this as something along the lines of "contains sourcing in the article that shows that the article subject satisfies at least one notability criterion", but this bumps into the wisdom of WP:NEXIST. An alternative might be to create a speedy deletion tag for all mass-created articles that do not contain a sourced claim of significance, which seems like a natural extension of WP:A7 to handle this sort of situation. But I don't think that GNG is the right framing here when the vast majority of controversial mass creations are under SNGs and this proposal's options basically excludes anything that could possibly claim SNG notability. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 03:56, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
16. B2>B>A2>A>C2>C>D. This would only apply to subjects that already must have two+ GNG sources in existence; requiring those sources to actually be cited in the article from the start will, by definition, not affect whether the subject merits an article. So this would have zero change to notability guidelines aside from any special informal temporal leeway certain topics may currently receive when having to demonstrate notability. JoelleJay (talk) 05:53, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
17. C 1 or 2. Vanamonde makes a good point between the mismatch in article creation expectations and article deletion expectations. If not a single reliable source can be found for mass created pages, then there are probably better ways to present the content. A and B are nice enough, but I find the arguments they are somewhat out of the scope of this RfC reasonable. CMD (talk) 08:19, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
18. D only This has nothing to do with the issue of scale. WP:GNG is not a policy, explicitly provides for exceptions and so is not mandatory. Andrew🐉(talk) 10:04, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
19. All articles should meet GNG>All articles should have at least one instance of SIGCOV>B2>B1>C2>C1>A2>A1. Strongest possible oppose of D. I do not see mass-creation problems in any area where GNG applies, it is entirely a creation of SNGs, particularly GEOLAND and NSPORTS (at least whe NSPORTs was being interpreted as if it were a stand-alone SNG). It is caused by just going through a database which does not provide enough coverage to actually write a meaningful article on and creating articles. I do not see what possible basis there is for GEOLAND being somehow kept out of this issue when it is far and away one of the worst areas for mass-creation problems. Requiring at least one instance of SIGCOV means that in every instance at least some kind of meaningful article can be written. FOARP (talk) 12:31, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
20. B2 > B > A2 > A > C2 > C. At least two independent sources are necessary to write a neutral article; an article which doesn't have them is going to fail multiple policies in any case. And assuming they're not just making stuff up whole-cloth, the person who originally creates an article ought to have those sources on-hand in any case; it's logical to ask them to provide them at the start. While we allow unsourced text to exist until it is challenged, an entirely unsourced article is another matter entirely. And trying to apply this only to some formally-defined "article creation at scale" is doomed to fail - the simple fact is that if someone is not mass-creating articles, providing the two sources they used to write the article should be trivial for them. The argument that this would somehow change our existing notability guidelines (which already set this requirement) is nonsensical. --Aquillion (talk) 14:59, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
21. C2, C. We should stick to making rules for mass-created articles. Two sources is preferable because the bar should be higher for an experienced user mass-creating new articles than for the ordinary Joe. Scolaire (talk) 15:05, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
22. D > C > B > A. Per Scolaire and WP:CREEP, we should stick to making rules for mass-created articles. I don't think the wording of any of A, B, or C is clear enough to both have the desired effect of preventing mass creation from lines in databases, and to avoid damaging the creation of properly-sourced stubs. And in practice, something like this is already the case, with unsourced stubs generally quickly getting draftified by the new page patrollers, so we don't need extra rules saying that something must happen without providing any mechanism for making that thing happen. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:30, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
23. C The best choice on this entire page. "A" and "B" are basically the elimination of SNG.....probably a good thing in the long run but not something that you do in a mass creat RFC. North8000 (talk) 19:06, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
24. B>B2>A>A2>C>C2>D, although A and B may be out of scope, as noted multiple times above and below. The burden of deleting a page (WP:AFDBEFORE) is considerably higher than the burden of creating one (WP:BLPPROD?). I can create 1000 pages about non-notable subjects citing nothing but interviews, and deleting each of them requires others to check various search engines for material I should have provided in the first place. And if one of the 1000s is actually notable, I have even achieved a goal "positive to the encyclopedia" on behalf of others' free time. AFC/draftification and WP:A7 exist, but they don't entirely solve the problem. Requiring at least one independent reliable source as proposed, for whichever cases this RfC can actually decide about, perhaps even two, sounds fine to me. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:58, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
25. D only per Joe Roe, Hut 8.5, XOR'easter, Red-tailed hawk and David Eppstein. Proposals A and B are completely outside of the scope of this RfC. C assumes that GNG is objective and unambiguous. C is not compatible with WP:NEXIST. James500 (talk) 00:26, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
26. B2 > A2 > C2 > B > A > C > D. All articles, like all mainspace content, should be supported by multiple sources. I'll take as close to that ideal as I can get. Levivich (talk) 01:18, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
27. D only A and B aren't related to mass creation in the first place, what counts as "would plausibly contribute to GNG" is too open to interpretation to be useful for a deletion or draftification criterion, and with the general trend away from SNGs that language seems a little odd. (I especially oppose any requirement for two sources; there are DYK-quality articles with only one non-database source.) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:03, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
28. D ≫ C > C2: I don't think that change will help here. Notable topics may suffer from scarcity of sources, while non-notable ones may have enough in the form of generic listings on web.^{(stricken as there is a carve-out for SNGs)} Not every article has to be a GA. If the proposals covered one or two subject areas, I would have considered to support. But a blanket rule is too far reaching that will hurt content creation more than improve it. Even more far reaching are the A/B proposals, which I think shouldn't be enacted at any cost. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 08:53, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
29. D > C (subject to a contingency) >> (A or B) - C only works if we have an adequate definition of "mass creation". Some of the definitions that have been proposed, like 50 over a month or 500 over a year amount to less than 2 a day, which is really not mass creation. Maybe something like 20 a day or 100 a week would qualify, and thus be appropriate to require some additional indication of notability upon creation. A and B might make sense at some point but are really outside the scope of this RfC. C2, B2 and A2 all go far beyond what should be required at the time of creation - there is time to add additional sources if there is a reliable source in the article at creation, and in addition B2 and A2 are way beyond the scope of an RfC on mass creation. Rlendog (talk) 15:06, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
30. C, the vast gulf in effort required to mass-create versus mass delete articles means that some form of quality control has to be introduced, and one GNG-approaching source is an acceptable compromise here, the massive amount of wasted editor time over mass-created sports biographies showcases this excellently. Devonian Wombat (talk) 02:16, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
31. C# with option C-2 > C. THis is because our problem addressed here is for masscreated articles, and this requirement should mean that the articles should pass GNG. And thus not be a problem for being useless or deletable. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:41, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
32. B > C > A > B2 > C2 > A2, not D. Requiring at least one instance of significant coverage should be a bare minimum for any article, but is an absolute must in order to prevent disruptive mass-creation. We are well beyond the point of doing nothing, so no change is not an option. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 12:30, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
33. Other: Depends if the article is a BLP. I feel that we need to raise standards incrementally, and the first standard we raise should be the one for biographies of living people. I feel that from now on, nobody should start a new biography of a living person in the mainspace unless it cites at least two GNG-quality sources, but if that's difficult we could make it one GNG-quality source and one other non-database source for the time being.—S Marshall T/C 19:02, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
34. D only. This really won't help. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:20, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
35. C>C2>D. The others are out of scope of this RFC. We are tolerating these quality errors from newbies because we don't want to bite them away, but mass-created articles with severe problems like that coming from likely more experienced editors are just not tolerable.Lurking shadow (talk) 06:53, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
36. D mainly; C is just about OK only. Of course articles should have reasonable sources. But trying to put in place "rules" which are really quite precise will cause more harm than good and lead to gaming Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:22, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
37. C2 > B > A; NOT D. The problem is mass creation so options A and B are effectively academic, though it is worth making the point that any new article must have SIGCOV from at least one reliable non-database source. BoJó | talk UTC 09:37, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
38. D Only The other options are inadequate, will leave a great opening for continued creation of poorly sourced stubs in areas covered by SNGs or not subject to GNG. - Donald Albury 14:55, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
39. D only. Per several others. BeanieFan11 (talk) 17:52, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
40. A2 > A> B2 > B > C2 > C, not D All articles, mass-created or not, should be expected to have a modicum of significant coverage that is not merely databases. The failure to include significant coverage in new articles is what leads to issues at AFD. Failure to include significant coverage in mass-created articles increases the probability of incorrect, low-quality, and non-notable content and moreover results in intractability of these issues as the scale of the articles make it daunting to attempt to address the problem at AFD as people call for procedural keeps. Reywas92^Talk 21:47, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
41. B > A > D > C - Requiring all articles to cite at least one source would ease many problems around here. Honestly, my ideal wording would be B, if it would leave out the parenthetical. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 20:11, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
42. D only. As said several times A and B are out of scope anyway, and C presupposes that GNG is clear and unambiguous, whereas much of AfD is actually occupied by squabbles between different subjective interpretations of what is or isn't GNG-worthy. Ingratis (talk) 06:55, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
43. B2 > C. B2 would overall best for the encyclopedia, but I think C more directly addresses the mass creation issues which have caused such trouble, so I'll settle with that for the time being. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:32, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
44. B2 > C. WP:SPORTCRIT already contains language comparable to B1, and it is my experience that it has slowed the creation of sports biographies that are sourced only to statistical databases (particularly for editors that engaged in "mass" creation via those databases). I think B2 will reduce the flow even further. The quantity of these types of biographies (and the toll it places on our deletion processes) is such that D cannot be the preferred outcome. Jogurney (talk) 19:53, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
45. A2>A>B2>B>C2>C>D Badly sourced articles being deletable would solve many problems. The most important articles already exist in an acceptable state(e.g. Earth). The less important articles need sources; if they have reliable sources they can far easier be checked for misinformation. The job of the cleaning squad would become drastically easier. We only have limited human resources already being stretched, let's solve that.Lurking shadow (talk) 17:20, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
46. C2 > C > A2 > A > D > B2 > B. scope_creep^Talk 18:42, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
47. D only. No need to change the existing rules. A and B are unrelated to this RFC. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 06:50, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
48. D only no change needed, this RFC is nonsensical. A and B out of scope, and we are becoming overreliant on GNG to begin with.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:41, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
49. B > C > A > B2 > C2 > A2 Requiring a single SIGCOV source is a perfectly reasonable quality standard, and doesn't put any strain whatsoever on competent page creators. There's no reason why article creators should not put at least that much effort into their work. Requiring two is perhaps too much, but still better than nothing. Avilich (talk) 18:31, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
50. C2 > C > B2 > B > A2 > A > D As stated above "Badly sourced articles being deletable would solve many problems." WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 00:51, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
51. B2 > B > A2 > A > C2 > C > D per Dlthewave, ToBeFree and others. The needs of Wikipedia have changed since 2005 but many of our policies and guidelines have not. Rather than further expansion, we mostly need further curation, and additional articles should meet a basic quality standard to avoid degradation of our reputation and accuracy. I cannot think of an example (excluding our almanac and gazetteer articles) where, in 2022, it would be appropriate to create an article that did not contain two sources that contribute to notability.
    I have never bought the argument that there are topics that are notable because of unreliable/useless sources that can't be included in the article. Even if this was true for a topic, a responsible volunteer would put the sources on the talk page. And we need to shift the burden of labour onto creators a lot more than we do, because of the huge burnout and understaffed ("under-volunteered?") nature of NPP, AFC, AFD and related areas. — Bilorv (talk) 13:09, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
52. Weak support for C, but really I think the guidance should go something like this: "Mass created articles must include sufficient sourcing to show notability, and cannot be based only on simple statistical databases. While there are no firm requirements about the level of quality an article must reach when created, many in the community have a strong preference for mass created articles to be more than one- or two-sentence stubs." (This obvious extends to quality, but doesn't mandate anything about length). 2B and 2A are outside of this RfC. (copied from comments section below in case it matters). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:23, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
53. D; while an argument can certainly be made for a modification of our guidelines, per Joe Roe and others, I feel like a wide-ranging alteration to the general notability guidelines should be made at an RfC about the general notability guidelines, not as one item of a seventeen-part RfC about mass article creation. It's already difficult enough for people to pay attention to the ever-blossoming world of gigantic policy RfCs, but I think it stretches the bounds of credibility to expect people to pay attention to every RfC on the whole site on the off-chance that an RfC about roller coasters has grave implications for rutabagas. jp×g 09:00, 25 October 2022 (UTC)
54. C or C2. It is clear that mass creating articles causes problems when the creator has not provided sources. If a user is mass creating articles they should be able to demonstrate that the article is notable as the time needed to clean up if they actually are not is a problem. For individual articles this is not as much of an issue, but for mass creations I think the burden should be on the editor who created the article. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:20, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
55. D only. Notability attaches to the subject, not the article content. So long as WP:CSD A1/A3 standards are exceeded, we're fine. --Jayron32 18:26, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
56. D only Wrong forum. At some point we will have such a requirement. But this discussion isn't the right place for it. Also I think the other options are a poor idea that would hurt getting and retaining new editors and so are bad for the encyclopedia. CSD criteria are enough. Hobit (talk) 17:42, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
57. D only. I don't see why we need special notability rules for mass creation. SpinningSpark 18:24, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
58. Anything other than D we have passed the point of needing to import databases. --Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 11:00, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (Require GNG-quality source(s))

Statements (Require inclusion of GNG-quality source(s))

Please rank your choices by listing, in order of preference from most preferred to least preferred. Sign as usual with 4 tildes.

• D only. Notability attaches to the subject, not the article content. So long as WP:CSD A1/A3 standards are exceeded, we're fine.
• D - there's already enough in the GNG to deal with this. Blue Square Thing (talk) 09:01, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
• D only. It is irrational to create different notability rules for mass-created articles. SpinningSpark 18:28, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (Require inclusion of GNG-quality source(s))

Support (Create definition)

1. • Thryduulf (talk) 19:06, 3 October 2022 (UTC) Reconsidered in light of others' comments. Thryduulf (talk) 07:40, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
   • Supporting on principle, but it's odd to ask if we should have a definition while simultaneously making decisions about the undefined thing. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:45, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
   • Support. How about the definition would be the top 10 article creators? Or 20?Paradise Chronicle (talk) 23:06, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (Create definition)

1. I supported, but was confused by the difference between the heading, which asks "By rate, source, similarity, other?" and the actual proposal, which answers that question: "by rate, similarity, and source". I moved to oppose mainly because "similar/similarly-structured" needs more clarity and because "using the same source" should be one way in which they can be similar/similarly-structured. See my comments below for an alternative. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 19:58, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Support creating a definition, oppose this definition. As I see it, mass-creation is simply creating articles without individually checking them for notability. Period. It's sometimes justifiable; it sometimes draws from lists or databases whose entries are inevitably notable; and sometimes it doesn't, but the products may still be good. However, putting numbers on it misses the crux of the matter, and also allows for endless dispute about timing and rates (see how bad the wikilawyering can get just with respect to 1RR restrictions). Vanamonde (Talk) 21:00, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I'm not sure I support a direct numeric value as anything but guidance; hard numbers can be gamed. The idea here is "If you intend to create a whole bunch of very similar articles, get community feedback rather than just plowing ahead with it." That's not unnecessary at 49 in a week but suddenly essential at 50. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:22, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Per Jacobellis v. Ohio, no need to get boxed in to definition that can be gamed. nableezy - 04:23, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
5. No need to get bogged down in particulars. Mass creation can be mass creation even when done slowly. Pinguinn 🐧 04:56, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
6. A definition for guidance is a good idea, but not rigid numbers. Thryduulf (talk) 07:40, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
7. It's really more about vibe then about specific numbers. We should avoid at all cost the wikilawyering that will come with putting a specific number on it. Create a definition but avoid putting a box around it too strictly. --WhoIs 127.0.0.1 ping/loopback 12:33, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
8. I support creating a general description of what "mass creation" would be. But not a rigid definition as such, because that would only lead to lawyering over details. More like a list of indicators of mass creation, like same process, high number, high rate, same source, same structure, etc. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 16:10, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
9. As with other editor's concerns this sounds like something that would end up being wikilawyered, whether claiming that creations do or don't meet the standard. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:33, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Pointless. "We'll know it when we see it". Might as well try to create a numerical definition of what WP:SIGCOV is, or what a stub is, or any of the other concepts which people have differing ideas around - the existence of those differing idea is not and should never be a reason not to do anything about the issues they address. FOARP (talk) 12:33, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
11. I've seen enough "I have made only 3 reverts, so I didn't edit war". ~ ToBeFree (talk) 22:02, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Impractical. Not the sort of thing you can define as each case needs to be considered individually for impact, need, etc. BoJó | talk UTC 09:44, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Better to focus on quality rather than quantity of new articles. - Donald Albury 14:45, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
14. The definition, if any is eventually adopted, will likely come from experience using the noticeboard. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:08, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
15. As mentioned previously, no. Articles should be looked at own merit unless an issue is raised elsewhere.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:43, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
16. I oppose any and all attempts to stop people from working hard to make Wikipedia better. Unless and until WP:BOLD is repealed, we need to leave people alone, and stop having to justify the work they are doing. --Jayron32 18:28, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
17. I'm not averse to having some guidance on this, but rigid rules are open to abuse. If you set 30 per month, creating 29 will suddenly be allowed by implication. 200 per year is way too low. That's less than one a day and is hardly overwhelming the community. SpinningSpark 18:33, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (Create definition)

Support 3A (alternative three-part definition)

1. As proposer. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:56, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. I think we can change the numbers later, but this is a good start at defining mass-creation. --Enos733 (talk) 21:16, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I don't think a generic "create definition" will suffice. We need to decide on a concrete definition at this stage. Scolaire (talk) 15:25, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Support this kind of criteria, but the third requirement is not necessary, as it is still article creation at scale if a script is used, just that extra controls are needed. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:58, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Generally support, since if we are going to have certain procedures related to article creation at scale we need a definition. I agree with Graeme Bartlett that criterion #3 is not needed and so should be eliminated. I also would remove "same sources" from #2, since it doesn't really matter and if there are multiple sources we are getting to the point where the mass creation is probably not a problem anyway. Of course, #1 needs to be defined appropriately. The proposal of 50 per month or 500 per year is really nowhere near appropriate, as we should be able to handle 2 creations a day from any editor. Something more like 25 per day, 100 per week would be more like a mass creation that would be potentially problematic (although I would be fine increasing those numbers). Rlendog (talk) 17:54, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
6. I support having a definition of mass-creation/article creation at scale, and I support that definition being based on all three of the criteria (rather than just some). The exact numbers (which have been removed?) do not matter to me, though I would like someone to be able to create more than one article per day without being hassled over it. Editors have done 30-day challenges to create articles, and if they like it enough to keep going, why shouldn't they? WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:27, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Support, but not this definition. The Rubicon has already been crossed, here. How it will pan out I don't know. We certainly need some kind of definition, in the manner of the processes we use at the moment but I don't know what it will contain. The bot approval problem is a process we can adapt. The disruption such a editor could do at scale would be enormous, so we need some kind of defintion for selection into the approval process with policy defining that standard. The whole thing needs needs to be hightly controlled at the beginning until everybody knows whats going on. If these creations are limited to 25 per day (which seem entirely arbitary and without foundation), its possible we either drive away new editors who would be expecting to create far more, as they have that capabilty, or we might miss the benefits of the AI revolution entirely, because we don't have vision to realise it. That opinion may change, re:numbers, when we see the physical benefits. 25 a day in 9000 odd a year. That is a number of articles that is easily checked and is within our capability. That figure may be a ideal number to start. scope_creep^Talk 18:43, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose 3A (alternative three-part definition)

1. Support some guidelines in principle, but 500 a year before some community oversight kicks in is way too many. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:19, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. The method of creation is not relevant, not convinced with these numbers. Thryduulf (talk) 23:24, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I'm fundamentally opposed to a numerical definition, see comments below. Vanamonde (Talk) 04:11, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Moral support as a better direction than a rigid definition, but any numbers will inevitably lead to gaming the system and arguing over semantics rather than following the intention. Kind of like everyone is always arguing about bot-like editing. Also I should not that mass creation and assisted creation are not mutually-exclusive. Both, either or neither processes could apply to article creation. Bot approval would still ask for mass creation approval should it become a more codified requirement. Finally, one point I do agree with is that an uninvolved admin (or "mass creation clerk" or some such) should have the "authority" to label any multiple article creation as mass creation to avoid arguments about what is or isn't mass creation on individual level. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 16:30, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
5. I oppose criteria 1. A definition of mass creation should be based on the amount of time spent writing the article. It should not be based the time between edits or the total number of articles. For example, a single article written in one minute is far more likely to be a problem than 500 articles each of which was written in 7.3 hours by an editor working ten hours a day for 365 days [i.e. (365 days x10 hours per day)÷500 articles=7.3 hours per article]. James500 (talk) 00:28, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
6. I can't support without having an idea of X and Y. I don't object to the idea, but if we leave this open then at some point X might get set to 3 and Y to 10 - and that's clearly nonsense (I've seen a suggestion that's not a million miles from those numbers). If a sensible lower bound were put on X and Y I might be able to support. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:26, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
7. As with Q3 above, impractical. BoJó | talk UTC 09:46, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Again, this is focused on quantity, I think quality is the key. - Donald Albury 14:47, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Same as above: "We'll know it when we see it". Just like with WP:SIGCOV and other similar concepts that lack a numerical definition but are nonetheless useful. FOARP (talk) 12:29, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
10. The worse offenders will game any given quantity or timescale (or sock around them). As commented in the prior definition discussion, examples will likely be self incrimminating to the casual observer. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:17, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Oppose, as articles can be on a similar topic without being mass created. In addition, the rate of creation doesn't matter; five hundred mass-created articles created over a week are as difficult to deal with as five hundred mass-created articles created over a year. BilledMammal (talk) 05:07, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Any numerical criteria is easily gameable. It is enough to use plain old common sense to determine whether someone is engaged in mass creation. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:06, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Oppose any and all attempts to stop people from doing the hard work necessary to make Wikipedia grow. WP:BOLD is still a core policy. --Jayron32 18:29, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments (alternative three-part definition)

Support (Q3B)

1. If this us just "should we have a definition", that seems obvious to me. Or, well, it did seem obvious until I saw a couple people on this page argue against it. What in the world is the noticeboard people are supporting going to be for if there's no clear definition of when someone needs to use it and/or what considerations requests will be judged by? Many people have proposed things like CSD or special rules for deleting mass created pages -- how can we support or propose anything like that without starting from a clear definition? — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:52, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
2. I believe this would be useful in principle. I'm fairly certain it's not going to get anywhere in practice, given how wide the disparities are in the understanding of the problems we face. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:14, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
3. We need some definition, but the placement of hard limits or certain methods will lead to wikilawyering. I think something that gives a basic definition, but only as far as the general idea, would be a better idea. We don't need a strict definition to recognise harassment, and we don't need one to recognise articles being created en masse. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:39, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
4. We absolutely must agree on some sort of a definition. Without a definition, we're all talking past each other when it comes to mass creation. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:47, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Per ActivelyDisinterested. The definition should be set of characteristics that mass actions generally have and non-mass actions generally don't that act as guidance not rigid rules. Thryduulf (talk) 09:37, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Sure? The devil's in the details on these things, though. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 22:12, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Support. I guess this is what the community needs so the parties don't have to explain it over and over again in discussions on editors who mass create articles.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 23:06, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Support, no real reason not to considering how much the topic is referenced. Devonian Wombat (talk) 02:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Yes, but make it fairly generic, and don't confuse the definition with the problems that may be there. The scale is just the rate or number, not the quality. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 03:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Support. We need a definition if we are going to do something about it. I think it needs to involve numbers, since only numbers can define whether the creation is "mass"; once we know we have a mass creation under the definition we can address whether the quality is adequate in any particular case. The numbers don't have to be rigid - if we say. for example, 25 per day and someone creates 24 per day for several days we can address that as mass creation, or even make the definition a bit fuzzy, like about X per [period]. Rlendog (talk) 17:58, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Support. This is the bare minimum we have to do to be able to take any action regarding article creation at scale at all. The definition might be somewhat fuzzy, but we need to have something to reference. --Aquillion (talk) 18:17, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Support. If we use numbers, then we can have a discretionary range - a minimum(e.g. more than 10 articles per week) and a maximum(e.g everyone doing more than 30 articles per week is engaging in mass-creation).Lurking shadow (talk) 19:40, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Yes, we need a definition. That definition needs to be clear enough that people who cry "mass creation" because someone created a handful of articles on subjects they dislike can be told to knock it off. We do not need another process in which there is one set of rules for me and another set of rules for thee. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:29, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Yes, per my opposition to 3A above Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:27, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
15. Though I still oppose numeric values being used as anything but very loose guidance (if at all), I think a clearer definition of what "mass creation" generally looks like would be helpful. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 12:02, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
16. As a statement more that a hard definition; "careless creation of quantities of low quality articles from poor sources are considered detrimental to the community cause" - if anyone can think of words beginning with c to replace article, poor sources, and detrimental, can substitute as they wish. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:24, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Support - you can't make rules about something if you don't define your terms. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 20:37, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
18. People here are disagreeing by an order of magnitude over the threshold (and other criteria) of "mass creation". Clearly we can't just say "I know it when I see it". Ovinus (talk) 00:51, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
19. Support, as 3A seems doomed to fail. There does need to be a definition, though I would have preferred to see a definition agreed in this RfC. Scolaire (talk) 12:44, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
20. If we are discussing "Article creation at scale", we should know what it is. Note that a simple fixed numerical definition is pointless, it must be conceptual and, if numerical, it must be flexible/adaptative - Nabla (talk) 23:57, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
21. This seems to be the most common sense place to start. Agree with Nabla that this shouldn't be a strict bureaucratic number but an overall spirit. (Contrast the WP:3RR with the broader spirit of WP:EDITWAR.) This doesn't have to lead to punishing or limiting mass creation, but being able to bring it into the light of discussion. Jontesta (talk) 23:14, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
22. WP:MASSCREATE currently says that creating more than 25-50 articles on the same topic is mass creation, with no additional context about rate or article quality. Judging by a lot of the comments on this page, particularly the ones distinguishing prolific creation from mass creation, that's not an accurate description of the issue at hand. Without another definition, though, we're making a lot of assumptions and talking past each other, and it's not clear what behavior any proposals would affect in practice. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:58, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
23. Support if this RfC makes rules about mass creation of articles, the definition of what makes something a mass creation is both important and IMO required. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:22, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
24. If we are going to debate whether creation of articles at scale is permissible, we really do need to have it well defined, so we can all be discussing the same thing. If we can't define it, we are wasting our time trying to regulate it. Having said that, I am also not expecting anyone to come up with a workable definition, per the Granfalloon comment below. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 19:11, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
25. Seems reasonable. Nabla makes a buch of good points. --Guerillero ^{Parlez Moi} 11:02, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (Q3B)

Per my support of 3A, I don't think a generic "create definition" will suffice. We need to decide on a concrete definition at this stage. Scolaire (talk) 15:27, 5 October 2022 (UTC) Switching to Support to try to reach consensus on one "create definition" proposal. Scolaire (talk) 12:44, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

1. Definitions are impractical and will be circumvented. A smart mass creation artist will always stop just short of the limit. Consider each case on its individual merits. BoJó | talk UTC 09:51, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
2. "Article creation at scale" is a granfalloon. Investing time into codifying a definition would just reify a wide variety of practices into a single thing. We've got people worried about the creation of 1000 sports stubs based on single lines in statistics tables from Gray's Sports Almanac, and other people pointing out that biomedical databases are rich with more than enough material to write articles, despite the "database" moniker. This isn't one argument; it's half a dozen different arguments, stemming from deep illusions that "GNG-level" and "SIGCOV" have meanings handed down from Sinai. XOR'easter (talk) 16:51, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Defining a threshold for the scale of articles that's okay to create is meaningless. In a vacuum, any particular number of articles—whether it's 10 or 10,000—could be spam or a major contribution to the encyclopedia. If we then try to create a more vague, non-numerical definition to avoid having the policy gamed, then it's not really an effective guideline. What matters is the quality of that encyclopedic content, in terms of verifiability and notability, which we already have well-established policies about which we can use to discuss the merits of articles and whether they should be deleted or not. If you think a particular subject or type of article is inherently not notable, then propose a new notability policy or guideline to specifically address it. A threshold based on the number and size of articles doesn't help us avoid crappy articles, and that blunt of a guideline will most definitely deter helpful editors from writing good articles. Steven Walling • talk 21:17, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Pure WP:BURO. I'm sure that this is not intended as such, but this is ultimately acting as just an excuse to do nothing. Wikipedia has many contested concepts (e.g., WP:SIGCOV, WP:BLUDGEON, WP:AUD etc.) but the fact that these are contested does not make them useless or counter-productive. What is an is not mass-creation is something that should be beaten out on a case-by-case basis and need not be predetermined here. Indeed, there are projects where mass creation already has been dealt with (particularly WP:NASTRO) and curiously enough they did not bother to define it explicitly beyond referring to the already-existing WP:MASSCREATE. FOARP (talk) 09:39, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Not something that makes sense to define numerically, and should be looked at on a case by case basis.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:44, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Oppose, same as all the others. We should not be regulating hard work, merely because someone has the time to do a lot of it. WP:BOLD exists. Follow it. Leave people alone. --Jayron32 18:30, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments (Q3B)

Support (prohibit)

1. The creation of encyclopedia articles must be understood as a matter of quality, not quantity, and that the rapid creation of articles almost certainly threatens our extant processes for article triage and improvement. Chris Troutman (talk) 20:37, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. The main problem affecting Wikipedia's status as an encyclopedia is the general lack of reliability. This includes lack of wikitext factual verification, lack of NPOV verification, and (where they exist) lack of citation validation. The exceptions are few, and glaring, as they inadvertently spotlight the vast majority of articles' shortcomings. As a tertiary resource of knowledge, Wikipedia falls short and cannot be trusted. Any action that does not immediately and directly deal with this problem contributes to it by extending and enhancing the status quo. This RFC, and its purpose, are prime examples. Not a single article should be allowed in Wikipedia mainspace unless it is deemed trustworthy by uninvolved editors. A first step would be that it should conform to the relevant Wikipedia mainspace policies, not an extraordinary concept. Any articles not created in this way do not contribute knowledge fit for anybody. Their provenance and accuracy are at best uncertain, and may as well be fiction. Considering the site's history and current state, it is prudent they be considered so unless proven otherwise. 65.88.88.68 (talk) 15:56, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
3. A "moral support", but every time I've examined a set of mass-created articles, they always have serious problems. I've never seen it done well. I've seen editors assert it can be done well, but I've yet to see an example. Levivich (talk) 15:40, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (prohibit)

1. Much too blunt of an instrument. At the most extreme, we're saying we don't want someone to create 51 GAs in a month on various topics? Or we're assuming they're all stubs? If the latter, a more precise question might be to ask whether we want a minimum level of quality for articles created at scale. Update: I've added Q5 accordingly. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 20:52, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. There are circumstances where mass-creation is quite justifiable. I'd support the more specific prohibition of mass-creation where notability is not automatic. Vanamonde (Talk) 21:20, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I think what is needed here is regulation, not prohibition. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 21:24, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Per everyone above. Thryduulf (talk) 23:24, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Mass creation without preapproval should be - and already is - forbidden, but this goes beyond that. BilledMammal (talk) 00:10, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Per Rhododendrites. Pinguinn 🐧 04:58, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
7. A non-starter. Mass creation—manual or semi-automated—has been one of the most useful tools we have for expanding our coverage of repetitive but encyclopaedic topics (e.g. geographic places, species, sports) and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. We have occasionally had problems with editors doing it badly, yes, but this would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It would also be a disaster for efforts to address systematic bias, because we'd be curtailing efforts to expand coverage in under-represented areas, while retaining all the mass-created articles we have now (favouring the Anglosphere/Global North). – Joe (talk) 11:06, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Mass creation of articles is OK if done properly. Hut 8.5 12:20, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Echoing everyone else. —  HELLKNOWZ ∣ TALK 16:36, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
10. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:00, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Articles are good, bad articles are bad. We don't want to stop good articles, but minimise bad articles that have to be taken to AfD and clog up NPP. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:41, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Plenty of instances where mass creation is perfectly justified (after elections, for example). I do think some parts of this (wider) debate have lost sight of the fact that new articles are the lifeblood of an encyclopedia. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:37, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
13. If an editor happens to find a batch of 10 notable topics in a day, and has the time to create properly sourced new articles on all 10 in a day, then that should be encouraged, not prohibited. The problem is the bad sourcing and cookie-cutter nature of some past binges of mass creation, not the volume itself. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:32, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
14. On the throwing the baby out with the bathwater and the problem is the bad sourcing and cookie-cutter nature of some past binges rationales articulated above. Are short descriptions of individual species or once-inhabited locales the sort of thing I expect to find when I open an encyclopedia? Yes, they are. Do we benefit people by freeing information that had been locked up in specialized, harder-to-navigate references? Yes, we do. XOR'easter (talk) 16:47, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
15. No. We are supposed to be creating an encyclopedia, and it is much closer to its beginning than the end. There is no reason to prohibit the creation of any articles. Phil Bridger (talk) 18:51, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
16. I've seen editors who can write 10+ sourced, non-stub articles in a day. There are definitely topics where Wikipedia is missing a lot of notable articles but it's also easy to find sources (e.g. American historic sites), and we want to encourage the creation of quality articles on those topics, not prohibit it. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:10, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
17. No, if the articles are good then they are welcome. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:00, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
18. No reason to prohibit mass creation of good articles that meet GNG and are well sourced. Rlendog (talk) 17:59, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
19. Decent, well sourced articles are welcome, however they come about. We don't need to restrict this in such a way Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:29, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
20. All that is needed is the requirement to cite reliable, non-database sources which provide significant coverage. Someone might have a couple of books which talk at length about numerous topics that are needed as individual articles. Those articles would then be mass-created but the sources would be reliable and coverage in each would be broad. We would welcome mass creation in that scenario. BoJó | talk UTC 09:56, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
21. Wrong approach, why limit the rate if articles subjects demonstrate notability and sourcing. - Donald Albury 14:50, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
22. This will start a war regarding WP:STUB, and their creation, which is an accepted guideline. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:28, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
23. No as long as the articles are still acceptable, if they aren't that's the same as if they were created individually other than perhaps the way the author may be dealt with namely the fact they have created more unsuitable pages quicker may make sanctions more likely. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:24, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
24. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 20:40, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
25. Blanket opposition to the creation of articles is the most boneheaded idea imaginable. Our mission is to create more encyclopedic content, not prevent it. Steven Walling • talk 21:02, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
26. Not in these hopelessly wide terms. Ingratis (talk) 06:56, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
27. If articles are good, then what does it matter if they are created en masse? We shouldn't try to gatekeep carefully crafted meticulous articles that people spend hours on before moving to the next one. There is nothing wrong with adding a bunch of stubs (that meet the criteria) and improving on them later. Supertrinko (talk) 02:07, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
28. Oppose - this should be dealt with case-by-case. In a theoretical scenario where someone is able to crank out a quality article daily that shouldn't be prohibited. Or if someone with expertise wants to make several stubs and improve on them over the next few days to weeks, that's not a problem either. I am of the opinion creating excessive rules will result in a barrier to entry for casual editors who may have valuable experience in a certain topic or field but don't live and breathe Wikipedia (I probably fall into that category). Connor Long (talk) 06:28, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
29. No, of course we can imagine a productive case for the above.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:44, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
30. Mass creation can help in some cases. --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:26, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
31. As previous editors have said, this should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:29, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
32. Said better above. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:23, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
33. Not only should we NOT prohibit it, we shouldn't even pay attention to it. WP:BOLD is still policy, and people who have the time, energy, and resources to improve Wikipedia should not be bothered. --Jayron32 18:32, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
34. Quantity should not be an issue. More good articles is desirable, it does not matter how many or at what rate, if the content is good, we want them. What we don't want is garbage, and it doesn't matter at what rate the garbage is produced, we don't want it anyway. To be tolerant of the learning needs of new editors, we try to be more tolerant of substandard material from people who appear to be working and learning in good faith, what we are really trying to deal with here are mass creations of substandard articles on unsuitable topics, largely because they drain our limited resources for no benefit. For substandard articles on unsuitable topics, we do not need a definition of mass creation or creation at scale as it does not affect the innate undesirability of the articles. We could just tell people who still create unsuitable articles after a reasonable trial period to stop creating articles because they are not competent. They can still contribute in other ways. This brings up a more relevant issue of how we assess whether a person shows competence in article creation, and one way is the ratio of surviving patrolled articles they have created to the total number hey have created (this should be something a bot could keep track of, and record it somewhere, like in Xtools). If someones articles have 90% survival rate after patrolling, then the person is probably doing adequate work, if the survival rate is 10%, they have a lot to learn, and may not be able to learn it. When the numbers are more evenly balanced, we should consider the residual value of the deleted articles - Why were they deleted? Have they been merged or deleted entirely? I would not hold it against an editor's record if the inadvertently created an occasional valid article that was later found to be a content fork under a plausibly acceptable alias, or found to be more suitable as a section in a broader article, as long at the topic is notable. When the majority or a large number of someone's articles have not been patrolled, a red flag should be raised. It may be necessary for them to slow down a bit or explain why they should not need to stop. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 08:01, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (prohibit)

Comments from WhatamIdoing (prohibit)

User:Supertrinko, for sufficiently high volumes of articles, we'd end up with one person flooding the review queues. Even if every article you write looks like it is ready to be nominated at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates from the very first revision, if you do that once a minute round the clock, that's going to cause problems for the New Pages Patrol and the RecentChanges reviewers. We don't really want to surprise the reviewers with the new-article equivalent of an Email bomb.

Previous discussions (years ago) suggested that a rate of less than one or two new articles per hour (i.e., 25 to 50 per day per editor) was likely sustainable for these groups. I don't know what the number is now, or how likely anyone is to reach it in practice, but there probably is a threshold beyond which the reviewers would feel overwhelmed and discouraged, and we would risk them either clearing or rejecting articles en masse just to get them out of the queue. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:58, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

I have to disagree with such limitations as one or two per hour. 50 articles per day per editor is so, so small. I feel it is on New Pages Patrol to adapt to the number of articles that are coming in, not on them to limit the number of new articles allowed. Supertrinko (talk) 05:19, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

@Supertrinko, I believe that, during the last year, only about 25 editors ever managed to make more than 50 articles in a single day, and none of them did it frequently. This is a quite unusual achievement. If you are looking at the average number of articles created over a long time period, I believe the record for all of last year was averaging around three or four articles per day, and the record for a single month was around 15 articles per day during that month. There are links to some statistics in Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee/Requests for comment/Article creation at scale#Statistics for mass creation if you'd like to get the real numbers instead of relying on my memory. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:55, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

If we encourage and enable mass article creation, then that number would be higher. Supertrinko (talk) 08:06, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

@Espresso Addict and @Levivich, about "[E]very time I've examined a set of mass-created articles, they always have serious problems": I think the question in play here is "What constitutes a serious problem?" A few years back, an editor created a large number of articles about different medical conditions. They were all sourced to a high-quality medical textbook. He created hundreds of them, and only a small percentage were either merged or deleted.

But: they are all very short, and most of them cited just a single source. Some people automatically consider short articles to represent "serious problems". Others will not. We don't have a shared understanding about what constitutes a serious problem. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:49, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Espresso Addict (prohibit)

Thanks for the reminder of the BilledMammal's stats, WhatamIdoing; I took a look at the recent creations of one of the most prolific creators, and found that the bottom line is a bit deceptive; a lot of the total is disambiguations -- I'm guessing they can't be excluded? Averaging two articles a day when one is a bio article and the other a disambiguation for that surname doesn't seem all that disruptive. Espresso Addict (talk) 06:17, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

@Levivich:: "[E]very time I've examined a set of mass-created articles, they always have serious problems" I think this is the definition of mass creation vs whatever we want to call unproblematic creation of multiple articles. Espresso Addict (talk) 20:45, 26 October 2022 (UTC)

Support (limit)

1. As proposer, and per comments above. Mass-creation is a problem only when the notability of each created item is not demonstrated. There are cases where groups of topics do meet this criterion (under NPOL, for instance, or GEOLAND) where it isn't a problem. Vanamonde (Talk) 21:28, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
2. That seems fair enough. Several SNGs are understood to be independent of the GNG (for example WP:NPROF: This guideline is... explicitly listed as an alternative to the general notability guideline). If the subject of an article meets one of those then there is no need to show that the subject passes the GNG. If you don't think any SNGs should work that way then make a proposal to change the SNGs which don't. Hut 8.5 12:20, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I'd See it as fair that if one creates 5 articles a day that they come under review and if they fairly elaborated articles, they should be allowed to create them on, but if they create one-two-three line stubs (with maybe an infobox) they should temporarily be only allowed to create drafts and submit them for review to see if they pass the AfC requirements.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 14:15, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Limiting mass creation allows time for proper scrutiny, especially with regards to SNGs that don't necessarily mean GNG is also met. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 22:07, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
5. If the do meet the inclusion criteria, then that removes a problem. I also think that the articles created en masse should also prove that they meet the criteria. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Some restriction on article creation at scale is clearly necessary, and this is at least a good start. Most of the opposes seem answered by the fact that approval can be sought at the mass-creation messageboard.--Aquillion (talk) 05:50, 28 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (limit)

1. Opposing mainly because I don't understand. Following on the proposer's support !vote, how does passing a SNG like GEOLAND or NPOL not make something notable? I mean, there's the "presumed" language of those guidelines, but that's even in the GNG. What's the distinction being made here? If this boils down to "articles created at scale need to be notable", that's pretty uncontroversial because all articles already have to be notable. If it's that articles have to meet the GNG, it would be clearer to propose that explicitly. I'd also disagree that notability is the only problem with mass creation. Sourcing and rate are the issues I see come up most often. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:58, 3 October 2022 (UTC)

   Adding post-addendum: Thanks for clarifying. I'd still go by the last part of what I wrote: all new articles have to be notable, and I don't think it particularly matters which notability guideline applies. What matters is more about sourcing and rate, so I'm not inclined to introduce a distinction that gives thumbs up/thumbs down just based on notability-related criteria. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:41, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

2. Per Rhododendrites. Thryduulf (talk) 23:27, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Mass creation is a problem even when the articles meet SNG's, as SNG's are subject to change, and the mass created articles on the basis of SNG's are almost always low quality. BilledMammal (talk) 00:12, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
4. SNGs should not be "granting" notability to start with, only pointing out when it is likely to exist. I certainly don't want anything that would further encourage that. Seraphimblade ^{Talk to me} 01:57, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Either it's notable or it isn't. SNGs are there to help clarify when articles should be created, not mandate what articles are created. Pinguinn 🐧 05:02, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Notability would be better handled by ensuring articles have some minimum referencing in place. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:48, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Per WP:CREEP. This seems to be pointless rule-making. I don't see any situation where making this into any kind of policy or guideline would change anything we do about mass creation. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:33, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
8. This is the same question as above, just with a carve-out for SNGs. I don't think this would solve our problem, since (a) a lot of problematic mass creation has been in areas that ostensibly were covered by an SNG, like Carlossuarez46 and GEOLAND, and (b) a lot of productive mass-creation isn't covered by a formal SNG because the articles literally never get deleted at AfD anyway (species, sites on the National Register of Historic Places, etc.) TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:14, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Per David Eppstein. Also, there is no reason to prohibit or even limit mass creations that are well-sourced and meet notability criteria, regardless of the status of other members of the "group". Rlendog (talk) 18:06, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Decent articles that are well sourced are decent, well sourced articles. We shouldn't restrict this in such a way - it might be that only 10% of <insert name of large topic> articles are notable; we should have those articles - and if they're mass created then that's fine Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:31, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Same as for Q4 above. Sources are what matter. This idea is making a rule for the sake of making a rule. Keep things simple. BoJó | talk UTC 09:59, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Same as above. Why limit the creation of acceptable articles? - Donald Albury 14:52, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Weakly for my reason above. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:25, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Creating a rule where you have to ask permission to create encyclopedia articles is a surefire way to deter people from volunteering their time to expand and improve the encyclopedia. Steven Walling • talk 21:04, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
15. There's no reason mass article creation should be allowed in some areas, but not others. If the article is notable, then it can be improved later. Supertrinko (talk) 02:09, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
16. I can't see a reason why you wouldn't welcome it. scope_creep^Talk 18:09, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
17. No, there's cases where this would be fine and even encouraged.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:45, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
18. Hard to understand, but appears too restrictive. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:31, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
19. Same as all of the other, leave people doing good work alone. Let them be. Someone does not have to get permission to work at Wikipedia, and we shouldn't be hounding people who do the most work. --Jayron32 18:32, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
20. Per above. My first edits were all new articles. --Rschen7754 01:32, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (limit)

Comments from Rlendog.

Vanamonde93 The proposal as written does not explicitly exempt mass creations that meet GNG. In any case, whether they meet GNG can often be subjection - hence many debates at AfD. Which is why I think (per my comment in #2) the criteria should be at least one source that plausibly meets GNG. Rlendog (talk) 15:43, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Support (minimum quality)

# Support. Articles that: 1)were disapproved by the community at the noticeboard for article creation at scale or the Bot Approvals Group or 2)contain no sources or 3)contain only: deprecated sources or sources that are easily editable by unqualified people should be speedily deletable. 1) is equivalent to a deletion discussion, 2 and 3 suggest that the author didn't have any standards whatsoever and their creations cannot be trusted.Lurking shadow (talk) 21:19, 3 October 2022 (UTC) Moved down.Lurking shadow (talk) 07:16, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

1. Support. Mass created articles (in vast majority stubs) mainly live from their creators (or are notable for their creators) and then after, are seldomly read or expanded for years. I suggest to enable the draftification of stubs (sourced or not) per wikipedia guideline and if there is interest by their creators (or the community) they'll expand to meet the AfC requirements.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 07:36, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Tentative support, looking at the ideal that an article should be more than a database entry. The support is tentative given the potential difficulty in finding an actionable formulation for what is quite a qualitative consideration. CMD (talk) 08:24, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Mass-created articles are always undesirable unless they are of a certain quality. Requiring one or two RSs alone does not guarantee that articles will be encyclopaedic. Scolaire (talk) 15:33, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. THe articles should be useful to a reader. They should also have enough referencing to show that they meet inclusion criteria. One sentence could be enough though, if it is useful to a reader. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:04, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
5. See my essays at Wikipedia:Substantive content, @FOARP: would that kind of guidance work? Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Articles in general should meet a minimum standard of quality, but this especially applies to mass-created articles that are harder to address in mass. We are beyond the point where hundreds of new one-liners can be expected to receive actual improvement later. Reywas92^Talk 17:24, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Support Absolutely with cherries. What is the point of it, otherwise. To create 40k of half-cut, partially damaged articles, or missing crucial information. Why would you do that? You want complete articles that are functionally perfect and contain as much as information about the subject as possible, with as many sources as needs to WP:V the content. Otherwise what is the point? Are you planning to do multiple passes. Who does that (although I'm not sure, its an unknown). Your not going to create 40k of articles and then do a second pass, with some new configuration with your software, adding other sources for example. Your going to do all of it, upfront. I have strong feeling I don't think people realise the change that going to come, with these automated tools, particularly AI. If someone created 40k of article, nodoby is going to update them, perhaps even not the person who creates them. So they need to be as complete as possible at the beggining. scope_creep^Talk 17:07, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Support. And I like @Paradise Chronicle:'s idea of stubs that are never viewed or improved be moved into draft format. WomenArtistUpdates (talk) 00:59, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Support. Some sort of standards or guidelines are necessary to evaluate when mass-article-creation is appropriate, otherwise any other restrictions (which are sorely needed) would just be spinning their wheels. --Aquillion (talk) 05:51, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Support. Creating a large number of badly written articles is disrespectful of those who clean up the mess. If creating large numbers of articles, the creator should be sufficiently competent to do it properly, and comply with MoS, and reasonably correct spelling and grammar. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:58, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (minimum quality)

1. IMO the basic requirement of containing a source with SIGCOV (as well as any rules that apply to non-mass-created articles) is sufficient. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 18:00, 4 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Per Pppery. —David Eppstein (talk) 16:34, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
3. There's no way to quantify "quality" that can't and won't be gamed. Nor is there a meaningful notion of "quality" that could extend over all topics on which articles can be created, beyond vague platitudes. XOR'easter (talk) 16:36, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Quality's a bit of a hard thing to systematically measure. There have been sanctions to restrict users so that they are only allowed to create articles of minimum length (such as 500 words), and maybe some concrete proposal along these lines would be rational. But, at the same time, there are some topics that are notable under current guidelines (such as legally recognized populated places) that can be quite easily created and described at a small prose size while not being terrible. I'm not principally opposed here, but I'm not able to do anything but oppose without a good mechanism for judging the nebulous character of "quality". — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 22:19, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Per XOR'easter and Red-tailed hawk. The number of sentences, and article size, are not necessarily a measure of quality. The grading of an article does not necessarily reflect the quality of that article due to human error in applying the (less than completely objective and unambiguous) criteria at WP:ASSESS. The ORES score of an article does not necessarily reflect the quality of that article due to the limits of articlequality model. James500 (talk) 01:23, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Per above. Measuring quality and setting a minimum standard of it is difficult and can be gamed. Basic requirements that apply to normal articles should be sufficient for mass created ones too. The problem we need solving is not that mass created articles are incomprehensible. The problem is that such articles (normal or mass created) would've been deleted or not deleted based on the inherent notability of the "subject", and that should be maintained no matter the rate of creation. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 12:56, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Even a sourced one line stub can be beneficial to the encyclopedia, if for nothing else than a starting point for expansion. Rlendog (talk) 18:05, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
8. This sort of thing can work as a sanction at ANI etc... when a problem editor is identified. It's not suitable as a one size fits all approach Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:33, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Quality is a matter of opinion and all articles can be improved. The key factor is sourcing. BoJó | talk UTC 10:03, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Per WP:STUB and WP:NOTABILITY, it is the hard to define attempt to simply create a mass of articles to inflate an editors creation listing that it the issue that needs addressing. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:34, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
11. We already have clear guidelines for notability and verifiability that cover all possible articles, and we also already have processes for developing a consensus about when articles need to be deleted. The last thing we need is more rules. Steven Walling • talk 21:06, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Articles can always be improved later. There is no reason to put this rule on mass created articles specifically. Supertrinko (talk) 02:10, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
13. I'll put my opposition here just in the narrow sense of species articles. Per WP:SPECIESOUTCOMES as long as a species has been described in reliable sources, it gets an article, whether at scale or not. Usually those articles do end up as stubs initially. I don't have any other strong opinions on the rest of this RfC, but that is one aspect that needs to be followed regardless. The only way for such an article to be deleted is if it was a made up article. If "minimum quality" is taken to mean "it exists in sources" in this instance, then consider my oppose a neutral/meh. KoA (talk) 17:49, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
14. If something is acceptable as a manually created article, the same thing should be acceptable as part of a mass creation too. Not necessary to have a seperate quality requirement for mass created articles. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:31, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
15. No, no inherent issues with stubs or even microstubs depending on context.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:46, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Again, this is too restrictive, and should be on a case-by-case basis. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:33, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Again, as with every other proposal, we shouldn't be putting the breaks on people who are doing good work. This entire train of thought that just because someone does a LOT of work, they or their work are under suspicion automatically is beyond rude. --Jayron32 18:34, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
18. Stubs and redlinks attract editors to Wikipedia. We need more of both. WaggersTALK 11:48, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
19. Oppose minimum standards above what qualifies for CSD A1. --Rschen7754 01:30, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (minimum quality)

Support (delete ranking)

1. Support as nominator. One motivation for bulk article creation appears to be gaining perceived prestige as an editor. Much of this is difficult to combat, but simply deleting the ranking is one simple step that might help to change the culture without obvious negative effects. I note (which I had not realised) that in April 2021 the order of the top 100 editors was randomised in an effort to discourage mass stub creation. Espresso Addict (talk) 05:58, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
2. This is a bold idea, and I find myself drawn to it. If needed, we already have a marker of an experienced article creator, the autopatrolled right. The list stems from a nice bit of code so I wouldn't want the information to be inaccessible, but certainly it doesn't need to be so prominent. CMD (talk) 08:29, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Reading other the many argumentative threads around mass creation this is a thought I've previously had. It seems a ridiculous measure, but the fact that action has previously been taken about it, as noted by Espresso Addict, hints towards this being necessary. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 13:09, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Creating new articles should be for the sake of the project, not for gaining plaudits. Scolaire (talk) 15:38, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Support for many reasons. One of them is the one brought forward by Espresso addict.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 16:07, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
6. We already scramble the top 100, and while there are plenty of excellent and valuable editors in that group, there are also a number of editors who are banned for various reasons, including a few whose contributions were part of why we're having this RfC in the first place. Deleting the page isn't going to solve the problem on its own, but it seems worth doing. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 03:26, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Support - The ranking only encourages editors who are here to get a "high score" rather than build a quality encyclopedia, as shown by the number of Top 10 creators who have been banned and left a huge pile of stubs for others to sort through. We're better off without it. –dlthewave ☎ 03:56, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
8. The top 100 is already scrambled as it is, making the page not even effective at its current job. Thus its only purpose right now is to send the wrong message about what Wikipedia is about. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 04:05, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
9. I don't think this has any direct relevance to mass-creation, but I would go further and remove any ranking of editors (whether by number of articles created, edits made, DYKs, or anything else) that could in any way be thought to be "official". Such rankings make editors concentrate on quantity rather than quality. We recently had an editor whose reply to any concern about his editing was simply to point to the number of articles he had taken to GA. That sort of thing should be stopped. Phil Bridger (talk) 08:13, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Support — In academia, emphasis on citation count has led to a publish or perish culture, where researchers are encouraged to publish as many ground-breaking articles as possible, without regard to quality. This process has resulted in many cases of scientific misconduct and other questionable research practices, such as plagiarism and data fabrication, in an attempt to cut corners where possible. One of the most extreme cases is that of Yoshitaka Fujii, a Japanese anesthesiologist who was found in 2012 to have fabricated data in at least 183 papers.
    Any quantity-based status is prone to similar abuses. Several users near the top of the closely related Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits, such as Rich Farmbrough, Koavf, and Lugnuts have specific sanctions targeting mass edits, such as unnecessary cosmetic changes and low-quality stubs. That does not mean that this other list should be deleted, since there are large-scale editing patterns with little risk of error due to their systematic nature — for example, the top-ranking user, Ser Amantio di Nicolao, is mostly involved in very large-scale category changes and talk page creeations using AWB or Cat-a-lot. However, mass creation of articles requires more careful discretion, such as ensuring that the database used is reliable and can be used to support WP:GNG; and is much more damaging to Wikipedia than say, mass talk-page creation, when it goes wrong, because we often have to scrutinize a large fraction of those articles which don't have obvious problems. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 09:40, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Support Stat-padding, as it is known in other places on the Interwebz, is the bane of online gaming communities. By removing ranking it may well demotivate those who mass produce low quality articles, while hopefully those with the encyclopedias best interests at heart will pay it no need. Anyone can put the their stats up on their homepage if they feel the need. LessHeard vanU (talk) 07:32, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Support I am of the belief this may help and can't hurt. The goal should be quality over quantity, and this is a metric that inverts this goal Connor Long (talk) 06:19, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
13. It can't hurt. Quantity of edits isn't something we should be highlighting versus quality. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 18:34, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
14. There should be fewer competitive activities in Wikipedia in general. Ranking by number of articles rewards quantity at the expense of quality. Robert McClenon (talk) 05:36, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (delete ranking)

1. I don't disagree that there's the potential for harm, but it's already randomized to the point of being pretty useless and anyone can get an unrandomized list through a quick Quarry query (and widely publicize that query) exactly like those at the top of this page. Maybe having it in projectspace makes it look a little too official/endorsed/valued, in which case a move might be in order. Meh. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 13:08, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
2. I don't think that the real cause of mass-creation is the fact that the list exists. Such numbers are also available on XTools and WikiScan, so if the point is to censor the amount of articles one has created so as to not allow someone to be overly prideful, then this is not really an effective implementation anyway. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 16:25, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Pointless proposal. I'm an admin on pi:, and found several bot created articles, with a single word or sentence and nothing else. There is no bot generated report there, why did the creator do it? Furthermore, even though I'm a complete novice in coding, I was easily able to create a list of editors by move count at Quarry in about an hour's time. I could do it just as easily for article creation count. Someone who really wants to know their article creation count can find it directly from databases. I don't think, this proposal is going to change a single editor's mind let alone solve the problem of mass creation. —CX Zoom[he/him] ^{(let's talk • {C•X})} 13:11, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
4. No point, as that list would not be a motivation for creating substubs rather than useful pages. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:14, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
5. I think rankings are silly and can incentivise unhelpful behaviour, but I'm not sure deleting this one would be a net benefit. First, because the list can be useful: for the overall statistics or as a maintenance list (if someone is very high up there, then their creations will most likely need scrutiny). Second, I don't think this particular list has a great influence on editor behaviour: my impression has been that, to a larger extent than with other rankings, people have tended to ignore the report and just kept their own manual counts on their user page. – Uanfala (talk) 13:00, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
6. We have a process for deleting articles and it does not include 'arbitrary decisions taken on subpages of subpages of pages completely unrelated to the page in question'. If there's a policy-based reason to delete Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by article count, it should be nominated at MfD. At best, a consensus here should be taken as a reason to have that MfD. Nobody's even bothered to notify the page's creator or watchers that this discussion is happening. – Joe (talk) 13:24, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Seems bizarre to me to remove a list of created articles. If there are issues with people mass producing articles, then this list would be helpful to know who's making the most and fix the issue. Without a list - there are no ideas. Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:01, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Disclaimer: list creator. Thank you Joe for the notification. There is no evidence this page is contributing to mass stub creation. There was evidence at one time involving a single user, who has since been permanently banned. That incident led to the top 100 scramble, which appears to be effective. Many users track their contributions this way, who are not bad actors. I don't mind moving it out of project space if so decided. And if that doesn't work, I can move it off-site as I have a wiki that can host it. There is demand for this list by many who are not bad actors. Some of the delete votes appear to dislike the egotistic nature of these lists which is fine they are not for everyone but these lists can also motivate and reward legitimate and positive behavior. I also don't think it's a good idea in principle to give up control of the list to offsite actors. -- GreenC 14:39, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Unlikely to make a difference, particularly now that the top 100 are randomized. (I also agree with the sentiment that RfCs are not for things covered by the deletion process, although that's an auxiliary issue.) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 17:49, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Don't see a need for this. Rlendog (talk) 18:01, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
11. The rankings tool is a helpful way to find the most prolific article creators, whose work we should watch.—S Marshall T/C 18:56, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
12. It seems pointless to remove something that would clearly just move to some other server and still get used in the same sort of way Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:40, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
13. A case of "it ain't broke, so don't fix it". BoJó | talk UTC 10:06, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Oppose, that page was created to reduce the load on Wikiscan and doesn't cause people to go cray-cray with the stub-creation-ay. Abductive (reasoning) 18:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
15. Oppose - Not needed. --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
16. I highly doubt anybody is creating loads of articles in order to rank more highly on that rather obscure list. Hut 8.5 11:45, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Oppose as not necessary given the scrambling. Hut 8.5 - I know that a number of mass-creators were regular visitors to the talk-page at that page and obviously checked it regularly, so even applying AGF, not a stretch to say they were at least interested in who was ranking highly on it. FOARP (talk) 14:27, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
18. No, its useful and interesting for other editors who may need it for research purposes. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:29, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
19. Oppose No need for this. Although perhaps you would need a seperate list. Once the process is stable, effectively there is no reason why your AI engine couldn't create 40k articles, for example on the worlds bays. They editor would shoot right to the top of the rankings, so perhaps a seperate list or some indication they are mass articles creators so to differentiate them, in a simple manner. scope_creep^Talk 16:57, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
20. Now that it's randomized, this specific page is not an impetus for mass creation. Editors count articles themselves (see, for example, Lugnuts's user page). If there were more evidence that people were generally making hundreds of low-quality articles simply to climb this specific ladder, I'd support. Ovinus (talk) 01:06, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
21. Deleting this would add burden to shared resources like quarry, slowing things down for everyone due to interested editors repeatedly running queries. Having it in a centralised page as now is a better use of resources. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:42, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
22. Why? Who cares?--Ortizesp (talk) 14:47, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
23. Oppose: I'm sure some editors create perverse incentives for themselves using the list, but the same can be done without it. I don't believe this list is a significant contributor to the phenomenon of mass creation. The list parallels the edit count list, which I would view as similarly harmful (perhaps moreso), but I still hold the view of an infobox I made in 2014. — Bilorv (talk) 13:23, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
24. Oppose and get rid of the scrambling as well. Users should know at this point that having created a ton of stubs isn't particularly prestigious and we don't need to protect people from themselves like this. This is an interesting statistic and it should be easily available. Elli (talk | contribs) 18:50, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
25. Oppose if people are this concerned about their position on this list, they would just a Quarry query or other method to find out their exact number. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:27, 27 October 2022 (UTC)
26. Meh. --Jayron32 18:34, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
27. I'm going to copy User:S Marshall's reasoning verbatim: The rankings tool is a helpful way to find the most prolific article creators, whose work we should watch. WaggersTALK 11:52, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
28. Oppose as unlikely to have any measurable effect until someone measures the effect. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:47, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
29. If someone really wants this, send it to MFD. Meanwhile someone could just create a tool to do it anyway. --Rschen7754 01:29, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (delete ranking)

Support (respond to issues)

1. Support. People are responsible for their edits. It is much easier to spot issues if the author informs you about what and why they did it.(Communication is required). And mass-creation has the potential for huge damage to the encyclopedia.Lurking shadow (talk) 10:10, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Support in principle, although some refinement of what it means to "respond" and what happens if you don't require elaboration - I don't think we can literally force people to respond, but we can establish that a failure to respond means that editors can make negative inferences about their intent and process, and that this is sufficient to justify sanctions preventing them from mass-creating articles in the future. This is necessary because of the danger of WP:FAIT - there is too much risk that someone could mass-create a bunch of articles and then try to stall out the process by refusing to engage, hoping that the difficulty of reversing their action leads to it remaining in place. --Aquillion (talk) 15:03, 5 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (respond to issues)

1. Oppose - Our current noticeboards work just fine without this requirement. If an editor doesn't show up to explain/defend themselves, we make decisions based on the information that we have, and there's no need to make a written rule that failure to comment may be viewed negatively. –dlthewave ☎ 21:37, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Per WP:NOTMANDATORY. We cannot compel ordinary editors to contribute to a particular noticeboard or thread; the only people that we expect this of are holders of advanced permissions, who are generally required to maintain the trust and confidence of the community. On the other hand, the decision to actively edit and not respond to an WP:ANI thread can at times indicate that a user has little or no interest in working collaboratively, and we should not prohibit the community from analyzing a user's conduct along those lines. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 22:11, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
3. The noticeboard whose existence is implied in this question ideally shouldn't exist. That said, if it is actually created against the concerns voiced at #Oppose_(Create_noticeboard), there's no need for a specific ADMINACCT-like requirement to be codified for that one noticeboard. Users are already expected to respond to community concerns about their editing (WP:DISRUPTSIGNS: "Does not engage in consensus building", "Rejects or ignores community input"), and WP:NOTCOMPULSORY limits this RfC's ability to go beyond this. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 22:13, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Per WP:NOTCOMPULSORY. We cannot force editors to make edits. James500 (talk) 01:35, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Oppose If they don't show up, they'll probably show up if the decision taken was perceived negatively by them. Also, mass creators are not new editors, they are rather experienced editors and know how noticeboards and talk-page notifications function.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 09:39, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
6. If they don't respond, that is not necessarily a serious problem. But if they continue with causing a problem with article creation, they can then be blocked, perhaps after AN/I discussion. There could be use of a noticeboard, or the user's talk page. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 04:12, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Oppose - We cannot force behaviour and should not try. The one thing I would request is that mass-creators at least do not battle to prevent clean-up - BTW this is typically the reason that mass-creators get banned from Wikipedia: not because of their mass-creation per se, but because they then get very angry when others start questioning the value of their X-thousand articles on Y-subject created manually from Z-database and engage in uncivil and disruptive behaviour against the people doing the clean-up. This then results in months of unpleasantness for the people doing the clean-up ending at ARBCOM (because ANI simply isn't up to the task of banning these typically long-tenured and influential editors). It is striking that only one of the top-ten article-creators (Ser Amantio di Nicolao) is still an active editor today, with all the rest being indeffed (3) retired under a cloud (3) semi-retired/just not very active (3), and that that one remaining editor has admirably stayed out of attempts to clean-up their articles (particularly the mass-created ones about non-notable geographical features in Antartica based solely on the GNIS database created back in 2008 when standards were more relaxed).FOARP (talk) 09:20, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Better dealt with at ANI and through a voluntary approach via sanction negotiation etc... Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:41, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
9. You can't FORCE people to do anything. If they won't respond, WP:ENGAGE applies. BoJó | talk UTC 10:09, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Oppose - Oppose per WP:NOTMANDATORY. --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:36, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Oppose Being involved in a scandal is just humiliating — the only involvement one should have in cleaning up their act is to make defending statements to the public or in the courtroom. And we don't want to shame people to the point of a catastrophic mental health breakdown, or else we risk getting sued in real life. Carlossuarez46 quit after the mass-creation scandal about Iranian abadis broke out, declining even to comment at the resulting Arbcom case. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 09:48, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Exactly the same rules as anywhere else. mass-created articles do not need to be treated differently. Supertrinko (talk) 02:14, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Oppose Completely unworkable. We should not be relying on the false hopes that an editor can mass create garbage and then we can just make them fix it. We have to find avenues for resolving this situation without them, since many I'm sure will not be cooperative or may simply stop mass creating and move on to better pastures (and no longer doing anything bad is generally acceptable enough on Wikipedia to not be blocked). -Indy beetle (talk) 08:38, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Truly problematic and disruptive cases of this (i.e., editors who keep on mass creating after been apprised of others' concerns) are already covered under WP:IDHT et al. Ovinus (talk) 00:47, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
15. This isn't a job. --Rschen7754 02:01, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Oppose, out of scope for our roles as editors.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:49, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Unworkable, and redundant. 1) We already require people to communicate with others, so I don't see why we are singling out people who work harder than the average Wikipedian. 2) We shouldn't assume that just because someone creates a lot of content, they are automatically under suspicion. --Jayron32 18:36, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
18. Per everyone else here WaggersTALK 11:54, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
19. We literally cannot force anyone to respond to communication. If they do not respond, however, they can be blocked for disruptive behaviour, and there are good arguments that creating large numbers of unencyclopedic articles is disruptive. Blocking from article creation only would also be an appropriate response. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:39, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (respond to issues)

Support (sourced claims of importance)

1. This establishes a bare minimum for mass-created articles, which is that they contain a source that verifies their claim of significance. This is non-exclusive with any particular option in Question 2 because this does not make any comments regarding sources that would necessarily contribute to GNG. This principle is eminently reasonable and more or less any mass creation that fails this would probably require a good bit of legwork to clean up if not resulting in much of the mass creation eventually being deleted. Failure to follow this principle could either be enforced as a simple disruptive editing case or, should the community decide in another RfC or question, through some modification to WP:DEL-REASON and/or the creation of a CSD criterion. — Red-tailed hawk _(nest) 22:00, 5 October 2022 (UTC)
2. I note that the heading here is ambiguous. But a claim of importance should be required, and the information should be sourced. A claim of importance may include SNG evidence. Enough good references also show GNG and importance. If no claim of importance then speedy delete criterion A7 may apply, and if its out of scope then claims will avert being an obvious AFD candidate. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Graeme Bartlett (talk • contribs) 04:19, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Support. We need to have some sort of bare-minimum standard for mass-created articles or discussions over them are just going to spin wheels endlessly. And this is a reasonable extension of WP:A7, which can be tweaked to be more in-line with it if necessary. --Aquillion (talk) 18:21, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Articles in general should have a cited claim to importance, not just mass-created ones. Reywas92^Talk 17:21, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Never understood why the community limited WP:A7 to only certain types of articles. It should apply to all articles. This is a step in the right direction. Levivich (talk) 20:08, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
6. I agree with Levivich that A7 should apply to all articles, though A7 is less strict as it does not require a source. But if an article does not contain a reliably sourced claim of importance ("importance" meaning what it does in A7) then it is not useful to the encyclopedia, at least not in its presented state. — Bilorv (talk) 13:30, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (sourced claims of importance)

1. Without any definition of what constitutes a "sourced claim of importance" that is objective and applicable to all subjects this is just a recipe for arguments. Thryduulf (talk) 15:13, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
2. "Sourced claim of importance" is one of those things that seems unambiguous but actually at the coalface is rather hard to agree on. Is being a populated place a claim of importance? A listed building? An athlete who competed at the Olympics? Or was in their national top 10? An academic with two papers with >100 citations? Also database sourcing is often (though not always) reasonably reliable, it's the "significant coverage" that is lacking. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:54, 6 October 2022 (UTC)
3. The opposite of what is required. Sets the bar way too low and potentially re-opens the door to mass-creation of (for example) sports biography stubs based on a single appearance somewhere, sourced only to a database, that was closed in WP:NSPORTS2022. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 12:40, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
4. This is attempting to apply the standard of WP:CSD#A7 to mass article creations, with the added requirement of a source for the claim. A7 has been restricted so that it's usually obvious whether an article has a claim of importance or not, and attempts to expand it usually fail because it wouldn't necessarily be clear what qualifies. However any admin is likely to give the benefit of the doubt to the article creator, and certainly any article which indicates the subject might meet an SNG or which includes some non-terrible references is unlikely to be deleted under this criterion, so it probably wouldn't make much difference anyway. Hut 8.5 16:40, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Oppose. What is a "claim of importance"? If it meets GNG it's fine. As per #2, I think if it has one decent source at creation, it should be considered to meet minimum standards for creation. Rlendog (talk) 18:03, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Importance is like significance – a value judgement – and different people have different values. For example, I would suppose that being included in a national register of historic buildings is implicitly a claim of importance but some seem to expect something more. As another example, consider a forthcoming FA: Daglish railway station. There doesn't seem to be a clear claim of importance for this – it all depends whether you think ordinary railway stations are important or not. And railway stations are the sort of topic that tend to be created systematically, en masse. We have lots of articles about them, such as this FA, and so they seem to be generally acceptable. We should be going by such precedents rather than requiring them to be proven afresh, every time, in a subjective way. Andrew🐉(talk) 18:24, 7 October 2022 (UTC)
7. I assume this is about CSD's concept of Wikipedia:Credible claim of significance, which explicitly does not apply to many subjects (e.g., animal species). It's nice when a Wikipedia article gives me a reason to care about the subject, but subjects can be notable, and articles about them can be useful, even if I don't care. If I'm looking up the subject, I already know why I want to know what it is; I don't need the article to tell me nearly as much as I need the article to have a decent first sentence. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:55, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Who judges the claim of importance? I've seen this used to defend articles about obviously non-notable subjects before. Not, in my view, the way to go Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:44, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
9. We already have notability. Something important to one person is unimportant to another. BoJó | talk UTC 10:13, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Oppose Conflicts with WP:STUB and WP:Notability, which are well established guidelines. LessHeard vanU (talk) 07:34, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
11. I'm satisfied that the existing notability guidelines are sufficient. Supertrinko (talk) 02:16, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
12. "Sourced claim of importance" is vague. Existing WP:Notability is enough. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:50, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
13. "Importance" is too subjective. --Rschen7754 04:05, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Oppose. What policy requires a topic to be important? Important to whom? Notability is difficult enough to manage, and it is much more objective than importance.· · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:30, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (sourced claims of importance)

Support (duty to expand)

1. support statement

Oppose (duty to expand)

1. There's no way to enforce this. Stubs as seeds for more developed articles are, to me, a reasonable way forward so long as there's actually some way of developing them. And they're more likely to be developed if they exist as stubs than if they don't. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:46, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
2. The idea that articles which remain stubs are unacceptable is just wrong and not consistent with the view of the community. Just over half of our articles are stubs, and most of them have remained that way for years. A proposal to delete half of the articles on Wikipedia would be dead on arrival. Hut 8.5 09:05, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Nothing at all wrong with any stub that has a reliable source. Why pick on stubs when there are volumes of "start-class" articles that have been "expanded" by conversion of a useful stub into an incoherent mess? BoJó | talk UTC 10:22, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Its a volunteers project.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 10:39, 8 October 2022 (UTC)
5. This can't be enforced, and is a more complicated version of requiring a bit more substantiveness at the point of creation, which is much easier to assess. CMD (talk) 04:26, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Oppose generally. There can be exceptions such as proving notability and ensuring compliance with copyright laws and WP:BLP but not for everything. Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 20:32, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Oppose - Oppose per WP:TOOSHORT. --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:37, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
8. No as long as at the time of creation they are acceptable. Crouch, Swale (talk) 20:30, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
9. You can't require someone to edit. We're all volunteers here. Steven Walling • talk 21:07, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Reluctatnt oppose, because this focus' upon the article and not the creator - who is the problem. We have criteria for the speedy deletion of poor quality content, while struggle to deal with problematic editors. LessHeard vanU (talk) 07:42, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Strongly oppose this, it will only discourage editors from contributing. There's no rush to have a stub improved, and it can be done at anyone's discretion. Supertrinko (talk) 02:17, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Oppose because its meaningless. Nobody is going to update mass-created articles. The numbers will be too big. Questions like who is going to validate them are perhaps more important, when you have 200k mountains and hills of the Africa articles, for example. Who validates these to prove they are good? The whole idea about stubs is a busted flush, its all last decade thinking. AI might be able to update a lot of them to a basic standard as certainly nobody is really interested on working on the 10,000's of stubs we have at the moment. I don't think we have the people for that. Many of them are never seen. Google and Microsoft can already mechanically create stubs of better quality than many of the stubs that are created on here. So the question is moot. AI is going to make that look like an amoeba at work. There should be some kind of minumum quality, specifying what should be in the article. Domain specific knowledge for that article series. Even a soft framework, where you suggested what should be in them, would be useful. Your not aiming for stubs with automated tools. You want beautiful, visually exciting articles of a sufficient length and detail. Think of the something of the Book of Kells, done at scale with lots of diagrams, animations, maps and lots and lots of visual details. scope_creep^Talk 18:57, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Per scope creep. >95% of Wikipedia stubs will remain that way forever, and that's fine. Ovinus (talk) 00:45, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
14. This isn't a job. --Rschen7754 02:00, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
15. Oppose from my own experience with making a bunch of stubs about lichen I can tell you that there isn't a ton of stuff out there so a stub is about as long as it's gonna get. Dr vulpes ^{(💬 • 📝)} 04:59, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
16. This is contrary to WP:VOLUNTEER. Different editors have different skills, forcing someone to do something they don't like doing with is not a good use of voluteer time. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 07:58, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Oppose as unenforceable, therefore pointless. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:23, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
18. Oppose Wikipedia is a volunteer organization, no one has a duty to do anything. --Jayron32 11:50, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (duty to expand)

Support (proposal name)

1. support statement

Oppose (proposal name)

1. oppose statement

Comments (proposal name)

Support (Q14: databases)

1. Databases that do not contain original prose written specifically about the subject are comparable to specialized web browsers or news aggregators: they may be reliable, but they are not synthesizing anything specifically for any entry, they are merely tools to autocurate and present facts without further analysis. Some of those facts might be from a secondary publication, but they are also likely to be cited to a primary research article or even uploaded directly by a researcher. Scientific databases especially are likely to contain millions or billions of entries (quoting from WP:NASTRO) with thousands of attributes, but merely existing in a (non-notability-granting) database with many severable "facts" ascribed to it is not sufficient for the database to count towards GNG for a given object. For the facts that are referenced to secondary sources in the database or have secondary coverage elsewhere, those publications should be the basis of the article rather than the database. If a GNG topic can only be referenced to a database (or to other primary documents), it should not have a standalone article. See also this discussion. JoelleJay (talk) 00:18, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Sourcing only to databases is an inherent failure of GNG. Even in a category with relaxed requirements, this may leave little to create a substantive article about. Any sort of bulk creation must have approval to ensure that a mass of articles that is impossible to deal with once created is using sources that are highly reliable and will lead to expansion without undue synthesis. Reywas92^Talk 02:41, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Articles sourced only to databases violate WP:NOTDATABASE, as without OR they cannot put the data in context with explanations referenced to independent sources. This means that creating articles sourced solely to them is already forbidden, but clarify this would be useful. BilledMammal (talk) 03:40, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
4. As to me, articles should not be created for creating articles but because there is a certain interest/knowledge on them. If there is a some knowledge, they'll probably also have an other source for the article they plan to create other than a basic database. Before, creating articles was good, but maybe its time for Wikipedia to shift the focus on quality instead of quantity. To prohibit articles based on databases, would shorten many deletion discussions.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 06:54, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
5. The early days of Wikipedia are past us, we no longer need to enable rapid expansion via database scraping. Copying databases is less helpful to the reader than letting them just use the original database in question, and we ought to be focusing on things that have SIGCOV in secondary sources. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:42, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
6. I mean, this is 4A come again, so yes, I support. If GNG is to be used to justify an article's existence, then GNG needs to be demonstrated when it's created, meaning that a database scrape is by definition insufficient. Some SNGs would justify database scraping (NPOL, for instance) and there GNG isn't in the picture usually. Vanamonde (Talk) 15:51, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

   I would prefer "sourced only to" per ONUnicorn below, but I believe that's a wording issue that is fixable when implement given the comments here. Vanamonde (Talk) 16:24, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

7. Support These databases are full of errors that are not validated upon use, just accepted. Sloppy practice. They are already the bane of WP and using them at scale is just asking for trouble. We should be seeking high-quality sources at every level. Personally I don't they will be needed to be used by automated tooling, as by point most archives will already be open for AI access. scope_creep^Talk 18:17, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
8. This is wise. I understand the position that "if it's notable, it's fine", but even ignoring the concerns of lowered quality standards, there is plenty of potential for database errors, that requiring additional sources would make far less likely. Ovinus (talk) 01:10, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Database entries are not evidence of notability. If it is a reliable database with good information, relevant information should be put onto a useful article related to the topic of the database rather than squirreled away to some hapless substub. CMD (talk) 03:26, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
10. per WP:NOT. One article sourced only to a non-prose-containing databases is a problem; mass-creation of such articles even moreso. Levivich (talk) 20:06, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
11. I've being going back and forth on this one. But Levivich wording clarifies the issue for me only to a non-prose-containing databases. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 18:47, 19 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Per WP:NOTDATABASE. Avilich (talk) 18:36, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Support articles sourced to non-prose-containing databases really only can be used to verify snippets of information and that the subject exists. Having one prose containing source would help combat this as it would ensure that mass creation through some kind of database crawl gets a better review by the creator as to whether it's notable. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 23:32, 27 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (Q14: databases)

1. Similar rhetoric is being used to weaken the notability of road articles at Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard#Google Maps and I am concerned that the implications of this are not well understood. --Rschen7754 00:45, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
2. As demonstrated in multiple venues around this issue, the proposer & I just fundamentally disagree on the utility of databases as sources. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:00, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I have no desire to limit the creation of articles simply because the source of the information is a database. If it meets the notability guidelines, then it deserves a place here. Supertrinko (talk) 02:19, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
4. There seem to be cases where databases are reasonable as the main source for an article at creation - as discussed elsewhere. Of course, it'd be lovely to be able to expand that article to include plenty of other sources, but I can see cases where at creation this it is reasonable to simply use database sources at times. There also seem too many clauses open to interpretation here as well - which concerns me a little. I can certainly see topic areas where something similar to this would apply, but others where it should be reasonable to allow it - it seems a little too broad brush Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:12, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Not all databases are created equal. Moreover, there is a difference between prohibiting "articles sourced only to non-prose-containing databases" (which I would be more likely to support) and prohibiting articles from being "based on databases that do not contain significant secondary prose". You can have the database as the foundation of the article, and then have additional sources to flesh it out and I think that would be fine - but such an article would still be based on the database. To be clear, I would hesitate to support the "sourced only to" language - I'm still a little uncomfortable with that because I think some databases are better than others. But I absolutely oppose the "based on" language. ~ ONUnicorn^{(Talk|Contribs)}problem solving 16:01, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
6. per ONUnicorn. Not all databases are the same and they are used differently. While I recognize that users can use a database to create articles at scale, that doesn't inherently mean that we should throw out all databases. Consider a list/table of all federal judges, or of all species - in these cases the compiled data provides a start to an article of a subject that the community considers notable. Yes, editors can and should search for and expand the article, but unlike others here, I have less concerns with stub articles and more concerns with copyright violations, unverified information and WP:NPOV issues. --Enos733 (talk) 20:13, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Prose vs. not prose is not a measure of the reliability of the source material. A rambling blog post I write purely from my own opinion can be all prose... and it's definitely not as reliable for citations as a fact checked structured database, depending on the subject matter. Steven Walling • talk 04:40, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
8. This area is already covered sufficiently by Question 2A * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 15:06, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
9. If the source is reliable, then it may be used. --Jax 0677 (talk) 18:57, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Per ONUnicorn. ಮಲ್ನಾಡಾಚ್ ಕೊಂಕ್ಣೊ (talk) 08:05, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
11. GNG does not require sources to be written in "prose", nor does it preclude "databases". The problem is not "non-prose databases" per se. James500 (talk) 20:11, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
12. No, non-prose providing database websites can be valuable, and data can be extrapolated to create valid articles. Not sure why those sources in particular are demonized.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:51, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
13. I do not understand the focus on presentation style rather than reliability and content. Prose/not-prose is simply the wrong criterion to base such a drastic judgment upon. XOR'easter (talk) 17:58, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
14. There's a wide range of databases out there, and I don't see how we can generalise about them. Inclusion in certain databases (say, accepted plant species in Plants of the World Online, or languages in Glottolog) pretty much guarantees a GNG pass. The requirement for prose is a red herring: how the information in a database happens to have been presented is not relevant. The records in many databases will have enough data to allow the writing up (in prose) of at least a Start-class article (for a random example, see what information is available in the various tabs of this USDA Plant Database record.) Many databases will also provide bibliographies for each entry, and these will contain the sources that could be used for any subsequent in-depth expansion (we're not requiring a B-class level of in-depth treatment from newly created articles, are we?). And for those quoting WP:NOTDATABASE above: I'm surprised that this needs pointing out, but that guideline says that Wikipedia itself is not an indiscriminate database, there's nothing there that limits the use of databases as sources. – Uanfala (talk) 12:20, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
15. There's a lot of generalising about what kind of information you can find in databases above. To add to the list of counter-examples: terrasindigenas.org.br is a comprehensive database of Indigenous territories in Brazil. It doesn't have any prose, but a typical entry contains: the name, location extent, and ecological makeup of the territory; a list of peoples that live or lived there; a timeline of its legal status; a population history; and a list of links (usually at least a few dozen) to related news articles. You could easily create a decent start-class article from that, and each of the ~720 entries are about populated, legally-recognised places (i.e. notable topics), 99% of which are red links. Compare that to List of Indian reservations in the United States – all blue. As with other proposals here, this would needlessly hamper efforts to expand our coverage of the Global South to match what we already have for comparable topics in the North (thanks in large part to mass creation). – Joe (talk) 15:22, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Oppose making rules that rely on assumptions that are inadequately supported. Databases vary in range and reliability of content, as well as how it is presented. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:15, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
17. Meh. --Jayron32 11:52, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (Q14: databases)

Support (awards)

1. as nominator. If it would only count for stubs or articles in general could be thought about, but the expanders of the articles are likely the ones who are also interested in maintaining the articles.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 23:28, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Support - --Jax 0677 (talk) 23:38, 9 October 2022 (UTC)
3. I'd been thinking of trying to codify a proposal to suggest this. I don't know whether the underlying software can handle it, but there seems no reason in principle why anyone can't ask to receive notifications on any article. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:39, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Support some kind of additional incentive for expansion - Expansion of stubs needs to be encouraged more. The plain truth is that simply creating stubs does not seem to encourage their expansion into real articles in any kind of reasonable time-frame even where the content exists for such an expansion (and especially if it does not). FOARP (talk) 09:22, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Support Seems reasonable, why not do what is already in this instance. It engenders community collaboration and definition by community consensus as well as drawing folk in. scope_creep^Talk 18:52, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
6. I don't understand why this is being described as an "award", but it will quite clearly be an improvement if substantial contributors to an article could count as "creators" for various purposes: for example, when Twinkle sends out an AfD notice for the article, or when an incoming link is created. – Uanfala (talk) 12:29, 29 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (awards)

1. This will only end up being gamed for the same reasons. Also I can't think of anything that would put me off developing stubs more than this. If people really want bonus points they can take articles to DYK Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:35, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

   It wouldn't put me off creating stubs, but I will note that stubs rarely get improved after their creation. Abductive (reasoning) 11:35, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

2. We have WP:DYK. --Rschen7754 04:07, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
3. No, you don't get awards for creating great articles, why would you get one for expanding one.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:53, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Oppose as useless for solving the problem we are supposed to be addressing here. If the stubs are on unencyclopedic topics they literally cannot be improved by editing. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Please open your own section with username in the heading. Please limit comments within a section to 300 words.

Comments (awards)

Comments from Rlendog

I don't understand Abductive's comment that "stubs rarely get improved after their creation." I have seen many stubs get improved after their creation, and in some cases well after their creation. Rlendog (talk) 16:55, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Abductive (awards)

Reply moved from #Comments from Rlendog –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 20:18, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

• @Rlendog:, I have created about 1700 non-list, non-disambig articles. About 1500 are still stubs. 200 or so have never been edited since my last edit, even to make minor corrections such as formatting or adding categories. Moreover, 3,749,266 out of 7,449,754 pages are assessed as stubs. This is 57% of the 6,562,906 articles on Wikipedia. Of course stubs get improved, and this is the hope of stub-creating editors such as myself (but not, I think, those completionist users who are only migrating databases onto Wikipedia). But as you note, some stubs don't get improved until "well after their creation," which suggests that the improvements are not motivated by any abstract urge to simply improve stubs. So I guess that is my definition of "rarely". Abductive (reasoning) 16:50, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Support (article improvement metric)

1. Support as nominator. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:02, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Support a constructive and cooperative approach to the mass creation of articles.Paradise Chronicle (talk) 08:20, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Support in principle, although I wonder about the practicalities. Ingratis (talk) 07:31, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
4. A metric to praise those who improve articles is a fantastic idea. It sounds difficult to implement, but I support it in principle. Supertrinko (talk) 02:21, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Support There's a lot of talk of quality rather than quantity so let's have a measure of it. Such a value added metric would help in nudging editors to add quality and value to the project. Currently, too much weight is given to simpler metrics such as edit count, which seems to encourage huge numbers of low-value edits. For example, by participating in the discussion we are boosting our edit count but doing nothing to improve articles. The editors who are creating and improving content in a detailed and uncontroversial way need more recognition and reward but we can't do that if we can't measure their effort.
6. Support It will be extremely disruptive at the begining and its important to understand who is doing what and why. Either that or its uncontrolled and we have already seen what that leads to. If its permission based, then assuming an editor comes in and creates 2k of broken articles and doesn't fix, it needs to be known if they are fixing them, never mind expanding them, so it can be controlled, at least initially. scope_creep^Talk 16:33, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Support. This is a thing I would line to see, because it would be a cool thing to have, but I do not think it will have any useful effect on the problem we are addressing here. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:03, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
8. Support if practical as it will give editors incentive to improve articles. However, I don't think it will solve this problem since articles that can't be improved beyond one line cited to a database won't be, and articles that can be improved were never problematic in the first place as there is no deadline to improve them. As such, it may be out of scope for this RfC, but Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy and this is where the discussion is happening, so I'm not going to oppose it on that reason alone. Smartyllama (talk) 12:55, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (article improvement metric)

1. This will only end up being gamed. And, as above, I have little interest in creating stats such as this. Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:36, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Oppose - This is pure solutionism. FOARP (talk) 07:24, 10 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Oppose - While article improvement is commendable, it doesn't solve the underlying problem of articles that can't be improved because significant coverage doesn't exist. Editors often skip over these articles when they can't find adequate sourcing, with the assumption that someone else will. We need solutions that specifically address the creation of unsourceable articles. –dlthewave ☎ 03:10, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Oppose, duplicates WP:Assessment scale, which is neglected anyway. Abductive (reasoning) 13:49, 29 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Oppose Hate this. See Goodhart's law. --Jayron32 11:53, 2 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (article improvement metric)

Support amending WP:MASSCREATE

1. Support both 1 and 2 as proposer - An argument repeatedly deployed by mass-creators was that they were not mass-creating, even when it was at the rate of dozens of articles per day through simply filling spaces in a template, as they were performing their mass-creation through repetitive editing by hand. They were able to argue this due to a perceived ambiguousness of WP:MASSCREATE/WP:MEATBOT as to whether they included mass-creation through repetitive editing by hand. Point 1 is intended to clarify that mass-creation by hand is also mass-creation.
   Point 2 is designed to promote engagement with mass-creators and the wider community at an early stage. I feel strongly that editors spending many hours of their day, every day, robotically creating articles is not good for their mental health or co-operative engagement with other editors, and is path that we should steer people away from where possible. Instead editors should be encouraged to discuss their planned mass-creation at an early stage with other editors, get feedback from them, and possibly even explore options for using tools/bots to speed up the process where there is a consensus to do so. This discussion can be in any appropriate forum (e.g., a relevant project). I think an earlier intervention in the cases of the mass-creators for whom we have had ARBCOM cases in recent years might have avoided the sad outcome of these proceedings. I think this is a minimalist solution based on existing policies and is not mutually exclusive with the other proposed solutions above.
   The enforcement mechanism for Point 2 would be a subject for the next RFC.FOARP (talk) 11:07, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
2. Support. Problematic mass-creation is already semi-automated through the use of spreadsheets, scrapers, or templates, but it is a good idea to remove any ambiguity. I also support Point 2; at the moment this is an implicit requirement (Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval only grant approval for mass creation tasks when there is a broader consensus) and making it an explicit requirement also helps to remove ambiguity. BilledMammal (talk) 13:58, 11 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Support both. Good and bad editors both can over-indulge in editing Wikipedia, but the issue is the content by bad editors. Give them an early warning that bot like editing may have consequences, so as to limit damage to the project. The analogy is WP:MEATPUPPET and WP:DUCK. LessHeard vanU (talk) 13:03, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Support for both proposals. If the issues at AfD are going to be solved mass creation needs to not be the norm. By getting edutors to discuss mass creation first AfD won't be clogged up later having to deal with any issues. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 15:27, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
5. Support- Ideally we would have one policy and approval process that covers all mass creation tasks, automated or not, as the effect is the same. This would also eliminate the loophole for editors who copy-paste the output of offline/local automated processes and insist that they're doing it all by hand. –dlthewave ☎ 15:55, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Support MASSCREATE already includes article creation manually by humans, and would not be amended to include that, as suggested by the first oppose. Stub creation that is high-volume can in fact be higher risk, so permission should be required and this should be explicit in the policy. Reywas92^Talk 17:20, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Support, in the understanding that anything resembling automated creation off of a list would require consensus. This is really what I tried to argue above and on the talk page, but apparently I'm not that good at getting my point across. Vanamonde (Talk) 23:37, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
8. Support, especially if coupled with a prohibition on using non-prose databases as the sources for such articles. JoelleJay (talk) 00:21, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Support - Getting some agreement beforehand would solve a lot of the issues mass creation has been at the root of. -Indy beetle (talk) 08:44, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Support both— when doing any large-scale series of edits, including creations, getting a double-check from the community should be the common-sense thing to do anyhow. This feels like it harmonizes fully with our existing prohibitions against botlike edits without approval. Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^talk 12:12, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Support 2 2 is critical I think to keep control, certainly. For point 1, they are not the same in any kind of way, even if your creating hundreds of atrticles manually, or even thousands, its not the same scale. Not now. They are fundamentally different and there is more and more evidence of this. I've not seen the WP:MASSCREATE policy before. I suspect it probably needs to be updated in some way, in the near time frame, but not sure how. There is so many unknows. scope_creep^Talk 17:28, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Weak support Mass-created (semi-)manually written articles, if not done with additional sourcing to non-database sources, are identical to bot-created articles, and should be treated as such. I'd be okay with something like, "create 10 articles in mainspace to show what you mean", and then ask for permission if you want to make more. I disagree with the citation of being bold below, as mass creation is inherently controversial (WP:CAREFUL). Ovinus (talk) 00:42, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Support per above. Levivich (talk) 20:04, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Weak support the placement in relation to bots is odd, but the spirit of the suggestion is constructive. Jontesta (talk) 23:16, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
15. Support both 2 in particular is important to prevent an unmanageable number of low quality stubs from being created in the first place. Avilich (talk) 18:48, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Support, as above. _wjemather^{please leave a message...} 10:37, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
17. Support. For many of these articles, a bot would actually be preferrable (lower error rate, bot flag). It shouldn't be an extra hurdle, rather an encouragement to do it right, as Ovinus, above. AKAF (talk) 06:44, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Oppose amending WP:MASSCREATE

1. Expanding WP:MASSCREATE to include article creation manually by humans is totally out of the scope of a bot policy page. Telling editors who want to do manual editing to go ask permission at a bot noticeboard based on a bot policy is going to make no damn sense at all. Any reasonable person's reaction would be... well, I'm not a bot, so why are you treating me like one? And they'd be right to react this way. Don't tell editors making manual edits to ask prior permission to do low risk things like create stubs. If they need to be deleted later, we can do that. Creating a policy of asking prior permission to edit goes against our fundamental guideline to be bold in editing. Steven Walling • talk 16:35, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
2. A bot page clearly isn't the right place to do this, and there's no indication of where else an editor would ask to create an unspecified (25? Over how long?) number of articles. I have some sympathy for the idea behind the proposal, but am concerned that it's so open that it can be used to write something really very restrictive. I also have serious and significant concerns that this is question 17 - we're back at that stage of an RfC where people lose interest and we end up "passing" something that has wide ranging impacts that aren't properly considered. I could support the idea of taking the first point of this proposal and discussing it as a standalone proposal at relevant places where it will be widely publicised and can be properly considered by a larger number of interested editors. I'm not sure that the second point of this proposal is something I could support - it goes too far, seems unnecessary. and is pointing at a really obscure part of , err, an essay a procedural polcy. Blue Square Thing (talk) 06:02, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
3. per Steven Walling. There is a substantial disconnect between bot policy and editors doing tasks manually. Rlendog (talk) 17:53, 13 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Um, what? Why does MASSCREATE need sentences like "it is irrelevant whether high-speed or large-scale edits...are actually being performed by a bot, by a human assisted by a script, or even by a human without any programmatic assistance" or "However, merely editing quickly, particularly for a short time, is not by itself disruptive." I really wonder whether the supporters have read either WP:MASSCREATE (which ends with the words "WP:MEATBOT still applies") or WP:MEATBOT recently. Perhaps this proposal would benefit from suggesting exact changes, in the "change X to Y" format preferred for edit requests.
   The problem with point 2, of course, is getting editors to agree on what constitutes mass creation of articles. We do not agree. MASSCREATE suggests 25 to 50 articles, but we don't agree on whether that threshold is meant to be per day (likely, if you read the discussion those numbers come out of) or per lifetime. FOARP, looking at your other comments, you want to "Make getting consensus for creation prior to mass creation mandatory", but you say that there's no need to agree on what constitutes mass creation, because "we'll know it when we see it". However, you can't "see it" until after the editor has already mass-created the articles. Taken as a whole, your proposals amount to:
   1. Someone creates 20 articles.
   2. You "know it when you see it", and you declare that the editor has culpably mass-created articles.
   3. You demand that the editor time-travel to get permission before creating the articles.

   This is not a good plan. You're going to have to pick one or the other. Either you tell editors, in objective terms when they do (and don't) need to get permission in advance, or you don't get to complain later that they didn't know that they should have gotten permission in advance. Refuse to write down the rules and them blame them later for not guessing the secret rules in your head (or subjecting them to drama when multiple editors have different rules in their own heads) is unfair. WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:09, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

5. Plumping here formally, per my comments below. I could support something broadly related to this, but we'd need some sort of an admin-understandable definition of "mass creation", and we need to sort out what is the most appropriate venue [if the noticeboard proposal does not succeed, I'd suggest wikiprojects, unless there's no active wikiproject, in which case the reliable sources noticeboard (as it comes down to whether the proposed source is good enough) or possibly the village pump, but not the bot noticeboard, it's offensive to good-faith editors]. Espresso Addict (talk) 04:11, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
6. Much article creation seems quite repetitive but the trouble is that this might be done at a variety of levels. For example, recent FAs include Fort Vancouver Centennial half dollar and Hurricane Sergio which are part of a series of similar articles. You can't really tell whether such work is problematic until you've got a number of examples. If someone had to ask for permission before they had started, then they would tend to talk ambitiously and hopefully about their plans, which might sound plausible. And, even if their first efforts were weak, they might improve as they get familiar with the task. I think it's better to let people have a go per WP:BOLD and monitor what they do. If lots of their creations are getting flagged at NPP then that's the time to start an audit/review process. Andrew🐉(talk) 08:56, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
7. Per Steven Walling and WhatamIdoing. The proposed amendments of the bot policy are outside the scope of the bot policy, and are not compatible with WP:BOLD. Point 1 of the proposal is not a mere clarification: WP:MEATBOT actually refers specifically to edits that are contrary to consensus, or that cause errors an attentive human would not make, which does not include all "mass-creation through repetitive editing by hand". James500 (talk) 20:07, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
8. This flips WP:BOLD on its head. I've said elsewhere in this discussion that I do think that it's a good idea to discuss mass creation with other knowledgeable editors beforehand, but making prior affirmative consensus mandatory is a de facto ban on mass creation: those opposed to mass creation on principle will simply filibuster each request. – Joe (talk) 09:30, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
9. Similar to Espresso Addict, I don't mind the spirit of this proposal, but it's too ill-defined for me to support it. There isn't a firm definition of what mass creation is yet, much less what constitutes a "highly similar" article, and I worry that this would just lead to arguments over what constitutes a mass creation before anything even got to a noticeboard. (I've seen editors argue that two-line species stubs aren't mass creations, and I've seen editors argue that articles with 20+ distinct sources are cookie-cutter; good luck reconciling those opinions.) And that's before we even get to the issue of what forum to discuss these at; the bot noticeboard isn't meant to handle human editing, any forum specifically for mass creations will attract regulars with blanket opinions on them, and review by wikiprojects can lead to issues with walled gardens and less active projects not reaching consensus. And if a mass creation proposal fails, does that leave the proposer with a de facto topic ban on creating new articles in a topic area, or can they still create new articles as long as they stay below some threshold or reach a certain level of quality? All details I'd like to see worked out before I can support. TheCatalyst31 ^{Reaction•Creation} 01:44, 18 October 2022 (UTC)
10. Oppose, don't see the value in this.--Ortizesp (talk) 14:54, 20 October 2022 (UTC)
11. Sets a bad precedent. What is next? Rapid minor edits conducted with the assistance of copy-paste and browser tabs? --Rschen7754 00:31, 21 October 2022 (UTC)
12. Per the unresolved issues in my comment below. Implementing a new requirement while at the same time failing to find consensus [in this RfC] for what it should apply to (and why) doesn't seem like a good idea. :/ — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:28, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
13. Oppose. This doesn't address the problem. If someone is creating many articles - even short articles - a day that are appropriately referenced to multiple reliable sources, there is no problem and no need for them to ask permission. Rlendog (talk) 20:23, 24 October 2022 (UTC)
14. Oppose Sorry, I'm just not seeing what is being solved here. I also share the concerns articulated above: To what is this meant to apply? Who says that a particular set of pages qualifies? Where is the discussion supposed to happen? Doesn't this invert the be bold! spirit? XOR'easter (talk) 17:53, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
15. Oppose Don't see the need to quote pages that already are linked from other pages. --Jayron32 18:38, 28 October 2022 (UTC)
16. Oppose. Does not fix the problem, which is mass creation of unencyclopedic stubs. This is a competence issue. Withdraw the right to create articles from those who misuse it, whether maliciously or incompetently. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 18:00, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (amend WP:MASSCREATE)

Support (expansion of BRFA powers)

1. As proposer. I have been involved in a mass edit event. Since such a proposal would force mass actions to go through BRFA first, this can ensure consensus for a potential mass action. Thanks, NotReallySoroka (talk) 02:37, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

Oppose (expansion of BRFA powers)

1. The bot approval process is not the place to deal with actions which are manual, even if they do meet MEATBOT definitions. I'm not sure that having an open ended "any mass edit" is awfully helpful - does this mean that any time that someone goes through and deals with dodgy categorisations that they'd need to ask permission first? It seems to me to be more likely that a series of mass edits on, say, UK place articles (such as the addition of historic counties - very much a divisive issue fwiw), would be best discussed at the appropriate wikiprojects where people with an interest in the content might see it, rather than at a notice board where people interested only in process are likely to see it. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:57, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
2. As I said above this could have unforeseen consequences. Plus, the BAG is chosen for their technical abilities and this would be a massive expansion of their duties as well as skills required. --Rschen7754 23:45, 30 October 2022 (UTC)
3. Bots are bots, people are people. People should not need to ask permission to work hard at Wikipedia. They should be encouraged to do so, not given a wall of bureaucracy. --Jayron32 11:46, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
4. Just no, per all above. Espresso Addict (talk) 22:45, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
5. The bot policy has a section about the bot approvals group. The members of the group are experienced in writing and running bots and have programming experience. This isn't relevant to article creation at scale by humans. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 08:14, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
6. What they said above. · · · Peter Southwood ^(talk): 17:50, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
7. BRFA is not the place to have this. BAG members are selected for their skill in making bots, programming and checking for automated bot issues. They are not selected to authorise mass edits by people, which IMO is a different ball game. Dreamy Jazz ^{talk to me | my contributions} 11:44, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Comments (expansion of BRFA powers)

• I kind of would like to know what the BRFA regulars think about this. Are they interested in this work, or would it feel like we're foisting difficult problems off onto them? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:54, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

  Can't speak for all BAG members, but I doubt there'd be interest to do this. BRFA only has a few active BAG members processing requests at a given time. I think very few BAG members would wish to assess whether consensus exists for a mass editing job by a person, especially as some of these will be contentious I imagine. The result would probably just be severe delays, if the requests were processed at all.

  In general (regarding the various BRFA/bot proposals on this page): It's convenient to see WP:MASSCREATE and WP:MEATBOT applied to article creation at scale, and while I do think those policies apply, I think it's ineffective to tinker with the bot policy or bot processes to try solve this problem. Firsly, because content editors don't read the bot policy or care about it. Secondly, because quoting the bot policy has typically lacked muster in these kinds of WP:ANI cases, even though the text is already clear. A clear guideline needs to be made and put into a content policy if it's to have any hope of success, and there needs to be quick action at WP:ANI, including effective action against the violating content. Without appropriate enforcement measures, the policy will be toothless. The bot policy has enforcement measures for bots (i.e. block the violating bot), which gives it standing in the context of bots, but these block rationales often aren't applied to human editors engaging in similar behaviours. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 02:06, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Further proposals

Please bring up further proposals on talk, with a ping to the nominators.

Comments from ActivelyDisinterested

As per my comment on question 5, it could be useful to have some limitation with WP:BLPs. Personally I wonder whether allowing it at all is a good idea. But I'm unsure how to word any proposal correctly. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 19:00, 4 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from JoelleJay

I brought this up in the earlier discussions, but given the difficulty in defining "mass creation", why don't we just have a limit on how many undersourced new articles a single person can have in their contributions (from X date)? If they go over that limit, they get escalating warnings up to a p-block from page creation, which can only be removed if they adequately source N other non-compliant articles. So it would be fine to create 100 microstubs if they included GNG sourcing from the start. And it wouldn't matter if other people expanded their articles after creation: the whole point is to discourage generating standalones for which other editors end up needing to find notability-confirming sources. 22:19, 6 October 2022 (UTC)

I don't know anything about technical feasibility in tracking the state of article sourcing at creation, but if it's doable I could add it to the proposals. "Undersourced" could be defined by AfC norms or hashed out more fully later. I intended for the counter to start only after extensive global notification across some period of time, so it wouldn't apply to old articles. Adding sufficient sourcing to other editors' articles would also be an option for offsetting one's own unexpandable-microstub footprint, it just would be harder to keep track of it. 21:01, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Also agreed with FOARP that GEOLAND is huge mass-creation fodder and should be covered. 21:22, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Espresso Addict

@JoelleJay: This is an interesting suggestion; I'd like further details on how it might work in practice. Is this technically feasible? What about articles which the contributor creates with sources but someone else removes the sources (this is reasonably common, someone "improves" the article by writing over it, losing all sourcing). Would you get points for sourcing other people's work? Anything that persuaded editors to work on the un(der)sourced articles heap would be positive. How is undersourced defined? My understanding of the way this RfC works is that if this is to be a proposal, it needs to be formally started in the next few days. ETA: Might want to include a date threshold; I think there might need to be a "statute of limitations" for very old contributions before referencing standards were anything like today's standards and when online sources were much more sparse. Espresso Addict (talk) 00:04, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

@Aquillion: Well, I tried to put forward proposals but both of them have/are failing. I don't personally feel this discussion format is at all helpful in bringing people together to find a solution to the undoubted problem. I wish I'd been able to participate in the brainstorming discussions but they happened when I was sufficiently injured to be unable to type. Espresso Addict (talk) 02:07, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@FOARP: I, and perhaps others, would be a great deal happier with proposals that relate to populated settlements under GEOLAND, rather the entire guideline, which also covers heritage-listed buildings, mountains, and similar. Espresso Addict (talk) 01:12, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

@FOARP: I had a look at Zykov Glacier and there is a little online about it beyond the existing text. After the expedition that photographed it there seem to have been at least two published independent studies of the rock there, which are reviewed in a handful of papers. A reader encountering Zykov Glacier in this literature might want to know where it was exactly. Someone who actually understood what the papers are talking about might be able to improve the article further. Espresso Addict (talk) 23:39, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

A lot of this is beginning to seem more like a conduct issue to me. Is it not the case that administrators are already empowered to tell someone that what they're doing is disruptive because they are flooding NPP with articles based on an inadequate/unreliable source, and that they should slow down/stop and form consensus to continue at an appropriate venue? Espresso Addict (talk) 04:20, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Dlthewave

@JoelleJay: This seems like a great idea - Besides removing the open-ended "someone will improve it in the future" assumption, it will limit the problem of articles that can't be improved because coverage doesn't exist, which are currently a massive time sink. Even if we have to tweak the wording, this seems like something that the community might support as it doesn't encroach on article creation quite as much as the GNG-sourcing-from-the-start requirement. Would love to see this added to the RfC. –dlthewave ☎ 02:09, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from FOARP

I am very concerned that people seem to not appreciate the extent to which mass-creation in the GEOLAND area is a really big problem, at least as big as that which was in NSPORTS. Exempting and excluding GEOLAND from a lot of the proposals above (why?) means there will essentially be no fix for the problems we are addressing. FOARP (talk) 08:40, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

@Valereee: - My GEOLAND-specific fix is that any fix for mass-creation also applies to GEOLAND articles. There is nothing special about GEOLAND articles that requires a carve-out for them. Going through a half-understood database and translating every line of it into its own article is as much a problem there as it is everywhere else. This whole thing started with Lugnuts mass-creating Turkish “village” articles that were likely neighbourhoods or individual farms. FOARP (talk) 14:33, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

@Valereee: - Having looked at this, I think this is better stated as a simple oppose !vote for proposals that (inexplicably) contain carve-outs for subject-areas known to be heavily affected by mass-creation. Beyond saying that Agro-Industry Complex and Harry Oppenheim were both undesirable mass-creations, what more is to be said? Instead I will just propose something based on an already existing policy that already applies to all subject-areas anyway. FOARP (talk) 10:32, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Espresso Addict - I cannot see how the rash of articles about geographical features in Antarctica mass-created in 2006 literally by word-for-word copying of single-sentence GNIS database entries (e.g., this one) were much better than the Iranian villages articles mass-created at the same time. By any definition these articles lack significant coverage and are never likely to be expanded because they are about features where no-one lives and which are almost never visited except fleetingly. The are straight NGEO-fails given that the only information about them is name and location. The one thing I will grant them is at least they are not simply the same single-sentence template repeated over and over, but this is because the people who created the GNIS data did not do that. FOARP (talk) 07:37, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Espresso Addict - Passing mentions in a long list of places that samples were collected in is not anything that will add content to an article. The same thing was true for minor planets (i.e., their observations are regularly recorded and many are regularly mentioned fleetingly in long lists) but we sensibly weeded out all the ones without SIGCOV years ago. FOARP (talk) 08:00, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

@Valereee, 127(point)0(point)0(point)1, and 127(point)0(point)0(point)1: - Engagement is lower than you might expect partly because the title is very anodyne and doesn't really say what it's about. This subject does cause major drama so I expect if we had a title that was closer to what it was actually about (what to do about mass creation of articles?) more people would be clicking through from CENT. FOARP (talk) 14:34, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

@AKAF - You are right that WP:MASSCREATE already exists - sharpening it up a bit is the subject of question 17. FOARP (talk) 10:47, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Aquillion

I'm noticing at least a few people seem to be opposing virtually all proposals. Is this because they do not believe there is a problem, or because they believe that none of these are the correct solution to the problem? If it's the latter, do they have proposals of their own? --Aquillion (talk) 18:23, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from XOR'easter

This whole discussion seems to have come unmoored from any specifics, in a way that creates an illusory unity of problems. Are we worried about copyright violations? Inaccurate information? The inclusion of accurate information in chunks that might be too small? I don't think "article creation at scale" is one thing, and so I don't think there can be a single rulebook for it, or a single remedy for it going wrong. XOR'easter (talk) 19:08, 7 October 2022 (UTC)

Hut 8.5, yes, I think that many people are just used to Wikipedia having lots of tiny articles about obscure things. I'm a bit surprised that there hasn't been a proposal along the lines of, "Before you create a lot of stubs, get community input on whether the source you are using is reliable." XOR'easter (talk) 14:03, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Blue Square Thing

@Aquillion: I seem to have found myself opposing almost all of the proposals. I didn't expect this to be the case - I expected to support some. But the arguments put forward by other people have led me to oppose much more frequently than I expected to. I'm not completely convinced that there is that much of a problem here than can't be dealt with in other ways; if there are other solutions I'm afraid that I'm not clever enough to see them just now. Blue Square Thing (talk) 08:51, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Valereee

Espresso Addict, we'll be workshopping the AfD RfC soon at WT:ADAS (and are discussing the timeline for that now; we are considering starting workshopping as soon as things significantly slow here). If none of the proposed solutions here gains consensus, that RfC will by necessity still need to cover any mass creation issues that affect AfD at scale. We ran this first to see if the community could find solutions to this one major problem, because if it could be solved at least partially here, that RfC could build on those solutions.

XOR'easter, we decided to do this RfC first not because creation at scale was the only thing affecting dysfunction at AfD but because there was a strong feeling that it was a major contributor, and if we could find solutions here before the RfC about deletions at scale, it might actually make that RfC less of a train wreck. Valereee (talk) 14:43, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

FOARP, can you propose a GEOLAND-specific fix? Valereee (talk) 14:48, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@FOARP, can you create a proposal for that? Valereee (talk) 14:40, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Ingratis, I'm not going to prevent something being proposed that is related to mass creation, if someone can come up with a proposal. The RfC has been announced in multiple places, including WT:N. Valereee (talk) 12:04, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

@127(point)0(point)0(point)1, the RfC has been announced at the articles for deletion talk page, the Arbitration Noticeboard, the administrators' noticeboard, the Bot policy talk page, Village pump (policy), Wikipedia talk:Notability and Centralized discussion. Some of those noticeboards have thousands of watchers. Valereee (talk) 14:17, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

@127(point)0(point)0(point)1, we can't actually force people to be interested or understand. @FOARP, you really think it's the name? Don't answer here, let's take it to talk. Valereee (talk) 14:51, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from 127

I'm rather surprised by the participation numbers here. Problems of this scale and discussions of reworking fundamental processes and the highest number of editors in any one counting stack response is... 13 at time of writing. There are more well populated ANI threads. I know there's more time to run, but at the rate there are new voices coming in, I don't think we're at a place we can realistically proclaim a consensus for or against. This RfC needs more visibility. --WhoIs 127.0.0.1 ping/loopback 20:56, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@User:Valereee I appreciate that it's been announced in all those places, and don't wan't this to be framed as some sort of lack of effort. But that still doesn't change the fact that we don't seem to have the participation we need for the kind of changes we're proposing here. Either those watching eyes aren't coming and aren't interested or they don't understand the scale of the RfC. -WhoIs 127.0.0.1 ping/loopback 14:36, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Hut 8.5

I get the impression that this is an issue a small number of editors care about a lot but where the wider community doesn't care. That explains the low particpation and the fact that none of the proposals is doing very well. The largest problem I've seen in this area is with people creating lots of articles on populated places that don't exist by citing sources that aren't reliable or don't really indicate that something is a populated place. The proposals here either wouldn't address this or are far too heavyweight. Hut 8.5 10:50, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Editor AKAF

This RFC seems a lot of faff to codify the current community position:

• Creation of "high quality" articles (whatever that means) is a net positive of which pretty much everyone approves.
• Creation of articles in a "bot-like manner", including manually populating templates from a database, is something to which editors appear indifferent or negative.
• A small percentage of articles created in a "bot-like manner" have been expanded to be "high quality" articles, and everybody likes these articles.

For bot-like edits, there is an existing route to approval (WP:BRFA), which could be enforced. AKAF (talk) 07:25, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Ingratis

@Valereee I'm very concerned at the apparent danger that this RfC may be used as backdoor leverage on the issues surrounding GEOLAND. As you will be aware, there is a long and rather vicious history of many attempts to change it which have met with much strong objection. Because of the complexity of the issues they need to continue to be discussed fully at the SNG itself, not tacked onto this RfC, the context of which will certainly slant the discussion, so it seems to me inappropriate for any GEOLAND reform proposal to be put forward here. Ingratis (talk) 11:28, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

@Valereee I understand that of course the focus here is on mass creation but there are many more issues involved in GEOLAND than that. Any proposal to draw its teeth as an SNG by removing its present criteria and making it subject to GNG (as advocated by for example FOARP) must surely require a separate RfC, which would doubtless attract a lot of participation, since there are many editors who have very firm views on whether GEOLAND should go the way of NSPORTS. Ingratis (talk) 08:19, 12 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Rhododendrites

I wish everyone responding to various proposals here with "that will just be wikilawyered" or "this will just be gamed" will consider whether the potential for wikilawyering/gaming would be greater if we have some of those basic rules/guidelines in place than the current situation. It seems like so many things are failing for two big reasons: this, and because there's a divide as to whether this is all about quality or all about quantity. On the latter, I don't know how you can say which creation projects the quality requirements would apply to without getting into quantity ("all new articles must have X sourcing/claims/whatever" is outside the scope of this RfC after all, so to what will it apply?). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 12:16, 10 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from LessHeard vanU

Anything that makes the job of admins, and Arbcom, easier in determining whether someone is not editing to the benefit of the encyclopedia is to be commended. The truth behind the fact that not a lot of the editorship cares about the issues around mass article creation is that they are not required to improve or even consider low quality content (and why should they, we need every good editor to be happy!). Those who care need a base from which they can address the issues and present them for necessary action. I support the purpose of this rfc. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:26, 13 October 2022 (UTC)

I am impressed by the reasoning of @Mangoe: below, especially their last point - where there is a singular source used in a batch of mass creation, that source needs investigation. This RfC might address how a contributor assessing a batch of edits might review the sources and how they may communicate their concerns to either a board or initially the original contributor. Certainly, mass creation of articles from a dubious source may be quickly deleted even if there may be better sources simply because a poor source on notability devalues the encyclopedia. Better to get rid en-masse and then rescue those which can be attributed to a better clain of notability at some future date. An editor who returns to a poor source, or recreates the same articles from it, after such articles are removed can be introduced to the WP:CLUESTICK. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:06, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

@@WhatamIdoing: Eh? We are talking mass creation of articles - in this proposition, a quantity from one poor source - so your example of one article having the source clicked perhaps 3 times a year is multiplied by the number of articles; dozens, scores or even hundreds of articles. 100 -/+ clicks to a link that is little more than a list or an index provides no indication of the notability of an article. Anyone with an interest in the individual subject might think that it deserves a better source so they can confirm the article content - they may indeed find and link that better source, but they may have done that in creating an article of a subject they are interested in. Mass creation from a bare list does not provide evidence of notability, even when the subject may be notable. LessHeard vanU (talk) 09:33, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I am going to make one final comment, as I think we are not talking about the same issue, and you may respond as you please. I am talking mass creation of articles, using a poor source, which creates far more work for patrollers, admins, and editors, than any benefit to the project; anyone looking for the WhatamIdoing Fine Dining Establishment may find it as it is created from a list called "Food Venues Using Names of Wikipedians" hosted on some obscure site on the internet, but may be better served by a source that is taken from a review publication of some repute. If it has an entry on the latter, then notability is easily determined. If the article does not yet exist, then someone can create it - hopefully using the good source - as a single one time subject. This improves the encyclopedia, as it takes less effort to review and add to than initially sorting the wheat from the chaff. This what I intend by my two ending sentences of my 15th October post. LessHeard vanU (talk) 16:09, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Ovinus

My worry from the preparatory RfC—that we don't have enough examples and data—grows stronger. Of the controversial mass creations/creators I can recall, we have 4 mentions of Carlossuarez, 7 of Lugnuts, and... that's it, according to Cmd-F. I feel I cannot make an informed decision without understanding how these proposed guidelines or solutions would have applied were they in existence five years ago. Ovinus (talk) 01:16, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Mangoe

First, @Hut 8.5:: I'm not terribly concerned that the "greater community" is ignorant of the issue, if indeed they are. They do not set the standards: comparable works, and the writing of academic works set the standards. And besides, the thing is so huge at this point that it is unsurprising that any given person is unaware of some aspect of the problem. I'm only aware of the issues because I follow AfD and have become active in geographic deletions; I am somewhat aware WRT to Olympic competitors, but beyond that I just don't have the time to follow further.

Moving on to the issues:

• Personally, I'm coming to the opinion that creating stubs at all is bad. I've made a very few myself, but I don't think I will ever do so again, especially if I'm not going to come back later and flesh the article out. There's just too much of a distance between the satisfaction of creating an article and that of expanding someone else's article.

• The second big issue is that mass creation from a source requires a supreme level of confidence in that source. In practice what has happened is that it takes time to realize that a source is not as good as people assume. GNIS is the poster child for this: one would think that a database from the official geographers of the country would be as reliable as possible, but in practice it took a lot of examination to expose its fallibility. It's unlikely that a review way back when would have exposed this before large numbers of stubs were created.

• The other substantial problem, as @FOARP: has pointed out, is that the subject guidelines are quite problematic. Again, I'm going to pick on GEOLAND, which I find, in its history, was not the result of an extensive discussion among many parties, but which was written, in pieces, by individuals, with no prior agreement. The understanding that they trump GNG, which is widely held, has meant many, many fights over notability. But the subtler issue is that these guidelines lead article creators to misclassify article subjects so as to fall under the aegis of a guideline— not necessarily on purpose, but because it is the path of least resistance. Therefore we have spent years trying to get rid of articles on nonexistent towns, er "unincorporated communities", and we had the recent cleanup in which a bunch of Iranian "towns" were imagined out of what turned out to ad hoc descriptions of census tracts.

So I'm not keen on mass creation. But if it has to happen, the articles and the process need to be held to very high standards. And the solution for mass errors has to be mass clean up, not the laborious process we're being put through now. Mangoe (talk) 03:56, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

@Ovinus: Carlos Suarez wasn't the only person who made a huge run of stub place articles; he was simply more egregious about it. From what I can tell all town/"unincorporated community" articles were stubbed out from GNIS by a variety of persons, and so far I've only found one state (Oregon) where there was a concerted effort to expand the stubs and clear out dubious entries. Mangoe (talk) 02:20, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Scope creep

I saw two news articles today that are in conflict. They were Why Mastering Language Is So Difficult For AI, where it states automated tooling with AI is currently a form of plagiarism. The second article is where a student is using it to create her homework. While I think we are on the cusp, its very early days. scope_creep^Talk 21:36, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

Moved reply from Atsme to own section. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 20:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

I hadn't seen that but it was really interesting. It was kind of thing I was thought was going to happen in the future but has now been formalised in the present. It seems to be a first generation attempt to go beyond the static model found on Wikipedia and is likely the first of many. His criteria for inclusion makes it similar to a search engine, but gives you an idea what is possible now. Unfortunately the software we have on here is too decript to even to begin use any of that. I suspect increasingly we are going to be seen as monks beavering away in the monastery while the Gutenberg revolution happens elsewhere, but its early days. scope_creep^Talk 08:51, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

I question what it will actually take us as group, to actually get off this software. The software environment is negating our capability over the long term of creating better and higher quality articles and more of them. It may be questionable saying better, but if we were on a platform that enabled us to quikly have deeper insight into certain sources using automation, I'm sure it would be used to create better articles within policy and consensus. These kinds of questions need to be asked. When is it going to happen. Are we still going to be on this software in 2030 or 2040. There seems be no plan by the WMF with its head in the sand and that is reflected in this software which unbelievably decrepit. At the moment, any kind of automation is going to be done off-wikipedia, outwith our control. So at some point we are have to say, when are going to move off this platform and how are we going to do it. scope_creep^Talk 09:37, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from User: Stuartyeates

Much of the discussion is about mass creation of articles in a scripted fashion from databases with a few facts about a very large number of items. Wikimedia already has infrastructure to support databases with a few facts about a very large number of items, called wikidata. Maybe what we need is a solution involving people putting data into wikidata and that being displayed via a scripted template in wikipedia which isn't actually created as a fully expanded article until human comes along to end it? Stuartyeates (talk) 00:24, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from WhatamIdoing

LessHeard vanU said: "a poor source on notability devalues the encyclopedia."

How? Like, literally, how does this happen? What's the mechanism you're hypothesizing here?

Imagine that I create an article on something you've never heard of, like Oculodentodigital dysplasia. Hardly anybody will ever see the article, though I imagine that its existence pleases the families of the ~100 patients in the world that are affected by this exceedingly rare disease. The article gets 3 or 4 page views per day. We know that nobody clicks on the little blue clicky numbers in 99.7% of page views, so if it's an average article, then just four people per year will click on a ref tag, and there's no guarantee that any of them will click on the links (if any) in the citation.

So: I've made a very low traffic article that nobody checks the sources on. How could the contents of the source nobody's reading, recorded in a ref tag that practically nobody is clicking on, on a page almost nobody's reading in the first place, affect anybody's view of anything? WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:10, 30 October 2022 (UTC)

LessHeard vanU, readers don't care whether the subject of a Wikipedia article is notable. Remember that almost everyone gets here from a web search engine. They're getting here because they're voluntarily, intentionally looking for information (usually a very tiny bit of information) about that subject. It is extremely unlikely that they will search for information about WhatamIdoing's Gas Station, click on a link to read a Wikipedia article about WhatamIdoing's Gas Station, and then think, "I'm offended! How dare Wikipedia have an article about the thing I was looking for! Also, how dare they have hardly any information in it and how dare they not cite sources that prove it complies with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines, about which I know absolutely nothing, including whether any such things exist!"

Have you heard the joke about the restaurant? "The food is terrible, and the portions are much too small."

Wikipedia's reputation is never in any danger when we provide readers with accurate information about the subject they are seeking. I've read a lot of research about Wikipedia's readers over the last dozen years, and I don't recall seeing even a single comment from a non-editor that says anything about there being too few sources in an article. I've seen some in which researchers have to point out to readers what those little blue clicky numbers are for, but never even one complaint about too few sources in an article. A list of sources to prove notability is just not part of the readers' goals. WhatamIdoing (talk) 14:44, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

LessHeard vanU, I think you're right: We are probably talking about different things. When you said that articles would "devalue" the encyclopedia, I assumed you were thinking about reputation. It now sounds like you meant something closer to "creating articles makes work for some editors (=the ones who have volunteered to do that work)". WhatamIdoing (talk) 18:50, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Atsme

Reply moved from #Comments from Scope creep –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 20:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

Are you aware of Botipedia? Atsme 💬 📧 13:15, 21 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from 69.203.140.37

Reply moved from #Comments from User: Stuartyeates –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 20:09, 1 November 2022 (UTC)

You are right about the obvious fit of Wikidata to projects such as mass creation. But that just transfers the problem to a more opaque platform when it comes to policy. Garbage-in/garbage-out applies with a vengeance at Wikidata. Dubious "references" and self-dealing (in the form of circular references) is a real issue. 69.203.140.37 (talk) 13:23, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Comments from Levivich

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