Wikipedia:Simple talk

Poorly worded or wrong interface message for Special link to non-existent user subpage

Following a link to a non-existent user subpage such as User:Mathglot/Sandbox gives the right top-of-page boilerplate message, apparently based on MediaWiki:Newarticletext, with some modifications to add strings like, "Before starting this page, please see m:Sub pages" absent from the basic message. So far, so good.

However, when a link is generated by a Special, such as (for me), Special:MyPage/Sandbox^{[blue always]} to the same non-existent user subpage, clicking it should result in the same top-of-page boilerplate, but it does not. Instead, I see this:^{[but see note]}

I don't believe Simple allows usernames with a slash character as part of the name, so this message is misleading at the very least. It apparently derives from MediaWiki:Noarticletext NS User, but either it is not adjusted properly to emit an appropriate message, or it is the wrong interface message entirely. Instead, I would emit something like this:

Note: if you already have a Sandbox subpage, the link above will not demonstrate the bad behavior to you, so you can use these links instead to observe it: Special:MyPage/Sandbox-999, Special:MyPage/Any old name here. Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 22:18, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Would any bureaucrat (@Eptalon, Ferien, and BRPever:) please look into this? canadachick (talk) 18:46, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

I've noticed this (although, for me, it is any time I visit a non-existent userspace page). Wouldn't replacing {{PAGENAME}} with {{ROOTPAGENAME}} fix the grammar? Walnut (talk • changes) 23:48, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

Thank you both for saying about this and for notifying 'crats. I have looked slightly into this, it should involve adding a subpage variation based on en, I just haven't had the energy to see all the changes through this week, but over the weekend I should get the chance. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 21:14, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Sincere apologies that this has been left for so long, I've forgotten to go back to this and I don't want it to be archived. I have a looked at it a few times since and it seemed a little daunting, it's something I would eventually have time to do but not over the next week. I will reping fellow crats @BRPever, Chenzw, Enfcer, and Eptalon: if any of you have the time to look into this before I do, it would be greatly appreciated. --Ferien (talk | join TBA!) 22:15, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

I have changed the wording which seems to have resolved the issue as far as I can see. Please feel free to ping me if there is anything else or if part of the issue remains unresolved. (On a sidenote, I thought admins could edit mediawiki pages and it did not have to be crats). BRP ^ever 02:57, 12 October 2026 (UTC)

New system for creating articles?

Hello! I'm new to wikipedia, when i try to make a new article it firsts asks me what is this about, and then i add sources, i remember that creating an article was very simple, what's next a draft system that is just like its from English Wikipedia or is similar to the English Wikipedia? Anyways, have a good day! - Some-normal-wikimedian (talk) 11:48, 22 October 2026 (UTC)

I just noticed you only registered recently, so welcome to Wikipedia. What you've experienced is Article guidance, which was initially rolled out to this wiki back in May. Once you complete the article you wanted to make, it'll publish it like a normal article as we don't have a draft system in place here. There is an option to turn off article guidance in your settings under the editing tab, although I'm unsure if that's for everyone or only for editors with a certain amount of edits. ShadowBallX (talk) 01:49, 23 October 2026 (UTC)

Server switch - Your wiki will be read-only for a short time soon

Trizek_(WMF) 14:01, 26 October 2026 (UTC)

Request to rename Cathy Parkers to Cathy Parkes

Could an experienced editor please rename the article Cathy Parkers to Cathy Parkes?

The subject was an Australian representative water polo player, and her correct surname is Parkes, not Parkers.

The article title, opening sentence and infobox should be corrected accordingly.

Thank you for your assistance. TamaRock (talk) 05:06, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Courtesy link: Cathy Parkers. This source lists her name as "Parkers". Do you have reliable sources which go against this? Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:14, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for your response.

The correct surname is Cathy Parkes, as confirmed by the following sources:

1. University of Sydney alumni website, featuring her obituary published in The Sydney Morning Herald on 31 October 2007: https://secureau.imodules.com/s/965/index.aspx?sid=965&gid=39&pgid=537
2. Water Polo Australia Hall of Fame, which also identifies her as Cathy Parkes.

These sources support correcting the article title, opening paragraph and infobox from "Cathy Parkers" to "Cathy Parkes".

Thank you for your assistance. TamaRock (talk) 05:22, 27 October 2026 (UTC)

 Done. It seems most sources support the Parkes name. Garsh (talk) 17:25, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Ndashes?

Is this the best place to get attention?

Are ndashes the done thing here? If so, a bunch of articles need moving and/or redirecting and/or whatever.

• 1972- 73 Austrian Women's Football Cup - 1972–73 Austrian Women's Football Cup
• 1973- 74 Austrian Women's Football Cup - 1973–74 Austrian Women's Football Cup
• 1974-75 Austrian Cup - 1974–75 Austrian Cup
• 1975- 76 Austrian Women's Football Cup - 1975–76 Austrian Women's Football Cup
• 1976-77 Austrian Cup - 1976–77 Austrian Cup

I won't list the rest until I can be certain this is the right thing to be done. There are bucketfuls more to be done. Bobo. 11:24, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Bobo192. We follow in such cases enwiki's rules. You can move the pages. -Barras talk 20:00, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Cool beans. I'll add a whole bucketful of redirects in that case as well - not just that competition but others too. I was just asking before I did anything rash. Bobo. 20:05, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

@Barras: Done and done. Bobo. 21:04, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

@Barras: I'll do the same with 1911-12 Austrian football championship and others if you don't object. Bobo. 21:08, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

That's absolutely fine. :) -Barras talk 21:10, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Mercy buckets. Sometime soon I'll expand on other countries' league and cup seasons as well.

I chortled when I got the message: "You have moved too many pages! Slow down because you might look crazy." Eventually my aim is to cover other countries' domestic leagues and cups to the same depth as en.wiki. I'll also work on cricket and Olympics articles in time. Redlinks make me sad. Bobo. 21:15, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Pinging @BlackJack: Eventually, if we decide to cover cricket seasons, we might think about doing the same. Bobo. 21:16, 29 October 2026 (UTC)

Help wanted: Self-medication

Hello, in the last few days, I essentislly rewrote self-medication, beforehand it was a text that had little to do with the subject, and that had been there for years. I think the language is fairly easy to understand. Article has two issues though:

• I am not a healthcare professional, no idea if it is accurate or relevant
• Still lacks sources

So, help would be appreciated Eptalon (talk) 11:53, 30 October 2026 (UTC)

@Eptalon Thank you for your efforts. However, I find these two statements, taken together, disturbing in the context of a medical article. You must follow and adhere to reliable sources, particularly when dealing with subjects outside your area of expertise. If your strength lies in simplification, you would be better off faithfully summarizing well-sourced material from English Wikipedia than attempting to write an article with original research. No information is preferable to misinformation on this particular subject. ~2026-58058-60 (talk) 09:47, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Hello,

What I wrote in the article may lack references, but these items are commonly known problems. As anyone is free to change the article, feel free to improve, that's why I asked here Eptalon (talk) 12:05, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Is there a reason why articles that are just copied from ENWP aren't deleted

Kinda defeats the purpose if the use of basic English is merely a suggestion and not an actual requirement--~2026-57739-67 (talk) 14:06, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

They probably would be if there were enough people who cared enough to delete them. But they don't cause much actual harm to keep them, so there's no urgent reason to do it. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 15:59, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

develop over time. Keep in mind that writing in simple English is not something that is Articles easy. So: first. Version: copy over from enwp, second version: rephrase in simpler language... Eptalon (talk) 17:35, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Such articles can be tagged for deletion per WP:QD#A3. New page patrolling is sadly heavily backlogged. I'm currently stuck with that in May 2026... -Barras talk 18:39, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Maybe i am missing something but nothing about WP:QD#A3 suggests that pages that the author just copies from ENWP and refuses to rewrite into Basic/Simple gets deleted ~2026-56416-04 (talk) 19:24, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

"rephrase in simpler language" But without any consequences there simply isn't any incentive for the author to do so

If an article gets deleted from ENWP and the author responds by copying the content to Simple Wikipedia this is usually done to save/preserve the article from deletion

We do have an option to throw an ugly little template top of the article to remind them of what they are supposed to do but since the goal of the author is simply to save the article and nothing more, said template does nothing to actually incentivize nor encourage them

Even if someone did had a genuine interest in Simple/Basic English, being left doing other people's dirty laundry that they neither bother to nor care about doing themselves is an extremely unattractive and discouraging demeanor ~2026-56416-04 (talk) 19:23, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

One should also keep in mind to check the article’s talk page and page history. In the talk page, you might see an attribution to the en wiki article. In the page history, at times, an article was simple at some point but then was vandalized through the addition of plain ol’ copy and paste material from en wiki. There’s been dozen of times in which I had to revert edits like these. TDKR Chicago 101 (talk) 19:28, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

Of course these are things that probably happens but it's obviously not what i was referring to ~2026-56416-04 (talk) 20:51, 1 November 2026 (UTC)

There are more articles added here.

We lost Antonio Navarro Wolff,and we can add Darío Gómez. ~2026-58083-78 (talk) 01:51, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

Thank<you @Bobo192 ~2026-58083-78 (talk) 01:52, 2 November 2026 (UTC)

George Baker

Probably the quickest and easiest way to ask. What was the year of birth of the cricketer George Baker that was deleted? I don't know what the original state was of the article but there are five different George Bakers on Wikipedia, all with different birth years. I note that the original discussion was a "soft delete based on minimal participation", which means I'm sure a decently-enough fleshed out article would be fine to resubmit. Bobo. 11:12, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

@Bobo192: The article said his dates were 15 September 1895 – 15 May 1962. Hope that helps. -- Auntof6 (talk) 12:42, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

@Auntof6: Cheers. His English Wikipedia article is at George Baker (New Zealand cricketer) in that case - that's why I wasn't sure which one he was.

Of the four George Bakers on the English Wikipedia, we have George Baker (1838), George Baker (1849), George Baker (1862), and George Baker (NZ) (en) - who would be the same as George Baker (1895). One way or another I'll get to them all eventually. I think the fifth one I was including was the redirect. Bobo. 16:18, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

@BlackJack: This will come in useful when the necessity to disambiguate will be key. Bobo. 16:23, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

Multiple Images in Infobox?

Hi! I am a user on regular Wikipedia, and have wanted to make some pages I find important on here to help out. Right now I want to work the page for the 2014 Isla Vista killings. I'm not quite used to simple Wikipedia yet, and wanted to ask if there was a consensus for having multiple images in an infobox, and how they should be captioned. Thank you! I hope my question makes sense. ArkadenBoden (talk) 13:40, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

@ArkadenBoden: There's no such consensus. People usually just copy the infobox from English Wikipedia. You can do it how you want but someone else may change it. ~2026-58707-97 (talk) 22:20, 4 November 2026 (UTC)

Got it! Thank you!

ArkadenBoden (talk) 12:26, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

VisualEditor auto-generated reference names

Hi, I'm Johannes from Wikimedia Germany's Technical Wishes team.

Our team has been working on a community wish to improve VisualEditor's auto-generated reference names in recent months. When re-using a reference in VisualEditor that doesn't have a name yet, VisualEditor automatically assigns a name lik <ref name=":1">. Editors on many wikis have long requested for these names to be human-readable and meaningful.

We've now implemented a mechanism for wikis to configure automatic reference names. Configuration is a multi-step process as described in mw:Help:Cite/VisualEditor reference names:

• You can create template to define how content-based names should be created (e.g. if you prefer names like <ref name="LastnameYear-1"> or <ref name="example.com-1">, your autoname template would define which citation template parameters to use for creating such names). test2wiki:Template:Autoname is a simple example of such a template.
• Many wikis probably want to extract content from citation template parameters (e.g. the year from |date=) – in that case you can create a Lua module to get even better names (see e.g. en:Module:Autoname, fr:Module:NomRefAuto or de:Modul:VisualEditorRef).
• Once you've create one (or multiple) autoname templates (and a module if you'd like that) you need to create MediaWiki:Cite-autoname-template-map.json to map which autoname template(s) to use for which citation template(s) (example). The easiest way is just using a single autoname template as a default for all citation templates.
• Even when configuring content-based reference names there will be instances where VisualEditor cannot create such a name (e.g. if it's a basic reference that doesn't use citation template) – in that case a fallback name will be created based on MediaWiki:Cite-ve-dialogbutton-reference-title and some other messages. The default fallback is usually something like <ref name="Reference-1"> in your wiki's language. You can configure these fallback names as well
• If you're done configuring everything (or if you just want to get rid of <ref name=":1"> without configuring content-based names) you can enable the improved reference names at Special:CommunityConfiguration/Cite-VisualEditor-Autonames
• See our help page for more information on technical details and examples.

Let me know if you have any questions or if there's something we can help you with if you're interested in configuring improved VisualEditor reference names! Johannes Richter (WMDE) (talk) 15:48, 3 November 2026 (UTC)

Attribution

Hi, So I came across @Bobo192 who's copying articles from Enwiki, pasting them and simplifying them but hasn't attributed the content on the talkpage,

I've tried explaining at https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Davey2010#Copying the best I can but they're not getting it and I don't know how else to explain it?, I didn't know if anyone could explain any better?, Thanks –Davey2010^Talk 01:45, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

You do know you can edit articles yourself? If the content of an article upsets you, just edit it based on your own knowledge of the subject. Bobo. 01:56, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

The issue is that your edits are in violation of the CC-BY-SA license. When copying the articles, you need an edit summary like "Copying from en:Example from English Wikipedia, which is licensed en:CC-BY-SA 4.0. See that page's history for attribution." Axolitl (talk | contribs) 03:21, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

My original intention was to add text which explained the context of the statistics - which is not present on en.wiki. To do that for 100-odd teams is tiring. I'm more than happy to do so in time - but it's hard to write 100 articles of prose in one day. I'll save that edit summary for the future. Bobo. 05:14, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good way to go about it. Technically, every time you copy without attribution, you are violating copyright law. While it probably won't ever be enforced, it's not a great idea. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:19, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

You can't copyright statistics. They're numbers. That's how numbers work. Bobo. 05:20, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

If all that's necessary is that edit summary, then fair enough. I've got the best part of 60 articles still to complete. Bobo. 05:28, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

I'm copying and pasting that exact edit summary, is that okay? (Replacing "en:example" with the actual article title itself). Is that right? Bobo. 05:41, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Should be fine. You can use some discretion, but all that is really necessary is that if you are copyrighting original content from enwiki, you should provide a link to the page, a link to w:CC-BY-SA-4.0, and instructions to check history for attribution. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:51, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Check my edit summary on List of Botswana Twenty20 International cricketers to see if I've done it right. Bobo. 05:53, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Seems alright, except that the license isn't wikilinked. Axolitl (talk | contribs) 05:58, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Many thanks @Axolitl for explaining it to them it's much appreciated, Thanks –Davey2010^Talk 12:47, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Now that I understand the problem I can work towards doing the right thing. Bobo. 12:51, 5 November 2026 (UTC)

Cat:Clothing controversies likely needs a closer look

Hello, just wanrted to point out that Category:Clothing controversies likely needs a closer look; we might need ot split the category up, into multiple (sub?) categries:

• There are things like bikini, and perhaps cameltoe, or Trousers as women's lcothing which caused a controversy/protest when they were first made public
• We do have the rather unrelated entry of cross-dressing
• We do have two aricle (exploitation behind clothes, sweatshop) which likely point out the problems behind clothing production
• There are two articles: Guidance patrol and Girls of Engelshab protests... that are more politically inclined

In short, we do have articles for about 2-4 thematic categories, but we do ont have enough articles to form these categories. I removed another, nude rereation, as in my opinion it is not really a clothingg controversy. Ideas/Help welcome Eptalon (talk) 21:52, 5 November 2026 (UTC)