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Introduction

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The purpose of this talk page is for discussions on over-arching matters regarding vital articles, including making proposals or asking questions about procedures, policies, quotas, or other broad changes to any or all of the five levels. This page is not for proposing whether an article should be added or removed from any vital article lists, and such proposals should be posted on the following pages:

What should happen to redirects and disambiguation pages which are marked as vital?

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I frequently come across redirects and disambiguation pages which are identified as vital articles. Sometimes these are the result of page moves or merges. It would be good if there were some instructions on how to deal with this — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 17:55, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If Cewbot doesn't bypass redirects it should. When I come across a disamb from a move, I look at the potential intended targets' talk page histories, usually the correct one's talk page has a recent edit by Cewbot unmarking it as vital. My position is to just remove deleted articles (or ones redirected into a different already-listed article) on sight.--LaukkuTheGreit (Talk•Contribs) 18:13, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Broad reorganization of geography

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Winter is here, and I've been motivated to put some thoughts together on this for a broader discussion. I'm going to Ctrl-C Ctrl-V some content from discussion on Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/5/History and geography with @Zar2gar1 and Wikipedia talk:Vital articles/Level/5 after being prompted by @Makkool to come up with a plan.

I had worked on the Geography topics template a while ago (while working on the main page for geography) and think that it can give some ideas for how we could organize stuff. I've been trying to put some thought into approaching this here. Specifically, many broad topics are vital to geography but, in my opinion, most people have been using geography to mean places, and broad topics aren't as interesting to them. My view of what geography is vs what the average person thinks of is likely to be vastly different, and it is honestly hard to look at the state of Wikipedia or hold discussions on the matter, which is why I'm trying to be cautious and think about how to approach this problem. I’d suggest reading over the Geography  2 page to get an idea of what I mean if you don’t understand my point of view here. I've organized my thoughts below, please pardon the length:

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

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

Note, that there is almost zero overlap between the template and the way vital articles are organized. The discrepancy between how I believe geography should be organized/approached and the way it is on vital articles is daunting and disappointing. Discussing this with editors is discouraging s I find people are highly defensive of the status quo. A "Basics & methods" section would be a start, but it is still original research when it comes to organization. That said, in a perfect world, if the section is actually about geography and not just a place to store places, then I'd go with the three-branch model at level 2, with categories Human geography  4, Physical geography  4, and Technical geography  5. I'd swap city with Human settlement and country with Territory, and put them under human geography, and I'd drop all the nonsense continents (seriously, including Europe as a continent should be viewed as backward as all the other racist Eurocentric nonsense that polluted early science. If Europe is a continent, so is Florida, and the model is completely useless for anything but explaining the racist European organization of the World. There isn't an argument that includes Europe but doesn't add several other locations, like India). Plate tectonics  3 at level 3 is fine, and we can put them at level 4 under there...maybe. Technical geography could start with quantitative and qualitative geography, satisfying the "methods" section. I'd keep "basics" under the broad heading of geography or use "key concepts," which is used in outside literature.


So my ideal 11 articles for VA 2 would be:


That is my ideal, but I would agree with an argument that quantitative and qualitative geography as categories could be at level 3 to organize concepts like Cartography  4. Scale (Geography) is central to the discipline, but I wouldn't be super set on convincing people it belongs at level 2. Dropping those three, this organization could therefore free up 3 article slots for level 2. I think we could use that organization at VA level 2 to fix all the other issues in the organization of the discipline. Due to the size of this issue, I'm struggling to think of where even to start, as the status quo is really hard to fight against, especially as many editors default to opposing changes. It's actually hard to even look at how bad the current organization is. As a geographer, I almost want to give up before starting. As it stands, I would consider the current organization of the geography section to be completely original research that does not align with outside sources. Fixing it through trying to add/swap/move/remove one or two pages at time through the levels feels like trying to organize a hoarder nest. Hoping to discuss a broad housecleaning strategy here.

BTW, Those blue links are all VA link templates, so if they're missing a number, they aren't listed as vital... GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:17, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Discuss

@GeogSage: I'll start the ball rolling with some thoughts while trying (and failing) to keep things short. First off, don't get discouraged if pushing for big changes here feels like a slog. There's a lot of compromise and things rarely end up the way you plan (like the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by committee). I've had that feeling working on articles sometimes too, but the nature of VA makes it inevitable.

One thing I'd actually be a bit more optimistic about is pushing your 11 priority articles up through the ranks. Even if they don't all make it to Lv 2 and the proposals take time to play out, we could nominate them for their next rank now, based on your rationale here. Some (like Technical geography  5) could probably still be added to pages as organizational headers too, even if the articles don't pass.

Pushing the more abstract articles to Level 3, or especially 2, might be hard though. Nothing's impossible, especially if enough people find your point about continents persuasive and free up space. At the same time, accessibility is sort of an unofficial factor for the higher levels; in a way, your point about the current Level 2 topics resembling a middle-school curriculum might be considered a positive. I know when I participated some at Level 3, if I had to choose, I would usually prefer a concrete, intuitive object over an abstract field of study (e.g. Set (mathematics)  3 over Set theory  4).

As for a specific schema, it sounds like we have several possible changes:

  • Add a Technical geography section
  • Consolidate Cities, States, etc. into a new Human geography section
  • Draw an even clearer line around Basics / Key concepts

Two things stand out to me:

  1. These 3 changes are largely independent so we could propose them in parallel. One failing to win approval shouldn't block the others either.
  2. All 3 changes probably only require full votes at Lv 5 because that's the only level where we would need quota adjustments and new pages. At Levels 1-4, these will just be organizational headers, and unless things have changed, people are typically more relaxed about boldly sorting items on a single page. As long as you post a notice, give people a few days for comments, avoid transcription errors, and accept feedback if anyone reverts, you could possibly change the schema at Levels 2-4 on your own initiative.

So yeah, it might be a programme and take several months to filter through, but I don't think what you've described would be unpopular. The end result obviously won't match your vision 100%, but much of it could still pass.

Your comment about listing specific locations also reminded me of one other idea. It's definitely not for now (it would be extreme scope-creep), just for the long-term, but you might appreciate it. In several big-picture discussions here about what we should include, I've seen participants split roughly down the middle. I tend to lean towards being more exclusive and conceptual, but I really liked one person's counterpoint, something to the effect of "many editors simply like to make lists so what's the harm if we give them a new space to do so?"

That got me thinking that maybe someday, as sort of a compromise, VA could spin off other types of reference lists. People that wanted to vote on recent events, music albums, landmarks, etc. could do so there, while the original VA list could focus more on forming a stable, centered, and balanced knowledge graph. In your case specifically, if VA ever spun off a ranked gazetteer, many of the locations (and the talk-page churn around choosing them) would be shunted off to there, and conceptual articles would almost definitely have more weight. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 02:24, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your last point about establishing new spin-off lists for different topics sounds feasible; much more than starting a new Level 6 grade. Maybe there could be something like Wikipedia's film reference list, where the bar for inclusion wouldn't need to be tied to fitting inside the 50,000 articles mark with all the other subjects. I see this project as well as something that would be evolving to something more stable, where we wouldn't be focusing on broadening the scope so much. Makkool (talk) 18:09, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Right, I don't want to hijack this thread, and I personally don't think VA is quite ready to have the discussion yet. But I think the spin-off reference lists would have many advantages if we implemented them in the medium-term.
In a lot of our proposals, especially around popular or recent topics, we wind up breaking into different camps or falling back onto arbitrary reasoning (myself included). We don't consistently fall in the same camps and all have good points, but we do wind up working at cross-purposes. I think with the other lists, we could replace some repeated debates (over things like recency, influence, or representation) with jurisdictional rules, which are (hopefully) easier to find a stable consensus on.
Say, someone nominates a biography article. Instead of arguing over recentism, we just ask when they were last active in their field, and if it's < X years, we kick the discussion over to a yearbook. Locations, landmarks, "X of Country Y" type articles? Gazetteer. Specific movies, music, paintings, etc.? Catalogs. The lists would still use a size limit and process like VA to prioritize things, but each article type could be evaluated more on its own terms -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 18:21, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Zar2gar1 Thank you for the reply! Wikipedia is great because anyone can edit it, which is also it's biggest weakness. Ideally, I'd want to believe editors would let the literature speak for itself and be willing to change their mind when presented with a viewpoint that is well supported in outside literature, but I've found that won't stop people because they won't read it. There are a few topics I've published on professionally, that I teach advanced college courses in, and when it comes to a Wikipedia article, consensus will end up being 3-1 against me despite citations. Some of these topics are harmless and pedantic, others are dangerous widespread vessels for misinformation across multiple pages. Can't get people to take that seriously though, because they don't understand the topic, much less why it is a big deal. Fortunately, the discussion here is more pedantic then dangerous misinformation. VA organization seems much less well organized then a camel made by committee, it seems like many of the categories were haphazardly thrown together early when the project was more malleable, and are now entrenched behind layers of bureaucracy. Like, when was this current organization implmI've technical geography to be moved from level 5 to level 4 here, and attempted to add several geography topics not included at all to level five here. As you are aware, this process is glacial paced, but hopefully there is some interest. It looks like much of the geography section at level 2 was organized on 16 May 2009 by @Quadell (who doesn't seem to be really active now a days), and hasn't changed that much since. It looks like this is a situation where it was really easy to set up early, and now we're stuck with those early decisions for better or worse.
I want to clarify, I don't mean that the current layout looks like a "middle-school curriculum," I mean that it looks like it was designed by 5th grade American students, and geography isn't taught to 5th grade American students. When it comes to teaching Geography and designing curriculum, that is usually at the college level unless the students are taking "AP Geography." That said, in the United States, the National Council for Geographic Education established the Five themes of geography, which are "Location," "place," "Human-enviornment interaction," "movement," and "region." European schools may be different, {I'm not familiar with each of their curriculum) but the five themes could also replace the current organization of level 2, although a bit less cleanly. In addition to these five themes of organizing the discipline, there is the Four traditions of geography (I originated that page, and would not recommend we use the traditions here), and the three branch model of Human geography, physical geography, and technical geography used by the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems. I favor the UNESCO model for simplicity, as well as because I believe it best fits the current way the discipline is approached today. On the topic of curriculum though, I've been going through my personal library and looking at the literature that covers intro geography for some ideas (yay for publishers giving out free desk copies). One book that resembles the current organization on Wikipedia might be the 1897 text Natural Elementary Geography, which has sections for "Introductory lessons" (containing things like map reading, direction, "Homes of the races of Mankind," "Our interest in the Eastern Continent", etc. ), "North America," "United States," "Minor countries of North America," "South America," "Eurasia," "Africa," and "Australia and Islands." I'd argue we should likely not use a 1897 book for this, but even then Eurasia was listed as a continent, which is a step up from separating Europe and Asia into separate continents. The textbook Introduction to Geography by Arthur Getis et al. is a bit more contemporary and aimed at freshman college students. It breaks it down the discipline into sections "Introduction," "Techniques of Geographical Analysis," "Physical geography: Landforms," "Physical Geography: Weather and Climate," "Population Geography," "Cultural Geography," "Human Interaction," "Political Geography," "Economic Geography: Agriculture nad Primary Activities," "Economic Geography: Manufacturing and Services," "An Urban World," "The geography of Natural Resources," and "Human Impact on the Environment." There is a similar organization to the textbook Introduction to Geography: People Places & Environment by Dahlman Renwick, with a few exceptions like the technology and techniques being placed in the introduction chapter, and there a chapter titled "A world of States" that stands out from the Getis book. A step more advanced then these introductory texts is World Regions: In Global Context by Sallie Marston et. al. (I say more advanced because it is more specific and builds upon the general concepts of geography by exploring the regional tradition. This is still an introductory level book though.) breaks it down to "World Regions in Global Context," "Europe," "The Russian Federation, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus," "Middle East and North Africa," "Sub-Saharan Africa," "The United States and Canada," "Latin America and the Carribbean," "East Asia," "South Asia," "South East Asia," and "Oceania." I like these as benchmarks for what an accessible schema might be. I would suggest that World Regions: In Global Context be used as a template for a level 3 organization of place names and regions (emphasis on regions and not continent, we don't want to use continents to organize human society).
I agree with your summary of possible changes. I understand that it won't likely ever match what I think it should look like, but would like to see it reflect the academic literature a bit more. Even if the pages are not fully moved around, I would like to see all the "continents" knocked off level 2, as this archaic method of organizing regions doesn't deserve this level of prestige/attention. I'd also like to see City swapped with Human Settlements. I'm not sure I fully understand your idea for other type of reference list on Wikipedia, but it could be an idea for Wikipedia:WikiProject Geography. The issue really is that we can't get enough participants in these groups... Making a bunch of really cool lists sounds great, but from what I can tell splitting them up only limits participation. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:02, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I understand what you mean about the openness being a mixed blessing sometimes. And don't get me started on some of the political stuff (there's a reason I mostly stick to technical articles despite an interest and some exposure to foreign affairs). Maybe even more than that, the volunteer nature of Wikipedia inevitably gives whoever has the strongest fixation a lot of leverage over a topic. On a couple occasions, I've walked away from articles that I knew were garbled because I didn't want to fight an edit-war; I only do this to scratch an itch after all.
That said, even if the piecemeal proposals can feel like trench warfare sometimes, VA strikes me as a very level-headed place. I actually worked on several of the STEM lists a year or two ago, back when we just allowed boldly adding to unfinished lists. And I have to admit, while I was initially skeptical about formalizing Lv 5 more, I think the change has been for the better. Even if things move a bit slower and there are still kinks, I feel the lists are evolving for the better, and even the less popular ones aren't stagnant.
I would stand by the one thing I mentioned, that even if your individual proposals hit a wall, you can probably sort the current articles boldly, as you see fit. As long as they're all on the same page and you add a courtesy notice to the talk page in advance (just in case anyone has comments), you should be good. You've clearly put significant thought into this and bring a strong background so I don't think you'll see much push-back. Even if a proposal is necessary at Lv 5, I see no problem with either your "5 theme" or "3 branch" schema.
I think we've only reverted reorganizations like that a couple times, and even then, it may have only been temporary due to articles being dropped by mistake. If you'll be shifting many articles around, doing it in several edits spread out over time can help by making it easier to check.
It may be more tedious up front, but as the most granular level, you may want to focus on Lv 5 first. That will require sorting out the new page names and quotas by proposal. After that though, you could roll-up any reorganization from there, probably with minimal bureaucracy. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:24, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Table at main VA landing page

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Why does the table at the main VA landing page show a May 2024 as of date. Can we get this set up so it is always current.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 05:42, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Kanashimi:, I am talking about the table at Wikipedia:Vital_articles#Vital_articles_in_Wikipedia. Maybe User:Cewbot could update this.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 04:10, 26 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, this will require some additional work, so I am afraid it will have to wait until we have time to talk about it. Kanashimi (talk) 22:08, 27 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It won't happen right away, but I do still intend to create a 2nd bot to help with some VA tasks. Updating the Lv 4 & 5 tables was going to be the first feature too. Adding the overall table shouldn't be much more effort.
So if Kanashimi doesn't get around to it first with Cewbot, I'm semi-volunteering to take care of it. I just don't want to promise any specific timeframe. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:27, 28 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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