User talk:Absolutiva

Orphaned non-free image File:Josh Duggar mugshot.jpg

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List of The World of the Married episodes moved to draftspace

Thanks for your contributions to List of The World of the Married episodes. Unfortunately, I do not think it is ready for publishing at this time because it has no sources. I have converted your article to a draft which you can improve, undisturbed for a while.

Please see more information at Help:Unreviewed new page. When the article is ready for publication, please click on the "Submit the draft for review!" button at the top of the page OR move the page back. John B123 (talk) 20:30, 1 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ahnentafel

Please do not remove ancestry tables. They are designed to be concise; the table is not designed to hold references. The correct place for references is in the articles that the table links to. -- Elphion (talk) 00:57, 2 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Why not? It is unsourced and trivial. Unless it can be sourced to a biography of the subject, because there are no sources to dump 30 names without any context. Please see WP:NOTGENEALOGY and WP:INDISCRIMINATE policies. Absolutiva 01:26, 2 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

contentious topic intro

You have recently made edits related to antisemitism in Poland. This is a standard message to inform you that antisemitism in Poland is a designated contentious topic. This message does not imply that there are any issues with your editing. For more information about the contentious topics system, please see Wikipedia:Contentious topics. Mikewem (talk) 02:03, 2 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Incorrect commons uploads

Please respect Commons copyright policy by not uploading images that are only free in the United States but not the source country. These images are clearly marked as such on Wikipedia so I don't understand why you uploaded files like this one that do not meet Commons copyright rules (but do meet the Wikipedia copyright rules). I would appreciate if you fixed this problem by requesting deletion of the incorrect Commons uploads. (t · c) buidhe 03:55, 2 July 2025 (UTC) There is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents regarding an issue with which you may have been involved.(t · c) buidhe 03:00, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Ethnicities and countries of origin in short descriptions

Would you mind explaining, before we have to start pulling the user warning templates out, what your issue is with giving adequate descriptions of ethnicity or origin in the short descriptions of articles on ethnic groups and languages? I've reverted several edits at Māori people and Māori language but your contributions page says you've been doing this at high volume on multiple articles.

—VeryRarelyStable 23:15, 21 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

It is inadequate to have longer short descriptions for more than 40 characters (they cause problems for readers), and it is not a definition. For example, Indonesian language – Language spoken in Indonesia, it is relevant, rather than Austronesian language or Standardized variety of Malay, it mentioned in the first sentence. For ethnic groups, which is also referred to Indigenous peoples, for example Alaska Natives – Indigenous people of the United States, can be considered as Native Americans. Absolutiva 00:56, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'm afraid I'm having trouble with your English here. I'm not sure what most of these sentences mean.

WP:Short description, from which WP:SDNOTDEF and WP:SD40 are excerpted, states that the purpose of a short description is to "concisely explain the subject of the page—for example, to help a user identify the desired article in a list of search results". The section on purpose says they are supposed to provide

a short descriptive annotation to the title, containing additional information useful to the reader
together with the title, a very brief indication of the field covered
a disambiguation in searches, especially between similarly titled subjects in different fields

None of these purposes are as well accomplished when you remove key information about localization or origins.

—VeryRarelyStable 01:59, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with you. Though I didn't get around to raising the issue myself when I first noticed Absolutiva's short description edits, I've been concerned about them for the reasons you've listed above. Now I'm seeing edits stripping short descriptions for ethnic groups down to "Ethnic group", and that's wrong, in addition to removals of short descriptions where the nature of an article's subject goes beyond the ordinary meaning of the words in the title and the SD is necessary to usefully characterize the subject. Largoplazo (talk) 02:24, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Including Italians, Armenians, etc. Absolutiva 02:29, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I partially made self-reverted (my mistake). What's next, see in Wikipedia talk:Short description#Ethnic groups in short description. Absolutiva 03:03, 22 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As I correct before with my previous revisions, so I decided to change back to Polynesian language spoken in New Zealand. Absolutiva 00:58, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

What led you to conclude that you were correct? —VeryRarelyStable 02:47, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Still under discussion. Absolutiva 03:40, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but why you make these changes and what leads you to believe that you're right to make them is the centre of that discussion. —VeryRarelyStable 07:50, 3 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your email

Could you explain why you shared that diff with me? I don't see anything facially problematic about it. Daniel Case (talk) 02:57, 26 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I was investigating about Denniss (talk · contribs) that reverted to previous version for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (see here) as a contentious topic (via Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/American politics 2). Absolutiva 03:09, 26 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

About short descriptions

Hi, Absolutiva, and thanks for your contributions to Wikipedia. I noticed some of your recent modifications to short descriptions, and changed some of them to |short desc=none. A bit of history: when folks created the 'short description' field at Wikipedia, they were kind of following a label created at Wikidata by the same name. That label works a whole lot less well here at Wikipedia, unfortunately, because it makes editors think that it is, well, a "short description" of the article topic, and it really is not that. That is a misnomer, and it was a mistake to call it that, and it has caused a lot of problems, but what's done is done, and it's too late to change the label now.

Have a look at Wikipedia:Short description for the long explanation, but the so-called "short description" really has only one purpose: to let a user know, when presented with a list of article titles, say in response to a search or some other kind of article list, which article is the one they are looking for, if you can't tell just by looking at the titles themselves. It's kind of a "similar-title-or-unusual-title-disambiguator". You want the user to be able to pick the right one from that list of article titles as easily as possible, without having to click the similar-sounding ones to see which one is the right one. That is the only point of the short description; not to define the article, not to explain it, or anything, just a minimum of words to make the reader realize, Aha, that is the one I am looking for! In many, many cases, an article title is so obvious, that a description does not help at all, and may even hurt a little.

It does not help a reader get to the right article faster, by telling them that the Constitution of Argentina is the "Fundamental law of Argentina"; those are just other words for the same thing. Even if the reader is a primary school student who hasn't learned the word constitution yet and needs it for their homework, it still doesn't help, it just slows them down from clicking the link and getting to the article faster to find out what it really is. Cases like that benefit from having {{short desc|none}}.

The unfortunate choice of term "short description" trips up almost everybody who gets involved with this at first, and I would say probably 80% of short descriptions are wrong, and should either be "none" or cut way, way back to just a couple of words—just the bare minimum needed to let a user quickly pick out the right title from a list. That's it; no definition, no description, no frills.

Does that mean that tons and tons of articles end up with the identical short description? Yes! And that is fine; if 500 different automobile articles all have the short description, "American car", that's great! Suppose you are trying to differentiate similar sounding titles like "Ford Models" and "Ford Model T" in a list–which is the right one? When you see them in a list along with their short descriptions, as:

Ford Models – American modeling agency
Ford Model T – American car

then you know right away which is the one you want so you can click it. It does not help at all to change the short description to a "better definition", like: "automobile produced by Ford Motor Company from 1908 to 1927"; that isn't the purpose of it, and may slow you down a tiny bit. "American car" is the best short description here, even though hundreds of other articles have the same one. Make sense?

You actually had kind of the right idea early on, with a bunch of your short description edits to elements of the periodic table. The right idea, but not quite: by removing the template from the page entirely, those pages now show up as having a "Missing short description", but that's not right either, and might induce someone trying to do the right thing, to add a bad one. But they shouldn't be missing, they should be present and marked "none", so the "Missing" notice goes away. Please lmk if this all makes sense, and if you have any questions. Thanks, and happy editing! Mathglot (talk) 08:15, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@Mathglot: I've noticed Randy Kryn that reverted my edit to Constitution of the United States – Supreme law of the U.S. since 1789 does not help a reader get to the right article faster, by telling them that the "Constitution of the United States" is the "Supreme law of the US since 1789" those are just other words for the same thing. Also that, Safes007 reinstated for "Politics of Australia" is the "Political system of Australia", to distinguish from politics in the colloquial sense, as previously set to "none" by Mellk. So what do I propose for short description if I attempted to set "none" as per WP:SDNONE. Absolutiva 08:41, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

As said above, "what's done is done", and the horse is out of the gate, and the essay is just an essay with no binding language. Although most short descriptors don't seem needed, and seemed like clutter to me since they started (luckily I use Monobook and don't see them) the short descriptor of the U.S. Constitution works well by giving the year as additional encyclopedic information for readers. This information is useful to the creation or reinforcement of their mental timeline of the founding documents of the nation. This is one which would be best to keep as is. Using the year 1958 at the Constitution of France also seems important, as France has had many constitutions. Note, since I use Monobook which does not show short descriptions, I've only heard that they are used on other skins and on mobile (I don't view Wikipedia on mobile, never have). Are these views the same size as the title or a different size, and are they experienced by readers as useful or as clutter? Maybe, if the criticism is correct, short descriptors on Wikipedia can be seen as a failed experiment and removed? Thanks. Randy Kryn (talk) 09:29, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps, I will set to "none" instead, unlike Mathglot set to these articles from "Constitution of.." Brazil to France moments ago. Absolutiva 10:44, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Sigh. One thing that is not short, is how to explain what short description really is, and especially, how we got here. In the case of Constitution of the United States, Randy had the right idea, and so did you; you both kind of came up with the right answer (possibly for the wrong reason):

Supreme law of the United States – (your version; fine)
Supreme law of the U.S. since 1789 – (Randy's version; also fine)

My recent change to drop the date was not really necessary and a bit picky (my excuses, Randy), but is at least no worse, and the real reason I did that, is that it allowed me to attempt to explain the point in the edit summary in a way that hopefully that will help going forward:

Dropped date from short desc. Readers coming here do not see the short description (neither on desktop, nor mobile), so it cannot help remind them of the year. Because someone searching for "US Constitution" and seeing this article and, say, "USS Constitution" in a list, it is worth keeping 'supreme law' in the s.d., so that users instantly see that this article is not the one about the navy ship, otherwise, 'none' would have worked here (and still does for most other countries).

but I won't complain or revert, if you put the date back; it's just as good that way.

A bit more of this history, which I hope will explain how we got here (I will add a link if I can find it): one of the important things to know about Wikidata, is that they do not have any requirement for verifiability at all. (I kid you not.) When someone at WMF noticed that Wikidata had short descriptions for data items, they decided, "Oh hey, what a cool thing, Wikidata has short descriptions! We can use those to help users at Wikipedia figure out which 'Ford model' is the right one, or which 'US[S] Constitution' by displaying it straight out of Wikidata", and so that's what they did; a software change was introduced, and Wikipedia started displaying Wikidata short descriptions. That caused a massive revolt at Wikipedia, as all of a sudden, hundreds of thousands of articles at Wikipedia were being annotated in some search contexts with completely unreliable short descriptions that were never tested or vetted for reliability or accuracy by anybody; a lot of them were just plain wrong, and others were suspect (or superfluous).

Enter stage two: with lots of influential editors at Wikipedia screaming at WMF about this, they were more or less forced to do something about it, but they refused to remove s.d. from Wikidata (which wasn't up to them, anyway), and they also refused to disable the automatic display of Wikidata short descriptions at Wikipedia, which is what the revolt was about, because nobody here cared what Wikidata did on their own turf, but messing with Wikipedia by automatically displaying unverifiable data from some other Wikimedia project was never going to be accepted here, and the screaming was not going to stop as long as the situation remained unchanged.

Finally, a compromise was found: WMF agreed to a software change at Wikipedia, in order to add short description stored at Wikipedia as well, accessible via a template. In those cases where there is only a Wikidata short description and no Wikipedia one, the Wikidata s.d. would get displayed at Wikipedia, just as it was before (and still is, by the way). But where both Wikidata *and* Wikipedia had a short description for a topic, then the Wikipedia one would override the Wikidata one, and display only the Wikipedia one.

A Wiki project was immediately started (Wikipedia:WikiProject Short descriptions) to start adding short descriptions to as many Wikipedia articles as possible. Whether WMF or anybody believed anything would ever come of it or not, the fact is that there are now 6.5 million transclusions of {{short description}} at Wikipedia, which is pretty amazing. The downside of the whole thing imho, as mentioned above, is the unfortunate choice of name, which has resulted in many articles having the wrong s.d. at least based on its intended purpose, which kind of got lost to an extent, when you started having thousands of editors updating literally millions of articles, and probably paying little or no attention to why it was there, and just going off the name.

The whole purpose of "none", is that one case where Wikidata has a short description and we don't: even if Wikidata *happens* to have the right s.d. for the moment, and so in theory we could just leave it out at Wikipedia, there was an Rfc somewhere that we should *not* leave out the template ever, because someone at Wikidata could come along and change the right one to some garbage, and then Wikipedia would immediately start picking up crap and using it. The {{shortdesc|none}} value, allows Wikipedia to override whatever Wikidata has, and not display any short description for articles that don't need one (and also not display the "Missing short description" notice). And now you know the rest of the story. In a nutshell, you can think of it as a turf war; Wikipedia saw it as an invasion by the barbarians, and drew a line in the sand.

But back to today: in the Constitution case: editors of good faith can always disagree and discuss the fine points of this, but imho most articles like "Constitution of Slobovia" don't need a short description because the article title is self-explanatory in all contexts, and a user would never get mixed up with other article titles in a list, like, say, "Government of Slobovia" or "King of Slobovia"; they are just obviously about other topics, so, no s.d. needed. However, if there are other titles that could possibly be confused with their constitution article, let's say, an aircraft carrier named 'HM Slobovian Constitution', then they probably do need an s.d., which could be, "Founding document of Slobovia", or "Supreme law of Slobovia" and so on. I think having an s.d. for the U.S. Constitution case is fine, because of the U.S.S. Constitution article title, and I think having one for Germany (Basic Law of Germany) is fine, because if someone is searching for the German constitution and that article comes up, they might not click it, thinking it was about something else, and not realizing that the Basic law *is* the German constitution. But for Canada, Australia, U.K., India, and dozens of other countries other than the U.S. and Germany, it just isn't needed, in my opinion; others may disagree.

From a practical standpoint, if I replace an unneeded s.d. with "none", and someone else drops by and reverts in order to put back the old one in good faith, even if I think it is unneeded, I am not going to get in a big fight about it, because it just isn't worth the trouble. Having an s.d. for the Constitution of India (which I just set to "none") is not going to make the sky fall, and nowhere close to the most important thing to worry about around here. The ones I find more annoying, are those where the editor clearly never bothered to look at what the short description is for, and added one that is both unneeded, and way over the 40-character limit. I hit Random article once, and it came up with Kaleinaung Subtownship, where the s.d. is nine words long and weighs in at over 1/3 of the article size (25 words); (it should've been "none", or at most two words). Ridiculous.

If you haven't dozed off yet, I hope you found this enlightening, and that you will carry on dealing with short descriptions at Wikipedia in the way you think best. At least you will be armed with some of the backstory, now, to help you come to the best decision for our readers looking for stuff, and the project. Cheers, Mathglot (talk) 18:47, 28 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you very much for your long and detailed explanation and history. I was, and still am a bit, confused as to why readers don't see the U.S. constitution short descriptor on desktop or mobile. What do they see if anything (nothing on Monobook). If I'm understanding correctly, most short descriptors are just decoys to fool the editors and not actually seen, do I have that right? Interesting history. Randy Kryn (talk) 11:31, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Just switched to Vector 2022 for a minute to see what short descriptor comes up and changed back quickly (Monobook is sooooo much better). Am I correct that the short descriptor only shows up when a term is put into the search box and not when viewing the article itself? When I found the search box and then put in U.S. constitution, several bells and flags and whistles came up, including the short des., and then viewed the article and am surprised any member of the reading public spends any time on Wikipedia having such an unsightly clutter as Vector as default. But your example of the short which is almost as long as the page itself is worth its weight in bytegold. Thanks again. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:10, 29 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Orphaned non-free image File:British passport (Series C) biographical data (2020).png

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Thanks for uploading File:British passport (Series C) biographical data (2020).png. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of non-free use. However, the image is currently not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described in section F5 of the criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. --B-bot (talk) 02:08, 1 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Archive links

Please don't delete links just because they're archive links. It is perfectly acceptable to have archive versions of useful websites as external links when the main site is dead. Archive links are there specifically for that purpose. If the main URL is dead, the archive is linked to if it's a useful resource. We don't remove links because they're dead if we have a good archive for them. Canterbury Tail talk 21:56, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Most external links to articles does not required dead links, but also duplicated. As WP:ELDEAD:

Dead links should either be removed or replaced with a working link. This working replacement link may be to a different URL on the same website (e.g., if the website was rearranged) or to a different webpage with similar information (e.g., replacing a dead link to an online Body mass index calculator with a working link to a BMI calculator on a different website).

Occasionally, replacement with an archive URL may be appropriate. Absolutiva 22:01, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

An archived copy is a different webpage with similar information. Largoplazo (talk) 22:15, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yes archive links are acceptable. If there isn't an adequate replacement then it's fine to keep the archived link if it still provides valuable information. It being an archive is irrelevant, it's just hosted somewhere else. The fact it's on Archive.org instead of its own webserver isn't relevant. It's no less valid than another site. Canterbury Tail talk 22:16, 7 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Concern regarding Draft:Sandy Hook Elementary School

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Concern regarding Draft:Dream Drop

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Short description at Online Safety Act

You may wish to contribute to Template talk:Infobox UK legislation#Short description generated by template: not so clever!. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 09:46, 12 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Concern regarding Draft:HiHi Jets

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Concern regarding Draft:Cleo Carney

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Your draft article, Draft:Sandy Hook Elementary School

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In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

Thank you for your submission to Wikipedia, and happy editing. Liz ^{Read! Talk!} 07:48, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Contrabass trombone

Hi, I dislike communicating by edit message. Can you please explain what exactly you want sources for? In your initial edit you did not say anything about sources. I reverted it explaining briefly why, and then you shifted the goalposts by reverted my revert complaining it was unsourced. Do you want sources to dictionaries for the German and Italian translations? — Jon (talk) 18:34, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I'll be placed in the "other names" section in the infobox, rather than lead section. Then I provide sources for other names from Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music, or other sources. Absolutiva 21:39, 9 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Your draft article, Draft:Dream Drop

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In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material, the draft has been deleted. When you plan on working on it further and you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it.

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Your draft article, Draft:HiHi Jets

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Death of James Cook

Hello there

Please note that British marines were not called Royal marines at the time of Cook's death.

Thanks Aemilius Adolphin (talk) 23:08, 17 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]