Wikipedia talk:Help desk

{{Creation}} subtemplates

FYI, a template related to Help Desk {{HD/new}} sibling template {{Creation}}, has had its subtemplates nominated for deletion. {{Creation/1}} and {{Creation/2}} have been nominated for deletion -- 65.92.246.142 (talk) 03:47, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

Bot to notify poster of archival on the Help Desk - do you agree with that?

The Help Desk sees quite a few questions from new editors. Many of those are unaware of the archival process and might be confused that their question disappeared when they come back a week or so later.

On the Teahouse, where (almost) all questions are from newbies, I have a bot, Muninnbot, that takes care of that - it leaves notifications pointing to the location of the archived thread (example). Here on the Help Desk, Vchimpanzee does the job manually (example) - while their notifications are higher-quality than what could be done by bot, surely that manual labor could be spared.

I would like to run Muninnbot here with a similar functionality, but I need consensus from Help Desk editors for that. (Formally, there is a trip to WP:BRFA, but if Help Desk responders gave the greenlight, this should sail smoothly.) Compared to the Teahouse, we could redesign the notification template if needed, and/or limit the notifications to be sent only to editors with more than X edits / older than Y days (to avoid spamming the old-timers). What do you say?

On the technical side, I will also need to do some light adaptations (because archival is done differently on the Help Desk and on the Teahouse), so I would rather not start working on it if there is no consensus to do it. I already proposed back all that in 2018 but got no replies; however, since then, Muninnbot has some history of running smoothly, and I now know that someone is doing a bot job by hand. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 10:20, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Courtesy ping: Scs, who's maintaining the bot that currently does the archiving, Scsbot. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 11:57, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

I do not think any action from their part is required, except possibly a commitment to warn me if they change the current format of archives in the future. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 14:59, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for the notification. If any minor modifications on my part end up being necessary, I'll be happy to try. I can't make promises about anything major, though, as the code for scsbot is dreadfully antiquated and rather difficult to maintain — although for that reason, no format changes are likely! —scs (talk) 15:18, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

@Tigraan: If User A posts, and User B responds, and then User A acknowledges the response, and then the section is archived, I don't think user A needs notification. Does it make sense to exclude those situations from the bot notification, and is that something that could be programmed? GoingBatty (talk) 14:13, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

What could be programmed with a reasonable degree of accuracy is a check of whether user A has posted a second time in the same thread. Technical details: thread identification is done by edit summary. If you click "new section", the edit summary will always be /* [your title] */ new section and you cannot change the parts outside [your title], so it can be reliably identified as a thread creation. If you edit a section, the edit summary preloads the /* [thread title] */ part, but you can change anything in the edit summary, so it is less accurate; you can also edit the whole page in which case it does not work at all.

However, it would be between difficult and impossible to know (in automated fashion) if that second post is an actual acknowledgement of a reply, a follow-up question, a typo fix etc. If it is a follow-up question, we probably want to notify, if it is a "thank you" we do not. I do not think parsing the thread history is a reasonable approach, which is why I suggested thresholds on edit or account age, which are rough but trivial to implement (and already coded). User groups are not coded yet but could be fairly easily as well. In my opinion, a 30/500 in line with ECP (= do not notify users who are both more than 30 days old and have more than 500 edits) would make sense.

I agree that the opt-in default (required if we want to target newbies) makes it a bit spammy, even though the bot notification contains instructions to opt-out. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 14:59, 20 January 2022 (UTC)

Enabling a feedback loop

I have been tracking this group for sometime now. It seems like certain themes of questions keep reappearing more often than the others. e.g. questions on fair use of images, questions on donations.

Has this project considered:

1. Passing this feedback to those respective sub groups in an aggregated manner so that they can update their documentation if needed. The hypothesis here is that a good number of editors are posting here at the Help Desk because that documentation is not easily accessible to them or the answer is evident to them on reading the documentation. My thinking is that this feedback loop will be quite important to refreshing those documents and improving a) coverage b) comprehensiveness and c) access.
2. Creating a topic tag / theme based archives. E.g. an archive link for donations, an archive link for fair use, another for a different topic etc that will allow you to get all the questions relating to that theme. That way one can read all questions regarding a topic before posting the same question again.

Please feel free to pass this to any of the other projects e.g. Village Pumps etc if there might be something there. Good luck. Ktin (talk) 00:33, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Can't exactly comment on anything else, however I know a template has been created regarding donations and I've told the donation team multiple times how much of an issue the donation banners are (although they don't seem to have taken the advice). ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 00:56, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Here's the donation template fwiw. {{subst:WikiDonation}}. Ktin (talk) 07:32, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Archiving is being semi-automated, and creating different archives for different "themes" would require an intense overhaul for bots. We already have search fields on the right-hand side near the top of the page that allows users to search both WP:FAQ and the help desk archives.

I believe why we get more of a certain type of question is that the help desk and Teahouse are common pages that act as funnels for users to be redirected to the appropriate resource. It makes more sense for users to ask questions here in a centralised location and have more experienced users redirect them properly, than to pepper links throughout Wikipedia and hope these users come across them. —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 06:35, 22 January 2022 (UTC)

Why does wikipedia ignore facts and dismiss them as opinion or not true?

Moved to Wikipedia:Help desk § Why does wikipedia ignore facts and dismiss them as opinion or not true?

 – —Tenryuu 🐲 ( 💬 • 📝 ) 05:28, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Increased amount of people asking "Why wikipedia ignores facts"

I find it rather strange how all of the sudden the HD has received an increase in the amount of people asking why "Wikipedia ignores facts". Could it be possible that this is a coordinated "raid" so to speak? (I say raid as in someone made a post somewhere like, "Everyone go to Wikipedia and start asking why they ignore facts! They'll tell us the truth soon enough") ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 14:32, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

We haven't had an increase, it's always been like this. WP:VP also gets a lot of it. Best Wishes, Lee Vilenski ^{(talk • contribs)} 14:34, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

I don't believe that! Nick Moyes (talk) 14:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Ah alright. Probably just haven't paid enough attention to the HD then lol. ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 14:40, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

As long as that shill money keeps coming in, who cares? --Gronk Oz (talk) 19:41, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

It's because of the obscene plague of tribalism that's infected the US, I'd argue, since most of the posts on that front are promoting/defending positions associated with the Republican Party, which has taken a sharp anti-intellectualist turn as of late. —A little blue Bori v^_^v ^{Jéské Couriano} 19:47, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Glad I stay out of politics! ― Blaze Wolf^Talk_{Blaze Wolf#6545} 19:48, 28 January 2022 (UTC)

Are there any statistics on how many people are asking about, e.g., "facts" with no sources, "facts" with dubious sources, facts with possibly legitimate sources that don't meet WP:RS?? --Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz Username:Chatul (talk) 01:49, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

To a one the "facts" they're claiming we're dismissing amount to right-wing talking points, i.e. "COVID was faked", "Jan 6 wasn't an insurrection", "Trump won in 2020", etc. The lot of them are provocatively-written and dropped by unregistered or new users who then proceed to never edit again. —A little blue Bori v^_^v ^{Jéské Couriano} 02:03, 30 January 2022 (UTC)

No surprise there, then. Nick Moyes (talk) 13:43, 31 January 2022 (UTC)

Reply Tool: a new opt-out feature arriving soon

As Help Desk volunteers may be aware, a new Reply Tool is about to be rolled out which will facilitate quick responses to discussions. This new section has now been inserted about the Reply Tool at Help:Talk pages.

Reply Tool will be an opt-out feature which all desktop users will soon be seeing. It will not be available to mobile users. Following a successful opt-in trial in beta, its rollout on English Wikipedia was initially intended for 7th February 2022. However, after discussions at WP:VPP, that rollout has been held back a short while so that as many users as possible are made aware of this feature, and for brief explanatory notes to be provided on Help pages and for users of other help fora to be made aware. Many thanks, Nick Moyes (talk) 23:09, 8 February 2022 (UTC)

Problems with Facebook

Every now and then the Help Desk and Teahouse get questions about Facebook, and the usual answer is to tell people to go to Facebook's equivalent of a help desk. I have had little or no response to any questions I asked here. That's my experience, but I wonder how many people are not finding help by asking Facebook for help. I had a problem with a new account there a year or so ago and tried every possible way to get them to resolve the problem, including snail mail, and nothing was done. To be specific, I have several Facebook friends with more than one account and I saw nothing wrong with doing that, except they blocked me from doing anything until I followed a very specific procedure involving a cell phone which I was unable to complete. It ended with an email from Facebook saying that because I took too long to respond there would be no appeal of their decision. I can't even tell you how many ways I tried to get them to help me within the time I had. People can post the link I provided and hope for results, but I would say no one on any Help Desks here should be giving people any kind of hope that Facebook cares or will do anything. To give people some kind of hope, perhaps they should refer people to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Computing and hope someone there has an idea.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:42, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

You are certainly free to do this, though I don't think the RD is meant to be a Facebook help desk. We aren't responsible for poor customer service at other websites. 331dot (talk) 00:00, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

I would rarely be around to answer Help Desk questions, but I could add to what people have said.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 00:04, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

@Vchimpanzee: You will appreciate that I have already replied to this post at WT:TH, but I will reiterate here for everyone's benefit that the evidence suggests the RefDesk folk also feel that dealing with Facebook issues is an issue for Facebook to deal with, not them. Regards, Nick Moyes (talk) 01:14, 15 February 2022 (UTC)

And my response is there.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:49, 16 February 2022 (UTC)