Talk:Main Page

Main Page error reports

To report an error in content currently or imminently on the Main Page, use the appropriate section below.

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• Offer a correction if possible.
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• Do not use {{edit fully-protected}} on this page, which will not get a faster response. It is unnecessary, because this page is not protected, and causes display problems. (See the bottom of this revision for an example.)
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Administrators: Clear all reports

Errors in the summary of the featured article

Please do not remove this invisible timestamp. See WT:ERRORS and WP:SUBSCRIBE. - Dank (push to talk) 01:24, 29 September 2022 (UTC)

Errors with "In the news"

In France, Dominique Pelicot and 49 other men are convicted of the mass rape of his ex-wife Gisèle Pelicot: It seems ambiguous whether:

1. She was his ex-wife during the rapes
2. She was his ex-wife at the time of the conviction

As they were married during the rapes, and they were married for 40+ years, I'd suggest rewording to ... convicted of the mass rape of his ex-wifelongtime wife Gisèle Pelicot, which reads fine regardless of whether the reader associates wife with the conviction or the rapes.—Bagumba (talk) 09:57, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

You honestly think longtime wife is better? Stephen 10:37, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Better than misleading those not familiar with the case that he was stalking his then ex-wife and raping her. No, they were married at the time. —Bagumba (talk) 11:02, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

FWIW, I saw "longtime" used by NPR: "Dominique Pelicot, Gisele's longtime husband".[1] They were divorced for a short time before remarrying each other again. —Bagumba (talk) 11:56, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

I don't think it's particularly bad as it is, but if you want it to be less ambiguous, the clear answer is to use "then-wife" instead of "ex-wife" or "longtime wife". 2A0A:EF40:983:DB01:D680:176D:8074:450C (talk) 11:37, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Or France 24 used "now ex-wife Gisèle Pelicot"[2]—Bagumba (talk) 11:42, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

"then-wife" is preferable, "now ex-wife" is acceptable, "longtime wife" to my ears has issues of tone. DuncanHill (talk) 12:10, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

"then-wife" is certainly an improvement over the existing plain "ex-wife", so I'd be OK with that. —Bagumba (talk) 13:06, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Futhermore, as noted at Talk:Mazan rapes#Requested move 11 December 2024, "mass rape" redirects to Mass sexual assault, which is defined there as: "... collective sexual assault of women, men and sometimes children, in public by groups". Don't know if there is anything more suitable. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:15, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

I agree that mass-rape does not seem right. I have been wondering why it’s not stated as a serial rape. Schwede66 14:16, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

I think that would be much less misleading. Martinevans123 (talk) 17:48, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Errors in "Did you know ..."

Current DYK

"that David Green published more than 200 research papers before his 18th birthday" - not seeing this in the target article which only says "In 2008, when Green was aged 72, a number of his former students, colleagues and collaborators published a collected volume of research papers 'in honour of the work of David Headley Green on the occasion of his 18th birthday, 29 February 2008'; a reference to his leap year birthday". I know the last main page hook is a quirky one, but this one is misleading to say the least. Brandmeister^talk 18:36, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Errors in "On this day"

Tomorrow's OTD

• Need to remove 2023 stuff. Not applicable to 2024.

Errors in the summary of the featured list

Friday's FL

(December 27)

Monday's FL

(December 23)

Errors in the summary of the featured picture

Notice to administrators: When fixing POTD errors, please update the corresponding regular version (i.e. without "protected" in the page title) in addition to the Main Page version linked below.

General discussion

Design

The main page at it: looks a lot better than this 11-year-old thing. KMF (talk) 20:17, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

See also zh: and nl:; they also managed to do a lot better than us. KMF (talk) 20:20, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

I think it's a matter of personal preference. With my layout, I can see everything including Today's Featured Picture all in one window -- the Italian version is very long and requires a bit of scrolling. On the NL version, I /do/ like the 'In The News' / 'On This Day' sections, however they cover far less than we do here. - NsTaGaTr ^(Talk) 20:50, 27 September 2017 (UTC)

That's exactly my reason for disliking the proposals any time this comes up. With the current design, I can see most of the interesting stuff without any scrolling. The current trend in web design of bulky and overblown spacing would hamper the functionality of the page. --Inops (talk) 13:42, 30 September 2017 (UTC)

This comes up a lot, but the facts are still clear: the main page is old-fashioned and drab, but it will probably never change because consensus. Aiken D 20:09, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

It's a valid argument, but until an alternative design is presented for actual consideration, nothing /can/ change. (*and "copy how this other page does it" doesn't always work, whether for technical reasons or just implementation/aesthetics*) - NsTaGaTr ^(Talk) 20:39, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

I don't like ANY of those options. But, then again, THIS is my main page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Main_Page_alternative_%28Khajidha%29 --Khajidha (talk) 20:51, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

main page

is Wikipedia losing it or something, the main page should have been changed by now. It's past 12

 Works for me try refreshing your cache. — xaosflux ^Talk 01:49, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

One of 'the charms of Wikipedia' - the occasional glitches and overlong persistence of entries on the Main Page. Jackiespeel (talk) 10:14, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Yom Kippur (and Jewish holidays in general)

OK, this is backward looking now, but we still have some issues to resolve.

I responded to the requests for updates on the eve of Yom Kippur, and pointed out that the references there covered all the ground in question. For whatever reason, my responses were ignored, and Yom Kippur was removed from the Main Page on September 30.

So we have a couple of problems that need to be addressed.

• First, I thought the standard that needed to be met for a page to be mentioned on the main page was that there be no sections (at least) marked with templates saying that cleanup was needed—not that there couldn't be a couple of specific inline templates to that effect. If that's wrong, please say so. But at least when I went off wiki Friday afternoon (about 19:00 UTC) there were no such section templates.
• Second, the person who removed Yom Kippur did not so much as respond to what I wrote. That's just not appropriate.
• Third, now that a decision has been taken that Jewish holidays are included on their day, rather than on their eve, those pages are all subject to a particular vulnerability—namely, that someone can come in late on the day before, make a claim of "cleanup required", perhaps even add such a template to a Jewish holiday page, and have that happen when the principal people who would do such cleanup are already off-wiki for the holiday. Most major Jewish holidays are near equinoxes, so assume the following case: Holiday starts at 6:00 pm local time the evening before, anywhere in the world, summer time in effect for Northern Hemisphere (because it always is). Assume also that people go off-wiki three hours before the holiday (3:00 pm local time) in order to finish preparing for the holiday. Then you end up with a schedule looking something like this:

Time (UTC) day before holiday	People going off-wiki
05:00	Australia (Eastern)
12:00	Israel
13:00	Western Europe
14:00	UK
19:00	US/Canada (Eastern)
22:00	US/Canada (Pacific)

User:Howcheng's notice to us was published around 15:30 UTC, meaning all Jewish communities in the Eastern Hemisphere were already off-line. And at that, Yom Kippur (and maybe Passover) are even more extreme: people go off-wiki even earlier, and even Jews who otherwise might stay on-wiki over the holidays are more likely to be off (preparing for the fast or the Seder). So even if there had been some specific error notices for us to respond to, many of us were already unavailable, and the rest of us were busy enough trying to wrap up the day's work before leaving for the holiday.

So what's your suggestion? I appreciate that the Main Page is looking to make sure there aren't quality issues in links. That's appropriate. But if the main people likely to correct the problems aren't available after a certain hour, that's a problem, too.

I don't think people want to go back to listing Jewish holidays on their eves (although that is certainly one solution).

I am generally willing to check pages for errors, but any thorough review would normally be on the second day before the listing (UTC). I will really refocus efforts on doing that. (Fast of Gedaliah is a particular problem: It always immediately follows Rosh Hashanah or Rosh Hashanah plus Sabbath, so the best I can do is the day before Rosh Hashanah.)

Beyond that, I suggest that if there is a problem, it should be reported to WT:JUDAISM by 9:00 UTC the day before. If there is a problem, that gives enough people enough time to have a look at it. And if there is no problem, protect the page from that point until the listing day is over, so that no one can "create" last-minute problems.

I'd appreciate any comments anyone might have. StevenJ81 (talk) 17:10, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

Had I noticed in time that Yom Kippur had been removed from the main page, I would have reinstated it. The article is not perfect but the quality is reasonable and the concerns expressed above are legitimate. Newyorkbrad (talk) 17:33, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I wasn't in on the decision not to list Jewish holidays on the night before, but I would have thought that Kol Nidrei and Erev Pesach would be worth listing in their own right (if necessary creating specific articles for them) -- the latter, for example, because it is the night that most Jewish families will be gathering to have a Seder meal together. Both of these nights, I would submit, are a bigger deal than almost any other day in the Jewish calendar.

As for yesterday's listing, not highlighting Yom Kippur but instead featuring "Blasphemy Day" does seem like a bad fail. But perhaps listing both would not have been so good either. Jheald (talk) 17:54, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

I did apologize for the late notice in informing you all. As you are aware, we are all volunteers, so I will get around to inspecting the articles when I have the time, and I work full-time and I volunteer for a local youth sports organization as well, so sometimes Wikipedia has to take a back seat, and that's what happened here. But you can't lay this all on me. The correct approach is to be proactive: go to all holiday/observance pages and make sure that the quality is good. Ask yourself, would it be listed in ITN or DYK on its current state? If not, then OTD is unlikely to feature it either. Generally speaking, the minimum standard is indeed no yellow-level (or more severe) maintenance tags on the page. However, that doesn't mean we should ignore pages that are in need of referencing just because they happen to not be tagged. If I see the article has issues, I'm going to tag it and take it out of OTD, even if it's the day before.x —howcheng {chat} 18:46, 1 October 2017 (UTC)

• As a heads-up, Sukkot is OTD on October 4 and also has unsourced sections. Shemini Atzeret on October 12 appears to be pretty good. That's it as far as I can see for October. I haven't looked at other religion's days, apart from Diwali on October 19 which also appears OK. Black Kite (talk) 18:53, 1 October 2017 (UTC)
  • I will address Sukkot. And Shemini Atzeret better not have such problems; I'm the main author on that.
  • Howcheng, I'm not at all laying it all on you. But I need to have something to go on here:

First, I addressed the issue, and informed everybody that even though there appeared to be a fair amount of unsourced text there, in fact, it was sourced: it was a single topic covered by the reference at the end of the section. Based on AGF, that should have been a sufficient answer in the short run.

Second, I looked at the page that morning, added a reference to a section that I thought needed one, saw nothing else but perhaps one or two "citation needed" in-line templates, and that's it. It didn't look to me like that was problematic enough that I needed to dive in and fix the whole page, and frankly that's a tough thing to do on the eve of Yom Kippur. Are you telling me that the presence of even one in-line cleanup tag is now the standard?

I can probably do some detailed fixing as late as the evening of the second day before the listing US ET (figure around 19:00 UTC). I can probably do light fixing up to about noon ET the day before the listing. If the page appears to be in good shape at that point, we've done what we can. But we're going to have problems if we can always be second-guessed about that between 16:00 UTC and publication time (midnight UTC). I'm just looking to get some clarity on that. StevenJ81 (talk) 02:12, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

Most of the "Observance" section has no citations, as well as the "Mishnaic and Talmudic literature" section. Furthermore, the "Heavenly books opened" and "Prayer service" sections have no citations at all. Those are the problematic items. The single CN tag on its own is no big deal. —howcheng {chat} 07:24, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

"Heavenly books opened" I will grant you. "Mishnaic and Talmudic literature" appears sparse, but in fact its first paragraph states that the entire summary is based on certain primary and secondary sources, which are then backed by a footnote for a secondary source that cites them. And that footnote is repeated at the end. So it's covered. "Prayer services" has several citations. One paragraph within doesn't, but that's pretty close to WP:BLUE in the sense that any Yom Kippur prayer book would have it. I'll add a citation to one just to be safe. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:20, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

I don't see that there's really any problem specific to Jewish holidays. I understand that religious practices means observant Jewish people may go completely offline and in any case may not be able to work on articles from the eve. But the reality is for plenty of observances, people don't really have the time or desire to edit wikipedia on the day of the observamce. I'd also note for observances primarily in one country, it's easily possible that just before midnight UTC is not even a time people may be awake. For example, India is UTC+05:30 so if the problems are encountered at 19:00 UTC (5 hours before), there's a fair chance many people will already be sleeping at 0:30 local time and won't be up until at least after midnight UTC. Again I understand that these people may technically be able to edit wikipedia after this, to at least get it up later in the day. But again just because there's nothing explicitly forbidding them from editing wikipedia, doesn't mean it's realisticly possible they will find the time or have the desire. (For example, I'd note that for various reasons incredibly important observances may not be public holidays so work may get in the way.)

In fact, even if the problems are pointed out 24 hours before, depending on the nature of the specific observance, the normal preparations etc, it's easily possible no one will have any time even with that much warning. (Incidentally, I'd also note that AFAIK, the norm is to remove articles already on OTD for the day if quality issues are uncovered later, so it's not like midnight UTC is some magic time anyway.) And the nature of the world, the internet and the spread of English speakers with the time, knowledge and desire to improve en.wikipeida means that for some stuff, the people who are likely to deal with the problem may very well me one or two people who could be only holiday, sick, whatever even for something incredibly important. In other words with any observance (or for that matter event) even important ones, timing issues could always mean that problems are only spotted after a time when no one is likely to be around to deal with it. These problems may be a bit more likely with Jewish holidays than with some other holidays but definitely similar issues can apply to any observance.

As howcheng has said, the best solution would seem to be to be for those that care to familiarise themselves with the quality requirements expected for the main page, and ensure the article meets them well before hand when they do have time, whatever the observance. This won't completely prevent someone later noticing a problem which requires removal of the article from OTD, it will greatly reduce the chance of it happening. In other words rather than simply responding to tags as others add them, being proactive than reactive. I make no comment on the quality of the articles involved, but if Howcheng's suggestion above that whole sections and large parts of other sections were unsourced it seems to me this is something which should have been noticed by anyone taking a proper look.

If we really do want to change practices, e.g. to guarantee an article is featured if there are no problems 24 hours before (or whatever) or to allow articles which are "not perfect but the quality is reasonable" even if they don't meet the normal main page quality requirements for every other section on the main page, I'm assuming we at least all agree that this will apply to all observances. But I just don't see why we need it. Ultimately it's always going to happen that incredibly important observances are excluded simply because there's no volunteer around willing to work on them. (Since some of the examples I recall, we actually had quite a bit of notice but the articles we so bad I don't think anyone would ever allowed them.)

So let's just keep our standards, everyone involved try their best to ensure articles are up to scratch or if they aren't this is noted with as much time as possible, and accept sometimes important stuff isn't going to be on OTD for quality reasons.

P.S. One issue I didn't touch on is someone coming along and ruining an article after someone has ensured it is up to scratch. But in that case I don't see protection is needed. I'd hope if there is something weird someone else would notice and revert to the great version. In any case, do we actually have an example were an OTD article developed major new problems (as opposed to existing problems someone noticed), in a few days time between someone getting it up to scratch for OTD, and it appearing?

Nil Einne (talk) 12:44, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

If something that weird really happens, I would hope someone would notice. I'm more thinking (AGF) of a case where someone reads the page relatively superficially, decides there's a problem, and then templates it. See the discussion of "Mishnaic and Talmudic literature" above. There's a long stretch without any visible inline citations, which I will admit on a superficial examination would look questionable. But the first paragraph of the section clearly says what the sources are, and that those sources apply to the whole exposition. So in fact that section is properly sourced. StevenJ81 (talk) 16:20, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

I've often wondered why people complain about observances (particularly religious festivals and national days) being left off the Main Page, these aren't exactly surprise occurrences. The dates are known far ahead of time. If you expect to see it on the Main Page, why aren't you making sure it is ready ahead of time? I find especially odd the stance that we have somehow insulted the religion or nation in question by leaving the observance off of OTD. I would think that a subpar article would be more of an insult. --Khajidha (talk) 13:49, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

That's a fair point. But it's also sometimes true that what constitutes a subpar article is in the eye of the beholder. And just because something appears to be a problem doesn't mean it actually is; see the mentions of "Mishnaic and Talmudic literature" above.

I actually think that Sukkot is subpar right now. I hope I will have a sufficient chance to fix it in time for a listing on October 5 (not October 4). StevenJ81 (talk) 16:20, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

I already moved it to October 5. —howcheng {chat} 17:05, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

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