Talk:Main Page

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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"

• Potomac River crash- shouldn't the operator of the helicopter (the US Army) be identified in the blurb? 331dot (talk) 13:54, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

  Yes, I think that's reasonable.  Done. Given we've spelled out the number of the airline in full, it makes sense to provide a bit of extra clarity on the helicopter too.  — Amakuru (talk) 14:13, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Errors in "Did you know ..."

Current DYK

• Why call Julius Caesar a "dictator"? That's neutral language? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.93.223.182 (talk) 02:27, 1 February 2025 (UTC)
  • Hi IP editor, it is not an error, Julius Caesar held the title of dictator. See the articles Julius Caesar and Roman dictator. TSventon (talk) 02:52, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

    better question... do we really need to qualify who Julius Caesar is? He's Julius Caesar. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 08:55, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

    There are many Julius Caesar like Gaius Julius Caesar Germanicus,Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus ; see Gaius Julius Caesar (disambiguation) It would be important to distinguish that which Julius Caesar ,we are referring to - and he's quite popular as a dictator.The AP (talk) 13:31, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

    I feel like that's a problem we solved with the PTOPIC system; Julius Caesar is also the name of a Shakespeare play, but we know that when people type in "Julius Caesar", they are almost certainly looking for and referring to Julius Caesar. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 21:47, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

    But dictator not as understood by the normal meaning of the word. Secretlondon (talk) 11:32, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

    I agree with the OP that we should drop the dictator from the hook. It's unnecessary and causes confusion, given the difference in meaning from the present day (I mean, yes, he probably was a dictator in our sense too, but that's not normally something we'd include in a hook). As for "It would be important to distinguish that which Julius Caesar we are referring to", no it really isn't - Julius Caesar is a WP:PRIMARYTOPIC for a reason and nobody will think we mean one of the other ones!  — Amakuru (talk) 14:11, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

    Hmm, I agree with your reasoning. You should go ahead and drop it, I guess. The AP (talk) 14:17, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

•  Done, albeit very late in the day. Gatoclass (talk) 21:59, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Errors in the summary of the featured list

Friday's FL

(February 7)

Monday's FL

(February 3)

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

Alexander McQueen

I'm sorry if I'm formatting this incorrectly or putting this in the wrong place -- I'm new to this form of editing. But I have a question: why do we keep on putting Alexander McQueen's work in the featured article section? Are we an encyclopedia, or are we Alexander McQueen's marketing team?

The extent to which Alexander McQueen is featured on the main page makes it seem as if our neutrality is compromised. I'm seriously beginning to wonder if people with links to Alexander McQueen are pulling strings behind the scenes.

Featured articles are supposed to not be reposted. While posting articles on different McQueen exhibits several times a year technically respects this rule, in practice we are giving McQueen a completely disproportionate amount of airtime. Is there a way we could address this problem? — Preceding unsigned comment added by NoahKidd1478 (talk • contribs) 16:16, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

@NoahKidd1478: I'm afraid you don't know what you're talking about. Featured articles can be reposted (a five year minimum between turns is current practice, IIRC). More importantly, you have managed to cast aspersions (that editors are shilling for fashion agents) while also assuming a massive amount of bad faith (suggesting the editors responsible for featured articles are some kind of marketing team). Editors write about the things, subject to certain policies and guidelines, that they want to. The guidelines regarding TFA can be found here.

Incidentally. Prepare to blow a gasket in the future; there are, I think around 10 AMQ articles currently with featured status. So far, only five of them have appeared on the main page. Guess we should all go buy AMQ stock. Serial (speculates here) 17:10, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

TFA's are nominated and selected at Today's_featured_article/requests. The whole process is transparent and I can assure you that nothing shady is going on.

Today's Featured Article pulls from the list of articles with the Featured Article status which has nothing to do with being "featured" on the main page, which might be a point of confusion if you're new. McQueen articles keep showing up on the main page because an editor has put in a massive amount of work in bringing them to FA status then nominating them to show up on the main page. The best way to get more variety in main page FA's would be to bring some to FA status and nominate them, which you can do. Nebman227 (talk) 17:11, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

I do not understand how putting an article about a collection from 20 years ago is marketing for McQueen. I think that the TFA bias is instead towards articles on underrepresented topics at TFA that were recently promoted to FA status. According to WP:TFASTATS, in the past six months, 57 articles were promoted 100 days or less before appearing as TFA, which is a little under 1/3 of the articles at TFA in that period. 22 articles are 100-200 days from promotion which is where Nihilism would fall (about 103 days from promotion), 10 articles for 200-300 days, and then the next drop off stabilises to about 3-5 articles per 100 days. There's also a bias with the TFA co-ords to prioritise FAs that haven't appeared on the main page yet. Since WP:FANMP does not have a lot of visual arts articles that haven't appeared on the main page, the coordinators tend to schedule visual arts articles more quickly. Whether these biases should exist or not is a question that only the community can answer. Z1720 (talk) 18:33, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

NoahKidd1478, there isn't a problem to address. We struggle to show sufficient variety as it is and have gluts of unused FAs in some areas (milhist and modern music) and a dearth of articles in multiple areas (See here for the large areas of shortfall). Sure, we can ignore new, fresh FAs from an under-represented topic and run more milhist or music, or we can rerun even more older FAs (which carries with it a whole set of other risks and problems), but that's going to lead to many, many more complaints. It would also be unfair on the editors involved in getting these to FA if we deliberately ignore them without a good rationale. If you want us to select different types of FAs, please develop articles and take them through FAC to give us a larger pot of articles to choose from, but these are excellent articles, they've never appeared on the MP before and they will keep being selected. - SchroCat (talk) 18:44, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Regardless of whether they are excellent articles (and they are), I have to admit that seven TFAs in the last year about the same person does appear to be pushing it a bit. Black Kite (talk) 19:00, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

It does naturally lead to 'PR rep?, or perhaps, 'someone's, Mother?; At any rate, there is no need to jump on Noah for asking about it, it means they are a reader. Thanks for reading, Noah. Alanscottwalker (talk) 19:51, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Agreed. One or two of the responses above are incredibly rude for what was basically a genuine question about the balance of main-page content.  — Amakuru (talk) 21:51, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

It's not just a question about MP content though: it's the aspersions and innuendo that are cast when asking the question. That's not acceptable. - SchroCat (talk) 10:32, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Maybe it's time to start cycling in old FAs if there's not enough variety in the unused ones. I think it's more important to be fair to readers than to editors. There's a huge variety of FA that may have only been on TFA once, years ago. Apfelmaische (talk) 21:18, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Old FAs are already being used (there will be one appearing in two and a half hours, for example), but they come with their own set of problems in terms of where they sit in terms of the current standards. As I have already said, if people could develop articles up to FA standard to give us a wider and deeper pool of articles from which to choose, life would much easier. If not, then our hands are largely tied, given the number of complaints if we start increasing the proportion of milhist or modern music articles to fill the spaces. - SchroCat (talk) 21:35, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Oh, sorry, I didn't understand the process. The page of unused FAs you linked is super useful. Maybe a new statistics page showing TFAs that have only appeared once (and the order they appeared in) might be similarly useful? I understand that would be a much longer list (thousands?) and not all of them are still up to snuff. Anyway, I think everyone can agree McQueen isn't an underrepresented topic anymore. Apfelmaische (talk) 22:31, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

@Apfelmaische: You might be interested in WP:URFA/2020. Z1720 (talk) 22:39, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

The regulars know how the Main Page sections work, but it's evidently unclear to the wider public. This question (about Alexander McQueen specifically, or other topic areas such as video games) comes up regularly here and other places such as the r/wikipedia subreddit. Perhaps it would be worth adding some descriptive subheadings to the main page e.g. "Today's featured article - from Wikipedia's highest quality articles", "Did you know - from recently created or improved articles". But oh god, we would need to come up with a summary for In the news that everyone can agree on. the wub "?!" 23:49, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

DYK used to have a tagline along those lines. I wish it'd return. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 03:36, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

It's not that clear here in the responses here either. There's not a lot of articles on Wikipedia:Featured articles that haven't been on the Main Page, but it doesn't seem so constrained that it necessitates five articles about the same person in quick succession. Although I suppose nobody here has yet noted how quick the successions has been, so I could be wrong in an assumption. CMD (talk) 04:20, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Chipmunkdavis Seven TFAs since February 2024; February 12, March 24, May 22, September 18, October 9, December 13, plus yesterday's. Black Kite (talk) 08:45, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Less than one a month? Well, my assumption was flawed. This doesn't seem particularly enthusiastic marketing given the number of non-military articles at Wikipedia:Featured articles that haven't been on the Main Page. If it is a problem at that frequency, what would a better spread be? CMD (talk) 08:48, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

The list of those that haven't appeared is just that: they have not appeared. Not all of them are in a fit enough state to put on to the MP without serious work, so it's not as big a pool of available 'fresh' articles as it looks at first glance. - SchroCat (talk) 08:41, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

Every time I see a thread about "too much <someone's niche topic> on the Main Page", my thought is like... get over it? I cannot think of any other context in which people criticize Wikipedians for doing literally the thing Wikipedians are most supposed to do: writing good Wikipedia articles. Nor has anyone ever explained to me why there being a series of articles on a topic on the Main Page is for some reason a bad thing. That seems to always be stated as a given, but, why? There is nothing about the Main Page's structure that would give readers the impression we don't have series of articles on topics. The closest thing to the Main Page among traditional media is a newspaper, and newspaper run series on niche topics all the time.

The whole thing—and I don't just mean the OP, who I appreciate is a new user, but I mean as a general phenomenon on Wikipedia—just reads like sour grapes. So you're not interested in something that keeps coming up on the Main Page? Alright. Go read a different article then. There's about 35 featured on the page at any point in time. -- Tamzin^{[cetacean needed]} (they|xe|🤷) 04:31, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Tamzin Going to have to disagree with you there. If people are complaining about the type of TFAs (i.e. "There are too many music/video game/pop culture/military history TFAs") then yes, that's not an issue, because it is multiple articles about different subjects, even if they share a genre. But here we have seven TFAs in a year about a single person, which does seem to me to be excessive. This is absolutely no reflection on those articles author, incidentally; they're great articles. But there are over 6,600 FAs, and it just seems that it could be balanced out a bit. Black Kite (talk) 08:45, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

It is a choice of what to balance, I guess. We have enough sports articles that the TFA coords can run regularly sports articles that are not about Gillingham FC, the 1948 Australian cricket team or the World Snooker Championship so people don't notice how many of those we have. On the other hand, if the TFA coords don't feature McQueen, they can't feature fashion at all. Overall I think the coords are generally doing a good job balancing out TFA topics given the material we give them to work with. —Kusma (talk) 09:20, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

All the responses here set in terms of defending editors against criticism are tone-deaf. Whatever group, by whatever process sincerely followed in good faith, determines what article to place on the main page each day should simply take into account the problem of giving Wikipedia the appearance of a conflict of interest, and should be sensitive, whether a priori in making their selections or afterwards in responding to expressed concerns, to this and try to avoid it at the same time they're applying all the other criteria that they apply. Largoplazo (talk) 13:27, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

The thing is, the Main Page TFA showcases our top quality content, which is extremely unevenly distributed among the topics covered by Wikipedia in general. For example, we have 24 FAs related to Taylor Swift and 9 FAs about countries. Sure, we can try to make people not notice how unbalanced we are lest they believe we have a conflict of interest, but it almost seems dishonest to pretend we don't have this massive systemic bias. —Kusma (talk) 13:48, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Does lend to the "Whiteguypedia" stereotype. Hyperbolick (talk) 06:17, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

There are some overly strong comments here on both sides of the debate. I too have been wondering why we've had so many McQueen TFAs and am glad that NoahKidd1478 raised the question. TFAs are selected on quality, and the topical coverage is limited by what quality articles have been written and promoted. They're not advertising and it's good that someone has put the effort in to write these articles. At the same time, the number of TFAs about McQueen has been unreasonably high - seven in a single year is too much. That's about double the rate I consider a sensible maximum. So yes, we should continue running TFAs about McQueen, but they should be spread out more. Three a year would be plenty. Modest Genius ^talk 12:43, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

It takes a long time to produce new featured articles. They're passion projects, and editors write about what they care about. If you think that different articles need to be promoted, then go make those articles better so they qualify. Put up or shut up. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 17:44, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Yup, I've been working on Margaret Sibella Brown for over six years; anybody who wants to fight the "whiteguypedia" stereotype is welcome to drop by FAC with a review. And Alien is right; the best way to fix our biased selection of articles is to write ones on under-represented topics. RoySmith (talk) 17:52, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

There's a number of issues wrapped up together here, but let me concentrate on the re-running of old material. I gather it happens from time to time on TFA, and within the past year or so, DYK passed a new rule allowing it there. I don't get why we want to do that. There's so much new material that deserves greater visibility, it seems silly to me that we're wasting limited main page space to run old stuff again. RoySmith (talk) 15:57, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

There are multiple reasons, but the simplest is that the Featured Articles process promotes substantially fewer than 365 articles per year, and has done since 2010. See the deltaFAs column at Wikipedia:Featured article statistics. If TFA didn't run some repeats, they would run out of articles sooner or later. I don't think having previously run something as TFA in (say) 2009 should disqualify it in 2025. Modest Genius ^talk 16:24, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

It's not that it ran in 2009 that disqualifies such an article. It's that since then it's had 15 plus years of the ebb and flow of Wikipedia editing that possibly hasn't improved it, especially since a lot of the people who were producing TFAs in the 00's are inactive or less active than they were, and likely no one has been watching the article very much. Also, we are limited in running reruns is that there may be no more than two a week. I'm not out to increase that because TFA is for many editors a capstone for their hard work on an article and we want to encourage people to write more FAs by rewarding them in the only way this project can. Wehwalt (talk) 17:25, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

I didn't realize there was a deficit of FAs. That certainly reduces my anxiety about whether any FA I do will be good enough to make TFA :-) But DYK has exactly the opposite problem; we have more material than we can handle, which is why we keep having to switch to running two sets per day. So I'm still mystified why people feel the need for reruns. RoySmith (talk) 17:29, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

You mean on TFAs? Because if we don't, we will slowly have less and less variety because we have less and less to choose from. Wehwalt (talk) 17:44, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Should we consider expanding the "thing" to "From today's featured or good article", starting to include GA:s as well? That would give us more to choose from. We don't have to change the wording, "featured" here seems to mean "shown on mainpage". Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 09:35, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

I think that would be a bad step. TFA is supposed to showcase our best work and many GAs are not at that standard. Besides, GAs get their chance to appear at DYK once they get promoted. - SchroCat (talk) 10:29, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

I had no idea our deficit was this bad. OK, challenge accepted, I will try for more than one this year :) —Kusma (talk) 17:53, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Kusma, The stats are here, but broadly the promotions over the last five years:

2024	282
2023	317
2022	300
2021	325
2020	268
2019	280

As you can see, we're running well short of the 365 we need to keep the level flat - and that's without taking into account WP:FAR which will reduce the overall pot. But for selecting for the front page the problem is exacerbated by the gluts we have in certain areas (milhist, modern music), where we get more complaints if we run too many of those and demands for more variety. People like reading the Culture and society articles, but we're low on those (which is one of the reasons why McQueen has appeared a few times this year - and seriously) and some broader topics are entirely empty, meaning we're severely constrained when the question of "variety" is considered in what to run each month. I keep challenging people who complain about TFA to write something that can appear there, but I've not seen anything positive come from it: people would rather complain and hope someone else does the actual work of magicking up a solution out of nothing! Cheers - SchroCat (talk) 10:29, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

So ... feature another article every week instead of every day? Largoplazo (talk) 22:52, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Why not try to produce new material, say by featuring something at AfI or encouraging readers to contribute more overtly? JayCubby 00:11, 1 February 2025 (UTC)

People write about what they are interested in. That's the bottom line. And writing a FA is a Lot of Work, the standards are high and exacting, the learning curve is steep, and we have no incentives to offer besides the privilege of seeing one's work or a summary thereof spend 24 hours on the main page. Wehwalt (talk) 16:50, 1 February 2025 (UTC)