On 17 June 2025, Did you know was updated with a fact from the article Rule of inference, which you recently created, substantially expanded, or brought to good article status. The fact was ... that logicians using classical rules of inference can deduce any arbitrary statement from a contradiction? The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Rule of inference. You are welcome to check how many pageviews the nominated article or articles got while on the front page (here's how, Rule of inference), and the hook may be added to the statistics page after its run on the Main Page has completed. Finally, if you know of an interesting fact from another recently created article, then please feel free to suggest it on the Did you know talk page.
Thank you and the team today for History, introduced in admirable simplicity as "the academic study of the past. It analyzes and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened"! - I have Alfred Brendel on the same page and made my story around him. -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 06:03, 19 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The 2025 Core Contest Winners!
The winners of the 2025 Core Contest are announced 🎉. An great turnout with a impressive variety of articles and laudable improvements. The judges (Aza24, Femke and Casliber) would like to thank everybody who joined and congratulate the winners.
First place (and a prize of £120) goes to Phlsph7 (talk·contribs) for his systemic overhaul of the Political Philosophy article. What was once an unwieldy entry—dominated by a sprawling history section of nearly three dozen subsections!—is now an accessible and well-structured survey of a complex and often polarizing subject. We particularly commend Phlsph7’s global, inclusive, and comprehensive approach. He has once again demonstrated exceptional skill in handling core topics with clarity and balance.
Second place (and a prize of £100) goes to Dracophyllum (talk·contribs) for their outstanding work on both Trunk and Flower. The former was reimagined from a ~200 word stub into a richly detailed and impeccably sourced overview—an effort truly worthy of its dedicatee, the late and much-missed Vami IV. Meanwhile, their improvements to the Flower article transformed an already strong entry into an exceptional one, now well on its way to passing FAC.
Third place (and a prize of £80) goes to Vigilantcosmicpenguin (talk·contribs) for his major development of the Niamey article. The entry now proudly stands among the finest city articles on Wikipedia—from thirty scattered references to nearly 400 high-quality academic sources. We particularly commend his inclusion of numerous French-language sources and thoughtfully comprehensive approach to the topic.
Hello. Thank you for taking part in this year's Core Contest and congratulations on your win. Could you please write to me at [email protected] to coordinate your prize. I may have your address from last year, just making sure it is is till the same. Best wishes, Karla Marte. Karla Marte(WMUK) (talk) 10:01, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Congrats!
Core Contest Belt
In wrestling, and some other competitions, the previous winner hands over a championship belt to the new champion. As this is all digital, I will pass this barnstar & message. The heavy rewriting of political philosophy frames a broad topic in a very approachable way. The inverted pyramid of concepts is a much clearer approach than the old version's history that abruptly started and abruptly jumped across time and space. It can be a lot to get these broad articles into a more cohesive shape, so thanks and good luck, Rjjiii (talk) 02:22, 28 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is to let you know that the above article has been scheduled as today's featured article for 2 August 2025. Please check that the article needs no amendments. Feel free to amend the draft blurb, which can be found at Wikipedia:Today's featured article/August 2025, or to make comments on other matters concerning the scheduling of this article at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/August 2025. Please keep an eye on that page, as notifications of copy edits to or queries about the draft blurb may be left there by user:JennyOz, who assists the coordinators by reviewing the blurbs, or by others. I also suggest that you watchlist Wikipedia:Main Page/Errors from two days before it appears on the Main Page. Thanks, and congratulations on your work! Gog the Mild (talk) 15:01, 3 July 2025 (UTC)
talk:Phlsph7#top|talk]]) 17:12, 8 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you today for the article, introduced as "the systematic study of values, examining which things are good and what it means for something to be good. It distinguishes different types of values and explores how they can be measured and compared." - I have a FAC open, in case of interest, for BWV 79. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 09:14, 2 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Today's story - short version: ten years ago we had a DYK about a soprano who sang in concerts with me in the choir, - longer: I found today a youtube of an aria she sang with us then, recorded the same year, - if you still have time: our performances were the weekend before the Iraq war ultimatum, and we sang Dona nobis pacem (and the drummer drummed!) as if they could hear us in Washington. --Gerda Arendt (talk) 14:51, 18 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Phlsph7, I've read a lot of your work here on Wikipedia, and I really enjoy the style and accessibility of your artilces. I was wondering if you had a minute look at an article I've been working on: Cardinality. Nothing formal, it's not finished (e.g. I haven't put in-line citations in yet and such), just things you like, things you think I should change, things you would have done different, etc. I'm trying to work on writing FA-level content (or at least closer to it). – Farkle Griffen (talk)23:37, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Farkle Griffen, that's an interesting project and congratulations on getting Equality (mathematics) to GA by the way. For Cardinality, it would probably be best to do the proposed merge first and then try a GA nomination before making an FA attempt.
A few observations:
Do the sources in the earlier subsections of the history section explicitly talk about cardinality, rather than related concepts? I haven't looked at the sources, but my guess would be that the concept arose primarily with Cantor and set theory. If that's correct, having such a detailed discussion of somehow related earlier developments would violate WP:UNDUE and/or WP:SYNTH.
Personally, I would put the history section at the end, since, presumably, readers are more interested in the mathematics than the intellectual history. But there is no fixed rule here.
Since the lead is supposed to provide an overview of the article, you could try to squeeze in a sentence each on the history and the paradoxes so that those two sections are also covered.
I don't think that etymology is important enough for this topic to deserve a full section. One option might be to condense it into a short paragraph and mention it somewhere in the history section.
As far as I'm aware, the term "cardinality" is also used in computer science with a slightly different meaning. Should this be mentioned somewhere in this article?
I know it's much smaller (shallower?) game than what you're used to taking on on here, but I'm curious if you'd ever be interested in working on this article? The topic seems quite aligned with your interests, though of course there're good reasons many such people pay it no mind at all. I'm one of those folks that thinks it's really a interesting theory even if it's wrong, and I think it'd make a really cool GA or FA. Thanks again for all the highest-quality work you do here for us. Remsense 🌈 论18:03, 24 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Remsense, thanks for the suggestion! That sounds like an interesting and controversial topic to get into. I'm currently occupied with Cognition and I might go for Proposition next, so it's unlikely that I would get to it anytime soon. By the way, kudos for getting Chinese characters to FA status earlier this year! Phlsph7 (talk) 09:18, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! I realize I didn't make it at all obvious or even detectable above, but if you do ever find yourself able I'd definitely want to collaborate on that.
It would be great to do a collaboration sometime. I've been eyeing Semiotics for a while. It might interest you because of its close relation to linguistics. The challenge would probably be the scope of the topic. We could also try it on Proposition, which would also cover the areas of logic and philosophy of mind but could be more technical. Phlsph7 (talk) 12:37, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would be really excited to do either—I've been meaning to really grapple with semiotics in the context of its own field for a bit now anyway! Remsense 🌈 论12:38, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In that case, we could see what we can do about semiotics. After a superficial look, our current article has an odd structure: individual theorists are first discussed in the history section and then again in the section "Notable semioticians" with a lot of overlap. The article Cognition will probably take me a few more days to finish. Then I could start looking more deeply into the semiotics literature and our article. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:45, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This will likewise (hopefully) encourage me to pick up the pace on the writing articles, for which the discussion on Talk:History of writing has already netted me some semiotics literature I'm becominng familiar with. Remsense 🌈 论15:25, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
If it's not a good time since you were planning to finish the writing articles first, I could focus on something else for now and we could get started when it fits better. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:36, 25 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, great. An important step would probably be to figure out the basic structure of the article. It could be similar to the one used for Semantics (Definition, Basic concepts,...). I was thinking about making a rough overall outline after getting familiar with the sources. We could then workshop the outline and use it to coordinate who focuses on which sections so we don't end up writing the same sections twice. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:01, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've gone through the Oxford Bibliography[1] and identified a subset of broad overviews plus a few subtopical publications from it, preferring slightly more recent ones. I'm going to see if I can identify suggestions in their own structures that could inform a better outline for the article.
I've also circled back around, and am pretty sure the structure you went with for Semantics is a perfectly suitable template to start with and adapt – that makes sense of course, given semantics is often considered a subfield within semiotics or at least a field with comparably major overlap.
Here's my first rough outline, working mostly from Semantics and Chandler (2022) [1994]:[2]
Definitions and related fields
Philosophy and logic [e.g. after Peirce]
Linguistics [e.g. after Saussure]
Structuralism
(It seems possible we might want to do the barest bit of acknowledgement that two streams were fused into one here historically rather than saving it for the § History section, but if there's enough confidence in shared terminology we would be happy not to.)
Basic concepts
Mediation
Sense and reference
Sign relations and arbitrariness
Sign systems, functions and tropes
Branches
Semantics
Pragmatics
Syntactics
Methods of analysis
Paradigmatic analysis
Syntagmatic analysis
Models of signs
Saussure
Pierce
Jakobson
Hjelmslev
Lotman?
History?
(Maybe this should form one section with the above, where each model is discussed in a historically anchored manner?)
Applications
Hermeneutics and literary analysis [e.g. Barthes, Eco]
Your suggestion covers many essential topics. In the definition section, it would probably be useful to explain that semiotics is an interdisciplinary field shaped by areas like philosophy and linguistics. For the semantics article, it was important to give a short explanation of the related linguistic fields to help readers understand what semantics is and isn't. This may not be as important for this article, so the definition section here may have less emphasis on the "related fields" part. A major division for models of signs is between dyadic and triadic models. Not sure if we should use that division or go by the names of the different theorists.
To add to the complexity, I'll throw some more pieces on the board. I don't know yet whether to integrate them into the article as separate (sub-)sections or in the discussion of something else.
For the branches, there are also subfields like bio-/zoosemiotics and cognitive semiotics to consider. There is some overlap with the application section, so we would have to see how to resolve that tension. Maybe we could distinguish core branches from applied semiotics.
Some theorists distinguish different types of signs, like Peirce's icon-index-symbol division.
We also need to cover the discussion of structure and codes somewhere
And yes, I think it is most coherent at present to distinguish branches which relate roughly to the different scopes in which signs can be studied—and applications, each intersecting with other fields, which are defined by which signs are being studied. Remsense 🌈 论00:26, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Great! I added a few more sources. My workflow is usually something like the following:
Get an overview of the sources and figure out the overall structure of the article (section titles, subsection titles, rough length and content of each (sub)section).
That's what I'm currently doing (at least when I'm not busy responding to GA and FA reviews).
Explain on the article talk page what my plans are and how the article should be changed.
Work on one section at a time and change the article section by section.
This has the advantage that I don't have to do everything at once and that I get feedback from other editors as I make changes.
If we wanted to adapt this approach for a collaboration, we could try to figure out steps 1 & 2 together. For step 3, I see several options. One approach is that each one picks a section on which they can work independently. We could also try to work on the same section simultaneously, but there is the danger of writing the same text twice. Yet another approach would be that one person writes a rough draft of a section while the other gives feedback, copyedits, adds references/images, etc. There could be some form of combination of those approaches, and I'm sure there are many other ways to proceed, so I'm also open to other ideas. Phlsph7 (talk) 08:34, 1 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've had a look through several of the sources from our overview. I found Nöth 1990, Danesi 2004 & 2020, Chandler 2022, and Sebeok 2001 particularly helpful for different aspects of the article. Based on the emphasis many of our sources give to ideas related to sign systems, I was considering a modification to your proposed outline. We could replace the sections "Basic concepts" and "Models of signs" with the sections "Signs" and "Sign systems". The contents could probably also be included while keeping those two sections if you prefer, but I find the new headings more intuitive.
The signs section would deal with a lot of information in the earlier two sections. It should define what signs are, how they differ from other things, how they relate to meaning, sense, and reference, and what models and types of signs there are. Sign relation could be covered when discussing types of signs, since the icon-index-symbol categorization is based on differences in the sign's relation to its object. The signs section would probably be the longest section of the article with several subsections.
The sign-systems section would discuss how sign systems provide non-sign building blocks for signs (e.g. letters/phonemes for words in language), how signs form codes characterized by paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations between the signs, how texts are large signs composed of smaller ones, and how associative mechanisms like metaphors affect meaning. Phlsph7 (talk) 09:14, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I prepared an explanation of our plans for the article talk page. What are your thoughts?
Remsense and I are thinking about implementing changes to this article with the hope of moving it in the direction of GA status. Large parts of the current article lack references. There are also the maintenance tags 13x citation needed, 1x Only primary sources, and 1x permanent dead link. At some points, the article is incoherent. For example, the discussion in the subsubsection "Peirce's list of categories" does not state what those categories are but jumps instead to the topics of Umwelt and animals without clarifying the relation.
The article has an odd structure in some places. Individual theorists are first discussed in the history section and then again in the section "Notable semioticians" with a lot of overlap and without a principle of what goes where. I think it would be better to have a unified history section that covers all notable semioticians in a concise manner. The article would also benefit from new sections dedicated to core topics of semiotics as a whole, such as a section on the nature, types, and models of signs. Another section could be added for sign systems and their underlying structures (like paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes), codes, and texts. Some of these points are currently spread around the discussion of individual theorists while others are not mentioned at all.
The sections "Formulations and subfields" and "Current applications" could be reorganized to have one section focusing on the core branches (syntactics, semantics, pragmatics) and another on the applications in particular fields, such as biology, anthropology, and literature. Since this is an article and not a list, it would be better to explain the topics in prose rather than lengthy lists. Another improvement could be having sections dedicated to the definition and methods of semiotics.
There are more things to consider, but they can be addressed later since the ones mentioned so far will already involve a lot of work to implement. We were hoping to get some feedback on these ideas and possibly other suggestions. For a more detailed discussion, see User_talk:Phlsph7#Semiotics.
My one structural wrinkle at the moment, now that you've further clarified all this for me, is how to keep a historical throughline that isn't overly redundant with other material—i.e. one that broaches Aristotle → Galen → Augustine → Ockham → Locke so we can introduce historically Saussure and Peirce. It feels that we have to do this in some manner because our sources often seem to—seemingly because the historical umwelts were so particular for what would be the later character of the multipolar discipline. Remsense 🌈 论13:50, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I usually try to leave the intellectual history of how ideas developed to the history section to the extent that it is possible. Usually there is a lot of ground to cover so a concise history section often has only one or two sentences per main theorist. With this approach, the other sections deal with the ideas themselves rather than their development and typically go more into detail. The main redundancy-challenge for this topic may be between "History" and "Models of signs". It could help to present the models as distinct options rather than a historical progression. Some redundancy is probably inevitable, but I hope we can keep it at bay. Phlsph7 (talk) 16:09, 6 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I made a few more changes to the definition section. Do you think we can use it like this? I also added some image suggestions regarding signs and models. We probably also need some images of famous semioticians, in case you encounter some during your other Wikipedia activities. Phlsph7 (talk) 13:17, 8 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
As a sidenote: for drafting, I usually work with the sfn template since they are easier to move around. Typically, I only bundle them when I'm mostly finished with the text. Phlsph7 (talk) 17:35, 8 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
You've rightfully received praise from myself and others for your work on broad concept articles, but I'd like to take a moment to recognize your creation of graphics for these articles. They're infamously difficult to illustrate, and your work on this aspect alone is something that would be celebrated were it not overshadowed by your other accomplishments. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 🛸00:16, 28 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Phlsph7! I was wondering if you had time to give feedback on the workshop text for the understandability guideline (comparison with the existing text). One goal of the rewrite is to talk more about how you use plain English to make articles understandable, which you always do well in your articles. Would you be able to have a look and give feedback? I'm also keen to get an example in from philosophy, as the examples now draw too heavily from biology. Would you be able to provide one?
Congratulations, Phlsph7! The article you nominated, Hedonism, has been promoted to featured status, recognizing it as one of the best articles on Wikipedia. The nomination discussion has been archived.This is a rare accomplishment and you should be proud. If you would like, you may nominate it to appear on the Main page as Today's featured article. Keep up the great work! Cheers, Gog the Mild (talk) via FACBot (talk) 00:06, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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