This page is for discussion about the page Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) only. You may want one of the village pump subpages above, or one of the links on the village pump main page. Irrelevant discussions will be moved or removed.
Section sizes in Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)
Stephen Harrison (2022-12-02). "The Huge Fight Behind Those Pop-Up Fundraising Banners on Wikipedia". Slate. Archived from the original on 2022-12-06. Retrieved 2022-12-06. Over the course of a messy monthlong debate, participating Wikipedia editors protested that the proposed ads were misleading and unethical, while raising the specter of what would happen if the site's contributors and the foundation failed to come to an agreement before the start of the annual fundraising season.
Regarding this post that editors seem to feel is misplaced, would it be advisable to have the instructions at the top include a point along the lines of "issues that affect only a single article do not belong here"? Cheers, Sdkbtalk19:57, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the list is already of the size that it won't be read by many people. Could you suggest some bullet points to remove to make way for this one? And I note that it's just one editor, rather than "editors", but I happen to agree so I suppose the plural is correct now. Phil Bridger (talk) 20:11, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Very fair. Proposed speedy deletion criteria seems like an infrequent enough thing it could probably be removed (it's also something that is more likely to be done by at least moderately experienced editors, who will ideally know better than to use the pump for it). Ditto for new wikis. Proposed new articles could be wrapped into the single-article bullet point as a specific example (it's something more likely to be done by newcomers, so probably worth spelling out). (I was including my own unstated agreement when I made it plural, so that's now three of us.) Sdkbtalk20:55, 8 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Archive bot was missing some parts
Archive bot wasn't archiving my old multi-part thread even though the latest date on it was Sep 16, 2024.
I noticed the archive bot was missing some parts. I added the parts. I did not change the number of days (9d), or the archive size (300K). See diff.
Looking at the bot's documentation, it probably wasn't archiving because the default for minthreadstoarchive is 2 and minthreadsleft is 5. We'd have needed at least one more section created to be able to archive 2 and still leave 5. We might also have had to wait for a second thread to be ready to archive. Your edit changed minthreadstoarchive to 1, allowing your thread to be archived while still leaving 5 on the page. Anomie⚔23:19, 2 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The bot archived 2 discussions on Sept 29, 2024. That was 13 days after the last post on Sept 16, 2024 in my multi-part thread that was just archived. So something else may be going on. I see you are a bot coder. Maybe you can figure it out.
The bot archived 3 discussions in Sept 26, 2024. So it can do 3 at a time. Or maybe it can only do a maximum amount of kilobytes at a time. Especially if it has to start a new archive. A good reason to change the default to minthreadstoarchive = 1.
On September 29, it archived 2, leaving 5 to satisfy minthreadsleft. I also note your large thread contained a DNAU for September 21 from Special:Diff/1245780731, which would have been used as the last-"comment" date rather than September 16. The two archived were older than September 21, which is why they went.
OK, thanks. I see now. Also, the {{DNAU}} made things more difficult for me to understand. I see that the "defaults" listed in the table in the section linked below really are defaults, not just suggestions. So when a parameter is "missing" on a Village Pump page, it still works. Using the defaults in the table:
I hope we keep minthreadstoarchive = 1 on the Village Pump so that threads are archived sooner rather than later. I think the Village Pump page works better for all, the faster it loads. And when threads that have reached a natural end are archived sooner. Rather then being possibly restarted much later when the past participants may no longer be paying attention.
For others reading this, here is what was being used before:
A declaration of war is not the normal method of justifying a proposed change, particularly when performing the change three times: diff + diff + diff. "Actionable" is standard wikispeak and is the best word. Johnuniq (talk) 10:43, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
See WP:BRD for best practice. It was OK to make the change once if you thought it was uncontroversial, but when your edit was disputed you should have left the page as it was and discussed. The word may not have been standard English in the non-legal sense a few decades ago, but it has now become so. Phil Bridger (talk) 12:57, 31 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
