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Level 5 Subpages

People History and geography Society STEM

Introduction

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The purpose of this page is for discussions of over-arching matters regarding Level 5 Vital articles, such as procedures, quotas, or other broad changes. Level 5 Vital articles are meant to be 50,000 topics for which Wikipedia should have high-quality articles.

If you want to propose articles to be added, removed, or swapped from the Level 5 Vital articles lists, please do so at the relevant subpages: #1 People; #2 History & geography; #3 Society (arts, philosophy, religion, everyday life, recreation, and social sciences); #4 STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics).

Discussions on this page and its subpages follow these guidelines:

Voting count table (>60%)
P = passes
F = fails 		opposing votes
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
0
supporting votes
 – – – – F F F F F F
1 – – – F F F F F F F
2 – – F F F F F F F F
3 – F F F F F F F F F
4 P P P F F F F F F F
5 P P P P F F F F F F
6 P P P P F F F F F F
7 P P P P P F F F F F
8 P P P P P P F F F F
9 P P P P P P F F F F
  1. Before being closed, a Level 5 proposal must:
    1. Run for at least 15 days; AND
    2. Allow at least 7 days after the most recent vote; AND
    3. Have at least 4 participants.
  2. For a proposal to be implemented on the Level 5 list:
    1. It must have over 60% support (see table); AND
    2. It must have at least 4 support votes !votes.
  3. For proposed additions from August 2024 onwards, the nominator should list (and possibly link to) at least one potential section in the level 5 vital articles list for the article to be added to. Supporters can also help in this regard.

For reference, the following times apply for today:

  • 15 days ago is: 18:02, 3 December 2024 (UTC)
  • 7 days ago is: 18:02, 11 December 2024 (UTC)

If you're interested in regularly participating as a closer, the following browser tools may also be helpful:

Swap Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi with Senusiyya

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I'm bringing it here rather than the people talk page since the Senusiyya will be placed under history if they get added. If anyone has seen my proposals lately, I have been pushing for the removal of articles that I personally feel are never going to escape stub-class. I will admit, that kind of the reason I want to get rid of al-Sanusi, although now I'm starting to think that his article can improve after all if we transplant some of the info from the Senusiyya article to him. However, even if we can improve his article, we have also been removing people who are chiefly known for finding a royal dynasty without actually being rulers, and I ultimately think that's why he's here. Instead, we should swap him out for the order he belongs to. Although only one of them end up ruling Libya, they still seem to play a big role in resisting Italian colonial rule.

Support
  1. SailorGardevoir (talk) 07:32, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Hanif Al Husaini (talk) 02:55, 21 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support adding Senusiyya to History. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
  1. Oppose removing Muhammad ibn Ali al-Sanusi from People. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Discuss
  • All of the relevant sections (whether you put the man under Religious figures or Rebels) are technically still under their quotas so I say why not have both for now? A personal theme of mine at Level 5 is that it's arguably even more useful for stimulating mergers / splits than improving single articles in isolation. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:08, 16 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to improve the nav bar in level 5

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I'm trying to improve the nav bar at level 5 to make navigating through lists a lot easier. The link is at Wikipedia:Vital articles/Nav bar/5. Because this list is broken down into many sublists that are difficult to navigate, I'm trying to figure out the best way to organize this navbar. The level 4 navbar seems to be OK, so I am looking for some advice on how I can improve navigation with the navbar. Right now, it is a bit of a mess so any advice and editor improvements to it are welcome. Interstellarity (talk) 23:55, 9 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It the table on Wikipedia:Vital articles/Level/5 useful in this regard. I think the table is trying to break up into equivalent sized sections? Aszx5000 (talk) 22:52, 22 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Let's bump this discussion a bit longer because the nav bar is cluttered for sure, especially when you get into sublists. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:55, 1 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Add a button that makes it easier to nominate vital articles according to the new rules

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I think it would be helpful to have a button in each of the subpages that makes the nomination process for adding and removing articles a lot easier. I was thinking a template could look something like this. The format proposed is commented in the edit source screen. Please let me know your thoughts on this. That way, we can have more nominations that are rule-binding. Interstellarity (talk) 21:10, 6 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Propose quota change: Culture +100 Biological and health sciences -100

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There's clearly work remaining, but I don't think there are that many easy cuts in the Culture section (Universities? Museums?), which is almost 200 entries over quota. On the other hand, Biology has taken too long to fulfill (nearly 400 under quota), and a similar proposal was made for Level 4 months ago. This one would be:

  • Culture 1750 ---> 1850 (currently has 1946 entries).
  • Biology 5815 ----> 5715 (currently has 5412 entries).
  1. Biology, biochemistry, anatomy, and physiology 1200 ---> 1150 (currently has 1062 entries).
  2. Plants, fungi, and other organisms 1075 ---> 1050 (currently has 968 entries).
  3. Health, medicine, and disease 1140 ----> 1115 (currently has 1005 entries).
Support
  1. As nominator. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 16:37, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support, other cuts could definitely be made to Television articles for example Makkool (talk) 14:29, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    Support, although I have been trying to improve the Health section. The problem is that nobody votes on the more technical proposals. QuicoleJR (talk) 14:20, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Questions? four Olifanofmrtennant (she/her) 15:39, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Regardless of current potential cuts (and this increase wouldn't even take Culture under quota as it stands), "Culture" is extremely broad, and there are some areas such as ethnic groups that are still lacking. Iostn (talk) 00:21, 23 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
  1. oppose. I think we could likely trim plenty from both sections, and we should emphasize reducing the list rather than shuffling stuff around. For example, while I love academic journals, I think half could probably be cut from the list. We could likely cut half the magazines, TV, and Radio articles while we're at it. I struggle to believe WWE Raw is one of the most important articles on Wikipedia, and while King of the Hill might be among the greatest animes of all time, I think it probably could be cut as well. While an argument could be made that Sports Illustrated is impactful, I don't know if Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue needs to be included as well. Biology and health sciences probably could be expanded tremendously, but I'm sure there are cuts to be found there as well. I look through Public health topics, and pages like Infant mortality and Birth defect are not included. In short, I believe that Wikipedians have been a bit overzealous about getting their favorite TV show or publication listed while slacking a bit on Biological and health sciences topics.GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 02:20, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Strong oppose, on a few counts. I'll be slowly coming back from a hiatus & doing some other things (like a mark-1 vitality estimator) before proposals here. I'm against removing slots from the biology section for now though because: 1. I don't think its current size reflects the subject, just a bias in the interest level by proposers. I'm not a botanist, but I have 45 plant nominations alone that I didn't get around to earlier this year. So we could probably exceed the current quota with more participation. 2. I know it's not an agreed convention for now, but I think we should also move away from overly-tuned quotas with more than 1 or 2 significant digits. 3. If any of the Society sections gets a quota bump, I would actually like to see it go to Religion & Philosophy. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 11:58, 31 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  3. After thinking about it for a bit, oppose per Zar2gar1. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:00, 6 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Discuss

If Biology is 400 below and Culture is 200 above, who are we not just shifting 200 from Biology to Culture? BD2412 T 15:40, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

  1. I may propose something similar if this one passes, but I think there's a decent amount of cuts for an outright +200 increase. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 16:37, 5 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't support that, since I think there are certainly enough additions to get at least the Health section to the quota. I also think enough cuts can be made to get Culture down to the new quota. QuicoleJR (talk) 14:23, 20 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What are your more technical proposals? GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 02:26, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

General quota proposal: larger denominations

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Hi everyone, how about one quick process proposal? It's a simple one: from here on out, let's restrict all Lv5 quotas and quota proposals to rounder numbers, specifically multiples of at least 200 (or 300, 400, etc.)

If this passes, we can round the current quotas to the nearest multiple, and if those wind up summing to less than 50,000, we'll add extra slots to the most over-quota sections (or subtract from the most under-quota if wind up over 50k). This won't supersede the active quota proposal above either; if that one passes, we'll apply the 100 slot change, then round the updated sections appropriately.

We've actually discussed this before, but I've never brought it for a formal !vote. I can think of several various reasons to make our quotas chunkier though:

  • We already use soft quotas at Lv 5 so smaller changes take up energy without much benefit
  • Round numbers are much easier to subdivide (especially if we ever re-introduce header-level quotas within lists)
  • Round numbers make it easier to read and audit our tables & data reports
  • Round numbers make things easier to swap when we do have quota proposals

Perhaps my main reason though is that I think we all agree the quotas (even if they're soft) are meant to discipline the lists and proposals, not just reflect the current size and proposal activity. If they become the latter, they're largely an exercise in box-checking and should arguably be done away with completely. By restricting quota changes to significant amounts though, we force ourselves to better justify the quotas, which also improves the list quality.

And as for the exact multiple, we can do multiples of 100 if everyone prefers. I honestly think Lv 5 is large enough for bigger chunks though, plus sections with prime multiples (e.g. 1700) can cause minor hiccups with subdivision. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 13:42, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Support
  1. Support as nom. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 13:42, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support multiples of 100 per nom. QuicoleJR (talk) 16:14, 26 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support multiples of 100 per nom. (Anything which improves list quality is good.) Makkool (talk) 15:41, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
Neutral
Discuss
  • Could we also consider potential gaps, when dividing extra slots to over-quota sections? There's a need for more articles to Arts, because there could be possible vital films still missing that haven't been considered yet. It would be good to leave room to add, in addition to covering over-quotas. Makkool (talk) 15:41, 5 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see a problem if the slots ultimately wind up with other sections; I just wanted to separate this proposal from any debates over specific sections. Shifting to the most over-quota sections seemed like the least controversial way to handle a potential remainder for now.
I suppose if everyone wanted to, we could hash that out in a sub-proposal here. I was really hoping we could just start up separate quota proposals though, in parallel or after this one is settled. Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:12, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Batch move: specific facilities, tech -> geography

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SUPERSEDED
Discussion superseded by other ones on the main VA talk page. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 23:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

I've been thinking, how about we move all of the articles for specific facilities and infrastructure projects to Geography? They could be allocated to Region or City based on scale: e.g. an airport goes by the city it serves, while an out-of-the-way facility or something regional (like a road network) goes to the region / country.

Some other arguments for:

  • We have some topics (like urban transit authorities) that otherwise fall into a gray area: they use transport technology like buses and solve logistical problems, but they're really organizations and their technical artifacts alone aren't that noteworthy.
  • Even if they have a technical orientation, geography is how we primarily differentiate them on the Tech page anyway
  • It will arguably be easier to balance and track them this way
  • As individual projects, they're bound up with their surrounding history and culture
  • While Tech is over quota, all the Geography sections are currently just below or more than 2% under.

On the quotas specifically, I'm completely neutral on whether they should change to reflect this move or not.

Support
  1. Support as nom. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 21:39, 7 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose
Neutral
  1. Case by case basis I'd support or oppose this. Geography is currently missing a lot of the core geographic/cartographic theory pages, and has kinda just become a place to dump places/regions. While that is certainly a component of geography, there are many topics like Central place theory, sub-fields like Time geography or Spatial analysis, and concepts like Activity space I'd rather see included in that 2%. Tech can and should be trimmed, I'd rather see us make the painful choice to cut away a lot of these facilities and transit authorities rather then push them into another category. As a professional geographer, less then 1% of my coursework has involved place name memorization but that is the vast majority of the category. It's one of the areas I'd like to see improved, but need to write up large explanations for why these are vital, as the average person might not know about them dispite interacting with numerous technologies that are based on them daily. In 1,000 years, the concepts are likely to still be vital, a particular cities transportation authority is less so. GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 18:58, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
    That's not a bad point at all; if you're trying to add theory on the Geography talk page, maybe I should swing by. My first thought is that we should definitely add the topics you mentioned, but we may be able to include both. If the Geo sections start going way over quota, then we can evaluate whether they deserve slots from somewhere else, or whether specific sites should be cut.
    I just posted a tweaked version of this proposal to the main talk page and will probably close this one out as "superseded" in a couple days. If you want to add your thoughts there too, we'll see how people that work at Lv 4 feel about it. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 19:21, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Discuss
If it touches on Level 4 too, I guess we should. I can post a modified proposal there before closing out this one. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 18:32, 8 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@GeogSage: I was thinking some about the technical geography topics you mentioned. It may actually be worth doing some reorganization around those too. If you think there are enough articles, we could do a "Basics & Methods" section under Geography (similar to what we do for Science). After looking over the Central place theory article though, I realized another possibility for now is to propose some topics under Science (for empirical methods) or Applied Math (for formal models), but that does scatter things a bit. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 20:13, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for the late reply. I had worked on the Geography topics template a while ago (while working on the main page for geography)and think that it can give some ideas for how we could organize stuff. I've been trying to put some thought into how to approach this here, and with Winter break might be able to help more (although I have several publications that need my attention at the moment as well, so not just endless free time). Specifically, there are many topics that are vital in my opinion, but most people have been using geography to mean places, and broad topics aren't as interesting to them. My view of what geography is vs what the average person thinks of is likely to be vastly different, and it is honestly hard to look at the state of Wikipedia or hold discussions sometimes on the matter, which is why I'm trying to be cautious and think about how to approach this problem. I've organized my thoughts below, please pardon the length:
To demonstrate, first start with the geography topics at VA level 2 which has 11 articles. This is where I believe the problem starts. Vital articles level 2 lists City  2, Country  2, Sea  2, Land  2, as well as Africa  2, Asia  2, Europe  2, North America  2, Oceania  2, South America  2. To be blunt, as a geographer, this looks like it was compiled by people with a (Western) 5th graders understanding of geography and confirms that it is mostly a place to put Locations and Place identity, two topics that are not included as vital articles at all. Continents are a really bad way to organize information, especially if we are going to push the weird notion that Europe is somehow a continent by any definition of the word. Country  2 is so ambiguous as a term that it is essentially meaningless, but less useful then Territory which is broader and crosses species. Also, not that people know the difference between a Nation  4, Sovereign state  5, or Nation state  4, but at least those are defined in some literature fairly clearly. I'd drop this completely in favor of place. City  2 is another one I'd flay someone on, and would suggest Human settlement  5 as a replacement. To many people think Cities are the be all, end all of human civilization.
Now look at the geography topics template (below). Quantitative geography, Qualitative geography, Time geography, Philosophy of geography, Geodesign, Geoinformatics, Geographic information science, Statistical geography, Spatial analysis are all major "fields" that aren't included but probably should be. Techniques like Geostatistics, Geovisualization, Computer cartography (and Web mapping), forms of Geographic information system  5 (such as Distributed GIS, Internet GIS, and Web GIS) are all missing. Heck, while Remote sensing  4 is thankfully inlcuded, Photogrammetry isn't.
Note, that there is almost zero overlap between the template and the way vital articles are organized. The discrepancy between how I believe geography should be organized and how it is approached by how much is missing is daunting and disappointing. Trying to discuss this with editors is discouraging, but it seems that geography is only being considered vital in the sense that it is useful to organize peoples home towns, at which point we should just name the section Toponomy. The glacial process of VA articles is annoying, but honestly I'm not sure if there is a way to salvage the organization of geography that is in line with any literature, which is even more daunting as I find people are highly defensive of the status quo.
A "Basics & methods" section would be a start, but it is still original research when it comes to organization. If the organization is actually about geography, an not just places, then I'd go with the three branch model at level 2, with categories Human geography  4, Physical geography  4, and Technical geography  5. I'd swap city with Human settlement, and country with Territory, and put them under human geography, and I'd drop all the nonsense continents (seriously, including Europe as a continent should be viewed as backwards as all the other racist Eurocentric nonsense that polluted early science. If Europe is a continent, so is Florida, and model is completely useless for anything but explaining the racist European view of the worlds organization. There isn't an argument that includes Europe but doesn't add several other locations, like India). Plate tectonics  3 at level 3 is fine, and we can put them at level 4 under there...maybe. Technical geography could start with just quantitative and qualitative geography, which would satisfy the "basics and methods" section. I'd keep "basics" under the broad heading of geography, or use "key concepts" which is used in the outside literature. Methods is just technical geography, broken into quantitative and qualitative geography.
So my ideal 11 articles for VA 2 would be:
  • Geography
    • location
    • Scale (Geographic)
    • Human geography
      • Human settlement
    • Physical geography
      • Land
      • Sea
    • Technical geography
      • Quantitative geography
      • Qualitative geography
I think we could use that organization at VA level 2 to fix all the other issues in the organization of the discipline. Due to the size of this issue, I'm struggling to think of where to even start. It's actually hard to even look at how bad the current organization is. BTW, Those blue links are all VA link templates, so if they're missing a number it is because they aren't listed as vital... Core concepts listed on the main geography page like Scale (geography) are ignored.
GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 19:10, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Note: Moved this discussion to Wikipedia talk:Vital articles#Broad reorganization of geography GeogSage (⚔Chat?⚔) 21:19, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'll go ahead and add any other thoughts I have over there. I think we can consider this discussion at Lv 5 closed out. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 23:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

vote recount needed

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Please check Wikipedia_talk:Vital_articles/Level/5/STEM#Remove_{{VA_link|_Bowie_knife}},_or_swap_with_{{VA_link|Fighting_knife}} which was closed by User:Makkool.-TonyTheTiger (T / C / WP:FOUR / WP:CHICAGO / WP:WAWARD) 13:24, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think it all checks out: the proposal was open > 15 days, > 7 days since the last vote, and the numbers seem right when swapping and removing are each considered distinctly.
While my vote was primarily to swap, I said I would also prefer removing over keeping if that choice was on the edge of passing. The one strict oppose vote also counted in both options. -- Zar2gar1 (talk) 17:14, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I had misread your vote as not including the remove vote too (only a swap), and tallied the total wrong. It's fixed now. Makkool (talk) 17:31, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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