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Word limits on ANI threads?
The recent capitalization debate shows that we might need word limits to some extent – to be able to follow the discussion, and, on a more technical level, to be able to even load the page at a reasonable speed. Has this already proposed for ANI, and would it be feasible? Chaotic Enby (talk · contribs) 15:10, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
What we have done a few times in the past is spin off a very lenghty discussion into a subpage of ANI, with a link on ANI for as long as the discussion continued. This would solve the load issue for ANI. Archiving long-dead subsections may also in some cases be a feasible solution. A word limit is not a good idea in my opinion. Fram (talk) 16:10, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've noticed in the last few days that scrolling has become a bit difficult without losing the discussion. I think we should be a little more aggressive about imposing Fram's ideas. Phil Bridger (talk) 16:50, 26 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I've got a question for you. What is the longest block that has ever been applied, but was not indefinite? My guess is an IP that was blocked for 10 years! I've never ever been blocked on any Wikimedia wiki. (But I have been warned, everyone makes mistakes).
I once threatened a particularly odious troll with being blocked until one minute past noon on the day after the Second Coming. Unfortunately, before I could finish my calculations another admin indeffed them. -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I now see primary and secondary schools blocked for 10+ years which is a big improvement over the informal maximum of one year when I was an admin in the 2010 timeframe. I analyzed several dozen of these schools’ IP edits, looking at every single edit. >>95% of each school’s edits were vandalism. It didn’t make any difference whether the schools were elite boarding schools or inner city schools. Likewise, location meant nothing - USA, Canada, UK, India, etc. Anonymous kids will be kids anywhere, anytime.
(We’ve had great registered editors that were kids.)
I love these kids - they’re just doing their job as kids (being a pain in the butt). In turn, grownups have their job to do - protecting our content, setting boundaries and being mild pains for the kids.
I encourage admins to block primary and secondary schools for more than 10 years. Maybe for the blocking admin’s expected lifespan so somebody else will have to deal with them! —A. B.(talk • contribs • global count)01:03, 4 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure if the recommendation here is meant to be a joke, but I don't like the idea of schools being painted with the same brush over one student's vandalism. My approach to school blocks is to block for only long enough to cover what I expect to be the length of the current term, usually 3 or 6 months. School networks have very high user turnover (most students don't keep using the school's network after they graduate) and so very long blocks of school IPs prevent new students from editing before they've even had an opportunity to edit. That's not great for new editor recruitment and retention. Ivanvector (Talk/Edits) 03:25, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ivanvector, I spent many hours going through these IP's edits over multiple years. Edit-by-edit: I looked at hundreds of edits. There was never a new school year that produced useful stuff. 2006-2007 looked like 2007-2008 looked like 2008-2009, etc., etc. Some schools had 100 or more bad edits and had racked up 20+ warnings. I was prepared to see a school that wasn't a long-term vandalism problem -- I never did except for one school in Florida that had a few good months. Here's a snapshot of my work on this in 2012. Some might have found this depressing but it wasn't for me -- I saw the situation for what it was -- just kids being kids. I never felt punitive about my blocks or angry about the vandalism. I was just locking our doors. At the same time, we had a steady stream of kids registering and becoming conscientious, productive editors.
I'm sure some of our 2006 vandals are by now doctors, physicists and probably even religious leaders.
The vandalism problem was so much worse 10 - 20 years ago. Edit filtering was just starting up and missing vandalism. Schools were unblocked most of the time in naive hopes kids would reform. Admins were tied up repetitively blocking children. There was a lot of undetected vandalism that lingered. I did not feel empowered to block more than a few months.
It's so much better now, thanks largely to much longer school blocks by others imposed while I was inactive for 10 years. I'm glad the current admin corps is proactive. --A. B.(talk • contribs • global count)04:27, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Brighton is being mislabelled on Wikipedia — and it needs correcting. I’m trying to edit and am adding reliable sources but they get removed for no legitimate reason other than “ohnoitsjamie” choosing to ignore the sources. The current Wikipedia page for Brighton is misleading. It describes Brighton as merely a place within Brighton & Hove — which misrepresents both its legal status and how the city is commonly understood.
In reality, Brighton is not just a place inside Brighton & Hove — it is “Brighton” & Hove. The full name of the city is “Brighton” & Hove. Brighton is not a subordinate area; it is the city.
https://www.kingseducation.com/kings-life/10-fun-facts-about-brighton
While the full name of the city is “Brighton and Hove,” this entry shows that even in Parliament, “Brighton” is used as to refer to the city — “The Millenium competition in 2000, which awarded city status to Brighton, Inverness and Wolverhampton.” https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/what-makes-a-city/
Brighton and Brighton & Hove refer to the same city — geographically, legally, and administratively.
So the description should say something more accurate, like:
“Brighton, officially of the city of Brighton & Hove, is a seaside city on the south coast of England.”
Or even better.
“Brighton, known as Brighton & Hove, is a seaside city on the south coast of England.”
Major institutions — like the city council , the University of Sussex, and the University of Brighton also refer to the city as Brighton. https://www.visitbrighton.com (https://www.visitbrighton.com/)https://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/student-life/brightonhttps://www.brighton.ac.uk/studying-here/choose-brighton/our-city.aspx92.29.183.135 (talk) 07:14, 27 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This page is for discussion about the operation of the administrators noticeboard, and is not the noticeboard itself, which is at WP:AN. 331dot (talk) 09:37, 27 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well, that's how it works. Each revision has a copy of the whole page wikitext, so if you simply remove the offending revision that added it, you can still retrieve the content using intermediate revisions. ChildrenWillListen (🐄 talk, 🫘 contribs) 02:19, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Eh, I don't know if I agree with this. Even if we used Git for Wikipedia, what you are really looking for is not just the ability to rebase edits, but also the ability to git push --force (i.e. override the upstream revision history with your version of the history), which is pretty universally forbidden or frowned upon even in the software world for collaborative projects. Mz7 (talk) 08:25, 15 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
It's not quite a git force-push either, though, as much of the reason why force-pushing is bad is that it breaks everyone's local copy of the repo and causes commit hashes to no longer match. What I'm proposing, on the other hand, unlike a git force-push, would not change the revision ID number (or in git parlance the hash) of any edits other than the ones that are inaccessible anyway. The git model has no real analog to either what we call revision deletion or what we call Special:MergeHistory - in fact the very design where each commit has a hash of its predecessor makes the latter technically impossible, so I don't think saying git push --force is often considered wrong really refutes my argument. Now suppose some content were somehow posted to the mainline of a git repository that later needed to be fully hidden from view for some reason. (This doesn't usually happen because almost all git repos require a trusted user to review each PR before merging, but it could) Would there be any way of doing that other than using git filter-branch (or its successor git-filter-repo) to rewrite the history of all commits? Although I'm diving very deep into WP:Reference desk/Computing and/or broader policy discussions where are kind of off-topic here, so I'll stop now. * Pppery *it has begun...19:25, 18 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
While I disagree with rebasing edits as you describe it, a different option would be for the software to store the diff of each revision either instead of or in addition to the content itself - such that unrelated diffs could still be accessible even if the overall page content is not.Ultimately though, the faster this stuff is reported and actioned the fewer revisions have to be removed. stwalkerster (talk) 20:27, 18 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Moved from Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard
