Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines

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Striking and collapsing obvious LLM-generated comments

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The request for comment at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)/Archive 199 § LLM/chatbot comments in discussions, closed in January, showed consensus that "it is within admins' and closers' discretion to discount, strike, or collapse obvious use of generative LLMs or similar AI technologies". This should be reflected in the talk page guidelines, because the described situation is becoming quite common and it is inconvenient to locate an archived village pump RfC every time this consensus needs to be referenced elsewhere.

I propose adding the following bullet point into Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines § Examples of appropriately editing others' comments:

  • LLM-generated comments: Comments that are obviously generated by a large language model (LLM) or similar AI technology may be struck or collapsed by administrators and discussion closers.

— Newslinger talk 19:39, 23 May 2025 (UTC) Edited 05:33, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I support this addition, and I would actually take it further, by omitting "by administrators and discussion closers". I think anyone should be able to do that, and given that the need to do it is going to grow dramatically, I think all hands are needed. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:14, 23 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Agreed. JoelleJay (talk) 23:55, 23 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Given other examples in WP:COLLAPSENO are not limited to admins, this seems in line with practice. CMD (talk) 05:19, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for bringing up this point. I agree that the limitation is unnecessary and I've struck it from the proposed text. — Newslinger talk 05:33, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
 Done. Thanks for suggesting this. I've added it to the page: [1], with WP:AITALK as a shortcut. --Tryptofish (talk) 21:19, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In recognition of Folly Mox's suggestion in the village pump RfC, I've also added the WP:HATGPT shortcut in Special:Diff/1292040840. — Newslinger talk 21:40, 24 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Note: Just an FYI for y'all, but there is currently a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#LLM/AI_generated_proposals? that is talking about potentially expanding this. I recognize some of the names here, but just wanted to make sure if anyone missed it they had a chance to discuss it. —Locke Cole • t • c 03:41, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Anchor location

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Regarding these edits: I don't think it's a good idea to move the CHECK anchor to the start of the paragraph preceding the corresponding text. Perhaps there is an issue specific to a particular browser, or window width, that can be resolved without moving the anchor away from the target text? isaacl (talk) 05:16, 13 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Exception for disclosed AI assistance

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Using AI as a tool for assisting doing research, such as going over a large edit history or large number of articles, can be useful to get a rough impression for topics such as whether editor's opinion follows majority viewpoints of reliable news outlets. See WP:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard#Michael Jackson article structure and information selection as well as an example.

With clear rules to follow I think AI can be a tool for assisting editors, such as disclosing which AI was used (Copilot, Gemini), what prompts, clearly disclosing which text is AI generated or based on generated output, and maybe other rules such as asking the AI to also generate a list of sources it used. As long as it is not editors assisting AI, I think it is a good thing to aliviate the impossible task of maintaining Wikipedia, which is proven by disputes that take so long they can't keep up/no one can be expected to parse all the information written in comments and pages with vanadalism that go uncorrected for months/years. The expectations of Wikipedia editors are becoming more and more impossible. It is time to ammend strategy rather than naïvely keep the bar this high at the expense of article quality and reputation of Wikipedia. Wikipedia to me is a bit like the part of the open source movement that still programs in C and uses RFC. Get with the times, get real. Wallby (talk) 08:40, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a specific proposal for one way to use AI? There is no total ban on using AI for some elements of maintenance, prior to llms we had already been using a number of tools that could be classified as AI. Disclosure is a good idea, although for llms "asking the AI to also generate a list of sources it used" is sometimes ineffective. That said, none of this seems to be about the talk page guidelines, which is generally unrelated to the concept of research and maintenance. CMD (talk) 09:41, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There is no restriction against using AI tools as part of your research process. AI and LLM outputs are generally unreliable, just like any other questionable source you encounter. WP:AITALK states that if you post obviously LLM-generated comments on Wikipedia, they can be collapsed and disregarded. — Newslinger talk 12:33, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I reviewed WP:NPOVN § Michael Jackson article structure and information selection, which is what this is apparently about. Disclosing that you are using an LLM does not grant you an exception to the WP:AITALK guideline. If you disclose that you asked an AI chatbot/tool a question and then post the LLM output, that output can still be collapsed and/or disregarded. None of the LLM-generated arguments in your initial post of that noticeboard discussion count toward consensus. — Newslinger talk 17:05, 17 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Well you are merely repeating what WP:AITALK says. This post is about amending WP:AITALK, not about trying to figure out how to game the current rules. If there is too little known at the time of whether, and if so how, to allow for acceptable use of AI output, then perhaps this discussion halts here. Wallby (talk) 17:23, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My 2c… there is NO acceptable AI output. At least directly. What an editors uses “behind the scenes” to conduct background research on a topic is their own business, but they must re-write it completely (in their own words) prior to posting it to WP. And (of course) they need to have non-AI published sources to verify anything in article space. Blueboar (talk) 17:42, 18 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § LLM/AI generated proposals?

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 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy) § LLM/AI generated proposals?. —Locke Cole • t • c 03:40, 14 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion at Template talk:Talk header § RfC: tooltip wording, minthreadstoarchive

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 You are invited to join the discussion at Template talk:Talk header § RfC: tooltip wording, minthreadstoarchive. Aaron Liu (talk) 04:12, 26 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

will it be okay to use Wikipedia talk to text people to just talk

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i was wondering if I would be okay to text my bf here at times Elyssab12 (talk) 14:43, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That's not an intended purpose for talk pages, and everything you post will be public. There are probably much more effective and appropriate tools you could use. CMD (talk) 15:05, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
oh, thank you for letting me know, do you think the chances are high people can just stumble upon our messages ? I'm using wiki as an alternative for personal reasons. Elyssab12 (talk) 15:26, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Everything posted on en.wiki is public and theoretically archived forever. Creating anonymous accounts on microblogging sites is one option that would be far more private. CMD (talk) 15:40, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Talk pages are for discussing improvements to that particular page. (WP:NOTFOURM). But to answer your question about whether people see your comments, it depends on the talk page. A talk page like this one has 1,400 watchers (people that have it on their Special:Watchlist), so will definitely get readers. A page that has only 1, 5, 10, or 20 watchers will get a lot less replies. You can check the # of watchers by going into the tools menu and clicking "Page Information". –Novem Linguae (talk) 15:41, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Even if only a few people watch a talk page… anyone can read what you post. Comments are public. Blueboar (talk) 18:26, 29 August 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Eligibility verification

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Thank you for the feedback. I want to clarify that the article "Eligibility Verification" was created through a mix of human writing and AI assistance. I am a writer specializing in healthcare, particularly revenue cycle management and the medical billing industry. I noticed there isn’t much content on these topics in Wikipedia, so I felt it was important to contribute. I understand and respect Wikipedia’s policies, and I will work on revising the article to ensure it follows a neutral, encyclopedic tone with stronger citations. Writing about healthcare is both my profession and my interest, and my goal is to improve the coverage of underrepresented areas in this field. Alexagoodwin (talk) 14:37, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah this is an AI, they even copypasted the output on the wrong page. FaviFake (talk) 15:40, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Can you explain? Alexagoodwin (talk) 15:43, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Oh you're human! Nice to meet you.
You're on the wrong page, see the huge banner at the top of this page:
YOU MIGHT BE ON THE WRONG PAGE.

This is NOT the place for general questions or for discussions about specific articles.
This page is only for discussions about the Wikipedia page Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines. To discuss an article, please use that article's talk page. To ask for help with using and editing Wikipedia, use our Teahouse. Alternatively, see our FAQ.

I don't know where you wanted to post that, but ti definitely isn't here. Try the talkpage of Eligibility Verification. FaviFake (talk) 15:46, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Lolz, my appologies. I thought I am talking with User:Pythoncoder. Apologies Alexagoodwin (talk) 15:50, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
No worries! You learn by making mistakes. FaviFake (talk) 16:09, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Looks like they’re sorry for posting on the wrong page, but not for posting LLM output to talk pages — they just went to the draft talk and copypasted the same message that they started this thread with. —pythoncoder (talk | contribs) 16:12, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
My apologies. but you are also using a LLM output in the replies. I never saw a human to use this sign " — " in the content Alexagoodwin (talk) 16:14, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Sir that's called a signature. Please learn how Wikipedia works before making such accusations.
And I—a human—use the em dashes—these things—often. FaviFake (talk) 17:00, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. I guess if em dashes are the ultimate proof of humanity, then you must be the most human of us all. Alexagoodwin (talk) 18:37, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I fully agree. FaviFake (talk) 18:42, 2 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

False Positive tagging as AI generated

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First, I realize the top of the page says this is not for general discussion, yet the editor tagged WP:AITALK and this is the talk page for that. If you want me to discuss this bias I am facing related to policy on this page, please give me a targeted policy page with a talk page, pls.

==

Hello, I noticed a recent instance where my hand typed, brain used content has been tagged as AI generated, for example at Talk:Infinity [Topic: Infinity, documented by Vedic text Yajurveda (c. 8th century BC)] by Leonidlednev

Whats the logic behind these? Are patrolling Editors using a AI tool which are actually not working? Getting this tag (and threats about getting comments collapsed) discourages me to want to invest time and energy.

Thank you for your comments in advanced.

Not AI Generated, Buddhimatta (talk) 08:02, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Buddhimatta, there is no tag on your comments, and no particular group of patrolling editors. This was an individual comment by an individual editor. You would have to ask the individual in question for their logic, but in the mean time you have informed them that they have made a mistake, which is likely the best response. CMD (talk) 08:39, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Gotcha.
Regarding my other comment about creating a space for AI assisted content creator editors (accused) to have a discussion, how do we go about creating a space? This page is obviously not the right space given the notice at the top. Someone like me, didn't know where to go have this discussion. Buddhimatta (talk) 09:12, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
There has been a lot of discussion about handling AI, but I can't recall any proposals for a dedicated space. The best place is likely always going to be the talk page with the relevant comments, and following that normal WP:Dispute resolution steps. CMD (talk) 09:21, 5 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Eccessive shortcuts in shortcut boxes

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Hi, I think this page could use a little cleanup of the shortcut boxes... I can't be the only one thinking this box contains way too many shortcuts:

Shortcuts

To be clear, I don't want to reduce the number of shortcut boxes, I just want to reduce the number of shortcuts that are inside the existing shortcut boxes.

Per the WP:LINKBOXES guideline:

The point of these template boxes is not to list every single redirect for any given page [...]. Instead, they generally should list only the most common and easily remembered redirects. One way to check which is the most common is through the Pageviews tool (replace the examples with the shortcuts you are testing).

FaviFake (talk) 21:52, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, 10 is a bit excessive. I'd support trimming that one box down to 4. If you're able to get data for these odd #-style links via "Page Information", maybe pick the 4 most used to keep, then remove the others. –Novem Linguae (talk) 22:48, 13 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Ordinarily this would be the right thing to do but in this case 9 of the 10 shortcuts didn't go to this location, they went to locations further down in the section. I've broken the linkbox out into individual linkboxes. Dan Bloch (talk) 20:56, 14 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't now that. Now it's definitely better than before, but there are a dozen more shortut boxes on the page. I wish there were a way to avoid cluttering the page so much with these boxes. FaviFake (talk) 11:08, 15 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Any other opinions about this? That one was just an example, there are others like
Shortcuts
Shortcuts
Shortcuts
...and more. These definitely feel like they're not following WP:LINKBOXES, since they're just different by a few chars. FaviFake (talk) 19:35, 25 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Re talk page links

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@Danbloch - re this revert - do you want to add "instead of linking to diffs" ? The added text did link to the DiscussionTools page explaining that all links to talk page comments and section/thread titles are talk page permalinks now (and they are auto-healing since it will also detect if a thread has been archived and alert the user of where the thread is now). The point of the addition to the best practices is to stop people linking to diffs to reference some other editors' comment (which was the de-facto standard prior to comment links having been a thing). The point of adding it was to try to get the people to shift from using diffs (unless say linking to a diff that contains a violation or so where the immutable state is important. Raladic (talk) 03:06, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That still doesn't mean anything to me. As far as I know, I've never used or seen a permalink in talk pages, and I'm not sure I've seen a link to a diff either. I did look at the linked page and didn't see any instructions there either. Danbloch (talk) 03:22, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I think you might have misunderstood the premise of what talk permalinks are - any link to a comment (clicking on the time thingy next to your signature) is now a permalink - it has a unique ID associated, which is stored in a database and makes that comment trackable, even if the thread gets archived, so if you follow a link to a talk page of such a permalink, a nice noticebox appears telling you that the comment has moved and can now be found at <link to Archive X/the comment>.
It's a very handy thing when you want to refer back to someone's comment that is 4 layers deep inside some conversation.
Let me illustrate:
Random thread that illustrates the point from FRINGE/N: Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard#Pajeet
In the comment here (note how it nicely highlights the comment I linked to if you click on it) by @UnpetitproleX (hi UnpetitproleX, apologies for randomly pulling your thread out of many as an example, but I figured you might be interested in learning there's a neater way to refer back to comments, so hence pinging you over here :) )
Now in that comment, they linked to diffs of their comments further up in the same thread to refer back to something - "....as I note above (here and here)....".
As I said, this is still very common, just go to any WP:NOTICEBOARD right now and open the source view and you'll find instances of it on almost all of them where people are referring back to some comment from further up in the thread, or to some talk page discussion before something came to the noticeboard) and they'll just link to the diff of their comment.
If a user wants to now follow these to see which comment the user was referencing back, they'll have to load the page 2 full times, once for each diff - if however, they instead had used the nifty "new" talk permalinks to the comments (you don't even need to do anything special to get that link, just left-click on the time signature next to each comment, and it will copy the link to your clipboard - way less work than opening up the page history to dig up the two diffs and manually link them) and we would have produced this instead:
"...as I note above (here and here)...."
This will not load an entire new page of the diff, instead it just jumps up on the thread to that comment and highlights it in beautiful fashion. And even when that thread gets archived in a few days/weeks, the link would still be intact and working, thanks to the id magic that talk comment permalinks now have. It does also work for talk thread titles/sections, so say if you click this Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography#... uses they/them pronouns link, you'll land on the page and be greeted by the nice notification which tells you that's it is no longer on the active talk page, but instead you can now find it at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Biography/2025 archive - Wikipedia - all thanks to the magic of the database also storing secret permalinks for talk thread titles to auto-heal the previous state of following an old link to a non-diff of a comment and just being stranded and having to manually go digging, now you can just click the link, follow the auto-heal link and land exactly where you find whatever was referenced.
So that is talk permalinks, they don't require any [[Special:.... sauce, they just work, thanks to DiscussionTools having been enabled over the past few years :)
Many users are just not aware of them yet and keep resolving to the old way of linking to diffs of comments, but that is something that we should start shifting (hence me adding the section to the "Best practices") - so I'll add the "instead of diffs to comments" and I can go into more details on the how-to Help:Talk pages page on the "how". (note the {{For|the how-to guide|Help:Talk pages}} hat note at the top of the section telling people if they want to know the technical side of "how" to do something go to there.
The WP:Talk page guidelines isn't a how-to-do, it's a "what"-to-do. The how-to is the Help page and the two of them link between them happily, or sometimes we may link external-ish, like I just did with the inter-wiki link, but I give you that it could be more descriptive, so I'll make a small section on our en-wiki help page summarizing what I summarized here. Raladic (talk) 05:05, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the detailed explanation. This was indeed new to me. A summarized version linked from the guideline would be great. Danbloch (talk) 07:05, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
 Done: Help:Talk pages#Linking to talk page comments or threads (and shortcuts H:TPL / H:TALKPERMALINK)
I'll re-instate the TPG bit and link to the how-to guide section.
Spread the word, it's a great feature that makes comment and thread navigation so much easier. Raladic (talk) 08:06, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! Danbloch (talk) 21:08, 19 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

That still doesn't mean anything to me.

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As I said, this is still very common, just go to any WP:NOTICEBOARD right now and open the source view and you'll find instances of it on almost all of them where people are referring back to some comment from further up in the thread, or to some talk page discussion before something came to the noticeboard) and they'll just link to the diff of their comment. visit more 103.174.195.148 (talk) 12:29, 26 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]