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• re: Van Gogh -- In this context, "born" rather than "borne" should be used. "Borne" means "carried" or "supported" (the word is actually a past participle of the verb "to bear"). Using "born" in its place would mean "originated from" or "created as a result of", which is more apt. Even a different construction (developed, arose, stemming, flowed from, grew out of, built upon, etc.) would be more grammatically correct than as-is.

• Al Begamut, it also uses "borne" in the target article. Should you not fix that first? Schwede66 06:46, 15 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that most of the facts in today's Did you know… section seem to rely on intentionally misleading names in order to be surprising, which I think is a bad idea. This is a significant deviation from Did you know… sections of past days. Was this an agreed-upon change?

And I realized that it's already April Fools Day in most of the world just before I was about to submit this. Never mind about what's above. Congratulations on fooling me. Care to differ or discuss with me? The N^th User 00:50, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome. Glad you enjoyed it. The C of E God Save the Queen! (talk) 11:30, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Was a little disappointed that the whole main page wasn't all tongue in cheek like preceding years.  :( -dashiellx (talk) 12:27, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I think it's misleading, despite the holiday, and damages trust in what people see here. Royal Autumn Crest (talk) 14:28, 1 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

April Fools Day is over, please correct. --Bernardoni (talk) 00:31, 2 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I still don't like the idea of deliberately fooling readers. I just don't think that it's worth trying to stop it if it's part of an April Fools prank since the Wikipedia community engages in April Fools pranks every year. It almost seems like clickbait to me, and I especially think that the sixth and tenth items went too far given the prominent position of Wikipedia's Main Page. To me, April Fools pranks are best done within the Wikipedia community, not with the recipients being readers who might not have accounts. However, like I said before, most users would just find it as a harmless April Fools prank, so there's no use trying to oppose it. Care to differ or discuss with me? The N^th User 14:28, 3 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

 You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Rules for Fools#Revoke the Main Page's exemption from the disclosure requirement. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:10, 2 April 2020 (UTC)Template:Z48[reply]

Note: the confusing title is rather misleading. This is a proposal to ban April Fools DYK entries and/or require them to be tagged with {{humour}}. Modest Genius ^talk 14:10, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to meta stats, each of Cebuano and Waray-Waray has more than 1m articles; Min Nan, Egyptian Arabic, Armenian, Chechen has more 250k articles; and 55 wikipedia versions have more than 50k articles respectively. But most of the above (excluding 13 out of the 55 wikipedia versions) are not in {{Wikipedia languages}}. I know that some of them are not on the list because of stub percentage, active users or else, but maybe we should set up a standard concerning who can be in the list, or it may be not fair for some medium-sized but active Wikipedias. --TongcyDai (talk) 13:08, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The raw number of articles is meaningless, as some Wikipedia's are created almost entirely by bot, consist entirely of bot-created placeholders, and are virtually useless as a resource. As an extreme case, the Cebuano Wikipedia you mention is virtually exclusively the pet project of a single editor (literally; hit ceb:Special:Random fifty times, check the histories, and it's unlikely you'll find a single page that's ever been edited by a non-bot) and a couple of years ago we seriously considered declaring it unsalvageable and shutting it down completely; at the time of writing it has a whopping 3 participants, although that number did briefly rise to the lofty heights of 4. It's of no benefit to our readers to advertise a useless resource. ‑ Iridescent 13:20, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

According to the top of this page, I believe this belongs at: "* Wikipedia languages: to propose a change to the list of Wikipedias in other languages" Art LaPella (talk) 17:27, 4 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

In theory yes, but sending a query there is just sentencing it to linger ignored—that page has a mighty 7 active watchers and averages four pageviews per day. The whole "direct queries to dedicated subpages to reduce clutter on this talkpage" thing is good in theory, but doesn't really work unless there are people monitoring those dedicated subpages. ‑ Iridescent 07:49, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Does that mean we should fix the misleading instruction? Art LaPella (talk) 19:57, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• Frankly, I'd be tempted to oppose this on the grounds that we should be reducing the amount of main page sidebar spam we force upon innocent readers who have wandered there.
  I don't know how comprehensive a tool it is, but with language preferences, why would someone who wanted to look something up on fi.wp need to come to en.wp to do so... ——SN54129 10:43, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  This isn't about the sidebar; it's about the {{Wikipedia languages}} section at the bottom of the main page which lists the major Wikipedias by size. It does serve a valid purpose, in that it allows readers to get an idea of which sister projects are actually active and which are just the preserve of a handful of hobbyists; so (for example) an Indian editor can see at a glance that Hindi Wikipedia isn't worth bothering with and they're probably better sticking to en-wiki. Whether the bot-created pseudowikipedias like Cebuano and Swedish get listed is a perennial source of debate. (The Bots Gone Wild problem on Swedish Wikipedia is so acute that their sidebar has separate "random article" buttons for "genuinely random choice" and "articles that actually have a human editor in their history".) If you're interested, the "depth" column on List of Wikipedias#Detailed list gives a reasonable indication of which Wikipedias are primarily the result of human work and which are a bot-generated Wikidata scrape. ‑ Iridescent 13:03, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Ah, I misunderstood, thanks for clarifying. (As it happens, I think that's the first time I've actually looked south of dyk etc for possibly years!) Do you mean, the Indian editor discovers that the Hindi wiki must have less than 50,000 articles and theefore not be worth going to?

  Also, what's the quality of the bot-generated articles? If they're basic machine translations which regularly convulse anything than the simples articles, I'd be tempted to argue that ~wholly bot-built Wikipedias should themselves be removed. But if, of course the quality is reasonable than that argument doesn't apply. ——SN54129 13:40, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

ceb:Special:Random, sv:Special:Random, war:Special:Random ("Random article" on Cebuano, Swedish and Waray, the three most heavily bot-created Wikipedias). Judge for yourself. ‑ Iridescent 13:56, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would suggest it be highlighted more through a different colour or bolding around the box. Aeonx (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

We've tried several versions already. The current version gives the best consensus-based balance of not being too distracting and staying in the color scheme of the main page while still being as highlighted as best as possible. --Masem (t) 17:07, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. It took quite a bit of discussion to get to where we are now, and I don't see a need to make it more prominent than this.  — Amakuru (talk) 17:39, 5 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Main page is throwing the error: [Xou2xQpAMNIAA-9stcIAAACN] 2020-04-06 23:09:58: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError" ^LetUs_NotLose^HearT 23:10, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

• There is T249565. --- C&C (Coffeeandcrumbs) 23:17, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]
• See WT:VPT. — J947 ^{(user | cont | ess)}, at 23:20, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  @LetUsNotLoseHeart: J947 means WP:VPT, sections Error message on Main Page on mobile and Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBQueryError in particular. —⁠andrybak (talk) 23:29, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  Wikipedia_talk:Village_pump_(technical)#Error_on_all_non-talk_pages_at_the_present_time. — J947 ^{(user | cont | ess)}, at 23:31, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! Appears to be working now.^LetUs_NotLose^HearT 23:35, 6 April 2020 (UTC)[reply]