Wikipedia talk:Reference desk
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Latest comment: 11 days ago by Scs in topic Archiving problems again
[edit]
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Brgy election 2025
editBrgy election 2025 on going December 122.54.223.207 (talk) 07:54, 26 July 2025 (UTC)
- Were you looking for 2025 Philippine barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan elections?-Gadfium (talk) 09:10, 26 July 2025 (UTC)
Why?
editAfter an issue with a linux mint package, I got interested in q&a sites and discovered this. I tried to look around and see how this work. With all due respect, What q&a site would Ever order it's content like this!? Imagine looking 'Google' up on wikipedia, only to be bombarded with countless "month-articles" that contain the word 'google' in it, and trying to figure out where the original article you're looking for by the arbitrary month it was created, only to, again, look for it between who knows how many articles were made in November 2004? I would love to use this as my standard q&a site, but the way that this is made is ridiculous. Is there any way this could change? Kind regards Ambrionix (talk) 21:47, 9 September 2025 (UTC)
- This is an encyclopedia, and the reference desks are a small part of it, constrained by using software not designed for a q&a site. The reference desk regulars use their skills in searching for information to help answer queries, but it cannot match the much more popular q&a sites of old with vast numbers of forums and great expertise in arcane matters in at least some of them (I'm specifically thinking of Stack Exchange). However, there are some questions we are very good at answering, such as those on obscure pieces of history. The rise of LLMs has substantially reduced the demand for Stack Exchange, and perhaps other q&a sites, and our own reference desk has lower traffic than it once did, and has lost some valuable contributors.-Gadfium (talk) 01:00, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
- @Ambrionix:-Gadfium (talk) 01:01, 10 September 2025 (UTC)
- If you do not like the wikipedia.org Web site, do not return to the wikipedia.org site. 130.74.58.73 (talk) 19:10, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- That's my advice to you. That's all I can offer. I hope that God will help you. The wikipedia.org site and its contents are offered 'as is', and articles are not written to order. Again, I hope that God will help you. 130.74.58.73 (talk) 19:11, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- I'm not sure I understand your problem. If you want to read about Google, all you do is enter "Google" into the search bar and a small menu of possible results come up, the first of which is the single word Google, and if you click Enter, up comes the Wikipedia article called Google, in its current version. If you want to look at any or all of the versions of the article since its creation in 2004, you click on the Page tab at the top of the page, then click on History and there they all are.
- If, however, you want to read any questions about Google that have ever been asked at the Wikipedia Reference Desks, that's going to require a bit of dedication. There might have been many such questions asked over the past quarter of a century, and they could have been asked at any of the 7 sub-desks, which are all archived separately.
- Further, questions are indexed according to the Header of the question, which is normally supplied by the questioner. The header for a question about Google will not necessarily include the word "Google". It may be something like "Searching issue", or "Computer problems", or "Just wondering", or just the single word "Question". (Yes, many people do actually put that as a Header, as if they were somehow unaware that every single one of the zillions of the questions that have ever been asked here is, well, a question.) We do try to intervene sometimes by editing the header to make searching for question topics that little bit easier.
- You can search the Archives by using the "Search the Archives" @ Wikipedia:Reference desk. That will search across all sub-desks. If you want to restrict your search to just the Humanities desk, say, go to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Humanities and use "Search humanities archives". Once you've got some options, it will require a visual scan to see which results are more or less likely to be what you're after. Sometimes it's pretty obvious and the process is very quick. That would be the case with a search for "Uruguayan xylophone player", for example. Sadly, due to the ubiquity of Google in our world, questions about Google are going to take dedication to identify. I can't see how any software could ever simplify that. Knowing the rough time period in which the question was asked would be an enormous advantage. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 21:40, 25 September 2025 (UTC)
- Although this is not a criticism against Wikipedia whatsoever, I found it helpful to Google "Wikipedia [keyword]" and it frequently find redirects/archived discussions I was looking for. The wonders of market competition, (the willingness to spend vastly on fancy machine learning technologies and hiring researchers,) I guess.
- I think we may put a note somewhere / link to an essay about how to search - and mentioning the 'Googling / Binging DuckDuckGoing Ask.coming Braving Yandexing Youing Wikipedia' method there. Might save newer users (like the OP) some time.
- Edit: I Googled for "wikipedia archive discussions reference desk intel core i7" off the top of my head just to verify my idea, and these two turns up. [1] [2] Turns out Google can find threads even when keyword is absent from the title. 海盐沙冰 / aka irisChronomia / Talk 04:23, 26 September 2025 (UTC)
Archiving problems again
editArchiving is broken.
Dunno why.
Something seems to have changed again.
Bot can't log in.
Working on it. —scs (talk) 04:28, 10 October 2025 (UTC)
- Okay, I think it's fixed. (Remarkably, there ended up being about four separate problems, that somehow all came together at once.) Please help me keep an eye on it for the next few days, as the changes were significant, and certain errors (in the worst case resulting in the garbling of archived pages) might be possible. —scs (talk) 04:07, 11 October 2025 (UTC)
Baseball trivia.
edit(Moved to Entertainment desk by Deor (talk) 22:46, 10 October 2025 (UTC))