@Yadsalohcin: I'm starting this discussion here, because this is a rather technical discussion, the talk page of the main page should better focus on editorial disputes (of which there are plenty), and we don't yet know which of the individual killing of pages will survive AfDs. Moreover, two of the sub-articles that to me look the best developed (per my biased judgment) don't even have a background section.
Currently, {{excerpt|2025–2026 Iranian protests|only=paragraphs|paragraph=11}} works OK (try it in a sandbox somewhere), i.e. per the current algorithm, the first paragraph of the lead is the 11th paragraph of the source. It seems like the problem is the infobox, which gets treated as having many paragraphs. There's a talk page Module talk:Excerpt for discussing bugs, where I've posted a brief report. The time scale for these sorts of fixes is more likely weeks or months, not hours - see the history of Module:Excerpt - but providing feedback for volunteers willing to work on these is useful for everybody in the long term.
A temporary hack for the Iran protests pages would be to write a brief lead that is likely to survive without needing updating, and to put that in one of the sub-articles most likely to survive and retain a reasonably simple top structure without an infobox, e.g. Tehran's Tank Man. This will be less likely to be subject to intense edit wars. We could then use something like {{excerpt|Tehran's Tank Man|Protest|only=paragraph}}, but with "Background" as the section instead of "Protest". Boud (talk) 16:43, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
- @Boud thanks for this-
- Behaviour of the excerpt template - via the excerpt template help pages I tried other parameters to no effect, and I got up to "paragraph=7" in my experiments before abandoning the effort in favour of a manual copy. Unfortunately I've lost most of the trail covering my experiments, but from memory, my efforts with the "templates=" excerpt parameter (I tried in particular "|templates=-Infobox civil conflict ") were, disappointingly, to no avail. I'd be grateful for a fix.
- Killing of Saghar Etemadi - I saw para 11 in 2025–2026 Iranian protests and chose not to manually copy it as it seemed too concise a summary compared with other choices.
- - Yadsalohcin (talk) 17:12, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
- By the way, if you copy/paste text from one article to another, best add {{copied}} near the top of both talk pages. I'm generally lazy and only do the minimum, i.e.
{{copied|to=this is the new page|from=this is the old page}}, though if you're willing to do the work, you can put in more parameters. This helps not just for the principle of proving copyright, but also of tracing of who/when is originally responsible for the text that's there. Boud (talk) 17:21, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
- @Boud it's a fair cop! I will try to do better in future. - Yadsalohcin (talk) 18:33, 10 January 2026 (UTC)Reply
Done. Personally, as can now be found in Talk:2025–2026 Iranian protests/Archive 3#Requested move 2 January 2026 (you probably saw my comment about the archiving mistake; feel free to double check my fixes), I don't see much point in the "present" version when we're barely one week into 2026. My impression is that "–present" is for when protests, or more often, a civil war, continues through to successive years and people don't want to have to rename the end year every 12 months. In any case, the main problem here was that the move was undiscussed; the fact that I prefer the original title is irrelevant. If you or someone else wants to invest energy into an RM, then go ahead, but best at the main article. Boud (talk) 17:37, 9 January 2026 (UTC)