Talk:Main Page
Welcome! This page is for discussing the contents of the English Wikipedia's Main Page.
For general questions unrelated to the Main Page, please visit the Teahouse or check the links below. To add content to an article, edit that article's page. Irrelevant posts on this page may be removed. Click here to report errors on the Main Page. If you have a question related to the Main Page, please search the talk page archives first to check if it has previously been addressed: For questions about using and contributing to the English Wikipedia:
To suggest content for a Main Page section:
|
 | Editing of this page by new or unregistered users is currently disabled due to vandalism. See the protection policy and protection log for more details. If you cannot edit this page and you wish to make a change, you can request unprotection, log in, or create an account. |
| Archives: Sections of this page older than three days are automatically relocated to the newest archive. |
|
001 002 003 004 005 006 007 008 009 010 011 012 013 014 015 016 017 018 019 020 021 022 023 024 025 026 027 028 029 030 031 032 033 034 035 036 037 038 039 040 041 042 043 044 045 046 047 048 049 050 051 052 053 054 055 056 057 058 059 060 061 062 063 064 065 066 067 068 069 070 071 072 073 074 075 076 077 078 079 080 081 082 083 084 085 086 087 088 089 090 091 092 093 094 095 096 097 098 099 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 |
- RfC on using non-free photos of low-profile victims in articles about death-related events
- Administrator elections RFC workshopping phase
- WMF Community Tech team disbandment, related petition and community-proposed direction for the wishlist
- Guidance on infobox use
 | National variations of the English language have been widely discussed previously:
|
To report an error in content currently or imminently to appear on Main Page, use the appropriate section below. Reports should contain:
- Where is the error? An exact quotation using {{!xt}} of the text in question helps.
- Offer a correction if possible using {{xt}}.
- References are helpful, especially when reporting an obscure factual or grammatical error.
- Time zones. The Main Page runs on Coordinated Universal Time (UTC, currently 02:29 on 16 June 2026) and cannot be adjusted to your local time zone.
- Can you resolve the problem yourself? If the error lies primarily in the content of an article linked from the Main Page, fix the problem there before reporting it here. Text on the Main Page generally defers to the articles with bolded links. Upcoming content on the Main Page is usually only protected from editing beginning 24 hours before its scheduled appearance. Before that period, you can be bold and fix any issues yourself.
- Do not use {{edit fully-protected}} on this page, which will not get a faster response. It is unnecessary, because this page is not protected, and causes display problems. (See the bottom of this revision for an example.)
- No chit-chat. Lengthy discussions should be moved to a suitable location elsewhere, such as the talk page of the relevant article or project.
- Actual errors only. Failures of subjective criteria such as taste or interestingness, or failure to divert enough DYK readers to articles that aren't new or recently improved, are not errors.
- Respect other editors. Another user wrote the text you want changed, or reported an issue they see in something you wrote. Everyone's goal should be producing the best Main Page possible. The compressed time frame of the Main Page means sometimes action must be taken before there has been time for everyone to comment. Be civil to fellow users.
- Reports are removed when resolved. Once an error has been addressed or determined not to be an error, or the item has been rotated off the Main Page, the report will be removed from this page. Check the revision history for a record of any discussion or action taken; no archives are kept.
Errors in the summary of the featured article
Errors with "In the news"
Errors in "Did you know ..."
Errors in "On this day"
Errors in the summary of the featured list
400 million
: there is an extraneous (regular) space that should be removed. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 00:02, 16 June 2026 (UTC)- Fixed. — Chris Woodrich (talk) 02:22, 16 June 2026 (UTC)
Errors in the summary of the featured picture
General discussion
Sea of blue
| This edit request has been answered. Set the |answered= parameter to no to reactivate your request. |
The Main Page's subtitle has always had an annoying quirk: the fact that it links both the words "free" and "encyclopedia" despite them being near each other, thereby violating MOS:SEAOFBLUE:
Do not place links next to each other that appear to be a single link, as in
[[chess]] [[tournament]](chess tournament). Instead, consider using a single and more specific link, such as[[chess tournament]](chess tournament). If this is not possible, consider omitting one of the links (chess tournament) [...]
I don't see the need to violate or overrule this guideline, on the main page no less! I, as I'm sure many other readers, have often been confused after clicking what I thought was a link to free encyclopedia but which turned out to only be a link to one of the two words. To fix this annoyance, as NebY nicely explained in their edit summary, if we're going to unlink one of two words on sea-of-blue grounds, it should be the overlinked everyday word used in an ordinary way, not the term we're using in a particular way as linked
.
Plus, encyclopedia is the very first wikilink in the Wikipedia article, which arguably makes its presence on the main page redundant. So, this is my proposed change:
| − | [[free content|free]] | + | [[free content|free]] encyclopedia |
FaviFake (talk) 13:30, 5 June 2026 (UTC)
- Support. But also "free" is also a everyday and widely understood term, and could also be unlinked — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 13:47, 5 June 2026 (UTC)
- The reason why it's link it's to distinguish it (free as in speech) from free as in beer (the "gratis versus libre" ambiguity). FaviFake (talk) 13:55, 5 June 2026 (UTC)
- We link to Free content, which is highly specific, talking of "copyright and other legal limitations" in the first paragraph. Of course, Wikipedia is also free of charge and freely available, but that remains true of most of the internet and even of other online encyclopedias such as Britannica, but they're not free content and thus neither available for copying nor editorially constrained by that availability as Wikipedia is. NebY (talk) 19:40, 5 June 2026 (UTC)
- I would suggest linking to free encyclopedia (or rather [[Encyclopedia#Free_encyclopedias|free encyclopedia]] per WP:MPNOREDIRECT).
dot.py04:54, 6 June 2026 (UTC)- I don't think we'd want to send our readers to that section, which is basically only talks about Wikipedia anyway. The Wikipedia article does a much better job at explaining what Wikipedia is, and that's already in the header. FaviFake (talk) 13:46, 6 June 2026 (UTC)
- Support, too many links there already, nice to cut down on one. Ilov3gam3z (talk) 22:19, 7 June 2026 (UTC)
- Would also support. No real reason for "encyclopedia" to be linked. InfernoHues (talk) 05:26, 8 June 2026 (UTC)
Done — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 07:37, 12 June 2026 (UTC)
Discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Replace the link “Content portals” with “Wikiprojects” in Main Page
You are invited to join the discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) § Replace the link “Content portals” with “Wikiprojects” in Main Page. - BlueEleephant (talk · contribs) 00:02, 12 June 2026 (UTC)
Ellipsis
In the did you know heading there is a space before the ellipsis (making "Did you know ..."). It was added in 2019 but I can't seem to find a discussion about this. The space honestly looks quite strange to me, I don't really know why, but I think it looked better without it. MOS:... doesn't appear to tell us what to do in this situation as it tells us how to deal with removing text from quotations. The DYK heading isn't really a quotation but instead is telling us that "more is coming soon". We actually have an ellipsis like this in the featured article section, "Full article...", which does not have a space. So I would like to propose removing the space.
| − | Did you know | + | Did you know... |
Panamitsu (talk) 04:37, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
- I feel exactly opposite. The version with the space looks better to me and I would recomend changing the one in the TFA section.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:27, 13 June 2026 (UTC)
- MOS:ELLIPSIS seems to suggest that there should be a space before an ellipsis, so I would agree that there should be a space in "Full article..." in TFA. The version with the space also harmonizes better with DYK hooks, where the ellipsis has a space after. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 00:06, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- That I suspect will cost one character towards the 1,025 character blurb limit, and while that isn't much, is it actually necessary? It also will make the blurb more often occupy one more line, I think. Wehwalt (talk) 01:09, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- Previous discussion and later previous discussion Art LaPella (talk) 03:29, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- My opinion hasn't changed since that 2011 discussion. Having a space before a terminal ellipsis looks very strange to me; it only makes sense to space it when indicating an omission in a quote. However I suspect this is an ENGVAR difference, and it's such a minor thing that I don't think it's worth arguing about. Modest Genius talk 11:12, 15 June 2026 (UTC)
- Previous discussion and later previous discussion Art LaPella (talk) 03:29, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- That I suspect will cost one character towards the 1,025 character blurb limit, and while that isn't much, is it actually necessary? It also will make the blurb more often occupy one more line, I think. Wehwalt (talk) 01:09, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- MOS:ELLIPSIS seems to suggest that there should be a space before an ellipsis, so I would agree that there should be a space in "Full article..." in TFA. The version with the space also harmonizes better with DYK hooks, where the ellipsis has a space after. — RAVENPVFF · talk · 00:06, 14 June 2026 (UTC)
- There's a case for saying that "know ..." means more words follow, whereas "know..." means more letters follow (making a word such as "knowledge"). So, "pi = 3.14..." means pi has more digits, but "pi = 3.14 ..." suggests that pi is exactly 3.14 and I'm also going to lie to you about other constants. Certes (talk) 13:15, 15 June 2026 (UTC)
- That's an important point that I hadn't really thought about but completely agree with now that you bring it up. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:39, 15 June 2026 (UTC)