Consumer Rights Wiki talk:Moderators' noticeboard

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• Category:Articles with deletion requests
• Category:Articles with merge requests
• Category:Articles marked as irrelevant
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Outdated wiki link

The following I copypasted from Template:ToneWarning’s talk page. AnotherConsumerRightsPerson (talk) 15:13, 17 September 2025 (UTC)

Done! Keith (talk) 11:28, 8 October 2025 (UTC)

Due to the changes made since this template's creation in January 2025, I recommend updating the link used for "editorial guidelines". Clicking on it currently leads to the top of the Mission statement article since the original section label no longer exists. — Sojourna (talk) 01:32, 12 July 2025 (UTC)

More specifically, it should point to Consumer_Rights_Wiki:Editorial_guidelines instead of Mission statement. NOTAROBOT (talk) 11:51, 9 August 2025 (UTC)

Place fightchatcontrol.eu in a prominent place on the homepage.

I wish to have https://fightchatcontrol.eu/ on the top of consumerrights.wiki. I understand that this is not a corporation thing. But privacy is something many of the people here strongly value and this is an important project for everyones rights. Dentist5735 (talk) 00:03, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Not a mod and so won’t implement it myself but there is a ‘consumer tools’ section if you scoll down very far that this would kinda fit in to. AnotherConsumerRightsPerson (talk) 05:21, 18 September 2025 (UTC)

Itron article has been flagged for questionable relevance.

I believe the Itron article has been mistakenly flagged for questionable relevance. I have added several Incidents to the page to further show Itron's systemic patterns of consumer privacy violations please see the below:

Itron's Smart meters allow them to collect, process, and store data without the end users' knowledge. (1980-Present)

NYSEG requires customers to switch to Itron Smart meters or face monthly charge (November 2022-Present)

CenterPoint Energy requires customers to switch to Itron Smart meters or face one-time and monthly service charges (Unknown-Present)

Southern California Edison requires customers to switch to Itron Smart meters or face monthly charge (Unknown-Present)

Smart meter (and smart grid solutions) usage by utility companies involves a lot of layers but these are what I find to be most concerning:

Lack of data privacy, utility companies can freely share customer data with third party smart meter companies (such as Itron) without customer knowledge.

Lack of freedom to choose whether or not you have a smart meter recording your electricity usage. This data can be used to infer all sorts of things from what kind of appliances you own to when you are home.

Itron's Data Processing Agreement is un-viewable (at least for me) and not easy to find either, and end users typically do not know they will have an Itron smart meter until after it is installed by their electric company.

Itron is not the only smart meter and smart grid solutions game in town but they are big and not end user friendly,.

Thank Mods! Privacywarrior (talk) 19:11, 28 September 2025 (UTC)

Watch out for this person

I was sent an e-mail yesterday (Sept 28th) from a person by the name "PawPatroler" who has apparently been harassing other wikis with the same appeal message in an attempt to have their Wikipedia account unbanned. Hopefully this just remains a one-off. — Sojourna (talk) 02:16, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

I got the email as well. Didn't know about the Wikipedia thing though. @Keith might wanna check this out Beanie Bo (talk) 12:12, 30 September 2025 (UTC)

Appeal deletion of Medical equipment page

Medical equipment has some issues relating to manufacturer lockdown and repair which are important (right to repair is right to save lives) and which may be somewhat different from issues in other devices. This page appears to be the natural place to cover these issues.

There was a device page on medical ventilators, but it has been demoted to an incident page.

This deletion request is particularly confusing, because @Beanie Bo who proposed deletion, has what looks like some notes for an article covering right to repair of medical devices on their talk page.

Not every "new consumer" issue with medical equipment falls under right to repair. There are also right to own considerations. (Such as having access to and control of my personal information - the readouts from my Cpap/pacemaker/etc. Also privacy issues. Who controls the device. ...) There are medical supplies (e.g. continuous glucose monitor patches or insulin refills, and things like region locking, supplier lockin, etc.) So I would not favor just moving the page to be only medical right to repair.

I am confident that there is more than enough verifiable information and issues to make at least one article.

I think the page should be kept. Having some general pages that link things together is helpful. Especially when a wiki is so skeletal as this. The page can certainly use improvement. I think having the beginnings of a structure encourages growth.

There is, as always, this disincentive to do anything to improve the page when it has a deletion notice. (No sense working on something that going to be destroyed.) Drakeula (talk) 02:32, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

Maybe @Mr Pollo can give his take since he's generally the one who finalizes article deletion.

As for my opinion, the article is simply too vague to be useful. Creating incident articles would be significantly more effective to shed a light on bad consumer practice in the medical industry, instead of one article with a ton of empty headlines. The article was created 9 months ago at this point yet only has 2 paragraphs worth of information. I take that to mean there is little interest in working on articles in the medical industry, and it's clear most people would rather discuss tech companies. So "encouraging growth" is not relevant at all in this case.

The way to give fair weight to the issues in the medical industry is by creating more articles dedicated to the various incidents that have been reported on. A single master sheet makes it seem like CRW only cares about tech issues (of which there are hundreds of relevant articles) and only adds in a few things from other industries lumped into one page that people are unlikely to find in the middle of hundreds of tech articles.

Incident pages are not "less than" company or product pages. They're simply different types. I don't think it's fair to say the medical ventilators article was "demoted" when the change was simply to portray the issues more accurately. Once I've gone through and edited the article to be more extensive and accurately portray the issue at hand, I hope that your position might change on the matter. And thanks for bringing it up anyway even if we disagree. It is motivating me to get to that article more quickly (as soon as I finish some smaller changes on articles I'm working on currently). Beanie Bo (talk) 14:53, 2 October 2025 (UTC)

I can see the importance of having a page that includes the medical equipment, though a category system can also achieve this in a better way. There can be a main category (ex: Category:Medical equipment), and subcategories for the machines (ex: Category:MRI, Category:Ventilators) that include a small description of why they are consumer rights problems with alongside the Medical equipment category to link it all together.

For example, this is what the source code of the Category:Ventilators could look like:

At the beginning of the Covid 19 pandemic, ventilators were suddenly in very high demand. Digital rights management and lack of right to repair made the equipment shortage worse, and probably increased mortality.

[[Category:Medical equipment]]

Let me know what you both think of this approach! Mr Pollo (talk) 22:42, 3 October 2025 (UTC)

@Beanie BoSorry if the term demoted offended. It was not intended to. I was thinking in terms of the tree structure for the articles, not in terms of possible emotional impact. Lots of leaf [incident] articles, smaller number of device articles which aggregate/lead to the incidents, but can cover things more broadly, beyond just an incident. With theme articles (or possibly a missing article type, like a navigation articles) above that. So an incident article is less than a product page in the sense of being less general (more specific), not less important or valuable. I always try to be courteous, but sometimes I don't think of possible interpretations. So, my apologies.

I added a bit more meat to the article, hoping it will make it clearer what it could become, or inspire links to other relevant articles that exist, or inspire people to cover more medtech. If this article is to be deleted, what is the plan? Where would content like I added to the article better be placed? Is there a better name this theme article could be placed under? (I started a thread to discuss this on the article's talk page.)

For example, if this page goes, and the ventilator page just covers the covid emergency, then where can we put information about ventilators beyond the initial Covid surge?

I have more response, but want to sleep on it. Drakeula (talk) 18:22, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

I just realized why I used "demoted." The list of article types lists them numerically (product is Tier 2, incident is Tier 3). For Tier 2 it says "This tier of articles may well be the most useful to the casual reader. This is where someone who googles [insert thing here] consumer rights wiki will usually end up." Sure sounds like incident articles are "less than" product articles (as in less useful, less likely to be seen, a lower tier).

Just pointing out what seems to me a natural interpretation of the wiki policies. I am not trying to justify or defend my word choice. I still apologize if they caused offense. Drakeula (talk) 19:58, 4 October 2025 (UTC)

I do wonder whether 'trunk, branch, leaf' might be a better way of putting it than the tiers. I wrote the basic article categorisation system in an afternoon many months ago, so it is very much not gospel! It seems to mostly work, but if we do need to make tweaks, it's worth discussing Keith (talk) 16:58, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

This makes perfect sense. I think it would help organize the wiki a lot, and help new contributors decide which article type is most fitting for what they want to write. Beanie Bo (talk) 17:27, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

@Mr Pollo@Beanie Bo

Just to be clear, when I first saw the medical equipment article, I figured it was a theme article. It would have been clearer had I said that in my initial appeal. I recognize that theme articles are to be used sparingly, but I think medical equipment has enough unique features and is important enough to consumers that a theme article is warranted.

I still think the medical equipment theme article is a better solution than categories.

The medical equipment theme article:

• Is easier for the reader (easier to make “grandmother” appropriate). (They don't have to learn how categories work.)
• Is easier for other articles to link to (don’t have to warn the reader that doing a context switch to categories).
• Allows compact coverage of additional issues and types of devices for which articles have not been created. (Easier to read and maintain than creating a bunch of stubs. Having mention of a device or issue may prompt people to create more detail.)
• Allows mention of considerations which would otherwise be replicated into articles in the area. (e.g., One could come up with boilerplate about FDA or insurance considerations, and copy it to the sub-articles – but maintenance headache.)
• Gives place to cover things which don’t fit neatly into the existing structure (e.g., artificial pancreas) (I am not advocating coverage there long term, but it is way we can capture those things that don’t fit neatly, rather than just losing them. As we find things that don’t quite fit, the structure can evolve. )
• The talk page gives a possible place for questions/discussion of articles in this area. (Or, if there is a better place for such discussion, the talk page could give a pointer to it.)
• A theme article fits in the official article types, whereas creating a new type of hybrid category/theme article feels like beyond the scope of what should be decided here?

Thanks. Drakeula (talk) 17:54, 6 October 2025 (UTC)

I generally think you're right to want to keep it here, and I think you've laid out good reasons for keeping it in mainspace rather than having it solely be a category page (a medical equipment category is also appropriate, but having a real page covering this sort of thing makes sense). We ideally want users to be able to navigate around the wiki through the use of links, and a general article on medical equipment, or conusmer protection in a medical context, is sensible. The article could certainly do with a coat of paint (maybe the examples should be tabulated?)

I'd probably say just keep it on the Wiki with a stub notice for now. Any thoughts @Mr Pollo@Beanie Bo?

It would probably at some point sit under an overarching 'medical consumer rights issues' article or something of the sort, and then this article serves to discuss equipment issues as opposed to ones related to payments, insurance, sales, etc. Keith (talk) 16:52, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

@Keith I think you and Drakeula made great arguments for why it should stay. Though I guess I should say my personal philosophy, which is basically to assume that others by default won't work to improve existing articles, especially niche ones. Most users prefer high traffic articles pertaining to large companies or major controversies. My personal opinion is that leaving a lot of low quality stubs ruins the integrity of the wiki, especially for articles that are 3+ months old. When I add relevance/deletion notices, it's on these articles that:

- have been stubs for 3+ months

- have not had any notable edits/improvements in 1-3 months

- are niche articles that have extremely low probability of further improvements, etc.

As a moderator, I'm attempting to fill that gap, which is why I sort of informally taken control over articles I feel like I may be able to do justice in fixing (e.g. covid ventilators). When low quality articles are left on the wiki, it's basically the moderators' responsibility to fix them. And since we don't have enough hands or time to fix the hundreds of articles out there in need of substantial work, I tend to err on the side of deletion, simply for maintaining the wiki's integrity.

So I understand completely why you err on the side of keeping articles unless they clearly do not belong. But I do genuinely think it could work against us if we have 900 articles yet half of them are stubs or need substantial improvements. And it's pretty clear that they will continue to stay stubs for months to come, leaving that stub-to-complete article ratio to ever increase.

Just food for thought, I guess. - Beanie Bo (talk) 17:24, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

I suppose my hope on that front has been that a good pool of 'stuff that needs work' will encourage people to work on it. Because we want the wiki to end up being reasonably comprehensive, I think that having a stub article basically just saying 'this should be an article, and here is at least enough stuff to justify it being more than just a row on article suggestions' has value in 'holding place' on the wiki and allowing other articles to link to it, and giving a bit of visibility that it needs to be properly written.

Realistically, it will be quite some time before we are at the point where we'll expect the wiki to be useful to a reader. At that point, when it comes (maybe around ~2000 articles? next year once the UI overhaul is done?) it might made more sense to have a 'step-up' in how strict we are about zombie articles. So for now I'd say that policing the deletion zombie articles should probably be mostly restricted to articles that make you go 'this could just be an entry in the article suggestions page' (although if an article feels irrelevant or is just complete trash, that's a different matter). Keith (talk) 20:36, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

That makes total sense, especially considering how young the wiki still is. I see where you're coming from and I can adopt that philosophy lol. Thanks for explaining it Beanie Bo (talk) 21:22, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

I’m fine with either approach, though for now adding a Stub template is good. I agree we should be more strict on "zombie articles" once the wiki becomes more fleshed out. Mr Pollo (talk) 20:42, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Can someone help me on the mess I made here?

Hello, I have recently made an article on the Biometric Information Privacy Act which I have completely messed up! I saw that King Louis made a place in the see also of the Friend app article about the BIPA, so I decided to make one myself, but me not being a US citizen and not fact checking, I based it on this BIPA from Wikipedia but somehow combined it with this bill (the wikipedia one was an Illinois one). So basically what I did was combined two articles into one and only found out when doing refs ~1 day after. Should we blow it up and start over? Somehow save this? I need help here. AnotherConsumerRightsPerson (talk) 14:37, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

The second bill you shared leads to a broken page. I'm gonna go ahead and make the judgment call that you can nuke it. Trying to parse through the information of which bill it belongs to might take more time than simply starting over. Also, I personally operate on the philosophy that "if I don't fix it myself, no one else will" (which isn't always true, but it's true often enough). And it seems especially true for niche pages like this one. If you want to fix it yourself, just make sure you add Illinois to your searches and make sure the relevant websites is Illinois state and not federal govt. Thanks for the attempts anyway, even if it gets nuked. We always appreciate contributors looking into policies and such, since it's rare that it happens. You're good! Beanie Bo (talk) 15:24, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Should've checked the second bill! I'll add a deletionreq now. AnotherConsumerRightsPerson (talk) 16:24, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Oh, I meant erasing the content and perhaps just having a one paragraph explanation and stub! Probably shouldn't have said "nuke." I was referring to that wiki article you linked to: "With articles, this is the TNT tipping point argument: if the article's content is useless (including all the versions in history) but the title might be useful, then delete the content to help encourage a new article." Maybe I read it wrong, sorry! Beanie Bo (talk) 17:09, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

*facepalm* Thanks for removing it, I couldn’t have because abuse filter. Also, the WP:TNT article means to delete the entire thing (done via a deletion discussion, which is in Wikipedia where people vote on whether to keep or delete an article) AnotherConsumerRightsPerson (talk) 17:40, 7 October 2025 (UTC)

Remove ‘Help About MediaWiki’ from the help list

This literally comes with MediaWiki to help you learn about it while setting up and it is still in the menu. I don’t see why we need this? AnotherConsumerRightsPerson (talk) 06:09, 8 October 2025 (UTC)