In the last Discussion report, I introduced a new contrivance of my own design — the electric winnower — which can automatically seek through noticeboard threads and tabulate their subject lines, lengths and numbers of participants; this allows the thousand or so threads that occur each month to be simmered down to a manageable list of the hundred, or two hundred, or fifty, or ten most active.

Time constraints, as well as an enormous backlog of unanalyzed discussions going back the whole year, meant that the last issue's report could not go any further than introducing the concept and giving a brief table-level overview of the basic statistics. However, this issue I have had more time available, and rather than the whole year this report is only covering a couple of months: June, July, and what little we've had of August.

The caveats I noted in the last report still apply, of course: perhaps most obviously, the winnower is only set up to prowl a short list of the noticeboards (and thereby misses a giant range of discussions held at other locations). More esoterically, it's an imperfect heuristic: size or participation is at best a loose proxy for the wider importance of a conversation. That is to say, all models are wrong, but some models are useful.

While individually reviewing all of the threads, my predictions from last time were largely borne out: a fair number of the most-active noticeboard discussions are indeed simple quotidian arguments which happen to be incredibly verbose. However, many of them are verbose for reasons that make them useful for making sense of Wikipedia: they touch on sensitive issues, they involve murky areas of ambiguous policy, or they deal with some new phenomenon that isn't well-covered by guidelines. Often, the behavior of a system in chaotic conditions can teach us a lot about how it functions (or doesn't): vehicles are tested by driving them into brick walls for a reason.

With that said, I will here analyze a portion of the fifty most-active noticeboard discussions for June, July and August 2025. The other portion, featuring the Village Pumps, will be in this issue's Community view (with descriptions written by Bri, as time has not permitted me to cover both).

The Reliable Sources Noticeboard, darling of the world's news media, did not have anything huge happen in the last couple of months. Of the four discussions that took place at RSN and made it into the most-active for this period, none were RfCs that made formal determinations, and none had formal closures.

AN is something of a stolid older brother to the considerably more rambunctious AN/I: it is far less urgent administratively (it is set aside for issues that resolve in days, not hours) and physically (threads tend to stay on it for much longer before being archived). In recent years, AN has subsumed some additional functions, such as ban appeals, which formerly fell under the purview of the Arbitration Committee (and indeed, under the purview of the Signpost's own Arbitration report).

ANI, known to many as the Great Dismal Swamp, is a noticeboard for "urgent incidents and chronic, intractable behavioral problems".

Generally speaking, nobody enjoys being brought here. It is a place for settling disputes between editors when interpersonal discussion fails, and for reporting vandalism slightly too sophisticated for AIV, but it is also a place where long-term patterns of disruption and harassment over decades are addressed and summarily adjudicated by ad-hoc straw polls. It's also a place where people go to hash out beef, settle grudges, whip out dossiers of old drama, and get their enemies banned. The main job of administrators on this board is to figure out which category any given filing falls into, and respond accordingly. It forms a critical part of Wikipedia's governance structure, but it is very resistant to any attempts at making it legible, and most people who aren't heavy editors do not really know about it.

It is not a place of honor. Mostly, it is a chaotic mixture of a school cafeteria and a school principal's office: there are very few explicit rules that govern its operation. While arbitration cases are often stressful, and concern people at their worst behavior on their most sensitive topics, arbitration is a highly regulated procedure in which discussion is moderated according to consistent rules, and decisions are made according to a consistent process. This is not true on ANI: basically anything can happen. This is not to mean that "anything goes" — indeed, people are often punished quite severely for breaking the rules of the venue — they just aren't really written down anywhere, and few can agree on what they are.

Owing to the uniquely and profoundly unpleasant nature of ANI proceedings, in which people invariably get stressed out and say stupid things, I have done my best to refrain from constructing an æ-style gallery of of heated editing moments. You may note that users are here referred to by their initials (the attached links lead to the full threads).

There are a variety of other, more specialized noticeboards, among them BLPN, ELN, FTN, NPOVN, NORN, BN, ACN, BOTN. These tend to be used for rather specific types of content discussion, and while they're definitely relevant to the project as a whole, they don't get as much everyday traffic as the major ones.

Owing again to time constraints, some of these do not have as much of a detailed analysis as I would have hoped to write. For some others, there is not much to say – an infobox argument from 2025 is virtually identical to an infobox argument from 2015. However, on the whole I am satisfied with the winnower's approach. There was a point, when I had much more free time than I do now, when I was in the habit of following nearly every single noticeboard discussion on the entire project: a look through the electrically winnowed top fifty feels like it more or less gives the same degree of general Gestalt. And even if they are not all worth reading (some are quite long), perhaps then they are worth reading a couple sentences of summary.

I think this will become more useful if it becomes possible to include talk pages, project pages, and project talk pages – of which we have 10,099,815, 1,511,331, and 209,282 respectively. These numbers mean that a more scientific approach must be used than just grabbing each one and checking for recent posts: but this can be worked out.

It may seem trivial to keep up with the daily goings-on of our internal processes, but the daily goings-on are what constitute the monthly goings-on, and the monthly goings-on are what constitute the yearly goings-on, and those constitute everything that's changed from 2001 to now, so:

It's 2025, do you know where your consensus is?