This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (idea lab). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57
This is pretty much what I wanted for my OmniGadget idea. I basically want something that allows you to quickly and easily add maintenance and infobox templates to pages. Do you think you can make more? -- vgmddg ( look | talk | do) 23:04, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
If a topic has not been covered by Wikipedia it would be neat if a box would appear above or below the ads that normally appear in Google. That box would say something like "This topic has not been covered in Wikipedia. Would you like to contribute information for a new page on the topic?" and another option could be "Would you like to suggest this topic for a new page?"
If someone clicks on the second option, the ideas will go to a page where someone can click on a blue link of that new word that will take them to an editing page for the new word. It would be a interesting way to get people to create new pages, put more information into Wikipedia and can eliminate repeat pages. People like to share information and would love to see a list of ideas of things they could write about.
ex: I type "fishing" into Google and Wiki doesn't have a page for it. It gives me the two options of writing about it or suggesting it. I suggest it and it goes into a list of topics that have not been covered. Someone else wants to write about a new topic, but can't think of one. They go to the page of listed suggestions and find "fishing."
That is how it works. I hope you like it and I hope someone can improve the idea. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.57.96.252 ( talk) 02:04, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Not sure if this is the right place or not, but with googles expansion into selling e-books I have noticed a lot more self published work appearing in the searches I do there. In the "find sources" template (used in AfD nomination pages and elsewhere) that links to the google books search it already takes out "-inpublisher:icon". I think it would be a good idea to add filters "-inpublisher:Lulu" and other major self publishing houses. Active Banana (bananaphone 16:57, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
If you are in the U.S., you see U.S. spelling variations If you are located in the U.K., you see U.K. spelling variations Etc., Etc.
I think this could be used to end thousands of edit wars in process and thousands of others yet to occur.— Preceding unsigned comment added by TravisMunson1993 ( talk • contribs)
I have seen articles recently on the Mexico City Metro, if you can call them articles, where there no info other than images and templates. I was just wondering whether this would be the right place to propose a template asking people to add text or info, or will {{ expand}} suffice? Simply south ( talk) and their tree 21:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
hello all, i've been anonymously editing wikipedia for many years now, but i am getting really worried about its future. i am finding myself more and more often disabled to edit articles, and i am not talking just about controversial topics, but topics in general. i have an impression that the semi-protected tag is being misused. do other editors have similar experience and impression? what can be done about it? (please do not suggest to create an account as i will not do that). 188.2.48.67 ( talk) 18:15, 23 December 2010 (UTC) I just made a very rough calculation using info from Category:Wikipedia_semi-protected_pages: almost 2000 pages listing about 200 articles each with semiprotection = about 400,000 articles which are semi-protected. that is 10% of all articles in english wikipedia! this to me seems like a clear abuse of this tag. 188.2.48.67 ( talk) 18:26, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
|
Many websites let users rate content and add comments. Perhaps Wikipedia should do so too. The idea would be to display a button or link beside each article, or a tab at the top, that would open a form showing current user ratings and comments, and let readers add their own ratings and comments. For example:
The great majority of readers are not comfortable with editing an article, but would have no problem giving opinions. The feature would open a direct channel of communication from readers to editors. Editor tools would of course be needed to display lists of articles with negative ratings. Articles change, so ratings would have to be aged, counting for less and less as edits accumulate. There is potential for abuse, as with standard editing, so controls would be needed to stop double-voting, ignore voting during surges and so on. But on the whole, listening to the audience seems the right thing to do. Aymatth2 ( talk) 21:27, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I started the sine article recently, and found there were already 20+ other versions on other language Wikipedias. This got me wondering what other articles exist in multiple other languages but don't appear in English. Has anyone tried to make a list of topics which have not been translated into English, sorted by the number of other language Wikipedias it appears in? Or is anyone willing to try making such a list? Thanks in advance. — Pengo 04:05, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
SELECT page_title, page_len AS "Bytes", COUNT(*) AS "Languages"
FROM page
JOIN langlinks ON ll_from=page_id
LEFT JOIN redirect ON rd_from=page_id
LEFT JOIN langlinks AS enwp ON enwp.ll_from=page_id AND enwp.ll_lang="en"
WHERE enwp.ll_from IS NULL
AND rd_from IS NULL
AND page_namespace=0
AND page_len>5000 /* atleast 5 KB */
GROUP BY page_id
HAVING COUNT(*) > 5
It occurred to me as I was creating an article from a redirect that we have no way (AFAIK) to keep track of new articles created from redirects. They don't show up on Special:NewPages, and I don't know of any other place to look. I think there's a filter or something that highlights a redirect becoming an article, but that's the extent of my knowledge. So what I'm wondering is whether there's a way to keep track of articles created from redirects, a list kinda like new pages or recent changes. The easiest way I can think of is just incorporating that into new pages, but a separate special page would work as well. Now I have no idea whether this is even technically possible, or feasible or anything, it's just a thought that occurred to me. But anyhow, just wondering what other people think (or have thought in previous discussions) about that. C628 ( talk) 00:24, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
Often when viewing "dif" pages it can be hard to exactly find where the changes took place in-article, so I'd generally suggest a change around this, although not replacing the current dif.-- ForgottenHistory ( talk) 23:02, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
look its getting a little old. Jimmy begging me for money.
i give hundreds of hours of labor. i think that's enough.
if someone has >1000 edits for the year or whatever, they should be able to opt out of the fundraising drive.
Decora ( talk) 06:06, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
I would like to have Wikipedia track a watchlist of sorts of articles that I am waiting on to come back to at some point in the future. For example, in an inactive article, I want to make a change, but I want first to give a week to see if anyone discusses my proposed change. It could be a simple list of articles with or without related dates. Drrll ( talk) 12:01, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
I've written an essay called WP:ArbCom reform. I originally posted on the Village Pump proposals page, however I think here is probably more appropriate. Anyway, comments or suggestions are most welcome. PhilKnight ( talk) 13:47, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
A discussion is currently taking place about the MOS recommendation that bulleted lists should be rewritten as prose. It specifically concerns making a possible exception for sections on 'Notable residents' in articles about towns and cities. Your comments are welcome at: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (embedded lists). Thanks. -- Kudpung ( talk) 02:38, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
There is an option to default all edits to minor within each user's profile.
Some considerable time ago, as I was doing a lot of minor edits, I set this on. I got out of the habit of checking, so even when making major edits (or creating new pages), I was flagging them as minor, until another editor pointed this out to me today.
What would help me is to amend the profile option to offer three possible selections:
Is this feature something that could be developed, and would it be beneficial to other editors? Regards, Lynbarn ( talk) 19:46, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Many Users have quite dull User Pages. This is because many users don't know how, or don't want to learn how to use wikipedia's code. I think it would be great if we could have a team of willing users who would edit peoples user pages and make them look striking and interesting. I would be willing to join such a team as I believe I am relatively good at editing User Pages (See My User Page). Thanks, Thomas888b ( talk) 21:00, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
The other discussion is now archived. It said to start a new one. I must clarify my ideas. I did not mean just going around editing peoples userpage, you would be a team there to design a user page if somebody asked you to design it. Thomas888b ( talk) 18:51, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
The sheer size and number of policy pages in Wikipedia overwhelms me. Is there a flow chart with yes/no gates anywhere and if not do you think it would be possible or a good idea? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tumadoireacht ( talk • contribs) 15:06, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
I notice that long pages (like two that I keep up with, Cold War and Lima) take a very long time to load. When I'm only looking a diffs between revisions, I typically don't need to have the diffs and the whole page load. I just want to see the edited part at the top. There should be a button or something that will load the "current" page under the diff, if you need it to load for some reason. Otherwise, the rest of the page doesn't need to load. There would be less server load if that happened, and looking through a group of diffs one after the other would be a lot faster. Hires an editor ( talk) 11:12, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
When textual information is displayed in a Wikipedia article, it is displayed as one column (except for tables). But this text is difficult to read because each line is too long. I read somewhere that the optimal length of a line should be about 66 characters, which is why many articles and books are formatted as two or even three columns. I recommend that Wikipedia developers add an option to increase the number of columns displayed for an article. This would make it easier for readers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 35.10.58.148 ( talk) 23:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
javascript:void(appendCSS(".ns-0 #bodyContent{text-align:justify; -moz-column-width:20em; -moz-column-rule: 1px solid #666; -webkit-column-width:20em; -webkit-column-rule: 1px solid #666;}"));
into your address bar on any Wikipedia page. One big problem, AFAIK the floats (infoboxes, thumbnail, quote boxes, etc.) can't knock out parts of a column even with a script rewriting the page. —
Dispenser 04:48, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
It has occurred to me that having the ability to interrupt Autoconfirmed status could be a useful instrument. In particular it seems a user who has been blocked should perhaps not be allowed to resume editing with full privileges when the block expires or is otherwise lifted. I am interested if others would consider this a productive recourse. My76 Strat 04:41, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I have an idea that often users want to suggest rather than actually put a live edit to a page, so I would propose that some system, whether it be an actual action with a log or a page devoted to this purpose be established. Possibly a system similar to that of pending revisions on certain pages, but this time voluntary and with users endorsing them? This is a raw idea.-- ForgottenHistory ( talk) 22:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
56, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
I've been following along on the WP:ANI discussion of User:Arilang1234 in this section. In short, for those who don't ANI-watch, Arilang is a Chinese editor who has recently been accused of extensive copyright violations. Today, it occurred to me that the problem here may be more cultural than it is editor specific.
It is well known in the field of teaching writing, particularly teaching ESL writing (my professions), that the very concepts of plagiarism and copyright infringement to students of Chinese origin is exceptionally difficult. Please understand that I don't mean this as a slight, but that there is a fundamental difference in the way that (and I generalize here) Westerners focus on the "rights" (intellectual and monetary) associated with "ownership" of a particular text, and Chinese (and others from the region) focus on the importance of preserving accurate knowledge (which, by definition, comes from officially approved, usually traditional, sources). When U.S. writing teachers confront such students with evidence of plagiarism, the students are often proud that they were able to demonstrate that they correctly knew and passed on the "right" information, rather than being shocked the way their teachers think they are supposed to be. In the ANI discussion, some people have mentioned that Arilang doesn't seem to understand what we mean by copyright violations or why its a problem. This seems to me to be exactly like what I've read about in my field.
My question is, assuming that Wikipedia wants to reach out to more editors outside of our traditional Western (especially US) base, what can we/should we do to help them understand what is likely a very difficult issue? As I have few answers, I come here to the lab first, looking for others' thoughts. Qwyrxian ( talk) 05:04, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Agree absolutely with Qwyrxian. Also I'd notice that in some parts of Europe (I'm Italian) the notion of plagiarism is (and especially was in the past) more nuanced than what happens to be in the US, where it is absolute anathema. More than a university professor in Italy encourages his students to copy introductory sentences when writing papers, simply because "if someone said it best, it is senseless to rewrite it worse". And I myself can't see what is the problem in copying public domain text verbatim -I thought this was one of the advantages of a free encyclopedia, taking advantage of public domain text- but it seems WP:PLAGIARISM thinks otherwise, so ok. -- Cyclopia talk 01:32, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a great main page- if I'm not sure what to look for I can check here for interesting stuff. However, first time viewers, and even people, like me, who have used it for a couple years, have a hard time finding certain things. Specifically, the Sandbox and the Editing Tutorial. It's a great place, but until I did a research report on Wikipedia I had no idea it existed! Perhaps someone could make it easier to find. I suggest this:
On the main page, scroll down to Other areas of Wikipedia (it links to the Village Pump and Help Desk). In this area there could be a link to the Sandbox, as well as the Editing Tutorial. Knowing about these made Wikipedia easier to navigate around and understand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.238.251.2 ( talk) 22:44, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps a bot or something could automatically leave a message on your talk page with a list of commonly used links when you make a new account. -- vgmddg ( look | talk | do) 22:56, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm wondering what people around think what Wikipedia might be like at its 15th birthday? I don't want to pose any particular questions, any thoughts and comments welcome. Obviously, we will all come back to this post in 5 years time and see who was right! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:48, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
Suggestion: Cross-linking information: Allowing users to create pages that use the same "title", but which exist from different perspectives. Such articles would be "Cross-linked."
Consider Cross-Linking Information. Did you know that one of the "revolutionary" benefits of using a computer is that you can cross-link information (related articles...that are similar, but present information from different perspectives).
For Example.
Consider two colors (black and white).
I am using my Dictionary as my primary source.
Imagine:
"Colors"
Information about colors based upon the "Scientific" study of Light.
The definition from this perspective would look like:
Colors
Black - 1) The achromatic object color of least lightness characteristically perceived to belong to objects that neither reflect nor transmit light. 2). Total or nearly total absence of light.
White: 1) The achomatic object colors of greatest lightness characteristically perceived to belong to objects that reflect diffusely nearly all incident energy throughout the visible spectrum.
This page would be "Cross-Linked" with another (similar) page, aslo called "Colors"
"Colors"
Information about Colors from an Industral or "Everyday" Perspective.
Black - 1). A black pigment or dye. 2) Of or relating to a group or race characterized by dark pigmentation.
White - 1) A white colored product (as flour, sugar or [My insert: white paint, or white pigment]
2) Being a member of a group o race characterized by reduced pigmentation.
"Cross-Linked" with
"Colors"
Colors as defined, or used "symbolically" in Western Literature.
For example:
Black - 1) Soiled, dirty
2) Thourghly evil, wicked. 3) Gloomy, Calamitious.
White: 1) Marked by upright fairness, free from spot or blemish. 2) Innocent 3) Not intended to cause harm (such as a white lie or white magic).
"Cross-Linked" with a similar "Colors" pages such as:
"Colors" as defined or used "Symbolically" in Eastern Literature
"Colors" as defined or used "symbolically" in African Culture and Literature
"Colors" as defined or used "symbolically" in Latin Literature....
My point: I don't think articles with similar (or the same) title is (necessarily) the problem.
I think an electronic (factual) encyclopedia may find that by supporting "electronic-links," they may"cross-link" information and create effective, and unique information layouts.
...can you believe they said (on the Wikipedia site) under Technical Problems: Editing articles of such length that you can't edit them. — C-ritah ( talk • contribs) 23:00, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
I have no idea if this has been discussed before, but would it be possible to implement an auto-refresh of the watchlist page (as it's really tedious to have to click "My watchlist" all the time)? I'm thinking that the default would be to have the current situation, but an option on "My preferences" would permit the auto-refresh to occur. Not sure about the refresh interval, but every ten or fifteen minutes would probably be okay. Cheers. GFHandel . 06:59, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
addOnloadHook(function(){ if(wgPageName=="Special:Watchlist") setInterval("window.reload()", 5*60*1000); });
Thanks. It works with one minor change (had to add "location."):
// Code to reload the Watchlist page automatically (every 5 minutes)
addOnloadHook
(
function()
{
if (wgPageName == "Special:Watchlist")
{
setInterval("window.location.reload()", 5*60*1000);
}
}
);
GFHandel . 20:17, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I just came up with this idea about telling/reminding Wikipedians to take a break after a long time of non-stop editting. If a Wikipedian edits solidly for more then 45 minutes/one hour, a small message – just like those that appear asking for donations – will appear for a maximum of five minutes, asking them to take a break. The person doesn't have to respond to it – it is there to purely remind them. The idea is to prevent the eyes from prolonged exposure to the screens and allow these people to rest. The person will be given the choice of whether to allow this message to appear, on their My preferences page. Sp33dyphil ( Talk) ( Contributions)(Feed back needed @ Talk page) 06:39, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
We're not our editors' nannies. If someone wants to edit for 48 hours straight it's their own problem, not ours. -- Cyclopia talk 19:19, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
As related to the above " #Time out message", I am trying to think of technical "time-out" limits which would deter POV-pushing without having to resort to debating a user's mindset at WP:AN/I, such as keeping per-article edit-counters on controversial articles. There seems to be a strong connection between POV-pushing and high edit-counts to an article. If a person edits one article excessively, say more than 250 times, then issue a pre-edit warning:
Perhaps the counting could be kept limited, to a relative handful of cases, by anyone setting an "opt-in" for suspicious users, rather than count all users who edit a controversial article. When a person changes usernames, then request an admin to update the new username's article-edit counter to be based from 240 edits (or such), rather than counting from zero.
I don't think admin's repeated reverts would be a problem, since, typically, different admins each take turns fixing one article. However, it might be good to also allow counting admin edits, in case a rogue admin was suspected of POV-pushing, as well. By allowing for per-article edit-counters, then POV-pushing could be deterred without such harsh feelings against the admins. Any thoughts about how many edits to allow, or should the various warning-level counts be set for each article? -
Wikid77 15:29, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I've been to other Wikis (not part of Wikimedia) and saw hit counters, such as one which displays on the bottom of the page in small text "This page has been accessed [#] times." Those webpages appear much more open than Wikipedia, in the sense you can see which pages were accessed how many times. This can be useful for letting users see which pages need more links, and the effects of how they're written to how often they're read. This is also helpful for detecting orphan articles, so I don't see why not add this feature. Users can also see how often their userpages were accessed, so they wont be wasting their time if no one reads their pages. Negative effects can be removed with an option allowing users to hide the counter from their screen. Unless this causes massive server lag, it should be added. 173.183.66.173 ( talk) 23:00, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Ok here's an idea: We have a Recent Changes Patrol.. We have New Page Patrol... We even have Random Page Patrol, plus a few others.. Well how about organizing and starting a project page for Wikipedia:Pending changes patrol? ( Special:PendingChanges) .. or why not a Wikipedia:New files patrol? ( Special:NewFiles) .. Just throwin' out ideas here, feel free to implement it yourself if interested. -- œ ™ 12:00, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
A related topic, for Recent Changes Patrol (or Special:NewPages), is to remind users to click "earliest" in the list of changes, to focus more users on fixing the older changes which are about to expire from the recent-changes list. Naturally, most people would, instinctively, focus on the new news of changes, so advising people to focus on older changes would help shift the balance to catch the earlier changes before they leave the lists. - Wikid77 09:15, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
01-Feb-2011: After finding many unusual performance problems in templates, I am documenting the performance issues in some utility templates, by adding a section "Performance impact" or similar. The unfortunate essay title " WP:Don't worry about performance" might be causing people to stop ensuring templates work ("perform"), or work without hogging resources ("perform efficiently"). For example, explaining performance in doc subpage Template:Valid/doc:
Many people might, understandably, expect {Valid} to actually reject ALL numbers having excess precision, so I think the doc page needs to say that it fails to reject some extreme numbers. Later, perhaps the template could be improved. Also, the expansion-depth usage of 8 levels seems high (an if-else is 1 level), so that is why revealing "8 levels" is good to know. Although {Valid} seems relatively efficient, other templates have seemed shocking (to me):
Template:Str_find has used expansion-depth 18(!) of 40 to find a left parenthesis "(" in an article title (for
Template:Italic title), so I have written {{
strfind_short}} to find a string using 5 levels instead of 18, and run 3x times faster.
Anyway, the basic idea, for the idea lab, is to start actively documenting performance for those 2 main reasons: reveal if the utility template fails to perform in some cases, and estimate the resource usage (thereby revealing a potential performance problem or "hog"). What I've learned about WP:PERF, over the past 3 years, is: many people imagine nothing matters, or for others, just saying, "Don't worry" does not stop people from worrying, in
superstitious ways, where they won't use the complex measurement converter
Template:Convert because they "fear" it is too big, rather than 8 times smaller than using a single {{
Cite_web}}. By documenting performance, we can overcome the superstitions and help to find better ways to allow larger templates to fit. -
Wikid77 (
talk) 14:37, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Delma —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.71.240.67 ( talk) 21:11, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
Now I imagine this would need to be worked out with archive.org or some other internet archive out there, but I think there's a real issue of link-rot among cited/referenced external links. Recently I discovered that a UN Document database changed it's url structure, leading to at least a half-dozen broken links in Wikipedia. My idea is that either when someone includes an external link, or more conservatively, whenever someone puts a link in web-cite, an api-call is triggered which causes that page to be archived, thus if someone notices an external link is broken, well, knowing that I know the mechanism is in place I'll go to the archive site. A special bonus in combo with the citation or cite web template could be the auto-filling of the "archive link" field. Now something like this may have been proposed before/might be in place without me knowing, but I simply think this would be an immensely cool way to make sure that information, especially when used to support assertions and arguments is not lost. Jztinfinity ( talk) 05:34, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_External_links/Webcitebot2#Proposal. Rd232 talk 02:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
If this has already been addressed, my apologies. My cursory search produced no existing pump article. I'm posting this here to develop/refine it before proposal.
According to Erase and rewind (Jeremy Keith) and BBC online website closures (Guardian UK), the BBC is planning on deleting 170 of its in depth programming-related websites. This isn't 170 pages, but an indeterminate number, possibly approaching thousands of pages.
Idea for development: It would be VERY helpful if some skilled Wikipedia API/Python coder could:
1. Using the Guardian list of 170 sites (above), search WP article space for <ref> references containing full or partial links to those doomed BBC websites (which are not already linked to archive.org or WebCitation)
2. Save the results as two lists in an article, a Talk/subpage (or other appropriate venue) for individual editors to repair/update:
2a. Wikipedia:List of articles with doomed BBC links
2b. Wikipedia:List of doomed but actively referenced BBC links - the fully-qualified URL, possibly redirected by the BBC servers. This list exists to aid manual or semiautomatic archiving at WebCitation.
3. Pipe the resulting Wikipedia:List of doomed but actively referenced BBC links to WebCitation's "list of links to archive" API, so that they are pre-archived for future use by editors. Be nice and don't hammer their server.
Of utmost urgency, in my opinion is, (1) and (3). Then repairs can commence at leisure.
-- Lexein ( talk) 04:16, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
There does seem to be a basic misunderstanding of... well everything. If the sites are in aspic, there's no significant maintenance cost - heck I'll host them for free, for the Google hits!
Rich
Farmbrough, 02:59, 13 February 2011 (UTC).
maybe wikipedia should have a fully editable blog to post on. it should be called something that people can remember, so that they can go and post whenever they want to, knowing that nothing of theirs will be deleted from the blogging area. here is my idea for an art blog:
Art blog
Info of the week: Caitlin Fox is an artist who specializes in streetart (grafitti) and classical art. She has kept an art diary ever since she was 10 and fills it with amazing sketches and drafts. an example of her work shall be saved shortly. i shall blog again later after I find some of Caitlin's work in digital format on the internet. stay tuned for more on the art blog, new to the blogging area.
Comments
Jo348-
hey wikipeeps! Love Caitlins work, i've seen it before wit my own eyes,
her art skills are awesome!
Annabelle689-
where did u get that - wikipeeps? - sounds cool. i'm setting up a vote
for if you want an art blog in wikipedia, it may get more viewers:
so far, 163 people like this
Like Dislike
Anza64- i'm definately voting for the art blog, might be interesting. see ya wikipeeps! ya, that is cool, maybe it'll catch on!
Bennyboy6-
hey wikipeeps, it totally caught on! i'm all heads up for the blog
thing, maybe if wikipedia doesnt let you do it, you could make a seperate website!
Annabelle689-
yeah, i'm working on it right now, i'll post the adress in the sandbox, temperary art
blog for now, anyway.
(this is an example)
I contribute to articles on UK East Midland MPs. The area is a keen marginal battleground and the
Politics Show is one of the best ways of seeing a new MP in action.
The most recent is
Nicky Morgan (politician) as
Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Universities minister supporting very large increases in tuition fees. I simply don't have another source comparable in quality or importance but transcripts aren't available except to contributors apparantly due to cost though the souce meets
wp:verifiable requirements.
Betty Logan on
WP:RSN came up with the excellent idea that I could include a transcript on the talk page which I've done. I also have a 1.6Mb MP3 recording which I could email or whatever.
Betty suggested I should ask a couple of volunteers to verify it -and to test people's reaction, yet to be achieved but I am strongly in favour of sources being easily checkable, particularly for
WP:BLP.
FormerIP also suggested putting it forward here. Any comments welcome.
JRPG (
talk) 17:41, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I just stumbled up on Wikipedia:Database reports/Old IP talk pages. That database report contains "Old IP talk pages where the IP has never been blocked and has not edited in the past year and where the IP's talk page has not had any activity in the past year, has no incoming links, and contains no unsubstituted templates"
In short these are mainly IP's who made a few edits, received a warning and then never edited again. I propose we get a bot to delete or blank these pages, for their continued existence serves absolutely no purpose that I can see. Yoenit ( talk) 13:42, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
Sometimes I will make a change and be reverted, so I start a discussion on the article talk page as per the BRD cycle. Obviously I want to make sure the user who reverted me is aware of this discussion and hopefully they contribute to it. Is there a template available to request a comment on the topic that I can post on the user's talk page? The {{talkback}} template is close, but I'm not sure it is appropriate in these cases since it implies the discussion is only for that user. – CWenger ( talk) 04:12, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
From Wikipedia:Sticky notes One thing that Wikipedia could definitely use is Sticky notes
This is the right place to get thoughts/suggestions on this, right?
-
Tesseract2 (
talk) 20:27, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Many times when I want to click on "Show preview," I keep on forgetting and click "Save page." There could be a confirmation popup that prevents this something like:
Are you sure you want to make this edit? ☑ Don't show this message again
173.183.79.81 ( talk) 01:39, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
The advantage of date linking was the autoformatting for people with a strong preference for a specific date format – or a strong aversion to some other format. The main disadvantage (IMO) is lots of pointless links. Another stated disadvantage is that autoformatting may conceal date-format inconsistencies if some dates on a page are autoformatted while others are not – but on the other hand, date-format inconsistencies arise anyway, and could actually be reduced by consistent use of autoformatting.
The idea is simple (even if its implementation may not be): use template markup, like {{15 January 1900}}
, for dates to be autoformatted according to a user's preferences, like {{#formatdate:15 January 1900}}
does now – without creating a link. So {{15 January 1900}}
and {{January 15, 1900}}
would display the same for a given user, and differently for another user with a different date-format preference.
This would then mean that "normal" templates, living in template namespace, cannot have a name that is a date (currently only the redirect page {{
September 11}}
, I think, which is linked to from only a few pages, but I haven't checked all names of the form YYYY-MM-DD
). This is, I feel, a minor issue; we can also have no template {{
PAGENAME}}
etcetera.
I don't want to raise a discussion here on whether this is a good idea or not, but rather on whether this is something worth discussing – perhaps it has been proposed elsewhere before and beaten to death with a frozen trout, or there is an obvious showstopper that I've overlooked – and if so, what is the appropriate forum, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), or someplace else? -- Lambiam 12:00, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
see topic moved to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#Translating_Articles_into_Multiple_languages.27_Wikipedias from its origin at the Village Pump, as suggested by Vgmddg, including subsections:
which includes subsubsections:
Notice to discuss it here also given at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta_talk:Babylon#Translating_Articles_into_Multiple_languages.27_Wikipedias
Attention: Before we continue building on this idea I ask that we move this topic to Meta-Wiki or another location where we can get input from other language wikis. This idea will not work otherwise. Thank you. -- vgmddg ( look | talk | do) 22:31, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Pandelver ( talk) 21:36, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
Has anyone proposed having planning conferences for projects dedicated to specific (say) category of articles?
The idea would be to produce a plan for editing a range of articles in a category so they would all be consitent in presentation.
Such a conference would offer a way to resolve, or at least mitigate many conflicts that arise when no prior discussion had taken place.
In technical terms it would require halting all editing on all articles until conclusion of the conference.
The conference would be conducted (say) over a period of a month, allowing even the busiest of editors to attend.
In a rather bold suggestion I would say that even indefinitely blocked editors that had contributed to the subject area in a positive way could be allowed to attend under certain provisions KoakhtzvigadMobile ( talk) 02:58, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Would it be possible to automatically format articles so that census data is automatically updated? Example:
"Bigfoot is a census-designated place (CDP) in Frio County, Texas, United States. The population was 304 at the 2000 census. "
Obviously, that information is 11 years old and could be updated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.171.166.191 ( talk) 06:47, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
The last few years Wikipedia has gone through major improvements in making the articles more reliably sourced. However, at this frequently start to appear with images, in particular maps. For example here the reliability of a map is discussed. At the moment there does not appear to be a structure in place to allow referencing for pictures, making it in this case problematic to keep the map (although if appropriately sourced the map would illustrate the point perfectly).
My suggestion would be to start working for a way to, and guidelines emphasising the importance of sourcing pictures, preferably at the picture (file or wikimedia page) to allow usage across wikipedia. Arnoutf ( talk) 12:09, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
The idea shown here (NYT) of two pictures with an adjustable slidey-thing... would allow all kinds of fascinating encyclopaedic images - especially historic pictures, showing how a view had changed over the years.
I know it'd be hard to line up two images, find two that 'matched', and all that stuff... but still... I think there is potential.
Ariel views of geo places, in particular, are one of the few types of pic that actually are often CC or PD.
I realise it can sort-of be done with an animated GIF oscillating between two, but that's not the same; ti's the interactive aspect which is nice. And I wouldn't have thought it'd be that hard to implement, really; it's just showing 2 pics and allowing a scroll. Chzz ► 15:21, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
gallery
tag is looked upon as if it were a disease by the Manual of Style. Still, I reckon it might be a good addition for Portals (even if they're
not as well-used as some might like). Or we could get MOS changed, but it's more likely the world will stop turning.
狐 FOX 11:17, 16 March 2011 (UTC)Currently, to view page view statistics for an article one must click on the "History" tab, then the "Page view statistics" tab. This allows viewers to see page views for the current month, with the option of viewing previous months using the search feature along the bottom. I am doing this constantly, mostly out of curiosity. Pages can receive page view spikes due to Main Page appearances, current events, social media, etc. I have no idea if this is something that could be programmed or implemented, but I think it would be so helpful if talk pages had a way of displaying the date in which that article received the highest number of page views (along with the number of page views, obviously).
This could be done with a banner, or an added parameter to the ArticleHistory template. Something along the lines of: "This article received the greatest number of page views, with XXX (the # of views), on XMonth XDay, XYear." This detail could be displayed below the "Article milestones" section of the ArticleHistory template. The page view number could link to the appropriate "Page view statistics" month so that viewers could see the spike in viewership.
Again, I have no idea if this idea is feasible or not. Can a bot determine the greatest number of page views an article has received, and when? Would a bot be able to add this information to the ArticleHistory template? Would editors have to update the talk pages manually much like the DYK Statistics page is maintained? If so, readers would have no way of knowing whether the statistic was accurate or not.
I bring this idea to the lab for other contributors to process and provide feedback. Thanks for any insight! (Also, please let me know if more detail or explanation is required--sometimes I speak type before thinking!) --
Another Believer (
Talk) 22:45, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
"I am doing this constantly, mostly out of curiosity" - this is exactly why I wouldn't be in support of such an addition; it adds nothing to the encyclopedia other than a YouTube-esque 'what's popular' stat. The only people I can see being interested in this are regular editors (who'll therefore know about grok.se) or the press when reporting on something. And they can find it themselves, the lazy sods. 狐 FOX 11:12, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm struggling to work out if there is any point in portals. I looked at some page view statistics and compiled this little table:
Page | Page views | Portal views |
---|---|---|
Philosophy | 7,099,200 | 341,407 |
Christianity | 8,488,131 | 302,499 |
Java (software platform) | 497,101 | 33,120 |
Linux | 7,822,309 | 88,783 |
Does anyone actually use portals? It would seem that the article is the portal. WP:P says they are "useful entry-points to Wikipedia content". Compared to 'see also' sections and the category system, are they actually doing that job effectively? Do portals need to be rethought?
I looked at the source of a portal as I was thinking about making one for a topic I'm interested in and it was... pretty intimidating to edit. — Tom Morris ( talk) 01:46, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
It's no secret that we sometimes misreport information badly during disasters and other breaking news events, and a few recent examples led me to put together a userspace draft of an essay about my thoughts on it. But backing up for a moment, I'm not sure that this is the right direction for communicating this information, the right venue, etc. So, just to kick around the bigger questions--do I make a case there that there is actually a problem? If so, is an separate essay the right direction to head to it? Is this better left as an essay that can be referred to, or is woud it make sense to pursue a guideline or such? Are there alternative ways of looking at making the situation better that I haven't concerned? What is staring me in the face that I'm missing? -- joe decker talk to me 19:59, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
Interesting thoughts and it's good to read an essay on it. But much of it is common sense, or already included in current guidelines so I don't think another guideline is needed. Some thoughts of my own:
Several excellent points here, I'm going to just do a consolidated reply.
One final note, on the whole, I have been very impressed with our average results on breaking news articles. We get an enormous amount of information into articles quickly and with a lot of sensible discussion. My concern relates to a disproportionately small fraction of edits that are harmful, not through vandalism but through lack of common sense, and was in no way meant to impune the excellent work that's been done. -- joe decker talk to me 01:06, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
So far, with all the smartphones I have had, it has not been possible to upload a photo taken onto Wikipedia straight from the phone.
Does anyone support making this somehow possible? Does anyone think it can be done? Sebwite ( talk) 05:26, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
There is an iPhone app for uploading photos straight to Commons; see mw:WikiSnaps. Regards, Rock drum Ba-dum Crash (Driving well?) 19:52, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
How can we get all cities' info to update to the latest Census 2010 data?
Is this left up to the respective cities?
Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.52.60.195 ( talk) 20:21, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
See here for previous discussion and here for latest talk on evolution.
This could be ready to be looked at again; some more input and insight might very well be all that's needed to get it, if not off the ground, then at least flapping its wings with a view to taking off. Pesky ( talk) 17:24, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
Many great sources have had their materiel incorporated into Wikipedia only haphazardly. If we could create project page's for important sources we can make sure their materiel is incorporated consistently into relevant articles. 173.128.76.48 ( talk) 18:48, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
On some pages there are some really large tables. And they need to be of that size to be useful. But it would be beneficial to be able to search the table without having to resort to keeping track of rows, columns and repeated sorting to find the right data. I hope extracting and sorting continue to be the only option to get efficient use of large tables? Electron9 ( talk) 12:59, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
In page histories - like this one - how about, if the "Browse history" box allowed us to filter edits for a specific user name? "Only show edits by user: < box >"?
It would make it much easier to find ones own contribs - or those of others - to specific forums; I think it would be especially handy on noticeboards such as WP:AN, WP:RSN and suchlike - and on user talk pages, to see what we'd added historically.
Alternatively / as well, Special:Contributions could allow filtering for a specified page.
I wouldn't think such an option would be terribly difficult to implement. Chzz ► 15:24, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
It occurred to me that SecurePoll could be used for anonymous opinion polling, and I think that could be useful to do in some situations. I would exclude policy questions or anything related to content, rather it should be to gauge the community's view on a particular situation, such as dispute resolution, arbitration, BLP enforcement, NPOV enforcement, deletion, RFA, etc. This would give us a measure of the satisfaction of the community on particular areas and could guide us in determining which need adjustments. Cenarium ( talk) 23:51, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
It'd be great if there was a way to find that out easily. Imagine Reason ( talk) 04:27, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Good daytime to any person reading this letter.
From Russia with respect.
I have an idea.
The name for it is "Wikideas". 'Pedia-based thing, made for posting invention projects/blueprints as articles. In my mind, it doesn't requires any special changes and differenses from Wikipedia and "serial Wiki-source": projects are same as articles, in fact - same "changes", same "history", same "discussion".
This idea came into my head, when I found by experience, that a lot of sci-fi\encyclopedias readers have a lot of things and ideas to say and post - but there is no right place to post an idea to let anybody else use it....
Sincerely, James D. Gloodun
P.S. I am one of those mentioned "sci-fi readers." Also, very often such people have a lot of scientific knowledge - but it is very fragmented, through deep.
Anyway, answer this letter, please. I has sum moar sots.
P.P.S. Anyway, if I will make it "by my own", how can I send it to you for your putting it into Wikimedia Projects page?
P.P.P.S. I would like to put some "karma" or even "levels" features... but it's not necessary. Well, will I be able to put it by my own later? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.41.32.120 ( talk) 19:09, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Binomial name - this phrase means 'two-name name' and is commonly used in natural history taxoboxes. Does anyone else think it absurd and contradictory? Perhaps "binomial tag", "binomial label" or "binomial reference"? Androstachys ( talk) 14:36, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
"* Some people deprecate use of binomial and advocate use only of binominal in this context. Synonyms
If http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/cgi/reprint/6/1/43.pdf has been accepted by the scientific world, why is WP still using the deprecated form? Androstachys ( talk) 19:03, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
What do people think of this proposal, available here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.38.34.86 ( talk) 11:46, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
I would like to consider viability, and development options for creating a page where a user can edit information confidentially. I think it could serve for developing content that you don't want considered until fully refined, and if you decide not to move forward, no one would be wiser for knowing you had considered developing an ANI or RFC, or were considering RfA because they noticed you preparing a nomination statement, or many other reasons. Of course there needs to be some element who can access it as a check and balance, but the entire admin corp may be larger than necessary. I would support the checkuser group as sufficient to maintain the institutional goals in balance with confidentiality. My76Strat ( talk) 01:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Hello people of Village pump!
I am interested, for a long time, the history of the Americas and I've worked a lot on wikipedia articles related to that topic. I realized that, since a long time, all governors of states like Texas, New Mexico and Florida have articles on wikipedia since those states joined the United States, while only a few colonial governors of those states had them, so I thought it would be nice to all colonial governors of those states also have articles on wikipedia, because they are a bit forgotten in this encyclopedia. I've already looked for information and I've edited articles the some of these governors and I ask that, if interested, you also collaborate on editing articles from other governors of those states. The names of the governors of Texas, New Mexico and Florida are on the lists Royal Governor of La Florida, Spanish governors of New Mexico, List of Texas Governors and Presidents.
That is my proposal!
-- Isinbill ( talk) 19:52, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
I uploaded a logo using the upload link then the logo template, meticulously (though less meticulously than was necessary some years ago) filled out the fair use rationale, and forgot to add the {{Non-free logo}} template because it's easy to forget and the logo upload page doesn't enforce some copyright tag or even go so far as to include it for you. All well and good until three minutes later, I get a smack on my talk page. If that upload had been my first action, I would probably be pretty put out by now and just go back to not contributing. I suggested we ought to have a friendler way of resolving this particular licensing issue on the editor's talk page, and he's agreed there should be a better way and suggested bringing the issue to the Village Pump.
Can we change the upload form to make it require a license or make the logo upload include {{Non-free logo}} by default since it already includes the fair use rationale, or otherwise address the problem without a brash template for a little oversight? -- ke4roh ( talk) 01:53, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
I came across a wiki page for a NZ swimmer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall_Barry), but the 'reference' link was pointing to a dead domain. I figured out that the ' http://www.commonwealthgames.org.nz' domain has since been relocated to ' http://www.olympic.org.nz/'. Their website has also been upgraded, so the original URL format no longer works.
I fixed the reference link for "Lyall Barry", but there are still 361 other wiki pages that have a reference link pointing to ' http://www.commonwealthgames.org.nz/Athletes/AthleteProfile/********'.
Here are the search results: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&redirs=0&search=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.commonwealthgames.org.nz%2FAthletes%2FAthleteProfile&limit=500&offset=0
So my question is: Is there a conventional way to update dead links in bulk?
If not, I would like to write a script to do this. The script would edit each of the 361 pages, and replace the old link with the fixed one. The URL replacement would be done with a regular expression, as follows:
wiki_title_as_url = wiki_title.downcase.gsub(" ", "-").(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/, '-').gsub(/\([^)]*\)/, "").strip wiki_content.gsub(/((http:\/\/)?www.commonwealthgames.org.nz\/Athletes\/AthleteProfile\/[^ ]*)/, " http://www.olympic.org.nz/nzolympic/athlete/" << wiki_title_as_url)
Does this sound reasonable, and will I have to get this approved by a moderator first? — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Nathan.f77 (
talk •
contribs) 04:46, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
As a fellow Wikipedian, I'm always on here browsing and editing but after a while, all that endless White on Wikipedia can really make your eyes burn. So, I purpose we create a new Dark/Night skin for Wikipedia, (similar to the one on Wowpedia.org) which can be turned On/Off via a link next to the (Read / Edit / View history) section at the top. AnimatedZebra ( talk) 13:34, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a lot of public data about campaign finance for both legislators and legislation. There are a few organizations who are also developing better tools to access this information. One group is maplight.org that provides an API.
This idea concerns the feasibility and appropriateness of running a bot to regularly insert this campaign finance data into legislator and legislation articles already on Wikipedia. I think it could fit quite nicely as a new set of entries or a single entry in article infoboxes.
As a newer Wikipedian, I'd love any thoughts or questions! If you know of any similar projects, I was not able to locate them so please tell me. Mattsenate ( talk) 01:26, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Dear people at Wikipedia,
I use Wikipedia frequently. I have the following comments:
Thanks. A user from India. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.164.154.239 ( talk) 03:54, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I've noticed that templates to Support, Oppose, Agree, say Yes, No, Maybe do not exist on English Wikipedia. On Wikiversity, this serves to clarify Proposals/Dsicussions a great load, where there are things like: Support . Or are we just not using them? - Richardofoakshire [talk] 10:48, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
For years, when I had visited Wikipedia pages about locations and people with Arabic names, I had seen the names written in Arabic script in the lead sentences, followed by a Romanization of the Arabic text. The Romanization was formatted in a specific style, which has been used elsewhere online and in print, and which has few diacritics and modified letters (I think only the ayin symbol, the apostrophe to represent hamza, a few consonants with dots under them, and the macron over long vowels were used apart from the basic Latin alphabet). Recently, however, I have seen a different Romanization style appearing on Wikipedia pages about Arab-related subjects here and there. For example, the pages on Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas al-Musawi. This style is markedly different and uses obscure, strange characters (sometimes even underlined, or with diacritics such as breves and accents) that are sometimes never used to represent the sound that they are used to Romanize and are not typically used in Arabic name transliteration. For example, Hassan Nasrallah's name is often spelled "Hasan Nasrallah" but never, outside of Wikipedia, as "Hɑsɑn Nɑƨrʋăllªe" (ditto for "Oɑbbás alMúsɑuí" being used to mean Abbas al-Musawi - why need an "O" to spell Abbas?). There is no need for a superscript, underlined "a" followed by an "e" to Romanize one vowel sound, and this isn't followed in common practice with names that include that sound, either (including Nasrallah's). Meanwhile, on pages such as Hamas and Mecca, the simpler Romanization is used, leading to confusion over what format is considered standard on Wikipedia. If it isn't obvious, I oppose the strange and unnecessary Romanization of Arabic with backwards letters and alpha symbols (I know, that isn't what it is encoded as in the Unicode set, but that's still what it's modeled after), because those aren't typically used and there is no reason to utilize a nearly unused Romanization standard that contains some characters that won't appear on all Latin charsets. But, for clarification, what is the standard on Wikipedia, and if there is none still existing, shouldn't there be? 96.26.213.146 ( talk) 08:28, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
I was wondering if there would be any interest in a "Block noticeboard"?
I know that, currently, some blocks are discussed on AN/I, but... that's an awfully "political" method of dealing with things, isn't it?
—
V = IR (
Talk •
Contribs) 14:19, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
I find IPA too complicated. When seeing an article with a pronunciation guide the symbols make no sense to me whatsoever. Take the article on Jules Verne for example. The pronunciation guide is French pronunciation: [ʒyl vɛʁn]. To get the pronunciation, I had to go to the IPA-French link and bounce back and forth to find the symbols. A simple (J(Je)ool Vehrn) would have done for me and I'd guess quite a good deal more people who really don't want to bounce from page to page to find out a simple pronunciation. In fact, I only did the tedious process because I needed to put down a simplified pronunciation. Could we not start putting simplified pronunciations like these on pages? — Calisthenis (Talk) 22:26, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
The Wiki engine is used by lots of sites, and I'd like to suggest a variation that some sites might find useful.
Take a nonfiction book in electronic form. I'm thinking about something where marginalia and other comments would be important—think any of the “annotated” books like Martin Gardner's "The Annotated Alice," for example. It could be an important literary work by Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or James Joyce. Or maybe an ancient work like the Bible, the Iliad, or the epic of Gilgamesh.
This is clumsily doable today. You could chop the work into chapters and anyone could respond like they do to a blog. There could be different threads on different topics. But a long thread with several people bickering back and forth endlessly is not at all like a paragraph or two neatly summarizing the facts and any controversy like you’d have in a Wikipedia article.
Some ideas: - You’d want to be able to read just the book text without any commentary. - Comments could be in categories that might vary by the book (“Chess” might be one for "Through the Looking Glass," for example). Readers could select which kinds of annotations to be visible. - There might be short notes to the side (I’m thinking of how Microsoft Word shows additions with Track Changes) or long ones, perhaps added at the end of a section. - The “annotated” books themselves might give ideas for how this might look on the screen. Here's a list: http://amzn.to/kNvv2Y —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seidensticker ( talk • contribs) 17:52, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
If I'm travelling I use my Eee PC. It has a tiny screen which makes reading Wiki articles with lots of "Improve the references" type tags hard to see. Reading the J. Robert Oppenheimer article recently, I noticed the clickable "Audio version" button and spent the next few minutes happily cleaning house while I learned something. But the button came with a caution that it was out of date. Would it be possible to have for every article a button which fires the text off to some speech engine like Festival, and returns a spoken version?
Preferably one which doesn't spend the first five minutes telling you to improve the article! -- Sdoradus ( talk) 10:26, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
During the partnership between Wikimedia projects and the château de Versailles, some actions are set in order to facilitate wikipedians work. Today, I'm offering you a new challenge.
This challenge is global and fairly simple : one defined day, I propose to indicate to the volunteers one article related to the palace. Then, they have to take pleasure in improving the selected article as well as possible during 24 hours. Of course, in order to make the participation easy for everyone, from everywhere in the world, the article will also be selected for its available on-line resources or books that can be easily found in a majority of well-stocked libraries, in French and/or English (we are lucky for this : the palace of Versailles has a great bibliography in English language !).
The challenge will be shared by the several people in the castle were formed to contribute to Wikipedia. These specialists currently contribute (when they have time), and of course they will be notified to participate in the adventure. During this challenge, I'll also be there as a resource person. This 24 hours challenge is a good way to promote the collaborative work and the characteristic ability to synthesize which defines the wikipedians.
I hope this project will inspire you ! I you are interested, or have ideas, I have opened a special page about it.
Thanks, Trizek here or on wpfr 10:12, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
I understand that Wikipedia is not censored so I would like to create this proposal:
All images containing nudity should be covered using the "hidden" template. The section header for the hidden template would be a warning label of some sort. This would hide them from users who want to do the research without the images, but would still keep them on the site. I have included an example of how this would work on this sandbox page. The version without the hidden file is here. Ryan Vesey ( talk) 18:15, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I think some of the rejection of the suggestion has been phrased a little more aggressively than it might have been, but my guess is that Ryan's not too delicate to cope with that OK. I do actually think that there is a good point behind Ryan's suggestion. It is a fact that some people are disturbed by seeing unexpected nudity. I am not, but even I have recently seen an image on Wikipedia that frankly I would rather not have seen: it was not just nudity, but an extreme sexual act. Like Ryan, I accidentally came across it in the course of anti-vandalism work. In fact if I thought there were any reasonable way of implementing this I would be in favour. It is not censorship, as the images would still be there, and anyone who wanted to see them would be free to do so. However, unfortunately I think there would be too many problems. There would be arguments about what to exclude, the "where do we draw the line " problem that has already been mentioned. There would be editors who simply didn't use the hiding mechanism. Ryan mentions coming across such images in the course of antivandalism work (as I have), but unfortunately I can't see a vandal using the hiding mechanism, so that reason is irrelevant. Also "children may be using the website" is not convincing, because most children I have ever known would immediately click the link as soon as they knew there was something hidden there. In fact in my opinion as far as simple nudity is concerned, children using Wikipedia is a reason for not doing this, as I think it is far better for children to learn that nudity is OK, and nothing to hide, rather than the "hee hee, look at this dirty picture that's hidden here! Hee hee" view which would be encouraged by hiding the images in the suggested way. As for photographs of extreme sexual activities, I do feel uncomfortable about children coming here and seeing them (call that "outdated conservative morals" if you like), but as long as the policy is that Wikipedia is not censored I don't see anything we can do to prevent it happening: certainly this proposal would not stop children from seeing them. So, in summary: I am more sympathetic to this idea than anyone else who has commented so far (apart of course from Ryan Vesey who proposed it) but unfortunately I think there are too many practical problems. JamesBWatson ( talk) 20:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm sorry if you don't appreciate being told honestly what your idea is. That's not really my problem, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The idea is terrible. If I were to say anything else, I would be lying. As for removal of content, Wikipedia is also dead-set against hiding content--see also spoilers, and the endless perennial arguments that plot details (e.g.) should be hidden. That always gets shot down too.
Rd232, I don't really care if you don't like my tone. I don't like yours either, nor do I like your insistence that hiding images is somehow beneficial to readers. But note that only one of us made a personal comment about it...
Auto-playing sound/video are very different things, as you well know; sound and video take up more bandwidth than images. Auto-playing either would slow page renders, which is an objective problem for people on slower connections. The classification of images into 'this is a nude body part' or 'this is a dead body' is not difficult, I agree; it is the value judgements applied to them that is a problem. Well, for the most part; you ignored the Venus de Milo example given above. Is that pornography or art? If it's art, then how about Mapplethorpe's photos? Or the paintings of Joanne whatsername, starts with a Y I think, paints explicit male nudes. Art or porn? Ayers Rock? You ignored that too. You know full well exactly how horrific the wars over this sort of image classification would be; you've been here far too long to pretend otherwise.
The irony of you complaining that I ignored your argument is... well.. sad. Anyway, this idea won't be succeeding, thankfully, so I don't really see any point in continuing this discussion. Hiding 'offensive' images (and again, you've really blatantly ignored several categories I've put forth that many would consider offensive) is just a leap down the slippery slope to removing them entirely. Once again: it is not Wikipedia's responsibility to police what hits your retinas. That is your responsibility, or that of your parent/legal guardian. Not ours. → ROUX ₪ 01:40, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Well it is the question I thought I was asking, since bandwidth wasn't on the table as an issue, and the context was a discussion about the acceptability of giving users control over content display. Rd232 talk 03:19, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
It seems to me like my proposal is moot like Roux said, unless the new system does not turn out how we expect it to. I have also been looking at Roux's argument for a third party application. Not everybody can use Huggle, so I am proposing this:
The Wikimedia Foundation should give millions of dollars to 3m. 3M would then agree to send every single Wikipedia user Post-it notes. The users can then use the post-it notes to cover inappropriate images on their screen while at work or studying with their children. This would be especially conforming with Roux's argument because it is, expensive, it is inconvenient, and it involves no system that is conveniently placed on Wikipedia for people to use to set their own content filter. Ryan Vesey ( talk) 13:39, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
The pictures in anatomy related articles all have pictures that appear to be from one source. Would it be possible to highlight the actual anatomy part that the wiki article is about? The font of the labels are difficult to read, so highlighting (or somehow showing the actual anatomy-part-of-interest) would be very helpful. Thanks.Eve 06:13, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello, one small suggestion, the size of the pages are based only in the preferences of some users. What about making a button where you can decide if this page is good/bad, too small/OK, partial/impartial and even important/irrelevant. One way is only make able to use this button the registered users. Or, for be more impartial and receive information from the majority of the users (not only the registered), give all the viewers that right.
In any case, is this a good idea??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Miguelinileugim ( talk • contribs) 14:30, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello all,
This idea occurred to me a few days ago. I just looked through the perennial proposals and this area's archives and didn't see anything like it, sorry if I've missed it even so.
The autopatrolled user right helps reduce the workload for new page patrollers. I was wondering whether a similar user right that prevents recent changes from appearing in Special:RecentChanges would similarly benefit recent change patrollers? Editors in good standing might be granted this right and thus be trusted to edit articles without burdening the recent change patrol team.
Possible disadvantages I can see include:
However, I assume similar questions arose during the debut of the autopatrolled, rollback, and reviewer user rights, so we might have an ideal how to address them.
Criteria to grant the right might be similar to those for the existing autopatrolled, rollback, and reviewer user rights.
Changes would of course still show up in the other usual places like the edit history and watch lists.
Would welcome comment to see whether this is worth looking into further.
Cheers, Northumbrian ( talk) 16:19, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the more detailed explanation of why this isn't feasible Yoenit. I admit my knowledge of how the WMF software works approaches zero so I learned something. Northumbrian ( talk) 20:02, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
As we all know, Wikimedia takes pride in not covering the site in advertisements. Ads take up screen space, are obstructive to readers, and are generally just annoying to see. As more and more time passes, this is exactly how I feel about the cleanup templates. I am not saying at all that we should get rid of them, but I think we need to find a way to greatly reduce them in space used — closer to what is used for {{ Expand section}} with the ability to place them side by side rather than only each below the next.
Think of it this way: we don't want ads on the site because then every page would begin with something like this...
...but many pages needing more than the most basic cleanup already start with something like this... {{Multiple issues}}
How is this visually any more acceptable, particularly for non-editors who only visit to find a bit of information? — CobraWiki ( jabber | stuff ) 23:01, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
This article needs
references. |
I'm with Roux. Essentially, the ugliness is functional. Rd232 talk 19:12, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
(First, on a side note, reading my posts I know that the tone of my typically-long ones can sound a bit snobbish; I assure you that is not the intent. My apologies in advance, though, just in case.) I can see Roux's point, but I think the only reason for validity is because it is what we are used to seeing. On the "Feature Articles" is a little icon in the upper right hand corner. Typically the same is true for admins' pages. We also receive those administrative notices in or watch lists that we can dismiss when we choose. None of them are large, yet I doubt they go unnoticed by the majority. It's not about size; it's about effectiveness. The two aren't always the same. Mentioning again the two examples shown here already:
This section needs expansion. You can help by
adding to it. |
This article needs
references. |
Can we not see those? Do we think that others cannot see them? What do the larger templates give except for an extended explanation of the template's purpose which is essentially the same as what the link always found in each template provides? If the person doesn't know what "Needs references" means, they can click the link and find out. They don't need it mentioned in the template along with a link visible in the same template for them to click to tell them the exact same thing in more detail. — CobraWiki ( jabber | stuff ) 22:03, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
I liked that point that banners end up sitting for months or years, even after the problems are gone, or of decidedly little interest even to the person who made the banner. Maybe these are good reasons that banners should evolve over time to get smaller?-
Tesseract2 (
talk) 20:36, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help us improve it if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. |
This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. You can assist by editing it. |
This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite it from a neutral point of view. Blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, should be marked for speedy deletion. using {{db-spam}}. |
Please expand this article using the suggested source(s) below. More information might be found in a section of the talk page. |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. It's need: copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling • rewriting from a neutral point of view. (Blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, should be marked for speedy deletion. using {{db-spam}}) • expanding by using the suggested source(s) below. Please help us improve it if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. |
Hmm? Przykuta ( talk) 17:21, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
Finally, sombody said what I've been feeling for more than a year now. All these "missing citations", "disputed", "should be merged" and similar notices are ugly, distracting, and gives Wikipedia a really unprofessional appearance. I did a short test: I clicked the "Random Article" 10 times. Out of these 10 random pages, 6 (!) had these large warning messages on them, 3 were stubs (very short articles), and only 1 a normal warning-less article... What is most annoying is that in many cases, several people worked hard and wrote a nice article, and then comes along one person who decides that this article needs citations, or whatever, and just tags it - and then this ugly banner stays around for years... If you want to add citations, do it. If you think there's an error, correct it - or remove the erronous statement. Or write about in the talk page. But what good do these banners do???? I say, ban these banners! Nyh ( talk) 10:03, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps the various tags could be replaced with icons located to the immediate right of the article title.
What I envisage is icons of the same font size as the article title, and in the form of a relevant image covered by a red crossed circle. The nature of each icon may be stated as alternative text (e.g. "This article needs...").
To avoid too many such icons, the current tags could be simplified down to a handful. For example, the orphan and dead end tags could be subsumed into a insufficient links icon. And all the references, refimprove, unreferenced, references-blp tags, some of which duplicate each other, could be subsumed into a insufficient references icon.
When adding an icon, an editor could be forced to enter a concern parameter indicating what is wrong. The concern, (in either WP:USETEMP or tag form) could then be automatically entered into the talk page. Once saved, each icon may then act as a link to the relevant section in the talk page. After all, shouldn't these sorts of tags be on the talk page. Isn't that what the talk page is for. How many times have we come across a tagged article and found that the talk page hasn't yet been created or if it has, it was only to add it to a WikiProject.
The obvious criticism I can see of this idea is that icons may be less noticeable than tags. However, considering how dominating tags can be, almost anything would be less noticeable. Nonetheless, I think readers would soon notice these icons as they wouldn't appear identically on every page if at all. And, of course, serving the same function as tags, they'd still add articles to hidden categories.
LordVetinari ( talk) 03:22, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I just re-read User:Shanes/Why tags are evil and it seems he already mentioned icons there. Must have been at the back of my mind when I thought of the idea described above. Thought I'd add this in case I get accused of stealing ideas. LordVetinari ( talk) 05:08, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I was asked by CobraWiki to give my views on this. I believe strongly that turning tags meant for editors into small icons would be an improvement. Tags that warn readers about factual controversy or bias are ok, I think. But all those "fix-me" tags nagging about whatever someone felt like nagging about is not worth the distraction and article ugliness the big boxes bring. The style manual states that articles should begin with defining or explaining the topic. These tags goes against that. In general I'd like article space to be for the readers, and complaints or suggestions to editors on how to improve an article should be made on the talk page, not with big flashy boxes on top of the article. -- Shanes ( talk) 20:41, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
So, umm, I'm not very familiar with this whole Village Pump process. What usually happens next? I'm thinking of moving this discussion to its own page in my userspace so that we can find it more easily. It looks a little lost on this page. LordVetinari ( talk) 07:06, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
I'll plug this here again, as I have in the past whenever the old cleanup tag discussion happens, designed to "lessen" the footprint of tags but still keep some degree of relevancy: User:MuZemike/Cleanup proposal. – MuZemike 20:24, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Article issues: |
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (idea lab). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57
This is pretty much what I wanted for my OmniGadget idea. I basically want something that allows you to quickly and easily add maintenance and infobox templates to pages. Do you think you can make more? -- vgmddg ( look | talk | do) 23:04, 14 December 2010 (UTC)
If a topic has not been covered by Wikipedia it would be neat if a box would appear above or below the ads that normally appear in Google. That box would say something like "This topic has not been covered in Wikipedia. Would you like to contribute information for a new page on the topic?" and another option could be "Would you like to suggest this topic for a new page?"
If someone clicks on the second option, the ideas will go to a page where someone can click on a blue link of that new word that will take them to an editing page for the new word. It would be a interesting way to get people to create new pages, put more information into Wikipedia and can eliminate repeat pages. People like to share information and would love to see a list of ideas of things they could write about.
ex: I type "fishing" into Google and Wiki doesn't have a page for it. It gives me the two options of writing about it or suggesting it. I suggest it and it goes into a list of topics that have not been covered. Someone else wants to write about a new topic, but can't think of one. They go to the page of listed suggestions and find "fishing."
That is how it works. I hope you like it and I hope someone can improve the idea. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.57.96.252 ( talk) 02:04, 16 December 2010 (UTC)
Not sure if this is the right place or not, but with googles expansion into selling e-books I have noticed a lot more self published work appearing in the searches I do there. In the "find sources" template (used in AfD nomination pages and elsewhere) that links to the google books search it already takes out "-inpublisher:icon". I think it would be a good idea to add filters "-inpublisher:Lulu" and other major self publishing houses. Active Banana (bananaphone 16:57, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
If you are in the U.S., you see U.S. spelling variations If you are located in the U.K., you see U.K. spelling variations Etc., Etc.
I think this could be used to end thousands of edit wars in process and thousands of others yet to occur.— Preceding unsigned comment added by TravisMunson1993 ( talk • contribs)
I have seen articles recently on the Mexico City Metro, if you can call them articles, where there no info other than images and templates. I was just wondering whether this would be the right place to propose a template asking people to add text or info, or will {{ expand}} suffice? Simply south ( talk) and their tree 21:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
This discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
---|
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
hello all, i've been anonymously editing wikipedia for many years now, but i am getting really worried about its future. i am finding myself more and more often disabled to edit articles, and i am not talking just about controversial topics, but topics in general. i have an impression that the semi-protected tag is being misused. do other editors have similar experience and impression? what can be done about it? (please do not suggest to create an account as i will not do that). 188.2.48.67 ( talk) 18:15, 23 December 2010 (UTC) I just made a very rough calculation using info from Category:Wikipedia_semi-protected_pages: almost 2000 pages listing about 200 articles each with semiprotection = about 400,000 articles which are semi-protected. that is 10% of all articles in english wikipedia! this to me seems like a clear abuse of this tag. 188.2.48.67 ( talk) 18:26, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
|
Many websites let users rate content and add comments. Perhaps Wikipedia should do so too. The idea would be to display a button or link beside each article, or a tab at the top, that would open a form showing current user ratings and comments, and let readers add their own ratings and comments. For example:
The great majority of readers are not comfortable with editing an article, but would have no problem giving opinions. The feature would open a direct channel of communication from readers to editors. Editor tools would of course be needed to display lists of articles with negative ratings. Articles change, so ratings would have to be aged, counting for less and less as edits accumulate. There is potential for abuse, as with standard editing, so controls would be needed to stop double-voting, ignore voting during surges and so on. But on the whole, listening to the audience seems the right thing to do. Aymatth2 ( talk) 21:27, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
I started the sine article recently, and found there were already 20+ other versions on other language Wikipedias. This got me wondering what other articles exist in multiple other languages but don't appear in English. Has anyone tried to make a list of topics which have not been translated into English, sorted by the number of other language Wikipedias it appears in? Or is anyone willing to try making such a list? Thanks in advance. — Pengo 04:05, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
SELECT page_title, page_len AS "Bytes", COUNT(*) AS "Languages"
FROM page
JOIN langlinks ON ll_from=page_id
LEFT JOIN redirect ON rd_from=page_id
LEFT JOIN langlinks AS enwp ON enwp.ll_from=page_id AND enwp.ll_lang="en"
WHERE enwp.ll_from IS NULL
AND rd_from IS NULL
AND page_namespace=0
AND page_len>5000 /* atleast 5 KB */
GROUP BY page_id
HAVING COUNT(*) > 5
It occurred to me as I was creating an article from a redirect that we have no way (AFAIK) to keep track of new articles created from redirects. They don't show up on Special:NewPages, and I don't know of any other place to look. I think there's a filter or something that highlights a redirect becoming an article, but that's the extent of my knowledge. So what I'm wondering is whether there's a way to keep track of articles created from redirects, a list kinda like new pages or recent changes. The easiest way I can think of is just incorporating that into new pages, but a separate special page would work as well. Now I have no idea whether this is even technically possible, or feasible or anything, it's just a thought that occurred to me. But anyhow, just wondering what other people think (or have thought in previous discussions) about that. C628 ( talk) 00:24, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
Often when viewing "dif" pages it can be hard to exactly find where the changes took place in-article, so I'd generally suggest a change around this, although not replacing the current dif.-- ForgottenHistory ( talk) 23:02, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
look its getting a little old. Jimmy begging me for money.
i give hundreds of hours of labor. i think that's enough.
if someone has >1000 edits for the year or whatever, they should be able to opt out of the fundraising drive.
Decora ( talk) 06:06, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
I would like to have Wikipedia track a watchlist of sorts of articles that I am waiting on to come back to at some point in the future. For example, in an inactive article, I want to make a change, but I want first to give a week to see if anyone discusses my proposed change. It could be a simple list of articles with or without related dates. Drrll ( talk) 12:01, 1 January 2011 (UTC)
I've written an essay called WP:ArbCom reform. I originally posted on the Village Pump proposals page, however I think here is probably more appropriate. Anyway, comments or suggestions are most welcome. PhilKnight ( talk) 13:47, 7 January 2011 (UTC)
A discussion is currently taking place about the MOS recommendation that bulleted lists should be rewritten as prose. It specifically concerns making a possible exception for sections on 'Notable residents' in articles about towns and cities. Your comments are welcome at: Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (embedded lists). Thanks. -- Kudpung ( talk) 02:38, 8 January 2011 (UTC)
There is an option to default all edits to minor within each user's profile.
Some considerable time ago, as I was doing a lot of minor edits, I set this on. I got out of the habit of checking, so even when making major edits (or creating new pages), I was flagging them as minor, until another editor pointed this out to me today.
What would help me is to amend the profile option to offer three possible selections:
Is this feature something that could be developed, and would it be beneficial to other editors? Regards, Lynbarn ( talk) 19:46, 9 January 2011 (UTC)
Many Users have quite dull User Pages. This is because many users don't know how, or don't want to learn how to use wikipedia's code. I think it would be great if we could have a team of willing users who would edit peoples user pages and make them look striking and interesting. I would be willing to join such a team as I believe I am relatively good at editing User Pages (See My User Page). Thanks, Thomas888b ( talk) 21:00, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
The other discussion is now archived. It said to start a new one. I must clarify my ideas. I did not mean just going around editing peoples userpage, you would be a team there to design a user page if somebody asked you to design it. Thomas888b ( talk) 18:51, 18 January 2011 (UTC)
The sheer size and number of policy pages in Wikipedia overwhelms me. Is there a flow chart with yes/no gates anywhere and if not do you think it would be possible or a good idea? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tumadoireacht ( talk • contribs) 15:06, 16 January 2011 (UTC)
I notice that long pages (like two that I keep up with, Cold War and Lima) take a very long time to load. When I'm only looking a diffs between revisions, I typically don't need to have the diffs and the whole page load. I just want to see the edited part at the top. There should be a button or something that will load the "current" page under the diff, if you need it to load for some reason. Otherwise, the rest of the page doesn't need to load. There would be less server load if that happened, and looking through a group of diffs one after the other would be a lot faster. Hires an editor ( talk) 11:12, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
When textual information is displayed in a Wikipedia article, it is displayed as one column (except for tables). But this text is difficult to read because each line is too long. I read somewhere that the optimal length of a line should be about 66 characters, which is why many articles and books are formatted as two or even three columns. I recommend that Wikipedia developers add an option to increase the number of columns displayed for an article. This would make it easier for readers. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 35.10.58.148 ( talk) 23:07, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
javascript:void(appendCSS(".ns-0 #bodyContent{text-align:justify; -moz-column-width:20em; -moz-column-rule: 1px solid #666; -webkit-column-width:20em; -webkit-column-rule: 1px solid #666;}"));
into your address bar on any Wikipedia page. One big problem, AFAIK the floats (infoboxes, thumbnail, quote boxes, etc.) can't knock out parts of a column even with a script rewriting the page. —
Dispenser 04:48, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
It has occurred to me that having the ability to interrupt Autoconfirmed status could be a useful instrument. In particular it seems a user who has been blocked should perhaps not be allowed to resume editing with full privileges when the block expires or is otherwise lifted. I am interested if others would consider this a productive recourse. My76 Strat 04:41, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
I have an idea that often users want to suggest rather than actually put a live edit to a page, so I would propose that some system, whether it be an actual action with a log or a page devoted to this purpose be established. Possibly a system similar to that of pending revisions on certain pages, but this time voluntary and with users endorsing them? This is a raw idea.-- ForgottenHistory ( talk) 22:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
56, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
I've been following along on the WP:ANI discussion of User:Arilang1234 in this section. In short, for those who don't ANI-watch, Arilang is a Chinese editor who has recently been accused of extensive copyright violations. Today, it occurred to me that the problem here may be more cultural than it is editor specific.
It is well known in the field of teaching writing, particularly teaching ESL writing (my professions), that the very concepts of plagiarism and copyright infringement to students of Chinese origin is exceptionally difficult. Please understand that I don't mean this as a slight, but that there is a fundamental difference in the way that (and I generalize here) Westerners focus on the "rights" (intellectual and monetary) associated with "ownership" of a particular text, and Chinese (and others from the region) focus on the importance of preserving accurate knowledge (which, by definition, comes from officially approved, usually traditional, sources). When U.S. writing teachers confront such students with evidence of plagiarism, the students are often proud that they were able to demonstrate that they correctly knew and passed on the "right" information, rather than being shocked the way their teachers think they are supposed to be. In the ANI discussion, some people have mentioned that Arilang doesn't seem to understand what we mean by copyright violations or why its a problem. This seems to me to be exactly like what I've read about in my field.
My question is, assuming that Wikipedia wants to reach out to more editors outside of our traditional Western (especially US) base, what can we/should we do to help them understand what is likely a very difficult issue? As I have few answers, I come here to the lab first, looking for others' thoughts. Qwyrxian ( talk) 05:04, 20 January 2011 (UTC)
Agree absolutely with Qwyrxian. Also I'd notice that in some parts of Europe (I'm Italian) the notion of plagiarism is (and especially was in the past) more nuanced than what happens to be in the US, where it is absolute anathema. More than a university professor in Italy encourages his students to copy introductory sentences when writing papers, simply because "if someone said it best, it is senseless to rewrite it worse". And I myself can't see what is the problem in copying public domain text verbatim -I thought this was one of the advantages of a free encyclopedia, taking advantage of public domain text- but it seems WP:PLAGIARISM thinks otherwise, so ok. -- Cyclopia talk 01:32, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
Wikipedia has a great main page- if I'm not sure what to look for I can check here for interesting stuff. However, first time viewers, and even people, like me, who have used it for a couple years, have a hard time finding certain things. Specifically, the Sandbox and the Editing Tutorial. It's a great place, but until I did a research report on Wikipedia I had no idea it existed! Perhaps someone could make it easier to find. I suggest this:
On the main page, scroll down to Other areas of Wikipedia (it links to the Village Pump and Help Desk). In this area there could be a link to the Sandbox, as well as the Editing Tutorial. Knowing about these made Wikipedia easier to navigate around and understand. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.238.251.2 ( talk) 22:44, 24 January 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps a bot or something could automatically leave a message on your talk page with a list of commonly used links when you make a new account. -- vgmddg ( look | talk | do) 22:56, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
I'm wondering what people around think what Wikipedia might be like at its 15th birthday? I don't want to pose any particular questions, any thoughts and comments welcome. Obviously, we will all come back to this post in 5 years time and see who was right! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 21:48, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
Suggestion: Cross-linking information: Allowing users to create pages that use the same "title", but which exist from different perspectives. Such articles would be "Cross-linked."
Consider Cross-Linking Information. Did you know that one of the "revolutionary" benefits of using a computer is that you can cross-link information (related articles...that are similar, but present information from different perspectives).
For Example.
Consider two colors (black and white).
I am using my Dictionary as my primary source.
Imagine:
"Colors"
Information about colors based upon the "Scientific" study of Light.
The definition from this perspective would look like:
Colors
Black - 1) The achromatic object color of least lightness characteristically perceived to belong to objects that neither reflect nor transmit light. 2). Total or nearly total absence of light.
White: 1) The achomatic object colors of greatest lightness characteristically perceived to belong to objects that reflect diffusely nearly all incident energy throughout the visible spectrum.
This page would be "Cross-Linked" with another (similar) page, aslo called "Colors"
"Colors"
Information about Colors from an Industral or "Everyday" Perspective.
Black - 1). A black pigment or dye. 2) Of or relating to a group or race characterized by dark pigmentation.
White - 1) A white colored product (as flour, sugar or [My insert: white paint, or white pigment]
2) Being a member of a group o race characterized by reduced pigmentation.
"Cross-Linked" with
"Colors"
Colors as defined, or used "symbolically" in Western Literature.
For example:
Black - 1) Soiled, dirty
2) Thourghly evil, wicked. 3) Gloomy, Calamitious.
White: 1) Marked by upright fairness, free from spot or blemish. 2) Innocent 3) Not intended to cause harm (such as a white lie or white magic).
"Cross-Linked" with a similar "Colors" pages such as:
"Colors" as defined or used "Symbolically" in Eastern Literature
"Colors" as defined or used "symbolically" in African Culture and Literature
"Colors" as defined or used "symbolically" in Latin Literature....
My point: I don't think articles with similar (or the same) title is (necessarily) the problem.
I think an electronic (factual) encyclopedia may find that by supporting "electronic-links," they may"cross-link" information and create effective, and unique information layouts.
...can you believe they said (on the Wikipedia site) under Technical Problems: Editing articles of such length that you can't edit them. — C-ritah ( talk • contribs) 23:00, 25 January 2011 (UTC)
I have no idea if this has been discussed before, but would it be possible to implement an auto-refresh of the watchlist page (as it's really tedious to have to click "My watchlist" all the time)? I'm thinking that the default would be to have the current situation, but an option on "My preferences" would permit the auto-refresh to occur. Not sure about the refresh interval, but every ten or fifteen minutes would probably be okay. Cheers. GFHandel . 06:59, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
addOnloadHook(function(){ if(wgPageName=="Special:Watchlist") setInterval("window.reload()", 5*60*1000); });
Thanks. It works with one minor change (had to add "location."):
// Code to reload the Watchlist page automatically (every 5 minutes)
addOnloadHook
(
function()
{
if (wgPageName == "Special:Watchlist")
{
setInterval("window.location.reload()", 5*60*1000);
}
}
);
GFHandel . 20:17, 6 January 2011 (UTC)
I just came up with this idea about telling/reminding Wikipedians to take a break after a long time of non-stop editting. If a Wikipedian edits solidly for more then 45 minutes/one hour, a small message – just like those that appear asking for donations – will appear for a maximum of five minutes, asking them to take a break. The person doesn't have to respond to it – it is there to purely remind them. The idea is to prevent the eyes from prolonged exposure to the screens and allow these people to rest. The person will be given the choice of whether to allow this message to appear, on their My preferences page. Sp33dyphil ( Talk) ( Contributions)(Feed back needed @ Talk page) 06:39, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
We're not our editors' nannies. If someone wants to edit for 48 hours straight it's their own problem, not ours. -- Cyclopia talk 19:19, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
As related to the above " #Time out message", I am trying to think of technical "time-out" limits which would deter POV-pushing without having to resort to debating a user's mindset at WP:AN/I, such as keeping per-article edit-counters on controversial articles. There seems to be a strong connection between POV-pushing and high edit-counts to an article. If a person edits one article excessively, say more than 250 times, then issue a pre-edit warning:
Perhaps the counting could be kept limited, to a relative handful of cases, by anyone setting an "opt-in" for suspicious users, rather than count all users who edit a controversial article. When a person changes usernames, then request an admin to update the new username's article-edit counter to be based from 240 edits (or such), rather than counting from zero.
I don't think admin's repeated reverts would be a problem, since, typically, different admins each take turns fixing one article. However, it might be good to also allow counting admin edits, in case a rogue admin was suspected of POV-pushing, as well. By allowing for per-article edit-counters, then POV-pushing could be deterred without such harsh feelings against the admins. Any thoughts about how many edits to allow, or should the various warning-level counts be set for each article? -
Wikid77 15:29, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
I've been to other Wikis (not part of Wikimedia) and saw hit counters, such as one which displays on the bottom of the page in small text "This page has been accessed [#] times." Those webpages appear much more open than Wikipedia, in the sense you can see which pages were accessed how many times. This can be useful for letting users see which pages need more links, and the effects of how they're written to how often they're read. This is also helpful for detecting orphan articles, so I don't see why not add this feature. Users can also see how often their userpages were accessed, so they wont be wasting their time if no one reads their pages. Negative effects can be removed with an option allowing users to hide the counter from their screen. Unless this causes massive server lag, it should be added. 173.183.66.173 ( talk) 23:00, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Ok here's an idea: We have a Recent Changes Patrol.. We have New Page Patrol... We even have Random Page Patrol, plus a few others.. Well how about organizing and starting a project page for Wikipedia:Pending changes patrol? ( Special:PendingChanges) .. or why not a Wikipedia:New files patrol? ( Special:NewFiles) .. Just throwin' out ideas here, feel free to implement it yourself if interested. -- œ ™ 12:00, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
A related topic, for Recent Changes Patrol (or Special:NewPages), is to remind users to click "earliest" in the list of changes, to focus more users on fixing the older changes which are about to expire from the recent-changes list. Naturally, most people would, instinctively, focus on the new news of changes, so advising people to focus on older changes would help shift the balance to catch the earlier changes before they leave the lists. - Wikid77 09:15, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
01-Feb-2011: After finding many unusual performance problems in templates, I am documenting the performance issues in some utility templates, by adding a section "Performance impact" or similar. The unfortunate essay title " WP:Don't worry about performance" might be causing people to stop ensuring templates work ("perform"), or work without hogging resources ("perform efficiently"). For example, explaining performance in doc subpage Template:Valid/doc:
Many people might, understandably, expect {Valid} to actually reject ALL numbers having excess precision, so I think the doc page needs to say that it fails to reject some extreme numbers. Later, perhaps the template could be improved. Also, the expansion-depth usage of 8 levels seems high (an if-else is 1 level), so that is why revealing "8 levels" is good to know. Although {Valid} seems relatively efficient, other templates have seemed shocking (to me):
Template:Str_find has used expansion-depth 18(!) of 40 to find a left parenthesis "(" in an article title (for
Template:Italic title), so I have written {{
strfind_short}} to find a string using 5 levels instead of 18, and run 3x times faster.
Anyway, the basic idea, for the idea lab, is to start actively documenting performance for those 2 main reasons: reveal if the utility template fails to perform in some cases, and estimate the resource usage (thereby revealing a potential performance problem or "hog"). What I've learned about WP:PERF, over the past 3 years, is: many people imagine nothing matters, or for others, just saying, "Don't worry" does not stop people from worrying, in
superstitious ways, where they won't use the complex measurement converter
Template:Convert because they "fear" it is too big, rather than 8 times smaller than using a single {{
Cite_web}}. By documenting performance, we can overcome the superstitions and help to find better ways to allow larger templates to fit. -
Wikid77 (
talk) 14:37, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Delma —Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.71.240.67 ( talk) 21:11, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
Now I imagine this would need to be worked out with archive.org or some other internet archive out there, but I think there's a real issue of link-rot among cited/referenced external links. Recently I discovered that a UN Document database changed it's url structure, leading to at least a half-dozen broken links in Wikipedia. My idea is that either when someone includes an external link, or more conservatively, whenever someone puts a link in web-cite, an api-call is triggered which causes that page to be archived, thus if someone notices an external link is broken, well, knowing that I know the mechanism is in place I'll go to the archive site. A special bonus in combo with the citation or cite web template could be the auto-filling of the "archive link" field. Now something like this may have been proposed before/might be in place without me knowing, but I simply think this would be an immensely cool way to make sure that information, especially when used to support assertions and arguments is not lost. Jztinfinity ( talk) 05:34, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_External_links/Webcitebot2#Proposal. Rd232 talk 02:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)
If this has already been addressed, my apologies. My cursory search produced no existing pump article. I'm posting this here to develop/refine it before proposal.
According to Erase and rewind (Jeremy Keith) and BBC online website closures (Guardian UK), the BBC is planning on deleting 170 of its in depth programming-related websites. This isn't 170 pages, but an indeterminate number, possibly approaching thousands of pages.
Idea for development: It would be VERY helpful if some skilled Wikipedia API/Python coder could:
1. Using the Guardian list of 170 sites (above), search WP article space for <ref> references containing full or partial links to those doomed BBC websites (which are not already linked to archive.org or WebCitation)
2. Save the results as two lists in an article, a Talk/subpage (or other appropriate venue) for individual editors to repair/update:
2a. Wikipedia:List of articles with doomed BBC links
2b. Wikipedia:List of doomed but actively referenced BBC links - the fully-qualified URL, possibly redirected by the BBC servers. This list exists to aid manual or semiautomatic archiving at WebCitation.
3. Pipe the resulting Wikipedia:List of doomed but actively referenced BBC links to WebCitation's "list of links to archive" API, so that they are pre-archived for future use by editors. Be nice and don't hammer their server.
Of utmost urgency, in my opinion is, (1) and (3). Then repairs can commence at leisure.
-- Lexein ( talk) 04:16, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
There does seem to be a basic misunderstanding of... well everything. If the sites are in aspic, there's no significant maintenance cost - heck I'll host them for free, for the Google hits!
Rich
Farmbrough, 02:59, 13 February 2011 (UTC).
maybe wikipedia should have a fully editable blog to post on. it should be called something that people can remember, so that they can go and post whenever they want to, knowing that nothing of theirs will be deleted from the blogging area. here is my idea for an art blog:
Art blog
Info of the week: Caitlin Fox is an artist who specializes in streetart (grafitti) and classical art. She has kept an art diary ever since she was 10 and fills it with amazing sketches and drafts. an example of her work shall be saved shortly. i shall blog again later after I find some of Caitlin's work in digital format on the internet. stay tuned for more on the art blog, new to the blogging area.
Comments
Jo348-
hey wikipeeps! Love Caitlins work, i've seen it before wit my own eyes,
her art skills are awesome!
Annabelle689-
where did u get that - wikipeeps? - sounds cool. i'm setting up a vote
for if you want an art blog in wikipedia, it may get more viewers:
so far, 163 people like this
Like Dislike
Anza64- i'm definately voting for the art blog, might be interesting. see ya wikipeeps! ya, that is cool, maybe it'll catch on!
Bennyboy6-
hey wikipeeps, it totally caught on! i'm all heads up for the blog
thing, maybe if wikipedia doesnt let you do it, you could make a seperate website!
Annabelle689-
yeah, i'm working on it right now, i'll post the adress in the sandbox, temperary art
blog for now, anyway.
(this is an example)
I contribute to articles on UK East Midland MPs. The area is a keen marginal battleground and the
Politics Show is one of the best ways of seeing a new MP in action.
The most recent is
Nicky Morgan (politician) as
Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Universities minister supporting very large increases in tuition fees. I simply don't have another source comparable in quality or importance but transcripts aren't available except to contributors apparantly due to cost though the souce meets
wp:verifiable requirements.
Betty Logan on
WP:RSN came up with the excellent idea that I could include a transcript on the talk page which I've done. I also have a 1.6Mb MP3 recording which I could email or whatever.
Betty suggested I should ask a couple of volunteers to verify it -and to test people's reaction, yet to be achieved but I am strongly in favour of sources being easily checkable, particularly for
WP:BLP.
FormerIP also suggested putting it forward here. Any comments welcome.
JRPG (
talk) 17:41, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
I just stumbled up on Wikipedia:Database reports/Old IP talk pages. That database report contains "Old IP talk pages where the IP has never been blocked and has not edited in the past year and where the IP's talk page has not had any activity in the past year, has no incoming links, and contains no unsubstituted templates"
In short these are mainly IP's who made a few edits, received a warning and then never edited again. I propose we get a bot to delete or blank these pages, for their continued existence serves absolutely no purpose that I can see. Yoenit ( talk) 13:42, 2 March 2011 (UTC)
Sometimes I will make a change and be reverted, so I start a discussion on the article talk page as per the BRD cycle. Obviously I want to make sure the user who reverted me is aware of this discussion and hopefully they contribute to it. Is there a template available to request a comment on the topic that I can post on the user's talk page? The {{talkback}} template is close, but I'm not sure it is appropriate in these cases since it implies the discussion is only for that user. – CWenger ( talk) 04:12, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
From Wikipedia:Sticky notes One thing that Wikipedia could definitely use is Sticky notes
This is the right place to get thoughts/suggestions on this, right?
-
Tesseract2 (
talk) 20:27, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Many times when I want to click on "Show preview," I keep on forgetting and click "Save page." There could be a confirmation popup that prevents this something like:
Are you sure you want to make this edit? ☑ Don't show this message again
173.183.79.81 ( talk) 01:39, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
The advantage of date linking was the autoformatting for people with a strong preference for a specific date format – or a strong aversion to some other format. The main disadvantage (IMO) is lots of pointless links. Another stated disadvantage is that autoformatting may conceal date-format inconsistencies if some dates on a page are autoformatted while others are not – but on the other hand, date-format inconsistencies arise anyway, and could actually be reduced by consistent use of autoformatting.
The idea is simple (even if its implementation may not be): use template markup, like {{15 January 1900}}
, for dates to be autoformatted according to a user's preferences, like {{#formatdate:15 January 1900}}
does now – without creating a link. So {{15 January 1900}}
and {{January 15, 1900}}
would display the same for a given user, and differently for another user with a different date-format preference.
This would then mean that "normal" templates, living in template namespace, cannot have a name that is a date (currently only the redirect page {{
September 11}}
, I think, which is linked to from only a few pages, but I haven't checked all names of the form YYYY-MM-DD
). This is, I feel, a minor issue; we can also have no template {{
PAGENAME}}
etcetera.
I don't want to raise a discussion here on whether this is a good idea or not, but rather on whether this is something worth discussing – perhaps it has been proposed elsewhere before and beaten to death with a frozen trout, or there is an obvious showstopper that I've overlooked – and if so, what is the appropriate forum, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)/Date autoformatting, Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals), or someplace else? -- Lambiam 12:00, 6 March 2011 (UTC)
see topic moved to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Babel#Translating_Articles_into_Multiple_languages.27_Wikipedias from its origin at the Village Pump, as suggested by Vgmddg, including subsections:
which includes subsubsections:
Notice to discuss it here also given at: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta_talk:Babylon#Translating_Articles_into_Multiple_languages.27_Wikipedias
Attention: Before we continue building on this idea I ask that we move this topic to Meta-Wiki or another location where we can get input from other language wikis. This idea will not work otherwise. Thank you. -- vgmddg ( look | talk | do) 22:31, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Pandelver ( talk) 21:36, 7 March 2011 (UTC)
Has anyone proposed having planning conferences for projects dedicated to specific (say) category of articles?
The idea would be to produce a plan for editing a range of articles in a category so they would all be consitent in presentation.
Such a conference would offer a way to resolve, or at least mitigate many conflicts that arise when no prior discussion had taken place.
In technical terms it would require halting all editing on all articles until conclusion of the conference.
The conference would be conducted (say) over a period of a month, allowing even the busiest of editors to attend.
In a rather bold suggestion I would say that even indefinitely blocked editors that had contributed to the subject area in a positive way could be allowed to attend under certain provisions KoakhtzvigadMobile ( talk) 02:58, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
Would it be possible to automatically format articles so that census data is automatically updated? Example:
"Bigfoot is a census-designated place (CDP) in Frio County, Texas, United States. The population was 304 at the 2000 census. "
Obviously, that information is 11 years old and could be updated. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.171.166.191 ( talk) 06:47, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
The last few years Wikipedia has gone through major improvements in making the articles more reliably sourced. However, at this frequently start to appear with images, in particular maps. For example here the reliability of a map is discussed. At the moment there does not appear to be a structure in place to allow referencing for pictures, making it in this case problematic to keep the map (although if appropriately sourced the map would illustrate the point perfectly).
My suggestion would be to start working for a way to, and guidelines emphasising the importance of sourcing pictures, preferably at the picture (file or wikimedia page) to allow usage across wikipedia. Arnoutf ( talk) 12:09, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
The idea shown here (NYT) of two pictures with an adjustable slidey-thing... would allow all kinds of fascinating encyclopaedic images - especially historic pictures, showing how a view had changed over the years.
I know it'd be hard to line up two images, find two that 'matched', and all that stuff... but still... I think there is potential.
Ariel views of geo places, in particular, are one of the few types of pic that actually are often CC or PD.
I realise it can sort-of be done with an animated GIF oscillating between two, but that's not the same; ti's the interactive aspect which is nice. And I wouldn't have thought it'd be that hard to implement, really; it's just showing 2 pics and allowing a scroll. Chzz ► 15:21, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
gallery
tag is looked upon as if it were a disease by the Manual of Style. Still, I reckon it might be a good addition for Portals (even if they're
not as well-used as some might like). Or we could get MOS changed, but it's more likely the world will stop turning.
狐 FOX 11:17, 16 March 2011 (UTC)Currently, to view page view statistics for an article one must click on the "History" tab, then the "Page view statistics" tab. This allows viewers to see page views for the current month, with the option of viewing previous months using the search feature along the bottom. I am doing this constantly, mostly out of curiosity. Pages can receive page view spikes due to Main Page appearances, current events, social media, etc. I have no idea if this is something that could be programmed or implemented, but I think it would be so helpful if talk pages had a way of displaying the date in which that article received the highest number of page views (along with the number of page views, obviously).
This could be done with a banner, or an added parameter to the ArticleHistory template. Something along the lines of: "This article received the greatest number of page views, with XXX (the # of views), on XMonth XDay, XYear." This detail could be displayed below the "Article milestones" section of the ArticleHistory template. The page view number could link to the appropriate "Page view statistics" month so that viewers could see the spike in viewership.
Again, I have no idea if this idea is feasible or not. Can a bot determine the greatest number of page views an article has received, and when? Would a bot be able to add this information to the ArticleHistory template? Would editors have to update the talk pages manually much like the DYK Statistics page is maintained? If so, readers would have no way of knowing whether the statistic was accurate or not.
I bring this idea to the lab for other contributors to process and provide feedback. Thanks for any insight! (Also, please let me know if more detail or explanation is required--sometimes I speak type before thinking!) --
Another Believer (
Talk) 22:45, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
"I am doing this constantly, mostly out of curiosity" - this is exactly why I wouldn't be in support of such an addition; it adds nothing to the encyclopedia other than a YouTube-esque 'what's popular' stat. The only people I can see being interested in this are regular editors (who'll therefore know about grok.se) or the press when reporting on something. And they can find it themselves, the lazy sods. 狐 FOX 11:12, 16 March 2011 (UTC)
I'm struggling to work out if there is any point in portals. I looked at some page view statistics and compiled this little table:
Page | Page views | Portal views |
---|---|---|
Philosophy | 7,099,200 | 341,407 |
Christianity | 8,488,131 | 302,499 |
Java (software platform) | 497,101 | 33,120 |
Linux | 7,822,309 | 88,783 |
Does anyone actually use portals? It would seem that the article is the portal. WP:P says they are "useful entry-points to Wikipedia content". Compared to 'see also' sections and the category system, are they actually doing that job effectively? Do portals need to be rethought?
I looked at the source of a portal as I was thinking about making one for a topic I'm interested in and it was... pretty intimidating to edit. — Tom Morris ( talk) 01:46, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
It's no secret that we sometimes misreport information badly during disasters and other breaking news events, and a few recent examples led me to put together a userspace draft of an essay about my thoughts on it. But backing up for a moment, I'm not sure that this is the right direction for communicating this information, the right venue, etc. So, just to kick around the bigger questions--do I make a case there that there is actually a problem? If so, is an separate essay the right direction to head to it? Is this better left as an essay that can be referred to, or is woud it make sense to pursue a guideline or such? Are there alternative ways of looking at making the situation better that I haven't concerned? What is staring me in the face that I'm missing? -- joe decker talk to me 19:59, 12 March 2011 (UTC)
Interesting thoughts and it's good to read an essay on it. But much of it is common sense, or already included in current guidelines so I don't think another guideline is needed. Some thoughts of my own:
Several excellent points here, I'm going to just do a consolidated reply.
One final note, on the whole, I have been very impressed with our average results on breaking news articles. We get an enormous amount of information into articles quickly and with a lot of sensible discussion. My concern relates to a disproportionately small fraction of edits that are harmful, not through vandalism but through lack of common sense, and was in no way meant to impune the excellent work that's been done. -- joe decker talk to me 01:06, 18 March 2011 (UTC)
So far, with all the smartphones I have had, it has not been possible to upload a photo taken onto Wikipedia straight from the phone.
Does anyone support making this somehow possible? Does anyone think it can be done? Sebwite ( talk) 05:26, 13 March 2011 (UTC)
There is an iPhone app for uploading photos straight to Commons; see mw:WikiSnaps. Regards, Rock drum Ba-dum Crash (Driving well?) 19:52, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
How can we get all cities' info to update to the latest Census 2010 data?
Is this left up to the respective cities?
Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.52.60.195 ( talk) 20:21, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
See here for previous discussion and here for latest talk on evolution.
This could be ready to be looked at again; some more input and insight might very well be all that's needed to get it, if not off the ground, then at least flapping its wings with a view to taking off. Pesky ( talk) 17:24, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
Many great sources have had their materiel incorporated into Wikipedia only haphazardly. If we could create project page's for important sources we can make sure their materiel is incorporated consistently into relevant articles. 173.128.76.48 ( talk) 18:48, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
On some pages there are some really large tables. And they need to be of that size to be useful. But it would be beneficial to be able to search the table without having to resort to keeping track of rows, columns and repeated sorting to find the right data. I hope extracting and sorting continue to be the only option to get efficient use of large tables? Electron9 ( talk) 12:59, 21 March 2011 (UTC)
In page histories - like this one - how about, if the "Browse history" box allowed us to filter edits for a specific user name? "Only show edits by user: < box >"?
It would make it much easier to find ones own contribs - or those of others - to specific forums; I think it would be especially handy on noticeboards such as WP:AN, WP:RSN and suchlike - and on user talk pages, to see what we'd added historically.
Alternatively / as well, Special:Contributions could allow filtering for a specified page.
I wouldn't think such an option would be terribly difficult to implement. Chzz ► 15:24, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
It occurred to me that SecurePoll could be used for anonymous opinion polling, and I think that could be useful to do in some situations. I would exclude policy questions or anything related to content, rather it should be to gauge the community's view on a particular situation, such as dispute resolution, arbitration, BLP enforcement, NPOV enforcement, deletion, RFA, etc. This would give us a measure of the satisfaction of the community on particular areas and could guide us in determining which need adjustments. Cenarium ( talk) 23:51, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
It'd be great if there was a way to find that out easily. Imagine Reason ( talk) 04:27, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
Good daytime to any person reading this letter.
From Russia with respect.
I have an idea.
The name for it is "Wikideas". 'Pedia-based thing, made for posting invention projects/blueprints as articles. In my mind, it doesn't requires any special changes and differenses from Wikipedia and "serial Wiki-source": projects are same as articles, in fact - same "changes", same "history", same "discussion".
This idea came into my head, when I found by experience, that a lot of sci-fi\encyclopedias readers have a lot of things and ideas to say and post - but there is no right place to post an idea to let anybody else use it....
Sincerely, James D. Gloodun
P.S. I am one of those mentioned "sci-fi readers." Also, very often such people have a lot of scientific knowledge - but it is very fragmented, through deep.
Anyway, answer this letter, please. I has sum moar sots.
P.P.S. Anyway, if I will make it "by my own", how can I send it to you for your putting it into Wikimedia Projects page?
P.P.P.S. I would like to put some "karma" or even "levels" features... but it's not necessary. Well, will I be able to put it by my own later? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.41.32.120 ( talk) 19:09, 3 April 2011 (UTC)
Binomial name - this phrase means 'two-name name' and is commonly used in natural history taxoboxes. Does anyone else think it absurd and contradictory? Perhaps "binomial tag", "binomial label" or "binomial reference"? Androstachys ( talk) 14:36, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
"* Some people deprecate use of binomial and advocate use only of binominal in this context. Synonyms
If http://ijs.sgmjournals.org/cgi/reprint/6/1/43.pdf has been accepted by the scientific world, why is WP still using the deprecated form? Androstachys ( talk) 19:03, 29 March 2011 (UTC)
What do people think of this proposal, available here? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.38.34.86 ( talk) 11:46, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
I would like to consider viability, and development options for creating a page where a user can edit information confidentially. I think it could serve for developing content that you don't want considered until fully refined, and if you decide not to move forward, no one would be wiser for knowing you had considered developing an ANI or RFC, or were considering RfA because they noticed you preparing a nomination statement, or many other reasons. Of course there needs to be some element who can access it as a check and balance, but the entire admin corp may be larger than necessary. I would support the checkuser group as sufficient to maintain the institutional goals in balance with confidentiality. My76Strat ( talk) 01:33, 4 April 2011 (UTC)
Hello people of Village pump!
I am interested, for a long time, the history of the Americas and I've worked a lot on wikipedia articles related to that topic. I realized that, since a long time, all governors of states like Texas, New Mexico and Florida have articles on wikipedia since those states joined the United States, while only a few colonial governors of those states had them, so I thought it would be nice to all colonial governors of those states also have articles on wikipedia, because they are a bit forgotten in this encyclopedia. I've already looked for information and I've edited articles the some of these governors and I ask that, if interested, you also collaborate on editing articles from other governors of those states. The names of the governors of Texas, New Mexico and Florida are on the lists Royal Governor of La Florida, Spanish governors of New Mexico, List of Texas Governors and Presidents.
That is my proposal!
-- Isinbill ( talk) 19:52, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
I uploaded a logo using the upload link then the logo template, meticulously (though less meticulously than was necessary some years ago) filled out the fair use rationale, and forgot to add the {{Non-free logo}} template because it's easy to forget and the logo upload page doesn't enforce some copyright tag or even go so far as to include it for you. All well and good until three minutes later, I get a smack on my talk page. If that upload had been my first action, I would probably be pretty put out by now and just go back to not contributing. I suggested we ought to have a friendler way of resolving this particular licensing issue on the editor's talk page, and he's agreed there should be a better way and suggested bringing the issue to the Village Pump.
Can we change the upload form to make it require a license or make the logo upload include {{Non-free logo}} by default since it already includes the fair use rationale, or otherwise address the problem without a brash template for a little oversight? -- ke4roh ( talk) 01:53, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
I came across a wiki page for a NZ swimmer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyall_Barry), but the 'reference' link was pointing to a dead domain. I figured out that the ' http://www.commonwealthgames.org.nz' domain has since been relocated to ' http://www.olympic.org.nz/'. Their website has also been upgraded, so the original URL format no longer works.
I fixed the reference link for "Lyall Barry", but there are still 361 other wiki pages that have a reference link pointing to ' http://www.commonwealthgames.org.nz/Athletes/AthleteProfile/********'.
Here are the search results: http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Special:Search&ns0=1&redirs=0&search=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.commonwealthgames.org.nz%2FAthletes%2FAthleteProfile&limit=500&offset=0
So my question is: Is there a conventional way to update dead links in bulk?
If not, I would like to write a script to do this. The script would edit each of the 361 pages, and replace the old link with the fixed one. The URL replacement would be done with a regular expression, as follows:
wiki_title_as_url = wiki_title.downcase.gsub(" ", "-").(/[^a-zA-Z0-9 ]/, '-').gsub(/\([^)]*\)/, "").strip wiki_content.gsub(/((http:\/\/)?www.commonwealthgames.org.nz\/Athletes\/AthleteProfile\/[^ ]*)/, " http://www.olympic.org.nz/nzolympic/athlete/" << wiki_title_as_url)
Does this sound reasonable, and will I have to get this approved by a moderator first? — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Nathan.f77 (
talk •
contribs) 04:46, 21 April 2011 (UTC)
As a fellow Wikipedian, I'm always on here browsing and editing but after a while, all that endless White on Wikipedia can really make your eyes burn. So, I purpose we create a new Dark/Night skin for Wikipedia, (similar to the one on Wowpedia.org) which can be turned On/Off via a link next to the (Read / Edit / View history) section at the top. AnimatedZebra ( talk) 13:34, 26 April 2011 (UTC)
There's a lot of public data about campaign finance for both legislators and legislation. There are a few organizations who are also developing better tools to access this information. One group is maplight.org that provides an API.
This idea concerns the feasibility and appropriateness of running a bot to regularly insert this campaign finance data into legislator and legislation articles already on Wikipedia. I think it could fit quite nicely as a new set of entries or a single entry in article infoboxes.
As a newer Wikipedian, I'd love any thoughts or questions! If you know of any similar projects, I was not able to locate them so please tell me. Mattsenate ( talk) 01:26, 27 April 2011 (UTC)
Dear people at Wikipedia,
I use Wikipedia frequently. I have the following comments:
Thanks. A user from India. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.164.154.239 ( talk) 03:54, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I've noticed that templates to Support, Oppose, Agree, say Yes, No, Maybe do not exist on English Wikipedia. On Wikiversity, this serves to clarify Proposals/Dsicussions a great load, where there are things like: Support . Or are we just not using them? - Richardofoakshire [talk] 10:48, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
For years, when I had visited Wikipedia pages about locations and people with Arabic names, I had seen the names written in Arabic script in the lead sentences, followed by a Romanization of the Arabic text. The Romanization was formatted in a specific style, which has been used elsewhere online and in print, and which has few diacritics and modified letters (I think only the ayin symbol, the apostrophe to represent hamza, a few consonants with dots under them, and the macron over long vowels were used apart from the basic Latin alphabet). Recently, however, I have seen a different Romanization style appearing on Wikipedia pages about Arab-related subjects here and there. For example, the pages on Hassan Nasrallah and Abbas al-Musawi. This style is markedly different and uses obscure, strange characters (sometimes even underlined, or with diacritics such as breves and accents) that are sometimes never used to represent the sound that they are used to Romanize and are not typically used in Arabic name transliteration. For example, Hassan Nasrallah's name is often spelled "Hasan Nasrallah" but never, outside of Wikipedia, as "Hɑsɑn Nɑƨrʋăllªe" (ditto for "Oɑbbás alMúsɑuí" being used to mean Abbas al-Musawi - why need an "O" to spell Abbas?). There is no need for a superscript, underlined "a" followed by an "e" to Romanize one vowel sound, and this isn't followed in common practice with names that include that sound, either (including Nasrallah's). Meanwhile, on pages such as Hamas and Mecca, the simpler Romanization is used, leading to confusion over what format is considered standard on Wikipedia. If it isn't obvious, I oppose the strange and unnecessary Romanization of Arabic with backwards letters and alpha symbols (I know, that isn't what it is encoded as in the Unicode set, but that's still what it's modeled after), because those aren't typically used and there is no reason to utilize a nearly unused Romanization standard that contains some characters that won't appear on all Latin charsets. But, for clarification, what is the standard on Wikipedia, and if there is none still existing, shouldn't there be? 96.26.213.146 ( talk) 08:28, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
I was wondering if there would be any interest in a "Block noticeboard"?
I know that, currently, some blocks are discussed on AN/I, but... that's an awfully "political" method of dealing with things, isn't it?
—
V = IR (
Talk •
Contribs) 14:19, 1 May 2011 (UTC)
I find IPA too complicated. When seeing an article with a pronunciation guide the symbols make no sense to me whatsoever. Take the article on Jules Verne for example. The pronunciation guide is French pronunciation: [ʒyl vɛʁn]. To get the pronunciation, I had to go to the IPA-French link and bounce back and forth to find the symbols. A simple (J(Je)ool Vehrn) would have done for me and I'd guess quite a good deal more people who really don't want to bounce from page to page to find out a simple pronunciation. In fact, I only did the tedious process because I needed to put down a simplified pronunciation. Could we not start putting simplified pronunciations like these on pages? — Calisthenis (Talk) 22:26, 29 April 2011 (UTC)
The Wiki engine is used by lots of sites, and I'd like to suggest a variation that some sites might find useful.
Take a nonfiction book in electronic form. I'm thinking about something where marginalia and other comments would be important—think any of the “annotated” books like Martin Gardner's "The Annotated Alice," for example. It could be an important literary work by Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or James Joyce. Or maybe an ancient work like the Bible, the Iliad, or the epic of Gilgamesh.
This is clumsily doable today. You could chop the work into chapters and anyone could respond like they do to a blog. There could be different threads on different topics. But a long thread with several people bickering back and forth endlessly is not at all like a paragraph or two neatly summarizing the facts and any controversy like you’d have in a Wikipedia article.
Some ideas: - You’d want to be able to read just the book text without any commentary. - Comments could be in categories that might vary by the book (“Chess” might be one for "Through the Looking Glass," for example). Readers could select which kinds of annotations to be visible. - There might be short notes to the side (I’m thinking of how Microsoft Word shows additions with Track Changes) or long ones, perhaps added at the end of a section. - The “annotated” books themselves might give ideas for how this might look on the screen. Here's a list: http://amzn.to/kNvv2Y —Preceding unsigned comment added by Seidensticker ( talk • contribs) 17:52, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
If I'm travelling I use my Eee PC. It has a tiny screen which makes reading Wiki articles with lots of "Improve the references" type tags hard to see. Reading the J. Robert Oppenheimer article recently, I noticed the clickable "Audio version" button and spent the next few minutes happily cleaning house while I learned something. But the button came with a caution that it was out of date. Would it be possible to have for every article a button which fires the text off to some speech engine like Festival, and returns a spoken version?
Preferably one which doesn't spend the first five minutes telling you to improve the article! -- Sdoradus ( talk) 10:26, 13 May 2011 (UTC)
During the partnership between Wikimedia projects and the château de Versailles, some actions are set in order to facilitate wikipedians work. Today, I'm offering you a new challenge.
This challenge is global and fairly simple : one defined day, I propose to indicate to the volunteers one article related to the palace. Then, they have to take pleasure in improving the selected article as well as possible during 24 hours. Of course, in order to make the participation easy for everyone, from everywhere in the world, the article will also be selected for its available on-line resources or books that can be easily found in a majority of well-stocked libraries, in French and/or English (we are lucky for this : the palace of Versailles has a great bibliography in English language !).
The challenge will be shared by the several people in the castle were formed to contribute to Wikipedia. These specialists currently contribute (when they have time), and of course they will be notified to participate in the adventure. During this challenge, I'll also be there as a resource person. This 24 hours challenge is a good way to promote the collaborative work and the characteristic ability to synthesize which defines the wikipedians.
I hope this project will inspire you ! I you are interested, or have ideas, I have opened a special page about it.
Thanks, Trizek here or on wpfr 10:12, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
I understand that Wikipedia is not censored so I would like to create this proposal:
All images containing nudity should be covered using the "hidden" template. The section header for the hidden template would be a warning label of some sort. This would hide them from users who want to do the research without the images, but would still keep them on the site. I have included an example of how this would work on this sandbox page. The version without the hidden file is here. Ryan Vesey ( talk) 18:15, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I think some of the rejection of the suggestion has been phrased a little more aggressively than it might have been, but my guess is that Ryan's not too delicate to cope with that OK. I do actually think that there is a good point behind Ryan's suggestion. It is a fact that some people are disturbed by seeing unexpected nudity. I am not, but even I have recently seen an image on Wikipedia that frankly I would rather not have seen: it was not just nudity, but an extreme sexual act. Like Ryan, I accidentally came across it in the course of anti-vandalism work. In fact if I thought there were any reasonable way of implementing this I would be in favour. It is not censorship, as the images would still be there, and anyone who wanted to see them would be free to do so. However, unfortunately I think there would be too many problems. There would be arguments about what to exclude, the "where do we draw the line " problem that has already been mentioned. There would be editors who simply didn't use the hiding mechanism. Ryan mentions coming across such images in the course of antivandalism work (as I have), but unfortunately I can't see a vandal using the hiding mechanism, so that reason is irrelevant. Also "children may be using the website" is not convincing, because most children I have ever known would immediately click the link as soon as they knew there was something hidden there. In fact in my opinion as far as simple nudity is concerned, children using Wikipedia is a reason for not doing this, as I think it is far better for children to learn that nudity is OK, and nothing to hide, rather than the "hee hee, look at this dirty picture that's hidden here! Hee hee" view which would be encouraged by hiding the images in the suggested way. As for photographs of extreme sexual activities, I do feel uncomfortable about children coming here and seeing them (call that "outdated conservative morals" if you like), but as long as the policy is that Wikipedia is not censored I don't see anything we can do to prevent it happening: certainly this proposal would not stop children from seeing them. So, in summary: I am more sympathetic to this idea than anyone else who has commented so far (apart of course from Ryan Vesey who proposed it) but unfortunately I think there are too many practical problems. JamesBWatson ( talk) 20:51, 18 May 2011 (UTC)
I'm sorry if you don't appreciate being told honestly what your idea is. That's not really my problem, and I'm not going to sugarcoat it. The idea is terrible. If I were to say anything else, I would be lying. As for removal of content, Wikipedia is also dead-set against hiding content--see also spoilers, and the endless perennial arguments that plot details (e.g.) should be hidden. That always gets shot down too.
Rd232, I don't really care if you don't like my tone. I don't like yours either, nor do I like your insistence that hiding images is somehow beneficial to readers. But note that only one of us made a personal comment about it...
Auto-playing sound/video are very different things, as you well know; sound and video take up more bandwidth than images. Auto-playing either would slow page renders, which is an objective problem for people on slower connections. The classification of images into 'this is a nude body part' or 'this is a dead body' is not difficult, I agree; it is the value judgements applied to them that is a problem. Well, for the most part; you ignored the Venus de Milo example given above. Is that pornography or art? If it's art, then how about Mapplethorpe's photos? Or the paintings of Joanne whatsername, starts with a Y I think, paints explicit male nudes. Art or porn? Ayers Rock? You ignored that too. You know full well exactly how horrific the wars over this sort of image classification would be; you've been here far too long to pretend otherwise.
The irony of you complaining that I ignored your argument is... well.. sad. Anyway, this idea won't be succeeding, thankfully, so I don't really see any point in continuing this discussion. Hiding 'offensive' images (and again, you've really blatantly ignored several categories I've put forth that many would consider offensive) is just a leap down the slippery slope to removing them entirely. Once again: it is not Wikipedia's responsibility to police what hits your retinas. That is your responsibility, or that of your parent/legal guardian. Not ours. → ROUX ₪ 01:40, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Well it is the question I thought I was asking, since bandwidth wasn't on the table as an issue, and the context was a discussion about the acceptability of giving users control over content display. Rd232 talk 03:19, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
It seems to me like my proposal is moot like Roux said, unless the new system does not turn out how we expect it to. I have also been looking at Roux's argument for a third party application. Not everybody can use Huggle, so I am proposing this:
The Wikimedia Foundation should give millions of dollars to 3m. 3M would then agree to send every single Wikipedia user Post-it notes. The users can then use the post-it notes to cover inappropriate images on their screen while at work or studying with their children. This would be especially conforming with Roux's argument because it is, expensive, it is inconvenient, and it involves no system that is conveniently placed on Wikipedia for people to use to set their own content filter. Ryan Vesey ( talk) 13:39, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
The pictures in anatomy related articles all have pictures that appear to be from one source. Would it be possible to highlight the actual anatomy part that the wiki article is about? The font of the labels are difficult to read, so highlighting (or somehow showing the actual anatomy-part-of-interest) would be very helpful. Thanks.Eve 06:13, 19 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello, one small suggestion, the size of the pages are based only in the preferences of some users. What about making a button where you can decide if this page is good/bad, too small/OK, partial/impartial and even important/irrelevant. One way is only make able to use this button the registered users. Or, for be more impartial and receive information from the majority of the users (not only the registered), give all the viewers that right.
In any case, is this a good idea??? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Miguelinileugim ( talk • contribs) 14:30, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Hello all,
This idea occurred to me a few days ago. I just looked through the perennial proposals and this area's archives and didn't see anything like it, sorry if I've missed it even so.
The autopatrolled user right helps reduce the workload for new page patrollers. I was wondering whether a similar user right that prevents recent changes from appearing in Special:RecentChanges would similarly benefit recent change patrollers? Editors in good standing might be granted this right and thus be trusted to edit articles without burdening the recent change patrol team.
Possible disadvantages I can see include:
However, I assume similar questions arose during the debut of the autopatrolled, rollback, and reviewer user rights, so we might have an ideal how to address them.
Criteria to grant the right might be similar to those for the existing autopatrolled, rollback, and reviewer user rights.
Changes would of course still show up in the other usual places like the edit history and watch lists.
Would welcome comment to see whether this is worth looking into further.
Cheers, Northumbrian ( talk) 16:19, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
Thanks for the more detailed explanation of why this isn't feasible Yoenit. I admit my knowledge of how the WMF software works approaches zero so I learned something. Northumbrian ( talk) 20:02, 20 May 2011 (UTC)
As we all know, Wikimedia takes pride in not covering the site in advertisements. Ads take up screen space, are obstructive to readers, and are generally just annoying to see. As more and more time passes, this is exactly how I feel about the cleanup templates. I am not saying at all that we should get rid of them, but I think we need to find a way to greatly reduce them in space used — closer to what is used for {{ Expand section}} with the ability to place them side by side rather than only each below the next.
Think of it this way: we don't want ads on the site because then every page would begin with something like this...
...but many pages needing more than the most basic cleanup already start with something like this... {{Multiple issues}}
How is this visually any more acceptable, particularly for non-editors who only visit to find a bit of information? — CobraWiki ( jabber | stuff ) 23:01, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
This article needs
references. |
I'm with Roux. Essentially, the ugliness is functional. Rd232 talk 19:12, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
(First, on a side note, reading my posts I know that the tone of my typically-long ones can sound a bit snobbish; I assure you that is not the intent. My apologies in advance, though, just in case.) I can see Roux's point, but I think the only reason for validity is because it is what we are used to seeing. On the "Feature Articles" is a little icon in the upper right hand corner. Typically the same is true for admins' pages. We also receive those administrative notices in or watch lists that we can dismiss when we choose. None of them are large, yet I doubt they go unnoticed by the majority. It's not about size; it's about effectiveness. The two aren't always the same. Mentioning again the two examples shown here already:
This section needs expansion. You can help by
adding to it. |
This article needs
references. |
Can we not see those? Do we think that others cannot see them? What do the larger templates give except for an extended explanation of the template's purpose which is essentially the same as what the link always found in each template provides? If the person doesn't know what "Needs references" means, they can click the link and find out. They don't need it mentioned in the template along with a link visible in the same template for them to click to tell them the exact same thing in more detail. — CobraWiki ( jabber | stuff ) 22:03, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
I liked that point that banners end up sitting for months or years, even after the problems are gone, or of decidedly little interest even to the person who made the banner. Maybe these are good reasons that banners should evolve over time to get smaller?-
Tesseract2 (
talk) 20:36, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help us improve it if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. |
This article may require copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling. You can assist by editing it. |
This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite it from a neutral point of view. Blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, should be marked for speedy deletion. using {{db-spam}}. |
Please expand this article using the suggested source(s) below. More information might be found in a section of the talk page. |
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. It's need: copy editing for grammar, style, cohesion, tone, or spelling • rewriting from a neutral point of view. (Blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic, should be marked for speedy deletion. using {{db-spam}}) • expanding by using the suggested source(s) below. Please help us improve it if you can. The talk page may contain suggestions. |
Hmm? Przykuta ( talk) 17:21, 28 February 2011 (UTC)
Finally, sombody said what I've been feeling for more than a year now. All these "missing citations", "disputed", "should be merged" and similar notices are ugly, distracting, and gives Wikipedia a really unprofessional appearance. I did a short test: I clicked the "Random Article" 10 times. Out of these 10 random pages, 6 (!) had these large warning messages on them, 3 were stubs (very short articles), and only 1 a normal warning-less article... What is most annoying is that in many cases, several people worked hard and wrote a nice article, and then comes along one person who decides that this article needs citations, or whatever, and just tags it - and then this ugly banner stays around for years... If you want to add citations, do it. If you think there's an error, correct it - or remove the erronous statement. Or write about in the talk page. But what good do these banners do???? I say, ban these banners! Nyh ( talk) 10:03, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps the various tags could be replaced with icons located to the immediate right of the article title.
What I envisage is icons of the same font size as the article title, and in the form of a relevant image covered by a red crossed circle. The nature of each icon may be stated as alternative text (e.g. "This article needs...").
To avoid too many such icons, the current tags could be simplified down to a handful. For example, the orphan and dead end tags could be subsumed into a insufficient links icon. And all the references, refimprove, unreferenced, references-blp tags, some of which duplicate each other, could be subsumed into a insufficient references icon.
When adding an icon, an editor could be forced to enter a concern parameter indicating what is wrong. The concern, (in either WP:USETEMP or tag form) could then be automatically entered into the talk page. Once saved, each icon may then act as a link to the relevant section in the talk page. After all, shouldn't these sorts of tags be on the talk page. Isn't that what the talk page is for. How many times have we come across a tagged article and found that the talk page hasn't yet been created or if it has, it was only to add it to a WikiProject.
The obvious criticism I can see of this idea is that icons may be less noticeable than tags. However, considering how dominating tags can be, almost anything would be less noticeable. Nonetheless, I think readers would soon notice these icons as they wouldn't appear identically on every page if at all. And, of course, serving the same function as tags, they'd still add articles to hidden categories.
LordVetinari ( talk) 03:22, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I just re-read User:Shanes/Why tags are evil and it seems he already mentioned icons there. Must have been at the back of my mind when I thought of the idea described above. Thought I'd add this in case I get accused of stealing ideas. LordVetinari ( talk) 05:08, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
I was asked by CobraWiki to give my views on this. I believe strongly that turning tags meant for editors into small icons would be an improvement. Tags that warn readers about factual controversy or bias are ok, I think. But all those "fix-me" tags nagging about whatever someone felt like nagging about is not worth the distraction and article ugliness the big boxes bring. The style manual states that articles should begin with defining or explaining the topic. These tags goes against that. In general I'd like article space to be for the readers, and complaints or suggestions to editors on how to improve an article should be made on the talk page, not with big flashy boxes on top of the article. -- Shanes ( talk) 20:41, 5 March 2011 (UTC)
So, umm, I'm not very familiar with this whole Village Pump process. What usually happens next? I'm thinking of moving this discussion to its own page in my userspace so that we can find it more easily. It looks a little lost on this page. LordVetinari ( talk) 07:06, 10 March 2011 (UTC)
I'll plug this here again, as I have in the past whenever the old cleanup tag discussion happens, designed to "lessen" the footprint of tags but still keep some degree of relevancy: User:MuZemike/Cleanup proposal. – MuZemike 20:24, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
Article issues: |