This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). 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: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BA, BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BK, BL, BM, BN, BO · 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, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193
I'm often seeing people's Time Top 100 of most influential people listings getting mentioned in lead sections of biography articles. But there are some reasons why that may not be the most helpful information:
For that I'd like to propose a policy that Time listings not be mentioned in the lead section and later not without citing Time's reasons. -- 94.79.143.154 ( talk) 08:07, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
I am trying to do some cleanup on Isaac Shelby, and I have a question. There are a number of places named for Governor Shelby; currently they are in list form at the end of the article. This seems like bad style. In this specific case, would it be correct to split this into a separate article ( List of places named after Isaac Shelby)? In general, approximately how many items is too many for an embedded list like this? Acdixon ( talk • contribs • count) 02:04, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
(Background: an attempt was made to merge WP:3RR with WP:Edit warring. This bold change was reverted; discussion continues below.)
It was not discussed at the relevant policy talk pages. My objection is that the changes were not discussed properly. We could merge all policies to m:Dick and WP:IAR, but that wouldn't be very useful, would it. We have created separate policy pages for clarity. Merging them may make things less clear. Jehochman Talk 14:46, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Respectfully, I think some of the discussion above overlooks the difference between how WP:3RR is written and how it is enforced. For example, Deacon of Pndapetzim called 3RR "an electric fence rule," but in practice it is enforced subjectively; sticking with the fence metaphor, individuals who walk near 3RR (without crossing or even touching it) get shocked, while cabals jump over it with impunity. (On the 3RR discussion page [1], I described an edit disagreement in which one side expressly refused my repeated invitations to discuss - for example here [2]. I followed 3RR carefully but got blocked anyway, and the wrong version got protected. Other editors then stepped in and the consensus version was restored. The best advice I received was to request page protection, which I had never known how to do before.) If 3RR is to stay on its own page, then its enforcement should be what Mango imagines it to be, i.e. a bright line rule with no subjective enforcement. (If the definition is considered inadequate, it could be changed to match the definition of edit warring, i.e. reverting "instead of discussion," and possibly to lengthen the period from 1 day to 3 days). If 3RR is going to be enforced as it is currently, then I agree with Kotniski and Gurch that it should be merged into WP:EW for context. TVC 15 ( talk) 23:28, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Regarding definitions and merger, please note there is a noticeboard page with definitions of 3RR and edit warring: [ [3]]. If a definition is updated or merged on one page, the other(s) should be consistent. TVC 15 ( talk) 02:13, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
We seem to be straying from the point somewhat - we were only talking about compacting policy by putting related points on one page; this won't affect the content or interpretation of those policies (except in that it makes it easier for learning editors to see the whole picture). Are there any remaining objections to doing that?-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:54, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
3RR encourages tag teaming and Wikilawyering. It should be stricken. Taemyr ( talk) 22:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed the discussion here about 3RR and I thought some time about commenting here. I would like to share my ver recent experience - as I side result I might draw some attention to the, but that is not m intention: Some people here might be aware of the controversies surrounding the article that is currently called Ancient Egyptian race controversy. I am still working on the topic, albeit slowly. As part of this, I moved the material on the question whether the Sphinx would depict an African person, or to be less politically correct but more clear: a 'black' person, to Great Sphinx of Giza. There was some discussion in this an that talk page, and some work being done, and I think that we arrived at a version that everyone could agree. That is, until a very new editor came along and changed the the article drastically, especially concerning that point. In the previous version we had 8 references, most of the to written works - in the version he proposed we only had two, and those very only images of some Pharaoh statues. I reverted, but repeatedly requested in the edit summary that he would take the issue to the talk page and wrote an elaborate statement there, but he didn't and kept reverting. When I finally got him to write something on the talk page, he continued the edit war and finally broke 3rr. I reported it, and what happened?
The admin who took the issue up dealt out "warnings all round". [4] Sorry, if this is the outcome of a 3RR notification, I would have been better of not to report it. The inexperienced editor would not have known about 3RR had I not informed him about it, and since I already got him to concede at some point (at least for now), I probably could have worked out a compromise in the article (not all of his edits were bad, just the part were he removed sourced content). However, that would have been a partial revert, and it would be my 4th. Currently I don't think that 3RR is archiving it's intended purpose. I don't mind spending hours reading literature for Wikipedia and hours editing. I also don't mind spending hours on discussion pages. But every time I get an edit war I am little bit closer to quitting Wikipeida. This time I really hoped that I wouldn't be that disappointed, but the comment the admin made simply broke another straw. If Wikipedia doesn't find a better way to handle edit wars, editors like my, who are honestly only interested in writing good articles about controversial topics, will be disappointed and quit. This doesn't mean that Wikipedia will fail. But this would mean that we will only have articles about topics like the characters from Battlestar: Galactica,(see: [5]) and not about important, but difficult topics like Radical Afrocentric historiography (At least nothing better than the current Ancient Egyptian race controversy). I don't have any concept that I could propose to replace 3RR, but if possible I would like to hear some views on this. Zara1709 ( talk) 01:02, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
I am sure that this has been discussed previously (possibly many times) but editing difficulties I experienced in editing the Anti-Zionism article has caused me to think that a balanced article on a controversial subject depends on who shows up to do the editing. In turn, who shows up depends on
Conclusion: a different process for editing articles on controversial issues is needed, or articles on controversial subjects should be excluded from Wikipedia. Why? Because crap articles, and bullshit articles, tend to discredit all of WP, and at minimum reflect badly on it. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 15:47, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
The dispute resolution process has seldom, if ever, solved these issues. In this case, there has been arbitration
here and it seems to have solved nothing.
Concerning the Irgun article (which I mentioned above), my only editing was yesterday, when I noticed this statement in the lead Initially, a central part of their efforts included attacks against Palestinian Arabs. That claim is a view that is disputed, and it was cited to a very main stream Jewish source; so I checked the source [7]. As is clear, the source says something rather different than what the lead presents it as saying, so I made this change [8]. That has been diverted back by two different users, and it seems unlikely that my correction can be gotten to replace the distortion because I am outvoted. If you refer to my original analysis of this sort of problem (above) you will see that in #2 I said: When the issue an article deals with is highly polarized, and with editors weighted to one side, the larger group will shove their POV down the throat of the other side, and call the resulting crap "consensus." This case is, it appears to me, a perfect example of that.
I already know that AN/I will not resolve this sort of problem. Also a look at the mediation and arbitration efforts of the past shows that will not resolve the problem either.
Challenge: I hope the users who read this understand that this a years old problem that can not be solved by any presently existing WP mechanism. Additionally, if WP wishes to be taken seriously as a reliable information source it is unacceptable to continue evading resolving the problem. The challenge is: do some brainstorming, and find a solution. Please, this really needs attention, and someone needs to hit the panic button. I brought this to Village pump (policy) because I hope someone here will start to think about finding a cure, instead of suggesting putting a band-aid on (what amounts to) a tumor. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 13:33, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
Producing an NPOV article depends on following policy - which includes not overwhelming an article with a discussion of antisemitism (where in fact, it barely belongs) and then announcing that more or less everyone in the world is guilty of it. Policy would also stop us using a laughably poor source for an extraordinarily "surprising" quote from Joschka Fischer that "anti-Zionism inevitably leads to antisemitism". I'll need to remind everyone you've been warned not to remove other people's TalkPage contributions. PR talk 21:18, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
Tarc, I did not say they (three users) are "behind me", I said that they acknowledge there is a problem that needs to be solved. I am not interested in getting anyone behind me. I am interested in solving a problem. If there is no solution forthcoming, then things will just continue in the direction in which they are now going. I have assumed that some users would find the present situation good, and others would not. (Actually the level of agreement with my view on this issue is better than I expected.) As I have explained, I think the situation with disputed articles is bad. Also, my own best guess is that the chances for change is remote, and the situation is hopeless. I decided to raise the question anyhow, but the thin response from users to this thread suggests that you have nothing to worry about. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 23:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
@Malcolm Schosha - it is extremely noticeable that you've again failed to deal with the first source-challenge that I presented you above (over the Anti-Zionism article). The content you wish to use from that source is "extreme" and the credibility of it is diminished and not enhanced by the better recorded material from the same subject that's been presented. (Your Telushkin edit also has serious problems, but we'll not go into that for a moment).
You've now Forum-shopped this highly contentious content dispute around various "conduct" based noticeboards at WP, starting with one at AN. This will not count in your favor since there is ArbCom Enforcement on this entire subject area, and it specifically refers to "conduct" of editors and adjudging whether such conduct is "disruptive". Administrators rightly have a short fuse in this particular area, and you will be blocked if you persist. If I had my way, you'd also be blocked for repeatedly addressing other editors in an ethnically-specific fashion, and your interference with TalkPages (even after being told repeatedly by an administrator to desist) does not bode well. PR talk 12:29, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
Another article that's an example of this problem is this article. Reform is definitely needed. Consensus regarding controversial articles is usually impossible. SMP0328. ( talk) 21:00, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
"a different process for editing articles on controversial issues is needed" What process do you suggest?
"articles on controversial subjects should be excluded from Wikipedia" This is a laughable suggestion.
You are correct that wikipedia has problems dealing with controversial subject matter in a neutral fashion, but I can not think of any better way. --
ScWizard (
talk) 05:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I want to cantact the Wikimedia foundation.
How to contact? I can't find the foundation's web page.
Korean Wikipedia Admins say that All non-GFDL texts can not be quoted, because Korean Wikipedia do not approve the fair use.
I can not quote anything from All non-GFDL texts?
What is the foundation's quotation policy?
Why the foundation makes the wikiquote korean?
I think I can quote anything from All non-GFDL texts.
I am right? or wrong?
Korean Wikipedia Admins are right? or wrong? -- WonRyong ( talk) 00:59, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Could we get some more input and discussion over at this policy page please? Wikipedia_talk:Image_use_policy#Removal_of_galleries. I have a feeling the current level of involvement won't quite be enough to solve it.-- Crossmr ( talk) 02:13, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
I am a great supporter of the current array of templates available at Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup, as I feel that they invite editors to address issues such as {{ notability}} by improving the articles in question. I use them often, and despite the fact their use brings me into conflict with other editors, I feel their benefit far outways their disadvantages.
However, there is an issue about their relevance to general reader. On the one hand, they act as a warning that there may be problems with the article subject, the content or viewpoint of the article itself, or that there are other quality issues that the reader should take account when forming their own views about a particular topic. On the other, cleanup issues such as notability really are not a major issue for most readers, and frankly notability is a rather esoteric subject in any case.
My proposal is that cleanup templates would be better placed on article talk pages, rather than added to the mainspace articles themselves on the grounds that they detract from the reader's experience of Wikipedia. In articles such as A Terrible Vengeance, the templates tend to disfigure the articles when looked from a purely presentational view, and the issues they are designed to address are probably better addressed through the talk pages in any case. Does anyone share this view, or should they remain on article page as is current practise? -- Gavin Collins ( talk) 11:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
This article needs help in the following area: | copy-editing | You can help. [Show me how] |
Just a short note to tell that I strongly support moving cleanup tags to talk pages. Every article is in need of improvements. Let us have an encyclopedia with a decent layout and appearance, instead of cluttering tags on almost every article. -- Kildor ( talk) 21:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm surprised that this perennial proposal hasn't made it to Wikipedia:Perennial proposals by now. Uncle G ( talk) 19:16, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
It is important for a reader to know that an article is not up to Wikipedia snuff. Tags belong atop articles that need major work. Tags can also serve to invite a reader to participate. Kingturtle ( talk) 16:04, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
Cleanup tags should be in prominant locations on the article page (top of page; top of section) because they serve two purposes: 1) they alert readers of weaknesses of the article they are reading so they do not assume an article with serious problems is reliable; 2) they alert potential editors of important areas where the article needs improvements. Neither of these purposes would be served by hiding the notices on the talk pages. — Chris Capoccia T⁄ C 14:17, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
As noted by many others above, cleanup tags serve important functions for wikipedia readers as well as wikipedia editors, not least of which is the conversion of one into the other :D. I agree with the sentiment that there should be no cleanup tags on any of our articles. However, it should be so because there aren't any cleanup issues to resolve. That is our real priority. Happy‑ melon 15:53, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
was just about to suggest something similar myself.
boilerplates in general can do two things:
on the downside, they really make the article ugly if too many are used.
I'd suggest leaving boilerplates up the top of an article soley for reader warnings, e.g. 'the factual accuracy of this article is disputed' (reader beware + editor help out) to alert them to issues before they've read the article, whilst all of the other maintanance crap goes down the bottom under a ==maintanance== header (e.g., crystal, wikify, deletion, etc). possible exeption for speedy-delete, which needs to be up the top to quickly grab an editors attention. this would be consistant with the 'this is a stub -- help inprove it' note to editors, which is discreetly placed down the bottom of the article.
example Jonathan_Sprout -- Dak ( talk) 21:46, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
Speaking as somebody who thinks cleanup tags are mostly a waste of time and effort that should absolutely be put on the Talk page, out of the way, I think you're correct - there is no consensus on this issue. Many good editors love them. (They're wrong, but such is life!) - DavidWBrooks ( talk) 20:05, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
Hello, I don't have much experience editing wikipedia, but I have a lot of experience learning from it. I just wanted to point out that it's very annoying when a one sentence "fact" has a 200 page PDF as its citation, and the citation doesn't reference what page of the PDF the "fact" comes from. You end up digging through a very long and technical document, looking for verification of a fact that for all you know the document may not even verify.
So I thought perhaps the policy on citations could be changed to require citations to mention on what page of the document the "fact" they cite is documented. When books are cited the page number is included in the citation, I don't see how a lengthly PDF should be any different. If requiring this would be too radical a change, policy should at least encourage this. It seems like this bit of extra information could only help. -- ScWizard ( talk) 05:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
You can always tag the citations with {{ pn}}. This adds them to Category:Wikipedia articles needing page number citations. — Chris Capoccia T⁄ C 22:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
oppose - I see no reason for individual page numbers on items of less than 30 pages, including chapters in books. To given an example, I've improved some articles on animal phlya, some to GA level. Journal articles are not written about such basic zoology, so textbooks are the only option. Typically I've used 2 textbooks for most of the hard-core zoology, and their sections on a single phylum are typically 20-30 pages. I typically use different refs for blocks of 5-10 pages, where possible. Giving individual page numbers would simply add increase the number of items in the "Footnotes" section by 30-50. Reviewers often don't have the books, and top text books tend not to be viewable in Google Books, so reviewers generally have to WP:AGF with refs to textbooks - as well as with refs to journals for which they do not have subscriptions. Specifying page numbers for each statement is meaningless extra work for editors, with no likely benefit for readers or reviewers. -- Philcha ( talk) 15:02, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
comment support - I disagree with Philcha's statement that "Specifying page numbers for each statement is meaningless extra work for editors, with no likely benefit for readers or reviewers." Citations have several purposes: (1) to permit the source of facts stated in an article to be verified by others, (2) to identify the source of quotations, (3) to provide readers with a place or places to find more detailed and/or additional information, and (4) to point out opposing viewpoints or controversy. The specificity of the page reference in a citation should depend on its purpose. Sources of facts and quotations (particularly) should be given with specificity — otherwise, the job of verification is made unnecessarily difficult, and editors may be tempted to "slide by" with work that isn't careful. Purposes (3) and (4) are best served in many cases by broader page references. It shouldn't be necessary in most cases to footnote every sentence — citations can be gathered in a omnibus single footnote at the end of a paragraph (a common academic practice). This is one of many issues for which good judgment is the key, and which should be reviewed carefully as part of the FAC process. If WP is ever going to overcome the disdain with which academics and educators now view it, our citation practice is going to have to improve.
Simmaren (
talk) 15:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
Page citation is already policy. WP:CITE, which is policy, instructs authors to use any standard citation system when citing sources (all other style manuals specify one system, but that is a different issue). All standard citation systems require page citations for specific facts. In fact, How to format citations specifies including page numbers. All of Wikipedia's citation templates have a parameter for page numbers. Finell (Talk) 02:03, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
This is a problem that has bugged me since the conclusion of
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/FritzpollBot: the community were relatively ambiguous about the notability of places and settlements. The purpose of the bot, which has already been approved by community consensus but as yet not ever run, was to eliminate the need for writers such as
User:Dr. Blofeld to do it manually, which takes place to this day, albeit with limited speed and semi-automated tools rather than bots.
Now I have been asked about
Wikipedia_talk:Noticeboard_for_India-related_topics#Bot_to_create_articles_on_missing_settlements_and_places_in_India on my talkpage and I went there to offer my assistance, and save Tinu from creating the bot himself when one already exists in an approved form. And I noticed in the proposal the old chestnut of "inherent notability" - I'm afraid I can't let this one go, because if Tinu gets approved to run in this fashion, I will wonder why the community bothered having the argument with me on notability in the first place, and I want to know if the consensus on the notability of places has changed.
I don't think this needs to be resolved for the purposes of bots, but for the simple fact that these articles are regularly created en masse manually. If they aren't notable, we need to decide to prevent this creation. If they are notable, it frees up some work for BRFA if other automated/semi-automated means are proposed. SO this isn't about Bots, and those who know me will understand why I want to avoid that discussion - this is a matter of notability (never cleared up at the essentially defunct
Wikipedia:Notability (Places and transportation)) that needs to be decided one way or the other without people referring to the non-policy/guideline of common deletion outcomes. I hope you can all be of help
Fritzpoll (
talk) 08:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Mmm a long standing question. Basically I think the fact that we have full detailed and encyclopedic articles on places with as little as 3 people and that some notability is asserted even for its history etc shows to me that anything can be written about just about any place. Any place is notable to the people who live there so if we are to think from a neutral viewpoint then I believe a high proportion of places are. I disagree with "places are inherently notable" as it suggests to me a gross generalisation of the world, given that many places however small or large often couldn't have a more different history or status. In reality though all cities, towns and villages are considered noteworthy on wikipedia as potentially a lot could be written about most places as has been proved. The main problem is undoubtedly equal access to information on all world places and indeed whether every hamlet or small village in the world needs including in wikipedia. As much as I want full world coverage, creating a high number of stub articles may be problematic given the gross uneveness in access to information and undoubtedly the uneven way in which editors edit wikipedia. If we were to create an article for every place in India as a stub how long to we think it would take manually for editors to fully expand them all? How many articles do you think would attract Indian IP's or vandals which post unintelligible text into them as has happened already on many articles and going undetected? I fully support the idea in principle but in reality the uneven acces in information and indeed the number of editors willing or interested in expand them is shockingly low given the scale of the project. I must have come across thousands of RamBot articles even on the United States which have barely been edited since so if we were to do the same for countries in Asian And Africa it is highly likely most will remain sub stubs for 5-10 years at least. So while I support the idea that a lot of notable information can be written for just about anywhere, the question is do we want hundreds of thousands of new articles with nothing more than a population figure sitting around for a long time without being expanded? As I said before on numerous occasions with Fritz if we can compile some sentences of information and start articles as meatier stubs rather than one liners I'll fully support it if we maximise the utility of it. The Bald One White cat 11:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Which is exactly why lists of places by district with coordinates were considered a sensible alternative. The Bald One White cat 14:04, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
One thing that really buggeed me about the whole thing, which I didn't bring up when it had that major discussion earlier this year, is that somehow adding all those places with a bot was supposed to counter systemic bias. The thing is, to me it seems that adding them would be /increasing/ the bias, against other topics in the encyclopedia. But that's just me. Furthermore, it seems to me that stating "every place is inherently notable (because we can prove their existence)" is rather like saying "every book is inherently notable", or whatever. In fact, it seems to ME that things should be the opposite -- since settling in places together in a group is standard human behavior, doing so is the exact opposite of notable and any place needs to have a reason to be in the encyclopedia beyond existing. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ ( talk) 14:14, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Well if you created 2 million geo articles it would probably change the balance but to me indeed it would only exemplify the uneveness in quality and access to information for certain parts of the world when editors search through large categories finding nearly all of them one liners and devoid of content. The idea that the world is fully covered is right in principle but indeed we would be kidding ourselves if we had 2 million sub stubs on places and prentending that we had the world covered. We'll get there eventually but sensibly and at least compromising the number of articles with greater quality. ANyway this discussion is nothing about what happened in the summer so please lets discuss notabililty only. In regards to notability as I said above, if articles contain adequate content or at least have the potential to be fully expanded with what sources are avilabale at present then they become welcome additions to the encyclopedia in my book. For example at present I am working Mexican municipalities at present which can all be fully expanded within minutes using reliable sources and they are started well. I wouldn't be bothering to create them if I didn't feel they weren't notable or couldn't be expanded immediately. This is why I no longer create articles based on computer generated coordinates I'd like to add. Best ot work wirh the information and resources we have at present. A coimputer generated site only is not good enough in regards to starting places I think. The Bald One White cat 15:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
In my distorted view, notability is, in essence, a function of verifiability. If there isn't substantial secondary coverage of the topic, how can we verify that the article we write is at all accurate? If it's just census data, that's verifiable and it's not a problem, but probably best left as a table instead of opening the possibility of articles filled with WP:OR. SDY ( talk) 18:11, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I can't speak for outside the United States, but inside the United States, if a locality has the power to make and enforce criminal laws that apply to visitors, e.g. towns, villages, Native-American reservations, etc., or it is a major administrative geographic subdivision, such as a county, a non-charter township, etc., then it qualifies. Other places that might have quasi-governmental authority, such as special-purpose taxing districts, homeowners' associations, neighborhoods, etc. generally have to earn their notability the old fashioned way. Having said that, a lot of not-really-notable neighborhoods and taxing districts have pages because they are part of "a set" such as "neighborhoods in major city" or "hospital district in state." Whether they would survive AFD probably depends on who happens to see the AFD and voice their opinion more than anything else. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 18:31, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
nothing is inherently notable. every article must cite reliable and independant sources that provide significant coverage of the subject matter. The only questions should be hashing out the details of what all those words from WP:NN mean in terms of the sources usually available for places (for example, clarifying that a dot on a map does not count as significant coverage). — Chris Capoccia T⁄ C 21:30, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Coming down to the basics: What's a notable village and what's a non notable village? Should there be a criteria (eg population cut-off limit)? =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:03, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
My fundamental question remains unaddressed. (These questions are not addressed to any person)
See User:Uncle G/On notability#Notability is not a blanket. You're looking for a blanket. Stop looking. Even Rambot worked from and cited sources. Uncle G ( talk) 23:22, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi there, I have a question regarding user categorisations. As you all know users may categorize themselves base on their background, skills and interests etc. I want to know if there is any policy prohibiting users from identifying themselves as supporters or members of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda or Hizbullah by using User categorisation? -- Kaaveh ( talk) 08:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I wanted to mention/discuss Self Identification and related policies. Due to recent American Election, a couple of issues has come up that may or may not have been discussed before, mainly how a person's BLP reflects how they self identify and editor's POV on the issue. Most times this s not an issue, but with Barack Obama being elected as the President of the United States, we now have an issue. Mainly it is this: A person is born of mixed race/heritage. While they acknowledge their mixed race/heritage, they prefer to be identified as one race/heritage, various reliable sources refer to this person as that race/heritage, and the public seem them as they self identify as. While most of these articles do delve into the person's mixed race/heritage to some degree, some editors have issues with what the person of a BLP self Identifies as. If it is verifiable through reliable sources that the person self identifies as something, would it be a BLP violation not to refer to them as such? Should a policy, addition, whatever be written to address this issue? I've noticed in the past that some editors also have a problem disassociating themselves from their POV when it comes to this issue? They seem to take this issue very personal and, in my opinion, ignore how the person of the BLP views themselves even if it violates BLP and NPOV. Brothejr ( talk) 15:43, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Lately I've noticed a rise in seemingly unfounded deletions. As a non-admin editor, I have to say that the process for reviewing and correcting such deletions could use some improvement. Once a page is deleted, it would be nice if the page was still visible and any discussion of the deletion was easily accessible. In general, it seems that the current deletion policy gives a lot of power to admins, some of whom are abusing it, so I think the policy may need to be somehow revised. -- Elplatt ( talk) 05:43, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
We currently have the impressive and interesting File:Chimpanzee congo painting.jpg as a DYK hook to Congo (chimpanzee) on the main page. That picture's description states that "Animals have no copyright" and hence the image (and faithful photographic reproductions) are in the public domain. I have two conflicting thoughts about this. First, from a moral perspective I don't see why animals, or at least higher primates and cetaceans, should not enjoy copyright protection of their works (also see Great Ape Project). Of course, legally they don't, at least in most jurisdictions. That opens up the other angle. Isn't, in this case, the animal just a tool of the owner for producing pictures? In that case, the copyright would belong to whoever had the idea of getting Congo to paint and gave him the proper equipment. Would that be different from a modern artist who semi-randomly splashes paint onto a canvas? -- Stephan Schulz ( talk) 09:11, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Deletion was requested on copyright grounds, and the image was kept. See:
commons:Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Chimpanzee congo painting.jpg
-- Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) ( Talk) 10:37, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
I am becoming increasingly concerned that the Fringe Theories Noticeboard is being used to enforce Political correctness, or in some cases just the personal preferences of a few users. See, for example, this discussion [9], in which a few users from that noticeboard argue for the removal of an article, which admittedly has problems, but which certainly has notability, based on premises that seem problematic. I want to put this here now, but do not have much time, and will fill this out better later, and supply some more examples too.
I have come to view the very existence of the Fringe theories/Noticeboard as more of a problem for WP, than as a solution to a problem. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 16:39, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Re:the "inherent canvassing in the operation of the noticeboard". Your accusation might be applied with equal justice to any other noticeboard on Wikipedia, including this one. The rest of your argument amounts to little more than "When I like what the Fringe Theories Noticeboard does, it works; when I don't, it doesn't. Recently, I haven't liked it very much at all, so let's get rid of it altogether". Again, this argument might be applied to any other noticeboard on Wikipedia. -- Folantin ( talk) 10:57, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
One has to wonder if there's a pattern developing here. Other editors don't like my changes to contentious articles? let's change the rules. Other editors don't agree with my point of view on FTN? FTN is useless. These policies and mechanisms appear to work for a great majority of the users, Malcolm. Why do they not work for you? Tarc ( talk) 15:53, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
trust that Malcolm has taken the wikilawyering to the (predictable) next level of calling it ad hominem. Pointing out that your argument has no merit isn't ad hominem, give me a break. Next thing you'll claim I have threatened you with violence or insulted your mother. How about you stick to the actual issue and try to build a case instead of trying to drag it to the level of wikipolitics. Everyone is prepared to give your article a fair chance within WP:NOTE and WP:DUE, so how about trying some, dare I say it, WP:AGF. -- dab (𒁳) 20:27, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
← Malcolm, it really sounds like the only solution for you would be to completely scrap our current Notice Board processes and invent something new. All the notice boards have a tendency to attract people interested in a particular topic. You may see that as PoV, but it's inherent to the system. Unless you propose and get community consensus to implement a new system, you're stuck with the consensus at the Fringe board. — The Hand That Feeds You: Bite 00:40, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
A subject, and accusation, which has entered this conversation a few times is the claim that FTN is concerned about (to use Dbachmann's term) "conspiracy mongers." The fact is that discussion at Fringe theories/Noticeboard generates its own conspiracy theories -- I suppose created by its own participating conspiracy mongers.
An outstanding example is this [13] discussion, concerning the activities of Wikipedia's Baha'i editors. For those who are interested, the discussion continues here [14], where much of the discussion centers on objections of FTN editors to Baha'i coming at the top of alphabetical lists, and here [15], where a FTN editor made a major change to a well developed article without any explanation (much less discussion) on the article's talk page. There was, later, some discussion on the talk page [16], in which several FTN editors out voted an editor of the article, ensuring that (what they regarded) undeserving Baha'is would no longer be at the top of an alphabetical list. It was this series of editing events that first caused me to doubt the positive benefit of FTN. In the end, I quite regretted my participation, with the disregard of protests by an established editor of that article. I doubt that any change was necessary, and if change was made it should have been done in a way that was not so arrogant.
The situation on the Fringe theories/Noticeboard is of somewhat out of control editors, in my view loose cannons, who suspect that much of what they do not understand, or what they do not like, to be fringe; and consequently going on the attack based on ignorance and/or personal preferences. They claim the result is NPOV, but the result is all too frequently nothing more than their own POV. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 15:19, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this has come up before, but would it be useful to add an infobox setting for outgoing incumbent officials? In other words, currently an official is listed as incumbent up until the end of his or her term, even if a successor has already been named. I just checked at George W. Bush, and there are warnings all over the place not to change it until 2009-01-20. Wouldn't it be less confusing and more information-rich to note these officials as "outgoing (on yyyy-mm-dd)" rather than "incumbent"? (also "outgoing" would seem better than "lame duck")
I checked on the Template:Infobox talk page and didn't see any comments there, but I thought I'd float the idea here first, since this page gets more traffic. I'll add a note there shortly. superluser t c 2008 December 17, 00:03 (UTC)
Let's not over explode the infoboxes. The US transition period is one of the longest in the world (to my knowledge). In most countries transitions between governments is an issues of weeks, if not days. As Wikipedia is not a news site adding a transition status for a fewdays would be over the top. So this expansion would be only relevant for those few countries with lengthy transition periods (ie the US) which happens only for a few months every 4 (or in the case of re-election) or 8 years. I think this is just over the top, to deal with a very specific and time-bound issue; so I would say, not relevant enough to implement. Arnoutf ( talk) 22:22, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
Moved to new proposal page: Wikipedia:Protected editing rights. Discussion moved to appropriate talk page. I just thought I would make a start. I strongly encourage everyone to mercilessly edit and improve the proposal page. -- .: Alex :. 20:11, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
A question has arisen at WT:RS that I don't remember ever discussing before... are podcasts considered reliable sources? Assuming I am right and this is a new question, I think we need a fairly large sample of community opinion before we can determine consensus. Please swing by the guideline talk page an share your views. If it is not a new question... please point me to where it has been discussed. Blueboar ( talk) 03:26, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Please provide your input on this RFC to resolve whether team logos can be used on pages that significantly talk about the team (such as per-season team pages or rivalry pages). -- MASEM 14:52, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
FYI, based on a conversation on Jimmy Wales's talk page:
Your feedback is appreciated. rootology ( C)( T) 19:27, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Looking at 50th Grammy Awards and 51st Grammy Awards I observe that WP:MOSMUSIC has not been applied and that almost everything has been emboldened. I can, perhaps, understand emboldening the winner in a list of nominees, but can't see the point in a list of winners only or of nominees only. Should WP:MOSMUSIC be applied rigorously? -- SGBailey ( talk) 23:24, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
I recall a discussion I had some time ago about trying to clarifying A7, so that it was made clear that any assertion of notability was enough to warrant an WP:AFD. However the discuss dried up and very little came of it . It still appears that user are devoting far too much time speeding articles under A7 and not understanding how it works or the subject at hand .Not wanting to single any user out but needing an example User:Adamfinmo has nominated four articles for A7 in the last day which have failed . This raises the question how many border line articles has the user nominated and a admin deleted. I propose A7 is removed and articles which have questionable notability are taken to AFD. If these articles are about a not notable person , band or what have you a WP:Snow consensus will form rather rapid. This will at least give the article author time to defend their work (a article can be A7 deleted in minutes) and will stop biting people. Gnevin ( talk) 23:31, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
Can you please review this and tell us why you felt Andrew Bonds had no indication of notability 02:04, 21 December 2008 (UTC)—Preceding unsigned comment added by Gnevin ( talk • contribs) Dloh cierekim 02:12, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
copying omitted portion from my talk page ::::There is no need to restore as I don't feel it would stand a WP:Snow chance on passing. I'm not trying to pick on you in particular ,rather just highlighting how A7 is being using far outside the scope for which it is intended . Gnevin ( talk) 02:33, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but there is no indication of meeting WP:BIO in the article. Dloh cierekim 02:11, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I've been doing some reviews lately on CSD work... A7 actually appears, based upon my limited non-scientific survey, to be one of the more reliably used tags. That being said, I think it is the one where (even when properly utilized) does the most biting of newbies.---EDIT: Forgot to sign:--- Balloonman PoppaBalloon 17:53, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I have restored my original heading. that was deleted as A7, not G11, as the below discussion shows, it was A7, with BLP concerns.
What about BLP , the guy ran for president if that isn't an assertion of notability I don't know what is. Of 20 articles tagged for speedy ,I found 5 which asserted some notablity , 3 where deleted thats 18% Gnevin ( talk) 02:41, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I've mark the above resolved as the issue has changed so much . As per above what is an assertion of notability? And are some admins confusing the issue by using A7 when more apt reasons would apply such as the Lee Mercer Jr. example above Gnevin ( talk) 02:57, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Proposed clarification for A7. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 03:16, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I was wondering how the no original research policy works with photographs. For example, there will be a photo of a bird taken by a user and included with an article and the user will state that this photograph is in indeed of the bird the article is about. To me this seems like original research in itself -- it doesn't seem trivial to identify the species of any arbitrary bird just based on a photograph. And of course there is no published source for these photographs identifying their subjects as such. And many photographs appear to have this status. What is the policy for this? -- Atethnekos ( talk) 05:20, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the undocumented photographs are reaching near-crisis proportions. I hereby call for all these dubious pictures to be quarantined pending review by a panel. Hole Punch 85 ( talk) 22:26, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
In WP:C, I'd like to propose including specific reference to abridgment as derivative work in the section Wikipedia:Copyrights#Using copyrighted work from others. Please see Wikipedia talk:Copyrights#Derivative works. I'd greatly appreciate feedback there as to the language used as well as with respect to potentially consensus-derailing problems. :) -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:35, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I have just posted a proposal for a board tasked with ensuring transparency and accountability for Arbitration, Checkuser and Oversight. The proposal is available at Wikipedia:Review Board, and comments are welcome and sollicited.
Please note that this is a proposal from a new Arbitrator, but not a Committee proposal. Other arbitrators have examined, commented, and assisted in the crafting of this proposal, but in their individual capacities. — Coren (talk) 23:52, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I want to understand the rationale of making number articles about years instead of about the actual numbers (i.e. this guideline). I hope that's clear enough: the article 1 is about the year, not about the actual number. I know there's a lot of discussion about it, but I haven't found a page that honestly explains why this is the way it was decided to be. (For the record, I find this convention totally ridiculous and the most annoying thing about Wikipedia). Kreachure ( talk) 22:42, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
[[1979]]
is writing about the year, or the number? In general, it's probably the year. Besides, it's more relevant to link years than link random numbers (despite that linking years, even, has fallen out of favour in some circles). I thought it was strange at first, but if you think about it, the way it is now makes a lot of sense. Besides, most of the year articles at low numbers have
hatnotes linking to the relevant number article. {{
Nihiltres|
talk|
log}} 23:07, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
The Criteria for speedy deletion A7 says articles about organizations except schools which do not claim notability can be speedy-deleted. This is up for discussion. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Criteria for Speedy Deletion A7 if you want to participate. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 04:41, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Can you have a look at User:Gnevin/schools and edit or comment as you see fit Gnevin ( talk) 10:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Who changed the wording of this tag? It used to read "The neutrality of this article is disputed". Now it reads:
The new wording is much more insipid and totally fails to get the point across in my view. I don't know who is responsible for the change, but I think it needs to be changed back to what it was, pronto. Gatoclass ( talk) 16:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
{{POV}}
is regularly used not only to label biased sections as such but it is also often used speciously to label broadly neutral sections as biased. That is to say that {{POV}}
is itself used to push a point-of-view; I was looking for a wording that would make it difficult to use in such a manner.
CIreland (
talk) 07:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm sure CIreland is correct to say that some people exploit the POV tag to try and discredit articles they don't like. However, some users will exploit any policy to try and gain an advantage, the solution is not to start discarding the policies.
Apart from which, I think the problem CIreland alludes to is a relatively minor one. In my own experience, the addition of the neutrality tag will usually encourage POV-pushers to co-operate in getting the tag removed, so I think it is, more often than not, actually quite an effective tool against POV-pushing.
Regardless however, I believe that informing our readership of a POV dispute is a vital function that must not be compromised. Interested readers can always check the talk pages to decide for themselves how legitimate the POV complaint is, but if they aren't adequately warned of the problem in the first place, they are unlikely to even realize a POV dispute exists, and that would be a far greater evil in my book. Gatoclass ( talk) 08:43, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Other than the three pillars (verifiability, npov, ) and copyrite? I'm a new editor whose edits keep getting reverted (I'm told that my edits are 'invalid', but none of the reverters will tell me why my edits are 'invalid' or point me to the policy which explains what they mean by 'invalid'. Instead, I was told to ask the question here. (please ignore the header, my iPhone doesn't have an equals sign) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 32.148.103.187 ( talk) 18:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
You where not told that your edit was invalid, you where told that your arguments to support that edit was invalid. Which means that the editor making that claim did not feel that the argument was convincing. Taemyr ( talk) 21:26, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Re anonymous IP new editor. I think your approach was a bit too bold, not to say blunt, on the illegal immigration page. Some discussion on its talk page should have been started (by you) if you want to remove large sections of text (note that this is usually a sign of vandalism so the original reversion is likely the consequence of that similiarity). You certainly should have gone to the talk page after the first revert. Shortening the article without extensive discussion may sometimes be considered invalid.
Re anonymous IP, I would strongly suggest to start using talk pages and create a user account.
Re other involved editors; as this user claims to be a newby your responses do not align well with
WP:BITE as it seems the anon editor was not consciously vandalising the article.
Arnoutf (
talk) 21:26, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Although I think the newbie IP editor was acting in good faith, (s)he was violating the three revert rule. Although we can't expect someone to learn Wikipedia in a day, or even a week, the user should get familiar with the policy to avoid future conflicts like this one. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:59, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
feel free to shoot me down for an already overwrought topic, but I would like to again suggest that instead of a [rather annoying] yearly banner add that wikipedia adopt google ads in a very conspicuously noted place [very bottom, somewhere where people can tell exactly what is going on]. Add a disclaimer, do what you need to do, but a fund drive is not necessary. Just my $0.02. Thoughts? Rogerdpack ( talk) 16:10, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Strong opposition. This is a perennial proposal and should probably be closed as per the snowball clause-- Ipatrol ( talk) 17:24, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Why start threads like this when you already know that the answer will always be no? This has been suggested many times, it has always received wide opposition, and you clearly know that this is a perennial proposal. Adding ads would completely contrast what Wikipedia is all about. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:47, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
I support advertising in whole, I would want. Reasons l84. Silk Knot ( talk) 17:18, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
There is an ongoing discussion as to weather Wikipedia:Coatrack should become a policy. This notice is here to attract the opinions of the wider community. Thank you.-- Ipatrol ( talk) 18:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I am unclear as to the status on Wikipedia of the wiki sister projects.
There has been a problem at FAC (and with articles in general) being translated automatically by Google or other automatic translating device. The translations obtained this way are usually inaccurate. There have been specific articles where the editor claimed to have translated it, then admitted it had been done automatically, then said he had a friend look over it for inaccuracies etc. It was agreed in FAC discussion that such translations were only acceptable if everyone involved in the translation was fluent both in English and in the language being translated. If not, then there would accuracy problems and a question of satisfying the fundamental policy of WP:V and WP:RS.
Also, at some point in the past there have been efforts to disallow links from wiki sister projects to be allowed in the body of an article on the ground that, although these projects are hosted by wiki servers, they are not Wikipedia, do not have the same standards and fact-checking requirements as Wikipedia, and should be treated just the same as links to article from any wiki. Therefore, they should go under External links only. As far as I know, this issue has not been definitively resolved.
There have been discussions over whether wiki sister projects should be promoted in any way on Wikipedia. That argument has apparently been decided in favor of allowing the links, as recently they have begun appearing to the right of Wikipedia links when a search of Wikipedia is done.
However, I am unclear as to the status regarding reliability of wiki sister projects and whether they have the same status on Wikipedia as articles produced for Wikipedia do. If anyone can point me to policy information on these issues, I would appreciate it. — Mattisse ( Talk) 20:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, all.
I was hoping if anyone that has not yet commented on this disputed naming convention, that they could add to the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora)#Two options (that's the most recent section, but feel free to jump in anywhere). I'm sure we've touched on pretty much every point multiple times, but there's always the possibility that another voice might bring up something we've overlooked (or maybe there's a particularly good arbiter out there?). Anyway, I believe the addition of new voices to the debate will bring some new perspectives to the discussion.
To make it a bit easier to understand, I offer this hopefully neutral summary. Several editors, including User:Born2cycle, User:Philip Baird Shearer (active earlier but has been contributing to the discussion recently), User:Pmanderson (who genuinely attempted to achieve consensus), and a few others, have indicated that they believe WP:NC (flora) as currently written (the "December 2 version") is in opposition to WP:COMMONNAME and it should be brought in line. Such examples would include preferring the vernacular name (botanists often call this the "common name" even though a species name may be more common), say Joshua tree over Yucca brevifolia. Virtually all of the active members of WP:PLANTS and several outside editors have come to the conclusion for many reasons (precision, lack of ambiguity, multiple "common names" applying to the same species often with BrE and AmE differences, etc.) that WP:COMMONNAME doesn't really apply to flora articles with very few exceptions, usually on the order of genus and higher. The most recent point I noted was that WP:COMMONNAME specifically states "Except where other accepted Wikipedia naming conventions give a different indication...", which doesn't give us carte blanche to do whatever we want for no reason. And now a biased opinion: As I see it, the plant editors had come together about two years ago and forged this convention for very explicit and well thought out reasons. A few editors don't buy the argument that flora articles require an exception to WP:COMMONNAME even after said reasons have been reiterated ad nauseum, so we're at a stand-still. If anyone is willing to wade through the various arguments and offer an opinion, I would appreciate it. Please offer your opinion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora). If you don't have the time to wade through the kilobytes and kilobytes spilled over this but have questions or want links to specific rationales or discussions, let me know here and I can provide them. Thank you, all. Cheers, Rkitko ( talk) 20:16, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
In the context of kinds of plants and animals, "common name" means vernacular name. In many (possibly most) cases, the scientific name is the most common (most used) name, especially in reliable sources. Also, in many cases the vernacular name is ambiguous. Hence we have Category:Plant common name disambiguation (also Category:Disambiguation plant pages) and Category:Fish common name disambiguation. -- Una Smith ( talk) 20:51, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Where is the best place to discuss the Personal Appeal From Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales that appears at the top of each page?? Thank you, -- Tom 21:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I have said this before but it bears repeating: the designation "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales" says nothing one way or the other about whether there were also one or more other founders. After all, I can describe myself as "Wikipedia editor Newyorkbrad" without implying that I'm the only editor. (It is the formulation "the founder of Wikipedia" that raises the issue you have in mind, and that is not being used here.) Therefore, the change requested here is not necessary. In any event, the change requested bears on a disputed issue and it is highly unlikely that it would be made in the site notice. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 22:07, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
The banner is hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation official wiki, of which the Board of Trustees and employees are the final decision-makers. In this case, the decision is to go with this wording, and even a consensus of the Jedi Council can't do anything to practically fix it except put pressure on. Daniel ( talk) 04:51, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Tom, User:Rand Montoya is the right person to talk to, if you really want to press the point. He is in charge of the fundraiser. Foundation-l is also a potential place to make your case. Personally, I think there is very little chance of getting people to tweak this, but you are welcome to try. Dragons flight ( talk) 09:24, 30 December 2008 (UTC) Not to sound close minded or anything, but it seems to me that we're making a big deal out of a little issue here. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:41, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
OMG, look at this long discussion about some banner that's here today, gone tomarrow on a page where nothing is going to be accomplished because the banner isn't just on Wikipedia, but rather on every single Wikimedia Foundation wiki! Jimbo Wales is noted as the founder on many areas of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, so why not make this discussion about more than just a silly little banner if we're gonna have such a big discussion? PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 01:38, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
I've been debating (mostly, but not by any means exclusively with myself) endlessly whether or not to post this here, but I really think it needs to be done: Wikiversity desperately needs the eyes and opinions of Wikipedia's policy wonks.
It's a bit of a long story, but the nutshell version is that until recently, we never really needed policies. In fact, we never wanted them... policies can (sometimes) be overly limiting, and we've had a bit of fear about those folks more interested enforcing rules than they are interested in encouraging learning and teaching. It kinda worked for us until this past (Northern Hemisphere) summer, but things have become unhappily complicated since then.
What happened this summer is that some of Wikipedia's "community banned" people arrived on Wikiversity, and were rather insistent that we should not be like Wikipedia in any way. Now, that seemed good at first (no offense, but the "management" of Wikiversity tends to be from a much older crowd, and we (yes, I'm an old guy too) were and remain a bit appalled by certain aspects of the "Wikipedian culture"), but it became clear in at least a couple of these cases that those folks were banned for good reason.
The problem, as I'm sure you all can anticipate, is this: we don't have policies to tell these people that they can't do that, and they're experienced enough from their Wikipedia "careers" to have leaned how to wikilawyer. So, we need policies. The problem is, most Wikiversity folks aren't interested in policies: we'd much rather spend (or waste) our time learning, sharing, or otherwise being creative. It even got to the point where Jimmy Wales himself had to get involved a couple times, because honestly our "staff" (sysops) just aren't interested in rassling with trolls.
One of our more serious problems lately is a guy who thinks "outing" people is a good way to get his point across (he was banned from WP for just that reason). We made a few ad-hoc rules and desysopped a very active Custodian (Custodian is "admin" to you guys and gals) who was very hostile to Wikipedians that had tried to get involved because of the outings (he was mostly outing Wikipedians, but recently outed a Custodian), calling interested Wikipedians "meddlers" and "outsiders"... but I'd much rather we didn't have to just make up rules when we needed them, and as far as I'm concerned, Wikiversity should above all be the "school" that's available to those who volunteer their efforts on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects.
So here's the appeal (after the babble): If you're watching this page, you have an interest in policy. Wikipedia's policies always need a bit of tweaking, but Wikiversity's need is more dire right now. We really need your help.
If you're willing, please check in and introduce yourself on Wikiversity:Policy review, or even on the Wikiversity:Colloquium (our VP) to ask even the silliest of questions (helping the newcomer understand us is our most serious concern). Wikiversity has a lot of potential (at least I think so), but the idealists are getting beaten up by the assholes (can I say that on WP?), and we really don't deserve that kind of treatment. -- SB_Johnny | talk 23:46, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I wondered if I could get some clarification about "see also" sections. I beleive that " conspiracy theories about Obama's place of birth' is peripherally realted to Barack Obama and that it is not a violation of policy to link to it after the article to help readers find the information if they are interested. I do not believe that Linking to it under the title saying that it is a conspiracy theory is an endorsement of the theory in anyway ,which seems to be other editors concerns. Any guidance from users not involved in the dispute would be welcomed by me. The policy on "see also " WP:ALSO appears to say that subject that are even peripherally related to the subject can be linked to there and no one will tell me how Barack Obama is not even peripherally related to conspiracy theories about himself.Thanks for any feed bak. Die4Dixie ( talk) 20:04, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
What is the idea here? I see more and more "/Comments" subpages to articles. How is a "comment" on a subpage different from a comment on a regular talkpage? Who is coordinating this? How are some people's comments worthy to be preserved enshrined in a special subpage, linked from {{ WikiProjectBannerShell}} as "assessment summary page", while the "assessments" of mere mortals of course get archived or lost in the noise in due time?
Really, this seems to be a cheap attempt at inflating the importance of whoever it is creating these special "/Comments" pages. We do have pages where people comment on articles. They are known as talkpages. -- dab (𒁳) 21:56, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Internal search is now at a point where it is viable for finding templates, past material, and pretty much anything needed within Wikipedia for editor use. This was a major "blocker" for past discussions of NOINDEXING major namespaces. With the new search working well, I think it's time we closed down indexing on all except content and other pages we positively want to be publicized on search engines. Proposal and rationale follows.
When I pushed for NOINDEX in 2007 [23], the big problem was that there was no other effective search. For example, an administrator who wanted to look up some past issue on ANI archives, or a template, could not, other than with Google (ANI search wasn't maintained). So Google was needed, and NOINDEX was a stop-gap to allow problem pages (ie reputation damaging SSP/ANI/RFAR pages) to be prevented from spidering.
The current search now seems "strong enough" ( announcement). It accepts a wide range of complex syntax (equivalent I think to Google), and any user seeking material from non-content pages can find it as easily with internal search as with Google. Indeed I'm finding it is sometimes easier, since it highlights sections and section links where Google only recognizes pages, and whole pages aren't omitted due to NOINDEX issues of one section.
I propose that it's finally time to close the gap. Instead of NOINDEXing individual pages mostly ad-hoc, I can't see any strong current continuing rationale for any "internal" page to be spidered at all, and I can see problems reduced by killing it. Use internal search to find such material, and kill off spidering of anything that's not really of genuine public note as our "output/product".
FT2 ( Talk | email) 03:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
(2ec) I support the proposal. I support indexing File: pages; they are content pages one may want to search. I don't know about Category: pages, though. On one hand, Davewild's sample search above shows the benefit of indexing, but I do worry about banned users and sockpuppeteers who have used their real names have their status here as their first search engine result, and it isn't necessary to index maintenance categories or user categories. So, would the default be INDEX and NOINDEX those, or would the default be NOINDEX and INDEX article categories? WODUP 16:46, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
{{NOINDEX}}
to {{
Wikipedia category}} to keep a lot of the sausage-making out of search results. :)
WODUP 05:02, 30 December 2008 (UTC)Support per FT2 and MBisanz, also propose combining this with another important change: henceforth all new accounts start with a Sandbox sub-page already set up for them.-- Goodmorningworld ( talk) 00:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
As far as how Wikipedia wants to present itself, trying to hide things is not to the point. If people are going to be confused by userspace essays, they'll be confused regardless of how they end up there, and getting moderately fewer people there in the first place is an ineffective defense. Instead, we should make it clearer in the interface (say with anon-only per-namespace notices) that content outside the content namespaces has not been reviewed and does not necessarily represent the Wikipedia community's beliefs. This will avert problems from direct links and other means as well. — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 01:02, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
As far as the non-encyclopedic pages being a byproduct: sure they are, but that doesn't mean they're useless. As long as their availability doesn't detract from the usefulness of the important stuff, why should we deindex them? There will always be some people who prefer to use Google for whatever reason. Google is often more readily available: in Firefox it's the default search engine, and typing random non-URL stuff in the address bar will Google it. Googling "Wikipedia beans" returns WP:BEANS (an essay, which it's been suggested should not be indexed) as the second result and may be more convenient than searching Wikipedia directly. The cost for implementing this measure is definitely nonzero, so it needs to have clear and concrete justification. What are the concrete benefits? And what other methods might be taken to gain those benefits? — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 17:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
{{
sofixit}}
applies. If problems are going uncorrected, we should address that; we shouldn't try and cover it up with NOINDEX. • I disagree that quality is now more important than it once was. Quality has always been important to me, and I would hope others as well. I think Wikipedia's popularity reflects its quality, not vice versa. If our quality is diminished, our popularity will adjust accordingly. This is a self-correcting feedback loop. • We can and do quality-control meta pages, as I've pointed out.
WP:CIVIL,
WP:NPA,
WP:NOT and others address this. Please stop asserting that we don't QC meta pages without some kind of counter-argument. • I think my point #4, "It won't help", deserves a response. If I thought NOINDEXing would actually achieve something, I'd at least grant you that. But as I see it, this has no possibility of helping. "No benefit" vs "Some cost" seems an easy decision.This village pump is a bit obscure in my mind (especially in comparison to the proposals or technical village pumps). Perhaps leaving a note at WP:AN or Template:CENT or cross-linking with the other village pumps might be best to raise awareness? -- MZMcBride ( talk) 09:41, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I note that this proposal was put forward by an arbitrator, immediately supported by another arb. Was this discussed out of public view? Jehochman Talk 04:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
Indexing all pages aids transparency and helps reduce cabalism. More pageviews is good, not bad. We want to keep the curtains open so people can see how we make articles. Jehochman Talk 04:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
I now understand FT2 wants to use the robots.txt file, not the NOFOLLOW meta tag method of robot exclusion. To give this proposal a proper hearing, could the proposed code please be posted so we can actually see what is going to be excluded? I think that will help people decide. I am willing to reconsider my opinion after inspecting the code. Jehochman Talk 04:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
Right now the proposal is a mystery. If you put forward code or specs I will probably feel more comfortable knowing specifically what's included and what isn't. Our policies should be indexed. They are freely licensed. Part of the value we provide the world is that our policies, guidelines and processes may be copied and used by other sites. Categories and portals are also content. They must be spidered. Userspace is very Myspacey; I'd agree not to index that. Projectspace should generally be indexed. We already NOINDEX RFCU pages via the header template, and I'd agree to NOINDEX other pages that are heavily used to comment on users, such as ANI, WQA, COIN, RFA, Editor Review, ACE, and RFC/U. Let's make a list and decide what should and should not be indexed. Jehochman Talk 15:07, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
It seems to me our primary concern here, as with all aspects of wikipedia, should be our visitors/readers not our editors. This means IMHO it's irrelevant whether this is going to make life more difficult for editors. In other words, I don't think complaints like 'this is going to make life more difficult for me' or 'I prefer Google' are relevant unless we can establish that these same issues will apply to our readers. It seems to me a lot of the discussion is getting sidetracked since it's failing to address this fundamental issue of whether the proposal will be a net benefit or disadvantage to readers, which requires us to considered whether they are likely to want to externally search the proposed noindexed pages and whether internal searching will be sufficiently accessible for those that do want search these pages, and whether us not indexing those pages will give better results for our readers. As well as issues like whether us notindexing will encourage complacency, and whether they will help reduce the BLP problem, and whether they will reduce spammers etc. (I.E. if this has a substanial negative effect on our editors or our content then obviously that needs to be considered since our readers are nowhere without editors/content but single editors having problems, not so much) Nil Einne ( talk) 13:15, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
{{
NOINDEX}}
to the report header template to exclude all RFCU cases. Except for Userspace, I think the appropriate course of action is to indentify classes of pages for noindexing and to propose it on the relevant talk page. This should be done sparingly, only when there is a clear privacy rationale.
Jehochman
Talk 02:57, 5 January 2009 (UTC)Starting point at Wikipedia:Search engine indexing, please add. Once those crafting the list agree, we can put it to the community for approval. Jehochman Talk 16:19, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
I'm trying to get the conflict of interest guidelines rewritten to be clearer in terms of what is allowable from people with conflicts of interest. At the moment they seem to allow most edits, but there are also several parts saying COI editing is strongly discouraged. It is not clear whether COI editing is generally unacceptable or only when it results in bad edits. I have written a proposed revision of the guidelines, but because of my own conflict of interest I really don't want to make any kind of change without consensus. I put a notice on the main village pump page a few days ago and so far there is a lot of agreement that change needs to be made, but no one willing to take charge of it. Please put forward your thoughts at User talk:Helenalex/coirewrite or on the conflict of interest guidelines talkpage. -- Helenalex ( talk) 05:28, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello folks, I know I am a relatively new username but as a user i am quite old through various ip's. I tell you in good faith that i believe i have a grasp of goodwill and professionalism on wikipedia.
What i propose is a so-called, "honorary" "Sixth Pillar of Wikipedia".
Please bear with me, i plan to support my case.
Now, it has often come to my attention (and sometimes personally affected me) that certain users that consider themselves knowledgeable in wikipedia protocol happen to see themselves in a certain authoritorian light. This is a completely natural human state. And, after all, since we know that even people of power may be led astray, that is why the laws of the land apply not only to all of us ordinary folk, but also on the law-enforcers themselves, for we are all shone upon by the light of the same sun and moon.
What I propose is for wikipedia's own self-check-and-balancing mechanism to be ameliorated with a minor addition that i believe will have positive equilibrating qualities.
I believe it is easiest to begin with an example. Often have i noticed on my travels through WP's articles and, more importantly, discussion pages, that certain users - perhaps such ones that have recently been made a junior administrator - to happen to stumble upon a fact in an article they they happen to personally not know...and such a fact i have found that they will often unflinchingly DELETE, citing something like "undid revision by user-so-and-so: unsourced info" in the history page log notes.
Now. I have noticed that whenever that happens, there tends to be a several-day-long edit war or passionate discussion on the talk pages that takes place, which almost invariably ends in the original info being reinstated with a source or some sort of footnote/explanation/justification added. Which has invariably made me think - what was the point of the argument in the first place?!
Could not the overzealous editor simply have added a "citation needed" or "this article needs a cleanup" tag and, if they felt it really urgent (which is rarely the case) to have contacted some of the regular contributors of the article in question to nudge them on to doing so?
Personally, i will rarely argue with someone on an article, due to the fact that i know that of the thousands of contributors to the project and all the time in the world that Wikipedia has ahead of it (let us hope!), i know that the truth will eventually prevail.
However, some facts tend to be pretty obscure, and are hard to find the source info for, and if they are randomly deleted, who really knows when a new user will join the project and re-contribute them along with the necessary source info?
Hence why i have been for some time considering the creation of a "Be Constructive, Not Destructive" policy to have on wikipedia, which could be placed as a main subsection of Wikipedia's Fifth Pillar: Be Bold. This is because, as per my point above, i have found human instincts and human pride to be much more powerful, despite the anonimity of a computer screen and online username, than common sense, and many users who believe themselves to be upright pillars of the wikipedia community to simply take the be bold maxim all too literally and to all too lighthandedly undo others' hard work by unscrupulously deleting what is often hard-found and thoroughly researched information, which simply the contributor has either lost, forgotten to add or simply lacks the hard bibliographical evidence to hand to properly reference.
Thus i think a collaboration of more experienced Wikipedians such as yourselves who make a point of contributing to Village Pump and truly do mean to help out less experienced wikipedians should create a page titled WP:CND ("¡Construye - No Destruye!" - sounds better in spanish!), in which the principles for CONSTRUCTIVE editing are outlined, helping people to yes, be bold, but at the same time not delete work which may not be being monitored by someone who can save it and therefore lead to it being lost forever.
To conclude my point from four paragraphs ago - i rarely argue with people on Wikipedia, but when i do it is ONLY EVER due to the fact that i have noticed them flagrantly getting rid of info that could be properly referenced and become even more useful through just a little effort on their part - after all, how much effort is required to simply add a "citation needed" tag?!
And the main reasoning i always try to present - and that i think should be central to my proposed WP:CND page - is the literal definition of the word "encyclopedia": "all-round knowledge" - ie. better to have the info under discussion for deletion stay in an article [obviously, unless it is clearly wrong - i am not proposing that we have wrong info on Wikipedia] and simply mention that it is a "fringe belief", or an "alternate interpretation", etc, along with a "citation needed" tag and an urgent discussion on the talk page, which would then prompt people to source the info and improve the article. see? better leave the info and discuss it, leading to improvement, than to delete it, possibly (and often) erroneously and erase any future possibility of the issue ever being raised again, thus losing the info forever.
Now, i wrote the above text several months ago after my last argument over such flagrant deletion but decided not to post it as i, as every human being, preferred to kid myself into believing the problem will not affect me personally again (I erroneously believed myself too zenned-up on the Wikipedia:Don't-give-a-fuckism philosophy!) - . But, alas, it has, and berhaps all the better for it, for two reasons - a) i believe my proposal will indeed help many inexperienced users have a quotable comeback to overzealous "experienced user" deleters, who are well-read and can quote you WP policies till kingdom come and whom less experienced users have no hope of arguing against, even when they are clearly in the right (have you read some of the classic edit wars - you can often see who is clearly in the right, but loses due to lack of WP experience... now i know life is unfair, but if we don't try to turn that around, what are we?! merely the members of the animal kingdom that philosophers have been trying to convince us to ascend from for millenia), and b) actually provides a good concrete example that i can use to hopefully convince you.
Yesterday i completely by chance stumbled across a certain currency article, to which i had several months ago added the nicknames for the currency in question. I noticed that two weeks ago these had been deleted, the deleter citing "unsourced". now, that got me rattled. a) because clearly no-one had thought of adding the nickname before or had noticed its deletion, and so no-one is defending this info's existence; b) the currency is due to join the euro within a year or two, after which the nickname may well become obscolete and no new source material will be available to reference it with; c) importantly, by its very nature a currency nickname is colloquial, so would be hard to find any references from non-blog/non-chatroom sources, and even then real sticklers for the rules would say that the meaning conveyed is ambiguous; no "respectable" sources are to be easily found using the terms; and d) even more importantly - why the double standards - why did the deleting user not require such sourced references for the fact that GBP is called "quid" or that USD is called "bucks"? yes, we all speak english and "know" that to be the case, but a required source is a required source... whether for a well-known topic or for a little-known one. I give another example - in the London article, nearly every sentence is sourced; in the article for the smaller town of Watford, there is not a single source in three of the first four paragraphs. Now, by the practice of some contributors, nearly the entire Watford article would have to be deleted. And how would that help? a) it would not, b) it would lead to an edit war, c) it would stop the people in that edit war from happily and calmly contributing to the rest of wikipedia. and what would be the result? nothing constructive, initially, and a little while and a lot of anger later - a better sourced Watford article - which chould be achieved without all the worry anyway!
In the particular case of the currency i talked to the administrator in question and we sorted the matter out...which just highlights my original point - namely, what was the point of the whole delete-argue-discuss-sort out palaver in the first place?! could not the first two steps (delete-argue) have been skipped altogether and simply the "discuss-sort out" ones have been implemented? because, again, if i had not stumbled upon it, the discuss-sort out might never, ever have taken place... and how is that constructive?!
now, i hope if the contributor in question reads this - and i actually hope he does, i'll probably prompt him to this page once we have ourselves a little discussion going - he does take it as a piece of constructive criticism and does not take offece. and considers this next point - which i am sure does not apply to him/her but, having scrawled through the contributions pages of many a user, can safely say applies to quite a few of our co-contributors... so, here goes:
Are not the implications of an overzealous user's deleting actions much more worrying - how many other pages can such a user traul through, deleting info simply because he/she does not personally know it? How many pages can a single user effectively destroy by systematically erasing the same piece of info from a bunch of pages simply because it does not meet their personal criteria? (in the concrete currency case above, not a single user, and there are ample numismatics users watching the currency pages, has thought to take this action before, or even question the info presented in the article concerned...it cannot be so wrong, therefore, that some sort of simple tag would not sffice...)
Now, the user in question boasts on his userpage that he has been a wikipedian for 19 months and has made over 5,000 edits. many others boast much longer times and many more edits. such are users who believe that the Power of the Edit is within them. (please to not take haste to hold these comments against me in and of themselves, and only because i am a "new user", but within the context of my argument, and consider some if not many of the arguments you yourselves have had in the past...and do not be aftaid to admit in your heart of hearts if you have not personally sometimes been the unnecessarily-strict administrator... for of the thousands of contributions many people boast of - are not some of these simply unwarranted deletions that big-up their notoriety as a knowledgeable bureaucrat and strict administrator? many have we met with such pretensions...)
i refused to enter an edit war with the user over the currency issue until the matter got discussed, and i awaited his reply for almost a day (not much, i know, but many people don't even wait several minutes, and i am true when i say i would have waited longer) because i stick by my own rules, and a major part of my here proposition to become official WP policy is for Constructive Discussion to precede any major deletions (for, while the amount deleted may be small, such as in this case, the implications can be big - such as the fact that it may be a unique packet of information that is not to be found elsewhere in a particular article or on wikipedia in general).
More importantly, however, what does such a small deletion tell us about such a user's overall mentality when it comes to editing and CONTRIBUTING to wikipedia? note the word - "contribute": it means "to add". how can deleting therefore be a contribution, let alone a constructive one? it can only be a contribution if it is removing info which is known 100% to be wrong.
A major related type of argument i have come across and even participated in is when people take out info from an article simply because it does not belong in the subsection it appears in. And i and others have tried to reason - why not simply add another chapter/section and put the info there, or simply leave it where it is and add a footnote, or put the whole info itself in a footnote, rather than completely removing it from the article?how hard would it be for that info, or for the currency nickname, to have been tagged with "citation needed"? [Although i still technically disagree due to the double standards issue, which will need to be sorted out.]
Please remember - we are all wikipedians who love this project and are working CONSTRUCTIVELY towards one common goal. Let us try and improve it by adding my proposal as an official policy (obviously, with modifications and additions - i eagerly await all proposals and the ensuing discussion), and this honorary "Sixth Pillar", while i do not truly expect it to become a pillar [BCND 1], it is probably just as important as the rest, as it relates to the preservation of the totality of the work that is Wikipedia. it is planned as a type of self-preservation mechanism - and, as self-preservation is a quality extant in arguably all sentient lifeforms, and if we philosophically consider "knowledge" to be, if not sentient, at least sapient (a self-referential definition if ever i saw one!), then my WP:CND proposal would be a major part of the central nervous system of this very project.
I would like to thank you all for your patience, and eagerly await your thoughts. BigSteve ( talk) 15:22, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree with davidwr: Write an essay first.
I do recognise some of your feeling though, but can also understand where the deletion actions come from.
Several thoughts: Many of the "unconstructive" or "overzealous" edits are acting upon suspected vandalism. The trusthworthiness of the project as a whole would suffer from incorrect information, so it is better to be incomplete than incorrect. How would your essay deal with this serious problem?
Another issue: deletion cannot be constructive. I disagree. Articles should present the most relevant information, not all; as that would render completely unreadable articles. Adding information to an already lengthy article is often less constructive compared to deleting issues that receive undue attention. How would your idea cope with that?
Arnoutf (
talk) 17:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the main issue with it is: ITS A GIANT WALL OF TEXT! If you want it to be taken seriously and not just look like a rant, it needs a little more structure than the occasional line break. Otherwise, most people (like myself, are just going to look at it, think " tl;dr" and move on. After skimming it, I would also suggest separating the anecdotes and personal opinions from the actual proposal. Mr. Z-man 17:27, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Every now and then I run into articles about literary works that clearly and unquestionably are not notable enough to be included in Wikipedia, a recent example would be A mermaid story, and the related afd. However, to my knowledge there is no csd for literary works, altough at times I've seen such an article deleted under A7. I propose a new criterion be added for literary works. — Twinzor Say hi! 16:31, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I vaguely remember that some time ago, there was a failed attempt to put little markers at the tops of all articles, similar to the little star at the top of featured articles, so that someone could see what rating the article had, simply by looking at the top right corner. What I can't remember, however, is good articles: do we place little markers for good articles? Not a person who works with article ratings much and who knows little about good articles, I thought we did, but I checked a few GA-class architecture articles and was surprised to see that they didn't have any. Nyttend ( talk) 03:07, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Apparently, Wikipedia is not censored, but WP:Introduction says "No profanity, libel, or personal attacks will be tolerated." Although we don't censor Wikipedia, the sandbox header clearly states "Please do not place copyrighted, offensive, or libelous content in the sandbox(es)." At Wikipedia, we don't believe in censorship, but we won't hesitate to delete article based on a guideline known as WP:N, which basically notes what WE consider notable. Wikipedia apparently does not permit censorship, but we do have WP:NOT. Censorship is not our style, except for when it comes to usernames. I agree that we can't have a free-for-all, and I like the idea of not censoring, but the conflicting policies as defined are probably confusing the newbies, and we get all kinds of vandalism, test edits, sockpuppets, and disgruntled users when newbies get confused. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Shouldn't we do something to clear up the confusion and fix the conflicting policies? PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:33, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). 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: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BA, BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BK, BL, BM, BN, BO · 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, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193
I'm often seeing people's Time Top 100 of most influential people listings getting mentioned in lead sections of biography articles. But there are some reasons why that may not be the most helpful information:
For that I'd like to propose a policy that Time listings not be mentioned in the lead section and later not without citing Time's reasons. -- 94.79.143.154 ( talk) 08:07, 13 December 2008 (UTC)
I am trying to do some cleanup on Isaac Shelby, and I have a question. There are a number of places named for Governor Shelby; currently they are in list form at the end of the article. This seems like bad style. In this specific case, would it be correct to split this into a separate article ( List of places named after Isaac Shelby)? In general, approximately how many items is too many for an embedded list like this? Acdixon ( talk • contribs • count) 02:04, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
(Background: an attempt was made to merge WP:3RR with WP:Edit warring. This bold change was reverted; discussion continues below.)
It was not discussed at the relevant policy talk pages. My objection is that the changes were not discussed properly. We could merge all policies to m:Dick and WP:IAR, but that wouldn't be very useful, would it. We have created separate policy pages for clarity. Merging them may make things less clear. Jehochman Talk 14:46, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Respectfully, I think some of the discussion above overlooks the difference between how WP:3RR is written and how it is enforced. For example, Deacon of Pndapetzim called 3RR "an electric fence rule," but in practice it is enforced subjectively; sticking with the fence metaphor, individuals who walk near 3RR (without crossing or even touching it) get shocked, while cabals jump over it with impunity. (On the 3RR discussion page [1], I described an edit disagreement in which one side expressly refused my repeated invitations to discuss - for example here [2]. I followed 3RR carefully but got blocked anyway, and the wrong version got protected. Other editors then stepped in and the consensus version was restored. The best advice I received was to request page protection, which I had never known how to do before.) If 3RR is to stay on its own page, then its enforcement should be what Mango imagines it to be, i.e. a bright line rule with no subjective enforcement. (If the definition is considered inadequate, it could be changed to match the definition of edit warring, i.e. reverting "instead of discussion," and possibly to lengthen the period from 1 day to 3 days). If 3RR is going to be enforced as it is currently, then I agree with Kotniski and Gurch that it should be merged into WP:EW for context. TVC 15 ( talk) 23:28, 25 November 2008 (UTC)
Regarding definitions and merger, please note there is a noticeboard page with definitions of 3RR and edit warring: [ [3]]. If a definition is updated or merged on one page, the other(s) should be consistent. TVC 15 ( talk) 02:13, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
We seem to be straying from the point somewhat - we were only talking about compacting policy by putting related points on one page; this won't affect the content or interpretation of those policies (except in that it makes it easier for learning editors to see the whole picture). Are there any remaining objections to doing that?-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:54, 26 November 2008 (UTC)
3RR encourages tag teaming and Wikilawyering. It should be stricken. Taemyr ( talk) 22:18, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
I've noticed the discussion here about 3RR and I thought some time about commenting here. I would like to share my ver recent experience - as I side result I might draw some attention to the, but that is not m intention: Some people here might be aware of the controversies surrounding the article that is currently called Ancient Egyptian race controversy. I am still working on the topic, albeit slowly. As part of this, I moved the material on the question whether the Sphinx would depict an African person, or to be less politically correct but more clear: a 'black' person, to Great Sphinx of Giza. There was some discussion in this an that talk page, and some work being done, and I think that we arrived at a version that everyone could agree. That is, until a very new editor came along and changed the the article drastically, especially concerning that point. In the previous version we had 8 references, most of the to written works - in the version he proposed we only had two, and those very only images of some Pharaoh statues. I reverted, but repeatedly requested in the edit summary that he would take the issue to the talk page and wrote an elaborate statement there, but he didn't and kept reverting. When I finally got him to write something on the talk page, he continued the edit war and finally broke 3rr. I reported it, and what happened?
The admin who took the issue up dealt out "warnings all round". [4] Sorry, if this is the outcome of a 3RR notification, I would have been better of not to report it. The inexperienced editor would not have known about 3RR had I not informed him about it, and since I already got him to concede at some point (at least for now), I probably could have worked out a compromise in the article (not all of his edits were bad, just the part were he removed sourced content). However, that would have been a partial revert, and it would be my 4th. Currently I don't think that 3RR is archiving it's intended purpose. I don't mind spending hours reading literature for Wikipedia and hours editing. I also don't mind spending hours on discussion pages. But every time I get an edit war I am little bit closer to quitting Wikipeida. This time I really hoped that I wouldn't be that disappointed, but the comment the admin made simply broke another straw. If Wikipedia doesn't find a better way to handle edit wars, editors like my, who are honestly only interested in writing good articles about controversial topics, will be disappointed and quit. This doesn't mean that Wikipedia will fail. But this would mean that we will only have articles about topics like the characters from Battlestar: Galactica,(see: [5]) and not about important, but difficult topics like Radical Afrocentric historiography (At least nothing better than the current Ancient Egyptian race controversy). I don't have any concept that I could propose to replace 3RR, but if possible I would like to hear some views on this. Zara1709 ( talk) 01:02, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
I am sure that this has been discussed previously (possibly many times) but editing difficulties I experienced in editing the Anti-Zionism article has caused me to think that a balanced article on a controversial subject depends on who shows up to do the editing. In turn, who shows up depends on
Conclusion: a different process for editing articles on controversial issues is needed, or articles on controversial subjects should be excluded from Wikipedia. Why? Because crap articles, and bullshit articles, tend to discredit all of WP, and at minimum reflect badly on it. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 15:47, 29 November 2008 (UTC)
The dispute resolution process has seldom, if ever, solved these issues. In this case, there has been arbitration
here and it seems to have solved nothing.
Concerning the Irgun article (which I mentioned above), my only editing was yesterday, when I noticed this statement in the lead Initially, a central part of their efforts included attacks against Palestinian Arabs. That claim is a view that is disputed, and it was cited to a very main stream Jewish source; so I checked the source [7]. As is clear, the source says something rather different than what the lead presents it as saying, so I made this change [8]. That has been diverted back by two different users, and it seems unlikely that my correction can be gotten to replace the distortion because I am outvoted. If you refer to my original analysis of this sort of problem (above) you will see that in #2 I said: When the issue an article deals with is highly polarized, and with editors weighted to one side, the larger group will shove their POV down the throat of the other side, and call the resulting crap "consensus." This case is, it appears to me, a perfect example of that.
I already know that AN/I will not resolve this sort of problem. Also a look at the mediation and arbitration efforts of the past shows that will not resolve the problem either.
Challenge: I hope the users who read this understand that this a years old problem that can not be solved by any presently existing WP mechanism. Additionally, if WP wishes to be taken seriously as a reliable information source it is unacceptable to continue evading resolving the problem. The challenge is: do some brainstorming, and find a solution. Please, this really needs attention, and someone needs to hit the panic button. I brought this to Village pump (policy) because I hope someone here will start to think about finding a cure, instead of suggesting putting a band-aid on (what amounts to) a tumor. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 13:33, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
Producing an NPOV article depends on following policy - which includes not overwhelming an article with a discussion of antisemitism (where in fact, it barely belongs) and then announcing that more or less everyone in the world is guilty of it. Policy would also stop us using a laughably poor source for an extraordinarily "surprising" quote from Joschka Fischer that "anti-Zionism inevitably leads to antisemitism". I'll need to remind everyone you've been warned not to remove other people's TalkPage contributions. PR talk 21:18, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
Tarc, I did not say they (three users) are "behind me", I said that they acknowledge there is a problem that needs to be solved. I am not interested in getting anyone behind me. I am interested in solving a problem. If there is no solution forthcoming, then things will just continue in the direction in which they are now going. I have assumed that some users would find the present situation good, and others would not. (Actually the level of agreement with my view on this issue is better than I expected.) As I have explained, I think the situation with disputed articles is bad. Also, my own best guess is that the chances for change is remote, and the situation is hopeless. I decided to raise the question anyhow, but the thin response from users to this thread suggests that you have nothing to worry about. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 23:58, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
@Malcolm Schosha - it is extremely noticeable that you've again failed to deal with the first source-challenge that I presented you above (over the Anti-Zionism article). The content you wish to use from that source is "extreme" and the credibility of it is diminished and not enhanced by the better recorded material from the same subject that's been presented. (Your Telushkin edit also has serious problems, but we'll not go into that for a moment).
You've now Forum-shopped this highly contentious content dispute around various "conduct" based noticeboards at WP, starting with one at AN. This will not count in your favor since there is ArbCom Enforcement on this entire subject area, and it specifically refers to "conduct" of editors and adjudging whether such conduct is "disruptive". Administrators rightly have a short fuse in this particular area, and you will be blocked if you persist. If I had my way, you'd also be blocked for repeatedly addressing other editors in an ethnically-specific fashion, and your interference with TalkPages (even after being told repeatedly by an administrator to desist) does not bode well. PR talk 12:29, 3 December 2008 (UTC)
Another article that's an example of this problem is this article. Reform is definitely needed. Consensus regarding controversial articles is usually impossible. SMP0328. ( talk) 21:00, 11 December 2008 (UTC)
"a different process for editing articles on controversial issues is needed" What process do you suggest?
"articles on controversial subjects should be excluded from Wikipedia" This is a laughable suggestion.
You are correct that wikipedia has problems dealing with controversial subject matter in a neutral fashion, but I can not think of any better way. --
ScWizard (
talk) 05:42, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I want to cantact the Wikimedia foundation.
How to contact? I can't find the foundation's web page.
Korean Wikipedia Admins say that All non-GFDL texts can not be quoted, because Korean Wikipedia do not approve the fair use.
I can not quote anything from All non-GFDL texts?
What is the foundation's quotation policy?
Why the foundation makes the wikiquote korean?
I think I can quote anything from All non-GFDL texts.
I am right? or wrong?
Korean Wikipedia Admins are right? or wrong? -- WonRyong ( talk) 00:59, 9 December 2008 (UTC)
Could we get some more input and discussion over at this policy page please? Wikipedia_talk:Image_use_policy#Removal_of_galleries. I have a feeling the current level of involvement won't quite be enough to solve it.-- Crossmr ( talk) 02:13, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
I am a great supporter of the current array of templates available at Wikipedia:Template messages/Cleanup, as I feel that they invite editors to address issues such as {{ notability}} by improving the articles in question. I use them often, and despite the fact their use brings me into conflict with other editors, I feel their benefit far outways their disadvantages.
However, there is an issue about their relevance to general reader. On the one hand, they act as a warning that there may be problems with the article subject, the content or viewpoint of the article itself, or that there are other quality issues that the reader should take account when forming their own views about a particular topic. On the other, cleanup issues such as notability really are not a major issue for most readers, and frankly notability is a rather esoteric subject in any case.
My proposal is that cleanup templates would be better placed on article talk pages, rather than added to the mainspace articles themselves on the grounds that they detract from the reader's experience of Wikipedia. In articles such as A Terrible Vengeance, the templates tend to disfigure the articles when looked from a purely presentational view, and the issues they are designed to address are probably better addressed through the talk pages in any case. Does anyone share this view, or should they remain on article page as is current practise? -- Gavin Collins ( talk) 11:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
This article needs help in the following area: | copy-editing | You can help. [Show me how] |
Just a short note to tell that I strongly support moving cleanup tags to talk pages. Every article is in need of improvements. Let us have an encyclopedia with a decent layout and appearance, instead of cluttering tags on almost every article. -- Kildor ( talk) 21:20, 1 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm surprised that this perennial proposal hasn't made it to Wikipedia:Perennial proposals by now. Uncle G ( talk) 19:16, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
It is important for a reader to know that an article is not up to Wikipedia snuff. Tags belong atop articles that need major work. Tags can also serve to invite a reader to participate. Kingturtle ( talk) 16:04, 8 December 2008 (UTC)
Cleanup tags should be in prominant locations on the article page (top of page; top of section) because they serve two purposes: 1) they alert readers of weaknesses of the article they are reading so they do not assume an article with serious problems is reliable; 2) they alert potential editors of important areas where the article needs improvements. Neither of these purposes would be served by hiding the notices on the talk pages. — Chris Capoccia T⁄ C 14:17, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
As noted by many others above, cleanup tags serve important functions for wikipedia readers as well as wikipedia editors, not least of which is the conversion of one into the other :D. I agree with the sentiment that there should be no cleanup tags on any of our articles. However, it should be so because there aren't any cleanup issues to resolve. That is our real priority. Happy‑ melon 15:53, 22 December 2008 (UTC)
was just about to suggest something similar myself.
boilerplates in general can do two things:
on the downside, they really make the article ugly if too many are used.
I'd suggest leaving boilerplates up the top of an article soley for reader warnings, e.g. 'the factual accuracy of this article is disputed' (reader beware + editor help out) to alert them to issues before they've read the article, whilst all of the other maintanance crap goes down the bottom under a ==maintanance== header (e.g., crystal, wikify, deletion, etc). possible exeption for speedy-delete, which needs to be up the top to quickly grab an editors attention. this would be consistant with the 'this is a stub -- help inprove it' note to editors, which is discreetly placed down the bottom of the article.
example Jonathan_Sprout -- Dak ( talk) 21:46, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
Speaking as somebody who thinks cleanup tags are mostly a waste of time and effort that should absolutely be put on the Talk page, out of the way, I think you're correct - there is no consensus on this issue. Many good editors love them. (They're wrong, but such is life!) - DavidWBrooks ( talk) 20:05, 7 January 2009 (UTC)
Hello, I don't have much experience editing wikipedia, but I have a lot of experience learning from it. I just wanted to point out that it's very annoying when a one sentence "fact" has a 200 page PDF as its citation, and the citation doesn't reference what page of the PDF the "fact" comes from. You end up digging through a very long and technical document, looking for verification of a fact that for all you know the document may not even verify.
So I thought perhaps the policy on citations could be changed to require citations to mention on what page of the document the "fact" they cite is documented. When books are cited the page number is included in the citation, I don't see how a lengthly PDF should be any different. If requiring this would be too radical a change, policy should at least encourage this. It seems like this bit of extra information could only help. -- ScWizard ( talk) 05:34, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
You can always tag the citations with {{ pn}}. This adds them to Category:Wikipedia articles needing page number citations. — Chris Capoccia T⁄ C 22:38, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
oppose - I see no reason for individual page numbers on items of less than 30 pages, including chapters in books. To given an example, I've improved some articles on animal phlya, some to GA level. Journal articles are not written about such basic zoology, so textbooks are the only option. Typically I've used 2 textbooks for most of the hard-core zoology, and their sections on a single phylum are typically 20-30 pages. I typically use different refs for blocks of 5-10 pages, where possible. Giving individual page numbers would simply add increase the number of items in the "Footnotes" section by 30-50. Reviewers often don't have the books, and top text books tend not to be viewable in Google Books, so reviewers generally have to WP:AGF with refs to textbooks - as well as with refs to journals for which they do not have subscriptions. Specifying page numbers for each statement is meaningless extra work for editors, with no likely benefit for readers or reviewers. -- Philcha ( talk) 15:02, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
comment support - I disagree with Philcha's statement that "Specifying page numbers for each statement is meaningless extra work for editors, with no likely benefit for readers or reviewers." Citations have several purposes: (1) to permit the source of facts stated in an article to be verified by others, (2) to identify the source of quotations, (3) to provide readers with a place or places to find more detailed and/or additional information, and (4) to point out opposing viewpoints or controversy. The specificity of the page reference in a citation should depend on its purpose. Sources of facts and quotations (particularly) should be given with specificity — otherwise, the job of verification is made unnecessarily difficult, and editors may be tempted to "slide by" with work that isn't careful. Purposes (3) and (4) are best served in many cases by broader page references. It shouldn't be necessary in most cases to footnote every sentence — citations can be gathered in a omnibus single footnote at the end of a paragraph (a common academic practice). This is one of many issues for which good judgment is the key, and which should be reviewed carefully as part of the FAC process. If WP is ever going to overcome the disdain with which academics and educators now view it, our citation practice is going to have to improve.
Simmaren (
talk) 15:14, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
Page citation is already policy. WP:CITE, which is policy, instructs authors to use any standard citation system when citing sources (all other style manuals specify one system, but that is a different issue). All standard citation systems require page citations for specific facts. In fact, How to format citations specifies including page numbers. All of Wikipedia's citation templates have a parameter for page numbers. Finell (Talk) 02:03, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
This is a problem that has bugged me since the conclusion of
Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/FritzpollBot: the community were relatively ambiguous about the notability of places and settlements. The purpose of the bot, which has already been approved by community consensus but as yet not ever run, was to eliminate the need for writers such as
User:Dr. Blofeld to do it manually, which takes place to this day, albeit with limited speed and semi-automated tools rather than bots.
Now I have been asked about
Wikipedia_talk:Noticeboard_for_India-related_topics#Bot_to_create_articles_on_missing_settlements_and_places_in_India on my talkpage and I went there to offer my assistance, and save Tinu from creating the bot himself when one already exists in an approved form. And I noticed in the proposal the old chestnut of "inherent notability" - I'm afraid I can't let this one go, because if Tinu gets approved to run in this fashion, I will wonder why the community bothered having the argument with me on notability in the first place, and I want to know if the consensus on the notability of places has changed.
I don't think this needs to be resolved for the purposes of bots, but for the simple fact that these articles are regularly created en masse manually. If they aren't notable, we need to decide to prevent this creation. If they are notable, it frees up some work for BRFA if other automated/semi-automated means are proposed. SO this isn't about Bots, and those who know me will understand why I want to avoid that discussion - this is a matter of notability (never cleared up at the essentially defunct
Wikipedia:Notability (Places and transportation)) that needs to be decided one way or the other without people referring to the non-policy/guideline of common deletion outcomes. I hope you can all be of help
Fritzpoll (
talk) 08:28, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Mmm a long standing question. Basically I think the fact that we have full detailed and encyclopedic articles on places with as little as 3 people and that some notability is asserted even for its history etc shows to me that anything can be written about just about any place. Any place is notable to the people who live there so if we are to think from a neutral viewpoint then I believe a high proportion of places are. I disagree with "places are inherently notable" as it suggests to me a gross generalisation of the world, given that many places however small or large often couldn't have a more different history or status. In reality though all cities, towns and villages are considered noteworthy on wikipedia as potentially a lot could be written about most places as has been proved. The main problem is undoubtedly equal access to information on all world places and indeed whether every hamlet or small village in the world needs including in wikipedia. As much as I want full world coverage, creating a high number of stub articles may be problematic given the gross uneveness in access to information and undoubtedly the uneven way in which editors edit wikipedia. If we were to create an article for every place in India as a stub how long to we think it would take manually for editors to fully expand them all? How many articles do you think would attract Indian IP's or vandals which post unintelligible text into them as has happened already on many articles and going undetected? I fully support the idea in principle but in reality the uneven acces in information and indeed the number of editors willing or interested in expand them is shockingly low given the scale of the project. I must have come across thousands of RamBot articles even on the United States which have barely been edited since so if we were to do the same for countries in Asian And Africa it is highly likely most will remain sub stubs for 5-10 years at least. So while I support the idea that a lot of notable information can be written for just about anywhere, the question is do we want hundreds of thousands of new articles with nothing more than a population figure sitting around for a long time without being expanded? As I said before on numerous occasions with Fritz if we can compile some sentences of information and start articles as meatier stubs rather than one liners I'll fully support it if we maximise the utility of it. The Bald One White cat 11:44, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Which is exactly why lists of places by district with coordinates were considered a sensible alternative. The Bald One White cat 14:04, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
One thing that really buggeed me about the whole thing, which I didn't bring up when it had that major discussion earlier this year, is that somehow adding all those places with a bot was supposed to counter systemic bias. The thing is, to me it seems that adding them would be /increasing/ the bias, against other topics in the encyclopedia. But that's just me. Furthermore, it seems to me that stating "every place is inherently notable (because we can prove their existence)" is rather like saying "every book is inherently notable", or whatever. In fact, it seems to ME that things should be the opposite -- since settling in places together in a group is standard human behavior, doing so is the exact opposite of notable and any place needs to have a reason to be in the encyclopedia beyond existing. ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ ( talk) 14:14, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Well if you created 2 million geo articles it would probably change the balance but to me indeed it would only exemplify the uneveness in quality and access to information for certain parts of the world when editors search through large categories finding nearly all of them one liners and devoid of content. The idea that the world is fully covered is right in principle but indeed we would be kidding ourselves if we had 2 million sub stubs on places and prentending that we had the world covered. We'll get there eventually but sensibly and at least compromising the number of articles with greater quality. ANyway this discussion is nothing about what happened in the summer so please lets discuss notabililty only. In regards to notability as I said above, if articles contain adequate content or at least have the potential to be fully expanded with what sources are avilabale at present then they become welcome additions to the encyclopedia in my book. For example at present I am working Mexican municipalities at present which can all be fully expanded within minutes using reliable sources and they are started well. I wouldn't be bothering to create them if I didn't feel they weren't notable or couldn't be expanded immediately. This is why I no longer create articles based on computer generated coordinates I'd like to add. Best ot work wirh the information and resources we have at present. A coimputer generated site only is not good enough in regards to starting places I think. The Bald One White cat 15:20, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
In my distorted view, notability is, in essence, a function of verifiability. If there isn't substantial secondary coverage of the topic, how can we verify that the article we write is at all accurate? If it's just census data, that's verifiable and it's not a problem, but probably best left as a table instead of opening the possibility of articles filled with WP:OR. SDY ( talk) 18:11, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I can't speak for outside the United States, but inside the United States, if a locality has the power to make and enforce criminal laws that apply to visitors, e.g. towns, villages, Native-American reservations, etc., or it is a major administrative geographic subdivision, such as a county, a non-charter township, etc., then it qualifies. Other places that might have quasi-governmental authority, such as special-purpose taxing districts, homeowners' associations, neighborhoods, etc. generally have to earn their notability the old fashioned way. Having said that, a lot of not-really-notable neighborhoods and taxing districts have pages because they are part of "a set" such as "neighborhoods in major city" or "hospital district in state." Whether they would survive AFD probably depends on who happens to see the AFD and voice their opinion more than anything else. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 18:31, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
nothing is inherently notable. every article must cite reliable and independant sources that provide significant coverage of the subject matter. The only questions should be hashing out the details of what all those words from WP:NN mean in terms of the sources usually available for places (for example, clarifying that a dot on a map does not count as significant coverage). — Chris Capoccia T⁄ C 21:30, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Coming down to the basics: What's a notable village and what's a non notable village? Should there be a criteria (eg population cut-off limit)? =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:03, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
My fundamental question remains unaddressed. (These questions are not addressed to any person)
See User:Uncle G/On notability#Notability is not a blanket. You're looking for a blanket. Stop looking. Even Rambot worked from and cited sources. Uncle G ( talk) 23:22, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi there, I have a question regarding user categorisations. As you all know users may categorize themselves base on their background, skills and interests etc. I want to know if there is any policy prohibiting users from identifying themselves as supporters or members of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda or Hizbullah by using User categorisation? -- Kaaveh ( talk) 08:38, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
I wanted to mention/discuss Self Identification and related policies. Due to recent American Election, a couple of issues has come up that may or may not have been discussed before, mainly how a person's BLP reflects how they self identify and editor's POV on the issue. Most times this s not an issue, but with Barack Obama being elected as the President of the United States, we now have an issue. Mainly it is this: A person is born of mixed race/heritage. While they acknowledge their mixed race/heritage, they prefer to be identified as one race/heritage, various reliable sources refer to this person as that race/heritage, and the public seem them as they self identify as. While most of these articles do delve into the person's mixed race/heritage to some degree, some editors have issues with what the person of a BLP self Identifies as. If it is verifiable through reliable sources that the person self identifies as something, would it be a BLP violation not to refer to them as such? Should a policy, addition, whatever be written to address this issue? I've noticed in the past that some editors also have a problem disassociating themselves from their POV when it comes to this issue? They seem to take this issue very personal and, in my opinion, ignore how the person of the BLP views themselves even if it violates BLP and NPOV. Brothejr ( talk) 15:43, 15 December 2008 (UTC)
Lately I've noticed a rise in seemingly unfounded deletions. As a non-admin editor, I have to say that the process for reviewing and correcting such deletions could use some improvement. Once a page is deleted, it would be nice if the page was still visible and any discussion of the deletion was easily accessible. In general, it seems that the current deletion policy gives a lot of power to admins, some of whom are abusing it, so I think the policy may need to be somehow revised. -- Elplatt ( talk) 05:43, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
We currently have the impressive and interesting File:Chimpanzee congo painting.jpg as a DYK hook to Congo (chimpanzee) on the main page. That picture's description states that "Animals have no copyright" and hence the image (and faithful photographic reproductions) are in the public domain. I have two conflicting thoughts about this. First, from a moral perspective I don't see why animals, or at least higher primates and cetaceans, should not enjoy copyright protection of their works (also see Great Ape Project). Of course, legally they don't, at least in most jurisdictions. That opens up the other angle. Isn't, in this case, the animal just a tool of the owner for producing pictures? In that case, the copyright would belong to whoever had the idea of getting Congo to paint and gave him the proper equipment. Would that be different from a modern artist who semi-randomly splashes paint onto a canvas? -- Stephan Schulz ( talk) 09:11, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Deletion was requested on copyright grounds, and the image was kept. See:
commons:Commons:Deletion requests/Image:Chimpanzee congo painting.jpg
-- Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) ( Talk) 10:37, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
I am becoming increasingly concerned that the Fringe Theories Noticeboard is being used to enforce Political correctness, or in some cases just the personal preferences of a few users. See, for example, this discussion [9], in which a few users from that noticeboard argue for the removal of an article, which admittedly has problems, but which certainly has notability, based on premises that seem problematic. I want to put this here now, but do not have much time, and will fill this out better later, and supply some more examples too.
I have come to view the very existence of the Fringe theories/Noticeboard as more of a problem for WP, than as a solution to a problem. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 16:39, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
Re:the "inherent canvassing in the operation of the noticeboard". Your accusation might be applied with equal justice to any other noticeboard on Wikipedia, including this one. The rest of your argument amounts to little more than "When I like what the Fringe Theories Noticeboard does, it works; when I don't, it doesn't. Recently, I haven't liked it very much at all, so let's get rid of it altogether". Again, this argument might be applied to any other noticeboard on Wikipedia. -- Folantin ( talk) 10:57, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
One has to wonder if there's a pattern developing here. Other editors don't like my changes to contentious articles? let's change the rules. Other editors don't agree with my point of view on FTN? FTN is useless. These policies and mechanisms appear to work for a great majority of the users, Malcolm. Why do they not work for you? Tarc ( talk) 15:53, 17 December 2008 (UTC)
trust that Malcolm has taken the wikilawyering to the (predictable) next level of calling it ad hominem. Pointing out that your argument has no merit isn't ad hominem, give me a break. Next thing you'll claim I have threatened you with violence or insulted your mother. How about you stick to the actual issue and try to build a case instead of trying to drag it to the level of wikipolitics. Everyone is prepared to give your article a fair chance within WP:NOTE and WP:DUE, so how about trying some, dare I say it, WP:AGF. -- dab (𒁳) 20:27, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
← Malcolm, it really sounds like the only solution for you would be to completely scrap our current Notice Board processes and invent something new. All the notice boards have a tendency to attract people interested in a particular topic. You may see that as PoV, but it's inherent to the system. Unless you propose and get community consensus to implement a new system, you're stuck with the consensus at the Fringe board. — The Hand That Feeds You: Bite 00:40, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
A subject, and accusation, which has entered this conversation a few times is the claim that FTN is concerned about (to use Dbachmann's term) "conspiracy mongers." The fact is that discussion at Fringe theories/Noticeboard generates its own conspiracy theories -- I suppose created by its own participating conspiracy mongers.
An outstanding example is this [13] discussion, concerning the activities of Wikipedia's Baha'i editors. For those who are interested, the discussion continues here [14], where much of the discussion centers on objections of FTN editors to Baha'i coming at the top of alphabetical lists, and here [15], where a FTN editor made a major change to a well developed article without any explanation (much less discussion) on the article's talk page. There was, later, some discussion on the talk page [16], in which several FTN editors out voted an editor of the article, ensuring that (what they regarded) undeserving Baha'is would no longer be at the top of an alphabetical list. It was this series of editing events that first caused me to doubt the positive benefit of FTN. In the end, I quite regretted my participation, with the disregard of protests by an established editor of that article. I doubt that any change was necessary, and if change was made it should have been done in a way that was not so arrogant.
The situation on the Fringe theories/Noticeboard is of somewhat out of control editors, in my view loose cannons, who suspect that much of what they do not understand, or what they do not like, to be fringe; and consequently going on the attack based on ignorance and/or personal preferences. They claim the result is NPOV, but the result is all too frequently nothing more than their own POV. Malcolm Schosha ( talk) 15:19, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this has come up before, but would it be useful to add an infobox setting for outgoing incumbent officials? In other words, currently an official is listed as incumbent up until the end of his or her term, even if a successor has already been named. I just checked at George W. Bush, and there are warnings all over the place not to change it until 2009-01-20. Wouldn't it be less confusing and more information-rich to note these officials as "outgoing (on yyyy-mm-dd)" rather than "incumbent"? (also "outgoing" would seem better than "lame duck")
I checked on the Template:Infobox talk page and didn't see any comments there, but I thought I'd float the idea here first, since this page gets more traffic. I'll add a note there shortly. superluser t c 2008 December 17, 00:03 (UTC)
Let's not over explode the infoboxes. The US transition period is one of the longest in the world (to my knowledge). In most countries transitions between governments is an issues of weeks, if not days. As Wikipedia is not a news site adding a transition status for a fewdays would be over the top. So this expansion would be only relevant for those few countries with lengthy transition periods (ie the US) which happens only for a few months every 4 (or in the case of re-election) or 8 years. I think this is just over the top, to deal with a very specific and time-bound issue; so I would say, not relevant enough to implement. Arnoutf ( talk) 22:22, 18 December 2008 (UTC)
Moved to new proposal page: Wikipedia:Protected editing rights. Discussion moved to appropriate talk page. I just thought I would make a start. I strongly encourage everyone to mercilessly edit and improve the proposal page. -- .: Alex :. 20:11, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
A question has arisen at WT:RS that I don't remember ever discussing before... are podcasts considered reliable sources? Assuming I am right and this is a new question, I think we need a fairly large sample of community opinion before we can determine consensus. Please swing by the guideline talk page an share your views. If it is not a new question... please point me to where it has been discussed. Blueboar ( talk) 03:26, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Please provide your input on this RFC to resolve whether team logos can be used on pages that significantly talk about the team (such as per-season team pages or rivalry pages). -- MASEM 14:52, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
FYI, based on a conversation on Jimmy Wales's talk page:
Your feedback is appreciated. rootology ( C)( T) 19:27, 19 December 2008 (UTC)
Looking at 50th Grammy Awards and 51st Grammy Awards I observe that WP:MOSMUSIC has not been applied and that almost everything has been emboldened. I can, perhaps, understand emboldening the winner in a list of nominees, but can't see the point in a list of winners only or of nominees only. Should WP:MOSMUSIC be applied rigorously? -- SGBailey ( talk) 23:24, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
I recall a discussion I had some time ago about trying to clarifying A7, so that it was made clear that any assertion of notability was enough to warrant an WP:AFD. However the discuss dried up and very little came of it . It still appears that user are devoting far too much time speeding articles under A7 and not understanding how it works or the subject at hand .Not wanting to single any user out but needing an example User:Adamfinmo has nominated four articles for A7 in the last day which have failed . This raises the question how many border line articles has the user nominated and a admin deleted. I propose A7 is removed and articles which have questionable notability are taken to AFD. If these articles are about a not notable person , band or what have you a WP:Snow consensus will form rather rapid. This will at least give the article author time to defend their work (a article can be A7 deleted in minutes) and will stop biting people. Gnevin ( talk) 23:31, 20 December 2008 (UTC)
Can you please review this and tell us why you felt Andrew Bonds had no indication of notability 02:04, 21 December 2008 (UTC)—Preceding unsigned comment added by Gnevin ( talk • contribs) Dloh cierekim 02:12, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
copying omitted portion from my talk page ::::There is no need to restore as I don't feel it would stand a WP:Snow chance on passing. I'm not trying to pick on you in particular ,rather just highlighting how A7 is being using far outside the scope for which it is intended . Gnevin ( talk) 02:33, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm sorry, but there is no indication of meeting WP:BIO in the article. Dloh cierekim 02:11, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I've been doing some reviews lately on CSD work... A7 actually appears, based upon my limited non-scientific survey, to be one of the more reliably used tags. That being said, I think it is the one where (even when properly utilized) does the most biting of newbies.---EDIT: Forgot to sign:--- Balloonman PoppaBalloon 17:53, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I have restored my original heading. that was deleted as A7, not G11, as the below discussion shows, it was A7, with BLP concerns.
What about BLP , the guy ran for president if that isn't an assertion of notability I don't know what is. Of 20 articles tagged for speedy ,I found 5 which asserted some notablity , 3 where deleted thats 18% Gnevin ( talk) 02:41, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I've mark the above resolved as the issue has changed so much . As per above what is an assertion of notability? And are some admins confusing the issue by using A7 when more apt reasons would apply such as the Lee Mercer Jr. example above Gnevin ( talk) 02:57, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
See Wikipedia talk:Criteria for speedy deletion#Proposed clarification for A7. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 03:16, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I was wondering how the no original research policy works with photographs. For example, there will be a photo of a bird taken by a user and included with an article and the user will state that this photograph is in indeed of the bird the article is about. To me this seems like original research in itself -- it doesn't seem trivial to identify the species of any arbitrary bird just based on a photograph. And of course there is no published source for these photographs identifying their subjects as such. And many photographs appear to have this status. What is the policy for this? -- Atethnekos ( talk) 05:20, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the undocumented photographs are reaching near-crisis proportions. I hereby call for all these dubious pictures to be quarantined pending review by a panel. Hole Punch 85 ( talk) 22:26, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
In WP:C, I'd like to propose including specific reference to abridgment as derivative work in the section Wikipedia:Copyrights#Using copyrighted work from others. Please see Wikipedia talk:Copyrights#Derivative works. I'd greatly appreciate feedback there as to the language used as well as with respect to potentially consensus-derailing problems. :) -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:35, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
I have just posted a proposal for a board tasked with ensuring transparency and accountability for Arbitration, Checkuser and Oversight. The proposal is available at Wikipedia:Review Board, and comments are welcome and sollicited.
Please note that this is a proposal from a new Arbitrator, but not a Committee proposal. Other arbitrators have examined, commented, and assisted in the crafting of this proposal, but in their individual capacities. — Coren (talk) 23:52, 21 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I want to understand the rationale of making number articles about years instead of about the actual numbers (i.e. this guideline). I hope that's clear enough: the article 1 is about the year, not about the actual number. I know there's a lot of discussion about it, but I haven't found a page that honestly explains why this is the way it was decided to be. (For the record, I find this convention totally ridiculous and the most annoying thing about Wikipedia). Kreachure ( talk) 22:42, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
[[1979]]
is writing about the year, or the number? In general, it's probably the year. Besides, it's more relevant to link years than link random numbers (despite that linking years, even, has fallen out of favour in some circles). I thought it was strange at first, but if you think about it, the way it is now makes a lot of sense. Besides, most of the year articles at low numbers have
hatnotes linking to the relevant number article. {{
Nihiltres|
talk|
log}} 23:07, 23 December 2008 (UTC)
The Criteria for speedy deletion A7 says articles about organizations except schools which do not claim notability can be speedy-deleted. This is up for discussion. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Schools/Criteria for Speedy Deletion A7 if you want to participate. davidwr/( talk)/( contribs)/( e-mail) 04:41, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Can you have a look at User:Gnevin/schools and edit or comment as you see fit Gnevin ( talk) 10:49, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Who changed the wording of this tag? It used to read "The neutrality of this article is disputed". Now it reads:
The new wording is much more insipid and totally fails to get the point across in my view. I don't know who is responsible for the change, but I think it needs to be changed back to what it was, pronto. Gatoclass ( talk) 16:56, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
{{POV}}
is regularly used not only to label biased sections as such but it is also often used speciously to label broadly neutral sections as biased. That is to say that {{POV}}
is itself used to push a point-of-view; I was looking for a wording that would make it difficult to use in such a manner.
CIreland (
talk) 07:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I'm sure CIreland is correct to say that some people exploit the POV tag to try and discredit articles they don't like. However, some users will exploit any policy to try and gain an advantage, the solution is not to start discarding the policies.
Apart from which, I think the problem CIreland alludes to is a relatively minor one. In my own experience, the addition of the neutrality tag will usually encourage POV-pushers to co-operate in getting the tag removed, so I think it is, more often than not, actually quite an effective tool against POV-pushing.
Regardless however, I believe that informing our readership of a POV dispute is a vital function that must not be compromised. Interested readers can always check the talk pages to decide for themselves how legitimate the POV complaint is, but if they aren't adequately warned of the problem in the first place, they are unlikely to even realize a POV dispute exists, and that would be a far greater evil in my book. Gatoclass ( talk) 08:43, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Other than the three pillars (verifiability, npov, ) and copyrite? I'm a new editor whose edits keep getting reverted (I'm told that my edits are 'invalid', but none of the reverters will tell me why my edits are 'invalid' or point me to the policy which explains what they mean by 'invalid'. Instead, I was told to ask the question here. (please ignore the header, my iPhone doesn't have an equals sign) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 32.148.103.187 ( talk) 18:46, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
You where not told that your edit was invalid, you where told that your arguments to support that edit was invalid. Which means that the editor making that claim did not feel that the argument was convincing. Taemyr ( talk) 21:26, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Re anonymous IP new editor. I think your approach was a bit too bold, not to say blunt, on the illegal immigration page. Some discussion on its talk page should have been started (by you) if you want to remove large sections of text (note that this is usually a sign of vandalism so the original reversion is likely the consequence of that similiarity). You certainly should have gone to the talk page after the first revert. Shortening the article without extensive discussion may sometimes be considered invalid.
Re anonymous IP, I would strongly suggest to start using talk pages and create a user account.
Re other involved editors; as this user claims to be a newby your responses do not align well with
WP:BITE as it seems the anon editor was not consciously vandalising the article.
Arnoutf (
talk) 21:26, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
Although I think the newbie IP editor was acting in good faith, (s)he was violating the three revert rule. Although we can't expect someone to learn Wikipedia in a day, or even a week, the user should get familiar with the policy to avoid future conflicts like this one. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:59, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
feel free to shoot me down for an already overwrought topic, but I would like to again suggest that instead of a [rather annoying] yearly banner add that wikipedia adopt google ads in a very conspicuously noted place [very bottom, somewhere where people can tell exactly what is going on]. Add a disclaimer, do what you need to do, but a fund drive is not necessary. Just my $0.02. Thoughts? Rogerdpack ( talk) 16:10, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
Strong opposition. This is a perennial proposal and should probably be closed as per the snowball clause-- Ipatrol ( talk) 17:24, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Why start threads like this when you already know that the answer will always be no? This has been suggested many times, it has always received wide opposition, and you clearly know that this is a perennial proposal. Adding ads would completely contrast what Wikipedia is all about. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:47, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
I support advertising in whole, I would want. Reasons l84. Silk Knot ( talk) 17:18, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
There is an ongoing discussion as to weather Wikipedia:Coatrack should become a policy. This notice is here to attract the opinions of the wider community. Thank you.-- Ipatrol ( talk) 18:19, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I am unclear as to the status on Wikipedia of the wiki sister projects.
There has been a problem at FAC (and with articles in general) being translated automatically by Google or other automatic translating device. The translations obtained this way are usually inaccurate. There have been specific articles where the editor claimed to have translated it, then admitted it had been done automatically, then said he had a friend look over it for inaccuracies etc. It was agreed in FAC discussion that such translations were only acceptable if everyone involved in the translation was fluent both in English and in the language being translated. If not, then there would accuracy problems and a question of satisfying the fundamental policy of WP:V and WP:RS.
Also, at some point in the past there have been efforts to disallow links from wiki sister projects to be allowed in the body of an article on the ground that, although these projects are hosted by wiki servers, they are not Wikipedia, do not have the same standards and fact-checking requirements as Wikipedia, and should be treated just the same as links to article from any wiki. Therefore, they should go under External links only. As far as I know, this issue has not been definitively resolved.
There have been discussions over whether wiki sister projects should be promoted in any way on Wikipedia. That argument has apparently been decided in favor of allowing the links, as recently they have begun appearing to the right of Wikipedia links when a search of Wikipedia is done.
However, I am unclear as to the status regarding reliability of wiki sister projects and whether they have the same status on Wikipedia as articles produced for Wikipedia do. If anyone can point me to policy information on these issues, I would appreciate it. — Mattisse ( Talk) 20:13, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, all.
I was hoping if anyone that has not yet commented on this disputed naming convention, that they could add to the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora)#Two options (that's the most recent section, but feel free to jump in anywhere). I'm sure we've touched on pretty much every point multiple times, but there's always the possibility that another voice might bring up something we've overlooked (or maybe there's a particularly good arbiter out there?). Anyway, I believe the addition of new voices to the debate will bring some new perspectives to the discussion.
To make it a bit easier to understand, I offer this hopefully neutral summary. Several editors, including User:Born2cycle, User:Philip Baird Shearer (active earlier but has been contributing to the discussion recently), User:Pmanderson (who genuinely attempted to achieve consensus), and a few others, have indicated that they believe WP:NC (flora) as currently written (the "December 2 version") is in opposition to WP:COMMONNAME and it should be brought in line. Such examples would include preferring the vernacular name (botanists often call this the "common name" even though a species name may be more common), say Joshua tree over Yucca brevifolia. Virtually all of the active members of WP:PLANTS and several outside editors have come to the conclusion for many reasons (precision, lack of ambiguity, multiple "common names" applying to the same species often with BrE and AmE differences, etc.) that WP:COMMONNAME doesn't really apply to flora articles with very few exceptions, usually on the order of genus and higher. The most recent point I noted was that WP:COMMONNAME specifically states "Except where other accepted Wikipedia naming conventions give a different indication...", which doesn't give us carte blanche to do whatever we want for no reason. And now a biased opinion: As I see it, the plant editors had come together about two years ago and forged this convention for very explicit and well thought out reasons. A few editors don't buy the argument that flora articles require an exception to WP:COMMONNAME even after said reasons have been reiterated ad nauseum, so we're at a stand-still. If anyone is willing to wade through the various arguments and offer an opinion, I would appreciate it. Please offer your opinion at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (flora). If you don't have the time to wade through the kilobytes and kilobytes spilled over this but have questions or want links to specific rationales or discussions, let me know here and I can provide them. Thank you, all. Cheers, Rkitko ( talk) 20:16, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
In the context of kinds of plants and animals, "common name" means vernacular name. In many (possibly most) cases, the scientific name is the most common (most used) name, especially in reliable sources. Also, in many cases the vernacular name is ambiguous. Hence we have Category:Plant common name disambiguation (also Category:Disambiguation plant pages) and Category:Fish common name disambiguation. -- Una Smith ( talk) 20:51, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Where is the best place to discuss the Personal Appeal From Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales that appears at the top of each page?? Thank you, -- Tom 21:29, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
I have said this before but it bears repeating: the designation "Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales" says nothing one way or the other about whether there were also one or more other founders. After all, I can describe myself as "Wikipedia editor Newyorkbrad" without implying that I'm the only editor. (It is the formulation "the founder of Wikipedia" that raises the issue you have in mind, and that is not being used here.) Therefore, the change requested here is not necessary. In any event, the change requested bears on a disputed issue and it is highly unlikely that it would be made in the site notice. Newyorkbrad ( talk) 22:07, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
The banner is hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation official wiki, of which the Board of Trustees and employees are the final decision-makers. In this case, the decision is to go with this wording, and even a consensus of the Jedi Council can't do anything to practically fix it except put pressure on. Daniel ( talk) 04:51, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Tom, User:Rand Montoya is the right person to talk to, if you really want to press the point. He is in charge of the fundraiser. Foundation-l is also a potential place to make your case. Personally, I think there is very little chance of getting people to tweak this, but you are welcome to try. Dragons flight ( talk) 09:24, 30 December 2008 (UTC) Not to sound close minded or anything, but it seems to me that we're making a big deal out of a little issue here. PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:41, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
OMG, look at this long discussion about some banner that's here today, gone tomarrow on a page where nothing is going to be accomplished because the banner isn't just on Wikipedia, but rather on every single Wikimedia Foundation wiki! Jimbo Wales is noted as the founder on many areas of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects, so why not make this discussion about more than just a silly little banner if we're gonna have such a big discussion? PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 01:38, 10 January 2009 (UTC)
I've been debating (mostly, but not by any means exclusively with myself) endlessly whether or not to post this here, but I really think it needs to be done: Wikiversity desperately needs the eyes and opinions of Wikipedia's policy wonks.
It's a bit of a long story, but the nutshell version is that until recently, we never really needed policies. In fact, we never wanted them... policies can (sometimes) be overly limiting, and we've had a bit of fear about those folks more interested enforcing rules than they are interested in encouraging learning and teaching. It kinda worked for us until this past (Northern Hemisphere) summer, but things have become unhappily complicated since then.
What happened this summer is that some of Wikipedia's "community banned" people arrived on Wikiversity, and were rather insistent that we should not be like Wikipedia in any way. Now, that seemed good at first (no offense, but the "management" of Wikiversity tends to be from a much older crowd, and we (yes, I'm an old guy too) were and remain a bit appalled by certain aspects of the "Wikipedian culture"), but it became clear in at least a couple of these cases that those folks were banned for good reason.
The problem, as I'm sure you all can anticipate, is this: we don't have policies to tell these people that they can't do that, and they're experienced enough from their Wikipedia "careers" to have leaned how to wikilawyer. So, we need policies. The problem is, most Wikiversity folks aren't interested in policies: we'd much rather spend (or waste) our time learning, sharing, or otherwise being creative. It even got to the point where Jimmy Wales himself had to get involved a couple times, because honestly our "staff" (sysops) just aren't interested in rassling with trolls.
One of our more serious problems lately is a guy who thinks "outing" people is a good way to get his point across (he was banned from WP for just that reason). We made a few ad-hoc rules and desysopped a very active Custodian (Custodian is "admin" to you guys and gals) who was very hostile to Wikipedians that had tried to get involved because of the outings (he was mostly outing Wikipedians, but recently outed a Custodian), calling interested Wikipedians "meddlers" and "outsiders"... but I'd much rather we didn't have to just make up rules when we needed them, and as far as I'm concerned, Wikiversity should above all be the "school" that's available to those who volunteer their efforts on Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects.
So here's the appeal (after the babble): If you're watching this page, you have an interest in policy. Wikipedia's policies always need a bit of tweaking, but Wikiversity's need is more dire right now. We really need your help.
If you're willing, please check in and introduce yourself on Wikiversity:Policy review, or even on the Wikiversity:Colloquium (our VP) to ask even the silliest of questions (helping the newcomer understand us is our most serious concern). Wikiversity has a lot of potential (at least I think so), but the idealists are getting beaten up by the assholes (can I say that on WP?), and we really don't deserve that kind of treatment. -- SB_Johnny | talk 23:46, 27 December 2008 (UTC)
Hi, I wondered if I could get some clarification about "see also" sections. I beleive that " conspiracy theories about Obama's place of birth' is peripherally realted to Barack Obama and that it is not a violation of policy to link to it after the article to help readers find the information if they are interested. I do not believe that Linking to it under the title saying that it is a conspiracy theory is an endorsement of the theory in anyway ,which seems to be other editors concerns. Any guidance from users not involved in the dispute would be welcomed by me. The policy on "see also " WP:ALSO appears to say that subject that are even peripherally related to the subject can be linked to there and no one will tell me how Barack Obama is not even peripherally related to conspiracy theories about himself.Thanks for any feed bak. Die4Dixie ( talk) 20:04, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
What is the idea here? I see more and more "/Comments" subpages to articles. How is a "comment" on a subpage different from a comment on a regular talkpage? Who is coordinating this? How are some people's comments worthy to be preserved enshrined in a special subpage, linked from {{ WikiProjectBannerShell}} as "assessment summary page", while the "assessments" of mere mortals of course get archived or lost in the noise in due time?
Really, this seems to be a cheap attempt at inflating the importance of whoever it is creating these special "/Comments" pages. We do have pages where people comment on articles. They are known as talkpages. -- dab (𒁳) 21:56, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
Internal search is now at a point where it is viable for finding templates, past material, and pretty much anything needed within Wikipedia for editor use. This was a major "blocker" for past discussions of NOINDEXING major namespaces. With the new search working well, I think it's time we closed down indexing on all except content and other pages we positively want to be publicized on search engines. Proposal and rationale follows.
When I pushed for NOINDEX in 2007 [23], the big problem was that there was no other effective search. For example, an administrator who wanted to look up some past issue on ANI archives, or a template, could not, other than with Google (ANI search wasn't maintained). So Google was needed, and NOINDEX was a stop-gap to allow problem pages (ie reputation damaging SSP/ANI/RFAR pages) to be prevented from spidering.
The current search now seems "strong enough" ( announcement). It accepts a wide range of complex syntax (equivalent I think to Google), and any user seeking material from non-content pages can find it as easily with internal search as with Google. Indeed I'm finding it is sometimes easier, since it highlights sections and section links where Google only recognizes pages, and whole pages aren't omitted due to NOINDEX issues of one section.
I propose that it's finally time to close the gap. Instead of NOINDEXing individual pages mostly ad-hoc, I can't see any strong current continuing rationale for any "internal" page to be spidered at all, and I can see problems reduced by killing it. Use internal search to find such material, and kill off spidering of anything that's not really of genuine public note as our "output/product".
FT2 ( Talk | email) 03:18, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
(2ec) I support the proposal. I support indexing File: pages; they are content pages one may want to search. I don't know about Category: pages, though. On one hand, Davewild's sample search above shows the benefit of indexing, but I do worry about banned users and sockpuppeteers who have used their real names have their status here as their first search engine result, and it isn't necessary to index maintenance categories or user categories. So, would the default be INDEX and NOINDEX those, or would the default be NOINDEX and INDEX article categories? WODUP 16:46, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
{{NOINDEX}}
to {{
Wikipedia category}} to keep a lot of the sausage-making out of search results. :)
WODUP 05:02, 30 December 2008 (UTC)Support per FT2 and MBisanz, also propose combining this with another important change: henceforth all new accounts start with a Sandbox sub-page already set up for them.-- Goodmorningworld ( talk) 00:19, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
As far as how Wikipedia wants to present itself, trying to hide things is not to the point. If people are going to be confused by userspace essays, they'll be confused regardless of how they end up there, and getting moderately fewer people there in the first place is an ineffective defense. Instead, we should make it clearer in the interface (say with anon-only per-namespace notices) that content outside the content namespaces has not been reviewed and does not necessarily represent the Wikipedia community's beliefs. This will avert problems from direct links and other means as well. — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 01:02, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
As far as the non-encyclopedic pages being a byproduct: sure they are, but that doesn't mean they're useless. As long as their availability doesn't detract from the usefulness of the important stuff, why should we deindex them? There will always be some people who prefer to use Google for whatever reason. Google is often more readily available: in Firefox it's the default search engine, and typing random non-URL stuff in the address bar will Google it. Googling "Wikipedia beans" returns WP:BEANS (an essay, which it's been suggested should not be indexed) as the second result and may be more convenient than searching Wikipedia directly. The cost for implementing this measure is definitely nonzero, so it needs to have clear and concrete justification. What are the concrete benefits? And what other methods might be taken to gain those benefits? — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 17:54, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
{{
sofixit}}
applies. If problems are going uncorrected, we should address that; we shouldn't try and cover it up with NOINDEX. • I disagree that quality is now more important than it once was. Quality has always been important to me, and I would hope others as well. I think Wikipedia's popularity reflects its quality, not vice versa. If our quality is diminished, our popularity will adjust accordingly. This is a self-correcting feedback loop. • We can and do quality-control meta pages, as I've pointed out.
WP:CIVIL,
WP:NPA,
WP:NOT and others address this. Please stop asserting that we don't QC meta pages without some kind of counter-argument. • I think my point #4, "It won't help", deserves a response. If I thought NOINDEXing would actually achieve something, I'd at least grant you that. But as I see it, this has no possibility of helping. "No benefit" vs "Some cost" seems an easy decision.This village pump is a bit obscure in my mind (especially in comparison to the proposals or technical village pumps). Perhaps leaving a note at WP:AN or Template:CENT or cross-linking with the other village pumps might be best to raise awareness? -- MZMcBride ( talk) 09:41, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I note that this proposal was put forward by an arbitrator, immediately supported by another arb. Was this discussed out of public view? Jehochman Talk 04:36, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
Indexing all pages aids transparency and helps reduce cabalism. More pageviews is good, not bad. We want to keep the curtains open so people can see how we make articles. Jehochman Talk 04:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
I now understand FT2 wants to use the robots.txt file, not the NOFOLLOW meta tag method of robot exclusion. To give this proposal a proper hearing, could the proposed code please be posted so we can actually see what is going to be excluded? I think that will help people decide. I am willing to reconsider my opinion after inspecting the code. Jehochman Talk 04:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
Right now the proposal is a mystery. If you put forward code or specs I will probably feel more comfortable knowing specifically what's included and what isn't. Our policies should be indexed. They are freely licensed. Part of the value we provide the world is that our policies, guidelines and processes may be copied and used by other sites. Categories and portals are also content. They must be spidered. Userspace is very Myspacey; I'd agree not to index that. Projectspace should generally be indexed. We already NOINDEX RFCU pages via the header template, and I'd agree to NOINDEX other pages that are heavily used to comment on users, such as ANI, WQA, COIN, RFA, Editor Review, ACE, and RFC/U. Let's make a list and decide what should and should not be indexed. Jehochman Talk 15:07, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
It seems to me our primary concern here, as with all aspects of wikipedia, should be our visitors/readers not our editors. This means IMHO it's irrelevant whether this is going to make life more difficult for editors. In other words, I don't think complaints like 'this is going to make life more difficult for me' or 'I prefer Google' are relevant unless we can establish that these same issues will apply to our readers. It seems to me a lot of the discussion is getting sidetracked since it's failing to address this fundamental issue of whether the proposal will be a net benefit or disadvantage to readers, which requires us to considered whether they are likely to want to externally search the proposed noindexed pages and whether internal searching will be sufficiently accessible for those that do want search these pages, and whether us not indexing those pages will give better results for our readers. As well as issues like whether us notindexing will encourage complacency, and whether they will help reduce the BLP problem, and whether they will reduce spammers etc. (I.E. if this has a substanial negative effect on our editors or our content then obviously that needs to be considered since our readers are nowhere without editors/content but single editors having problems, not so much) Nil Einne ( talk) 13:15, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
{{
NOINDEX}}
to the report header template to exclude all RFCU cases. Except for Userspace, I think the appropriate course of action is to indentify classes of pages for noindexing and to propose it on the relevant talk page. This should be done sparingly, only when there is a clear privacy rationale.
Jehochman
Talk 02:57, 5 January 2009 (UTC)Starting point at Wikipedia:Search engine indexing, please add. Once those crafting the list agree, we can put it to the community for approval. Jehochman Talk 16:19, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
I'm trying to get the conflict of interest guidelines rewritten to be clearer in terms of what is allowable from people with conflicts of interest. At the moment they seem to allow most edits, but there are also several parts saying COI editing is strongly discouraged. It is not clear whether COI editing is generally unacceptable or only when it results in bad edits. I have written a proposed revision of the guidelines, but because of my own conflict of interest I really don't want to make any kind of change without consensus. I put a notice on the main village pump page a few days ago and so far there is a lot of agreement that change needs to be made, but no one willing to take charge of it. Please put forward your thoughts at User talk:Helenalex/coirewrite or on the conflict of interest guidelines talkpage. -- Helenalex ( talk) 05:28, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Hello folks, I know I am a relatively new username but as a user i am quite old through various ip's. I tell you in good faith that i believe i have a grasp of goodwill and professionalism on wikipedia.
What i propose is a so-called, "honorary" "Sixth Pillar of Wikipedia".
Please bear with me, i plan to support my case.
Now, it has often come to my attention (and sometimes personally affected me) that certain users that consider themselves knowledgeable in wikipedia protocol happen to see themselves in a certain authoritorian light. This is a completely natural human state. And, after all, since we know that even people of power may be led astray, that is why the laws of the land apply not only to all of us ordinary folk, but also on the law-enforcers themselves, for we are all shone upon by the light of the same sun and moon.
What I propose is for wikipedia's own self-check-and-balancing mechanism to be ameliorated with a minor addition that i believe will have positive equilibrating qualities.
I believe it is easiest to begin with an example. Often have i noticed on my travels through WP's articles and, more importantly, discussion pages, that certain users - perhaps such ones that have recently been made a junior administrator - to happen to stumble upon a fact in an article they they happen to personally not know...and such a fact i have found that they will often unflinchingly DELETE, citing something like "undid revision by user-so-and-so: unsourced info" in the history page log notes.
Now. I have noticed that whenever that happens, there tends to be a several-day-long edit war or passionate discussion on the talk pages that takes place, which almost invariably ends in the original info being reinstated with a source or some sort of footnote/explanation/justification added. Which has invariably made me think - what was the point of the argument in the first place?!
Could not the overzealous editor simply have added a "citation needed" or "this article needs a cleanup" tag and, if they felt it really urgent (which is rarely the case) to have contacted some of the regular contributors of the article in question to nudge them on to doing so?
Personally, i will rarely argue with someone on an article, due to the fact that i know that of the thousands of contributors to the project and all the time in the world that Wikipedia has ahead of it (let us hope!), i know that the truth will eventually prevail.
However, some facts tend to be pretty obscure, and are hard to find the source info for, and if they are randomly deleted, who really knows when a new user will join the project and re-contribute them along with the necessary source info?
Hence why i have been for some time considering the creation of a "Be Constructive, Not Destructive" policy to have on wikipedia, which could be placed as a main subsection of Wikipedia's Fifth Pillar: Be Bold. This is because, as per my point above, i have found human instincts and human pride to be much more powerful, despite the anonimity of a computer screen and online username, than common sense, and many users who believe themselves to be upright pillars of the wikipedia community to simply take the be bold maxim all too literally and to all too lighthandedly undo others' hard work by unscrupulously deleting what is often hard-found and thoroughly researched information, which simply the contributor has either lost, forgotten to add or simply lacks the hard bibliographical evidence to hand to properly reference.
Thus i think a collaboration of more experienced Wikipedians such as yourselves who make a point of contributing to Village Pump and truly do mean to help out less experienced wikipedians should create a page titled WP:CND ("¡Construye - No Destruye!" - sounds better in spanish!), in which the principles for CONSTRUCTIVE editing are outlined, helping people to yes, be bold, but at the same time not delete work which may not be being monitored by someone who can save it and therefore lead to it being lost forever.
To conclude my point from four paragraphs ago - i rarely argue with people on Wikipedia, but when i do it is ONLY EVER due to the fact that i have noticed them flagrantly getting rid of info that could be properly referenced and become even more useful through just a little effort on their part - after all, how much effort is required to simply add a "citation needed" tag?!
And the main reasoning i always try to present - and that i think should be central to my proposed WP:CND page - is the literal definition of the word "encyclopedia": "all-round knowledge" - ie. better to have the info under discussion for deletion stay in an article [obviously, unless it is clearly wrong - i am not proposing that we have wrong info on Wikipedia] and simply mention that it is a "fringe belief", or an "alternate interpretation", etc, along with a "citation needed" tag and an urgent discussion on the talk page, which would then prompt people to source the info and improve the article. see? better leave the info and discuss it, leading to improvement, than to delete it, possibly (and often) erroneously and erase any future possibility of the issue ever being raised again, thus losing the info forever.
Now, i wrote the above text several months ago after my last argument over such flagrant deletion but decided not to post it as i, as every human being, preferred to kid myself into believing the problem will not affect me personally again (I erroneously believed myself too zenned-up on the Wikipedia:Don't-give-a-fuckism philosophy!) - . But, alas, it has, and berhaps all the better for it, for two reasons - a) i believe my proposal will indeed help many inexperienced users have a quotable comeback to overzealous "experienced user" deleters, who are well-read and can quote you WP policies till kingdom come and whom less experienced users have no hope of arguing against, even when they are clearly in the right (have you read some of the classic edit wars - you can often see who is clearly in the right, but loses due to lack of WP experience... now i know life is unfair, but if we don't try to turn that around, what are we?! merely the members of the animal kingdom that philosophers have been trying to convince us to ascend from for millenia), and b) actually provides a good concrete example that i can use to hopefully convince you.
Yesterday i completely by chance stumbled across a certain currency article, to which i had several months ago added the nicknames for the currency in question. I noticed that two weeks ago these had been deleted, the deleter citing "unsourced". now, that got me rattled. a) because clearly no-one had thought of adding the nickname before or had noticed its deletion, and so no-one is defending this info's existence; b) the currency is due to join the euro within a year or two, after which the nickname may well become obscolete and no new source material will be available to reference it with; c) importantly, by its very nature a currency nickname is colloquial, so would be hard to find any references from non-blog/non-chatroom sources, and even then real sticklers for the rules would say that the meaning conveyed is ambiguous; no "respectable" sources are to be easily found using the terms; and d) even more importantly - why the double standards - why did the deleting user not require such sourced references for the fact that GBP is called "quid" or that USD is called "bucks"? yes, we all speak english and "know" that to be the case, but a required source is a required source... whether for a well-known topic or for a little-known one. I give another example - in the London article, nearly every sentence is sourced; in the article for the smaller town of Watford, there is not a single source in three of the first four paragraphs. Now, by the practice of some contributors, nearly the entire Watford article would have to be deleted. And how would that help? a) it would not, b) it would lead to an edit war, c) it would stop the people in that edit war from happily and calmly contributing to the rest of wikipedia. and what would be the result? nothing constructive, initially, and a little while and a lot of anger later - a better sourced Watford article - which chould be achieved without all the worry anyway!
In the particular case of the currency i talked to the administrator in question and we sorted the matter out...which just highlights my original point - namely, what was the point of the whole delete-argue-discuss-sort out palaver in the first place?! could not the first two steps (delete-argue) have been skipped altogether and simply the "discuss-sort out" ones have been implemented? because, again, if i had not stumbled upon it, the discuss-sort out might never, ever have taken place... and how is that constructive?!
now, i hope if the contributor in question reads this - and i actually hope he does, i'll probably prompt him to this page once we have ourselves a little discussion going - he does take it as a piece of constructive criticism and does not take offece. and considers this next point - which i am sure does not apply to him/her but, having scrawled through the contributions pages of many a user, can safely say applies to quite a few of our co-contributors... so, here goes:
Are not the implications of an overzealous user's deleting actions much more worrying - how many other pages can such a user traul through, deleting info simply because he/she does not personally know it? How many pages can a single user effectively destroy by systematically erasing the same piece of info from a bunch of pages simply because it does not meet their personal criteria? (in the concrete currency case above, not a single user, and there are ample numismatics users watching the currency pages, has thought to take this action before, or even question the info presented in the article concerned...it cannot be so wrong, therefore, that some sort of simple tag would not sffice...)
Now, the user in question boasts on his userpage that he has been a wikipedian for 19 months and has made over 5,000 edits. many others boast much longer times and many more edits. such are users who believe that the Power of the Edit is within them. (please to not take haste to hold these comments against me in and of themselves, and only because i am a "new user", but within the context of my argument, and consider some if not many of the arguments you yourselves have had in the past...and do not be aftaid to admit in your heart of hearts if you have not personally sometimes been the unnecessarily-strict administrator... for of the thousands of contributions many people boast of - are not some of these simply unwarranted deletions that big-up their notoriety as a knowledgeable bureaucrat and strict administrator? many have we met with such pretensions...)
i refused to enter an edit war with the user over the currency issue until the matter got discussed, and i awaited his reply for almost a day (not much, i know, but many people don't even wait several minutes, and i am true when i say i would have waited longer) because i stick by my own rules, and a major part of my here proposition to become official WP policy is for Constructive Discussion to precede any major deletions (for, while the amount deleted may be small, such as in this case, the implications can be big - such as the fact that it may be a unique packet of information that is not to be found elsewhere in a particular article or on wikipedia in general).
More importantly, however, what does such a small deletion tell us about such a user's overall mentality when it comes to editing and CONTRIBUTING to wikipedia? note the word - "contribute": it means "to add". how can deleting therefore be a contribution, let alone a constructive one? it can only be a contribution if it is removing info which is known 100% to be wrong.
A major related type of argument i have come across and even participated in is when people take out info from an article simply because it does not belong in the subsection it appears in. And i and others have tried to reason - why not simply add another chapter/section and put the info there, or simply leave it where it is and add a footnote, or put the whole info itself in a footnote, rather than completely removing it from the article?how hard would it be for that info, or for the currency nickname, to have been tagged with "citation needed"? [Although i still technically disagree due to the double standards issue, which will need to be sorted out.]
Please remember - we are all wikipedians who love this project and are working CONSTRUCTIVELY towards one common goal. Let us try and improve it by adding my proposal as an official policy (obviously, with modifications and additions - i eagerly await all proposals and the ensuing discussion), and this honorary "Sixth Pillar", while i do not truly expect it to become a pillar [BCND 1], it is probably just as important as the rest, as it relates to the preservation of the totality of the work that is Wikipedia. it is planned as a type of self-preservation mechanism - and, as self-preservation is a quality extant in arguably all sentient lifeforms, and if we philosophically consider "knowledge" to be, if not sentient, at least sapient (a self-referential definition if ever i saw one!), then my WP:CND proposal would be a major part of the central nervous system of this very project.
I would like to thank you all for your patience, and eagerly await your thoughts. BigSteve ( talk) 15:22, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I agree with davidwr: Write an essay first.
I do recognise some of your feeling though, but can also understand where the deletion actions come from.
Several thoughts: Many of the "unconstructive" or "overzealous" edits are acting upon suspected vandalism. The trusthworthiness of the project as a whole would suffer from incorrect information, so it is better to be incomplete than incorrect. How would your essay deal with this serious problem?
Another issue: deletion cannot be constructive. I disagree. Articles should present the most relevant information, not all; as that would render completely unreadable articles. Adding information to an already lengthy article is often less constructive compared to deleting issues that receive undue attention. How would your idea cope with that?
Arnoutf (
talk) 17:09, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
I think the main issue with it is: ITS A GIANT WALL OF TEXT! If you want it to be taken seriously and not just look like a rant, it needs a little more structure than the occasional line break. Otherwise, most people (like myself, are just going to look at it, think " tl;dr" and move on. After skimming it, I would also suggest separating the anecdotes and personal opinions from the actual proposal. Mr. Z-man 17:27, 29 December 2008 (UTC)
Every now and then I run into articles about literary works that clearly and unquestionably are not notable enough to be included in Wikipedia, a recent example would be A mermaid story, and the related afd. However, to my knowledge there is no csd for literary works, altough at times I've seen such an article deleted under A7. I propose a new criterion be added for literary works. — Twinzor Say hi! 16:31, 30 December 2008 (UTC)
I vaguely remember that some time ago, there was a failed attempt to put little markers at the tops of all articles, similar to the little star at the top of featured articles, so that someone could see what rating the article had, simply by looking at the top right corner. What I can't remember, however, is good articles: do we place little markers for good articles? Not a person who works with article ratings much and who knows little about good articles, I thought we did, but I checked a few GA-class architecture articles and was surprised to see that they didn't have any. Nyttend ( talk) 03:07, 31 December 2008 (UTC)
Apparently, Wikipedia is not censored, but WP:Introduction says "No profanity, libel, or personal attacks will be tolerated." Although we don't censor Wikipedia, the sandbox header clearly states "Please do not place copyrighted, offensive, or libelous content in the sandbox(es)." At Wikipedia, we don't believe in censorship, but we won't hesitate to delete article based on a guideline known as WP:N, which basically notes what WE consider notable. Wikipedia apparently does not permit censorship, but we do have WP:NOT. Censorship is not our style, except for when it comes to usernames. I agree that we can't have a free-for-all, and I like the idea of not censoring, but the conflicting policies as defined are probably confusing the newbies, and we get all kinds of vandalism, test edits, sockpuppets, and disgruntled users when newbies get confused. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Shouldn't we do something to clear up the confusion and fix the conflicting policies? PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 15:33, 31 December 2008 (UTC)