This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). 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.
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i think it be useful to have a list (or more likely several lists) of people who own or have access to a particular book or books, the list could be organized by author and then title with the usernames of anyone who has said book added afterwards (voluntarily) like a signature. this would help authors help each other with fact checking and stuff. SJMNY ( talk) 22:54, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I think their should be a random article generator for various subjects. e.g if you wanted a random article about maths you would go to the math's portal and click on the random article link their. Ziphon ( talk) 04:50, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
See bugzilla:2170. It is possible to get a random article from a category (e.g. Category:FA-Class articles), but for performance reasons this is disabled on Wikimedia wikis. Gracenotes T § 20:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
Categories are not consistently organized here. It would be a better idea to get random articles under the banner of a given WikiProject.-- Pharos ( talk) 05:20, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
One of the main criticisms of Wikipedia is that its articles are often not reliable. Whenever Wikipedia or Wikipedia fans try to defend this complaint, they generally stress that the reliability of a Wikipedia article can be checked with a few simple tests. Like:
All these sound very simple to experienced Wikipedians, but most new comers are not familiar with the way to check all these.
That’s why I propose the following:
There should be a small but prominent box (with small font) showing the vital information of the article at a visible location of article mainspace. It may be in article header, footer or even right below the Wikipedia logo on left hand side. The box should contain the following information:
Although I have proposed 5 sentences, with the proposed omissions, for most articles the number of sentences will come down to 2-3.
These are the vital information that a reader should know to decide how to use an article or to what extent the article can be relied on. So I think these information belong to the article page. Arman ( Talk) 06:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia does not make disclaimers about the reliability of its articles, and a heuristically based disclaimer may cause more harm/speculation than good. As Sbowers3 said, most readers might not understand (and even make incorrect guesses) about what the statistics mean. The 24 hours line may be a problem, since that cannot be cached – I'd imagine it must be calculated every time a user visits a page. The reason why Wikipedia's servers are efficient is because they cache (hold copies of) pages for the next time someone requests it. he last-modified date can be seen at the bottom of the article, in the white box with the orange border. The rest of the statistics can be cached, it looks like, but the database load of it all might be too much. Gracenotes T § 17:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
At the least it might be an informative thing for our casual readers if we started putting {{ ArticleHistory}} on the front side of our articles.-- Pharos ( talk) 06:38, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone for the feedback. In general there seems to be a consensus that this is a good idea - at least better than the "ugly" tags we have now. As far the article rating suggestion is concerned, we should rather allow the readers to interpret the "facts" given in the box, than giving a conclusive remark on the reliability of the article, which would be too subjective and debatable. So far the strongest objection to this has been on technical limitations. I strongly feel technical limitations tend to be short lived. What seems impractical today may become very simple in few year's time. But still, let's think whether the following suggestion makes it more practical given today's technology: Let's have the box with the first 3 points: the GA-FA status, The quality tags and the first & last edit dates. Then we have a (show more) link which, if clicked, will retrieve the two more processing-capacity intensive points - number of unique editors and number of edits in last 24 hours. May be we could think of a few more points. Does it sound more practical now? Arman ( Talk) 08:58, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
If one visits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_19, for example, one will see more news about the anniversaries and deaths on that day, but nothing about sunrise and sunset times for that day. Do you think that these dates could at least include dates for Greenwich Mean Time?This would, I am sure, interest some people. The article on sunsets has a useful external link, so the times should not be too hard to fnd. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 20:52, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I brought this up
at VP (technical) (but this particular thread was started by someone else, moot point), and was referred to this page. I was wondering what is the point of having user namespace pages show up in search engines and can they be removed from such searches?
I reason that: A) if someone types in "Old Hoss", the last thing they want is me (#4 on Google
[1] and #2 on Yahoo!
[2] with my test page showing #5); and B) if they did want me (as a user), they could go to
Special:Listusers. The average lay person typing in "Old Hoss" in a search engine most certainly does not want me (they probably want Old Hoss Radbourn, whom I was not thinking of when I chose this name, although I am a 19th century baseball fan).
I would propose that user pages and user talk pages (and all accompanying subpages) be exempt from search engines. I was told it could be added to "robots.txt", even though I have no idea whatsoever what that means. Thoughts?-- Old Hoss ( talk) 02:44, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Blocking search engines from indexing User: and User_talk pages is certainly possible from a technical perspective. However, doing so would be a large change for this project (i.e., the English Wikipedia). For this proposal to get serious consideration and discussion, I suggest starting either an RfC or a separate Wikipedia: page discussing the benefits / detriments of the proposal and then getting community discussion and consensus. Cheers. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 20:20, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
I've often used external searches to find discussions, templates, and other things in user and project namespaces. An idea, would it be possible to place noindex as some kind of opt-in option for the short term? Users concerned about their pages being indexed could put a tag on their specific pages. -- Ned Scott 20:26, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
The WMF is in such a position that I don't think it would be unreasonable for them to just ask Google to drop the pagerank for the userspace pages. They certainly have the ability to do so. User pages showing up as the top result is not helpful for anybody (except spammers who dump crap on their userpages and don't get noticed by RC patrollers). We could then just tell everyone but Googlebot to not index userpages at all and exclusively use Goog.... hmmmm, this is the beginning of a bad idea, isn't it? --- RockMFR 06:02, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
You guys should definatly have a forums... It would also keep vandalism down. because the main reason people vandalize is because they are bored. If you would like i would make a forums for you. All you have to do is do the financing unless you want to make a free forums first to see how it works out>>>>>> i recomend www.setbb.com
Please take this into consideration>>>>>>> Mr_KC ( talk) 17:32, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm listing this here to see if other people think it might be a good idea because implementing would require both a technical and a policy change. Generally speaking, I've noticed that the most persistent IP vandals tend to have a narrow focus for their vandalism and use an ISP that gives them a different IP each time they log on to the internet. Because such ISP's also tend to have non-vandal anonymous users, simply blocking the whole range of IP's isn't practical nor desirable, but if such ranges could be blocked on specific pages it would at a minimum allow for a more specific block than simple semi-protection, and because it is more specific, perhaps it would be possible to leave it in place for longer periods of time. Caerwine Caer’s whines 21:59, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
This is something that definitely needs to be addressed. The English Wikipedia needs to more recognize the Simple English Wikipedia, not just list it in the in other languages bar on the side, hidden with the other languages alphabetically where only the most dedicated Wikipedians know of its existence. Imagine a little elementary kid needing to do a report on the American Revolution. He goes to Google or Yahoo! and types 'American Revolution'. Of course, the first result is Wikipedia. He clicks on it but, he cannot read its complex english. Wouldn't it be nice if he can actually read it (since we already have a simple english wikipedia). I think that adding a simple template on all English Wikipedia articles that have a Simple English equivalent similar to this one
at the end of the article under See also or External links, should solve the problem for the most part.
Why else is this good?
Hopefully this gets implemented somehow.-- Penubag 05:49, 25 November 2007(UTC)
So is this enough support for the creation of a bot that will place SE templates to English articles??-- Penubag 03:41, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
Ahh Sorry, I missed this post...as response to your post, every effort made to make simple more well-known is better (such as moving it to the top of interwikis and bolding it. ) However a great substitute for the template, I still believe a template would be better, as it is still more prominent. I will be working some examples on my page and present them when they are done.--
penubag 05:59, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
I think I could support moving it to the top of the interwikis - can we get consensus for this change in particular, since the devs won't do it without a clear consensus?—
Random832 14:32, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
Support for the proposal, but only if there's a visible link for a guideline to simplification on the SE pages. It is more difficult than many realize to simplify things, so without a guide we might get excessive length from over-explaining, dumbed-down to a point of confusion which hurts the goal of being understandable. I'd like to see the SE pages get special treatment, where a list of un-friendly words are cross-referenced with an internal database that editors contribute to. So if anyone writes an article in SE, the unfriendly words become highlighted in a low-distraction color (vey light gray?) and users can double-check that internal database for whatever alternatives might be listed in pararenthesis next to the un-friendly word. -boozerker 01:12, 01 December 2007 (UTC)
So? Do I have proper support for a bot now? What's my next step? -- Penubag 07:55, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Support moving simple english wikipedia link to the top of the interwikis and even make it more prominent than other links. Arman ( Talk) 03:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Support We need to make Simple Wikipedia easier to find and help it develop. Encyclopedia Britannica has 6 levels of articles, with different levels of difficulty and sophistication. With Simple Wikipedia we can have 2 levels for many articles. With the introductory articles like Introduction to evolution together with Simple Wikipedia we can have some articles with 3. If EB can have 6 levels, can't we have 2 or 3?-- Filll ( talk) 05:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Oppose Ugh. This is a lousy idea, and an even worse one if someone tires to implement it with a bot. I can't watchlist both the English and Simple English versions of every article that I keep up with, and if you try to prominently link the simple article to the en article, it just blurs the line for readers. Can't we think of the readers? The vast majority of them who wind up at a POV fork on Simple will think they "read it on Wikipeida". There's no need to encourage this. Simple can get the same treatment as the other language wikipedias, and stand on it's own merits, or lack thereof. ➪ HiDrNick! 07:23, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I think not. We already have enough clutter in terms of links to other projects. Geni 03:51, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Hmmm Some good points Geni, and it could become messy where article splitting, page redirection, and such on regular Wikipedia isn't mirrored on its Simple counterpart. That is a big problem if the two versions are tightly cross-linked. At the same time, the increased readership of Simple means they have healthy population of their own watchlisters, so you don't need much worry there. -- Boozerker ( talk) 07:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Oppose Don't get me wrong, I like the Simple English Wikipedia and I've used it on occasion to explain Mechanics of Materials to a 9 year-old... lol. However, Simple English is just another form of English. The Chinese Wikipedia has six types of Chinese, ranging from Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Taiwan Traditional Chinese, People's Republic of China Simplified Chinese, Hong Kong/Macau Chinese, and Malaysian Chinese. They all appear to be as separate languages when linked properly (however, they have a pull down menu on top next to the "History" tab where they could select again which six versions of Chinese to use. Nevertheless, they are listing all six Chinese forms (max) as different languages, even while in the same article under a different form of Chinese, so I don't see how Simple English and regular Wikipedia needs any more distinction than it already has. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 07:37, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Support, but think it is high time we stop the highly parochial (and more than a little childish) attitude that "they aren't us, so why should we advertise for them". Admittedly, other projects in their early days had some real rough spots... but then so do our article stubs. It's time to revisit those "consensus decisions", if indeed they weren't the normal case... a swarm of the really involved subborning those who have less time to keep up. (Personally, until and unless we have a"quorum floor", I don't believe we've got a mechanism that reflects the claim of consensus. As a project now maturing and stable, that is perhaps a good next step too, but I digress! Sorry.)
Interwiki's are known to many foreigners, and probably nearly totally unknown to newer editors here. Worse, they don't link to our sister sites, many of which are equally unheralded, but would be of interest to our readership. Hell, I didn't know about Simple English wikipedia, until seeing the above, and I've accounts on most sisters! What harm would there to be having a page wide (noprint class) 'banner' above our article proper. It'd be far less controversial to me than those confidence distroying self-inflicted wounds we base on {{ ambox}}, that is about every cleanup template out there. Better yet it'd be more consistent to the current state where one sister (wiktionary's {{ wiktionary}}) template is tolerable on a page top, at least defacto, and others are in effect insulted by being relegated to "External Links", with other links. I'm personally convinced that this issue is a big factor behind some sister's almost hostile attitude to any idea which originates here... people don't like their hard work to be dismissed, and if the foundation is funding them, I say they deserve a little prominence and acknowledgement here!.
Have such a banner template link to whichever sisterpage handles the same topic, wikibooks, wiktionary, wikiversity, the commons (may need two entries sometimes, given atlases), wikiquote and other content sites (admittedly, meta and mediawiki will hardly ever be linked, but they are administrative or source repositories, not content sites per se.) whatever... and cease denigrating our sisters as if they were just another external link. THEY AREN'T.
Like any other nav box, it can be thin and inconspicuous, and programmed in this case with named parameters to generate boilerplate if the community desires. Unlike most other nav boxes, I think this one should be a header placement. I'm suggesting something fairly inconspicuous, but standardized along the understated size and height of {{ commons}} which can be seen on a page here. Considering all the waste space we create with "Ugly White Space" (how professional does a screen filled with long Table of Contents and nothing else look!??, giving a small banner border to cross-sister linkages is a minor page formatting issue. Actually, implementation would be pretty trivial, a few parserfunction tests in the applied template, calling some sub-templates modeled on {{ commons}}, which is a table format, gives an array of tables across. The order would be standardized alphabetically, and the link could be the display icon, sans text... that would prevent space overcrowding, and enable links to slightly differently worded titles covering the same materials. Some template savvy editor could knock together something like that in a few hours. The template could take a command arguemnt that tells it how to format itself. Three or four links as icons would fit in the 250 pixels width easily of the current sister links templates, as "commons" will fit in less as shown. A few more links could wrap to a double row of icons format. Hence on linkname trigger for each sister, one number command, saying how many links are involved to control the formatting. That would appear above any infoboxes etc., but if a page has a lot of links, could left float and appear as one stretched out banner of icons above page intros. // Fra nkB 17:37, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Any way to make text wrap to the right of the default left-TOC the same way it wraps to the left of right-TOCs? For example see Wikipedia:WikiProject Trivia and Popular Culture. Would be a more efficient use of space, especially for long TOCs.
I had the same need... Requires a change to Common.css or some such... You can find "technical discussion thread" on that on User talk:CBDunkerson about two weeks ago. I've got to get to the dentist. Cheers! // Fra nkB 16:32, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). 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.
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i think it be useful to have a list (or more likely several lists) of people who own or have access to a particular book or books, the list could be organized by author and then title with the usernames of anyone who has said book added afterwards (voluntarily) like a signature. this would help authors help each other with fact checking and stuff. SJMNY ( talk) 22:54, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I think their should be a random article generator for various subjects. e.g if you wanted a random article about maths you would go to the math's portal and click on the random article link their. Ziphon ( talk) 04:50, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
See bugzilla:2170. It is possible to get a random article from a category (e.g. Category:FA-Class articles), but for performance reasons this is disabled on Wikimedia wikis. Gracenotes T § 20:31, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
Categories are not consistently organized here. It would be a better idea to get random articles under the banner of a given WikiProject.-- Pharos ( talk) 05:20, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
One of the main criticisms of Wikipedia is that its articles are often not reliable. Whenever Wikipedia or Wikipedia fans try to defend this complaint, they generally stress that the reliability of a Wikipedia article can be checked with a few simple tests. Like:
All these sound very simple to experienced Wikipedians, but most new comers are not familiar with the way to check all these.
That’s why I propose the following:
There should be a small but prominent box (with small font) showing the vital information of the article at a visible location of article mainspace. It may be in article header, footer or even right below the Wikipedia logo on left hand side. The box should contain the following information:
Although I have proposed 5 sentences, with the proposed omissions, for most articles the number of sentences will come down to 2-3.
These are the vital information that a reader should know to decide how to use an article or to what extent the article can be relied on. So I think these information belong to the article page. Arman ( Talk) 06:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia does not make disclaimers about the reliability of its articles, and a heuristically based disclaimer may cause more harm/speculation than good. As Sbowers3 said, most readers might not understand (and even make incorrect guesses) about what the statistics mean. The 24 hours line may be a problem, since that cannot be cached – I'd imagine it must be calculated every time a user visits a page. The reason why Wikipedia's servers are efficient is because they cache (hold copies of) pages for the next time someone requests it. he last-modified date can be seen at the bottom of the article, in the white box with the orange border. The rest of the statistics can be cached, it looks like, but the database load of it all might be too much. Gracenotes T § 17:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)
At the least it might be an informative thing for our casual readers if we started putting {{ ArticleHistory}} on the front side of our articles.-- Pharos ( talk) 06:38, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Thanks everyone for the feedback. In general there seems to be a consensus that this is a good idea - at least better than the "ugly" tags we have now. As far the article rating suggestion is concerned, we should rather allow the readers to interpret the "facts" given in the box, than giving a conclusive remark on the reliability of the article, which would be too subjective and debatable. So far the strongest objection to this has been on technical limitations. I strongly feel technical limitations tend to be short lived. What seems impractical today may become very simple in few year's time. But still, let's think whether the following suggestion makes it more practical given today's technology: Let's have the box with the first 3 points: the GA-FA status, The quality tags and the first & last edit dates. Then we have a (show more) link which, if clicked, will retrieve the two more processing-capacity intensive points - number of unique editors and number of edits in last 24 hours. May be we could think of a few more points. Does it sound more practical now? Arman ( Talk) 08:58, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
If one visits http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_19, for example, one will see more news about the anniversaries and deaths on that day, but nothing about sunrise and sunset times for that day. Do you think that these dates could at least include dates for Greenwich Mean Time?This would, I am sure, interest some people. The article on sunsets has a useful external link, so the times should not be too hard to fnd. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 20:52, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
I brought this up
at VP (technical) (but this particular thread was started by someone else, moot point), and was referred to this page. I was wondering what is the point of having user namespace pages show up in search engines and can they be removed from such searches?
I reason that: A) if someone types in "Old Hoss", the last thing they want is me (#4 on Google
[1] and #2 on Yahoo!
[2] with my test page showing #5); and B) if they did want me (as a user), they could go to
Special:Listusers. The average lay person typing in "Old Hoss" in a search engine most certainly does not want me (they probably want Old Hoss Radbourn, whom I was not thinking of when I chose this name, although I am a 19th century baseball fan).
I would propose that user pages and user talk pages (and all accompanying subpages) be exempt from search engines. I was told it could be added to "robots.txt", even though I have no idea whatsoever what that means. Thoughts?-- Old Hoss ( talk) 02:44, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
Blocking search engines from indexing User: and User_talk pages is certainly possible from a technical perspective. However, doing so would be a large change for this project (i.e., the English Wikipedia). For this proposal to get serious consideration and discussion, I suggest starting either an RfC or a separate Wikipedia: page discussing the benefits / detriments of the proposal and then getting community discussion and consensus. Cheers. -- MZMcBride ( talk) 20:20, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
I've often used external searches to find discussions, templates, and other things in user and project namespaces. An idea, would it be possible to place noindex as some kind of opt-in option for the short term? Users concerned about their pages being indexed could put a tag on their specific pages. -- Ned Scott 20:26, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
The WMF is in such a position that I don't think it would be unreasonable for them to just ask Google to drop the pagerank for the userspace pages. They certainly have the ability to do so. User pages showing up as the top result is not helpful for anybody (except spammers who dump crap on their userpages and don't get noticed by RC patrollers). We could then just tell everyone but Googlebot to not index userpages at all and exclusively use Goog.... hmmmm, this is the beginning of a bad idea, isn't it? --- RockMFR 06:02, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
You guys should definatly have a forums... It would also keep vandalism down. because the main reason people vandalize is because they are bored. If you would like i would make a forums for you. All you have to do is do the financing unless you want to make a free forums first to see how it works out>>>>>> i recomend www.setbb.com
Please take this into consideration>>>>>>> Mr_KC ( talk) 17:32, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm listing this here to see if other people think it might be a good idea because implementing would require both a technical and a policy change. Generally speaking, I've noticed that the most persistent IP vandals tend to have a narrow focus for their vandalism and use an ISP that gives them a different IP each time they log on to the internet. Because such ISP's also tend to have non-vandal anonymous users, simply blocking the whole range of IP's isn't practical nor desirable, but if such ranges could be blocked on specific pages it would at a minimum allow for a more specific block than simple semi-protection, and because it is more specific, perhaps it would be possible to leave it in place for longer periods of time. Caerwine Caer’s whines 21:59, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
This is something that definitely needs to be addressed. The English Wikipedia needs to more recognize the Simple English Wikipedia, not just list it in the in other languages bar on the side, hidden with the other languages alphabetically where only the most dedicated Wikipedians know of its existence. Imagine a little elementary kid needing to do a report on the American Revolution. He goes to Google or Yahoo! and types 'American Revolution'. Of course, the first result is Wikipedia. He clicks on it but, he cannot read its complex english. Wouldn't it be nice if he can actually read it (since we already have a simple english wikipedia). I think that adding a simple template on all English Wikipedia articles that have a Simple English equivalent similar to this one
at the end of the article under See also or External links, should solve the problem for the most part.
Why else is this good?
Hopefully this gets implemented somehow.-- Penubag 05:49, 25 November 2007(UTC)
So is this enough support for the creation of a bot that will place SE templates to English articles??-- Penubag 03:41, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
Ahh Sorry, I missed this post...as response to your post, every effort made to make simple more well-known is better (such as moving it to the top of interwikis and bolding it. ) However a great substitute for the template, I still believe a template would be better, as it is still more prominent. I will be working some examples on my page and present them when they are done.--
penubag 05:59, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
I think I could support moving it to the top of the interwikis - can we get consensus for this change in particular, since the devs won't do it without a clear consensus?—
Random832 14:32, 30 November 2007 (UTC)
Support for the proposal, but only if there's a visible link for a guideline to simplification on the SE pages. It is more difficult than many realize to simplify things, so without a guide we might get excessive length from over-explaining, dumbed-down to a point of confusion which hurts the goal of being understandable. I'd like to see the SE pages get special treatment, where a list of un-friendly words are cross-referenced with an internal database that editors contribute to. So if anyone writes an article in SE, the unfriendly words become highlighted in a low-distraction color (vey light gray?) and users can double-check that internal database for whatever alternatives might be listed in pararenthesis next to the un-friendly word. -boozerker 01:12, 01 December 2007 (UTC)
So? Do I have proper support for a bot now? What's my next step? -- Penubag 07:55, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Support moving simple english wikipedia link to the top of the interwikis and even make it more prominent than other links. Arman ( Talk) 03:26, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Support We need to make Simple Wikipedia easier to find and help it develop. Encyclopedia Britannica has 6 levels of articles, with different levels of difficulty and sophistication. With Simple Wikipedia we can have 2 levels for many articles. With the introductory articles like Introduction to evolution together with Simple Wikipedia we can have some articles with 3. If EB can have 6 levels, can't we have 2 or 3?-- Filll ( talk) 05:31, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
Oppose Ugh. This is a lousy idea, and an even worse one if someone tires to implement it with a bot. I can't watchlist both the English and Simple English versions of every article that I keep up with, and if you try to prominently link the simple article to the en article, it just blurs the line for readers. Can't we think of the readers? The vast majority of them who wind up at a POV fork on Simple will think they "read it on Wikipeida". There's no need to encourage this. Simple can get the same treatment as the other language wikipedias, and stand on it's own merits, or lack thereof. ➪ HiDrNick! 07:23, 6 December 2007 (UTC)
I think not. We already have enough clutter in terms of links to other projects. Geni 03:51, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Hmmm Some good points Geni, and it could become messy where article splitting, page redirection, and such on regular Wikipedia isn't mirrored on its Simple counterpart. That is a big problem if the two versions are tightly cross-linked. At the same time, the increased readership of Simple means they have healthy population of their own watchlisters, so you don't need much worry there. -- Boozerker ( talk) 07:47, 9 December 2007 (UTC)
Oppose Don't get me wrong, I like the Simple English Wikipedia and I've used it on occasion to explain Mechanics of Materials to a 9 year-old... lol. However, Simple English is just another form of English. The Chinese Wikipedia has six types of Chinese, ranging from Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Taiwan Traditional Chinese, People's Republic of China Simplified Chinese, Hong Kong/Macau Chinese, and Malaysian Chinese. They all appear to be as separate languages when linked properly (however, they have a pull down menu on top next to the "History" tab where they could select again which six versions of Chinese to use. Nevertheless, they are listing all six Chinese forms (max) as different languages, even while in the same article under a different form of Chinese, so I don't see how Simple English and regular Wikipedia needs any more distinction than it already has. - Jameson L. Tai talk ♦ contribs 07:37, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
Support, but think it is high time we stop the highly parochial (and more than a little childish) attitude that "they aren't us, so why should we advertise for them". Admittedly, other projects in their early days had some real rough spots... but then so do our article stubs. It's time to revisit those "consensus decisions", if indeed they weren't the normal case... a swarm of the really involved subborning those who have less time to keep up. (Personally, until and unless we have a"quorum floor", I don't believe we've got a mechanism that reflects the claim of consensus. As a project now maturing and stable, that is perhaps a good next step too, but I digress! Sorry.)
Interwiki's are known to many foreigners, and probably nearly totally unknown to newer editors here. Worse, they don't link to our sister sites, many of which are equally unheralded, but would be of interest to our readership. Hell, I didn't know about Simple English wikipedia, until seeing the above, and I've accounts on most sisters! What harm would there to be having a page wide (noprint class) 'banner' above our article proper. It'd be far less controversial to me than those confidence distroying self-inflicted wounds we base on {{ ambox}}, that is about every cleanup template out there. Better yet it'd be more consistent to the current state where one sister (wiktionary's {{ wiktionary}}) template is tolerable on a page top, at least defacto, and others are in effect insulted by being relegated to "External Links", with other links. I'm personally convinced that this issue is a big factor behind some sister's almost hostile attitude to any idea which originates here... people don't like their hard work to be dismissed, and if the foundation is funding them, I say they deserve a little prominence and acknowledgement here!.
Have such a banner template link to whichever sisterpage handles the same topic, wikibooks, wiktionary, wikiversity, the commons (may need two entries sometimes, given atlases), wikiquote and other content sites (admittedly, meta and mediawiki will hardly ever be linked, but they are administrative or source repositories, not content sites per se.) whatever... and cease denigrating our sisters as if they were just another external link. THEY AREN'T.
Like any other nav box, it can be thin and inconspicuous, and programmed in this case with named parameters to generate boilerplate if the community desires. Unlike most other nav boxes, I think this one should be a header placement. I'm suggesting something fairly inconspicuous, but standardized along the understated size and height of {{ commons}} which can be seen on a page here. Considering all the waste space we create with "Ugly White Space" (how professional does a screen filled with long Table of Contents and nothing else look!??, giving a small banner border to cross-sister linkages is a minor page formatting issue. Actually, implementation would be pretty trivial, a few parserfunction tests in the applied template, calling some sub-templates modeled on {{ commons}}, which is a table format, gives an array of tables across. The order would be standardized alphabetically, and the link could be the display icon, sans text... that would prevent space overcrowding, and enable links to slightly differently worded titles covering the same materials. Some template savvy editor could knock together something like that in a few hours. The template could take a command arguemnt that tells it how to format itself. Three or four links as icons would fit in the 250 pixels width easily of the current sister links templates, as "commons" will fit in less as shown. A few more links could wrap to a double row of icons format. Hence on linkname trigger for each sister, one number command, saying how many links are involved to control the formatting. That would appear above any infoboxes etc., but if a page has a lot of links, could left float and appear as one stretched out banner of icons above page intros. // Fra nkB 17:37, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
Any way to make text wrap to the right of the default left-TOC the same way it wraps to the left of right-TOCs? For example see Wikipedia:WikiProject Trivia and Popular Culture. Would be a more efficient use of space, especially for long TOCs.
I had the same need... Requires a change to Common.css or some such... You can find "technical discussion thread" on that on User talk:CBDunkerson about two weeks ago. I've got to get to the dentist. Cheers! // Fra nkB 16:32, 21 December 2007 (UTC)