This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals).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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A discussion about including coordinate and map information in articles in in progress at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Geolinks-cityscale. -- SEWilco ( talk) 15:33, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Some articles, once deemed to be entirely accurate, up-to-date, and of very good quality, should be saved in that state until new information regarding that topic is discovered. This applies best to scientific articles, as the general public often makes edits to perfectly accurate scientific articles because they believe wrongly that the article contains errors. Making an article semi-permanent would firstly assure that an article portrays correct information and secondly protect against vandalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.84.10.3 ( talk) 20:58, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
It would be nice to develop automated webcite tools that would issue requests to archive pages linked from Wikipedia pages using webcite, and then link to those archived pages instead of the "active" pages. This would prevent linkrot problems, and relieve editors of the immense effort of archiving all the web references cited in an article and then link to those archived pages. Is this possible? Comments?-- Filll ( talk) 00:17, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm relativly new here, but I've created a couple of proposals about our fair-use impage upload and management system here User:Mbisanz/ImageSystemProposal and am looking for comments or smarter users who would know how to code such things, if there was a conensus for them. Mbisanz ( talk) 06:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
There are approximately 300,000 species of plant and an estimated over 1,000,000 species of animal. It seems that some people want to have an article on every one of them. There are multiple bots whose job is to create these articles from other websites. All of these bot-generated articles are very short stubs at first, and very few make it anywhere beyond that. Take for example genus Aloeides. Of its eleven species articles, not a single one has any edits but its bot creation way back in July. I have seen countless others of these useless stubs while random paging and new article patrolling. I call them useless because they are; not a single word of unique information is in any one of them.
Another example from a main culprit, User:Polbot, is Keizaburō Saeki, one of many so-called renowned Japanese photographers, all generated from a single website list of 328 of them. I find it hard to believe that a one-sentence article is useful. A single list should be made with all of them.
My proposition is simple: An article about something should be created only if it has enough unique material to warrant its own page. If not, then a list is perfectly acceptable. If a stub could easily be merged into a parent article, then it should. In fact, this theory of individual notability could also be attributed to people, places and other topics.
Following the plants/animals example, all species should be included in the genus article until sufficient unique information is found. People and places can have fine lists until more things pertinent to that person/place is found.
Obviously, perhaps the best, most common, and strongest rebuttal is eventualism, that every one of these articles could, as legitimate topics, eventually be a featured article or whatnot. I fully agree with this. A species of butterfly is vital to the ecosystem and a Japanese photographer is important and notable in his own right. But until a topic has eventually been taken one step further and a second sentence has been written, I insist that the individual articles remain merged as one. While these topics may be notable, they rarely have good sources and are much too short for use.
As a model, the German Wikipedia, even if it were about the President, would not allow such a short article. I will admit, however, that we are not the German Wikipedia, and that some of their merging, such as for fictional characters, is a bit too intense.
The first step toward merging these unneeded articles is stopping the bots which automatically write them. Proponents of these bots claim that these immediate stubs are starting points for other users to add to them. However, I see absolutely no reason that, as the articles contain only a few lines anyway, a list is not a perfectly acceptable starting point. Besides, as I said before, this point is nullified as the butterfly species pages above haven't even been touched since July, and I could find many even older than that if I tried. Eventually? Maybe. Having no unique, useful content for the last six months? Definitely not. And no, I did not scour the site for the very shortest pages; there are many more rediculously short articles.
I do hope that you can see the unnecessarities of many redundant stubs. I'm sure that many will oppose this, but I hope I have made my points clear and that many will agree that redundant one-liners are not wanted here. Thank you, Reywas92 Talk 00:21, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Quadell uses Polbot as a tool to make article creation easier. The bot doesn't do it by itself. If you don't like these articles, why not take it up with the relevant taxonomy project? This hardly seems to place for such posts. The German wikipedia has banned the use of stub templates, but it still has its share of stub articles, even if it doesn't call them by this name (e.g. de:Erik Eriksen, de:Carl Theodor Zahle, de:Cornelius Alfred Moloney, de:Maguzawa, de:Wappen Kameruns). de:Wikipedia:Artikel#Umfang_(Stubs) names "Ludwig II was a king of Bavaria" as an example of an article that is too short, but "Ludwig II (25 August 1845 - 13 June 1886) was King of Bavaria (10 March 1864 – 13 June 1886)" as a valid (but short) article. All the Germans did was to remove their equivalent of the stub sorting project. Valentinian T / C 14:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
A one sentence stub can tell you a lot about a plant. It is better to have a one-sentence stub than no article at all. Anyway, there are dozens of resources for every species of plants and what is one-sentence now, will grow over time (Wikipedia is organic, and not immediate, after all). Deleting useful content isn't productive and doesn't help Wikipedia. -- Oldak Quill 05:33, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
.: Perhaps there could be a group started that focuses on impriving stubs? Is there one already? I mean something to the effect that each person upgrades a stub to a paragraph through a little research on the article. Is there a list of stubs? There could also be a group to improve upgraded stubs. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't like the merging idea, though. Of course you could make a list seperate from the stubs without deleting the stubs.-- Vapor One ( talk) 01:20, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
The whole point about Wikipedia is that eventually there will be a decent article on every species. This is a young project, give it time to grow. Every species is by definition notable by itself and there's no policy which says a 'stub' should be deleted because it's a 'stub'. If you're worried that the articles aren't good enough then improve them yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it. Nick mallory ( talk) 10:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
When the summary is left blank, why can't an automatic summary be created to reflect whatever changes were made? I can't be bothered to write an explanation every time I wikify a link or correct someone's spelling or capitalization and I don't think I'm the only one. [Summaries] are nice but changing a P to p is enough of a drag (click on edit, wait for load, find P, place cursor, hit delete, hit p, scroll page, hit save) without having explain yourself. Having made an effort to use the summary for a few months, I've reverted to my previous form of just using it for potentially contentious edits. -- Seans Potato Business 18:32, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
←You can set your preferences so this happens, but it's pretty annoying. I think something automatic has merit in that it would be useful, but probably very difficult to implement. It would need to function as a kind of AI, looking at the diff and trying to "figure out" how to classify what you did. It would be very buggy -- that's my prediction. I think the shortcut buttons for common minor edits are a very good solution though. Buttons for Wikify, spelling, -whitespace, etc would help tremendously, and you can bet people would use them.
←Thanks for the info. I'm not sure how things work at Bugzilla... will another discussion need to take place there to make sure there's consensus for the addition? I think I'll let someone else handle that... if anyone feels like it.
You have a great idea, but I think you are to advanced! I would much prefer the bot to just copy a short bit from the "before", and then from the "after", in the section being changed. Or something. I think would be much more useful when you scan the edit sumaries for the article, the "wikify" don't really tell you a lot, but something actually explaining the change, might. Similarly would this be a great help on the RCP, telling you without having to look what the change was. Greswik ( talk) 16:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Sometimes you use the <ref> tag for notes (ie a bit more information) instead of for a reference, and i have seen articles which use the old {{note}} template to create a separate list of notes as well as of references. It should be very easy for the mw:Extension:Cite/Cite.php extensions to add <note> and <notes /> as two new hooks which work in exactly the same way as <ref> and <references /> do.
This would enable an article to maintain two lists (one of notes and one of references) as now it is either lumped together in one list, or needs to use old templating systems. For example: International Whaling Commission uses just the ref tags but some of the tags are for notes (eg number 6), so could have two lists instead.
Also, would it not be possible (maybe with a bit more work) to be able to have multiple lists of each. Ie you could have <ref1>, <ref2>, <ref3> which corresponds to <references1 />, <references2 />, <references3> which would be handy for articles such as List of Governors of Alabama which has a list below a table, and then one at the end of the article; or United Kingdom (and like many of country articles) has some notes in the infobox as well as a References section at the end of the article.
(I also raised this question at the technical village pump.) C hris_huh talk 15:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Having a section attribute would be a good way to implement this. Example usage:
<ref section="notes">hello i am a note</ref> and <ref>i'm just a regular (default) ref</ref>
Hi, I noticed that the spellings on Hindi pages are in most cases quite atrocious. I tried to edit one of the pages to correct the mistakes when I realised that the Hindi based editor has inherent mistakes.
To explain further When you type out "Wikipedia" in the Hindi editor, the editor decides to put the "e" sound after the "W" sound and so on, which is how it would be in English, but in Hindi this results in the word "Wukipidayeeaa.
If you click on the Hindi language link on a page you can see this error by looking at the Wikipedia logo in Hindi (which reads correctly) and then looking at the title bar of the page, which shows the incorrect spelling.
I just realised this problem automatically expands itself to most other Indian languages, since they follow a similar style.
Jugular Bean ( talk) 08:23, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Fight songs for a discussion about the inclusion of songs in university articles, particularly fight songs and especially the inclusion of their full lyrics. violet/riga (t) 10:56, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd really like to see a list like this. Including myself, Jonathon Sharkey (and all his socks), Ray McKinney, and countless others. I don't even know how many have edited wikipedia and ran for the highest office in other countries, but it sure would be interesting. Does anybody else think we should do this?-- Uga Man ( talk) UGA MAN FOR PRESIDENT 2008 22:53, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
We are now in a position where the developers have made it possible for administrators to grant and remove the rollback permission for non administrators. Over the last month, we have been discussing the ways in which it can be given, and we're now at the point to try and get a consensus for it's implementation. Please could I ask as many people as possible to review the proposal and come to a conclusion to support or oppose the proposal. Ryan Postlethwaite 23:06, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I think if Wikipedia included “Did you mean?” tip-off along with (top of) all results, it would be fine. Google already had it when we mistakenly type something in the search box. The reason why I suggest this I started an article for Charles_Shobraj(see the history) and was keep on working hard. Before creating the article, I searched about it and did make sure that the article does not exist. After all finished my work, I was trying to get some additional references from google. This time I understood that the article is existing already under the title Charles Sobhraj (see shobraj & sobhraj). If WP had the option “did you mean?” I should not have wasted my time. -- Avinesh Jose ( talk) 06:43, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Why not create a 'red link' counter that let people know how many pages has the same red link ? And then list the 'most red' links, the ones that appear in more pages, in a ranking page. Therefore contributors could find right away what are the most needed articles. It is better (or more democratic) than the 'requests' page.
Merry Xmas!
Lgtrapp ( talk) 22:54, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
This is to bring into notice about a project developed to help Wikipedia in Indian Editions. Even before launching the project, considering the importance of the same DD NEWS (the official news channel of Government of India) did a story about the project and a recorded version is available at
You can try some tools (for trying the coding) at
http://mozhi.org/hindi http://mozhi.org/punjabi http://mozhi.org/tamil
We can offer customized search boxes for Wikipedia pages for Indian readers to search in the respective languages and they enter words in the respective Indian language itself. The users can enter words directly in the respective languages and search.
Please let us know if you need any clarification or help in implementation. You can find the contact page in our site for the same.If interested we can launch it extensively and include all the pages.
Hello dear Wikipedians,
Please allow me to briefly present my project and feel free to post your suggestions. I was discussing ecology with a friend and I was supporting the argument : the consumer has the power. His daily choices direct industries towards ecology or not. Towards quality. Towards fair trade.
Then I thought : wouldn't it be great if a website enabled each user to rate companies and products. I imagined an ecology rate, a fair trade rate, a quality rate, a "workman's rights" or human rights rate. Each internet-user-consumer could share his knowledge and in a way, be the butterfly that changes this world (hopefully, stirring up less violent means than a hurricane).
I have programming skills in PHP, ASP.Net and am currently looking for advice (technical, GUI, ...) and suggestions about this idea. Any colloboration would be of course welcome. Why not a new wikipedia branch ?
Also, if you know anyone who could be interested in this project, feel free to forward this message.
Thanks in advance,
Peace ,
Michael.
(you may contact me on the wikimedia foundation mailing list 'foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org')
I am having increasing problems with bots that are dedicated to tag images for "speedy deletion" on grounds of "lacking fair use rationale", "lacking source", etc.
In all cases they are wrong.
You can't discuss with a bot, obviously and they have an unfair advantage of being "machines" and therefore being active continuously more or less.
Case 1: Image:Euskadi escudo.png. BetacommandBot obviously wasn't able to see the self-evident fair use rationale of using the official schuteon of the Basque Autonomous Community in its own article. A human would have never comitted this error (nevertheless an administrator deleted it without a second thought).
Case 2: Image:Batasuna logo.jpg. OsamaKBOT (what a name!) claimed that it was to be speedily deleted due to lacking "source". It's a common logo reproduced a zillion times, I have no idea what the source was. Luckily in this case my protests were heeded and the image stays.
Please let's humans take care of these issues that require human-quality discernment. Otherwise we are going to go nuts.
Bots are ok to add links to other Wikis and things like that but otherwise, specially when they are in charge of nominating for SD on such hard to discern grounds, they are very disruptive. Let's kill them for the sake of a human Wikipedia! -- Sugaar ( talk) 07:36, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
(undent) Copyright violations are a fundamental threat to Wikipedia. Copyright owners can and do sue for violations. Image copyright violation is an open-and-shut situation, unlike most textual violations; further, when there are textual violations, it's generally something favorable to the copyright holder (e.g., PRish text on a website), while image owners are often third parties who make money from selling images. Wikipedia content isn't just about what's online - the goal of the project is to distribute information, by paper and DVDs and mirrors and however. Since images are (a) often not particularly critical to understanding a topic and (b) much more likely to result in lawsuits if copyright violations are widespread, it makes sense for the Foundation to be quite restrictive about what it allows, when sourcing and licensing are incomplete. And yes, bots aren't 100% correct, but where they make mistakes, and admins don't catch them, it's still possible to fix the problem. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Oftentimes when making an edit without an edit summary, an automatic edit summary (I'll call it AES) is made. For a new article, the AES is Created article with "ABC..." When redirecting a page and not giving a reson as a summary, the AES is Redirected page to XYZ. However, there are also two other common AESs: Blanked the page. and Replaced page with "Abc def". These two are very, very rarely used by experienced editors, but show up in watchlists, etc. as vandalism. ~98% of the time when these are used it is an edit by an IP or new user vandalising the page by blanking it or replacing the content with foul language. I propose that is should be impossible for an edit to make these AESs. The software knows when this type of vandalism edits occur, as it makes the summary. I see it as a simple change prohibiting vandals from vandalising in this way and saves others the time reverting them. I was a bit wordy, but I see no reason why this shouldn't be implemented, as non-vandals rarely blank pages. Reywas92 Talk 20:49, 30 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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A discussion about including coordinate and map information in articles in in progress at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Geolinks-cityscale. -- SEWilco ( talk) 15:33, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Some articles, once deemed to be entirely accurate, up-to-date, and of very good quality, should be saved in that state until new information regarding that topic is discovered. This applies best to scientific articles, as the general public often makes edits to perfectly accurate scientific articles because they believe wrongly that the article contains errors. Making an article semi-permanent would firstly assure that an article portrays correct information and secondly protect against vandalism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.84.10.3 ( talk) 20:58, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
It would be nice to develop automated webcite tools that would issue requests to archive pages linked from Wikipedia pages using webcite, and then link to those archived pages instead of the "active" pages. This would prevent linkrot problems, and relieve editors of the immense effort of archiving all the web references cited in an article and then link to those archived pages. Is this possible? Comments?-- Filll ( talk) 00:17, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm relativly new here, but I've created a couple of proposals about our fair-use impage upload and management system here User:Mbisanz/ImageSystemProposal and am looking for comments or smarter users who would know how to code such things, if there was a conensus for them. Mbisanz ( talk) 06:52, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
There are approximately 300,000 species of plant and an estimated over 1,000,000 species of animal. It seems that some people want to have an article on every one of them. There are multiple bots whose job is to create these articles from other websites. All of these bot-generated articles are very short stubs at first, and very few make it anywhere beyond that. Take for example genus Aloeides. Of its eleven species articles, not a single one has any edits but its bot creation way back in July. I have seen countless others of these useless stubs while random paging and new article patrolling. I call them useless because they are; not a single word of unique information is in any one of them.
Another example from a main culprit, User:Polbot, is Keizaburō Saeki, one of many so-called renowned Japanese photographers, all generated from a single website list of 328 of them. I find it hard to believe that a one-sentence article is useful. A single list should be made with all of them.
My proposition is simple: An article about something should be created only if it has enough unique material to warrant its own page. If not, then a list is perfectly acceptable. If a stub could easily be merged into a parent article, then it should. In fact, this theory of individual notability could also be attributed to people, places and other topics.
Following the plants/animals example, all species should be included in the genus article until sufficient unique information is found. People and places can have fine lists until more things pertinent to that person/place is found.
Obviously, perhaps the best, most common, and strongest rebuttal is eventualism, that every one of these articles could, as legitimate topics, eventually be a featured article or whatnot. I fully agree with this. A species of butterfly is vital to the ecosystem and a Japanese photographer is important and notable in his own right. But until a topic has eventually been taken one step further and a second sentence has been written, I insist that the individual articles remain merged as one. While these topics may be notable, they rarely have good sources and are much too short for use.
As a model, the German Wikipedia, even if it were about the President, would not allow such a short article. I will admit, however, that we are not the German Wikipedia, and that some of their merging, such as for fictional characters, is a bit too intense.
The first step toward merging these unneeded articles is stopping the bots which automatically write them. Proponents of these bots claim that these immediate stubs are starting points for other users to add to them. However, I see absolutely no reason that, as the articles contain only a few lines anyway, a list is not a perfectly acceptable starting point. Besides, as I said before, this point is nullified as the butterfly species pages above haven't even been touched since July, and I could find many even older than that if I tried. Eventually? Maybe. Having no unique, useful content for the last six months? Definitely not. And no, I did not scour the site for the very shortest pages; there are many more rediculously short articles.
I do hope that you can see the unnecessarities of many redundant stubs. I'm sure that many will oppose this, but I hope I have made my points clear and that many will agree that redundant one-liners are not wanted here. Thank you, Reywas92 Talk 00:21, 15 December 2007 (UTC)
Quadell uses Polbot as a tool to make article creation easier. The bot doesn't do it by itself. If you don't like these articles, why not take it up with the relevant taxonomy project? This hardly seems to place for such posts. The German wikipedia has banned the use of stub templates, but it still has its share of stub articles, even if it doesn't call them by this name (e.g. de:Erik Eriksen, de:Carl Theodor Zahle, de:Cornelius Alfred Moloney, de:Maguzawa, de:Wappen Kameruns). de:Wikipedia:Artikel#Umfang_(Stubs) names "Ludwig II was a king of Bavaria" as an example of an article that is too short, but "Ludwig II (25 August 1845 - 13 June 1886) was King of Bavaria (10 March 1864 – 13 June 1886)" as a valid (but short) article. All the Germans did was to remove their equivalent of the stub sorting project. Valentinian T / C 14:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)
A one sentence stub can tell you a lot about a plant. It is better to have a one-sentence stub than no article at all. Anyway, there are dozens of resources for every species of plants and what is one-sentence now, will grow over time (Wikipedia is organic, and not immediate, after all). Deleting useful content isn't productive and doesn't help Wikipedia. -- Oldak Quill 05:33, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
.: Perhaps there could be a group started that focuses on impriving stubs? Is there one already? I mean something to the effect that each person upgrades a stub to a paragraph through a little research on the article. Is there a list of stubs? There could also be a group to improve upgraded stubs. I don't know. Maybe I'm crazy. I don't like the merging idea, though. Of course you could make a list seperate from the stubs without deleting the stubs.-- Vapor One ( talk) 01:20, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
The whole point about Wikipedia is that eventually there will be a decent article on every species. This is a young project, give it time to grow. Every species is by definition notable by itself and there's no policy which says a 'stub' should be deleted because it's a 'stub'. If you're worried that the articles aren't good enough then improve them yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it. Nick mallory ( talk) 10:24, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
When the summary is left blank, why can't an automatic summary be created to reflect whatever changes were made? I can't be bothered to write an explanation every time I wikify a link or correct someone's spelling or capitalization and I don't think I'm the only one. [Summaries] are nice but changing a P to p is enough of a drag (click on edit, wait for load, find P, place cursor, hit delete, hit p, scroll page, hit save) without having explain yourself. Having made an effort to use the summary for a few months, I've reverted to my previous form of just using it for potentially contentious edits. -- Seans Potato Business 18:32, 21 December 2007 (UTC)
←You can set your preferences so this happens, but it's pretty annoying. I think something automatic has merit in that it would be useful, but probably very difficult to implement. It would need to function as a kind of AI, looking at the diff and trying to "figure out" how to classify what you did. It would be very buggy -- that's my prediction. I think the shortcut buttons for common minor edits are a very good solution though. Buttons for Wikify, spelling, -whitespace, etc would help tremendously, and you can bet people would use them.
←Thanks for the info. I'm not sure how things work at Bugzilla... will another discussion need to take place there to make sure there's consensus for the addition? I think I'll let someone else handle that... if anyone feels like it.
You have a great idea, but I think you are to advanced! I would much prefer the bot to just copy a short bit from the "before", and then from the "after", in the section being changed. Or something. I think would be much more useful when you scan the edit sumaries for the article, the "wikify" don't really tell you a lot, but something actually explaining the change, might. Similarly would this be a great help on the RCP, telling you without having to look what the change was. Greswik ( talk) 16:41, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Sometimes you use the <ref> tag for notes (ie a bit more information) instead of for a reference, and i have seen articles which use the old {{note}} template to create a separate list of notes as well as of references. It should be very easy for the mw:Extension:Cite/Cite.php extensions to add <note> and <notes /> as two new hooks which work in exactly the same way as <ref> and <references /> do.
This would enable an article to maintain two lists (one of notes and one of references) as now it is either lumped together in one list, or needs to use old templating systems. For example: International Whaling Commission uses just the ref tags but some of the tags are for notes (eg number 6), so could have two lists instead.
Also, would it not be possible (maybe with a bit more work) to be able to have multiple lists of each. Ie you could have <ref1>, <ref2>, <ref3> which corresponds to <references1 />, <references2 />, <references3> which would be handy for articles such as List of Governors of Alabama which has a list below a table, and then one at the end of the article; or United Kingdom (and like many of country articles) has some notes in the infobox as well as a References section at the end of the article.
(I also raised this question at the technical village pump.) C hris_huh talk 15:01, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
Having a section attribute would be a good way to implement this. Example usage:
<ref section="notes">hello i am a note</ref> and <ref>i'm just a regular (default) ref</ref>
Hi, I noticed that the spellings on Hindi pages are in most cases quite atrocious. I tried to edit one of the pages to correct the mistakes when I realised that the Hindi based editor has inherent mistakes.
To explain further When you type out "Wikipedia" in the Hindi editor, the editor decides to put the "e" sound after the "W" sound and so on, which is how it would be in English, but in Hindi this results in the word "Wukipidayeeaa.
If you click on the Hindi language link on a page you can see this error by looking at the Wikipedia logo in Hindi (which reads correctly) and then looking at the title bar of the page, which shows the incorrect spelling.
I just realised this problem automatically expands itself to most other Indian languages, since they follow a similar style.
Jugular Bean ( talk) 08:23, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Fight songs for a discussion about the inclusion of songs in university articles, particularly fight songs and especially the inclusion of their full lyrics. violet/riga (t) 10:56, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I'd really like to see a list like this. Including myself, Jonathon Sharkey (and all his socks), Ray McKinney, and countless others. I don't even know how many have edited wikipedia and ran for the highest office in other countries, but it sure would be interesting. Does anybody else think we should do this?-- Uga Man ( talk) UGA MAN FOR PRESIDENT 2008 22:53, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
We are now in a position where the developers have made it possible for administrators to grant and remove the rollback permission for non administrators. Over the last month, we have been discussing the ways in which it can be given, and we're now at the point to try and get a consensus for it's implementation. Please could I ask as many people as possible to review the proposal and come to a conclusion to support or oppose the proposal. Ryan Postlethwaite 23:06, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I think if Wikipedia included “Did you mean?” tip-off along with (top of) all results, it would be fine. Google already had it when we mistakenly type something in the search box. The reason why I suggest this I started an article for Charles_Shobraj(see the history) and was keep on working hard. Before creating the article, I searched about it and did make sure that the article does not exist. After all finished my work, I was trying to get some additional references from google. This time I understood that the article is existing already under the title Charles Sobhraj (see shobraj & sobhraj). If WP had the option “did you mean?” I should not have wasted my time. -- Avinesh Jose ( talk) 06:43, 24 December 2007 (UTC)
Why not create a 'red link' counter that let people know how many pages has the same red link ? And then list the 'most red' links, the ones that appear in more pages, in a ranking page. Therefore contributors could find right away what are the most needed articles. It is better (or more democratic) than the 'requests' page.
Merry Xmas!
Lgtrapp ( talk) 22:54, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
This is to bring into notice about a project developed to help Wikipedia in Indian Editions. Even before launching the project, considering the importance of the same DD NEWS (the official news channel of Government of India) did a story about the project and a recorded version is available at
You can try some tools (for trying the coding) at
http://mozhi.org/hindi http://mozhi.org/punjabi http://mozhi.org/tamil
We can offer customized search boxes for Wikipedia pages for Indian readers to search in the respective languages and they enter words in the respective Indian language itself. The users can enter words directly in the respective languages and search.
Please let us know if you need any clarification or help in implementation. You can find the contact page in our site for the same.If interested we can launch it extensively and include all the pages.
Hello dear Wikipedians,
Please allow me to briefly present my project and feel free to post your suggestions. I was discussing ecology with a friend and I was supporting the argument : the consumer has the power. His daily choices direct industries towards ecology or not. Towards quality. Towards fair trade.
Then I thought : wouldn't it be great if a website enabled each user to rate companies and products. I imagined an ecology rate, a fair trade rate, a quality rate, a "workman's rights" or human rights rate. Each internet-user-consumer could share his knowledge and in a way, be the butterfly that changes this world (hopefully, stirring up less violent means than a hurricane).
I have programming skills in PHP, ASP.Net and am currently looking for advice (technical, GUI, ...) and suggestions about this idea. Any colloboration would be of course welcome. Why not a new wikipedia branch ?
Also, if you know anyone who could be interested in this project, feel free to forward this message.
Thanks in advance,
Peace ,
Michael.
(you may contact me on the wikimedia foundation mailing list 'foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org')
I am having increasing problems with bots that are dedicated to tag images for "speedy deletion" on grounds of "lacking fair use rationale", "lacking source", etc.
In all cases they are wrong.
You can't discuss with a bot, obviously and they have an unfair advantage of being "machines" and therefore being active continuously more or less.
Case 1: Image:Euskadi escudo.png. BetacommandBot obviously wasn't able to see the self-evident fair use rationale of using the official schuteon of the Basque Autonomous Community in its own article. A human would have never comitted this error (nevertheless an administrator deleted it without a second thought).
Case 2: Image:Batasuna logo.jpg. OsamaKBOT (what a name!) claimed that it was to be speedily deleted due to lacking "source". It's a common logo reproduced a zillion times, I have no idea what the source was. Luckily in this case my protests were heeded and the image stays.
Please let's humans take care of these issues that require human-quality discernment. Otherwise we are going to go nuts.
Bots are ok to add links to other Wikis and things like that but otherwise, specially when they are in charge of nominating for SD on such hard to discern grounds, they are very disruptive. Let's kill them for the sake of a human Wikipedia! -- Sugaar ( talk) 07:36, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
(undent) Copyright violations are a fundamental threat to Wikipedia. Copyright owners can and do sue for violations. Image copyright violation is an open-and-shut situation, unlike most textual violations; further, when there are textual violations, it's generally something favorable to the copyright holder (e.g., PRish text on a website), while image owners are often third parties who make money from selling images. Wikipedia content isn't just about what's online - the goal of the project is to distribute information, by paper and DVDs and mirrors and however. Since images are (a) often not particularly critical to understanding a topic and (b) much more likely to result in lawsuits if copyright violations are widespread, it makes sense for the Foundation to be quite restrictive about what it allows, when sourcing and licensing are incomplete. And yes, bots aren't 100% correct, but where they make mistakes, and admins don't catch them, it's still possible to fix the problem. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 02:55, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Oftentimes when making an edit without an edit summary, an automatic edit summary (I'll call it AES) is made. For a new article, the AES is Created article with "ABC..." When redirecting a page and not giving a reson as a summary, the AES is Redirected page to XYZ. However, there are also two other common AESs: Blanked the page. and Replaced page with "Abc def". These two are very, very rarely used by experienced editors, but show up in watchlists, etc. as vandalism. ~98% of the time when these are used it is an edit by an IP or new user vandalising the page by blanking it or replacing the content with foul language. I propose that is should be impossible for an edit to make these AESs. The software knows when this type of vandalism edits occur, as it makes the summary. I see it as a simple change prohibiting vandals from vandalising in this way and saves others the time reverting them. I was a bit wordy, but I see no reason why this shouldn't be implemented, as non-vandals rarely blank pages. Reywas92 Talk 20:49, 30 December 2007 (UTC)