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Anyone planning on building a MediaWiki extension to support OpenSocial?????????? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.249.243.163 ( talk) 22:44, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Creating the ability for a user to annotate an article, perhaps with his/her own observations on some aspect of it for his/her future reference. It would, via a cookie (I assume - I'm not technical) remain on the user's computer, so the Wiki page itself would not be affected. This may help users who are using Wikipedia for learning purposes, and he/she can have a series of notes that would either pop up or give the user the option of having them pop up whenever that page (even if, by then, revised by other uses) is summoned again. Ajarmitage 09:04, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
This proposal is for the verification of the proper use or misuse of a word in the title of a large number of articles, and for the moving/renaming of the articles if the community determines that they are misnamed.
According to the articles Demography and Demographics, the term demographics is often used erroneously in place of the word demography.
This seems to be the case with the majority of articles on the demography of regions:
Compare with:
See Demographics#Demographics vs Demography for the distinction between the two terms.
My question is: Are the above "demographics" articles named correctly?
The Transhumanist 07:33, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Can primary sources (Such as people's diarys, religous texts etc) be used as references within an article? Is this discouraged?-- Phoenix-wiki ( talk · contribs) 19:14, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
WP:PSTS + WP:SPS + WP:RS all speak on the issue. Publicola 22:11, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Firstly apologies if this has been suggested before, or there is a fix already available, couldn't find it anywhere. Would it be possible to increase the number of most recent edits on a users watchlsit to two or three (or a user defined number). Reason is that often the most recent edit isn't the one which is most significant as far as changes go. A number of times I've seen an edit which is a trivial number of characters and which may be ignored, however the second or third most recent edit may be significant and need acting on. If the user was made aware of the 'bigger' changes they may be less likely to miss these changes. The 'show/hide' minor edits option doesn't do the job for me. Yorkshiresky 20:20, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
A new higher quality image has replaced the lower quality and controversial image on Lolicon. In the last RfC, many editors expressed a desire to see a higher quality image on the article and this new image attempts to fill the role. See talk page for further discussion. -- Farix ( Talk) 00:53, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
A lot of the policies on wikipedia are great. I have read through most of them multiple times. There is one thing I don't 100% agree with. I am a little paranoid about doing this as this is the first time I offered feedback on something like policies. So ever if every disagrees, and it doesn't go through or even if it's ignored, atleast try to understand this is my first time commenting on something like this. What I disagree with is the overall Policies take on fictional work. I think that we should consider a slight alteration. I think that fictional related "text" should be allowed, when references are cited. There are some policies stating that it has to be of real life related works with citings, and if it's fictional it has to be written from a real life view (which I agree with). However I have noticed that certain articles get opted for deletion when they contain great deals of information on a fictional plot. I think we should be more linient when it comes to that. We have giant fictional lists, or great details of data about a fictional work that details out a great deal about the plot, but when this happens, it's generally tagged off (even when it has decent citings). I think that is something we should work, towards being more linient with. I am not sure if I exactly communicated what I was trying to say accurately, so if anyone has questions about my thoughts or didn't understand let me know and I will try to rephrase. businessman332211 16:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
I recently created {{
Wikipedia policies and guidelines}} in an effort to make it easier to navigate through our important Wikipedia policies and guidelines, while also making it easier to cite the policies (by adding their main shortcut next to the title of the policy or guideline). I was thinking of adding this template to the bottom (or the "See also" sections) of the noted policies and guidelines, but I wanted some input and consensus since we are talking about our main policy pages. Please tell me what you think, and if you see anything that you can fix or make better, be bold! Thanks.
Gonzo fan2007
talk ♦
contribs
03:46, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
We already have a project to sort current deletion debates by topic, so interested users can participate in particular areas, but what I was thinking, is that we initiate a new process of sorting Peer reviews by topic – this might even have the potential to at least lower the backlog on the peer review page, and help editors by getting the most out of a peer review, by getting a review from someone with experience writing on the subject. As the number of active peer reviews is much lower than the amount of deletion debates ongoing at any one time, the scope of a topic should be widened.
This idea may perhaps expand to not just peer reviews, but copyediting requests on League of Copyeditors pages, since I hear that there are new systems in place over there to put each request for copyediting/proofreading on a separate subpage – making transcluding a particular request easier.
Any feedback on the proposal is welcome. ~ Sebi 20:54, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
What do you all think of having a sort of "Templates for creation" page? It'd be a place where people who want to use a template that doesn't yet exist could request that someone more experienced with templates and template syntax make one. I don't think we have anything like this yet, and it could be very helpful considering how complicated and confusing making some kinds of templates can be. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 17:08, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia seems to have trouble with admins abusing privilege, acting uncivil, making questionable decisions, etc. There is also discontent over administrator actions and behavior. Both problems seem significant. Here is a survey concluded early this year. Anecdotally, the problem seems to have since grown worse (in the interest of disclosure, I have had my run-ins as well but don't want to focus on that). Some feel this impact the health and perhaps even the long-term viability of the project. It seems there are a fair number of people who should simply not be administrators, and many others who will not perform well unless there is some oversight and accountability. The two mechanisms we have do not seem to be working. Arbitration Committee cases are few and far between, sanctions are made for immediate practical behavioral problems only, and de-sysopping is seen as an extraordinary punishment that should be done only after everything else fails. WP:AN/I is an unruly, rude place with more conversations than anyone can keep up with, some involving a high degree of incivility, accusations, and edit warring, often by administrators. Informal discussion and behavioral norms would work if there were only a few bad admins, but when the behavior veers too far from expectations, those norms are off. A large proportion of administrators seem to think it's okay to make summary decisions, use threats or even actual administrative actions to enforce their content preferences, treat non-administrators in a condescending or uncivil way, and so on, knowing there is no penalty for doing so and that other administrators will back them up. Some proposals (changing the administrator approval process, or limiting the terms) have been considered and rejected.
I have no specific proposal, but can we brainstorm on how we can make administrators more accountable to the wishes of Wikipedians, and the benefit of Wikipedia? My first thought is a recall system whereby if there is a sufficient question raised as to behavior or competence, an admin would have to stand for re-appointment. The downside is that implementation might be difficult, it is similar to a vote, it may be prone to sockpuppeting, canvassing, etc., and that there would be a possible stigma to getting recalled. Any thoughts or ideas? (proposal by user:Wikidemo)
Here's another troubling case, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Privatemusings. It's pretty horrific, actually. Administrators warring, yelling and screaming, accusing each other of bad faith, and calling for each other's de-sysopping, all over one administrator blocking another. One of those duking it out, an administrator who has ostensibly "retired" for murky reasons but nevertheless blocks about five users per day and deletes more articles than that, deleted a comment I made on an unrelated AN/I matter, obviously on the other side of the issue than me, and came to my talk page to scold me for "inflaming" things. I have no idea who is right and wrong in the current spat. Maybe both sides are wrong. You bet that sends the message that non-administrators should live in fear and shouldn't cross paths with aggressive administrators. I'm glad all this is out in the open for everyone to see, but at the same time I shouldn't have to see this. Yuck. Wikidemo 21:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
(I'm moving the subheading down here - if you want to brainstorm about possible changes, here's the place. You can criticize me above for bringing up the question)
Some:
Could we add
<div style="float:{{#switch: | align = right | align = left | #default = right }};
to userboxes? See
this for an example. It would allow the |align=left or |align=right , which is nice because you don't need to copy the source and modify the "float:<option> directly.
Ρх₥α
02:07, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
<div style="float:{{{align|left}}}">
work to allow overriding the alignment?
Anomie
02:44, 2 November 2007 (UTC){{User:UBX/Anti-federalism|float=l1ft}}
on your user page to change the default location.
Andrwsc
01:13, 8 November 2007 (UTC)I have proposed the creation of a Q&A page for active arbitration cases here. Summary: There should be one page dedicated to questions and answers from all open Arbitration Cases so that all questions for arbitrators can be concentrated and kept on the same page in the same namespace, not spread across arbitrator talk pages as they frequently are now. See the discussion for more details regarding the rationale behind this. Input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Ante lan talk 16:49, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Further discussion to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation. MER-C 03:19, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Please see this thread on Wikien-l. It would be ideal if any discussion was mostly kept to one place. Thanks for your attention. :) -- Gmaxwell 21:31, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
Creating a new article is one of the most complex things you can do on Wikipedia... especially considering we just give people a blank box with a link to tutorials hardly anyone will read. Most new articles created by new users are disasters. Check Special:Newpages if you disagree. If someone can't figure out how to create an account... how are they going to figure out how to navigate copyright, formatting, verifiability, NPOV policy, self-references and all the other things needed to create a marginally decent new article? There are a lot of common sense things that could be done to make new articles less likely to be very bad... like warning if there's no formatting, no incoming links and no category. Or even a decent UI that gives people something better than a blank box to work with. Why aren't any of these things ever considered?
We have tremendous backlogs in dealing with the basic problems article creators often forget to address - the categories for {{ unreferenced}}, {{ wikify}}, {{ uncategorized}} and so on have backlogs in the tens of thousands. Now doesn't seem to be the time to be making it even easier to create articles that require huge ammounts of work from a small pool of cleanup people. -- W.marsh 06:16, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Blurgh. I cannot see any good coming of this - CSD is already permanently backlogged, and now we're going to have thousands of articles about schookids "whu r da best" and their "smelly teachers lol" created every day. For those to even be halfway manageable, we're going to have to relax the rules on how many warnings are required before an IP is blocked, not bitch out admins who block on sight, and probably look at expanding some of the criteria for speedy deletion to avoid overrunning PROD or AFD. Expanding A7 to cover buildings, books, the albums and singles of A7-deleted bands, and so on, would be a start. Neil ☎ 10:17, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
W.marsh has hit it right on the head. As anybody who does newpage patrols knows, articles created by newbies are of, at best, a subpar quality. Given the high learning curve for editing, the many arcane and obscure policies one must obey related to content, style, interaction, etc., and the fact that NP patrollers usually jump down the throat of a crappy article, I cannot see any good coming from this. east. 718 at 10:33, 10/27/2007
Since the "decision" to permit anonymous article creation was presented as a means to acquire data on the effect of anonymous article creation, the parameters and procedures to be followed in collecting that data, and those responsible for doing so, need to be specified before any such action is actually taken. - Nunh-huh 16:35, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
As an experiment, I went to Special:Newpages and had a look at the top five pages where the creator had less then ten edits. I got:
I doubt we're going to get a good signal-to-noise ratio from anon users at that rate. Hut 8.5 19:48, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Reading through the mailing list, I haven't been able to determine who actually made the decision that anonymous article creation will be re-enabled. I assumed it was an "official" decision until I read this post by Tim Starling:
Can a developer, board member or someone else in the know elaborate on who made this decision? Thanks, Chaz Beckett 14:54, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
I posted on the list on this subject. Honestly, I think Tim's message was out of line and had he bothered to talk to the names he mentioned he wouldn't have said the same things. But you're welcome to conclude whatever you wish. :) -- Gmaxwell 17:20, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
After a one month period, on December 9th, we will re-evaluate this decision using previously established methods (average article lifespan, rate of deletion, manual quality classification, random samplings of newly created articles, and most importantly, community discussion). (per the initial announcement)
I hope that this we of whom you speak becomes somewhat organized in the near future. Then it could address such things as whether the exact methods will be established before the change takes affect on November 9th, who will do the number crunching; when ther number-crunching will take place (a snapshot on December 9th might miss a large number of page created in the prior week that don't survive the next week or two, for example), how long will the number-crunching should be expected to take (a week, a month?), and what the base comparison will be (October 2007? November 2006?).
Someone else commented (in the mailing list discussion) that I'd personally consider a substantial increase in the percentage of new pages deleted to be a reason to turn anon-page creation back off. That's a start toward discussing how we'd feel about outcomes, though it would be nice to replace "substantial" with at least some range (10 to 20%? 20 to 40%). And (as noted above) "deleted" can mean "deleted within 24 hours", "deleted within a week", or "deleted within a month". More generally, it would really be nice to have a discussion about what different outcomes would mean before the results of this change were known, even if no hard criteria were set. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:44, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Interesting, but of course that was from two years ago, which is like 20 in wikipedia years. I definitely see the need for getting new data. Comparing the absolute volumes of articles created and articles deleted (speedily deleted or prodded) before and after the experiment will also interesting. Anyway, I don't see how testing this for a month could ruin the encyclopedia. Worst case scenario is that we have a busy couple of weeks of CSD tagging. henrik• talk 20:27, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
In an above section, someone suggested that we should have a walkthrough process for article writing similar to image uploads. I agreed and decided to start working on such a thing. You can see a very early start at Wikipedia:Article wizard (note the format directly ripped off from the upload form).
I'll report back here as I finish more. I also need suggestions for more general topics to start with. Right now I just have biographies, companies, and "other." All except other [will] have an infobox in the preload for people to fill in and will have advice and policy stuff related to their topic ( WP:BLP for bios, WP:COI for companies, etc.). Mr. Z-man 23:57, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Seriously, has anyone here been to Special:Newpages of late? It gets crazy on a good day in a good time-zone...imagine what it'll be like on a bad day, in the US, in the afternoon when all the bored teenagers are home? What next - let's remove the protection functionality? GO NUTS! Dihydrogen Monoxide ( H2O) 06:47, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
The only thing worse than the quality of Newpages is the over-a-year-long backlog at AfC. I think this is a fine decision and I look forward to discussing the results in December. Publicola 06:59, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
So much speculation: The fact is that the percentage of deleted articles went UP after anon page creation as well as the amount of time it took us to getting around to delete them. Was this because anon page creation was turned off or because Wikipedia became more 'mainstream'? We don't know. We can guess, thats all we can do.
But we will know after toggling the setting. We'll have solid information, and we can use that information to make an informed decision as well as help us make better decisions about related things in the future.
If the result is terrible we'll know, the community will decide to disable anonymous page creation, and life will go on. One advantage we can expect from flipping the switch is that the worst of the rubbish will be from anons, so going through special new pages will be easier. I also added an option to special:newpages to hide logged in users. -- Gmaxwell 06:09, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Looking through the mailing list post and above arguments what I can't tell is what is wrong with the current system ? As stated variously above anyone spending some time on new-pages patrol sees the signal to noise ratio and allowing anonymous creators would certainly not ameliorate this. I just can't see that Wikipedia stands anything to gain by removing the current few-day delay in creating articles. Gmaxwell is correct that turning this back on will create data. Unfortunately the data will most likely just show administrators spending more time pressing the delete button and no improvement in Wikipedia at all. Can't see that it's broken and can't see why this has to be fixed.- Peripitus (Talk) 06:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Would it be fair to say that part of the reason why our exponential growth has been decelerating is because we're approaching - though not there yet - a more sufficient level of breadth? When it seems like the project has finally started to concentrate the bulk of its efforts into article depth, this just doesn't seem like a good idea - it seems like a bullet in the foot. I'm not saying there's not a fair number of articles needed that have yet to exist, nor that we'll ever run out of needed articles (thanks to current events, new media releases, and technology obsolescence, if nothing else), but considering how much junk we already see at AfD, Speedy, and requested articles, maybe continuing to concentrate on breadth after nearly seven years and 2 million articles is a semi-bad thing... Girolamo Savonarola 13:34, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
I don't have a strong opinion on this. On the one hand, I expect the vast majority of anon-created pages to end up on the cutting room floor. On the other hand, it might slow down the rate of creation of single purpose accounts, which is a benefit. On the other hand, it also is a drawback in two ways. On balance, I don't think switching back is a good idea.
First, some of those SPAs provide usernames that makes it obvious they have a conflict of interest with regard to the article created, which can be a yellow flag for new page patrol. When User:YAJohnson creates an article on Yet Another Johnson or [User:Corporation XYZ]] creates an article on XYZ we can be appropriately wary. If an IP creates those articles, the same cautionary flag won't exist.
Second, requiring account creation encourages account creation. Some new accounts stick around and become valuable users. My first contribution was a new page creation, and I'd not have bothered to create the account if anons could have created pages. I've been around long enough that I'm approaching the one year anniversary of becoming an admin. So I point to essentially all of my contributions as things that might have been lost had anon page creation been allowed. GRBerry 22:18, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Well, it's easy enough for an admin to speedy delete articles that shouldn't be on Wikipedia. Marlith T/ C 04:19, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
First of all, I don't understand how a decision as important as this gets to be decided by one person, Gregory Maxwell, rather than through an inclusive community discussion. I make a point to try to be involved in all important Wikipedia discussions and this is the first I have heard of this idea. I've read gmaxwell's explanation that there's no point having a discussion since people have already talked about it (mostly on the listserv apparently) and that no one has any salient points to debate anyway, which, I'm sorry, is just ridiculous. I believe this is a bad decision undertaken in an even worse manner. I'm sure Gregory has the best of intentions, but there's no reason to rush this. As Kat has stated, this should be decided by the enwiki as a community, not by individuals or the board. Kaldari 14:55, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
In case you don't know, I was one of the people involved in addressing the Seigenthaler controversy back in 2005. I talked to the media, swatted off the vandals, and basically adopted the article in a personal quest to redeem Wikipedia. It was not a fun time to be an administrator. I also campaigned for more stringent controls over Wikipedia contributors and content. Before Seigenthaler, Wikipedia was a total mess. It was the Wild West without enough sheriffs. Jimbo's decisions to eliminate anonymous page creation, create the BLP policy, and tighten the verifiability policy were the best things that ever happened to this project. I am quite certain that enabling anonymous page creation is a step backwards, back to the Wild West days that led to the Seigenthaler controversy and the crucifixion of Wikipedia in the media. I don't need data to tell me that, I lived through the Wild West days and the subsequent introduction of saner policies and I know that we are a tighter ship now.
I also don't understand why this "experiment" is necessary. It seems to me that the issue you are trying to address is philosophical rather than practical. If you look at the rate of article creation for the last few years, you'll see that restricting anonymous article creation had virtually no effect on the rate of articles created. If a subject is important it will get an article on Wikipedia one way or another, that much is certain. The only thing that has slowed down the rate of article creation is the recent plateauing effect that has come from Wikipedia reaching a saturation point of articles. I've worked with WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles for several years and in the past year the project has become stagnant. Know why? There aren't anymore important missing articles left to create! The only important articles left to create are articles on current events and we meet that need 110% even without anonymous page creation. Indeed, that's probably our strongest area of coverage. What is the practical need that this change will address? There is none. Maybe it will silence the blogchair pundits who complain that Wikipedia is too restricted now, but somehow I doubt it. Wikipedia is more restricted now for a reason. We're not just a place for people to post their pet trivia. We are an encyclopedia, and as the de facto authority on every person, place, and thing under the sun, we have a very serious responsibility to "get it right". This responsibility is far more important than conforming to some abstract notion of "openness" (I say this as an active contributor to several open source projects). If indeed, we are too open, as some suggest, why have all the Wikipedia imitation sites (Citizendium, Veropedia, etc) decided to become more restrictive rather than less? By opening the door to anonymous page creation, we are once again inviting a Seigenthaler controversy (or worse).
I support the idea of anonymous page creation in theory, but it has to fit with Wikipedia's other goals. To that end, I believe we should wait until "article verification" or "good article flagging" (or whatever you want to call it) is implemented before we re-enable anonymous page creation. Alternately, if we must turn it back on immediately, we should do it for one month, and then turn it back off unless there is compelling evidence that it substantially improved Wikipedia (which I'm quite certain it won't). Right now the terms of this "experiment" seem sufficiently vague to permit anonymous page creation to remain the standard no matter what the results.
Finally, if you are successful at getting anonymous page creation re-enabled, I expect to see you on the front lines of new pages patrol on a daily basis, as it will be hell there. Don't expect to be able to sit back in your chair as an impartial observer while the rest of us wade through the mountains of shit without suffering a bit of resentment. Kaldari 18:43, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm a bit confused by the above argument. "If you look at the rate of article creation for the last few years, you'll see that restricting anonymous article creation had virtually no effect on the rate of articles created." I agree that there is no visible effect. Why oppose re-enabling anonymous article creation then?
I'm very interested in why some people seem to think that there will be anything like "article verification" coming anytime soon to help this. The only thing proposed is revision flagging and it iss months out, and the standing consensus on English Wikipedia *appears* to be that it will *only* be used in places where we currently use semi-/protection, which is also the position advanced by Erik Moller.
As far as what I'm doing to help new page patrol: I implemented the MediaWiki feature request in bug 1405. This feature will allow users (all logged in users, autoconfirmed only, or sysop only.. you decided: its per-wiki configurable) to mark new articles as reviewed. Unreviewed articles show up with a yellow background in Special:Newpages. I also added a feature to hide logged in users, and I can easily add a feature to hide reviewed new articles (rather than just color them). These features should dramatically increase our patrolling resources by reducing duplication.
These features are turned on at a test wiki I just put online for you to look at. Go to Special:Newpages there and create an account. Try creating some pages. Pages by users and anons start off life unpatroled yellow, but if you click on them in special:Newpages you can patrol them (link on the lower right) if you are logged in. A record of all patrol actions is in the patrol log. Your feedback will be helpful. -- Gmaxwell 20:24, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
If this is an experiment, where is the lab notebook where the things to be measured are being discussed? ( SEWilco 16:16, 30 October 2007 (UTC))
Rather than statistical studies, perhaps the people backing this change should volunteer to do a few hours of newpage patrol per day during the trial period. I think having to actually deal with the pages, rather than run crunch some numbers after other saps have dealt with 90% of the pages, dramatically changes people's perspectives on this whole thing. -- W.marsh 19:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Obviously the person behind this idea has never gone on new page patrol or participated at AFC, this is just going to result in a torrent of new articles which are either a1) too low a quality to be useful, b2) blatant advertising, c3) attack pages or d4) nonsense or too low notability and for what, one extra stub per week? We need to keep in mind that while less than ¼ of anonymous edits are made in bad faith over 90% of vandalism comes from IPs, and this problem is just going to get worse if anonymous page creation is re-enabled given that most users are unable to simply revert it. Really, if a person is that interested in creating an article they can take the time to register an account, otherwise it’s probably not worth us having. And what happened to community consensus on decisions, this seems to be one man’s opinion being forced on the rest of the project, and I have a pretty good idea who are going to be the people cleaning up the mess that results. Guess I had better dust off my old account then, it’s going to be a hectic month… 124.176.84.7 09:13, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
This is a terrible idea imposed without discussion or consensus. I am frankly appalled. Tim Vickers 05:51, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
As I remember, at least one hundred people including myself agreed to stop anonymous article creation a couple years ago. It would greatly increase the load for newpage patrol and admins. Not to mention the fact that logged in editors are blocked indefinitely every day for creation of nonsense and vandalism. We usually can't block ips indefinitely leaving them nothing to loose and free to do it again, unlike a registered account.-- Sandahl 06:21, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
Wanted to throw my voice in here as well in thinking that re-enabling anon article creation is... madness. Wikipedia has grown up past a point where anon article creation helps us, and putting it back in will hurt far more than it helps. -- Ned Scott 06:10, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
...as according to one of our concurrents, lab mice are the most intelligent creatures on the planet.
The question is whether accountless page creation is good or bad has been disputed. The experiment is a good idea. That's proper scientific procedure, you don't talk the talk, you walk the walk.
Though I share the opinions that is a bad idea to re-establish this permanently, I judge the risk for that as low.It takes a while for users to notice registration is no longer required (though I don't how much waves this proposal made outside of wikipedia, not so much according to a google smell). I believe that few people here haven't noticed the donation campaign, and I think the experiment is part of it, while catching valuable data with the same stone.
I think people saying there should be some kind of strike are not helping. It will skew the data, create even more backlogs at XfDs, and generally promote discontent. So I suggest folk to do their duty toward the community, and do the honourable thing.
If, and only if, the experiment proves negative and accountless page creation is re-established anyway, will I urge the hauling of the ensign at your right hand.-- victor falk 18:11, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Having taken a look at gmaxwell's neat tool for looking at new articles, and as someone who repeatedly runs into CSD-worthy articles than the NPP people miss when I go through Special:Uncategorizedpages or Category:Uncategorized pages, I'm not worried about the upcoming change. -- Hemlock Martinis 00:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure if I follow where the confidence (or unconcern) here is stemming from. The {{ uncat}}-tagged pages are, as you correctly state, only the ones NPP has missed, and by no means all of those, either. (Articles with a stub tag or in a cleanup category aren't generally included, and nor, obviously, are "correctly" (or at least, tokenly) categorised deletion-bait. (Granted some are also old articles that have had their categories vandalised, deleted, mislaid through markup error, or removed through some other sequence of events.)) And backlog's north of seven thousand pages (or somewhat over a month's worth). Nor would I assume that the good people over at WP:UNCAT are all immune to getting fed up of the endless struggle, any more than NPPers would be.
For me that motivates the opposite question: why aren't we doing something more meaningful to deter hoaxes, advertising, vanity, crankery, and axe-grinding than imposing a four-day waiting period to spam us with it? For myself, I'd be strongly in favour of some sort of lightweight non-auto confirmation process. Alai 23:54, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Could we at least require IP editors to provide one reference for new articles? This is how AFC works, and in the age of WP:BLP it seems perfectly reasonable to ask new editors for a reference when creating articles. A separate field below the article field could ask for it, and add the contents in a ==References== section (if a references section was provided in the text anyway, the need for entering them into the new field would be negated). Some short but sweet wording could say something along the lines of "Independent newspaper and magazine articles are better than official websites; books and scholarly journals are even better". Sure some new articles would give phony references, or the creators would just enter junk information in the field... but that would make it easier to spot the hoaxes, not harder.
I still think allowing IP article creation now is a bad idea, but requiring a reference would probably be the easiest way to keep the situation manageable. -- W.marsh 18:29, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Allowing IP's to create new articles is one of the craziest things we on Wikipedia can do. Because of attack pages. Now, if this goes ahead, if someone leaves a warning on a IP's talkpage, they could go straight ahead and create an attack page. Nothing would stop them. This could seriously hurt a lot of people, and a lot of respected admins around here that have to put up with a lot of abuse every single day, yet stay on Wikipedia. Editors like myself, could easily have an attack page created on them. This is seriously something that I am heavily against. This could potentionally drive a lot of people (including myself) out of Wikipedia. Davnel03 19:28, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Hopefully we can all agree that almost any page created in under 2 minutes of work will be deleted. The only real exception is if you're working from a template, such as modifying an existing article on a similar subject. But this is an advanced editing technique... and really only useful occasionally. The vast majority of new articles will take the absolute minimum of 2 minutes of work to write out 1-3 sentences to give context and assert importance, cite a reference, and look up a category. The average time for a decent stub article is probably well over 2 minutes, but I suppose if you notice a redlink on a topic you're familiar with, you could whip up an article that quickly. But not much more quickly.
It's not 2004 any more. An unreferenced, uncategorized 1-sentence article that you spent 30 seconds represents a lot of work other people will have to do. And if you do newpage patrol (again with that if), it's pretty clear one of the major reasons a good-faith article gets deleted is the creator just didn't spend much time on it.
What does this all have to do with anonymous editors? Anononymous editors rarely spend a lot of time on their edits. That's not their strength. Show me a featured article or a good article with the majority of content and referencing done by an IP... you can't, because that's never happened. Show me an article that reads decently and contains few errors because IPs have gradually fixed all the problems in tiny, 30 second edits... that's easy to do. The strength of the IP editor is in the casual, minor edit.
In 2007, creating an article is not a casual, minor affair to be done on a whim during a commercial break. It takes a meaningful amount of time, effort and experience (or willingness to commit a lot of time to reading up). Look at IP edits to existing articles and observe how few of them represent 2+ minutes of work... and that's exactly what new pages created by IPs will look like. People creating articles quickly is just not good for the project. It's just hard to envision a lot of people who'd spend 10 minutes writing an article, but wouldn't spend 5 seconds making an account, even a throwaway one just so they can submit their page. Or who wouldn't go to AFC. But it's easy to envision people who'd spend 30 seconds writing an article not bothering with an account.
We really aren't going to get a lot more decent pages out of anonymous page creation... just a lot more work. By people who could be writing great articles if they had less busy work. -- W.marsh 13:37, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
This proposal is insane, we are already experiencing constant backlog at CAT:CSD, if we allow anon creation the admins will be brutally outnumbered, can we imagine how will the ammount of vanity pages skyrocket with this? I can recall recently reading an article that stated that having a Wikipedia article has become the latest "symbol of status". I am not sure when this feature was disabled but it has been at least a year and we need to remember that this is fastly becoming one of the most visited websites in the world, when someone types something on the Google or Yahoo search engines Wikipedia is ussually in the first five websites, [1] [2] I can't see any real improvement if we allow anonimous creation only a massive flood of work and more stress on the contributive users. - Caribbean~H.Q. 14:54, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
We have under a day until anonymous page creation is reenabled. I intend to be on NPP at the time it occurs so I can see how quickly things change; hopefully a number of regular NPPers will do the same so we can get some immediate info on it. For that matter, there'd better be a few people other than me there — I can't even come close to handling it myself at peak times as it stands now!
A quick side note for anyone who plans to help out on CSD during the next month: If you haven't already, install the Twinkle user script. It's extremely useful for newpage patrolling as it allows you to do things such as simultaneously tag an article for speedy deletion and warn the article's creator with a couple clicks.
I sincerely hope that things work out well, but I am not optimistic. I just hope there's a lot of admins ready to clear the CSD backlog. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 03:56, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
It seems overwhelmingly obvious that the consensus does not exist for this, yet it is being thrust upon the project regardless. Now if it's a Foundation mandate, then so be it, but let's call it what it is. And if not, why continue to push forward with this? Surely it would be easier to implement a test with random and brief periods of anon creation rather than letting them run loose openly for a prolonged period across the whole project. It seems that in every metric, the long-standing concerns regarding the encyclopedia as of late 2007 are about improving the information depth (ie quality) and scaling back the need for breadth. I'm not saying that we don't need more articles, but I'm dubious that re-enabling anon creation will make a significant difference for genuinely needed articles, while creating exponentially greater admin overhead (admin overhead we don't really have at this moment). From the looks of the conversation above, I believe that this opinion is well within the (super?)majority. Girolamo Savonarola 20:21, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
TimStarling, one of the eternal ones in charge of this wikipeida thing, has decided that "it could be turned on, if by some miracle someone files a request in bugzilla and links to a page on the wiki where consensus is demonstrated". -- uǝʌǝs ʎʇɹnoɟ ʇs(st47) 01:23, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Apparently this has all been shuffled to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation. Can someone who knows the template close this here discussion? -- W.marsh 02:10, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
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Anyone planning on building a MediaWiki extension to support OpenSocial?????????? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.249.243.163 ( talk) 22:44, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Creating the ability for a user to annotate an article, perhaps with his/her own observations on some aspect of it for his/her future reference. It would, via a cookie (I assume - I'm not technical) remain on the user's computer, so the Wiki page itself would not be affected. This may help users who are using Wikipedia for learning purposes, and he/she can have a series of notes that would either pop up or give the user the option of having them pop up whenever that page (even if, by then, revised by other uses) is summoned again. Ajarmitage 09:04, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
This proposal is for the verification of the proper use or misuse of a word in the title of a large number of articles, and for the moving/renaming of the articles if the community determines that they are misnamed.
According to the articles Demography and Demographics, the term demographics is often used erroneously in place of the word demography.
This seems to be the case with the majority of articles on the demography of regions:
Compare with:
See Demographics#Demographics vs Demography for the distinction between the two terms.
My question is: Are the above "demographics" articles named correctly?
The Transhumanist 07:33, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Can primary sources (Such as people's diarys, religous texts etc) be used as references within an article? Is this discouraged?-- Phoenix-wiki ( talk · contribs) 19:14, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
WP:PSTS + WP:SPS + WP:RS all speak on the issue. Publicola 22:11, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Firstly apologies if this has been suggested before, or there is a fix already available, couldn't find it anywhere. Would it be possible to increase the number of most recent edits on a users watchlsit to two or three (or a user defined number). Reason is that often the most recent edit isn't the one which is most significant as far as changes go. A number of times I've seen an edit which is a trivial number of characters and which may be ignored, however the second or third most recent edit may be significant and need acting on. If the user was made aware of the 'bigger' changes they may be less likely to miss these changes. The 'show/hide' minor edits option doesn't do the job for me. Yorkshiresky 20:20, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
A new higher quality image has replaced the lower quality and controversial image on Lolicon. In the last RfC, many editors expressed a desire to see a higher quality image on the article and this new image attempts to fill the role. See talk page for further discussion. -- Farix ( Talk) 00:53, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
A lot of the policies on wikipedia are great. I have read through most of them multiple times. There is one thing I don't 100% agree with. I am a little paranoid about doing this as this is the first time I offered feedback on something like policies. So ever if every disagrees, and it doesn't go through or even if it's ignored, atleast try to understand this is my first time commenting on something like this. What I disagree with is the overall Policies take on fictional work. I think that we should consider a slight alteration. I think that fictional related "text" should be allowed, when references are cited. There are some policies stating that it has to be of real life related works with citings, and if it's fictional it has to be written from a real life view (which I agree with). However I have noticed that certain articles get opted for deletion when they contain great deals of information on a fictional plot. I think we should be more linient when it comes to that. We have giant fictional lists, or great details of data about a fictional work that details out a great deal about the plot, but when this happens, it's generally tagged off (even when it has decent citings). I think that is something we should work, towards being more linient with. I am not sure if I exactly communicated what I was trying to say accurately, so if anyone has questions about my thoughts or didn't understand let me know and I will try to rephrase. businessman332211 16:57, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
I recently created {{
Wikipedia policies and guidelines}} in an effort to make it easier to navigate through our important Wikipedia policies and guidelines, while also making it easier to cite the policies (by adding their main shortcut next to the title of the policy or guideline). I was thinking of adding this template to the bottom (or the "See also" sections) of the noted policies and guidelines, but I wanted some input and consensus since we are talking about our main policy pages. Please tell me what you think, and if you see anything that you can fix or make better, be bold! Thanks.
Gonzo fan2007
talk ♦
contribs
03:46, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
We already have a project to sort current deletion debates by topic, so interested users can participate in particular areas, but what I was thinking, is that we initiate a new process of sorting Peer reviews by topic – this might even have the potential to at least lower the backlog on the peer review page, and help editors by getting the most out of a peer review, by getting a review from someone with experience writing on the subject. As the number of active peer reviews is much lower than the amount of deletion debates ongoing at any one time, the scope of a topic should be widened.
This idea may perhaps expand to not just peer reviews, but copyediting requests on League of Copyeditors pages, since I hear that there are new systems in place over there to put each request for copyediting/proofreading on a separate subpage – making transcluding a particular request easier.
Any feedback on the proposal is welcome. ~ Sebi 20:54, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
What do you all think of having a sort of "Templates for creation" page? It'd be a place where people who want to use a template that doesn't yet exist could request that someone more experienced with templates and template syntax make one. I don't think we have anything like this yet, and it could be very helpful considering how complicated and confusing making some kinds of templates can be. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 17:08, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia seems to have trouble with admins abusing privilege, acting uncivil, making questionable decisions, etc. There is also discontent over administrator actions and behavior. Both problems seem significant. Here is a survey concluded early this year. Anecdotally, the problem seems to have since grown worse (in the interest of disclosure, I have had my run-ins as well but don't want to focus on that). Some feel this impact the health and perhaps even the long-term viability of the project. It seems there are a fair number of people who should simply not be administrators, and many others who will not perform well unless there is some oversight and accountability. The two mechanisms we have do not seem to be working. Arbitration Committee cases are few and far between, sanctions are made for immediate practical behavioral problems only, and de-sysopping is seen as an extraordinary punishment that should be done only after everything else fails. WP:AN/I is an unruly, rude place with more conversations than anyone can keep up with, some involving a high degree of incivility, accusations, and edit warring, often by administrators. Informal discussion and behavioral norms would work if there were only a few bad admins, but when the behavior veers too far from expectations, those norms are off. A large proportion of administrators seem to think it's okay to make summary decisions, use threats or even actual administrative actions to enforce their content preferences, treat non-administrators in a condescending or uncivil way, and so on, knowing there is no penalty for doing so and that other administrators will back them up. Some proposals (changing the administrator approval process, or limiting the terms) have been considered and rejected.
I have no specific proposal, but can we brainstorm on how we can make administrators more accountable to the wishes of Wikipedians, and the benefit of Wikipedia? My first thought is a recall system whereby if there is a sufficient question raised as to behavior or competence, an admin would have to stand for re-appointment. The downside is that implementation might be difficult, it is similar to a vote, it may be prone to sockpuppeting, canvassing, etc., and that there would be a possible stigma to getting recalled. Any thoughts or ideas? (proposal by user:Wikidemo)
Here's another troubling case, Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#User:Privatemusings. It's pretty horrific, actually. Administrators warring, yelling and screaming, accusing each other of bad faith, and calling for each other's de-sysopping, all over one administrator blocking another. One of those duking it out, an administrator who has ostensibly "retired" for murky reasons but nevertheless blocks about five users per day and deletes more articles than that, deleted a comment I made on an unrelated AN/I matter, obviously on the other side of the issue than me, and came to my talk page to scold me for "inflaming" things. I have no idea who is right and wrong in the current spat. Maybe both sides are wrong. You bet that sends the message that non-administrators should live in fear and shouldn't cross paths with aggressive administrators. I'm glad all this is out in the open for everyone to see, but at the same time I shouldn't have to see this. Yuck. Wikidemo 21:41, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
(I'm moving the subheading down here - if you want to brainstorm about possible changes, here's the place. You can criticize me above for bringing up the question)
Some:
Could we add
<div style="float:{{#switch: | align = right | align = left | #default = right }};
to userboxes? See
this for an example. It would allow the |align=left or |align=right , which is nice because you don't need to copy the source and modify the "float:<option> directly.
Ρх₥α
02:07, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
<div style="float:{{{align|left}}}">
work to allow overriding the alignment?
Anomie
02:44, 2 November 2007 (UTC){{User:UBX/Anti-federalism|float=l1ft}}
on your user page to change the default location.
Andrwsc
01:13, 8 November 2007 (UTC)I have proposed the creation of a Q&A page for active arbitration cases here. Summary: There should be one page dedicated to questions and answers from all open Arbitration Cases so that all questions for arbitrators can be concentrated and kept on the same page in the same namespace, not spread across arbitrator talk pages as they frequently are now. See the discussion for more details regarding the rationale behind this. Input would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. Ante lan talk 16:49, 7 November 2007 (UTC)
Further discussion to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation. MER-C 03:19, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Please see this thread on Wikien-l. It would be ideal if any discussion was mostly kept to one place. Thanks for your attention. :) -- Gmaxwell 21:31, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
Creating a new article is one of the most complex things you can do on Wikipedia... especially considering we just give people a blank box with a link to tutorials hardly anyone will read. Most new articles created by new users are disasters. Check Special:Newpages if you disagree. If someone can't figure out how to create an account... how are they going to figure out how to navigate copyright, formatting, verifiability, NPOV policy, self-references and all the other things needed to create a marginally decent new article? There are a lot of common sense things that could be done to make new articles less likely to be very bad... like warning if there's no formatting, no incoming links and no category. Or even a decent UI that gives people something better than a blank box to work with. Why aren't any of these things ever considered?
We have tremendous backlogs in dealing with the basic problems article creators often forget to address - the categories for {{ unreferenced}}, {{ wikify}}, {{ uncategorized}} and so on have backlogs in the tens of thousands. Now doesn't seem to be the time to be making it even easier to create articles that require huge ammounts of work from a small pool of cleanup people. -- W.marsh 06:16, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Blurgh. I cannot see any good coming of this - CSD is already permanently backlogged, and now we're going to have thousands of articles about schookids "whu r da best" and their "smelly teachers lol" created every day. For those to even be halfway manageable, we're going to have to relax the rules on how many warnings are required before an IP is blocked, not bitch out admins who block on sight, and probably look at expanding some of the criteria for speedy deletion to avoid overrunning PROD or AFD. Expanding A7 to cover buildings, books, the albums and singles of A7-deleted bands, and so on, would be a start. Neil ☎ 10:17, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
W.marsh has hit it right on the head. As anybody who does newpage patrols knows, articles created by newbies are of, at best, a subpar quality. Given the high learning curve for editing, the many arcane and obscure policies one must obey related to content, style, interaction, etc., and the fact that NP patrollers usually jump down the throat of a crappy article, I cannot see any good coming from this. east. 718 at 10:33, 10/27/2007
Since the "decision" to permit anonymous article creation was presented as a means to acquire data on the effect of anonymous article creation, the parameters and procedures to be followed in collecting that data, and those responsible for doing so, need to be specified before any such action is actually taken. - Nunh-huh 16:35, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
As an experiment, I went to Special:Newpages and had a look at the top five pages where the creator had less then ten edits. I got:
I doubt we're going to get a good signal-to-noise ratio from anon users at that rate. Hut 8.5 19:48, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Reading through the mailing list, I haven't been able to determine who actually made the decision that anonymous article creation will be re-enabled. I assumed it was an "official" decision until I read this post by Tim Starling:
Can a developer, board member or someone else in the know elaborate on who made this decision? Thanks, Chaz Beckett 14:54, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
I posted on the list on this subject. Honestly, I think Tim's message was out of line and had he bothered to talk to the names he mentioned he wouldn't have said the same things. But you're welcome to conclude whatever you wish. :) -- Gmaxwell 17:20, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
After a one month period, on December 9th, we will re-evaluate this decision using previously established methods (average article lifespan, rate of deletion, manual quality classification, random samplings of newly created articles, and most importantly, community discussion). (per the initial announcement)
I hope that this we of whom you speak becomes somewhat organized in the near future. Then it could address such things as whether the exact methods will be established before the change takes affect on November 9th, who will do the number crunching; when ther number-crunching will take place (a snapshot on December 9th might miss a large number of page created in the prior week that don't survive the next week or two, for example), how long will the number-crunching should be expected to take (a week, a month?), and what the base comparison will be (October 2007? November 2006?).
Someone else commented (in the mailing list discussion) that I'd personally consider a substantial increase in the percentage of new pages deleted to be a reason to turn anon-page creation back off. That's a start toward discussing how we'd feel about outcomes, though it would be nice to replace "substantial" with at least some range (10 to 20%? 20 to 40%). And (as noted above) "deleted" can mean "deleted within 24 hours", "deleted within a week", or "deleted within a month". More generally, it would really be nice to have a discussion about what different outcomes would mean before the results of this change were known, even if no hard criteria were set. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 20:44, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Interesting, but of course that was from two years ago, which is like 20 in wikipedia years. I definitely see the need for getting new data. Comparing the absolute volumes of articles created and articles deleted (speedily deleted or prodded) before and after the experiment will also interesting. Anyway, I don't see how testing this for a month could ruin the encyclopedia. Worst case scenario is that we have a busy couple of weeks of CSD tagging. henrik• talk 20:27, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
In an above section, someone suggested that we should have a walkthrough process for article writing similar to image uploads. I agreed and decided to start working on such a thing. You can see a very early start at Wikipedia:Article wizard (note the format directly ripped off from the upload form).
I'll report back here as I finish more. I also need suggestions for more general topics to start with. Right now I just have biographies, companies, and "other." All except other [will] have an infobox in the preload for people to fill in and will have advice and policy stuff related to their topic ( WP:BLP for bios, WP:COI for companies, etc.). Mr. Z-man 23:57, 27 October 2007 (UTC)
Seriously, has anyone here been to Special:Newpages of late? It gets crazy on a good day in a good time-zone...imagine what it'll be like on a bad day, in the US, in the afternoon when all the bored teenagers are home? What next - let's remove the protection functionality? GO NUTS! Dihydrogen Monoxide ( H2O) 06:47, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
The only thing worse than the quality of Newpages is the over-a-year-long backlog at AfC. I think this is a fine decision and I look forward to discussing the results in December. Publicola 06:59, 28 October 2007 (UTC)
So much speculation: The fact is that the percentage of deleted articles went UP after anon page creation as well as the amount of time it took us to getting around to delete them. Was this because anon page creation was turned off or because Wikipedia became more 'mainstream'? We don't know. We can guess, thats all we can do.
But we will know after toggling the setting. We'll have solid information, and we can use that information to make an informed decision as well as help us make better decisions about related things in the future.
If the result is terrible we'll know, the community will decide to disable anonymous page creation, and life will go on. One advantage we can expect from flipping the switch is that the worst of the rubbish will be from anons, so going through special new pages will be easier. I also added an option to special:newpages to hide logged in users. -- Gmaxwell 06:09, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Looking through the mailing list post and above arguments what I can't tell is what is wrong with the current system ? As stated variously above anyone spending some time on new-pages patrol sees the signal to noise ratio and allowing anonymous creators would certainly not ameliorate this. I just can't see that Wikipedia stands anything to gain by removing the current few-day delay in creating articles. Gmaxwell is correct that turning this back on will create data. Unfortunately the data will most likely just show administrators spending more time pressing the delete button and no improvement in Wikipedia at all. Can't see that it's broken and can't see why this has to be fixed.- Peripitus (Talk) 06:47, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Would it be fair to say that part of the reason why our exponential growth has been decelerating is because we're approaching - though not there yet - a more sufficient level of breadth? When it seems like the project has finally started to concentrate the bulk of its efforts into article depth, this just doesn't seem like a good idea - it seems like a bullet in the foot. I'm not saying there's not a fair number of articles needed that have yet to exist, nor that we'll ever run out of needed articles (thanks to current events, new media releases, and technology obsolescence, if nothing else), but considering how much junk we already see at AfD, Speedy, and requested articles, maybe continuing to concentrate on breadth after nearly seven years and 2 million articles is a semi-bad thing... Girolamo Savonarola 13:34, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
I don't have a strong opinion on this. On the one hand, I expect the vast majority of anon-created pages to end up on the cutting room floor. On the other hand, it might slow down the rate of creation of single purpose accounts, which is a benefit. On the other hand, it also is a drawback in two ways. On balance, I don't think switching back is a good idea.
First, some of those SPAs provide usernames that makes it obvious they have a conflict of interest with regard to the article created, which can be a yellow flag for new page patrol. When User:YAJohnson creates an article on Yet Another Johnson or [User:Corporation XYZ]] creates an article on XYZ we can be appropriately wary. If an IP creates those articles, the same cautionary flag won't exist.
Second, requiring account creation encourages account creation. Some new accounts stick around and become valuable users. My first contribution was a new page creation, and I'd not have bothered to create the account if anons could have created pages. I've been around long enough that I'm approaching the one year anniversary of becoming an admin. So I point to essentially all of my contributions as things that might have been lost had anon page creation been allowed. GRBerry 22:18, 29 October 2007 (UTC)
Well, it's easy enough for an admin to speedy delete articles that shouldn't be on Wikipedia. Marlith T/ C 04:19, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
First of all, I don't understand how a decision as important as this gets to be decided by one person, Gregory Maxwell, rather than through an inclusive community discussion. I make a point to try to be involved in all important Wikipedia discussions and this is the first I have heard of this idea. I've read gmaxwell's explanation that there's no point having a discussion since people have already talked about it (mostly on the listserv apparently) and that no one has any salient points to debate anyway, which, I'm sorry, is just ridiculous. I believe this is a bad decision undertaken in an even worse manner. I'm sure Gregory has the best of intentions, but there's no reason to rush this. As Kat has stated, this should be decided by the enwiki as a community, not by individuals or the board. Kaldari 14:55, 30 October 2007 (UTC)
In case you don't know, I was one of the people involved in addressing the Seigenthaler controversy back in 2005. I talked to the media, swatted off the vandals, and basically adopted the article in a personal quest to redeem Wikipedia. It was not a fun time to be an administrator. I also campaigned for more stringent controls over Wikipedia contributors and content. Before Seigenthaler, Wikipedia was a total mess. It was the Wild West without enough sheriffs. Jimbo's decisions to eliminate anonymous page creation, create the BLP policy, and tighten the verifiability policy were the best things that ever happened to this project. I am quite certain that enabling anonymous page creation is a step backwards, back to the Wild West days that led to the Seigenthaler controversy and the crucifixion of Wikipedia in the media. I don't need data to tell me that, I lived through the Wild West days and the subsequent introduction of saner policies and I know that we are a tighter ship now.
I also don't understand why this "experiment" is necessary. It seems to me that the issue you are trying to address is philosophical rather than practical. If you look at the rate of article creation for the last few years, you'll see that restricting anonymous article creation had virtually no effect on the rate of articles created. If a subject is important it will get an article on Wikipedia one way or another, that much is certain. The only thing that has slowed down the rate of article creation is the recent plateauing effect that has come from Wikipedia reaching a saturation point of articles. I've worked with WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles for several years and in the past year the project has become stagnant. Know why? There aren't anymore important missing articles left to create! The only important articles left to create are articles on current events and we meet that need 110% even without anonymous page creation. Indeed, that's probably our strongest area of coverage. What is the practical need that this change will address? There is none. Maybe it will silence the blogchair pundits who complain that Wikipedia is too restricted now, but somehow I doubt it. Wikipedia is more restricted now for a reason. We're not just a place for people to post their pet trivia. We are an encyclopedia, and as the de facto authority on every person, place, and thing under the sun, we have a very serious responsibility to "get it right". This responsibility is far more important than conforming to some abstract notion of "openness" (I say this as an active contributor to several open source projects). If indeed, we are too open, as some suggest, why have all the Wikipedia imitation sites (Citizendium, Veropedia, etc) decided to become more restrictive rather than less? By opening the door to anonymous page creation, we are once again inviting a Seigenthaler controversy (or worse).
I support the idea of anonymous page creation in theory, but it has to fit with Wikipedia's other goals. To that end, I believe we should wait until "article verification" or "good article flagging" (or whatever you want to call it) is implemented before we re-enable anonymous page creation. Alternately, if we must turn it back on immediately, we should do it for one month, and then turn it back off unless there is compelling evidence that it substantially improved Wikipedia (which I'm quite certain it won't). Right now the terms of this "experiment" seem sufficiently vague to permit anonymous page creation to remain the standard no matter what the results.
Finally, if you are successful at getting anonymous page creation re-enabled, I expect to see you on the front lines of new pages patrol on a daily basis, as it will be hell there. Don't expect to be able to sit back in your chair as an impartial observer while the rest of us wade through the mountains of shit without suffering a bit of resentment. Kaldari 18:43, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm a bit confused by the above argument. "If you look at the rate of article creation for the last few years, you'll see that restricting anonymous article creation had virtually no effect on the rate of articles created." I agree that there is no visible effect. Why oppose re-enabling anonymous article creation then?
I'm very interested in why some people seem to think that there will be anything like "article verification" coming anytime soon to help this. The only thing proposed is revision flagging and it iss months out, and the standing consensus on English Wikipedia *appears* to be that it will *only* be used in places where we currently use semi-/protection, which is also the position advanced by Erik Moller.
As far as what I'm doing to help new page patrol: I implemented the MediaWiki feature request in bug 1405. This feature will allow users (all logged in users, autoconfirmed only, or sysop only.. you decided: its per-wiki configurable) to mark new articles as reviewed. Unreviewed articles show up with a yellow background in Special:Newpages. I also added a feature to hide logged in users, and I can easily add a feature to hide reviewed new articles (rather than just color them). These features should dramatically increase our patrolling resources by reducing duplication.
These features are turned on at a test wiki I just put online for you to look at. Go to Special:Newpages there and create an account. Try creating some pages. Pages by users and anons start off life unpatroled yellow, but if you click on them in special:Newpages you can patrol them (link on the lower right) if you are logged in. A record of all patrol actions is in the patrol log. Your feedback will be helpful. -- Gmaxwell 20:24, 31 October 2007 (UTC)
If this is an experiment, where is the lab notebook where the things to be measured are being discussed? ( SEWilco 16:16, 30 October 2007 (UTC))
Rather than statistical studies, perhaps the people backing this change should volunteer to do a few hours of newpage patrol per day during the trial period. I think having to actually deal with the pages, rather than run crunch some numbers after other saps have dealt with 90% of the pages, dramatically changes people's perspectives on this whole thing. -- W.marsh 19:09, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Obviously the person behind this idea has never gone on new page patrol or participated at AFC, this is just going to result in a torrent of new articles which are either a1) too low a quality to be useful, b2) blatant advertising, c3) attack pages or d4) nonsense or too low notability and for what, one extra stub per week? We need to keep in mind that while less than ¼ of anonymous edits are made in bad faith over 90% of vandalism comes from IPs, and this problem is just going to get worse if anonymous page creation is re-enabled given that most users are unable to simply revert it. Really, if a person is that interested in creating an article they can take the time to register an account, otherwise it’s probably not worth us having. And what happened to community consensus on decisions, this seems to be one man’s opinion being forced on the rest of the project, and I have a pretty good idea who are going to be the people cleaning up the mess that results. Guess I had better dust off my old account then, it’s going to be a hectic month… 124.176.84.7 09:13, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
This is a terrible idea imposed without discussion or consensus. I am frankly appalled. Tim Vickers 05:51, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
As I remember, at least one hundred people including myself agreed to stop anonymous article creation a couple years ago. It would greatly increase the load for newpage patrol and admins. Not to mention the fact that logged in editors are blocked indefinitely every day for creation of nonsense and vandalism. We usually can't block ips indefinitely leaving them nothing to loose and free to do it again, unlike a registered account.-- Sandahl 06:21, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
Wanted to throw my voice in here as well in thinking that re-enabling anon article creation is... madness. Wikipedia has grown up past a point where anon article creation helps us, and putting it back in will hurt far more than it helps. -- Ned Scott 06:10, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
...as according to one of our concurrents, lab mice are the most intelligent creatures on the planet.
The question is whether accountless page creation is good or bad has been disputed. The experiment is a good idea. That's proper scientific procedure, you don't talk the talk, you walk the walk.
Though I share the opinions that is a bad idea to re-establish this permanently, I judge the risk for that as low.It takes a while for users to notice registration is no longer required (though I don't how much waves this proposal made outside of wikipedia, not so much according to a google smell). I believe that few people here haven't noticed the donation campaign, and I think the experiment is part of it, while catching valuable data with the same stone.
I think people saying there should be some kind of strike are not helping. It will skew the data, create even more backlogs at XfDs, and generally promote discontent. So I suggest folk to do their duty toward the community, and do the honourable thing.
If, and only if, the experiment proves negative and accountless page creation is re-established anyway, will I urge the hauling of the ensign at your right hand.-- victor falk 18:11, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
Having taken a look at gmaxwell's neat tool for looking at new articles, and as someone who repeatedly runs into CSD-worthy articles than the NPP people miss when I go through Special:Uncategorizedpages or Category:Uncategorized pages, I'm not worried about the upcoming change. -- Hemlock Martinis 00:22, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure if I follow where the confidence (or unconcern) here is stemming from. The {{ uncat}}-tagged pages are, as you correctly state, only the ones NPP has missed, and by no means all of those, either. (Articles with a stub tag or in a cleanup category aren't generally included, and nor, obviously, are "correctly" (or at least, tokenly) categorised deletion-bait. (Granted some are also old articles that have had their categories vandalised, deleted, mislaid through markup error, or removed through some other sequence of events.)) And backlog's north of seven thousand pages (or somewhat over a month's worth). Nor would I assume that the good people over at WP:UNCAT are all immune to getting fed up of the endless struggle, any more than NPPers would be.
For me that motivates the opposite question: why aren't we doing something more meaningful to deter hoaxes, advertising, vanity, crankery, and axe-grinding than imposing a four-day waiting period to spam us with it? For myself, I'd be strongly in favour of some sort of lightweight non-auto confirmation process. Alai 23:54, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Could we at least require IP editors to provide one reference for new articles? This is how AFC works, and in the age of WP:BLP it seems perfectly reasonable to ask new editors for a reference when creating articles. A separate field below the article field could ask for it, and add the contents in a ==References== section (if a references section was provided in the text anyway, the need for entering them into the new field would be negated). Some short but sweet wording could say something along the lines of "Independent newspaper and magazine articles are better than official websites; books and scholarly journals are even better". Sure some new articles would give phony references, or the creators would just enter junk information in the field... but that would make it easier to spot the hoaxes, not harder.
I still think allowing IP article creation now is a bad idea, but requiring a reference would probably be the easiest way to keep the situation manageable. -- W.marsh 18:29, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
Allowing IP's to create new articles is one of the craziest things we on Wikipedia can do. Because of attack pages. Now, if this goes ahead, if someone leaves a warning on a IP's talkpage, they could go straight ahead and create an attack page. Nothing would stop them. This could seriously hurt a lot of people, and a lot of respected admins around here that have to put up with a lot of abuse every single day, yet stay on Wikipedia. Editors like myself, could easily have an attack page created on them. This is seriously something that I am heavily against. This could potentionally drive a lot of people (including myself) out of Wikipedia. Davnel03 19:28, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
Hopefully we can all agree that almost any page created in under 2 minutes of work will be deleted. The only real exception is if you're working from a template, such as modifying an existing article on a similar subject. But this is an advanced editing technique... and really only useful occasionally. The vast majority of new articles will take the absolute minimum of 2 minutes of work to write out 1-3 sentences to give context and assert importance, cite a reference, and look up a category. The average time for a decent stub article is probably well over 2 minutes, but I suppose if you notice a redlink on a topic you're familiar with, you could whip up an article that quickly. But not much more quickly.
It's not 2004 any more. An unreferenced, uncategorized 1-sentence article that you spent 30 seconds represents a lot of work other people will have to do. And if you do newpage patrol (again with that if), it's pretty clear one of the major reasons a good-faith article gets deleted is the creator just didn't spend much time on it.
What does this all have to do with anonymous editors? Anononymous editors rarely spend a lot of time on their edits. That's not their strength. Show me a featured article or a good article with the majority of content and referencing done by an IP... you can't, because that's never happened. Show me an article that reads decently and contains few errors because IPs have gradually fixed all the problems in tiny, 30 second edits... that's easy to do. The strength of the IP editor is in the casual, minor edit.
In 2007, creating an article is not a casual, minor affair to be done on a whim during a commercial break. It takes a meaningful amount of time, effort and experience (or willingness to commit a lot of time to reading up). Look at IP edits to existing articles and observe how few of them represent 2+ minutes of work... and that's exactly what new pages created by IPs will look like. People creating articles quickly is just not good for the project. It's just hard to envision a lot of people who'd spend 10 minutes writing an article, but wouldn't spend 5 seconds making an account, even a throwaway one just so they can submit their page. Or who wouldn't go to AFC. But it's easy to envision people who'd spend 30 seconds writing an article not bothering with an account.
We really aren't going to get a lot more decent pages out of anonymous page creation... just a lot more work. By people who could be writing great articles if they had less busy work. -- W.marsh 13:37, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
This proposal is insane, we are already experiencing constant backlog at CAT:CSD, if we allow anon creation the admins will be brutally outnumbered, can we imagine how will the ammount of vanity pages skyrocket with this? I can recall recently reading an article that stated that having a Wikipedia article has become the latest "symbol of status". I am not sure when this feature was disabled but it has been at least a year and we need to remember that this is fastly becoming one of the most visited websites in the world, when someone types something on the Google or Yahoo search engines Wikipedia is ussually in the first five websites, [1] [2] I can't see any real improvement if we allow anonimous creation only a massive flood of work and more stress on the contributive users. - Caribbean~H.Q. 14:54, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
We have under a day until anonymous page creation is reenabled. I intend to be on NPP at the time it occurs so I can see how quickly things change; hopefully a number of regular NPPers will do the same so we can get some immediate info on it. For that matter, there'd better be a few people other than me there — I can't even come close to handling it myself at peak times as it stands now!
A quick side note for anyone who plans to help out on CSD during the next month: If you haven't already, install the Twinkle user script. It's extremely useful for newpage patrolling as it allows you to do things such as simultaneously tag an article for speedy deletion and warn the article's creator with a couple clicks.
I sincerely hope that things work out well, but I am not optimistic. I just hope there's a lot of admins ready to clear the CSD backlog. Pyrospirit ( talk · contribs) 03:56, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
It seems overwhelmingly obvious that the consensus does not exist for this, yet it is being thrust upon the project regardless. Now if it's a Foundation mandate, then so be it, but let's call it what it is. And if not, why continue to push forward with this? Surely it would be easier to implement a test with random and brief periods of anon creation rather than letting them run loose openly for a prolonged period across the whole project. It seems that in every metric, the long-standing concerns regarding the encyclopedia as of late 2007 are about improving the information depth (ie quality) and scaling back the need for breadth. I'm not saying that we don't need more articles, but I'm dubious that re-enabling anon creation will make a significant difference for genuinely needed articles, while creating exponentially greater admin overhead (admin overhead we don't really have at this moment). From the looks of the conversation above, I believe that this opinion is well within the (super?)majority. Girolamo Savonarola 20:21, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
TimStarling, one of the eternal ones in charge of this wikipeida thing, has decided that "it could be turned on, if by some miracle someone files a request in bugzilla and links to a page on the wiki where consensus is demonstrated". -- uǝʌǝs ʎʇɹnoɟ ʇs(st47) 01:23, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Apparently this has all been shuffled to Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation. Can someone who knows the template close this here discussion? -- W.marsh 02:10, 9 November 2007 (UTC)