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There's currently a plan to create categories for death ages where known, such as this one. I don't have a firm opinion on the matter, but I thought it might be a good idea to discuss it before it gets applied to thousands of biographies. Biruitorul Talk 00:54, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
I just noticed something on the New York Times website. In any article, double-clicking on a word performs a reference search, and automatically provides a definition of the word in a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia (all apparently powered by Answers.com).
I think this would significantly enhance the scope and impact of Wikipedia.
In June 2008 the Arbitration Committee announced a request that the English Wikipedia consider allowing some non-administrators the ability to view deleted material. The summary of the announcement was
Note that this is a request that the idea be considered, nothing stronger. The announcement led to this proposal. As this conversation has gone on for several months, the proposal has shifted around quite a bit. This makes it very unclear where editors are currently giving their support or opposition. For the sake of clarity, I am attempting to pick out the main proposals, and create a straw poll around them. Please share your opinion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 09:05, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
I would like to put a notification about the "view-deleted" straw poll in the watchlist. My reasoning is that this is a big decision that will affect all users, possibly the way that Wikipedia works, but not everyone reads the noticeboards where I posted messages. Also these noticeboards move rather quickly (especially WP:AN), so this will make sure that more people have a chance to see it. This is the line I would like added -
Thoughts? ~ JohnnyMrNinja 16:26, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
please see Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#A_Couple_of_Suggestions... for more info.
Thanks,
B G 7even 08:31, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
So, see the discussion there. - jc37 02:47, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Why do we have duplicate pages here? GO-PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 01:51, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
I've always loved the idea of the random article button, but it never takes me anywhere interesting. So, I thought it would be awesome if readers would be able to get to a random article within a specific category with similar ease and convenience to just clicking the random article link. If that were to be implemented it would definitely be a feature I would use quite a bit. I'm surprised that no one seems to have proposed it before (or have they?). Abyssal ( talk) 17:02, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
As some might now (though I suspect most don't), user talk pages are no longer indexed thanks to bugzilla:13890. This was cited as the conesnous for that change: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 25#Stopping search engines from indexing the user talk namespace?
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say what the frak?
We've already got the __NOINDEX__ magic words that let us exclude pages if there's an issue. There's no need for this change and there's a lot of reasons to oppose. -- Ned Scott 02:58, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Regardless of who supports what, is anyone else bothered by the fact that this change was first made without any real discussion? I know we don't want to give the devs grief over stuff like this, which is most likely a misunderstanding (AGF), but we really need a better way of dealing with these kinds of changes. -- Ned Scott 03:56, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm closing this now as it seems to be snowballing. It seems like the widely held consensus is that User talk: pages should remain noindexed as was set by the developers. While there may or may not have been consensus for this at the time, it's clear from this discussion that the majority of interested users are uncomfortable with the indexing of these pages for a wide range of reasons, including but not limited to: confusion between people; confusion between encyclopedic content and userspace content; privacy and "outing" concerns from attack sites; lack of need due to built-in search functions; etc. While it is true the outing concerns do not happen often, they do occur often enough that we regularly see otherwise good editors leave the project due to what essentially boils down to blackmail in the loosest of terms (I do not intend to make any sort of legal accusation/threat/statement with that comment, that is simply my personal observation on previous matters). Removing these pages from Google will not stop that (and I notice nobody said that here), but it will certainly slow it down, as well as address many of the other concerns raised about indexing.
If a user wishes to have their usertalk page indexed by search engines, they are entitled to do so by adding the template {{ INDEX}} to their user talk page. This will override $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies and grant access by search bots to your talk page. Some time should be allowed after the addition for the googlebots to get around to finding it again, but ideally the page should be searchable by external engines within a week or so. Naturally, users should not add this template to any page but their own; this is a personal choice, and users have the right to decline search indexing if they wish. Since the great majority of those here are declining it, the default will remain as-is; noindex. Hersfold ( t/ a/ c) 21:17, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Currently, when a new or experienced user hits "edit this page" on a page like Microsoft, this is what they see. It's a mess. It's confusing. And it's horribly incomprehensible for a lot of users.
I'm proposing that we move infoboxes to subpages of their respective templates and incorporate "view - talk - edit" links into the boxes themselves at the bottom. So, for example, Microsoft's infobox would be located at Template:Infobox Company/Microsoft and Template:Infobox Company would be modified to have "view - talk - edit" links at the bottom of it.
Over a year ago, I converted some of the chemical element infoboxes to a subpage-type format and editing of the articles is now much more user-friendly. Compare: previously to now.
Thoughts, suggestions, comments, concerns? -- MZMcBride ( talk) 04:09, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
This would make it more complicated for the people that know what they're doing, and not only in obvious ways. Someone fixing links to disambiguation pages might have to click through to the infobox. Someone updating a headquarters city will need to make two edits, one to the article and another to the infobox template. If the infobox name is based on the article name, it will have to be moved if the article is moved. -- NE2 18:34, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Why don't we just put overly complex infoboxes in subpages ( Microsoft/Infobox in this case)? By definition, an infobox about a single company isn't a template anymore; it's encyclopedic content. If someone happens across one with Special:Random, big deal; we can just put a noinclude tag around the explanation that it is used on Microsoft. If someone is confused by that, I'd be surprised if they have the mental capacity for editing anyway. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:10, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
---
Great suggestion! Anything that reduces line noise and preserves the wikitext spirit of being quick and easy to edit gets my vote.
It does work (see here and here). OK, it's not technically a subpage i.e. there's no backlink to Microsoft, but it's otherwise the same. The only caveat is that the infobox must be transcluded as {{:Microsoft/Infobox}} rather than {{Microsoft/Infobox}}.
chocolateboy ( talk) 10:44, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
All good points. Still, I'd suggest keeping it that way for a while. More people are likely to spot the change in the Microsoft article than are monitoring this discussion, and they can weigh in here. It's easy enough to CSD the subpage if that's the consensus.
Yeah. I've tried to do that ( here for instance). It works well for uncluttered templates like that, but the Microsoft infobox is full of references and nested templates, which end up line-wrapping, so the unreadability is hard to avoid.
chocolateboy ( talk) 13:31, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I would like to suggest, a form of invisible universal category that all articles would belong to. It would be called the Index. it would be viewable to all people, just like an index an the back of a paper encyclopedia. It would look like category pages currently do. Until developers can get in on this, bots would attach all articles they find to an "index" category. The index would have an abridged versiom of articles with only at least a certain number of monthly visitations, an an unabridged version with all articles. You may comment, discuss, or vote under the following categories. -- Ipatrol ( talk) 00:57, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
There is a problem with material cited with an online reference, when that reference disappears, especially when someone then deletes the content on the basis it can't be verified. There are two situations: a) sometimes it is known, or can be suspected, that a ref will disappear because of the nature of the site (its practice is not to archive its own pages)—there is then the opportunity for pre-emptive action; b) it is unexpected—in this case it may still be available on google, but possibly only for a short time.
Some solutions to this might be:
1. An archive noticeboard, where editors ask for endorsement that the material they have used is accurately based on the ref. This would be viable for simple uses of the ref, such as straightforward factual material.
2. An archive noticeboard where relevant extracts from the ref are posted and endorsed. This would be useful when not a large portion of the ref is being used.
3. A Wiki cache, similar to google, where editors can cache a page directly. This would be particularly useful if it could also cache a google cache.
The best solution is 3, as it does not require any other editor participation or endorsement. 1 and 2 don't need any developer work, and could be instituted immediately. There could be a combination of these.
Ty 09:00, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
I agree with the motivation, particularly re. pages describing modern technology, since they are likely to become obsolete and be taken down or changed. (How many web-based references will you find for the ISA bus these days? What about MCA?) However, is there a reason that the archives at archive.org aren't suitable or sufficient? Perhaps WF could work together with archive.org to ensure that the pages referenced here, even the specific versions referenced here, are archived. Could WP's software automatically add links to the archive.org copies of linked pages? Jeh ( talk) 17:09, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
FYI, a cache system was put in place on the French Wikipedia several weeks ago. It is provided by Linterweb, the company that operates the
Wikiwix search engine.
Briefly, external links added to articles are automatically cached; a link to the cached version is displayed near the corresponding external link (see
Image:Capture-cache-wikiwix.JPG). Currently, only registered users can see these links by editing their monobook.js, but there's a
vote to decide whether they should be displayed by default for all users.
For more information, see
fr:Utilisateur:Pmartin/Cache (
translation) and
fr:Discussion Wikipédia:Prise de décision/Système de cache#Le projet cache (
translation).
Korg (
talk) 19:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Category:Uncategorized pages is growing every day, and even with such excellent tools such as HotCat, it can be difficult to manage. I think categories are important on wikipedia for organisation and mantainance as well as article-hopping for the average reader. Is there perhaps any support for a system where a warning/marker pops up on any article being created without categories that, while not interfering with the editing windows, reminds the editor that they have not added any categories yet? It might just help cut down on the number of category-less articles out there. SGGH speak! 13:19, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
The solution is to make adding a category easier. Look at what Commons does with its images.. — Werdna • talk 00:43, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, this random thought popped into my head the other day and I thought I'd entertain it. First question: is there any technical way to implement a wiki-wide freeze on article creation? If so, I just think it would be interesting and helpful if Wikipedia had "improvement weeks", where an article creation freeze was put into effect and instead directed people to improve bad articles or send them to AfD. After all, we're shooting for quality, right? Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ( talk) 13:14, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Being able to enter new pieces of information or corrections into the respective articles' editors and submit them to an area within wikipedia where wiki editors wikify what has been sent (instead of altering the article instantly) might attract those people to the wiki idea who are willing to share their knowledge, but do not want to deal with wikipedia's formal prerequisites.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 22:42, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Just throwing this out there; I'd love to see it implemented as other projects already have but it would need wide community acceptance. Please see the bottom of any Wikinews article or the sidebar of Wiktionary. These projects have implemented a feature where anonymous readers can submit feedback about articles so the project knows how it can improve. I know that it will be a good way to better learn the public's perception of Wikipedia. Many people will read something wrong, a vandalized article, or something that needs improvement, but they don't know how to fix it or that they can even edit it. They then just write Wikipedia off as worthless. A public feedback system will let us know exactly what articles need to be improved the most as well as in what way. Very few of our millions of readers ever make an edit, so we really don't know exactly what they want. This is obviously a major change that wld require wide community acceptance, but I urge you to consider this beneficial plan and perhaps implement a short testing period before making anything official. Thanks, Reywas92 Talk 02:45, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Not everybody's bold. We should be pragmatic and give people the lowest barrier for entry required. I think being able to say "this article needs some love" without getting wrapped up in dealing with it encourages participation (what Wikipedia is about) rather than discouraging it. And it should absolutely be available for everyone, blocked, logged-in or administrator. — Werdna • talk 00:33, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
I've been having a bunch of issues trying to figure out what all the symbols mean, though I'm starting to figure out what some of them are, like the bronze star. But there are just so many symbols (or at least to me) that I don't really get them all (e.g. one day I was looking at a page and next to German/Deutsch, I think, there was a gold star, and so I didn't know what it was and it annoyed me, tough I eventually figured out it was the equivalent to the bronze star). I think that would be very helpful. Like what does the green circle with a plus sign in it mean? That would also be helpful to new users. Thanks! Helixer ( talk) 22:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Ever feel frustrated by the thought that it's really hard to get Did you know credit for expanding anything bigger than a substub, and it's a big gap from there to good article? Okay, let's fill that gap. Proposing the Killer B's to thank people for raising the dreadful up to pretty good.
Killer B recognition goes to improvement drives for existing articles that start out at C-class or below, with a few requirements:
There wouldn't be any special designation for Killer B at the article, but we could keep a 'Beehive' to thank editors for their contributions and offer cute doodads for userspace. The basic setup would operate similar to GAC: anyone can review and the process works on an honor system. Durova Charge! 20:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Support I agree, but I'd be more inclined to simpily have an award, like a barnstar, awarded by common editors for such a thing -- Ipatrol ( talk) 00:40, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I see, but what I was trying to say is that I don't agree with the "beehive" part of your proposal. Also you might run into issues with WP:OWN, in otherwords, who of the editors on such a page would get that award? -- Ipatrol ( talk) 01:00, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I like the general idea, but I really dislike the actual characterisation of it - I mean come on, a bee called 'killer'? We're not in primary (elementary) school... get rid of the whole 'bee' thing, make it more like the existing barnstar system (i.e. a bit more mature, without a character), and I'll be more happy to fully support. Talk Islander 14:01, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
How about this:
The B class award
I award this Barnstar to Village pump (proposals)/Archive 36 for their achivement In getting Wikipedia:Main Page to B class status. |
-- Ipatrol ( talk) 17:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi all - when you go to delete a page via http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=(pagename)&action=delete you are presented with a handy-dandy list of reasons for deletion that you can pick and choose from. At present, that list is simply all the Speedy Deletion criteria, plus the catch-all "other reason". I'd like to see a further reason added to that list - "Per consensus at deletion process page". Consensus at AFD, CFD, and the like is surely one of the most common reasons for deleting a page, and would be a useful extra item to have on that list. Grutness... wha? 23:53, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
The reason it's not there may be because such deletions should always include a link to the deletion discussion. That would not be possible if it was a dropdown option. If something is deleted at xfd, you should put something like "per [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Main Page]]" as the deletion reason. --- RockMFR 17:40, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
I've been bold and added it. Feel free to remove it if it causes problems. — Werdna • talk 00:31, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't know how big a problem it is in the main wikipedia, but users quite often forget to sign their comments on talk pages of the smaller wiki I use to contribute to. How about automated signing of comments so that it cannot be forgotten or refused (if technically possible, of course)?
Alternatively, I suggest creating a box in the "Editing" column on the "My preferences" special page so that, if the box is checked, users would be reminded to sign their comments if they haven't done that yet when trying to save the talk page they have been working on. The "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" function works similarly.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 03:07, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
Will be sorted by LiquidThreads, and David McCabe has been hired to finish it for Wikimedia. — Werdna • talk 12:53, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
We use a variety of shortcuts to important pages on-wiki, to save ourselves typing a few characters; these invariably involve shortening the namespace prefix to an acronym. We call common namespace abbreviations 'pseudospaces' because they refer to namespaces that don't actually exist: the pages are created in the mainspace and their corresponding talk pages are "Talk:ABBR:Foo" rather than "ABBR Talk:Foo". A while ago the developers, having written the necessary underlying code, made the "WP:" prefix an actual alias of the "Wikipedia:" namespace, and similarly for "WT:" and "Wikipedia talk:". So typing "WT:FOO", you would immediately be directed to "Wikipedia:Foo", and it was impossible to create a mainspace page at "WT:FOO" in the same way that it is not (AFAIK) possible to create a mainspace page at "Help:Foo". A maintenance script was used to move all the shortcut pages starting with "WP:" and "WT:" to new locations in the Wikipedia: and Wikipedia talk: namespaces. The update was fairly painful because there were a lot of name conflicts between pages named "WP:Foo" and "Wikipedia:Foo", and a number of templates beginning with "Template:WP:...". I have been investigating the corresponding situation with other popular shortcuts such as "T:", "P:" and "CAT:", with mixed results.
From Special:Prefixindex/T: we can see the 30 or so extant "T:..." shortcuts: I have confirmed that there are relatively few potential name conflicts, and no template conflicts. In every case where there is a name conflict, the two pages are either the template target and its shortcut redirect, or two redirects to another template; the conflicts could be trivially resolved by deleting the redirect or by merging the histories of the two redirects, respectively. It would therefore be possible to implement "T:" as a namespace alias for "Template:" relatively painlessly. This would of course prevent these shortcuts from multiplying while at the same time allowing every short template name to be used as a potential shortcut. There is a small issue with the "T:..." alias: the valid article t:kort. I'm not sure what could be done with this, perhaps there is some unicode replacement for the colon (or the t for that matter!) that we could use for the main article? A redirect from Template:Kort (which would be the result of typing "t:kort" into the search bar) would have to be condoned but that's no big deal - we already have such redirects from Help: A Day in the Life to Help!: A Day in the Life, for instance). It would be nice to be able to define "TT:..." as an alias for the Template talk: namespace, but this is unfortunately the interwiki prefix for the tatar wikipedia!
The situation with the "P:..." alias is similar. There are some three hundred "P:..." pages, the majority of which have no equivalent page "Portal:...". The very few that do (see list) are without exception redirects or targets, as with the T: alias. Once again there is a minor problem in the article P:ano. There are no pages of the form "PT:...", but this is the interwiki prefix for the Portugese wikipedia so it is not possible for us to use it as an alias.
The situation with the "CAT:..." shortcut is more difficult: there are a large number of them, this time redirects without exception, but I don't think that defining "CAT:..." as a namespace alias for "Category:..." would be very helpful, as it would mean that the normal rules of category links would apply: writing [[CAT:CSD]], for instance, would result in the page being added to CAT:CSD rather than being linked to it. If there is an option to specify that "CAT:" is equivalent to ":Category:" then this would be useful, otherwise these redirects will probably have to remain. There are no pages with the prefix "CATT:" so this could be easily enabled as an alias for the "Category talk:" namespace.
There are only a handful of pages with the "H:" prefix, all redirects to Help: space; none of their alias pages exist. However there are a number of templates prefixed with "H:", associated with the bot-imported help pages from metawiki. This help system itself appears to be in disuse and needs to be rethought, so this may not be an insurmountable obstacle. "HT:" is the interwiki prefix for the Creole wikipedia.
There are no valid shortcuts with the prefix "I:" to images, and three valid articles; such an alias would also suffer from the same problems as the "CAT:" alias above. "IT:" is the interwiki prefix for the italian wikipedia. There are no shortcuts or articles at "U:", just a handful of implausible redirects, or "UT:" - "UT" is also not an interwiki prefix so could be used as an alias for the "User talk:" namespace.
In summary, the following namespace aliases could be easily created with minimal effort, with the associated benefits.
In addition, the following aliases could be created if a few issues were resolved:
I guess this is more of a status update and food-for-thought exercise than a concrete proposal at this time, but there is clearly some mileage in this and the potential to remove a lot of 'backstage' housekeeping links from the 'reader-facing' mainspace. It would also probably be a good idea to discover or plead for a solution to the problem of needing to create an article that begins with a valid wiki (or interwiki) prefix; we already have a few of these, and sooner or later someone is going to write a book entitled "Wikipedia:The free encyclopedia" or "Portal:A great SciFi novel"; our handling of these is currently quite inconsistent, a coherent approach (preferably by escaping the colon in some fashion) would be desirable. Comments? Happy‑ melon 17:33, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
I support the proposal, or at least the general idea behind it. If it saves typing and isn't a big deal to implement, then there's benefits, but no drawbacks, which means there is no good reason not to implement it. Criticisms so far aimed at the idea sound suspiciously like arguing "I'm not interested in it" to have a page deleted. Abyssal ( talk) 11:08, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Dear friends,
I have begun to read "Today's Featured Article" of the Wikipedia everyday. I appreciate this effort and consider this as a very good venue for self-education. In fact I have made it my default page so that I can read it everyday.
However, I noted that the topics, at least in the past one week, concerned things that were too minor or trivial for a global audience. Today's article for example is about Trafford, a small town in England. There are countless small towns all over the world and one doesn't gain much knowledge by knowing the hundreds of thousand small towns in the world. Yesterday it was the Grass Fight during the Texas Revolution. It would have been better if the feature is on the Texas Revolution rather than the Grass Fight because majority of people didn't even know that there was a Texas Revolution.
May I make a suggestion?
Can we make the daily Featured Article a kind of long-term educational program that will widen and deepen the liberal education of Wiki readers? In making this, we can make it cover a broad range of significant human knowledge that will matter in the lifetime of a person -- covering history, science, arts, religion, philosophy, humanities, geography, etc. It can include topics that are seldom heard-of, but still of significance when learned. Here are examples:
Quarks / Strings Michelson Morley Experiment Asoka Lemmings Angkor Wat Gordian Knot Western Schism Anti-Popes The Fourth Crusade Samadhi Hundred Years' War Genome Project A priori and a posteriori Impressionism Knight Templars Ataturk Cargo cult Marianas Trench Timaeus (dialogue) etc.
Being an educator myself, I am willing to be of help in suggesting articles for the Featured Article section.
May I take this opportunity to thank all those nameless volunteers who make this truly revolutionary encyclopedia possible.
With warm regards, Vicente Hao Chin, Jr. Author, The Process of Self-Transformation
Thank you for the comments. I did not realize that there was the Wikiversity. I have looked at it, and will make use of it a lot for our school. However, for the Featured Article for the Day, I still think that it would be better that the information will have a learning value. After all that is the purpose of an encyclopedia. I will try to make proposals to the Featured Article and hope that I can be of help. Thanks again!
I think there should be more simple wikis like the simple English one. How about a simple Spanish one?-- Megaman en m ( talk) 20:19, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
I've started a discussion to finally get rid of the shambling monstrosity that is this category and all its children.
My opinion is clear on the matter (get rid of the entire nest of prejudicial editwar bait), but this is a bold and big move and needs wide participation. Participate. — Coren (talk) 20:13, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
Would people here be interested in this discussion? Carcharoth ( talk) 15:04, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
People put 'under construction' on a page to say that they are actively working on articles. But then the templates seem to hang around on the article for hours, days, and weeks. It is sometimes difficult to get them removed because people say 'I haven't finished yet, I just have to get round to it'. Sometimes people even revert removal of the template.
A reasonable proposal (I think) is to merge the templates into one. The one template would have a fixed expiry time visible in read mode. If it expires, the editor would be able to refresh it but would have to take positive action to refresh it. The current fire-and-forget design would be gone. The expiry time would be consistent with real tappity-tap editing where fingers are pounding the keyboard e.g. 15 minutes to an hour.
For more details, debate, and voting, see: Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 October 13. Regards Lightmouse ( talk) 16:21, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
Actually, I am talking about them all but perhaps my comments highlight specific problems. So far we have had a novel suggestion that the sell-by date is actually *increased* from a few days to 6 months and that the current process of purging stale tags by bot is stopped and tags only be removed after individual negotiation over each tag with the person that put it there. I have the feeling that we are going backwards by making it harder to clear up after fire-and-forget editors. Sigh. Lightmouse ( talk) 18:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
I have proposed moving List of YouTube celebrities and all its related "celebrities" to YouTube phenomena (or something similar). There are more details about the proposal here. I just want more people to see this as there doesn't seem to be much activity on the talk page. But my main is that there seems to be a lot of articles about people who had some sort of success and minor media attention on YouTube and have gone no further after, a flash in the pan. See Emmalina (currently at 4th AfD) for an example of this. -- TwentiethApril1986 (want to talk?) 19:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
On a related issue, there is a discussion and straw poll at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates on whether there should be a minimum length in words for FAs of say 1,000 or 1,500 woords, and other issues. At the moment there seems no majority on this, so we are likely to continue to get increasingly short FAs - the shortest candidate I have seen was 329 words - many on small tropical storms (one reached 40mph for 1 minute) and American state roads (one a 1/4 mile long, outside a military base). The questions start here. Johnbod ( talk) 11:16, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
I think this discussion belongs at the village pump, NOT Jimbo's userpage. -- Ipatrol ( talk) 14:37, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
I propose to change the "wikt:" namespace, which forwards articles from Wikipedia, to Wiktionary to "d:" namespace. The letter "d" stands for dictionary, define, and definitions. An alternative coming to mind is "t:", standing for the first letter of what seems to be the second syllable of "Wiktionary". Instead of renaming the namespace, "d:" could also be only added while keeping "wikt:" intact, which would probably be better for compatibility reasons.
Unlike Wiktionary, most other Wikimedia projects have a single letter forwarding namespace, including "W:", "B:", and "S:".
One benefit is a quicker linking to Wiktionary from another project. Another one is typing "d:word" into the Wikipedia searchbox of Firefox, and getting to Wiktionary.
Thanks for reading. -- Dan Polansky ( talk) 13:40, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
Please see comment I made here about obtaining and recording gender (male/female) metadata. Opinions would be welcomed. Thanks. Carcharoth ( talk) 02:05, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Metadata should be encouraged! I don't understand what you're on about in terms of identity theft. — Werdna • talk 12:54, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
There doesn't seem to be a
WP:WARN for adding to an article in a language other than english. The closest one is uw-english, but it's intended for non-english communication on talk pages, rather than non-english additions to articles. Additionally, uw-english is only available in english, which is unlikely to be helpful in a situation where communication is being attempted in a person that may have only a basic grasp of the english language.
I propose:
I eagerly await the community's input. Horselover Frost ( talk) 08:54, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Just as we have an {{ editprotected}} template, how about {{ editintricate}} for the talk pages of template pages with {{ Intricate template}} in them? This would be used for templates which are not necessarily protected, but are just incomprehensible to all but the most technically savvy. A corresponding group or watchlist could be set up for people to watch for {{ editintricate}} requests.
Thoughts? It Is Me Here ( talk) 20:59, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi
I have proposed some recommendations as to requirements to be a contactor on the talk page of Abuse Reports, being active there myself. Due to the nature of the work we do there and the fact that vandals (long-term or otherwise) quite often show up on their own abuse reports, I’m concerned that there is a fundamental flaw, it is currently too easy for vandals and other [ab]users to undermine the success of that forum's goal as well as people who are in-experienced. The most common way would be "Lets not and say we did" For this reason I would like to discuss and propose some guidelines for contactors only (for now).
Anyone who has worked at Abuse Reports or has an interest in it (or anyone else) is invited to discuss my proposal and / or make proposals of their own. Thanks «l| Ψrometheăn ™|l» (talk) 04:25, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Sorry if this is an old horse I haven't really been involved in the numerous previous discussion about this area. I'll start with an example:
Having to go through each and everyone of those articles seems like an unnecessary use of time and people wanting to use this area of the encyclopaedia might be better served if articles of this type were arranged into a list (i.e. List of unincorporated communities of Albermarle County, Virginia). The list could incorporate the names and geographic coordinates of all the communities (such as in List of United Kingdom locations: Aa-Ak) and when reliably sourced information about the different places becomes available a separate article could be written (the entry in the list could then be blue-linked and added to the appropriate navigational template). This could save anyone researching the topic from having to trudge through links that don't provide any additional information. I've used a very recently created group of articles as an example so I apologise if it not the most typical, however after randomly clicking through Category:Unincorporated communities in Virginia it does appear that there are similar short stubs elsewhere and that "listification" - at least in the short term whilst articles are being developed - might be beneficial. Again I apologise if I've misinterpreted the situation from an atypical group or am just rehashing old discussion Guest9999 ( talk) 21:34, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
Guest9999, I find the 100+ one-line stubs linked to on Template:Albemarle County, Virginia absolutely sickening. I'm sorry, but they are. They contain zero useful information and they would be much better suited as a list as you recommended as you suggested with these names redirecting there. There are no coordinates, population, or any other useful information on any of these articles. While yes, they exist, they are no more than very small unincorporated communities for which there is little to no information provided by USGS or the Census. Theoretically they could be expanded, but a much better alternative at this point would be a list. I have no problem with articles on unincorporated communites, but I do have a probem with one-liners. Give me the word, Guest9999, and I'd love to whip out AWB and merge these into a single list. Reywas92 Talk 20:47, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
Have you ever been reading a diff on a talk page and said, "Hmm...I think I'll look at this in context," only to search up and down the page for the actual post because all it tells you is that the post is in line 1,037? I propose a link on (or by) each green box in a page diff that will take you down to where the addition is in the body of the page. Thoughts? SunDragon34 ( talk) 06:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
on the main page of www.wikipedia.com, when we type in a keyword to search, we need to type in the language too... can't we just search without specifying a language?
for example, if we search for 李克勤 on google, we don't really need to specify the language, because it is taken as UTF-8 and there is a perfect 1 to 1 match of those characters in UTF-8. There is no ambiguity...
is it because the content portion of wikipedia is so big that we want to limit the range of search? won't building a good index solve that problem? or otherwise, can we just search for all the "titles" of the whole wiki database if the user choose not to specify a language in the main box, and then down below, there is a more extensive search box where users can enter the keyword and then specify the lanugage as well? thanks.
Automatic language selection on the home page based on computer's local settings is very annoying. My computer has foreign settings, but in 99.9% of my searches I need to browse the articles in English. It is annoying to have to select English every time I open wikipedia.org. I don't want to be switched automatically into the other language.
When I read an article, I tend to mentally emphasise linked words inside my own head. I'm sure if I read it out aloud I'd sound like a complete retard :P Is there some script that will display blue and red links in black text? It should preferably have a button somewhere on the page to quickly toggle between black and red/blue. This would allow one to read articles more naturally, as nature intended :)
When I read an article, I tend to mentally emphasise linked words inside my own head. I'm sure if I read it out aloud I'd sound like a complete retard :P Is there some script that will display blue and red links in black text? It should preferably have a button somewhere on the page to quickly toggle between black and red/blue. This would allow one to read articles more naturally, as nature intended :) Zunaid 10:19, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
While I'm on the point, can we have a similar button to toggle the display of the reference superscripts on/off? Zunaid 10:19, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
.reference {display: none;}
div #bodyContent a {color:black;}
Script request cross-posted to Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Requests#Option to hide wiki-links in articles / option to hide references' superscripts. Thanks Happy Melon, however I'd really like a button to quickly toggle between the two. This would allow one to read an article normally, but still be able to quickly check out where the linked articles are.
p.s. does anyone else experience this phenomenon or is it just me? Zunaid 13:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Is it just me or did someone change the navigation bar significantly:
I don't remember seeing anything about this anywhere - Community bulletin board, Signpost, Village Pump. Anyone know what's going on? Kaldari ( talk) 19:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
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There are quite a few changes. I don't remember seeing any discussion, though. -- Imperator3733 ( talk) 20:21, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Discussion appears to have petered out on the latest proposed process for removal of adminship. A straw poll has been started to assess community opinion on whether or not to proceed.
Your participation is welcomed. TenOfAllTrades( talk) 15:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
I posted here a few months back on the possibility of a bot patrolling certain list articles or list sections and reverting the addition of redlinks, as PseudoBot currently does to the Births and Deaths sections of the date pages. I've since put in a proposal for such a bot. The selection of articles to be patrolled and the policy of operation of the bot is under discussion. Your comments on the discussion there would be welcome. Pseudomonas( talk) 17:22, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
When editing a page, it is difficult to read a section with many references. Couldn't we change the way the editing window looks? For example, the text between <ref></ref> tags could be shown smaller or in a different color. Emmanuelm ( talk) 18:10, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
I believe this functionality should be provided by an extension or the mediawiki software. Eklipse ( talk) 20:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
I guess one thing that could be done would be to have a referencing system where all the references were typed out in the references section at the end of the article and only links through footnotes (which could be less obtrusive) were included in the main body. I don't know if it would be a great system to work with in practise though. Guest9999 ( talk) 23:59, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
Here is some '''bold text''', ''italicized text'', and, {{damn it, my template is boxed off,|including=its|parameters}}.
In the meantime, Emmanuelm, if you use Firefox, then try the WikEd gadget (you can find it under My preferences:Gadgets), which has many helpful features in the edit window, including turning the refs a pale grey. I always use Firefox for WP now, as I can't do without it. Gwinva ( talk) 06:38, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Since we have an abortion law article, and we have abortion articles by country, why not also an abortion policy by political party article? It's relevant, since it's a very heated subject.
It would be a series of tables by country. The vertical on each table would be the major political parties in the country, and the horizontal would be either an "x" or check-mark, based on if the party is "officially pro-life", "officially pro-choice", "no official policy", "no official policy, typically pro-life", or "no official policy, typically pro-choice". What do you think? -- LightSpectra ( talk) 23:21, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
Another good reason for not using the American euphemistic terminology. — Werdna • talk 10:04, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
New namespace. Notability out the window, almost anything can be included, and at a more technical level. e.g. video game enemies get their HP, weapons, attacks, defense, strategies listed, in their own article. "list" articles would not be included as normal articles, but linked sparingly (user pages, normal articles with very little information could link to more poorly sourced "list" articles. I mean, I'd rather have poorly sourced information rather than none at all.). If not this, please, please please please make a new wiki with this in mind. And that's my uhh... 44 cents, adjusting for inflation. CompuHacker ( talk) 11:00, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
This proposal refers to internal links to already created pages. Entering text into an editor, we can create an internal link by adding double square brackets around a phrase which agrees with the title of a wiki page. Couldn't such agreements be pointed out to us automatically? A background color, for instance, could highlight phrases like "internal links" after having typed them into the editor with the double square brackets being set when double-clicking on the highlighted phrase. Every possible internal link could be represented that way and we would just have to double-click those which we want on the page. Another background color could be used for possible links to disambiguation pages, which would give us the opportunity to adjust the possible links so that they would link to specific pages rather than disambiguation pages. Of course, internal links would still have to be created the old way if we wanted phrases to link to pages with which they do not agree, i.e. if piped links are required.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 23:43, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
(This message was originally posted on MediaWiki talk:Revision-info, but I realized that the Village pump may be an more appropriate forum)
Currently, when I go through articles history, I often have to see how an article has improved since a certain date; but there is no easy way to do so using the existing message. (I.e. I have to insert "&diff=curr" in the address bar) Is it possible to update the message to read as follow (Without it having the external link icon, of course)? G.A.S talk 06:23, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
The software fairy paid a visit. You guys owe me a cookie. — Werdna • talk 01:28, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
<span class="plainlinks"></span>
, by the way, as we manually encode the <a>
elements for this message, meaning they don't get the special CSS for external links applied to them automatically), but realized quickly that we have the "(diff) ← Previous revision | Current revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)" that Anomie mentioned. Do we really need this update? (if yes, I'm still willing to implement it.) {{
Nihiltres|
talk|
log}} 15:58, 21 October 2008 (UTC)I have a question (or proposal?) about some fundraising that I would like to do that involves Wikipedia. I'm concerned that it might create a conflict and would like some feedback. Since June I have been working on revising the lemur articles (under WP:PRIMATES) and have started to make good progress. (See Ring-tailed Lemur and Ruffed lemur for examples of my work.) I have also been selected by Azafady to volunteer in Madagascar between October and December 2009. This volunteer opportunity is highly relevant to my career goals, so I am very excited.
In order to go and help with their conservation work, I need to raise at least £2,200 (~$4,000) to fund my volunteer activities. In the past, people have come up with many creative fundraisers for Azafady, including sponsorships for marathons, climbing mountains, etc. Since I am working to enhance as many lemur articles as possible, I was thinking I could ask friends, family and my local community to pledge donations for every article re-write, successful GA review, DYK and successful FA review. (And if Wikimedia were especially generous, maybe I could mention it on my user page or on the WP:PRIMATES page.)
In short, I was hoping to put my volunteer fundraising and Wiki editing together in order to benefit everyone. Not only would I get to pursue my dreams in Madagascar, but the Malagasy people would benefit from my volunteer work, lemurs would benefit from both the conservation work and a more informed public, and Wikimedia would get numerous GAs and FAs under WP:PRIMATES.
I realize that Wikimedia Foundation is non-profit and in the business of soliciting its own donations. I am hoping this fundraiser of mine will not cause any conflicts. If so, maybe we can work something out? What does everyone think? (BTW, I've sent a letter to Wikimedia specifically asking this question, and a volunteer gave me a tentative thumbs-up, directed me here to get more feedback from the community, and told me a more official note from Wikimedia was forthcoming.)
Thank you for your time. - Visionholder ( talk) 04:12, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
In an effort to follow the ruling of the Arbitration Committee to "work collaboratively to develop a generally accepted and applicable approach to the articles in question" in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Episodes and characters 2, I am proposing a sitewide fiction survey in order to accomplish that. The first draft of the survey is in my userspace and I would appreciate feedback on it before it goes forward. Any comments, suggestions, criticisms, edits to the survey, etc are welcome. Thank you. -- Pixelface ( talk) 04:17, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
Problem. We have this huge list of stub templates, which seems to ever grow longer, and is basically used to categorize "stubs". However we already have a category system, which as far as I can tell is perfectly fine (maybe not browsing them though, see below). So in essence we have two overlapping categorization systems which leads to duplicate work by the Wikipedians who perform the already pretty tedious tasks of handling new/raw articles. Besides, the stub categorization is not as comprehensive as regular categories.
Proposal 1.
I would also like to point out that assessment of articles is pretty much generalized now to all articles on Wikipedia thanks to many wikiprojects, yet stubs seem to be a special case, which leads me to another related proposal:
Proposal 2
I leave the "how" aside on purpose for now, however Wikipedia:Category intersection might be relevant here. Equendil Talk 10:49, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
It's not the purpose of the system of stub types to be "comprehensive". The purpose is to enable sorting of stub-sized articles into categories of reasonable size, according to their primary notability. In order for this to be reified from the permcats directly, one would need not only category intersection, but also category union -- in arbitrary combination indeed; one would need the categories to already exist on all the articles in question, and to have some way of indicating which of those categories are of primary topic-sorting significance. As none of those is presently the case, I don't see such an idea as being foreseeably viable.
Stub-tagging and stub-sorting is also not about "grading" articles in the sense of the ever-more-byzantine "1.0" classification system (which introduced the "stub class article" concept many years after the guideline-defined idea of a "stub", without ever actually clarifying if they were the same or not). Unless the idea is simply to abolish the one in favour of the other, I strongly suggest keeping discussion of the two separate. Alai ( talk) 16:39, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
How about just assign these stub templates to the related WikiProject?
It seems to me that these are similar to WikiProject talk page banner templates, in that they indicate the "type" of article. The difference would simply be to not include the "word" WikiProject in the stub template text. (since it would be placed in mainspace.) So for example, WikiProject Comics places "Comics-related stub" templates.
So essentially, if there isn't a WikiProject, perhaps there shouldn't be a related stub template? - jc37 01:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Stubs are deliberately kept separate from all wikiprojects for the exact reason you outlined above - that quite often they are to be used by multiple projects. In other cases, there are no relevant wikiprojects for particular stubs. There is a perfectly acceptable system which is used by wikiprojects, but it is not stubs - it is Stub-Class articles, part of the assessment process used by individual projects. Grutness... wha? 05:41, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
And thus you prove my point. What you've just described is actually a Stub-Class article, not a stub. The definition of a stub is at Wikipedia:Stub. It is through the confusing and conflating of these two completely different definitions that this proposal has been made and moch of the argument in favour of it has been made. As pointed out above, Stub-Class might well work very well with the proposal. Unfortunately, stubs (as defined at Wikipedia;Stub, would not. It would have been better had Stub-Class (often incorrectly shortened to "stub", as here, just to add to the confusion) been called something completely different when the assessment scheme was inaugurated. These points were alluded to by Alai, above. Unfortunately, to do so now would be to increase editors' confusion even more. Grutness... wha? 00:02, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
I'll reply to a few objections here :
I do not advocate nuking stub categorization as long as no viable solution exists regarding category browsing, for that matter I do not advocate nuking stub categorization at all, only to keep stub tagging and categorization separate, meaning that categorization efforts would not be duplicated. It would make little difference to an editor looking for stubs to expand (though they would surely benefit from browsing stubs through full blown categorization).
I also wanted to leave the "how" aside, as the intersection proposal is not necessarily the only one or best one (it would be possible to replace categories with a more simple system of keywords, and/or implement data mining schemes, or make rating of articles an attribute for instance), it is one possibility however, that's workable. I realize it may be too early, the proposal being based on a feature that does not exist yet, but then again, discussing future directions is what proposals are for. Equendil Talk 17:09, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
The proposal was supported by Equendil, Pseudomonas, NVO, Kleinzach, David Fuchs, and jc37. (It was only opposed by Grutness and Alai.)
The consensus was in favour of the proposal. -- Klein zach 07:34, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
The idea for this proposal came to me while at Talk:Sandwich. An argument over there was about if a sandwich required leavened bread to be classified as such. This struck me as very odd, as I know that a sanwich is a bit of food between to bits of bread. Even a (wise) proposal by an un-involved user was ignored. This got me thinking about a new guideline: Wikipedia: Common Sense. Here's my (rough) draft:
Wikipedia:Common Sense
Sometimes users can cite policies so much down the slightest wording, that it causes uneeded argument.
E.G. This article states that "milk is milk". It does not cite a reliable source that states that milk is milk. -Mr.Verifiability
These arguments an become long, tedious, and, due to stuborness on both sides, are very diffcult to resolve. The solution is to use common sense.
E.G. Because it is a generally accepted fact that milk is indeed milk as evidenced by the name, among other thing, and there has been no known soures stating that milk is not milk, the article should state that milk is milk. -Mr.CommonSense
This does not mean that all, or even most facts can go uncited. It simply means that basic facts, supported by common sense, do not need to be cited.
There it is.
[[User:Tutthoth-Ankhre|Tutthoth-Ankhre~ The Pharaoh of the Universe]] (
talk) 19:12, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Support
Oppose
Commenting
The example is pretty poor. "Milk is milk" would never be written in an article.. it's somewhat demeaning to our readers to suggest that they might not know that A ≡ A. However, let's suppose an article said that "Milk is an opaque white liquid produced by the mammary glands of female mammals". Maybe everybody knows that, and maybe we don't need to cite our sources for that "common knowledge". However, what is hurt by citing it? It's a low priority, but if somebody finds a source, then there's no reason not to include it. By the same token, it would be a little silly to remove such a statement from an article. And for those nitpickers who need a policy for everything, I think "mathematical truisms", and "common knowledge" are listed as exempt from citation anyway.
Now, if we had a Wikipedia:No, you don't need to propose a policy for that! policy, then we'd be talking... — Werdna • talk 00:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
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There's currently a plan to create categories for death ages where known, such as this one. I don't have a firm opinion on the matter, but I thought it might be a good idea to discuss it before it gets applied to thousands of biographies. Biruitorul Talk 00:54, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
I just noticed something on the New York Times website. In any article, double-clicking on a word performs a reference search, and automatically provides a definition of the word in a dictionary, thesaurus, and encyclopedia (all apparently powered by Answers.com).
I think this would significantly enhance the scope and impact of Wikipedia.
In June 2008 the Arbitration Committee announced a request that the English Wikipedia consider allowing some non-administrators the ability to view deleted material. The summary of the announcement was
Note that this is a request that the idea be considered, nothing stronger. The announcement led to this proposal. As this conversation has gone on for several months, the proposal has shifted around quite a bit. This makes it very unclear where editors are currently giving their support or opposition. For the sake of clarity, I am attempting to pick out the main proposals, and create a straw poll around them. Please share your opinion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 09:05, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
I would like to put a notification about the "view-deleted" straw poll in the watchlist. My reasoning is that this is a big decision that will affect all users, possibly the way that Wikipedia works, but not everyone reads the noticeboards where I posted messages. Also these noticeboards move rather quickly (especially WP:AN), so this will make sure that more people have a chance to see it. This is the line I would like added -
Thoughts? ~ JohnnyMrNinja 16:26, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
please see Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#A_Couple_of_Suggestions... for more info.
Thanks,
B G 7even 08:31, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
So, see the discussion there. - jc37 02:47, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Why do we have duplicate pages here? GO-PCHS-NJROTC (Messages) 01:51, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
I've always loved the idea of the random article button, but it never takes me anywhere interesting. So, I thought it would be awesome if readers would be able to get to a random article within a specific category with similar ease and convenience to just clicking the random article link. If that were to be implemented it would definitely be a feature I would use quite a bit. I'm surprised that no one seems to have proposed it before (or have they?). Abyssal ( talk) 17:02, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
As some might now (though I suspect most don't), user talk pages are no longer indexed thanks to bugzilla:13890. This was cited as the conesnous for that change: Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 25#Stopping search engines from indexing the user talk namespace?
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say what the frak?
We've already got the __NOINDEX__ magic words that let us exclude pages if there's an issue. There's no need for this change and there's a lot of reasons to oppose. -- Ned Scott 02:58, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Regardless of who supports what, is anyone else bothered by the fact that this change was first made without any real discussion? I know we don't want to give the devs grief over stuff like this, which is most likely a misunderstanding (AGF), but we really need a better way of dealing with these kinds of changes. -- Ned Scott 03:56, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm closing this now as it seems to be snowballing. It seems like the widely held consensus is that User talk: pages should remain noindexed as was set by the developers. While there may or may not have been consensus for this at the time, it's clear from this discussion that the majority of interested users are uncomfortable with the indexing of these pages for a wide range of reasons, including but not limited to: confusion between people; confusion between encyclopedic content and userspace content; privacy and "outing" concerns from attack sites; lack of need due to built-in search functions; etc. While it is true the outing concerns do not happen often, they do occur often enough that we regularly see otherwise good editors leave the project due to what essentially boils down to blackmail in the loosest of terms (I do not intend to make any sort of legal accusation/threat/statement with that comment, that is simply my personal observation on previous matters). Removing these pages from Google will not stop that (and I notice nobody said that here), but it will certainly slow it down, as well as address many of the other concerns raised about indexing.
If a user wishes to have their usertalk page indexed by search engines, they are entitled to do so by adding the template {{ INDEX}} to their user talk page. This will override $wgNamespaceRobotPolicies and grant access by search bots to your talk page. Some time should be allowed after the addition for the googlebots to get around to finding it again, but ideally the page should be searchable by external engines within a week or so. Naturally, users should not add this template to any page but their own; this is a personal choice, and users have the right to decline search indexing if they wish. Since the great majority of those here are declining it, the default will remain as-is; noindex. Hersfold ( t/ a/ c) 21:17, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Currently, when a new or experienced user hits "edit this page" on a page like Microsoft, this is what they see. It's a mess. It's confusing. And it's horribly incomprehensible for a lot of users.
I'm proposing that we move infoboxes to subpages of their respective templates and incorporate "view - talk - edit" links into the boxes themselves at the bottom. So, for example, Microsoft's infobox would be located at Template:Infobox Company/Microsoft and Template:Infobox Company would be modified to have "view - talk - edit" links at the bottom of it.
Over a year ago, I converted some of the chemical element infoboxes to a subpage-type format and editing of the articles is now much more user-friendly. Compare: previously to now.
Thoughts, suggestions, comments, concerns? -- MZMcBride ( talk) 04:09, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
This would make it more complicated for the people that know what they're doing, and not only in obvious ways. Someone fixing links to disambiguation pages might have to click through to the infobox. Someone updating a headquarters city will need to make two edits, one to the article and another to the infobox template. If the infobox name is based on the article name, it will have to be moved if the article is moved. -- NE2 18:34, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
Why don't we just put overly complex infoboxes in subpages ( Microsoft/Infobox in this case)? By definition, an infobox about a single company isn't a template anymore; it's encyclopedic content. If someone happens across one with Special:Random, big deal; we can just put a noinclude tag around the explanation that it is used on Microsoft. If someone is confused by that, I'd be surprised if they have the mental capacity for editing anyway. :) EVula // talk // ☯ // 21:10, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
---
Great suggestion! Anything that reduces line noise and preserves the wikitext spirit of being quick and easy to edit gets my vote.
It does work (see here and here). OK, it's not technically a subpage i.e. there's no backlink to Microsoft, but it's otherwise the same. The only caveat is that the infobox must be transcluded as {{:Microsoft/Infobox}} rather than {{Microsoft/Infobox}}.
chocolateboy ( talk) 10:44, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
All good points. Still, I'd suggest keeping it that way for a while. More people are likely to spot the change in the Microsoft article than are monitoring this discussion, and they can weigh in here. It's easy enough to CSD the subpage if that's the consensus.
Yeah. I've tried to do that ( here for instance). It works well for uncluttered templates like that, but the Microsoft infobox is full of references and nested templates, which end up line-wrapping, so the unreadability is hard to avoid.
chocolateboy ( talk) 13:31, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I would like to suggest, a form of invisible universal category that all articles would belong to. It would be called the Index. it would be viewable to all people, just like an index an the back of a paper encyclopedia. It would look like category pages currently do. Until developers can get in on this, bots would attach all articles they find to an "index" category. The index would have an abridged versiom of articles with only at least a certain number of monthly visitations, an an unabridged version with all articles. You may comment, discuss, or vote under the following categories. -- Ipatrol ( talk) 00:57, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
There is a problem with material cited with an online reference, when that reference disappears, especially when someone then deletes the content on the basis it can't be verified. There are two situations: a) sometimes it is known, or can be suspected, that a ref will disappear because of the nature of the site (its practice is not to archive its own pages)—there is then the opportunity for pre-emptive action; b) it is unexpected—in this case it may still be available on google, but possibly only for a short time.
Some solutions to this might be:
1. An archive noticeboard, where editors ask for endorsement that the material they have used is accurately based on the ref. This would be viable for simple uses of the ref, such as straightforward factual material.
2. An archive noticeboard where relevant extracts from the ref are posted and endorsed. This would be useful when not a large portion of the ref is being used.
3. A Wiki cache, similar to google, where editors can cache a page directly. This would be particularly useful if it could also cache a google cache.
The best solution is 3, as it does not require any other editor participation or endorsement. 1 and 2 don't need any developer work, and could be instituted immediately. There could be a combination of these.
Ty 09:00, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
I agree with the motivation, particularly re. pages describing modern technology, since they are likely to become obsolete and be taken down or changed. (How many web-based references will you find for the ISA bus these days? What about MCA?) However, is there a reason that the archives at archive.org aren't suitable or sufficient? Perhaps WF could work together with archive.org to ensure that the pages referenced here, even the specific versions referenced here, are archived. Could WP's software automatically add links to the archive.org copies of linked pages? Jeh ( talk) 17:09, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
FYI, a cache system was put in place on the French Wikipedia several weeks ago. It is provided by Linterweb, the company that operates the
Wikiwix search engine.
Briefly, external links added to articles are automatically cached; a link to the cached version is displayed near the corresponding external link (see
Image:Capture-cache-wikiwix.JPG). Currently, only registered users can see these links by editing their monobook.js, but there's a
vote to decide whether they should be displayed by default for all users.
For more information, see
fr:Utilisateur:Pmartin/Cache (
translation) and
fr:Discussion Wikipédia:Prise de décision/Système de cache#Le projet cache (
translation).
Korg (
talk) 19:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Category:Uncategorized pages is growing every day, and even with such excellent tools such as HotCat, it can be difficult to manage. I think categories are important on wikipedia for organisation and mantainance as well as article-hopping for the average reader. Is there perhaps any support for a system where a warning/marker pops up on any article being created without categories that, while not interfering with the editing windows, reminds the editor that they have not added any categories yet? It might just help cut down on the number of category-less articles out there. SGGH speak! 13:19, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
The solution is to make adding a category easier. Look at what Commons does with its images.. — Werdna • talk 00:43, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Sorry, this random thought popped into my head the other day and I thought I'd entertain it. First question: is there any technical way to implement a wiki-wide freeze on article creation? If so, I just think it would be interesting and helpful if Wikipedia had "improvement weeks", where an article creation freeze was put into effect and instead directed people to improve bad articles or send them to AfD. After all, we're shooting for quality, right? Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ( talk) 13:14, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Being able to enter new pieces of information or corrections into the respective articles' editors and submit them to an area within wikipedia where wiki editors wikify what has been sent (instead of altering the article instantly) might attract those people to the wiki idea who are willing to share their knowledge, but do not want to deal with wikipedia's formal prerequisites.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 22:42, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
Just throwing this out there; I'd love to see it implemented as other projects already have but it would need wide community acceptance. Please see the bottom of any Wikinews article or the sidebar of Wiktionary. These projects have implemented a feature where anonymous readers can submit feedback about articles so the project knows how it can improve. I know that it will be a good way to better learn the public's perception of Wikipedia. Many people will read something wrong, a vandalized article, or something that needs improvement, but they don't know how to fix it or that they can even edit it. They then just write Wikipedia off as worthless. A public feedback system will let us know exactly what articles need to be improved the most as well as in what way. Very few of our millions of readers ever make an edit, so we really don't know exactly what they want. This is obviously a major change that wld require wide community acceptance, but I urge you to consider this beneficial plan and perhaps implement a short testing period before making anything official. Thanks, Reywas92 Talk 02:45, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Not everybody's bold. We should be pragmatic and give people the lowest barrier for entry required. I think being able to say "this article needs some love" without getting wrapped up in dealing with it encourages participation (what Wikipedia is about) rather than discouraging it. And it should absolutely be available for everyone, blocked, logged-in or administrator. — Werdna • talk 00:33, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
I've been having a bunch of issues trying to figure out what all the symbols mean, though I'm starting to figure out what some of them are, like the bronze star. But there are just so many symbols (or at least to me) that I don't really get them all (e.g. one day I was looking at a page and next to German/Deutsch, I think, there was a gold star, and so I didn't know what it was and it annoyed me, tough I eventually figured out it was the equivalent to the bronze star). I think that would be very helpful. Like what does the green circle with a plus sign in it mean? That would also be helpful to new users. Thanks! Helixer ( talk) 22:10, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
Ever feel frustrated by the thought that it's really hard to get Did you know credit for expanding anything bigger than a substub, and it's a big gap from there to good article? Okay, let's fill that gap. Proposing the Killer B's to thank people for raising the dreadful up to pretty good.
Killer B recognition goes to improvement drives for existing articles that start out at C-class or below, with a few requirements:
There wouldn't be any special designation for Killer B at the article, but we could keep a 'Beehive' to thank editors for their contributions and offer cute doodads for userspace. The basic setup would operate similar to GAC: anyone can review and the process works on an honor system. Durova Charge! 20:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Support I agree, but I'd be more inclined to simpily have an award, like a barnstar, awarded by common editors for such a thing -- Ipatrol ( talk) 00:40, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I see, but what I was trying to say is that I don't agree with the "beehive" part of your proposal. Also you might run into issues with WP:OWN, in otherwords, who of the editors on such a page would get that award? -- Ipatrol ( talk) 01:00, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
I like the general idea, but I really dislike the actual characterisation of it - I mean come on, a bee called 'killer'? We're not in primary (elementary) school... get rid of the whole 'bee' thing, make it more like the existing barnstar system (i.e. a bit more mature, without a character), and I'll be more happy to fully support. Talk Islander 14:01, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
How about this:
The B class award
I award this Barnstar to Village pump (proposals)/Archive 36 for their achivement In getting Wikipedia:Main Page to B class status. |
-- Ipatrol ( talk) 17:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi all - when you go to delete a page via http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=(pagename)&action=delete you are presented with a handy-dandy list of reasons for deletion that you can pick and choose from. At present, that list is simply all the Speedy Deletion criteria, plus the catch-all "other reason". I'd like to see a further reason added to that list - "Per consensus at deletion process page". Consensus at AFD, CFD, and the like is surely one of the most common reasons for deleting a page, and would be a useful extra item to have on that list. Grutness... wha? 23:53, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
The reason it's not there may be because such deletions should always include a link to the deletion discussion. That would not be possible if it was a dropdown option. If something is deleted at xfd, you should put something like "per [[Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Main Page]]" as the deletion reason. --- RockMFR 17:40, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
I've been bold and added it. Feel free to remove it if it causes problems. — Werdna • talk 00:31, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
I don't know how big a problem it is in the main wikipedia, but users quite often forget to sign their comments on talk pages of the smaller wiki I use to contribute to. How about automated signing of comments so that it cannot be forgotten or refused (if technically possible, of course)?
Alternatively, I suggest creating a box in the "Editing" column on the "My preferences" special page so that, if the box is checked, users would be reminded to sign their comments if they haven't done that yet when trying to save the talk page they have been working on. The "Prompt me when entering a blank edit summary" function works similarly.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 03:07, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
Will be sorted by LiquidThreads, and David McCabe has been hired to finish it for Wikimedia. — Werdna • talk 12:53, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
We use a variety of shortcuts to important pages on-wiki, to save ourselves typing a few characters; these invariably involve shortening the namespace prefix to an acronym. We call common namespace abbreviations 'pseudospaces' because they refer to namespaces that don't actually exist: the pages are created in the mainspace and their corresponding talk pages are "Talk:ABBR:Foo" rather than "ABBR Talk:Foo". A while ago the developers, having written the necessary underlying code, made the "WP:" prefix an actual alias of the "Wikipedia:" namespace, and similarly for "WT:" and "Wikipedia talk:". So typing "WT:FOO", you would immediately be directed to "Wikipedia:Foo", and it was impossible to create a mainspace page at "WT:FOO" in the same way that it is not (AFAIK) possible to create a mainspace page at "Help:Foo". A maintenance script was used to move all the shortcut pages starting with "WP:" and "WT:" to new locations in the Wikipedia: and Wikipedia talk: namespaces. The update was fairly painful because there were a lot of name conflicts between pages named "WP:Foo" and "Wikipedia:Foo", and a number of templates beginning with "Template:WP:...". I have been investigating the corresponding situation with other popular shortcuts such as "T:", "P:" and "CAT:", with mixed results.
From Special:Prefixindex/T: we can see the 30 or so extant "T:..." shortcuts: I have confirmed that there are relatively few potential name conflicts, and no template conflicts. In every case where there is a name conflict, the two pages are either the template target and its shortcut redirect, or two redirects to another template; the conflicts could be trivially resolved by deleting the redirect or by merging the histories of the two redirects, respectively. It would therefore be possible to implement "T:" as a namespace alias for "Template:" relatively painlessly. This would of course prevent these shortcuts from multiplying while at the same time allowing every short template name to be used as a potential shortcut. There is a small issue with the "T:..." alias: the valid article t:kort. I'm not sure what could be done with this, perhaps there is some unicode replacement for the colon (or the t for that matter!) that we could use for the main article? A redirect from Template:Kort (which would be the result of typing "t:kort" into the search bar) would have to be condoned but that's no big deal - we already have such redirects from Help: A Day in the Life to Help!: A Day in the Life, for instance). It would be nice to be able to define "TT:..." as an alias for the Template talk: namespace, but this is unfortunately the interwiki prefix for the tatar wikipedia!
The situation with the "P:..." alias is similar. There are some three hundred "P:..." pages, the majority of which have no equivalent page "Portal:...". The very few that do (see list) are without exception redirects or targets, as with the T: alias. Once again there is a minor problem in the article P:ano. There are no pages of the form "PT:...", but this is the interwiki prefix for the Portugese wikipedia so it is not possible for us to use it as an alias.
The situation with the "CAT:..." shortcut is more difficult: there are a large number of them, this time redirects without exception, but I don't think that defining "CAT:..." as a namespace alias for "Category:..." would be very helpful, as it would mean that the normal rules of category links would apply: writing [[CAT:CSD]], for instance, would result in the page being added to CAT:CSD rather than being linked to it. If there is an option to specify that "CAT:" is equivalent to ":Category:" then this would be useful, otherwise these redirects will probably have to remain. There are no pages with the prefix "CATT:" so this could be easily enabled as an alias for the "Category talk:" namespace.
There are only a handful of pages with the "H:" prefix, all redirects to Help: space; none of their alias pages exist. However there are a number of templates prefixed with "H:", associated with the bot-imported help pages from metawiki. This help system itself appears to be in disuse and needs to be rethought, so this may not be an insurmountable obstacle. "HT:" is the interwiki prefix for the Creole wikipedia.
There are no valid shortcuts with the prefix "I:" to images, and three valid articles; such an alias would also suffer from the same problems as the "CAT:" alias above. "IT:" is the interwiki prefix for the italian wikipedia. There are no shortcuts or articles at "U:", just a handful of implausible redirects, or "UT:" - "UT" is also not an interwiki prefix so could be used as an alias for the "User talk:" namespace.
In summary, the following namespace aliases could be easily created with minimal effort, with the associated benefits.
In addition, the following aliases could be created if a few issues were resolved:
I guess this is more of a status update and food-for-thought exercise than a concrete proposal at this time, but there is clearly some mileage in this and the potential to remove a lot of 'backstage' housekeeping links from the 'reader-facing' mainspace. It would also probably be a good idea to discover or plead for a solution to the problem of needing to create an article that begins with a valid wiki (or interwiki) prefix; we already have a few of these, and sooner or later someone is going to write a book entitled "Wikipedia:The free encyclopedia" or "Portal:A great SciFi novel"; our handling of these is currently quite inconsistent, a coherent approach (preferably by escaping the colon in some fashion) would be desirable. Comments? Happy‑ melon 17:33, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
I support the proposal, or at least the general idea behind it. If it saves typing and isn't a big deal to implement, then there's benefits, but no drawbacks, which means there is no good reason not to implement it. Criticisms so far aimed at the idea sound suspiciously like arguing "I'm not interested in it" to have a page deleted. Abyssal ( talk) 11:08, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Dear friends,
I have begun to read "Today's Featured Article" of the Wikipedia everyday. I appreciate this effort and consider this as a very good venue for self-education. In fact I have made it my default page so that I can read it everyday.
However, I noted that the topics, at least in the past one week, concerned things that were too minor or trivial for a global audience. Today's article for example is about Trafford, a small town in England. There are countless small towns all over the world and one doesn't gain much knowledge by knowing the hundreds of thousand small towns in the world. Yesterday it was the Grass Fight during the Texas Revolution. It would have been better if the feature is on the Texas Revolution rather than the Grass Fight because majority of people didn't even know that there was a Texas Revolution.
May I make a suggestion?
Can we make the daily Featured Article a kind of long-term educational program that will widen and deepen the liberal education of Wiki readers? In making this, we can make it cover a broad range of significant human knowledge that will matter in the lifetime of a person -- covering history, science, arts, religion, philosophy, humanities, geography, etc. It can include topics that are seldom heard-of, but still of significance when learned. Here are examples:
Quarks / Strings Michelson Morley Experiment Asoka Lemmings Angkor Wat Gordian Knot Western Schism Anti-Popes The Fourth Crusade Samadhi Hundred Years' War Genome Project A priori and a posteriori Impressionism Knight Templars Ataturk Cargo cult Marianas Trench Timaeus (dialogue) etc.
Being an educator myself, I am willing to be of help in suggesting articles for the Featured Article section.
May I take this opportunity to thank all those nameless volunteers who make this truly revolutionary encyclopedia possible.
With warm regards, Vicente Hao Chin, Jr. Author, The Process of Self-Transformation
Thank you for the comments. I did not realize that there was the Wikiversity. I have looked at it, and will make use of it a lot for our school. However, for the Featured Article for the Day, I still think that it would be better that the information will have a learning value. After all that is the purpose of an encyclopedia. I will try to make proposals to the Featured Article and hope that I can be of help. Thanks again!
I think there should be more simple wikis like the simple English one. How about a simple Spanish one?-- Megaman en m ( talk) 20:19, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
I've started a discussion to finally get rid of the shambling monstrosity that is this category and all its children.
My opinion is clear on the matter (get rid of the entire nest of prejudicial editwar bait), but this is a bold and big move and needs wide participation. Participate. — Coren (talk) 20:13, 12 October 2008 (UTC)
Would people here be interested in this discussion? Carcharoth ( talk) 15:04, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
People put 'under construction' on a page to say that they are actively working on articles. But then the templates seem to hang around on the article for hours, days, and weeks. It is sometimes difficult to get them removed because people say 'I haven't finished yet, I just have to get round to it'. Sometimes people even revert removal of the template.
A reasonable proposal (I think) is to merge the templates into one. The one template would have a fixed expiry time visible in read mode. If it expires, the editor would be able to refresh it but would have to take positive action to refresh it. The current fire-and-forget design would be gone. The expiry time would be consistent with real tappity-tap editing where fingers are pounding the keyboard e.g. 15 minutes to an hour.
For more details, debate, and voting, see: Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2008 October 13. Regards Lightmouse ( talk) 16:21, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
Actually, I am talking about them all but perhaps my comments highlight specific problems. So far we have had a novel suggestion that the sell-by date is actually *increased* from a few days to 6 months and that the current process of purging stale tags by bot is stopped and tags only be removed after individual negotiation over each tag with the person that put it there. I have the feeling that we are going backwards by making it harder to clear up after fire-and-forget editors. Sigh. Lightmouse ( talk) 18:55, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
I have proposed moving List of YouTube celebrities and all its related "celebrities" to YouTube phenomena (or something similar). There are more details about the proposal here. I just want more people to see this as there doesn't seem to be much activity on the talk page. But my main is that there seems to be a lot of articles about people who had some sort of success and minor media attention on YouTube and have gone no further after, a flash in the pan. See Emmalina (currently at 4th AfD) for an example of this. -- TwentiethApril1986 (want to talk?) 19:48, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
On a related issue, there is a discussion and straw poll at Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates on whether there should be a minimum length in words for FAs of say 1,000 or 1,500 woords, and other issues. At the moment there seems no majority on this, so we are likely to continue to get increasingly short FAs - the shortest candidate I have seen was 329 words - many on small tropical storms (one reached 40mph for 1 minute) and American state roads (one a 1/4 mile long, outside a military base). The questions start here. Johnbod ( talk) 11:16, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
I think this discussion belongs at the village pump, NOT Jimbo's userpage. -- Ipatrol ( talk) 14:37, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
I propose to change the "wikt:" namespace, which forwards articles from Wikipedia, to Wiktionary to "d:" namespace. The letter "d" stands for dictionary, define, and definitions. An alternative coming to mind is "t:", standing for the first letter of what seems to be the second syllable of "Wiktionary". Instead of renaming the namespace, "d:" could also be only added while keeping "wikt:" intact, which would probably be better for compatibility reasons.
Unlike Wiktionary, most other Wikimedia projects have a single letter forwarding namespace, including "W:", "B:", and "S:".
One benefit is a quicker linking to Wiktionary from another project. Another one is typing "d:word" into the Wikipedia searchbox of Firefox, and getting to Wiktionary.
Thanks for reading. -- Dan Polansky ( talk) 13:40, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
Please see comment I made here about obtaining and recording gender (male/female) metadata. Opinions would be welcomed. Thanks. Carcharoth ( talk) 02:05, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Metadata should be encouraged! I don't understand what you're on about in terms of identity theft. — Werdna • talk 12:54, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
There doesn't seem to be a
WP:WARN for adding to an article in a language other than english. The closest one is uw-english, but it's intended for non-english communication on talk pages, rather than non-english additions to articles. Additionally, uw-english is only available in english, which is unlikely to be helpful in a situation where communication is being attempted in a person that may have only a basic grasp of the english language.
I propose:
I eagerly await the community's input. Horselover Frost ( talk) 08:54, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
Just as we have an {{ editprotected}} template, how about {{ editintricate}} for the talk pages of template pages with {{ Intricate template}} in them? This would be used for templates which are not necessarily protected, but are just incomprehensible to all but the most technically savvy. A corresponding group or watchlist could be set up for people to watch for {{ editintricate}} requests.
Thoughts? It Is Me Here ( talk) 20:59, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
Hi
I have proposed some recommendations as to requirements to be a contactor on the talk page of Abuse Reports, being active there myself. Due to the nature of the work we do there and the fact that vandals (long-term or otherwise) quite often show up on their own abuse reports, I’m concerned that there is a fundamental flaw, it is currently too easy for vandals and other [ab]users to undermine the success of that forum's goal as well as people who are in-experienced. The most common way would be "Lets not and say we did" For this reason I would like to discuss and propose some guidelines for contactors only (for now).
Anyone who has worked at Abuse Reports or has an interest in it (or anyone else) is invited to discuss my proposal and / or make proposals of their own. Thanks «l| Ψrometheăn ™|l» (talk) 04:25, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Sorry if this is an old horse I haven't really been involved in the numerous previous discussion about this area. I'll start with an example:
Having to go through each and everyone of those articles seems like an unnecessary use of time and people wanting to use this area of the encyclopaedia might be better served if articles of this type were arranged into a list (i.e. List of unincorporated communities of Albermarle County, Virginia). The list could incorporate the names and geographic coordinates of all the communities (such as in List of United Kingdom locations: Aa-Ak) and when reliably sourced information about the different places becomes available a separate article could be written (the entry in the list could then be blue-linked and added to the appropriate navigational template). This could save anyone researching the topic from having to trudge through links that don't provide any additional information. I've used a very recently created group of articles as an example so I apologise if it not the most typical, however after randomly clicking through Category:Unincorporated communities in Virginia it does appear that there are similar short stubs elsewhere and that "listification" - at least in the short term whilst articles are being developed - might be beneficial. Again I apologise if I've misinterpreted the situation from an atypical group or am just rehashing old discussion Guest9999 ( talk) 21:34, 13 October 2008 (UTC)
Guest9999, I find the 100+ one-line stubs linked to on Template:Albemarle County, Virginia absolutely sickening. I'm sorry, but they are. They contain zero useful information and they would be much better suited as a list as you recommended as you suggested with these names redirecting there. There are no coordinates, population, or any other useful information on any of these articles. While yes, they exist, they are no more than very small unincorporated communities for which there is little to no information provided by USGS or the Census. Theoretically they could be expanded, but a much better alternative at this point would be a list. I have no problem with articles on unincorporated communites, but I do have a probem with one-liners. Give me the word, Guest9999, and I'd love to whip out AWB and merge these into a single list. Reywas92 Talk 20:47, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
Have you ever been reading a diff on a talk page and said, "Hmm...I think I'll look at this in context," only to search up and down the page for the actual post because all it tells you is that the post is in line 1,037? I propose a link on (or by) each green box in a page diff that will take you down to where the addition is in the body of the page. Thoughts? SunDragon34 ( talk) 06:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
on the main page of www.wikipedia.com, when we type in a keyword to search, we need to type in the language too... can't we just search without specifying a language?
for example, if we search for 李克勤 on google, we don't really need to specify the language, because it is taken as UTF-8 and there is a perfect 1 to 1 match of those characters in UTF-8. There is no ambiguity...
is it because the content portion of wikipedia is so big that we want to limit the range of search? won't building a good index solve that problem? or otherwise, can we just search for all the "titles" of the whole wiki database if the user choose not to specify a language in the main box, and then down below, there is a more extensive search box where users can enter the keyword and then specify the lanugage as well? thanks.
Automatic language selection on the home page based on computer's local settings is very annoying. My computer has foreign settings, but in 99.9% of my searches I need to browse the articles in English. It is annoying to have to select English every time I open wikipedia.org. I don't want to be switched automatically into the other language.
When I read an article, I tend to mentally emphasise linked words inside my own head. I'm sure if I read it out aloud I'd sound like a complete retard :P Is there some script that will display blue and red links in black text? It should preferably have a button somewhere on the page to quickly toggle between black and red/blue. This would allow one to read articles more naturally, as nature intended :)
When I read an article, I tend to mentally emphasise linked words inside my own head. I'm sure if I read it out aloud I'd sound like a complete retard :P Is there some script that will display blue and red links in black text? It should preferably have a button somewhere on the page to quickly toggle between black and red/blue. This would allow one to read articles more naturally, as nature intended :) Zunaid 10:19, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
While I'm on the point, can we have a similar button to toggle the display of the reference superscripts on/off? Zunaid 10:19, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
.reference {display: none;}
div #bodyContent a {color:black;}
Script request cross-posted to Wikipedia:WikiProject User scripts/Requests#Option to hide wiki-links in articles / option to hide references' superscripts. Thanks Happy Melon, however I'd really like a button to quickly toggle between the two. This would allow one to read an article normally, but still be able to quickly check out where the linked articles are.
p.s. does anyone else experience this phenomenon or is it just me? Zunaid 13:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Is it just me or did someone change the navigation bar significantly:
I don't remember seeing anything about this anywhere - Community bulletin board, Signpost, Village Pump. Anyone know what's going on? Kaldari ( talk) 19:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
|
|
|
There are quite a few changes. I don't remember seeing any discussion, though. -- Imperator3733 ( talk) 20:21, 16 October 2008 (UTC)
Discussion appears to have petered out on the latest proposed process for removal of adminship. A straw poll has been started to assess community opinion on whether or not to proceed.
Your participation is welcomed. TenOfAllTrades( talk) 15:33, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
I posted here a few months back on the possibility of a bot patrolling certain list articles or list sections and reverting the addition of redlinks, as PseudoBot currently does to the Births and Deaths sections of the date pages. I've since put in a proposal for such a bot. The selection of articles to be patrolled and the policy of operation of the bot is under discussion. Your comments on the discussion there would be welcome. Pseudomonas( talk) 17:22, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
When editing a page, it is difficult to read a section with many references. Couldn't we change the way the editing window looks? For example, the text between <ref></ref> tags could be shown smaller or in a different color. Emmanuelm ( talk) 18:10, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
I believe this functionality should be provided by an extension or the mediawiki software. Eklipse ( talk) 20:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
I guess one thing that could be done would be to have a referencing system where all the references were typed out in the references section at the end of the article and only links through footnotes (which could be less obtrusive) were included in the main body. I don't know if it would be a great system to work with in practise though. Guest9999 ( talk) 23:59, 15 October 2008 (UTC)
Here is some '''bold text''', ''italicized text'', and, {{damn it, my template is boxed off,|including=its|parameters}}.
In the meantime, Emmanuelm, if you use Firefox, then try the WikEd gadget (you can find it under My preferences:Gadgets), which has many helpful features in the edit window, including turning the refs a pale grey. I always use Firefox for WP now, as I can't do without it. Gwinva ( talk) 06:38, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
Since we have an abortion law article, and we have abortion articles by country, why not also an abortion policy by political party article? It's relevant, since it's a very heated subject.
It would be a series of tables by country. The vertical on each table would be the major political parties in the country, and the horizontal would be either an "x" or check-mark, based on if the party is "officially pro-life", "officially pro-choice", "no official policy", "no official policy, typically pro-life", or "no official policy, typically pro-choice". What do you think? -- LightSpectra ( talk) 23:21, 18 October 2008 (UTC)
Another good reason for not using the American euphemistic terminology. — Werdna • talk 10:04, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
New namespace. Notability out the window, almost anything can be included, and at a more technical level. e.g. video game enemies get their HP, weapons, attacks, defense, strategies listed, in their own article. "list" articles would not be included as normal articles, but linked sparingly (user pages, normal articles with very little information could link to more poorly sourced "list" articles. I mean, I'd rather have poorly sourced information rather than none at all.). If not this, please, please please please make a new wiki with this in mind. And that's my uhh... 44 cents, adjusting for inflation. CompuHacker ( talk) 11:00, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
This proposal refers to internal links to already created pages. Entering text into an editor, we can create an internal link by adding double square brackets around a phrase which agrees with the title of a wiki page. Couldn't such agreements be pointed out to us automatically? A background color, for instance, could highlight phrases like "internal links" after having typed them into the editor with the double square brackets being set when double-clicking on the highlighted phrase. Every possible internal link could be represented that way and we would just have to double-click those which we want on the page. Another background color could be used for possible links to disambiguation pages, which would give us the opportunity to adjust the possible links so that they would link to specific pages rather than disambiguation pages. Of course, internal links would still have to be created the old way if we wanted phrases to link to pages with which they do not agree, i.e. if piped links are required.-- Emaster82 ( talk) 23:43, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
(This message was originally posted on MediaWiki talk:Revision-info, but I realized that the Village pump may be an more appropriate forum)
Currently, when I go through articles history, I often have to see how an article has improved since a certain date; but there is no easy way to do so using the existing message. (I.e. I have to insert "&diff=curr" in the address bar) Is it possible to update the message to read as follow (Without it having the external link icon, of course)? G.A.S talk 06:23, 17 October 2008 (UTC)
The software fairy paid a visit. You guys owe me a cookie. — Werdna • talk 01:28, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
<span class="plainlinks"></span>
, by the way, as we manually encode the <a>
elements for this message, meaning they don't get the special CSS for external links applied to them automatically), but realized quickly that we have the "(diff) ← Previous revision | Current revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)" that Anomie mentioned. Do we really need this update? (if yes, I'm still willing to implement it.) {{
Nihiltres|
talk|
log}} 15:58, 21 October 2008 (UTC)I have a question (or proposal?) about some fundraising that I would like to do that involves Wikipedia. I'm concerned that it might create a conflict and would like some feedback. Since June I have been working on revising the lemur articles (under WP:PRIMATES) and have started to make good progress. (See Ring-tailed Lemur and Ruffed lemur for examples of my work.) I have also been selected by Azafady to volunteer in Madagascar between October and December 2009. This volunteer opportunity is highly relevant to my career goals, so I am very excited.
In order to go and help with their conservation work, I need to raise at least £2,200 (~$4,000) to fund my volunteer activities. In the past, people have come up with many creative fundraisers for Azafady, including sponsorships for marathons, climbing mountains, etc. Since I am working to enhance as many lemur articles as possible, I was thinking I could ask friends, family and my local community to pledge donations for every article re-write, successful GA review, DYK and successful FA review. (And if Wikimedia were especially generous, maybe I could mention it on my user page or on the WP:PRIMATES page.)
In short, I was hoping to put my volunteer fundraising and Wiki editing together in order to benefit everyone. Not only would I get to pursue my dreams in Madagascar, but the Malagasy people would benefit from my volunteer work, lemurs would benefit from both the conservation work and a more informed public, and Wikimedia would get numerous GAs and FAs under WP:PRIMATES.
I realize that Wikimedia Foundation is non-profit and in the business of soliciting its own donations. I am hoping this fundraiser of mine will not cause any conflicts. If so, maybe we can work something out? What does everyone think? (BTW, I've sent a letter to Wikimedia specifically asking this question, and a volunteer gave me a tentative thumbs-up, directed me here to get more feedback from the community, and told me a more official note from Wikimedia was forthcoming.)
Thank you for your time. - Visionholder ( talk) 04:12, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
In an effort to follow the ruling of the Arbitration Committee to "work collaboratively to develop a generally accepted and applicable approach to the articles in question" in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Episodes and characters 2, I am proposing a sitewide fiction survey in order to accomplish that. The first draft of the survey is in my userspace and I would appreciate feedback on it before it goes forward. Any comments, suggestions, criticisms, edits to the survey, etc are welcome. Thank you. -- Pixelface ( talk) 04:17, 22 October 2008 (UTC)
Problem. We have this huge list of stub templates, which seems to ever grow longer, and is basically used to categorize "stubs". However we already have a category system, which as far as I can tell is perfectly fine (maybe not browsing them though, see below). So in essence we have two overlapping categorization systems which leads to duplicate work by the Wikipedians who perform the already pretty tedious tasks of handling new/raw articles. Besides, the stub categorization is not as comprehensive as regular categories.
Proposal 1.
I would also like to point out that assessment of articles is pretty much generalized now to all articles on Wikipedia thanks to many wikiprojects, yet stubs seem to be a special case, which leads me to another related proposal:
Proposal 2
I leave the "how" aside on purpose for now, however Wikipedia:Category intersection might be relevant here. Equendil Talk 10:49, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
It's not the purpose of the system of stub types to be "comprehensive". The purpose is to enable sorting of stub-sized articles into categories of reasonable size, according to their primary notability. In order for this to be reified from the permcats directly, one would need not only category intersection, but also category union -- in arbitrary combination indeed; one would need the categories to already exist on all the articles in question, and to have some way of indicating which of those categories are of primary topic-sorting significance. As none of those is presently the case, I don't see such an idea as being foreseeably viable.
Stub-tagging and stub-sorting is also not about "grading" articles in the sense of the ever-more-byzantine "1.0" classification system (which introduced the "stub class article" concept many years after the guideline-defined idea of a "stub", without ever actually clarifying if they were the same or not). Unless the idea is simply to abolish the one in favour of the other, I strongly suggest keeping discussion of the two separate. Alai ( talk) 16:39, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
How about just assign these stub templates to the related WikiProject?
It seems to me that these are similar to WikiProject talk page banner templates, in that they indicate the "type" of article. The difference would simply be to not include the "word" WikiProject in the stub template text. (since it would be placed in mainspace.) So for example, WikiProject Comics places "Comics-related stub" templates.
So essentially, if there isn't a WikiProject, perhaps there shouldn't be a related stub template? - jc37 01:20, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
Stubs are deliberately kept separate from all wikiprojects for the exact reason you outlined above - that quite often they are to be used by multiple projects. In other cases, there are no relevant wikiprojects for particular stubs. There is a perfectly acceptable system which is used by wikiprojects, but it is not stubs - it is Stub-Class articles, part of the assessment process used by individual projects. Grutness... wha? 05:41, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
And thus you prove my point. What you've just described is actually a Stub-Class article, not a stub. The definition of a stub is at Wikipedia:Stub. It is through the confusing and conflating of these two completely different definitions that this proposal has been made and moch of the argument in favour of it has been made. As pointed out above, Stub-Class might well work very well with the proposal. Unfortunately, stubs (as defined at Wikipedia;Stub, would not. It would have been better had Stub-Class (often incorrectly shortened to "stub", as here, just to add to the confusion) been called something completely different when the assessment scheme was inaugurated. These points were alluded to by Alai, above. Unfortunately, to do so now would be to increase editors' confusion even more. Grutness... wha? 00:02, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
I'll reply to a few objections here :
I do not advocate nuking stub categorization as long as no viable solution exists regarding category browsing, for that matter I do not advocate nuking stub categorization at all, only to keep stub tagging and categorization separate, meaning that categorization efforts would not be duplicated. It would make little difference to an editor looking for stubs to expand (though they would surely benefit from browsing stubs through full blown categorization).
I also wanted to leave the "how" aside, as the intersection proposal is not necessarily the only one or best one (it would be possible to replace categories with a more simple system of keywords, and/or implement data mining schemes, or make rating of articles an attribute for instance), it is one possibility however, that's workable. I realize it may be too early, the proposal being based on a feature that does not exist yet, but then again, discussing future directions is what proposals are for. Equendil Talk 17:09, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
The proposal was supported by Equendil, Pseudomonas, NVO, Kleinzach, David Fuchs, and jc37. (It was only opposed by Grutness and Alai.)
The consensus was in favour of the proposal. -- Klein zach 07:34, 21 October 2008 (UTC)
The idea for this proposal came to me while at Talk:Sandwich. An argument over there was about if a sandwich required leavened bread to be classified as such. This struck me as very odd, as I know that a sanwich is a bit of food between to bits of bread. Even a (wise) proposal by an un-involved user was ignored. This got me thinking about a new guideline: Wikipedia: Common Sense. Here's my (rough) draft:
Wikipedia:Common Sense
Sometimes users can cite policies so much down the slightest wording, that it causes uneeded argument.
E.G. This article states that "milk is milk". It does not cite a reliable source that states that milk is milk. -Mr.Verifiability
These arguments an become long, tedious, and, due to stuborness on both sides, are very diffcult to resolve. The solution is to use common sense.
E.G. Because it is a generally accepted fact that milk is indeed milk as evidenced by the name, among other thing, and there has been no known soures stating that milk is not milk, the article should state that milk is milk. -Mr.CommonSense
This does not mean that all, or even most facts can go uncited. It simply means that basic facts, supported by common sense, do not need to be cited.
There it is.
[[User:Tutthoth-Ankhre|Tutthoth-Ankhre~ The Pharaoh of the Universe]] (
talk) 19:12, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Support
Oppose
Commenting
The example is pretty poor. "Milk is milk" would never be written in an article.. it's somewhat demeaning to our readers to suggest that they might not know that A ≡ A. However, let's suppose an article said that "Milk is an opaque white liquid produced by the mammary glands of female mammals". Maybe everybody knows that, and maybe we don't need to cite our sources for that "common knowledge". However, what is hurt by citing it? It's a low priority, but if somebody finds a source, then there's no reason not to include it. By the same token, it would be a little silly to remove such a statement from an article. And for those nitpickers who need a policy for everything, I think "mathematical truisms", and "common knowledge" are listed as exempt from citation anyway.
Now, if we had a Wikipedia:No, you don't need to propose a policy for that! policy, then we'd be talking... — Werdna • talk 00:32, 16 October 2008 (UTC)