This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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The current article assessment scheme lumps length, completeness, and quality together. However, there are some very short articles which are quite complete, either because the topic is very narrow or because very little reliable information can be found (eg. Choco Taco). Such articles are often assessed as stub- or start- class because of their length, an assessment which implies nothing about completeness or quality. However, stub- and start- assessments are often used to indicate the quality and completeness of articles which do have significant room for improvement. Because of limitations on scope and sources, not all articles have the capacity to become FAs, but it would be helpful if quality and completeness were assessed separately from length, so a reader or editor can know if an article is the kind of stub that is incomplete or of poor writing quality or sourcing, or the kind that isn't likely to ever be more than a stub. — Swpb talk . edits 17:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
In general, I would say that FA's and GA's are good. Beyond that, ratings seem to be rather arbitrary; and just because an article is not rated GA or FA does not mean that it is not very good (so I agree with others above on that point). Ante lan talk 05:54, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I couldn't find a style guideline on providing examples in articles.
Is there one?
If not, we need one. Wikipedia:Examples - shortcut: WP:EX
Images presented as examples abound on Wikipedia.
As for examples presented in text form, the phrase "For example" came up in a Google-specific search of Wikipedia 137,000 times! "Some examples" turned up 7,400 times, and "Examples include" came up 7,000 times. "E.g." showed up 101,000 times.
The closest thing to a guideline I could find was an essay stub called Wikipedia:Give examples.
The featured article Hoysala architecture includes a list of "some famous" and "notable" examples.
For an article that is filled entirely with examples, see Examples of groups, an expansion page of Group (mathematics).
For a treatment of examples in the real world, see List of mathematical examples.
Policies trump guidelines, and the relevant guideline here would be WP:NPOV. The mere selection of an example has been argued by some to be POV. I tried to include an embedded list of some geographers as examples of participants in the field over at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates, and it was opposed on the grounds that examples were inherently POV. Yet the same article had an image in almost every section which posed as an example of a topic from the respective section, the images selected in precisely the same way as the geographer links, and nobody objected to the pics.
My guess is that, in addition to a style guideline on examples, an exception or clarification to WP:NPOV would need to be made to accomodate the presentation of examples.
I look forward to reading your thoughts on this matter: What should the guideline on including examples in an article say?
The Transhumanist 07:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
It might be useful to give an indication of a curse word introduced in an edit in the watchlists. The curse word could be drawn from a list. This would invite people on vandal patrol to look more closely.
Also, vandals can sometimes get away with murder by making 2 or 3 or 4 edits in a row, and so that to revert their actions, one has to roll back several edits. Providing tools that alert one to this problem, or to make this sort of revert of multiple edits would be very handy.-- Filll 22:14, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation - let's try and come to a consensus either way on what we want to do about this. Ryan Postlethwaite 01:44, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
It should be possible to access the history of individual sections of a page. This would save considerable search time!
The best way to do this would be to have the page history sortable or filterable to show just the changes made to a section. This might miss the creation of a section for those cases where people add a new section to the last one (instead of using the + symbol), or edit the whole page instead of a section, but it would give a reasonable history for a section. Carcharoth 12:36, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
With m:Edit Wikipedia Week coming up, I was thinking about how confusing Wikipedia is for newbies. There really is no clear short path for getting started editing. No newbie wants to read pages of crap; they want to start editing. No newbie wants to try to go to the community portal to find tutorials etc. The help pages and the community page are terrible for new users. For example, Wikipedia:New contributors' help page and other assorted help for new users should be at the top of the help page and prominent.
Also, most of the welcome pages I have seen are not very helpful for new users. Is there a better welcome page that can be placed on newbie pages? Maybe we can designate a certain welcome page as an official Wikipedia Week welcome page.-- Filll 14:19, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
I was taking a look at the Flagged Revisions proposal and found the link to m:Wikiquality. Is the "Revision tagging" section accurate? Has the beta testing period ended without any scalability/security concerns? If so then I think we should start a new widely advertised discussion about if we are going to use Flagged Revisions and how we will configure it. Fun Pika 23:34, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Sign up, one and all. Marskell 14:22, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
I've got an idea for the Section bar. Usually it says just "Edit", but I thought it might help if the section bar had "Edit", "History" and "Watch" like an article does. It would help navigation, because on longer pages, instead of having to scroll allllll the way down to the section you want, you could just have it on your watchlist so it'd be right there when you need it. And as for "History", instead of having to weed out one revision from thousands, you could just see the history of the section you're working on. That would help because you could see any prior vandalism. Just an idea. Best, -- Gp75motorsports 23:11, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Yes, there are lots of ways to break it that I didn't list, though their occurences are rare. However I accept it probably wouldn't be good enough for an official watchlist feature, but I don't see why it can't be used on article histories. Of course it can be done easily with javascript, but then you have to load a longer list in the history page in the first place before filtering it. -- DatRoot 13:31, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
The main site is pretty difficult to navigate on the iPhone screen--an iPhone optimized site would be incredible.
I do not understand the template instructions for Template:RfCpolicy. I have asked for help there but have received none. This is what I am trying to add to Talk:J. Vernon McGee - the following template:
{{RFCpolicy | section=RfC:Should articles be verified and referenced !! reason=Editor removes tags without fixing the problem, as if [[WP:OWN]] !! time=~~~~}}
I have been trying for almost two hours now. I cannot understand what I am doing wrong. It shows up on the talk page but not on the RfC list Thanks! -- Mattisse 17:15, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
On pages where there is a whole article covering it in depth e.g. see 'main article' or 'see also' editors usually write a brief paragraph on it, but editing the sub-article doesn't update any sections that link to it and the info may get out of kilter. My suggestion is a template/special link that inserts the lead of the sub article into the main page - thus articles would be consistent with their sub articles.
Flaws I can think of are; that an editor would have to go to the subpage to edit the text found on a page, may have to be jigged for release versions (have to store the text from the subpage intro with the main) and tailoring to fit with rest of the article, but I think the removal of redundant editing and increased accuracy would more than make up for this, any ideas? Leevanjackson 12:03, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
On many important articles, there are one or more sections that branch into related "child" articles, typically using the {{ main}} template. In these sections there is a summary of the child article, usually two or three paragraphs. For example, in the Minnesota article, there are twelve child articles corresponding to various sections (e.g. Geology of Minnesota, History of Minnesota, Climate of Minnesota, etc.). The problem is that the child article and its corresponding summary paragraph in the parent article are not always updated together, so inconsistencies may arise from time to time. Also, people tend to add to the summary instead of the child article, so the summary text grows while the child article does not. I propose that the summary text be moved from the parent article to the child article and put inside <includeonly> tags, and the whole text of the article itself be put inside <noinclude> tags. Then, in the parent article, instead of having actual text, the parent article will just transclude the child article.
For example, in the Minnesota article, we would change this:
== Geology of Minnesota == {{main|Geology of Minnesota}} Minnesota contains some of the oldest rocks found on earth, ... ... ... (six paragraphs of summary text)to this:
== Geology of Minnesota == {{:Geology of Minnesota}}And the Geology of Minnesota article would be changed to this: <includeonly>Minnesota contains some of the oldest rocks found on earth, ... ... ... (six paragraphs of summary text)</includeonly> <noinclude>(full Geology of Minnesota text)<noinclude>
- Advantages
- Summary of child article is now fully visible to editors of the child article (and vice versa), so it will be easier to keep them in sync.
- People interested in the child article but not the parent article don't need to keep the parent article on their watchlist.
- People not interested in some sections of the parent article won't be bothered by changes made to those sections because they didn't add the child articles to their watchlist.
- Child article summary can be transcluded to multiple parent articles. For example, Geology of Minnesota could appear in both the Minnesota article and a new "Geology of U.S. States" article.
- Disadvantages
- Much more difficult for new editors to figure out how to edit summary sections in the parent article, since the text is now actually in the child article.
- People interested in the entire parent article will need to manually add all of the child articles to their watchlist.
- Transclusion of numerous child articles in the parent article may increase server overhead.
Thoughts? — Jonathan Kovaciny ([[User talk:Jonathan Kovaciny|talk]]| contribs) 15:16, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Thoughts
This looks like an attempt to workaround the lack of mw:Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion. Doing this on articles would be a bad idea for technical reasons at present due to the template limits; I like the idea from a non-technical point of view, though. -- ais523 15:53, 1 November 2007 ( U T C)
- If the includeonly tags are left out the lead section of the child article could be used as the summary in the parent article. An undesirable effect would be the bolding of the selflink to the parent article.-- Patrick 17:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
- Creating summaries of each child article (or each article period) would be a massive, but perhaps useful, change to Wikipedia. The parent/child distinction breaks down, though because the organization structure is a web, not a tree. An article may be the child of more than one parent, in which case the summary in each parent article would necessarily be different because it has to be relevant to the parent. The mini-summary would be useful for all kinds of purposes, though. What would the relationship be to the lead? In general, because of this forking problem, I think summarizing articles within other articles should be discouraged. That's what hyperlinks are for. The forking of content is actually a huge organizational problem around here. If you're lucky the child article at least has a hyperlink to every place the subject is discussed. In practice, a thing may be talked about in many articles that don't even link to each other. Wikidemo 20:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
- The problem is that a lead section for a child article has to presume that the reader knows nothing about the subject - so, for example, the Geology of Minnesota article begins "The geology of Minnesota is the study of the rock, minerals, and soils of the U.S. state of Minnesota, including their formation, development, distribution, and condition." Putting the words "the U.S. state of Minnesota" into a section of the article "Minnesota" makes no sense. In short, you can't use exactly the same text for the lead section of a child article and a section of a parent article.
- For what it's worth, the {{ sync}} template, designed to point out where significant divergence exists, seems underused. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:25, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
–Copy-n-pasted by — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 14:32, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
There is currently a proposal at Template talk:Cite web#Automatic date wikilinking to tweak Template:cite web for automatic date wikilinking. Any thoughts? — Remember the dot ( talk) 03:21, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia started out as an encyclopedia six years ago, but nowadays it's much more than that: we're quickly becoming one of the leading news portals in the world. See for instance the Virginia Tech shootings. This will be no different at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. For the past few weeks, I've had something on my mind wrt the upcoming Olympics, and I am looking for community input, to see how others think about this. I want to raise the idea of putting a box specifically about the 2008 Summer Olympics on the Main Page. In what I had in mind, it would contain all the latest results, upcoming events and other news. That way we can provide people with the information they might be looking for, while reducing the load this might put on ITN. The best location for this would be right above or right below Today's Featured Picture, in a similar size and format. If it helps the discussion, I can create a lorem ipsum in my userspace. A ecis Brievenbus 20:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a great idea. Pretty much everything that happens in the Olympics will be documented on Wikipedia. Maintaining extremely up-to-date statistics and information gathered from international sources is what Wikipedia does best. People will be coming here for information about the Olympics, so we should definitely try to provide this information on the Main Page. --- RockMFR 23:40, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
I've created a draft version at User:Aecis/Olympic sandbox, to give you an impression of what I had in mind. It uses the results of the 2004 Summer Olympics, in a completely random order. The formatting is all over the place, but you gotta start somewhere. The page shows three sections. The first, Latest news, is similar to ITN, and contains all the news that might be included on ITN. This would reduce the load on ITN, giving us the opportunity to present non-Olympic news there. The second sections contains the latest results. The number of results shows would obviously have to be decided by consensus, but four is probably ideal for the browser size. The third section contains all of the day's events, and could work like the Template:POTD protected on the Main Page, using CURRENTYEAR, CURRENTMONTH and CURRENTDAY2. When a final listed in the Today's finals section has finished and the Olympic champion is known, it can be removed and moved to the Latest results section. Example: Povetkin defeats Aly in the final of the men's super heavyweight boxing. It will be put on first place in the Latest result, pushing athletics to second place, table tennis to third and basketball to fourth, and pushing rowing off the Main Page. A ecis Brievenbus 20:17, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Would a Portal:2008 Summer Olympics be better suited for presenting this kind of information? And if so, would a link to the Portal from the Main Page for the duration of the Games address some of the concerns raised above? A ecis Brievenbus 20:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
The Olympics don't deserve to be covered on the main page to any greater extent than any other current event. It would be undue weight to give them their own section while they were going on. Atropos 03:26, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
In view of the above discussion, there appears to be no consensus for putting a box about the 2008 Summer Olympics on the Main Page. I withdraw that proposal/suggestion. However, there appears to be some support for creating a Portal about the 2008 Summer Olympics, and putting a link to that Portal on the Main Page. I want to bring that specific suggestion up for discussion again. A ecis Brievenbus 14:41, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the right place to voice this or not, but I think there should be a "reading list" section in your personal pages that users could add pages to so that they can come back and read them at a later time. I am constantly opening other articles from links in the text of pages I'm reading until I have somewhat like 20 tabs open in one Firefox window. Ultimately, I end up with four or so such windows, and I go to great lengths to avoid closing Firefox so that I don't lose them. The problem is that I don't have enough time in one sitting to read all of the articles that catch my interest--especially when I'm already doing research for some project. I have to imagine that I'm not alone in this, and I wish there were a list like the wishlist on Amazon.com (and similar sites)--one that didn't watch for changes, but simply held a list of pages for later reference. I don't know much about the Wikipedia community--I spend enough time reading the articles; if I started editing them, I'd probably never stop. But if you agree with me and you know how to bring this suggestion to the Wikipowers-that-be, lend a hand to a fellow Wikipedia addict.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Sleepisplayedout ( talk • contribs)
my proposal is soft edit blocks of every article that is on the main page for 24 hours, as to curb a heavy amount of vandalism. Any one agree? Doc Strange 17:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
Thought it would be a nice idea to make accounts using the WikiMedia Foundations set of web-sites universal. That is, that a user will be able to create an account on Wikipedia and also be able to use the same account on WikiBooks, WikiQuote, etc. Didn't see this on any of the FAQ's and thought I would throw it out there.
It seems to me that a MOS page (or a new section on the Wikipedia:Guide to layout page) is needed for navigation boxes. There seems to be a wide variety of styles, although that is converging somewhat as Template:Navbox is being used more frequently. It might be a good idea to more strongly recommend that meta-template for navboxes. I've also seen several different placement styles — most common is grouped together at the very end of the article, after the references or external links sections, but I've also seen them appear as the content of the "See also" section (instead of a bulleted list), or even stranger, as the content of a main article section (such as Inverness#Areas of the city). Again, I think some MOS guidelines could be beneficial here. Andrwsc 21:34, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
This ProteinBoxBot's plan of use was proposed here and some consensus was formed that that use would require reliable sourcing in the 10,000 articles to be created by it. The implementation appears to not be strictly adhering to that consensus. Please see User talk:ProteinBoxBot#Unreferenced articles are being created and apparently in large numbers.-- Fuhghettaboutit 15:50, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Cross-namespace redirects are generally not allowed, however, an exception for WP: has been created due to its cost vs. benefit of keeping/eliminating it. Somewhat recent changes in the software now allow for there to be namespace aliases. This would eliminate the cross-namespace redirects from (Main) to Wikipedia. The alias would mean that WP: = Wikipedia: , so a page like WP:WS would equal Wikipedia:WS. While most people would probably agree that a total ban or total allowance of cross-namespace redirects is not a good idea, this particular cross-namespace type is one that can be easily fixed by the developers if on-wiki consensus is demonstrable. Please comment below. Cheers. -- MZMcBride 00:22, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
Do you have a link to a bugzilla page (or similar) about this? Tra (Talk) 00:50, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
I just got a little more insight into how this would work. A script would be run be one of the sysadmins (developers) that would move the pages to essentially the "same place", unless there is a conflict, in which the script would move the page to a predefined place where there would be no conflict. In sum, the devs know how to resolve the issues and will do so after implementing the change. Worries regarding breakage should be left to the devs, they only want to know if this change is wanted or not. -- MZMcBride 18:11, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
As mentioned at bugzilla:6313, don't we then need MOS: WT: CAT: P: etc to be included in this fix too? -- Quiddity ( talk) 21:08, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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The current article assessment scheme lumps length, completeness, and quality together. However, there are some very short articles which are quite complete, either because the topic is very narrow or because very little reliable information can be found (eg. Choco Taco). Such articles are often assessed as stub- or start- class because of their length, an assessment which implies nothing about completeness or quality. However, stub- and start- assessments are often used to indicate the quality and completeness of articles which do have significant room for improvement. Because of limitations on scope and sources, not all articles have the capacity to become FAs, but it would be helpful if quality and completeness were assessed separately from length, so a reader or editor can know if an article is the kind of stub that is incomplete or of poor writing quality or sourcing, or the kind that isn't likely to ever be more than a stub. — Swpb talk . edits 17:15, 6 November 2007 (UTC)
In general, I would say that FA's and GA's are good. Beyond that, ratings seem to be rather arbitrary; and just because an article is not rated GA or FA does not mean that it is not very good (so I agree with others above on that point). Ante lan talk 05:54, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I couldn't find a style guideline on providing examples in articles.
Is there one?
If not, we need one. Wikipedia:Examples - shortcut: WP:EX
Images presented as examples abound on Wikipedia.
As for examples presented in text form, the phrase "For example" came up in a Google-specific search of Wikipedia 137,000 times! "Some examples" turned up 7,400 times, and "Examples include" came up 7,000 times. "E.g." showed up 101,000 times.
The closest thing to a guideline I could find was an essay stub called Wikipedia:Give examples.
The featured article Hoysala architecture includes a list of "some famous" and "notable" examples.
For an article that is filled entirely with examples, see Examples of groups, an expansion page of Group (mathematics).
For a treatment of examples in the real world, see List of mathematical examples.
Policies trump guidelines, and the relevant guideline here would be WP:NPOV. The mere selection of an example has been argued by some to be POV. I tried to include an embedded list of some geographers as examples of participants in the field over at Wikipedia:Featured list candidates, and it was opposed on the grounds that examples were inherently POV. Yet the same article had an image in almost every section which posed as an example of a topic from the respective section, the images selected in precisely the same way as the geographer links, and nobody objected to the pics.
My guess is that, in addition to a style guideline on examples, an exception or clarification to WP:NPOV would need to be made to accomodate the presentation of examples.
I look forward to reading your thoughts on this matter: What should the guideline on including examples in an article say?
The Transhumanist 07:30, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
It might be useful to give an indication of a curse word introduced in an edit in the watchlists. The curse word could be drawn from a list. This would invite people on vandal patrol to look more closely.
Also, vandals can sometimes get away with murder by making 2 or 3 or 4 edits in a row, and so that to revert their actions, one has to roll back several edits. Providing tools that alert one to this problem, or to make this sort of revert of multiple edits would be very handy.-- Filll 22:14, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Anon page creation - let's try and come to a consensus either way on what we want to do about this. Ryan Postlethwaite 01:44, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
It should be possible to access the history of individual sections of a page. This would save considerable search time!
The best way to do this would be to have the page history sortable or filterable to show just the changes made to a section. This might miss the creation of a section for those cases where people add a new section to the last one (instead of using the + symbol), or edit the whole page instead of a section, but it would give a reasonable history for a section. Carcharoth 12:36, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
With m:Edit Wikipedia Week coming up, I was thinking about how confusing Wikipedia is for newbies. There really is no clear short path for getting started editing. No newbie wants to read pages of crap; they want to start editing. No newbie wants to try to go to the community portal to find tutorials etc. The help pages and the community page are terrible for new users. For example, Wikipedia:New contributors' help page and other assorted help for new users should be at the top of the help page and prominent.
Also, most of the welcome pages I have seen are not very helpful for new users. Is there a better welcome page that can be placed on newbie pages? Maybe we can designate a certain welcome page as an official Wikipedia Week welcome page.-- Filll 14:19, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
I was taking a look at the Flagged Revisions proposal and found the link to m:Wikiquality. Is the "Revision tagging" section accurate? Has the beta testing period ended without any scalability/security concerns? If so then I think we should start a new widely advertised discussion about if we are going to use Flagged Revisions and how we will configure it. Fun Pika 23:34, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
Sign up, one and all. Marskell 14:22, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
I've got an idea for the Section bar. Usually it says just "Edit", but I thought it might help if the section bar had "Edit", "History" and "Watch" like an article does. It would help navigation, because on longer pages, instead of having to scroll allllll the way down to the section you want, you could just have it on your watchlist so it'd be right there when you need it. And as for "History", instead of having to weed out one revision from thousands, you could just see the history of the section you're working on. That would help because you could see any prior vandalism. Just an idea. Best, -- Gp75motorsports 23:11, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
(unindent) Yes, there are lots of ways to break it that I didn't list, though their occurences are rare. However I accept it probably wouldn't be good enough for an official watchlist feature, but I don't see why it can't be used on article histories. Of course it can be done easily with javascript, but then you have to load a longer list in the history page in the first place before filtering it. -- DatRoot 13:31, 5 November 2007 (UTC)
The main site is pretty difficult to navigate on the iPhone screen--an iPhone optimized site would be incredible.
I do not understand the template instructions for Template:RfCpolicy. I have asked for help there but have received none. This is what I am trying to add to Talk:J. Vernon McGee - the following template:
{{RFCpolicy | section=RfC:Should articles be verified and referenced !! reason=Editor removes tags without fixing the problem, as if [[WP:OWN]] !! time=~~~~}}
I have been trying for almost two hours now. I cannot understand what I am doing wrong. It shows up on the talk page but not on the RfC list Thanks! -- Mattisse 17:15, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
On pages where there is a whole article covering it in depth e.g. see 'main article' or 'see also' editors usually write a brief paragraph on it, but editing the sub-article doesn't update any sections that link to it and the info may get out of kilter. My suggestion is a template/special link that inserts the lead of the sub article into the main page - thus articles would be consistent with their sub articles.
Flaws I can think of are; that an editor would have to go to the subpage to edit the text found on a page, may have to be jigged for release versions (have to store the text from the subpage intro with the main) and tailoring to fit with rest of the article, but I think the removal of redundant editing and increased accuracy would more than make up for this, any ideas? Leevanjackson 12:03, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
On many important articles, there are one or more sections that branch into related "child" articles, typically using the {{ main}} template. In these sections there is a summary of the child article, usually two or three paragraphs. For example, in the Minnesota article, there are twelve child articles corresponding to various sections (e.g. Geology of Minnesota, History of Minnesota, Climate of Minnesota, etc.). The problem is that the child article and its corresponding summary paragraph in the parent article are not always updated together, so inconsistencies may arise from time to time. Also, people tend to add to the summary instead of the child article, so the summary text grows while the child article does not. I propose that the summary text be moved from the parent article to the child article and put inside <includeonly> tags, and the whole text of the article itself be put inside <noinclude> tags. Then, in the parent article, instead of having actual text, the parent article will just transclude the child article.
For example, in the Minnesota article, we would change this:
== Geology of Minnesota == {{main|Geology of Minnesota}} Minnesota contains some of the oldest rocks found on earth, ... ... ... (six paragraphs of summary text)to this:
== Geology of Minnesota == {{:Geology of Minnesota}}And the Geology of Minnesota article would be changed to this: <includeonly>Minnesota contains some of the oldest rocks found on earth, ... ... ... (six paragraphs of summary text)</includeonly> <noinclude>(full Geology of Minnesota text)<noinclude>
- Advantages
- Summary of child article is now fully visible to editors of the child article (and vice versa), so it will be easier to keep them in sync.
- People interested in the child article but not the parent article don't need to keep the parent article on their watchlist.
- People not interested in some sections of the parent article won't be bothered by changes made to those sections because they didn't add the child articles to their watchlist.
- Child article summary can be transcluded to multiple parent articles. For example, Geology of Minnesota could appear in both the Minnesota article and a new "Geology of U.S. States" article.
- Disadvantages
- Much more difficult for new editors to figure out how to edit summary sections in the parent article, since the text is now actually in the child article.
- People interested in the entire parent article will need to manually add all of the child articles to their watchlist.
- Transclusion of numerous child articles in the parent article may increase server overhead.
Thoughts? — Jonathan Kovaciny ([[User talk:Jonathan Kovaciny|talk]]| contribs) 15:16, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
Thoughts
This looks like an attempt to workaround the lack of mw:Extension:Labeled Section Transclusion. Doing this on articles would be a bad idea for technical reasons at present due to the template limits; I like the idea from a non-technical point of view, though. -- ais523 15:53, 1 November 2007 ( U T C)
- If the includeonly tags are left out the lead section of the child article could be used as the summary in the parent article. An undesirable effect would be the bolding of the selflink to the parent article.-- Patrick 17:40, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
- Creating summaries of each child article (or each article period) would be a massive, but perhaps useful, change to Wikipedia. The parent/child distinction breaks down, though because the organization structure is a web, not a tree. An article may be the child of more than one parent, in which case the summary in each parent article would necessarily be different because it has to be relevant to the parent. The mini-summary would be useful for all kinds of purposes, though. What would the relationship be to the lead? In general, because of this forking problem, I think summarizing articles within other articles should be discouraged. That's what hyperlinks are for. The forking of content is actually a huge organizational problem around here. If you're lucky the child article at least has a hyperlink to every place the subject is discussed. In practice, a thing may be talked about in many articles that don't even link to each other. Wikidemo 20:37, 1 November 2007 (UTC)
- The problem is that a lead section for a child article has to presume that the reader knows nothing about the subject - so, for example, the Geology of Minnesota article begins "The geology of Minnesota is the study of the rock, minerals, and soils of the U.S. state of Minnesota, including their formation, development, distribution, and condition." Putting the words "the U.S. state of Minnesota" into a section of the article "Minnesota" makes no sense. In short, you can't use exactly the same text for the lead section of a child article and a section of a parent article.
- For what it's worth, the {{ sync}} template, designed to point out where significant divergence exists, seems underused. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 00:25, 4 November 2007 (UTC)
–Copy-n-pasted by — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 14:32, 12 November 2007 (UTC)
There is currently a proposal at Template talk:Cite web#Automatic date wikilinking to tweak Template:cite web for automatic date wikilinking. Any thoughts? — Remember the dot ( talk) 03:21, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia started out as an encyclopedia six years ago, but nowadays it's much more than that: we're quickly becoming one of the leading news portals in the world. See for instance the Virginia Tech shootings. This will be no different at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. For the past few weeks, I've had something on my mind wrt the upcoming Olympics, and I am looking for community input, to see how others think about this. I want to raise the idea of putting a box specifically about the 2008 Summer Olympics on the Main Page. In what I had in mind, it would contain all the latest results, upcoming events and other news. That way we can provide people with the information they might be looking for, while reducing the load this might put on ITN. The best location for this would be right above or right below Today's Featured Picture, in a similar size and format. If it helps the discussion, I can create a lorem ipsum in my userspace. A ecis Brievenbus 20:13, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a great idea. Pretty much everything that happens in the Olympics will be documented on Wikipedia. Maintaining extremely up-to-date statistics and information gathered from international sources is what Wikipedia does best. People will be coming here for information about the Olympics, so we should definitely try to provide this information on the Main Page. --- RockMFR 23:40, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
I've created a draft version at User:Aecis/Olympic sandbox, to give you an impression of what I had in mind. It uses the results of the 2004 Summer Olympics, in a completely random order. The formatting is all over the place, but you gotta start somewhere. The page shows three sections. The first, Latest news, is similar to ITN, and contains all the news that might be included on ITN. This would reduce the load on ITN, giving us the opportunity to present non-Olympic news there. The second sections contains the latest results. The number of results shows would obviously have to be decided by consensus, but four is probably ideal for the browser size. The third section contains all of the day's events, and could work like the Template:POTD protected on the Main Page, using CURRENTYEAR, CURRENTMONTH and CURRENTDAY2. When a final listed in the Today's finals section has finished and the Olympic champion is known, it can be removed and moved to the Latest results section. Example: Povetkin defeats Aly in the final of the men's super heavyweight boxing. It will be put on first place in the Latest result, pushing athletics to second place, table tennis to third and basketball to fourth, and pushing rowing off the Main Page. A ecis Brievenbus 20:17, 24 October 2007 (UTC)
Would a Portal:2008 Summer Olympics be better suited for presenting this kind of information? And if so, would a link to the Portal from the Main Page for the duration of the Games address some of the concerns raised above? A ecis Brievenbus 20:53, 25 October 2007 (UTC)
The Olympics don't deserve to be covered on the main page to any greater extent than any other current event. It would be undue weight to give them their own section while they were going on. Atropos 03:26, 26 October 2007 (UTC)
In view of the above discussion, there appears to be no consensus for putting a box about the 2008 Summer Olympics on the Main Page. I withdraw that proposal/suggestion. However, there appears to be some support for creating a Portal about the 2008 Summer Olympics, and putting a link to that Portal on the Main Page. I want to bring that specific suggestion up for discussion again. A ecis Brievenbus 14:41, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
I don't know if this is the right place to voice this or not, but I think there should be a "reading list" section in your personal pages that users could add pages to so that they can come back and read them at a later time. I am constantly opening other articles from links in the text of pages I'm reading until I have somewhat like 20 tabs open in one Firefox window. Ultimately, I end up with four or so such windows, and I go to great lengths to avoid closing Firefox so that I don't lose them. The problem is that I don't have enough time in one sitting to read all of the articles that catch my interest--especially when I'm already doing research for some project. I have to imagine that I'm not alone in this, and I wish there were a list like the wishlist on Amazon.com (and similar sites)--one that didn't watch for changes, but simply held a list of pages for later reference. I don't know much about the Wikipedia community--I spend enough time reading the articles; if I started editing them, I'd probably never stop. But if you agree with me and you know how to bring this suggestion to the Wikipowers-that-be, lend a hand to a fellow Wikipedia addict.—Preceding unsigned comment added by Sleepisplayedout ( talk • contribs)
my proposal is soft edit blocks of every article that is on the main page for 24 hours, as to curb a heavy amount of vandalism. Any one agree? Doc Strange 17:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
Thought it would be a nice idea to make accounts using the WikiMedia Foundations set of web-sites universal. That is, that a user will be able to create an account on Wikipedia and also be able to use the same account on WikiBooks, WikiQuote, etc. Didn't see this on any of the FAQ's and thought I would throw it out there.
It seems to me that a MOS page (or a new section on the Wikipedia:Guide to layout page) is needed for navigation boxes. There seems to be a wide variety of styles, although that is converging somewhat as Template:Navbox is being used more frequently. It might be a good idea to more strongly recommend that meta-template for navboxes. I've also seen several different placement styles — most common is grouped together at the very end of the article, after the references or external links sections, but I've also seen them appear as the content of the "See also" section (instead of a bulleted list), or even stranger, as the content of a main article section (such as Inverness#Areas of the city). Again, I think some MOS guidelines could be beneficial here. Andrwsc 21:34, 14 November 2007 (UTC)
This ProteinBoxBot's plan of use was proposed here and some consensus was formed that that use would require reliable sourcing in the 10,000 articles to be created by it. The implementation appears to not be strictly adhering to that consensus. Please see User talk:ProteinBoxBot#Unreferenced articles are being created and apparently in large numbers.-- Fuhghettaboutit 15:50, 10 November 2007 (UTC)
Cross-namespace redirects are generally not allowed, however, an exception for WP: has been created due to its cost vs. benefit of keeping/eliminating it. Somewhat recent changes in the software now allow for there to be namespace aliases. This would eliminate the cross-namespace redirects from (Main) to Wikipedia. The alias would mean that WP: = Wikipedia: , so a page like WP:WS would equal Wikipedia:WS. While most people would probably agree that a total ban or total allowance of cross-namespace redirects is not a good idea, this particular cross-namespace type is one that can be easily fixed by the developers if on-wiki consensus is demonstrable. Please comment below. Cheers. -- MZMcBride 00:22, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
Do you have a link to a bugzilla page (or similar) about this? Tra (Talk) 00:50, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
I just got a little more insight into how this would work. A script would be run be one of the sysadmins (developers) that would move the pages to essentially the "same place", unless there is a conflict, in which the script would move the page to a predefined place where there would be no conflict. In sum, the devs know how to resolve the issues and will do so after implementing the change. Worries regarding breakage should be left to the devs, they only want to know if this change is wanted or not. -- MZMcBride 18:11, 11 November 2007 (UTC)
As mentioned at bugzilla:6313, don't we then need MOS: WT: CAT: P: etc to be included in this fix too? -- Quiddity ( talk) 21:08, 12 November 2007 (UTC)