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Our current main page layout is plain and boring. It hasn't been updated in years. I think we should have some kind of "customer satisfaction" survey about the main page. The 2008 redesign proposal was blown off, maybe it's time we tried again? I think it could use a re-do to make it look more modern. iMatthew talk at 19:48, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
In the recent usability study, infoboxes consistently tripped new editors up.
I think we can get around this: Instead of the long, lengthy infobox code that currently dominates our articles, why not instead simply transclude Article/Infobox, which would contain the complicated code currently kept in the article? With a small amount of extra coding, Article/Infobox could be automatically watchlisted alongside Article, just like Talk:Article is.
Thoughts? Shoemaker's Holiday Over 184 FCs served 12:15, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
An alternate solution is to use templates that start with "Infobox/", such as {{ Infobox/Shark}}. This is more flexible in terms of naming. Non-free images have to be wrapped in includeonly, but that isn't much of a problem. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:24, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
There is one practical caution against this , and that is the situation with references. References in infoboxes are often not the unique use of the reference, and thus it requires a lot more work to coordinate this between infobox and article body if they are separated. -- MASEM ( t) 13:57, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
As I see it, advantages to this proposal are:
And disadvantages:
IMO, this is another of those usability-spawned proposals where anything we can do here now is likely to be premature and unlikely to be particularly successful. The solution most likely to be actually usable requires rather large changes to MediaWiki, to basically change editing from one big text field to multiple text fields (e.g. "header", "main body", "references", "metadata (categories)", and so on). Anomie ⚔ 14:40, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps we could put the infobox into a section called "data", and then find some way to have it up in the top right (javascript?). I've often thought that if we want to be correct about article layout in terms of html and all that (eg. with stylesheets removed), that's a horrible place for the infobox. If you have your CSS off, it basically takes up the entire top of the page, when it's clear that our articles should begin with "An infobox is a table of data about a certain subject...", and not a bunch of random data. M 20:33, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
What about creating a separate Infobox: namespace? — Ruud 18:51, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
It might be good if the infobox code could be moved to the end rather than the start of the wikitext. But I'd be anti any scheme to put the infobox on a separate page and transclude it. That would just increase user confusion, hamper editing, force you to watch two pages instead of one, create additional search complications, and generally cause a lot of trouble just to "solve" what isn't exactly a major problem anyway...-- Kotniski ( talk) 09:19, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
I think the only real workable solution is to treat certain templates like the ToC, and create magic words that can be put into base text that will locate the specific template top-right (or top-center or whatever). Perhaps this could be even further expanded to cover navboxes or other templates: bottom of the page, top-right of Section 3 (for review templates, like at New Super Mario Bros.#Reception). Then we could put all or a lot of infobox/template code at the bottom of articles, where people won't mind them. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 02:05, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
I was sure that this existed, but when I went to cite it, realized that it doesn't. I had understood the particular warnings on the various noticeboards (AN, ANI, WQA, SPA, etc.) that one should notify an editor whose conduct is being reported to be manifestations of a deeper policy, or at least community norm, of notification. Viz. that as a matter of wikiquette if nothing else, if you are trying to get someone into hot water, you should notify that person so that they have basic due process (notice and opportunity to be heard). Whether you are asking for sanctions against someone at ANI or on an admin's talk page, or anywhere else, you should let that person know.
Is my understanding correct, that there is a broad community norm of notification? Is this reflected in any existing policy? If the answer to 1 is yes and to 2 is no, how do I go about proposing such a policy? Do I just create WP:NOTIFY and slap the "proposed" tag on it?- Simon Dodd { U· T· C· WP:LAW } 20:52, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
Also, see Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines for information on how to go about proposing new policies. -- œ ™ 23:36, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm reading the RFA of 7. One of the points of discussion is an incident where someone used(hacked) a prior account.
It may be that polices are in place to ensure this cannot happen again, but I don't get that impression from the discussion. As I understand it, if you decide you want a new user name, you abandon your old one, which can be taken over by someone else. To avoid that, it is recommended (but not required) that you re-register the old name and redirect it to your new name. In fact 7 tried to do this but was tripped up by an understandable rule, prohibiting the creation of a new name substantially similar to an old one.
Now I move into speculation - I speculate than an ordinary editor cannot create a name in this circumstance, but someone with more rights, perhaps an admin, could create the account. I don't know whether that happened in this case, but it seems plausible it could happen sometime.
Why not make the suggested policy mandatory, and implement it in software? If a user desires a new user name, and the request is granted, why not make the creation of the new name (presumably requiring more than editor rights in order to move the history over) simultaneously re-register, or maintain the registration of the old name with an automatic re-direct to the new name, possibly also adding something to make sure someone couldn't use the old name to do anything else, (i.e. the old name is not allowed any rights).
As I learn more about the twists and turns of the software, I realize there are something that sounds easy but turn out to be more difficult than they sound, but I would think this is possible. I assume when a user requests a new name, we would never want the old name being used ever again, neither for a new user (who would be confused with the prior owner) or the old user, who would then have multiple accounts. (I'm aware that multiple accounts are allowed, but this isn't the way to accomplish that.)
I haven't made this a formal proposal, because I'd like to hear from some more experienced users, who might tell me that it already works this way, and I just missed the announcement, or that it is impossible as stated for reasons I'm not following. After feedback, if there's anything to this idea, I'll try to write it up as a formal proposal.-- SPhilbrick T 23:06, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
I'd like to make it possible to import edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia and Meta to the English Wikipedia. The Nostalgia Wikipedia is a copy of the Wikipedia database from 20 December 2001 which contains several edits which aren't in our database but probably should be. For example, compare the first edit of the saint article on the English Wikipedia with the history of the saint article in the Nostalgia Wikipedia. Meta was originally a place for discussion of Wikipedia policies, and some pages were moved from Meta to here by cut and paste, like our blocking policy.
I specialise in history merging old edits (see my user subpage about page history), and I'd find it useful to be able to import old edits from the Nostalgia wiki and Meta. Should this ability be given to admins as they request it, or to *all* admins?
If this discussion results in the ability to import pages, I'll refer it to this page on meta. I don't think that what I want to do (i.e. import edits to fill out page histories) is at all controversial, but the ability to import edits could be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I think it should be restricted in some way. Graham 87 15:10, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
This is a very good idea. I personally cannot see any issues with people wanting import right - and I've seen Graham87 doing complex history merges before so I know he would use the rights appropriately. Can import be granted, or do settings have to be changed for it to be possible to import from certain places? Majorly talk 18:26, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion on Template_talk:Asbox#Microformats_in_stubs, about wether or not it is desirable to add microformats to stub templates. This would add special markup to for instance {{ Ghana-stub}}, that makes it possible for a microformat understanding system to detect that "Ghana" means a place called Ghana for instance. The arguments pro are: does no harm, adds machine readable context. The arguments against are: adds extra complexity to stub templates, and stubs are not part of the "proper" article content, as well as "all these locations will get their microformat trough infoboxes in the future, why do the work twice". New insights are welcomed. — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 19:58, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
I understand and support the principle of Bold, but that guideline emphasizes editing existing articles, not creating a brand-new article from scratch with zero experience. While our guideline to writing one's first article mentions starting in user space, it is often ignored. New users are coming to Wikipedia, thinking they can create a brand-new article in mainspace and see it survive. I think the experience of pouring time and effort into an article in good faith, then seeing it disappear through CSD or AfD must be discouraging to people who might otherwise turn into fine editors. We do a disservice to potential new editors by not being clearer about the best way to write an article form scratch.
I have a simple solution.
Whenever a new person creates an account, I'd like to see the account prepopulated with a user subpage - call it user:Newname/My First Article
Populate it with some useful advice(e.g. "when you think this is ready, here's how to ask for editor review", and "here's how to move it to mainspace").
Automatically include a Notes section with {{reflist}}, as the creation of references trips up many new editors. I'm sure others can add to what would be a good new article template.
My guess is that a new editor who creates an article in user space, asks for editor review before moving, and then moves into mainspace will be much more likely to avoid CSD or Afd - probably by a factor of ten.
I see this as a major gain for a relatively small cost.-- SPhilbrick T 16:59, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure that a new user would be able to know or even care if that subpage exists; the normal welcome page could just have option to create it, with appropriate text preloaded, i.e. :
- Steve Sanbeg ( talk) 19:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
With almost 3 million articles in the English Wikipedia, I wish that there was a site notice asking contributors/the public to upload their pictures with a free license to Commons. I think this is better than the site notice we have, currently. miranda 02:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
Just a thought but there should be an option for a less intrusive way to notify editors of new talk page messages, either by a selection in "preferences" or by a gadget. My suggestion (at least on the monobook skin) would be for "my talk" to be highlighted. Thoughts? -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 22:15, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
/* This section */
bit, others aren't made notice of. Some people edit multiple sections, others add their comments to the lead. So yeh, some serious clever parsing or a bit ol' PHP rewrite. It would be handy though, especially for long user talk pages.
Greg Tyler (
t •
c)
21:47, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
My propose is to use template en:Template:Iwiki-conflict for all pages involved in intewiki conflicts. More details you can find at page m:Interwiki synchronization and in template documentation. Also users who contributes in other language sections of Wikipedia can create translated analogues of template in those languages. If we will have similar templates in all languages we will be able to use bot to add template to all involved pages automatically. What do you think about this idea? DixonD ( talk) 20:41, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
Have you seen Template:Interwikiconflict? — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 14:04, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
I was working on a proposal, but see it is largely a variation of Wikipedia:Deferred revisions and Wikipedia:Delayed revisions. Two questions:
As a follow-up to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_44#Double_redirects, I posted a note at Wikipedia talk:Double redirects#Many double redirects are good. — Sebastian 00:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
August 24, 2009
Good Day Everyone at Wikipedia,
I´m sure you are used to getting congratulations from people all over the planet, and in many languages by now. Mine is adding another one to your collection for a job that is very well done and keeps on growing for the benefit of all mankind. In this regard, I wish to extend my best wishes to Jimmy Wales and to the entire team at Wikipedia.
I also have one or two suggestions to put forward for consideration.
The first one would be to add another portal to the list. Why not have a portal named say, Business and Economics. The portal would include such topics as accounting, bookkeeping, credit including defaulting/delinquency and bankruptcy, economics, finance, insurance, investments, mortgage and personal lending (could form part of credit or simply addressed separately), project management, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, risk management, statistics, and other related topics.
How would I initiate the separate portal one would ask? To begin with, I would classify each article listed in the 3 million plus articles currently in English, and show the classification next to the article name as a cross-reference. Example: Cat - Portal: Natural & Physical Sciences, sub category Biological Science. By classifying all articles, beginning with the English language, all articles that would be classified as part of the Business and Economics portal and the connecting sub categories would be appropriately identified, indexed and included in the new portal. Example: Balance Sheet – Portal: Business & Economics, sub category Accounting.
Accordingly, and in time, the new Business & Economics portal would not only be a comprehensive source of information for reference, but a self-teaching tool and guide on any subject that could otherwise be learned in school, university and of course applied in a real life environment. I believe that the separate portal approach could foster increased learning. For instance, someone accessing the Business and Economics portal directly may learn interesting and useful information that otherwise the person may not have been aware of from the main site.
In conjunction with Mr. Wales´s philosophy of capturing the sum of human knowledge in print form for easy reference by everyone, I believe the effective use of this information is to depict it as a self-teaching and tutorial guide so that people can not only inform themselves (passive approach), but also use this information for personal benefit and furthering human progress (creative, progressive and constructive approach).
Yours truly,
Charles Roy
Hello, I am a long time Wikipedia user, although I just signed up for an account today in order to post this message :p. I've noticed that when I'm reading an article, I often click on one or more of the links on the page to read about a related topic, or for more detail on a related concept, etc. More often than not however, I will click on a link only to explain or further my understanding of a concept that I'm reading about, or for a definition of a specific word, so I click on the link, do a brief read of the connected article, then go back and continue reading.
So, my proposal is that when you hover over a link in an article, a cursor pop up displays a condensed/summary entry of that related article, or a short definition of a word (if appropriate). Now I understand that this would take some time to implement, as summary entries would have to be created for pretty much every article, however I really think there are benefits to readability and comprehension of articles. Really the summary would just have enough info to give someone a rough idea of the concept or main idea of the related article, or a short definition of a word.
Anyone feel like this would be a useful change to implement on Wiki?
Thanks for your feedback.
Hey great! thanks for the heads up.
Something I've encountered from time to time is what appears to be bureaucracy for its own sake at AIV. Depending on which admin sees a report (not necessarily mine, but anyone's) a blatant vandal-only account may be blocked, or the block request may be declined because the person "hasn't been warned enough or has been incorrectly warned". Apparently, you have to go in order from Test1 through test4 before they can be blocked.
I don't understand the value in giving 4 warnings to people who are obviously here to play games by creating new articles of patent nonsense or spam about their bands, then continually recreating them after they've been speedied multiple times. 90% of them are bored kids who know exactly what they're doing is wrong. The other 10% are pretty obvious to anyone who is not a total blockhead, and can be helped along.
AGF and welcoming new editors should not be a suicide pact. Obvious trolls who are reported at AIV should just be blocked, without having to go through the process of placing 4 warnings (that will just be ignored), reverting more vandalism and tagging more garbage pages for speedy, before someone is willing to block them. Come on, we're not vogons! <>Multi-Xfer<> ( talk) 00:46, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
I guess my question is, if there is a pattern that [some] administrators will only require three warnings... why do we have four? I think the points the OP makes are correct to make in some ways; he makes the point that it is bureaucratic to say "we require four, because that's how many warnings there are"... --
Izno (
talk)
03:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
PS: Hyperspace bypass? =d
Obvious vandal IPs should be blocked straight away if there's a pattern (if it's just a one-off, then forget about it). Obvious vandal accounts should be blocked anyway (to prevent their becoming autoconfirmed). If it's not obvious (they might be just experimenting) then warnings might be appropriate before blocking (I would have thought 1, or an absolute maximum of 2, warnings would always be sufficient). We should show our genuine editors and our readers more respect than to allow preventible damage to our encyclopedia; we should certainly show vandal-fighters more respect than to make them waste their time jumping through hoops. (If a vandal is going to reform, then they can do so after the block has expired, or apologize and ask for it to be revoked - if they really are interested in contributing positively, they'll understand why the block was placed, and hopefully be encouraged to contribute knowing that steps are taken to protect their contributions from damage.) -- Kotniski ( talk) 09:13, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
(outdent) The ideals behind the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard in courts is often summed up in civics class as an expression of the idea that we'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free then one innocent man put in jail. As a core principle of the project we have held that letting a vandal screw a few, easily reverted edits is the price we pay for making sure we dont scare off bright eyed potential contributors. One may call replacing the Kleenex article with "FUCK OFF!!" vandalism, but its just as likely to be a well intentioned, if crude, test. One may argue for or against this approach, but like the conviction standard mentioned it's largely set in stone at this point- for the right reasons. -- M ask? 09:15, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
![]() | Join the effort at WikiProject Policy and Guidelines! |
Is it time to set aside some community resources in order to conduct a "Policy and Guideline improvement drive"? Just thinking about it, it's possible that Wikipedia has recently (as in the last year to 18 months) reached some sort of tipping point. There are more then 3 million articles now, Wikipedia is regularly featured on Google, the user-base has changed both in size and character, and governance itself has significantly evolved. I don't have anything really specific in mind other then an amorphous feeling that some policies and guidelines are showing their age. There does seem to be a lot of conflict that occurs still, and some of that is sometimes due to (lacking) policy in my opinion. And then there are real issues such as the deletion policy... Anyway, I was just thinking about this for some reason, and wanted to bring it up.
—
Ω (
talk)
11:16, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Note: After writing this, I've discovered that I'm not the only person to have had similar thinking. See especially
Wikipedia:Areas for Reform#Poorly written policies. I was actually thinking of a wider, more purposeful effort here, but I have no problem with connecting onto an existing effort and attempting to propel it forward.
—
Ω (
talk)
05:13, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
I agree with the many editors who suggest adoting a specific policy and joining the several people who work to improve it. But let me provide a little context for WP:Areas for Reform. There was an atempt by the ArbCom to create a policy committee, precisely because ArbCom flt there was a need for reform. There was an RfC in which many people - close to a hundred - participated. Most agreed that there was a need for reform; some agreed with the way ArbCom was going about it, and some agreed on a particular direction for reform. Others agreed there was a need for reform but objected to the way ArbCom was going about it, and objected to diferent directions. Although I expressed a stong position in the RfC, it seemed to me that Wikipedia could use a space where people advocating any direction of reform could develop proposals. When I created "Areas for Reform" I started with specific questions that people on all sides of the RfC had raised and left a means for people to add new questions. There has been ongoing discussion there since. I invite people here to take a look at the diferrent questions being discussed. I close with one plea for the value of such a page (which I think Ohm shares, given his actions here): people working on a policy are doing so in isolation of more general trends and arguments at Wikipedia and are often focused on very specific issues pertaining to that policy. When ArbCom tried to create a policy committee I think they were expressing the need for a group of people a little insuated from the demands to solve urgent problems ight away, but who were also thinking about the "big picture" of where Wikipedia is going, what it can and ought to be. I think there is a need for this kind of discussion, I just do not think it should be limited to an exclusive group of people. I hope other editors who are thinking about "the big picture" of how Wikipedia is functioning will see whether any of the questions currenty being discussed at WP:Areas for Reform get at something important. if so, I hope they take advantage of that space as a place to brainstorm without having to worry about immediate consequences (yet), and then as a place to generate proposals for new policies or proposals to change existing policies ... which can then be taken to the appropriate policy talk page. I think this process might help generate fresh ideas. Slrubenstein | Talk 08:51, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Why isn't there an external links notice board? Smallman12q ( talk) 14:54, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
It would be a place to gather consensus on whether or not to include links and which ones. Aside from spamming...and all those other vandal issues, according to WP:EL, links should be kept to a minimum. And while disputes over which links are pertinent and best represent the topic are rare, they do occur. Currently other than the talk page, it is difficult to get other people's opinion as there is no place to go. Smallman12q ( talk) 18:39, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
Because it would be full of people who think every external links is spam. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 15:45, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
We would use <ref group="arch">, where "arch" stands for archive. These footnotes would be invisible by default, until users make them visible in their preferences.
Just as lawyers consult legislative histories and precedents before making an argument in court, our editors (ought to) explore the archives to examine whether proposed changes to policies and guidelines are consistent with well-reasoned consensus (as I have done here). However, lawyers have the advantage of "annotated" codes and citators. I'm proposing something like that for our own policies.
Some of you have been here since the beginning, but I'm barely a year old. I am constantly proposing changes to our policies that, it turns out, were thoughtfully considered and rejected years ago. I think this proposal could cut back on ill-considered churn by people like me.
PS If this proposal was considered and rejected already ... that supports my argument ;) Andrew Gradman talk/ WP:Hornbook 01:42, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Unfortunately policies and guidelines have evolved in a very messy way. The worst thing is that there is no procedure for establishing whether there is consensus for something or not - basically Ps&Gs are shaped either through edit warring, or through someone sneaking something through without it being noticed. Only a few people take an interest in the content of any given page, and hence it is their views that are reflected on that page, not those of the community. Consequently different pages often come to contradict each other. Even tidying them up to make them more readable and comprehensible often meets with resistance from individuals who treat particular tracts of text as some kind of immutable scripture. I don't believe these pages have much effect on what actually happens on WP (except when their words are interpreted to mean something they weren't intended to), but the sorry condition (and excessive number) of them must surely confuse and even deter new contributors.
My vision is that Wikipedia should have nice, tidy, structured documentation that makes it easy for people to find the information they need - whether about the project in general, how to use the software, or about what is considered good practice on WP. (I would put all this in the Help: namespace, leaving the Wikipedia: namespace for process and discussion, but that's a detail). Disagreements about what actually is good practice would be resolved through RfC's or similar, but with clear results (i.e. closure by disinterested parties if necessary). So to get back to the point, yes, we should have links to discussions as references where that would be helpful, but those discussions should have a clear conclusion that shows why the recommended practice is supported.-- Kotniski ( talk) 09:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
No need to make them invisible. It's already being done... what was it, WP:OFFICE? has some ref content at the bottom. The only problem is that some people might take this to mean that consensus can't change, but that's a problem best handled elsewhere. M 23:18, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
It would be cool if there was a new option to automatically watch pages. Accdude92 ( talk) ( sign) 17:09, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
Just an FYI, that there is a discussion occurring about possible changes to the ITN section of the main page, located here:
Template talk:In the news#Use of Wikinews. Feel free to jump in on the conversations!
—
Ω (
talk)
09:42, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Has anyone considered the idea of having Peer reviews by experts in fields who aren't members of Wikipedia? i.e. Having people who run a website about gardening do a review of a gardening-based article?---- occono ( talk) 23:26, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Since there is a kilobyte counter there is no need to have a minor edit option. If the edition is smaller then 500 k, the system should automatically save it as m. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 14:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I am talking about Wikipedia:Introduction, a page that welcomes our new users. The page has sandbox functionality, in other words, the users are free to make test edits there as long as the intro template stays untouched. Too bad it doesn't, and new editors may be greeted by something along the lines of "lol wikipedia is teh suxx0rz haxd" or "Get stuff online www.fakesite.com". This is mostly incompetence and misunderstanding the purpose of the page instead of actual vandalism, but to ensure that the page looks the way it's supposed to when a new user views it, I suggest we remove the sandbox functionality from this page altogether. Obviously, it's good to have a sandbox page for our newcomers, so I suggest editing our current sandbox template to point forward to Wikipedia:Introduction_2 (titled "Learn more about editing") so new editors wouldn't have to look for the next page of the introduction OR creating a new sandbox page between the first and the second introduction page. Any support, comments, suggestions? Kotiwalo ( talk) 19:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
(outdent)I have recently been watching the introduction page. No idea how that started, but I regularily check out the new user contributions and revert offensive or immature edits. It has begun to irk me that the message we use to greet newcomers is routinely vandalised into absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is not the place to read about ketchup farts, or at least a main page isn't.
I wish to propose that the page for editing WP:Introduction redirect to the page for editing WP:Sandbox. This way, new users can read the introduction, still click edit, and edit the sandbox instead of defacing the message that they just read. WP:Introduction could then be protected from editing. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 14:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Why not make it work the way {{
doc}}
works on protected templates (via transclusion of the sandbox -- in this case -- onto the protected intro page). That way the message stays intact, and you can have a special edit link right there (though the "edit this page" tab won't work right, unfortunately). Maybe have Cluebot and/or its friends lightly patrol the sandbox for profanity to stop that.
--
Thin
boy
00 @117, i.e.
01:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
Hi from the
Basque Country!
This is a message to the administrators of wikipedia in English or for someone who can help me with this issue:
I´m an user and contributor of the
Basque Wikipedia.,
Basque language is one of the oldest in Europe and the world, it has thousands of years old and is one of the few languages that survived the arrival of Indo-Europeans to Europe. Perhaps being one of the oldest nations or countries of the world not even have their own state, but our language is our homeland and pride. It put us on the map and give a reference recognizable to English speakers, the city of
Pamplona (
Iruña in basque language), where they celebrate the internationally famous festival of
San Fermin are in the
Basque Country.
After this brief introduction I would kindly ask you this request:
On July 15, 2009, in the Basque wikipedia we exceed the figure of 40,000 items, today (August 8, 2009) and we have 42,000 items, achievement of which we are very proud, because if we compare proportionately the number of speakers of the Basque language (about a million) with other spoken language Wikipedia in more than one state or nation in the world with millions of speakers is like to be proud.
Because one of the aims of Wikipedia in addition to expanding human knowledge worldwide is also to expand the knowledge of all languages of mankind: From the Basque Wikipedia We wanted to make the request to the users and particularly to the Admin of the English wikipedia would be possible if you put the link to Basque Wikipedia in your English Wikipedia´s language list of everyone in your main cover ("Languages" section: as is currently the case Galician or Catalan language) and the Wikipedia list of more than 40,000 items that is below your main entrance page ("Wikipedia languages" section). Since English is currently the most powerful, influential and widespread in the world (your wikipedia already has 3,000,000 articles), the presence of Basque Wikipedia in your list of the world would be a great help to supervival of our language and their knowledge in the world.
Awaiting your reply.
Greetings from the Basque Wikipedia.
.
--
Euskalduna
(tell me) 15:05, 26 August 2009 (UTC) (UTC)
Having re-read your posting, I understand that you would like the Basque Wikipedia to be mentioned on the Main Page, where - at the bottom of the page - a list of languages other than Wikipedia in which Wikipedias exist can be found. I think you had better contact a Wikipedia administrator there (I am not one myself), who may be able to help with proposed changes to the Main Page. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 19:47, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I WANT TO POST AN INFORMATION ON AARON BERKMAN, A RECOGNIZED WELL LISTED ARTIST. COULD YOU PLEASE ADVISE HOW I MAY PROCEED IN POSTING THE INFORMATION IN ADDITION TO AN IMAGE. THANKS, JEANETTE HENDLER —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeanettehendler ( talk • contribs)
-- SPhilbrick T 18:15, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
@Jeanette, click here:
edit Aaron Berkman and start adding stuff.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
04:32, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I think that there should be a forum for wikipedia. Accdude92 ( talk) ( sign) 14:14, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia Review is fairly active. Chuthya ( talk) 11:59, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I really like knowing about etymologies, but they can get in the way of smooth reading of the lead paragraph in many articles. I'd like these to be in collapible spans (I think this would need some technical implementation) when they get past a certain length.
would therefore be replaced with something looking a bit like
expanding to the former when clicked. As with collapsible divs, these could be custom-CSS-ed for users who want them always-visible. The downside would be that that the text inside the span might get read, expanded and checked less, and it's another click if that's what you were mainly after looking at the article. The OED website does something similar, hiding pronunciation and etymology by default. Pseudomonas( talk) 13:48, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
{{
Lead sentence|Beijing|pron-en|beɪˈdʒɪŋ|IPA-en|beɪˈʒɪŋ|(etc...)}}
(undent) To respond to an earlier question, Wikipedia:Requested templates is the place to ask for help with a new template. And, for what it's worth, I'd support such a template, as being a benefit to the average reader, who isn't interested in pronunciation and etymology. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:20, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
I like this idea a lot, though I must say, the original language should be included outside of the collapse, though not necessarily the transliteration. But it would be nice to hide the arcane pronunciation guides and elaborate linguistic notes. -- Golbez ( talk) 22:35, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
I take the point made in MOS:SCROLL about accessibility. At the moment, collapsible spans are not possible; I don't know whether this is changeable by admins or needs devs. I figure that if this proposal is popular with the community then people who know more about screen-readers and the like should decide if there's a non-obnoxious way of implementing it. Pseudomonas( talk) 23:57, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Is there a reason we don't have one of the Creative commons badges at the bottom of our pages? I seem to remember a GFDL badge being there once upon a time. -- Cybercobra (talk) 11:04, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
(←)In 'advanced search,' there's a link that says "Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more." Click it, and there will be a dropdown box that you can choose the appropriate license. It only works with Creative Commons though, I think.-- Unionhawk Talk E-mail 17:00, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
I generated a preliminary example for what something like that may look like:
code
|
---|
|
Wether or not to use an image, and the exact wording and formatting still requires quite some discussion of course. We wouldn't want to get that wrong. — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 17:08, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
I think we should at the very least add the microformat, as I propose here: MediaWiki_talk:Wikimedia-copyright — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 00:47, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Right, now that the microformat was added, any thoughts from people on the original question of an image badge? Possibilities: [2], [3], [4] -- Cybercobra (talk) 05:31, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm posting this in response to the CNN article which was reporting on Wikipedia's decision to use editors for select articles to approve changes before they're made public. I'd like to suggest that Wikipedia enact a system of "community based edit approval" on selected articles wherein pages need to have changes approved before being made public. Edits would be voted on by users before taking affect. In this way, when a user makes a change to an article it will not be immediately visible on the article's main page. Instead, it will be logged onto the articles edit page for review and if it receives a set amount of negative votes in a certain amount of time then edit will be discarded and the article will not be changed. This would be a good way to prevent vandalism and preventing bad changes from ever coming into action. 74.131.111.224 ( talk) 23:19, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I wish a hide bots button on history pages. There is so huge amount of bot edits on every history page it is really annoying to check other "real" edits. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 14:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
(undent) Such a gadget would only hide the entries on the history list, not the edits themselves. So if the original history looked like this:
etc.
Then the "truncated history" would be this:
etc.
but clicking the first "prev" link would (assuming no major restructuring on the part of the gadget) show a diff between the edits at 0:05 and 0:10, not the edits at 0:00 and 0:10, and the author of the old version would be correctly identified as User:ExampleBot (i.e. everything would "just work"). If the gadget somehow was designed to show the diff between 0:00 and 0:10, it would look as though the user had selected this diff via the radio buttons on the original history (complete with message about intermittant edits etc.). This, however, would entail a much more complex gadget. In short, the MediaWiki software is not stupid and won't do inconsistent things like those mentioned above without warning you. -- Thin boy 00 @144, i.e. 02:27, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
Here is one solution. You put this option in Preferences -> Gadgets -> User interface gadgets. So if you pick this option out every history page whould include show/hide buttons where bots should be listed. And if you want to make a preview or undo, you just have to click show. That's all. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 22:42, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Aha, I have to explain my reason. The problem is that smaller Wikipedias have a series of bots on the history lists (interwikis) while bigger wikis like en: or de: maybe don't know that problem so strictly. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 22:46, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
It's entirely possible that what I'm thinking about exists already and I'm simply not aware of it, but recently I've been running across situations where I feel that I'm "going out on a limb" somewhat. You know that feeling that you get, where you don't want to just leave something, but you also don't really feel comfortable with the change that you've just made? has there been discussion about some sort of feedback system that addresses this, at all? The first thing to come to my mind is some sort of template.. something like {{
Check me}} or... something.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
07:13, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Per
WP:REDLINK and
WP:STUB, I think there should be a balance between creating an article of one or two sentences and allowing an unimproved micro stub to exist indefinitely. My view is that a redlink is as much or more an incentive to research and create an article as is a stub to expand, but that a minimal stub detracts from the impression of the encyclopedia as a serious enterprise. As I am aware that many editors do create a very short stub as a type of placeholder and then they (or a project) begin expanding them I would think there should be a generous allowance to permit them - or others - to work upon them to bring them up to article status.
Per WP:Stub
Wikipedia is not a directory and it would be difficult to argue that a one or two sentence page would not fall into that definition - except perhaps place names; "X" is a small village in Y province/state of country Z", and discussion might suggest particular stub types that might be exempt from the cull. Also suggestions regarding time frames may be beneficial, especially with input from those who can provide analysis on the likelihood of expansion on stubs over time from creation.
I look forward to comments.
LessHeard vanU (
talk)
14:01, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
[[File:JohnSmith.jpg|thumb|John Smith]] '''John Smith''' was a sixteenth century English author. While he wrote several collections of poetry, including [[Collection1]], he's most famous for his plays, mainly [[His famous comedy]]. {{author-stub}}
Well, it appears that there is a large sentiment for "something is better than nothing" - even if it triggers WP:NOTDIR, so perhaps it would be best that any initial run bot would simply list these stubs and a taskforce could go through and remove the real junk (once tagged by the bot it would whitelist any stub not deleted). Any subsequent bot runs could PROD an article under the criteria, and again allow flesh and blood operators make the decision. I would comment that this is not attempting to "finish up the encyclopedia" but to remove content that is no longer up to standard - much like some old FA's lose the status - and improve the overall quality of the project. I would, of course, sign up for such a review body in the first instance. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 20:11, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
This tool may help with this effort. -- œ ™ 04:28, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
**I am happy to try and expand some of these articles. It would be a good idea to move the list onto wikipedia, where notes can be placed against entries where action is taken or which are quite appropriate to be kept short such as the disambiguation pages on the list.
Davewild (
talk)
18:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
I did include a date parameter in {{ Asbox}} at one point, in case it was ever thought useful to explore how long things remained as stubs, and perhaps triage them. It was taken out as scope creep. However if it would result in less stubs, in a good way, it can be put back in. Rich Farmbrough, 04:03, 30 August 2009 (UTC).
Now I know that wikipedia isn't the place for "chatting", BUT I think a page just for talking and for getting to know all the editors, and other members, would be nice to have. As of now, everybody is sepperated. I also know that there is irc, but not everyone can use irc. Accdude92 ( talk) ( sign) 14:19, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Sometimes, we have important community announcements, but there is no optimal way to advertize them. We can use the watchlist notice, but IPs can't see it, and logged-in users don't always frequently check their watchlist, so it's not that efficient. There's also the sitenotice, which makes the message visible to all users on all pages. But some announcements are not intended for all readers or are not important enough to be put on the sitenotice, so we could use a talknotice working like the sitenotice and displayed only on talk pages, also dismissible. If we agree that such a thing is desirable, it'll be requested to the developers. Cenarium ( talk) 00:26, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{TALKSPACE}}|...}}
should do? —
Dispenser
21:38, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I filled T22458 requesting this. Cenarium ( talk) 00:22, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Wikia already developed this functionality, so could be a good starting place - it's available here: https://wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/extensions/wikia/SiteWideMessages/ ... via a special page you can send out dismissable messages that show up on user talk pages. Because it's on user talk pages, it triggers the new message notification, so users will know it's there. You can target groups of people (admins, for instance), individual users, or just everyone. If needed, you can also retract messages after they were sent out. The messages can have an expiration date so they go away on their own after a specific date/time - useful for things like maintenance notifications where no one cares 1 month after the event. Also handles anon user talk pages, empty user talk pages, diffs, etc. This was a particularly useful extension as it allowed us to communicate with people en masse for whom we had no email address. The dismissable part of it is what made it appealing to the users. Jqsjqs ( talk) 22:50, 16 October 2009 (UTC) More here: http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Talk_Page_Messaging Jqsjqs ( talk) 00:06, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
Check out Maglev (transport). Its table of contents is floated over to the right, next the the main text, instead of above the rest of the text. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been annoyed by having to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to get past the TOC. Maybe using the method found in "Maglev (transport)" in all articles, or at least all long ones, would make Wikipedia more usable overall. All it would require would be a TOCright or TOCleft in double curly brackets where the table of contents is.--( User:Star Trek enthusiast) ( talk) 23:21, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Every day I say or hear "Donno, check it up on wikipedia" or "even google it on wikipedia". A better verb needs to be coined as to wikipedia sounds silly. If it does, what is it? just an odd thought, but this could go a long way, so I am posting. -- Squidonius ( talk) 11:31, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps there could be a new verb coined here - after, Google has become such a popular search engine that people now talk of "googling the web" rather than "surfing the Web". Perhaps we could talk about Wikipeding for a term? I would be against, however, saying "wikifying it" because there are a lot of other Wiki websites (such as Wikinews}other than Wikipedia.
ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 06:23, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
I appreciate your liking of this term, but I stick with what I said above - I am a little unsure of "wiki it" myself, as there are other Wiki websites besides Wikipedia. How about Wikipede it, as AGradman suggested above? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 19:54, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
The task is to find an abbreviation of Wikipedia (5 syllables) that fits in "___ it" and is short verbally (not just in writing). Then we start using it. "Wiki it" slurs into weekeet. "Doubleyou-pee it" doesn't quite work. Check TFE? WiP? WP, pronounced as 'wip'? Whip it. Ha ha. From now on, in my head, I'll be pronouncing WP as Wip, and referring to Wikipedia as WiP. Join me! and soon we too may have an awesome nounverb. M
Wikipate! Grand master ka 03:26, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Hello!
Sorry for my limited knowledge of English, but I think that the images like these:
http://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9E%C9%99kil:Anti_Armenia.png
http://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9E%C9%99kil:No_France.svg
http://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9E%C9%99kil:No_Israel.svg
should not be in Wikipedia nor Users pages of Wikipedians.
Wikipedia should be a place for knowledge not for rasistic expressions of some users.
Skrabbit ( talk) 16:45, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
(od) Somewhat relevant to this thread: commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/Image:Anti_Poland.png which also discusses commons:Category:Anti_logos and its >220 member files. I don't know what to make of the discussion, but in any case there isn't anything to be done within the scope of this project. BTW, someone attempted to speedy the no-France image and the speedy tag was quickly removed by the author. Sswonk ( talk) 21:35, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
The content on the Recent changes page is very badly arranged. Could tha data be sorted in the table? -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 14:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
The table could have about 6 columns: Column1 labels N or m, Column2 Title, then hour, counter of bytes, author and finally notes. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 22:28, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I meant a table with grid like this (for now there is just bulleted list):
(diff) (hist) | m | Hyderabadi haleem | 01:58 | (+3) | Sarabseth (talk | contribs) | →Preparation: grammar |
(diff) (hist) | N | User:Darrenhusted/sandbox22 | 01:58 | (-25) | Hooliganb (talk | contribs) | →Karl |
(diff) (hist) | Wikipedia:WikiProject Macau/Popular pages | 01:58 | (+57) | Baxtersmalls (talk | contribs) | Popularity stats for WikiProject Macau | |
(diff) (hist) | Dexilla | 01:58 | (+456) | Mr.Z-bot (talk | contribs) | →Links: moved to subcategory, Replaced: Category:Tachinidae → Tachinidae-stub,, Removed: fly-stub, using AWB |
I wonder whether you meant that you would like to see the Wikipedia "Recent Changes" feature become better categorised. At present, I agree that if you click on "Recent Changes", the only order seems to be the purely temporal order of the last x number of changes (which some Wikipedians might think is fair enough - after all, this is the name of this feature). However, perhaps there could be a way to categorise this feature, so people can find what they may wish to see in this feature more easily.
ACEOREVIVED (
talk)
20:02, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Right, this has been on my back burner for a long time, and I've finally done it: based on the article for creation wizard, I've created Wikipedia:Article wizard2.0, (superceding the less helpful and less pretty and underused WP:Article wizard) as a generic wizard for registered users to create articles, including a simple template at the end. Comments please on the idea and execution; and on how we can promote it when it's ready. I've previously considered things like the MediaWiki page that produces the Search Results page (I forget the name now), that kind of thing. NB The one thing that the old Article wizard does that may be worth taking is emphasising the need to search for alternate spelling etc (see Wikipedia:Article wizard/other). But I'm tired and hungry now... Rd232 talk 14:13, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article_wizard2.0/subpage is broken (this is used in construction of a userspace proto-article)(instead of showing the name of the viewer, it shows the name of the last person to edit the page). Recommend replacing {{REVISIONUSER}}
with Special:Mypage
. --
Thin
boy
00 @276, i.e.
05:37, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
An overview of Outstanding issues is now available at Wikipedia talk:Article wizard2.0#Outstanding issues. Thanks. Rd232 talk 18:57, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for your work, I had thought about something like that and it could help some new users. Cenarium ( talk) 17:11, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Is there any way a Search box could be added to the bottom of every page? If one gets to the bottom of a page and is using Firefox, you have to grab the scroll bar and scroll all the way to the top of the page to get to the Search box. This isn't a problem in IE, which allows you to right click on the scroll bar and request to go to the top of the page, but you can't do that with Firefox. Or, maybe even just a link that says "Go to the top of the page". Who then was a gentleman? ( talk) 20:57, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Please see here for details on this proposal and preliminary discussion. It's proposed to transform the Audit Subcommittee into an entity independent of the Arbitration Committee and grant several additional responsibilities regarding the overseeing of the checkuser and oversight permissions. Cenarium ( talk) 22:40, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Is there a template for marking a table/chart/graph as unsourced (for example, something you can put underneath the image or the {{
bar box}}
that would say something along the lines of "the
sources of this table/chart/graph are unclear"? I couldn't find any. And, if there isn't, does anyone think adding one would be useful? I could create one fairly easily.
rʨanaɢ
talk/
contribs
21:02, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
A poll has been created on whether Reports of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China is a standalone topic, or should it be merged to Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China? Please go to Talk:Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China/FG poll. Ohconfucius ( talk) 14:04, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I am requesting discussion on moving the common hatnote template {{ otheruses4}} → {{ about}} (or → {{ otheruses}}) because the current name (with an arbitrary 4) is hard to remember and esoteric. I have started the discussion at Template_talk:Otheruses4#Request_move_discussion. If you are interested, please come to discuss whether the template should be moved and if so, to where. Thanks, - Sligocki ( talk) 20:43, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Please see and comment here on this proposal. Thanks, Cenarium ( talk) 23:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Hello all! You're probably aware that Wikipedia is reviewing its editing interface at the moment, the purpose being to make it easier to use. A lot of time and money is being spent, and this is all obviously a great idea. However, while the developers are still at work, I feel a massive improvement could be made relatively easily. The text that surrounds the edit box is confusing, unsightly, and not at all helpful. It is fragmented, and is clearly a product of years of tinkering by many different people. I feel we should take a step back and organise this important text in a much more presentable and informative way. Below are two images of the interface; before, and after my proposal.
As you can see, my proposal is simpler, clearer and prettier than the current situation. I'd also like that a similar one be created, identical except for the removal of the third 'create account' line, for users who are logged in. I'd also hope that its display could be turned off in user preferences. Anxietycello ( talk) 15:48, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Drawn up a new draft, adding the suggestions given. Header moved to the sides to shrink the box and remove whitespace. The code I used to make the text and boxes can be found at User:Anxietycello/Interface. Anxietycello ( talk) 14:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Ok, I can see that the idea for the box I started with is not being happily accepted, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Perhaps a simpler reform would be better recieved? Forget the top box for now, and lets focus on the mess of text below the edit box. As I said before, it is fragmented, and is clearly a product of years of tinkering by many different people. It is also a highly important peice of information, one that people should be able to easily read and understand. I therefore propose the above re-organisation. Any thoughts? Anxietycello ( talk) 00:56, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm honestly not trying to be a stick in the mud here, but I'm really wondering why this discussion is occurring here rather then on the
Usability study page. This is exactly what they are tasked with studying and improving, and they have the money, resources, time, and backing of the WMF to actually implement changes. Their also smack dab in the middle of evaluating exactly what this is attempting to address, so your suggestions and comments would be much more likely to have an impact there regardless.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
06:02, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
We talked about this a little bit, above. There should be a method to edit the minor flag and at least your own edit summaries. The easiest way that I can think of to implement that would be to add them as editable fields to the old revision view of a page. That page is missing the edit summary anyway, so this is technically two enhancements.
Bug 20511
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
05:31, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
wikipedia has <code></code> <u></u> <b></b> <i></i> <s> </s> but is missing very useful tags such as
CSS
or <acronym title="North Atlantic Treaty Organisation">NATO</acronym> which would really help with the readability of articles. This would make it so users wouldn't have to scroll up to the top of the page to remember what an acronym stood for. Personally, I think all acronyms/abbreviations should use this tag. We could start by just enabling the feature.
Dragonsshadows (
talk)
16:08, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
<acronym>
is to be obsolete in HTML 5, but <abbr>
is listed as what should be used in its place
[5] and it says that they should be treated the same
[6].
Mr.
Z-man
16:34, 5 September 2009 (UTC){{
tooltip}}
, which uses the title attribute, available on most (X)HTML elements: CSS 2 {{
abbr}}
, which uses the abbr attribute:
IMF , and {{
abbrlink}}
which wikilinks the term:
IMF At present, if you go to the "History" of an article, it is not easy to find when an article was first created if it has had a long history - for example, the article Criticism of Wikipedia has been in existence since at least August 2005 (I gave up back-tracking after then). Please forgive me if you are more informed about the mechanics of Wikipedia than me, as there may be an ansewr to this one already - is there a simple way to find out the date when an article was first created? If I am making a proposal here, it is to have something like a little note saying when an article was first created in the "History" of the article. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 20:42, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
(I am not sure if this is the right place for this proposal. I looked around but didn't find anywhere better...)
I have noticed that some "you've been blocked" messages that admins add to the talk page of a blocked user do not include the duration of the block. The length of the block can be found elsewhere, but it seems like a fundamental characteristic of the block and should be included in the blocked user's talk page entry. Is there some reason why it's not included? If not, I propose that the length of block always be included in such messages, and block templates be adjusted (docs and otherwise) to indicate the requirement. Alternatively, perhaps there is some way for the Wiki software to detect the length of the current block and the templates could be modified to use that mechanism and thus avoid the need for the admin to specify the information manually.
FYI, here is one recent example. (I am not criticizing the admin involved in that edit.) Here's is another example by a different admin who apparently added the length of the block by adding text that wasn't part of the template. — John Cardinal ( talk) 15:49, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
(outdent) The current situation doesn't seem rational to me: any blocked user who tries to edit is told they are blocked and for how long, yet some admins don't put the length of the block in the talk page entry where it's useful to other editors. It doesn't make sense to me that omitting the length of the block helps avoid collateral damage, as uninvolved editors who happen to use the same IP and try to edit will see the block info. Moreover, it's unlikely they'll see the talk page entry unless they are veterans, in which case they'll know how to find the block info. I thought through some other use cases and I don't think there are any where hiding the length of the block has any real benefit.
I can't accept arguments based on users not noticing information that we deliberately put into the message. It's irrational: if we put the info in the message, we intend the user to see it. If we don't want them to see it, we should leave it out. If we want some users to see it, and others not, well... how does it feel to want? Once we display the message, we can't control which readers notice and which ones don't.
On the other hand, the info is available and my proposal was only intended to make it more convenient to see it. There's clearly not consensus and while I don't agree, it's not a big deal. Thanks for considering this proposal. — John Cardinal ( talk) 15:06, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia will benefit greatly from photo tags. When looking for a picture of a specific person, every article on a person, place or thing can have itself tagged on specific pictures. Like that, when looking for a picture of "Barack Obama", all the pictures tagged with his name will appear. This will make editing much more convenient. Feed back ☎ 03:07, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
There are some articles which were nominated for deletion and the reult is "No consensus". Should we then be given information about the default position being keepig the article? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 21:28, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I can give an example - if you look at the article on Bob Taggart and go to its talk page, you can see that the article was nominated for deletion in August 2009; the tag on the talk page just says "The result of the discussion was no consensus". I guess that I am really saying that this tag needs modification, so that it should say something to the effect of "The result of the discussion was no consensus, and therefore the article is being kept, as that is the default position". ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:09, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
{{oldafdfull|page=<pagename>|date=<date of nom>|result='''keep'''}}
below the afd tag for easily copy/pasting them to the talk page. So it would be too much cost for a little benefit in any way we proceed.
Cenarium (
talk)
00:01, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
{{#ifeq:{{{result}}}|'''No consensus'''|'''No consensus[1]'''|{{{result|}}}}}
?) which would probably add some overhead but which would ultimate be one edit. -
Jarry1250 [ In the UK? Sign
the petition! ]
19:06, 4 September 2009 (UTC)Thank you Jarry 1250, that is the type of thing I had in mind. A template such as "No consensus - result = keep article (default position)" would be more informative than what there is at present, and would not require major editorial changes. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:13, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
I think it would be great to use the "what links here" and "what links from here" information for creating mind maps. The reader would only need to specify in how many "levels of links" he or she is interested. For example, I would like to see all "what links here" and up to two levels of articles linked from the current page, i.e. a map with the current page in the midle, pages linking to the current page, pages linked to from the current page ("at level 1") and pages linked to from these ("at level 2"). Anša ( talk) 12:22, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
Users who are being checkusered and accused of having sockpuppet accounts should have more privacy and the right to defend themselfs when banned/blocked. At the moment such users get blocked and banned without any warnings and have their private information displayed for everyone to see. They cannot edit or defend themselfs either.
My proposal is:
1.) Being more discreet about private information such as related IP-info (even when used for editing)
2.) The right to edit their talkpage so they can defend themselfs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 7853hgh ( talk • contribs) 14:12, 7 September 2009
A proposal to add a link to Wikinews articles in {{ Recent death}}. Please see Template_talk:Recent_death#Optional_link_to_a_Wikinews_obituary. Thank you for your time, Cirt ( talk) 17:25, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Greetings.
Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI), a government-affiliated research institute, conducts a research on motive for contribution as well as cultural characteristics of participants in collective intelligence sites as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. (See www.kisdi.re.kr for the detailed information about our Institute.)
The survey aims to identify factors affecting Wikipedia users' usage and participation. Your responses are absolutely confidential and will only be used to extend our understanding of collective intelligence. We count on your responses to help us make policies for encouraging collective intelligence.
A small amazon gift card will be offered for those who complete the survey.
Thank you for your full cooperation.
Sincerely,
Joo-Seong Hwang | Senior Research Fellow | Convergence and Future Strategy Research Division
E-mail redacted
→ Click
I was just thinking that it would be nice to be able to mark pure vandalism edits as such, in a pages edit history. The benefit to that could be the ability to hide such edits if the viewer desires to do so (in the same manner as minor edits and bot edits can be "hidden").
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
07:31, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
What we should do is give everyone the ability to roll back (well, all autoconfirmed users, or everyone who asks for it - and strongly encourage people to ask for it - but take it away from the minority who abuse it). Then we could make rollback the standard recommended way of dealing with vandalism, and record rolled-back edits as vandalism edits. This could be used for all sorts of purposes - filtering watchlists and edit histories as suggested here, and automated tracking/warning/blocking of vandals (though obviously no automatic blocks just because a lot of your edits got rolled back). Obviously you'll get occasional misuse, as you do with every WP feature, but that shouldn't be a reason not to do it when it could provide such benefits.-- Kotniski ( talk) 17:48, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Doesn't the rollback tool already use tags to mark some rollbacks as "vandalism"? Personally, I think that access to the rollback and admin tools ought to be fairly automatic, but that's a whole other issue. My main thinking in bringing this up was just to add a relatively simple, and non-controversial, means of marking and "hiding" those edits ("Hiding" as in the ability to mask them out just like minor edits or bot edits can be currently). I can see where you're going, and I don't really disagree, but I just don't see that type of proposal going anywhere "politically". I think that this at least has a chance, and could even prove to be statistically useful down the road.
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V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
16:56, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Anyway yea, the proposal is to just add a simple flag, exactly like the minor flag, which we could add to posts. The simple implementation is to make it's use available when using the undo feature (to mark the edit being undone). The more involved implementation would be to ask to have the tick box on the edit page (I'm not sure what the correct name for this would be, but the version that you see when you click on the date link of an edit from the page history). That page could actually include check boxes for both, "minor" and "vandalism", and if it's your own edit, it could allow you to edit the summary as well.
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V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
18:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Bug#: 20510 filed for the "vandalism flag", specifically. Maybe it'll get somewhere, maybe not... It's a small thing, but I think it would be nice.
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V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
05:25, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
I've seen "RVV" or "vandalism" in many edit summaries, when in fact that what was not what the reverted entry was. Sometimes it's pure disagreement or difference of opinion; sometimes the reverted editor was going by a different unit or spelling convention; and sometimes that editor had a different source of facts (sometimes more recent, sometimes older, sometimes just different). Often what seems obvious to the average reader (and thus the most recent editor-but-one) has been shown over extended discussion on a Talk Page to be inaccurate or imprecise, but that doesn't mean that the reverted edit wasn't made in good faith. The reversion might well be justified, but what was reverted wasn't necessarily vandalism. —— Shakescene ( talk) 20:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
It might be a good idea to implement a "vandalism reversion" flag, akin to the "minor edit" flag. Then again, the risk of abuse (which would inevitably lead to bad faith assumptions and large disputes) is concerning... – Juliancolton | Talk 01:44, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
I am talking about Wikipedia:Introduction, a page that welcomes our new users. The page has sandbox functionality, in other words, the users are free to make test edits there as long as the intro template stays untouched. Too bad it doesn't, and new editors may be greeted by something along the lines of "lol wikipedia is teh suxx0rz haxd" or "Get stuff online www.fakesite.com". This is mostly incompetence and misunderstanding the purpose of the page instead of actual vandalism, but to ensure that the page looks the way it's supposed to when a new user views it, I suggest we remove the sandbox functionality from this page altogether. Obviously, it's good to have a sandbox page for our newcomers, so I suggest editing our current sandbox template to point forward to Wikipedia:Introduction_2 (titled "Learn more about editing") so new editors wouldn't have to look for the next page of the introduction OR creating a new sandbox page between the first and the second introduction page. Any support, comments, suggestions? Kotiwalo ( talk) 19:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
(outdent)I have recently been watching the introduction page. No idea how that started, but I regularily check out the new user contributions and revert offensive or immature edits. It has begun to irk me that the message we use to greet newcomers is routinely vandalised into absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is not the place to read about ketchup farts, or at least a main page isn't.
I wish to propose that the page for editing WP:Introduction redirect to the page for editing WP:Sandbox. This way, new users can read the introduction, still click edit, and edit the sandbox instead of defacing the message that they just read. WP:Introduction could then be protected from editing. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 14:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Why not make it work the way {{
doc}}
works on protected templates (via transclusion of the sandbox -- in this case -- onto the protected intro page). That way the message stays intact, and you can have a special edit link right there (though the "edit this page" tab won't work right, unfortunately). Maybe have Cluebot and/or its friends lightly patrol the sandbox for profanity to stop that.
--
Thin
boy
00 @117, i.e.
01:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
“Categorization is a feature of Wikipedia's software, enabling pages to be placed in categories which can then be used by readers to find sets of articles on related topics. Categories can be defined as subcategories of other categories, allowing easy navigation between connected subject areas via a tree-like structure. This helps readers find articles on particular topics even if they don't know which articles exist or what they are called.”
However, the current system is not intuitive; it is hidden at the bottom of the page; it does not make the most of its navigational potential; category pages look unappealing.With the minimum change it should be possible to display the same information much more effectively. The following is suggested:
I would be pleased to discuss further with any programmers willing to give it a try. There are probably many other category-based improvements that could be achieved at the same time: a tool to edit and manage categories for example. Granitethighs ( talk) 10:32, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Not entirely sure what this proposal would look like, but certainly categories are not currently doing their job very well, and it's mainly a problem that requires developer assistance (though various requests for improvements at Bugzilla have brought little effect). In fact I'd like to see categories dumped in favour of a far more natural and powerful system - some syntax for stating characteristics of article subjects ( {profession=singer;sex=male;birthdate=...;nationality=...}, that sort of thing), then users could search based on exactly what characteristics they chose, without editors constantly having to make judgments about what levels of categorization are going to be a help or a hindrance.-- Kotniski ( talk) 11:47, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I find Categories rather confusing. They seem to a casual user as performing the same function as (A) the lists of ... in small type at the foot of pages and (B) the "List of ..." articles. In fact what is the functional advantage over a "List of" article?
Also category pages are confusing when (as very often happens) "There is one sub-category" which appears at the top and 134 regular entries underneath. As said above, the pages are more unattractive and do not seem to adopt the "house style" of a Wikipedia page. Sussexonian ( talk) 21:40, 7 September 2009 (UTC) In answer to the question of what is the advantage of a category over list, the answer can be summarized in one word - hierarchy. If you click on a category, and then go the bottom of that category, you will see that often the category is itself a member of a more superordinate category. I personally rather like the category system in Wikipedia - as do many other Wikipedians, as is evidenced by the Association of Categorist Wikipedians. After all, if one wishes to learn about the Linneaan division of the world, this could be an extremely useful tool. One might find that a gibbon is a primate, which in turn is in mammal, which in turn is a vertebrate, which in turn is a chordate and so on and so forth. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 22:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
when people create tables and mboxes and such things and they change the background color why do they automatically assume that the foreground color is going to be black? I use white forground and, while it works well enough for most of the pages that I actually use, a few pages (including some important ones) are nearly unreadable. when people change the background color they should also specify exactly what foreground color to use as well. would it be reasonable to ask that this be made into a policy? Lemmiwinks2 ( talk) 00:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
As I said in the discussion below on the proposal to introduce orange and green wikilinks, we must be careful not to confuse people with colour blindness (black and white text should not do this).
I read this article a couple of minutes ago:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/
Please, please don't implement this. Not only would this make reading articles difficult with this turned on, but I can only see this causing a lot of issues with 'truthiness'. Editors with get into discussions and, rather than coming to a consensus, they will simply let the edit color speak for itself.
I understand Wikimedia Foundation's interest in making Wikipedia seem more accurate to the eye of the general and scientific communities, (Despite Wikipedia already being the most expansive and accurate general source in existence. citation needed) but rainbow coloring pages doesn't seem like the way to do this. It's distracting, may actual reduce accuracy, and makes the page seem disjointed. Instead, let's extend the extension which shows page rankings under the page title and color codes page titles respectively to where it's used by default, as well as a link to a 'research safe' version of the article. (A recent history of the page with an equal or greater ranking.)
This method would not only ensure accuracy, but would also provide a standard, static-style encyclopedia which could be used reliably in a professional or academic context. 8bit ( talk) 05:41, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
In short, if the nationalists are quiet enough that nobody reverts the next FYROM, they will become trusted editors, and their POV will become trustworthy. God preserve this, and keep it far from us! Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:47, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Instead, let's take FA off the main page; the others can stay, they cause less harm. This would immediately reduce the amount of nationalist POV-pushing, where each national gang tries to get their national glory on the main page, like Samuel of Bulgaria - which was written out of the nationalist schoolbook of Bulgaria, vintage 1912. The source, and the article, give Samuel and his allies all the positive adjectives; his enemies, including his brother, get the negative ones. Fortunately Karanacs noticed this and declined the star, but that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough.
The useful aspects of FA and GA would continue; there would continue to be stars for ego-boo, and reviewers would continue to look at articles. About one time in three, as now, review would improve an article; actual harm would be rare, as now. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:10, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Archived
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Note: This is a proposal I created on the Strategic Planning wiki. Since it is primarily relevant to the English Wikipedia I decided to post it here to get some feedback. GeometryGirl ( talk) 21:08, 6 September 2009 (UTC) Observations and backgroundWikipedia currently has two types of links: blue links (for existing articles) and red links (for nonexistent articles). The major benefits of blue links are navigational. As for red links, it has been shown that they stimulate article production. Indeed, Wikipedians want to "turn all links blue" and this has been, and still is, a major bolster to article production, especially for small Wikipedias. For larger Wikipedias, the focus is changing from article production to article amelioration, and the disappearing red links are losing their former impact. Details of proposalDescriptionAs an addition to the positive red links, orange links (or links of some other descriptive colour) could attest for articles in poor shape. For example, all stubs and start class articles could be linked to by orange links. Various implementations are possible, from offering orange links to every user by default, to limiting them to signed-in users. Potential benefitsThe potential benefits are similar to red links in prompting users to produce content. Orange links would encourage editors to expand and improve articles, as a support to the already existing red links that encourage editors to start articles. In effect, similarly to red links, orange links would drive editors to where work is needed. ExtensionsThe idea can be extended to different classes of articles. For example, we could have all featured and good articles be linked to by green links. This may incite viewers to read articles they would not have otherwise read, so as to drive users to quality content. Choice of coloursThe similarity between the orange and red colours is significant since stubs and start class articles are almost nonexistent, containing barely any information. As for the green colour for good and featured articles, it would reflect upon the green logo already used for good articles. A careful choice of colour should be made to minimize potential confusion for colour blind people. References
Discussion (orange links)This is an interesting and ingenious suggestion, and you have obviously thought out this proposal well.However, I am not too sure it would work. Many Wikipedians might prefer the simple task of having any article, no matter how small, linked by a blue link and red links for articles that are not in Wikipedia - to implement this change would mean much editing to Wikipedia. Perhaps it would be easier to reserve orange articles for those articles where, if you type a word in the box on the left, you get redirected elsewhere, i.e. where there is not an article with verbatim that name in Wikipedia, but there is an article on a similar topic. If we had the orange article as a marker of quality of an article, it could lead to edit wars on whether articles should be linked by red or orange links. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:45, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
a.stub:link {color: #ff6600;} a.stub:active {color: #ff6600;} a.stub:visited {color: #ff6600;} a.stub:hover {color: #ff6600; font-weight: bold;}
a.stub:visited {color: #cc5500;}
GeometryGirl invited me to comment here - I think that finding intuitive ways to highlight articles that need attention is a good idea. I do want to note that red links being somewhat annoying is probably a significant part of the reason they work - there's something particularly satisfactory about seeing an article with lots of red links "turn blue". That said, I do share the concern about making the reader experience potentially significantly more confusing. How about an implementation that adds a simple summary in an appropriate location, such as "22 articles linked from this one could use your help (expand)", which would then list the articles and the specific problems when expanded?-- Eloquence * 02:08, 9 September 2009 (UTC) |
Dismissed
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Wikipedia currently only has two types of links: the blue links for existing articles, and the red links for nonexistent articles. I propose to add a system of green links whereby any wikilink to a good or featured article would be coloured green. Q&A (and summary of discussion)
Discussion (green links)Please discuss here. In good wikispirit, I am leaving this proposal "open". Feel free to edit it! GeometryGirl ( talk) 14:05, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
In short, I very strongly oppose this, until FA and GA acquire a better population of reviewers, which I expect shortly after publication. My only edit would be to insert the word never as often as necessary. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Still not a fan of the change. We've got two colors for links (red and blue), with another derivative color (light blue), all of which is rather easy to determine rather quickly. Someone can click a green link and not see what the difference is once they've arrived at that page (as opposed to a redlink, where they are prompted to create the article, or a blue link, which is an article, or a light blue link, which is an interwiki link). Make it a gadget, that'd be fine, but implementing it as an actual standard feature of the wiki, no. EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:59, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Why should we want to make readers read particular articles that they're not really interested in? Aren't the FA and GA processes and categories themselves (and the "Featured content" link on every single page) enough by way of showing off?-- Kotniski ( talk) 16:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm opposed to giving FA/GA articles special wikilink colors. We can't even get consensus on whether GA articles should have an icon on the article page, so I doubt there would be consensus for turning their wikilinks a special color. In general, I think that this system of multiple wikilinks colors would confuse most readers. I'm an experienced editor, and I don't think it would be very helpful. I am not more likely to click on a wikilink because the article is rated highly; I am likely to click on the wikilink if I am interested in the topic. Karanacs ( talk) 19:43, 8 September 2009 (UTC) Unlike most of the editors who have opined here, I don't think the MOS-creep problem is not nearly as prevalent or burdensome as some think it is, aside from the alt text requirement (which arose recently). However, I'm opposed to this wikicolor proposal because a) as Karanacs said, links are for topics relevant to the subject, not for high-quality articles; b) not all FAs and even more so GAs are created equal; and c) the extra colors would confuse and distract readers from what they are reading. Dabomb87 ( talk) 21:27, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for raising this proposal, and for leaving a message on my userpage about it. It seems to me that the rationale for this proposal was different to your that for your above rationale for the "orange links" one - you took the view there that certain orange links would be a good way to get Wikipedians to improve certain articles, just how red wikilinks, you claimed there, help Wikipedians to create new articles. For this very reason, I am not too sure of this suggestion. This is only my own personal view, but I cannot quite work out why you may wish to draw attention to articles that do not need improvement. Please do not take that comment the wrong way - it is only my own humble view, and I expect you have good reasons for this proposal. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 19:55, 9 September 2009 (UTC) |
Archived
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For stubs, I suggest having the edit tab changed from edit this page to edit this stub. Why change "page" to "stub"?
Why orange?
Discussion (edit tab)Don't bite too hard! :) GeometryGirl ( talk) 11:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
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Dismissed for now
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For stubs, I suggest having the edit tab changed from edit this page to please edit this stub or please edit this stub or Please edit this stub pr Please edit this stub. Why change "page" to "stub"?
Why add "please"?
Why red?
Why green?
Why stubs?
For who?
Discuss (edit tab new proposal)Don't bite! GeometryGirl ( talk) 17:27, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
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Proposed at
WP:Stub
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I propose to change or something similar.
I have just had a thought. As any lecturer who has presented using overhead acetates or Powerpoint will know full well, one has to be very careful with choice of colours, so as not to confuse students who may suffer from colour blindness. Are you sure that your choice of colour scheme will not do this? One thing I should say is that perhaps the most common form of colour blindness is red-blue colour blindness - so perhaps you are right, we do not need to change the colours of wikilinks! ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:11, 9 September 2009 (UTC) I have a feeling I was actually thinking of red-green colour blindness - please, pleaes, consider this. Although I do not suffer from colour blindness myself, remember, Wikipedia should be accessible to all. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:23, 9 September 2009 (UTC) FWIW, red-green is the most common form of colourblindness, followed by total colourblindness, then blue-yellow - though that's all beside the point. I have a question, though... why is this change being proposed? If it serves no purpose (and for the life of me I can't see what purpose it would serve), then it simply seems to be wasting effort. What difference does centring the text do other than moving the icon away from the left margin and potentially making formatting look odd in a few cases? Similarly, what difference would changing the colour make other than making readers wonder whether the stub message is a hyperlink? In both cases it would increase the visibility of the stub template (something which we've been doing as much as possible to avoid at WP:WSS - the more discreet a stub template is, the better), but other than that, it wouldn't really make for any other than a cosmetic change. By the way, King Oomie is right - changes to the stub template(s) are normally discussed over at either Template talk:Stub or at Talk:Stub. Indeed, there have been numerous suggestions on changing the look of stub templates there in the past in many different ways - including, IIRC, a rejected suggestion to centre stub messages. Grutness... wha? 01:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC) | to
The proposal in this box is shelved/withdrawn until the proposal in the next sub-section is resolved. (May be worth reading for background on that proposal, though) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Wikipedia:PEREN#Create_a_counter_of_people_watching_a_page There are more good editors than vandals. Even if making the counter visible and the 'unwatched pages' page public resulted in massive abuse, editors would quickly remedy the problem by adding unwatched pages to their watchlist. Can an admin tell us how many pages there are on the unwatched list? Reasons for doing this, or why the 'vandalism' objection is invalid:
What other reasons were given against this proposal? It might help if the PEREN page linked to the discussions. Without knowing what was said, the reasoning sounds like "the vandals would make this impossible", which is often a poor objection. –M T 03:50, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
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Vandalism is a problem on all pages, but it is a much larger problem on pages that, on average, have fewer or zero people watching them. One solution to this problem is Wikipedia_talk:Special:UnwatchedPages, which was requested by Jimbo, is accessible only to admins, is updated infrequently, and is therefore very difficult to 'clean out'. Another solution, advocated here, is to modify the recent-changes table in MediaWiki to grab the watcher-count from the watchlist table. We would then be able to create a "recent changes in unwatched articles" page. This page would let editors catch vandalism that would usually have gone unnoticed for long periods of time. It would also encourage editors to expand their watch-lists, and urge editors to contribute to fringe/stub articles that are seeing some recent activity. It would also allow us to finally address one of the WP:PERENs. To get this proposal off the ground, we would need:
Comments addressing any of these four points are especially welcome. –M T 19:38, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Would there be some way of combining it with the recent "whitelist" list of autreviewers? That is, for there to be a list of recent changes to unwatched pages excluding those pages where the last change is by an autoreviewer? That way it would be easy to look for vandalism without checking pages where someone else has already reverted vandalism. That might well solve some of Excirial's concerns about multiple checks of the same recent edit. Grutness... wha? 02:09, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Would it be a good idea to move this proposal into its own page, and if so, where should it be located? M 22:10, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
The proposal is to create a recent changes page for unwatched articles to prevent vandalism by modifying the recent-changes table in MediaWiki. (I'd really prefer not to see this one archived, since it would open up several useful features. It would permit Watched counters. A now-ignored bugfix in the watchlist code and the addition of a 'checked' watchlist row would then let you patrol your own watchlist. Adding a public-watchlist preference would then give us a passive form of Flagged revisions.) Though this is a software feature request, support from editors would help.
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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Our current main page layout is plain and boring. It hasn't been updated in years. I think we should have some kind of "customer satisfaction" survey about the main page. The 2008 redesign proposal was blown off, maybe it's time we tried again? I think it could use a re-do to make it look more modern. iMatthew talk at 19:48, 13 August 2009 (UTC)
In the recent usability study, infoboxes consistently tripped new editors up.
I think we can get around this: Instead of the long, lengthy infobox code that currently dominates our articles, why not instead simply transclude Article/Infobox, which would contain the complicated code currently kept in the article? With a small amount of extra coding, Article/Infobox could be automatically watchlisted alongside Article, just like Talk:Article is.
Thoughts? Shoemaker's Holiday Over 184 FCs served 12:15, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
An alternate solution is to use templates that start with "Infobox/", such as {{ Infobox/Shark}}. This is more flexible in terms of naming. Non-free images have to be wrapped in includeonly, but that isn't much of a problem. — Carl ( CBM · talk) 13:24, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
There is one practical caution against this , and that is the situation with references. References in infoboxes are often not the unique use of the reference, and thus it requires a lot more work to coordinate this between infobox and article body if they are separated. -- MASEM ( t) 13:57, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
As I see it, advantages to this proposal are:
And disadvantages:
IMO, this is another of those usability-spawned proposals where anything we can do here now is likely to be premature and unlikely to be particularly successful. The solution most likely to be actually usable requires rather large changes to MediaWiki, to basically change editing from one big text field to multiple text fields (e.g. "header", "main body", "references", "metadata (categories)", and so on). Anomie ⚔ 14:40, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps we could put the infobox into a section called "data", and then find some way to have it up in the top right (javascript?). I've often thought that if we want to be correct about article layout in terms of html and all that (eg. with stylesheets removed), that's a horrible place for the infobox. If you have your CSS off, it basically takes up the entire top of the page, when it's clear that our articles should begin with "An infobox is a table of data about a certain subject...", and not a bunch of random data. M 20:33, 9 August 2009 (UTC)
What about creating a separate Infobox: namespace? — Ruud 18:51, 10 August 2009 (UTC)
It might be good if the infobox code could be moved to the end rather than the start of the wikitext. But I'd be anti any scheme to put the infobox on a separate page and transclude it. That would just increase user confusion, hamper editing, force you to watch two pages instead of one, create additional search complications, and generally cause a lot of trouble just to "solve" what isn't exactly a major problem anyway...-- Kotniski ( talk) 09:19, 11 August 2009 (UTC)
I think the only real workable solution is to treat certain templates like the ToC, and create magic words that can be put into base text that will locate the specific template top-right (or top-center or whatever). Perhaps this could be even further expanded to cover navboxes or other templates: bottom of the page, top-right of Section 3 (for review templates, like at New Super Mario Bros.#Reception). Then we could put all or a lot of infobox/template code at the bottom of articles, where people won't mind them. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 02:05, 12 August 2009 (UTC)
I was sure that this existed, but when I went to cite it, realized that it doesn't. I had understood the particular warnings on the various noticeboards (AN, ANI, WQA, SPA, etc.) that one should notify an editor whose conduct is being reported to be manifestations of a deeper policy, or at least community norm, of notification. Viz. that as a matter of wikiquette if nothing else, if you are trying to get someone into hot water, you should notify that person so that they have basic due process (notice and opportunity to be heard). Whether you are asking for sanctions against someone at ANI or on an admin's talk page, or anywhere else, you should let that person know.
Is my understanding correct, that there is a broad community norm of notification? Is this reflected in any existing policy? If the answer to 1 is yes and to 2 is no, how do I go about proposing such a policy? Do I just create WP:NOTIFY and slap the "proposed" tag on it?- Simon Dodd { U· T· C· WP:LAW } 20:52, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
Also, see Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines for information on how to go about proposing new policies. -- œ ™ 23:36, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm reading the RFA of 7. One of the points of discussion is an incident where someone used(hacked) a prior account.
It may be that polices are in place to ensure this cannot happen again, but I don't get that impression from the discussion. As I understand it, if you decide you want a new user name, you abandon your old one, which can be taken over by someone else. To avoid that, it is recommended (but not required) that you re-register the old name and redirect it to your new name. In fact 7 tried to do this but was tripped up by an understandable rule, prohibiting the creation of a new name substantially similar to an old one.
Now I move into speculation - I speculate than an ordinary editor cannot create a name in this circumstance, but someone with more rights, perhaps an admin, could create the account. I don't know whether that happened in this case, but it seems plausible it could happen sometime.
Why not make the suggested policy mandatory, and implement it in software? If a user desires a new user name, and the request is granted, why not make the creation of the new name (presumably requiring more than editor rights in order to move the history over) simultaneously re-register, or maintain the registration of the old name with an automatic re-direct to the new name, possibly also adding something to make sure someone couldn't use the old name to do anything else, (i.e. the old name is not allowed any rights).
As I learn more about the twists and turns of the software, I realize there are something that sounds easy but turn out to be more difficult than they sound, but I would think this is possible. I assume when a user requests a new name, we would never want the old name being used ever again, neither for a new user (who would be confused with the prior owner) or the old user, who would then have multiple accounts. (I'm aware that multiple accounts are allowed, but this isn't the way to accomplish that.)
I haven't made this a formal proposal, because I'd like to hear from some more experienced users, who might tell me that it already works this way, and I just missed the announcement, or that it is impossible as stated for reasons I'm not following. After feedback, if there's anything to this idea, I'll try to write it up as a formal proposal.-- SPhilbrick T 23:06, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
I'd like to make it possible to import edits from the Nostalgia Wikipedia and Meta to the English Wikipedia. The Nostalgia Wikipedia is a copy of the Wikipedia database from 20 December 2001 which contains several edits which aren't in our database but probably should be. For example, compare the first edit of the saint article on the English Wikipedia with the history of the saint article in the Nostalgia Wikipedia. Meta was originally a place for discussion of Wikipedia policies, and some pages were moved from Meta to here by cut and paste, like our blocking policy.
I specialise in history merging old edits (see my user subpage about page history), and I'd find it useful to be able to import old edits from the Nostalgia wiki and Meta. Should this ability be given to admins as they request it, or to *all* admins?
If this discussion results in the ability to import pages, I'll refer it to this page on meta. I don't think that what I want to do (i.e. import edits to fill out page histories) is at all controversial, but the ability to import edits could be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I think it should be restricted in some way. Graham 87 15:10, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
This is a very good idea. I personally cannot see any issues with people wanting import right - and I've seen Graham87 doing complex history merges before so I know he would use the rights appropriately. Can import be granted, or do settings have to be changed for it to be possible to import from certain places? Majorly talk 18:26, 14 August 2009 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion on Template_talk:Asbox#Microformats_in_stubs, about wether or not it is desirable to add microformats to stub templates. This would add special markup to for instance {{ Ghana-stub}}, that makes it possible for a microformat understanding system to detect that "Ghana" means a place called Ghana for instance. The arguments pro are: does no harm, adds machine readable context. The arguments against are: adds extra complexity to stub templates, and stubs are not part of the "proper" article content, as well as "all these locations will get their microformat trough infoboxes in the future, why do the work twice". New insights are welcomed. — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 19:58, 17 August 2009 (UTC)
I understand and support the principle of Bold, but that guideline emphasizes editing existing articles, not creating a brand-new article from scratch with zero experience. While our guideline to writing one's first article mentions starting in user space, it is often ignored. New users are coming to Wikipedia, thinking they can create a brand-new article in mainspace and see it survive. I think the experience of pouring time and effort into an article in good faith, then seeing it disappear through CSD or AfD must be discouraging to people who might otherwise turn into fine editors. We do a disservice to potential new editors by not being clearer about the best way to write an article form scratch.
I have a simple solution.
Whenever a new person creates an account, I'd like to see the account prepopulated with a user subpage - call it user:Newname/My First Article
Populate it with some useful advice(e.g. "when you think this is ready, here's how to ask for editor review", and "here's how to move it to mainspace").
Automatically include a Notes section with {{reflist}}, as the creation of references trips up many new editors. I'm sure others can add to what would be a good new article template.
My guess is that a new editor who creates an article in user space, asks for editor review before moving, and then moves into mainspace will be much more likely to avoid CSD or Afd - probably by a factor of ten.
I see this as a major gain for a relatively small cost.-- SPhilbrick T 16:59, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure that a new user would be able to know or even care if that subpage exists; the normal welcome page could just have option to create it, with appropriate text preloaded, i.e. :
- Steve Sanbeg ( talk) 19:11, 20 August 2009 (UTC)
With almost 3 million articles in the English Wikipedia, I wish that there was a site notice asking contributors/the public to upload their pictures with a free license to Commons. I think this is better than the site notice we have, currently. miranda 02:48, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
Just a thought but there should be an option for a less intrusive way to notify editors of new talk page messages, either by a selection in "preferences" or by a gadget. My suggestion (at least on the monobook skin) would be for "my talk" to be highlighted. Thoughts? -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 22:15, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
/* This section */
bit, others aren't made notice of. Some people edit multiple sections, others add their comments to the lead. So yeh, some serious clever parsing or a bit ol' PHP rewrite. It would be handy though, especially for long user talk pages.
Greg Tyler (
t •
c)
21:47, 18 August 2009 (UTC)
My propose is to use template en:Template:Iwiki-conflict for all pages involved in intewiki conflicts. More details you can find at page m:Interwiki synchronization and in template documentation. Also users who contributes in other language sections of Wikipedia can create translated analogues of template in those languages. If we will have similar templates in all languages we will be able to use bot to add template to all involved pages automatically. What do you think about this idea? DixonD ( talk) 20:41, 16 August 2009 (UTC)
Have you seen Template:Interwikiconflict? — Martin ( MSGJ · talk) 14:04, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
I was working on a proposal, but see it is largely a variation of Wikipedia:Deferred revisions and Wikipedia:Delayed revisions. Two questions:
As a follow-up to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)/Archive_44#Double_redirects, I posted a note at Wikipedia talk:Double redirects#Many double redirects are good. — Sebastian 00:47, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
August 24, 2009
Good Day Everyone at Wikipedia,
I´m sure you are used to getting congratulations from people all over the planet, and in many languages by now. Mine is adding another one to your collection for a job that is very well done and keeps on growing for the benefit of all mankind. In this regard, I wish to extend my best wishes to Jimmy Wales and to the entire team at Wikipedia.
I also have one or two suggestions to put forward for consideration.
The first one would be to add another portal to the list. Why not have a portal named say, Business and Economics. The portal would include such topics as accounting, bookkeeping, credit including defaulting/delinquency and bankruptcy, economics, finance, insurance, investments, mortgage and personal lending (could form part of credit or simply addressed separately), project management, qualitative analysis, quantitative analysis, risk management, statistics, and other related topics.
How would I initiate the separate portal one would ask? To begin with, I would classify each article listed in the 3 million plus articles currently in English, and show the classification next to the article name as a cross-reference. Example: Cat - Portal: Natural & Physical Sciences, sub category Biological Science. By classifying all articles, beginning with the English language, all articles that would be classified as part of the Business and Economics portal and the connecting sub categories would be appropriately identified, indexed and included in the new portal. Example: Balance Sheet – Portal: Business & Economics, sub category Accounting.
Accordingly, and in time, the new Business & Economics portal would not only be a comprehensive source of information for reference, but a self-teaching tool and guide on any subject that could otherwise be learned in school, university and of course applied in a real life environment. I believe that the separate portal approach could foster increased learning. For instance, someone accessing the Business and Economics portal directly may learn interesting and useful information that otherwise the person may not have been aware of from the main site.
In conjunction with Mr. Wales´s philosophy of capturing the sum of human knowledge in print form for easy reference by everyone, I believe the effective use of this information is to depict it as a self-teaching and tutorial guide so that people can not only inform themselves (passive approach), but also use this information for personal benefit and furthering human progress (creative, progressive and constructive approach).
Yours truly,
Charles Roy
Hello, I am a long time Wikipedia user, although I just signed up for an account today in order to post this message :p. I've noticed that when I'm reading an article, I often click on one or more of the links on the page to read about a related topic, or for more detail on a related concept, etc. More often than not however, I will click on a link only to explain or further my understanding of a concept that I'm reading about, or for a definition of a specific word, so I click on the link, do a brief read of the connected article, then go back and continue reading.
So, my proposal is that when you hover over a link in an article, a cursor pop up displays a condensed/summary entry of that related article, or a short definition of a word (if appropriate). Now I understand that this would take some time to implement, as summary entries would have to be created for pretty much every article, however I really think there are benefits to readability and comprehension of articles. Really the summary would just have enough info to give someone a rough idea of the concept or main idea of the related article, or a short definition of a word.
Anyone feel like this would be a useful change to implement on Wiki?
Thanks for your feedback.
Hey great! thanks for the heads up.
Something I've encountered from time to time is what appears to be bureaucracy for its own sake at AIV. Depending on which admin sees a report (not necessarily mine, but anyone's) a blatant vandal-only account may be blocked, or the block request may be declined because the person "hasn't been warned enough or has been incorrectly warned". Apparently, you have to go in order from Test1 through test4 before they can be blocked.
I don't understand the value in giving 4 warnings to people who are obviously here to play games by creating new articles of patent nonsense or spam about their bands, then continually recreating them after they've been speedied multiple times. 90% of them are bored kids who know exactly what they're doing is wrong. The other 10% are pretty obvious to anyone who is not a total blockhead, and can be helped along.
AGF and welcoming new editors should not be a suicide pact. Obvious trolls who are reported at AIV should just be blocked, without having to go through the process of placing 4 warnings (that will just be ignored), reverting more vandalism and tagging more garbage pages for speedy, before someone is willing to block them. Come on, we're not vogons! <>Multi-Xfer<> ( talk) 00:46, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
I guess my question is, if there is a pattern that [some] administrators will only require three warnings... why do we have four? I think the points the OP makes are correct to make in some ways; he makes the point that it is bureaucratic to say "we require four, because that's how many warnings there are"... --
Izno (
talk)
03:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
PS: Hyperspace bypass? =d
Obvious vandal IPs should be blocked straight away if there's a pattern (if it's just a one-off, then forget about it). Obvious vandal accounts should be blocked anyway (to prevent their becoming autoconfirmed). If it's not obvious (they might be just experimenting) then warnings might be appropriate before blocking (I would have thought 1, or an absolute maximum of 2, warnings would always be sufficient). We should show our genuine editors and our readers more respect than to allow preventible damage to our encyclopedia; we should certainly show vandal-fighters more respect than to make them waste their time jumping through hoops. (If a vandal is going to reform, then they can do so after the block has expired, or apologize and ask for it to be revoked - if they really are interested in contributing positively, they'll understand why the block was placed, and hopefully be encouraged to contribute knowing that steps are taken to protect their contributions from damage.) -- Kotniski ( talk) 09:13, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
(outdent) The ideals behind the 'beyond a reasonable doubt' standard in courts is often summed up in civics class as an expression of the idea that we'd rather see 10 guilty people walk free then one innocent man put in jail. As a core principle of the project we have held that letting a vandal screw a few, easily reverted edits is the price we pay for making sure we dont scare off bright eyed potential contributors. One may call replacing the Kleenex article with "FUCK OFF!!" vandalism, but its just as likely to be a well intentioned, if crude, test. One may argue for or against this approach, but like the conviction standard mentioned it's largely set in stone at this point- for the right reasons. -- M ask? 09:15, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
![]() | Join the effort at WikiProject Policy and Guidelines! |
Is it time to set aside some community resources in order to conduct a "Policy and Guideline improvement drive"? Just thinking about it, it's possible that Wikipedia has recently (as in the last year to 18 months) reached some sort of tipping point. There are more then 3 million articles now, Wikipedia is regularly featured on Google, the user-base has changed both in size and character, and governance itself has significantly evolved. I don't have anything really specific in mind other then an amorphous feeling that some policies and guidelines are showing their age. There does seem to be a lot of conflict that occurs still, and some of that is sometimes due to (lacking) policy in my opinion. And then there are real issues such as the deletion policy... Anyway, I was just thinking about this for some reason, and wanted to bring it up.
—
Ω (
talk)
11:16, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
Note: After writing this, I've discovered that I'm not the only person to have had similar thinking. See especially
Wikipedia:Areas for Reform#Poorly written policies. I was actually thinking of a wider, more purposeful effort here, but I have no problem with connecting onto an existing effort and attempting to propel it forward.
—
Ω (
talk)
05:13, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
I agree with the many editors who suggest adoting a specific policy and joining the several people who work to improve it. But let me provide a little context for WP:Areas for Reform. There was an atempt by the ArbCom to create a policy committee, precisely because ArbCom flt there was a need for reform. There was an RfC in which many people - close to a hundred - participated. Most agreed that there was a need for reform; some agreed with the way ArbCom was going about it, and some agreed on a particular direction for reform. Others agreed there was a need for reform but objected to the way ArbCom was going about it, and objected to diferent directions. Although I expressed a stong position in the RfC, it seemed to me that Wikipedia could use a space where people advocating any direction of reform could develop proposals. When I created "Areas for Reform" I started with specific questions that people on all sides of the RfC had raised and left a means for people to add new questions. There has been ongoing discussion there since. I invite people here to take a look at the diferrent questions being discussed. I close with one plea for the value of such a page (which I think Ohm shares, given his actions here): people working on a policy are doing so in isolation of more general trends and arguments at Wikipedia and are often focused on very specific issues pertaining to that policy. When ArbCom tried to create a policy committee I think they were expressing the need for a group of people a little insuated from the demands to solve urgent problems ight away, but who were also thinking about the "big picture" of where Wikipedia is going, what it can and ought to be. I think there is a need for this kind of discussion, I just do not think it should be limited to an exclusive group of people. I hope other editors who are thinking about "the big picture" of how Wikipedia is functioning will see whether any of the questions currenty being discussed at WP:Areas for Reform get at something important. if so, I hope they take advantage of that space as a place to brainstorm without having to worry about immediate consequences (yet), and then as a place to generate proposals for new policies or proposals to change existing policies ... which can then be taken to the appropriate policy talk page. I think this process might help generate fresh ideas. Slrubenstein | Talk 08:51, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Why isn't there an external links notice board? Smallman12q ( talk) 14:54, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
It would be a place to gather consensus on whether or not to include links and which ones. Aside from spamming...and all those other vandal issues, according to WP:EL, links should be kept to a minimum. And while disputes over which links are pertinent and best represent the topic are rare, they do occur. Currently other than the talk page, it is difficult to get other people's opinion as there is no place to go. Smallman12q ( talk) 18:39, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
Because it would be full of people who think every external links is spam. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 15:45, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
We would use <ref group="arch">, where "arch" stands for archive. These footnotes would be invisible by default, until users make them visible in their preferences.
Just as lawyers consult legislative histories and precedents before making an argument in court, our editors (ought to) explore the archives to examine whether proposed changes to policies and guidelines are consistent with well-reasoned consensus (as I have done here). However, lawyers have the advantage of "annotated" codes and citators. I'm proposing something like that for our own policies.
Some of you have been here since the beginning, but I'm barely a year old. I am constantly proposing changes to our policies that, it turns out, were thoughtfully considered and rejected years ago. I think this proposal could cut back on ill-considered churn by people like me.
PS If this proposal was considered and rejected already ... that supports my argument ;) Andrew Gradman talk/ WP:Hornbook 01:42, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Unfortunately policies and guidelines have evolved in a very messy way. The worst thing is that there is no procedure for establishing whether there is consensus for something or not - basically Ps&Gs are shaped either through edit warring, or through someone sneaking something through without it being noticed. Only a few people take an interest in the content of any given page, and hence it is their views that are reflected on that page, not those of the community. Consequently different pages often come to contradict each other. Even tidying them up to make them more readable and comprehensible often meets with resistance from individuals who treat particular tracts of text as some kind of immutable scripture. I don't believe these pages have much effect on what actually happens on WP (except when their words are interpreted to mean something they weren't intended to), but the sorry condition (and excessive number) of them must surely confuse and even deter new contributors.
My vision is that Wikipedia should have nice, tidy, structured documentation that makes it easy for people to find the information they need - whether about the project in general, how to use the software, or about what is considered good practice on WP. (I would put all this in the Help: namespace, leaving the Wikipedia: namespace for process and discussion, but that's a detail). Disagreements about what actually is good practice would be resolved through RfC's or similar, but with clear results (i.e. closure by disinterested parties if necessary). So to get back to the point, yes, we should have links to discussions as references where that would be helpful, but those discussions should have a clear conclusion that shows why the recommended practice is supported.-- Kotniski ( talk) 09:21, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
No need to make them invisible. It's already being done... what was it, WP:OFFICE? has some ref content at the bottom. The only problem is that some people might take this to mean that consensus can't change, but that's a problem best handled elsewhere. M 23:18, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
It would be cool if there was a new option to automatically watch pages. Accdude92 ( talk) ( sign) 17:09, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
Just an FYI, that there is a discussion occurring about possible changes to the ITN section of the main page, located here:
Template talk:In the news#Use of Wikinews. Feel free to jump in on the conversations!
—
Ω (
talk)
09:42, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Has anyone considered the idea of having Peer reviews by experts in fields who aren't members of Wikipedia? i.e. Having people who run a website about gardening do a review of a gardening-based article?---- occono ( talk) 23:26, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Since there is a kilobyte counter there is no need to have a minor edit option. If the edition is smaller then 500 k, the system should automatically save it as m. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 14:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I am talking about Wikipedia:Introduction, a page that welcomes our new users. The page has sandbox functionality, in other words, the users are free to make test edits there as long as the intro template stays untouched. Too bad it doesn't, and new editors may be greeted by something along the lines of "lol wikipedia is teh suxx0rz haxd" or "Get stuff online www.fakesite.com". This is mostly incompetence and misunderstanding the purpose of the page instead of actual vandalism, but to ensure that the page looks the way it's supposed to when a new user views it, I suggest we remove the sandbox functionality from this page altogether. Obviously, it's good to have a sandbox page for our newcomers, so I suggest editing our current sandbox template to point forward to Wikipedia:Introduction_2 (titled "Learn more about editing") so new editors wouldn't have to look for the next page of the introduction OR creating a new sandbox page between the first and the second introduction page. Any support, comments, suggestions? Kotiwalo ( talk) 19:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
(outdent)I have recently been watching the introduction page. No idea how that started, but I regularily check out the new user contributions and revert offensive or immature edits. It has begun to irk me that the message we use to greet newcomers is routinely vandalised into absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is not the place to read about ketchup farts, or at least a main page isn't.
I wish to propose that the page for editing WP:Introduction redirect to the page for editing WP:Sandbox. This way, new users can read the introduction, still click edit, and edit the sandbox instead of defacing the message that they just read. WP:Introduction could then be protected from editing. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 14:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Why not make it work the way {{
doc}}
works on protected templates (via transclusion of the sandbox -- in this case -- onto the protected intro page). That way the message stays intact, and you can have a special edit link right there (though the "edit this page" tab won't work right, unfortunately). Maybe have Cluebot and/or its friends lightly patrol the sandbox for profanity to stop that.
--
Thin
boy
00 @117, i.e.
01:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
Hi from the
Basque Country!
This is a message to the administrators of wikipedia in English or for someone who can help me with this issue:
I´m an user and contributor of the
Basque Wikipedia.,
Basque language is one of the oldest in Europe and the world, it has thousands of years old and is one of the few languages that survived the arrival of Indo-Europeans to Europe. Perhaps being one of the oldest nations or countries of the world not even have their own state, but our language is our homeland and pride. It put us on the map and give a reference recognizable to English speakers, the city of
Pamplona (
Iruña in basque language), where they celebrate the internationally famous festival of
San Fermin are in the
Basque Country.
After this brief introduction I would kindly ask you this request:
On July 15, 2009, in the Basque wikipedia we exceed the figure of 40,000 items, today (August 8, 2009) and we have 42,000 items, achievement of which we are very proud, because if we compare proportionately the number of speakers of the Basque language (about a million) with other spoken language Wikipedia in more than one state or nation in the world with millions of speakers is like to be proud.
Because one of the aims of Wikipedia in addition to expanding human knowledge worldwide is also to expand the knowledge of all languages of mankind: From the Basque Wikipedia We wanted to make the request to the users and particularly to the Admin of the English wikipedia would be possible if you put the link to Basque Wikipedia in your English Wikipedia´s language list of everyone in your main cover ("Languages" section: as is currently the case Galician or Catalan language) and the Wikipedia list of more than 40,000 items that is below your main entrance page ("Wikipedia languages" section). Since English is currently the most powerful, influential and widespread in the world (your wikipedia already has 3,000,000 articles), the presence of Basque Wikipedia in your list of the world would be a great help to supervival of our language and their knowledge in the world.
Awaiting your reply.
Greetings from the Basque Wikipedia.
.
--
Euskalduna
(tell me) 15:05, 26 August 2009 (UTC) (UTC)
Having re-read your posting, I understand that you would like the Basque Wikipedia to be mentioned on the Main Page, where - at the bottom of the page - a list of languages other than Wikipedia in which Wikipedias exist can be found. I think you had better contact a Wikipedia administrator there (I am not one myself), who may be able to help with proposed changes to the Main Page. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 19:47, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I WANT TO POST AN INFORMATION ON AARON BERKMAN, A RECOGNIZED WELL LISTED ARTIST. COULD YOU PLEASE ADVISE HOW I MAY PROCEED IN POSTING THE INFORMATION IN ADDITION TO AN IMAGE. THANKS, JEANETTE HENDLER —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jeanettehendler ( talk • contribs)
-- SPhilbrick T 18:15, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
@Jeanette, click here:
edit Aaron Berkman and start adding stuff.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
04:32, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I think that there should be a forum for wikipedia. Accdude92 ( talk) ( sign) 14:14, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia Review is fairly active. Chuthya ( talk) 11:59, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
I really like knowing about etymologies, but they can get in the way of smooth reading of the lead paragraph in many articles. I'd like these to be in collapible spans (I think this would need some technical implementation) when they get past a certain length.
would therefore be replaced with something looking a bit like
expanding to the former when clicked. As with collapsible divs, these could be custom-CSS-ed for users who want them always-visible. The downside would be that that the text inside the span might get read, expanded and checked less, and it's another click if that's what you were mainly after looking at the article. The OED website does something similar, hiding pronunciation and etymology by default. Pseudomonas( talk) 13:48, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
{{
Lead sentence|Beijing|pron-en|beɪˈdʒɪŋ|IPA-en|beɪˈʒɪŋ|(etc...)}}
(undent) To respond to an earlier question, Wikipedia:Requested templates is the place to ask for help with a new template. And, for what it's worth, I'd support such a template, as being a benefit to the average reader, who isn't interested in pronunciation and etymology. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 22:20, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
I like this idea a lot, though I must say, the original language should be included outside of the collapse, though not necessarily the transliteration. But it would be nice to hide the arcane pronunciation guides and elaborate linguistic notes. -- Golbez ( talk) 22:35, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
I take the point made in MOS:SCROLL about accessibility. At the moment, collapsible spans are not possible; I don't know whether this is changeable by admins or needs devs. I figure that if this proposal is popular with the community then people who know more about screen-readers and the like should decide if there's a non-obnoxious way of implementing it. Pseudomonas( talk) 23:57, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Is there a reason we don't have one of the Creative commons badges at the bottom of our pages? I seem to remember a GFDL badge being there once upon a time. -- Cybercobra (talk) 11:04, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
(←)In 'advanced search,' there's a link that says "Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more." Click it, and there will be a dropdown box that you can choose the appropriate license. It only works with Creative Commons though, I think.-- Unionhawk Talk E-mail 17:00, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
I generated a preliminary example for what something like that may look like:
code
|
---|
|
Wether or not to use an image, and the exact wording and formatting still requires quite some discussion of course. We wouldn't want to get that wrong. — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 17:08, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
I think we should at the very least add the microformat, as I propose here: MediaWiki_talk:Wikimedia-copyright — TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 00:47, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Right, now that the microformat was added, any thoughts from people on the original question of an image badge? Possibilities: [2], [3], [4] -- Cybercobra (talk) 05:31, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I'm posting this in response to the CNN article which was reporting on Wikipedia's decision to use editors for select articles to approve changes before they're made public. I'd like to suggest that Wikipedia enact a system of "community based edit approval" on selected articles wherein pages need to have changes approved before being made public. Edits would be voted on by users before taking affect. In this way, when a user makes a change to an article it will not be immediately visible on the article's main page. Instead, it will be logged onto the articles edit page for review and if it receives a set amount of negative votes in a certain amount of time then edit will be discarded and the article will not be changed. This would be a good way to prevent vandalism and preventing bad changes from ever coming into action. 74.131.111.224 ( talk) 23:19, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
I wish a hide bots button on history pages. There is so huge amount of bot edits on every history page it is really annoying to check other "real" edits. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 14:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
(undent) Such a gadget would only hide the entries on the history list, not the edits themselves. So if the original history looked like this:
etc.
Then the "truncated history" would be this:
etc.
but clicking the first "prev" link would (assuming no major restructuring on the part of the gadget) show a diff between the edits at 0:05 and 0:10, not the edits at 0:00 and 0:10, and the author of the old version would be correctly identified as User:ExampleBot (i.e. everything would "just work"). If the gadget somehow was designed to show the diff between 0:00 and 0:10, it would look as though the user had selected this diff via the radio buttons on the original history (complete with message about intermittant edits etc.). This, however, would entail a much more complex gadget. In short, the MediaWiki software is not stupid and won't do inconsistent things like those mentioned above without warning you. -- Thin boy 00 @144, i.e. 02:27, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
Here is one solution. You put this option in Preferences -> Gadgets -> User interface gadgets. So if you pick this option out every history page whould include show/hide buttons where bots should be listed. And if you want to make a preview or undo, you just have to click show. That's all. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 22:42, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Aha, I have to explain my reason. The problem is that smaller Wikipedias have a series of bots on the history lists (interwikis) while bigger wikis like en: or de: maybe don't know that problem so strictly. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 22:46, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
It's entirely possible that what I'm thinking about exists already and I'm simply not aware of it, but recently I've been running across situations where I feel that I'm "going out on a limb" somewhat. You know that feeling that you get, where you don't want to just leave something, but you also don't really feel comfortable with the change that you've just made? has there been discussion about some sort of feedback system that addresses this, at all? The first thing to come to my mind is some sort of template.. something like {{
Check me}} or... something.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
07:13, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Per
WP:REDLINK and
WP:STUB, I think there should be a balance between creating an article of one or two sentences and allowing an unimproved micro stub to exist indefinitely. My view is that a redlink is as much or more an incentive to research and create an article as is a stub to expand, but that a minimal stub detracts from the impression of the encyclopedia as a serious enterprise. As I am aware that many editors do create a very short stub as a type of placeholder and then they (or a project) begin expanding them I would think there should be a generous allowance to permit them - or others - to work upon them to bring them up to article status.
Per WP:Stub
Wikipedia is not a directory and it would be difficult to argue that a one or two sentence page would not fall into that definition - except perhaps place names; "X" is a small village in Y province/state of country Z", and discussion might suggest particular stub types that might be exempt from the cull. Also suggestions regarding time frames may be beneficial, especially with input from those who can provide analysis on the likelihood of expansion on stubs over time from creation.
I look forward to comments.
LessHeard vanU (
talk)
14:01, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
[[File:JohnSmith.jpg|thumb|John Smith]] '''John Smith''' was a sixteenth century English author. While he wrote several collections of poetry, including [[Collection1]], he's most famous for his plays, mainly [[His famous comedy]]. {{author-stub}}
Well, it appears that there is a large sentiment for "something is better than nothing" - even if it triggers WP:NOTDIR, so perhaps it would be best that any initial run bot would simply list these stubs and a taskforce could go through and remove the real junk (once tagged by the bot it would whitelist any stub not deleted). Any subsequent bot runs could PROD an article under the criteria, and again allow flesh and blood operators make the decision. I would comment that this is not attempting to "finish up the encyclopedia" but to remove content that is no longer up to standard - much like some old FA's lose the status - and improve the overall quality of the project. I would, of course, sign up for such a review body in the first instance. LessHeard vanU ( talk) 20:11, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
This tool may help with this effort. -- œ ™ 04:28, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
**I am happy to try and expand some of these articles. It would be a good idea to move the list onto wikipedia, where notes can be placed against entries where action is taken or which are quite appropriate to be kept short such as the disambiguation pages on the list.
Davewild (
talk)
18:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
I did include a date parameter in {{ Asbox}} at one point, in case it was ever thought useful to explore how long things remained as stubs, and perhaps triage them. It was taken out as scope creep. However if it would result in less stubs, in a good way, it can be put back in. Rich Farmbrough, 04:03, 30 August 2009 (UTC).
Now I know that wikipedia isn't the place for "chatting", BUT I think a page just for talking and for getting to know all the editors, and other members, would be nice to have. As of now, everybody is sepperated. I also know that there is irc, but not everyone can use irc. Accdude92 ( talk) ( sign) 14:19, 25 August 2009 (UTC)
Sometimes, we have important community announcements, but there is no optimal way to advertize them. We can use the watchlist notice, but IPs can't see it, and logged-in users don't always frequently check their watchlist, so it's not that efficient. There's also the sitenotice, which makes the message visible to all users on all pages. But some announcements are not intended for all readers or are not important enough to be put on the sitenotice, so we could use a talknotice working like the sitenotice and displayed only on talk pages, also dismissible. If we agree that such a thing is desirable, it'll be requested to the developers. Cenarium ( talk) 00:26, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}|{{TALKSPACE}}|...}}
should do? —
Dispenser
21:38, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
I filled T22458 requesting this. Cenarium ( talk) 00:22, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Wikia already developed this functionality, so could be a good starting place - it's available here: https://wikia-code.com/wikia/trunk/extensions/wikia/SiteWideMessages/ ... via a special page you can send out dismissable messages that show up on user talk pages. Because it's on user talk pages, it triggers the new message notification, so users will know it's there. You can target groups of people (admins, for instance), individual users, or just everyone. If needed, you can also retract messages after they were sent out. The messages can have an expiration date so they go away on their own after a specific date/time - useful for things like maintenance notifications where no one cares 1 month after the event. Also handles anon user talk pages, empty user talk pages, diffs, etc. This was a particularly useful extension as it allowed us to communicate with people en masse for whom we had no email address. The dismissable part of it is what made it appealing to the users. Jqsjqs ( talk) 22:50, 16 October 2009 (UTC) More here: http://help.wikia.com/wiki/Help:Talk_Page_Messaging Jqsjqs ( talk) 00:06, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
Check out Maglev (transport). Its table of contents is floated over to the right, next the the main text, instead of above the rest of the text. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has been annoyed by having to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll to get past the TOC. Maybe using the method found in "Maglev (transport)" in all articles, or at least all long ones, would make Wikipedia more usable overall. All it would require would be a TOCright or TOCleft in double curly brackets where the table of contents is.--( User:Star Trek enthusiast) ( talk) 23:21, 27 August 2009 (UTC)
Every day I say or hear "Donno, check it up on wikipedia" or "even google it on wikipedia". A better verb needs to be coined as to wikipedia sounds silly. If it does, what is it? just an odd thought, but this could go a long way, so I am posting. -- Squidonius ( talk) 11:31, 24 August 2009 (UTC)
Perhaps there could be a new verb coined here - after, Google has become such a popular search engine that people now talk of "googling the web" rather than "surfing the Web". Perhaps we could talk about Wikipeding for a term? I would be against, however, saying "wikifying it" because there are a lot of other Wiki websites (such as Wikinews}other than Wikipedia.
ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 06:23, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
I appreciate your liking of this term, but I stick with what I said above - I am a little unsure of "wiki it" myself, as there are other Wiki websites besides Wikipedia. How about Wikipede it, as AGradman suggested above? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 19:54, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
The task is to find an abbreviation of Wikipedia (5 syllables) that fits in "___ it" and is short verbally (not just in writing). Then we start using it. "Wiki it" slurs into weekeet. "Doubleyou-pee it" doesn't quite work. Check TFE? WiP? WP, pronounced as 'wip'? Whip it. Ha ha. From now on, in my head, I'll be pronouncing WP as Wip, and referring to Wikipedia as WiP. Join me! and soon we too may have an awesome nounverb. M
Wikipate! Grand master ka 03:26, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Hello!
Sorry for my limited knowledge of English, but I think that the images like these:
http://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9E%C9%99kil:Anti_Armenia.png
http://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9E%C9%99kil:No_France.svg
http://az.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9E%C9%99kil:No_Israel.svg
should not be in Wikipedia nor Users pages of Wikipedians.
Wikipedia should be a place for knowledge not for rasistic expressions of some users.
Skrabbit ( talk) 16:45, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
(od) Somewhat relevant to this thread: commons:Commons:Deletion_requests/Image:Anti_Poland.png which also discusses commons:Category:Anti_logos and its >220 member files. I don't know what to make of the discussion, but in any case there isn't anything to be done within the scope of this project. BTW, someone attempted to speedy the no-France image and the speedy tag was quickly removed by the author. Sswonk ( talk) 21:35, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
The content on the Recent changes page is very badly arranged. Could tha data be sorted in the table? -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 14:42, 28 August 2009 (UTC)
The table could have about 6 columns: Column1 labels N or m, Column2 Title, then hour, counter of bytes, author and finally notes. -- Janezdrilc ( talk) 22:28, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
I meant a table with grid like this (for now there is just bulleted list):
(diff) (hist) | m | Hyderabadi haleem | 01:58 | (+3) | Sarabseth (talk | contribs) | →Preparation: grammar |
(diff) (hist) | N | User:Darrenhusted/sandbox22 | 01:58 | (-25) | Hooliganb (talk | contribs) | →Karl |
(diff) (hist) | Wikipedia:WikiProject Macau/Popular pages | 01:58 | (+57) | Baxtersmalls (talk | contribs) | Popularity stats for WikiProject Macau | |
(diff) (hist) | Dexilla | 01:58 | (+456) | Mr.Z-bot (talk | contribs) | →Links: moved to subcategory, Replaced: Category:Tachinidae → Tachinidae-stub,, Removed: fly-stub, using AWB |
I wonder whether you meant that you would like to see the Wikipedia "Recent Changes" feature become better categorised. At present, I agree that if you click on "Recent Changes", the only order seems to be the purely temporal order of the last x number of changes (which some Wikipedians might think is fair enough - after all, this is the name of this feature). However, perhaps there could be a way to categorise this feature, so people can find what they may wish to see in this feature more easily.
ACEOREVIVED (
talk)
20:02, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Right, this has been on my back burner for a long time, and I've finally done it: based on the article for creation wizard, I've created Wikipedia:Article wizard2.0, (superceding the less helpful and less pretty and underused WP:Article wizard) as a generic wizard for registered users to create articles, including a simple template at the end. Comments please on the idea and execution; and on how we can promote it when it's ready. I've previously considered things like the MediaWiki page that produces the Search Results page (I forget the name now), that kind of thing. NB The one thing that the old Article wizard does that may be worth taking is emphasising the need to search for alternate spelling etc (see Wikipedia:Article wizard/other). But I'm tired and hungry now... Rd232 talk 14:13, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article_wizard2.0/subpage is broken (this is used in construction of a userspace proto-article)(instead of showing the name of the viewer, it shows the name of the last person to edit the page). Recommend replacing {{REVISIONUSER}}
with Special:Mypage
. --
Thin
boy
00 @276, i.e.
05:37, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
An overview of Outstanding issues is now available at Wikipedia talk:Article wizard2.0#Outstanding issues. Thanks. Rd232 talk 18:57, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for your work, I had thought about something like that and it could help some new users. Cenarium ( talk) 17:11, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Is there any way a Search box could be added to the bottom of every page? If one gets to the bottom of a page and is using Firefox, you have to grab the scroll bar and scroll all the way to the top of the page to get to the Search box. This isn't a problem in IE, which allows you to right click on the scroll bar and request to go to the top of the page, but you can't do that with Firefox. Or, maybe even just a link that says "Go to the top of the page". Who then was a gentleman? ( talk) 20:57, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Please see here for details on this proposal and preliminary discussion. It's proposed to transform the Audit Subcommittee into an entity independent of the Arbitration Committee and grant several additional responsibilities regarding the overseeing of the checkuser and oversight permissions. Cenarium ( talk) 22:40, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
Is there a template for marking a table/chart/graph as unsourced (for example, something you can put underneath the image or the {{
bar box}}
that would say something along the lines of "the
sources of this table/chart/graph are unclear"? I couldn't find any. And, if there isn't, does anyone think adding one would be useful? I could create one fairly easily.
rʨanaɢ
talk/
contribs
21:02, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
A poll has been created on whether Reports of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners in China is a standalone topic, or should it be merged to Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China? Please go to Talk:Organ harvesting in the People's Republic of China/FG poll. Ohconfucius ( talk) 14:04, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I am requesting discussion on moving the common hatnote template {{ otheruses4}} → {{ about}} (or → {{ otheruses}}) because the current name (with an arbitrary 4) is hard to remember and esoteric. I have started the discussion at Template_talk:Otheruses4#Request_move_discussion. If you are interested, please come to discuss whether the template should be moved and if so, to where. Thanks, - Sligocki ( talk) 20:43, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Please see and comment here on this proposal. Thanks, Cenarium ( talk) 23:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Hello all! You're probably aware that Wikipedia is reviewing its editing interface at the moment, the purpose being to make it easier to use. A lot of time and money is being spent, and this is all obviously a great idea. However, while the developers are still at work, I feel a massive improvement could be made relatively easily. The text that surrounds the edit box is confusing, unsightly, and not at all helpful. It is fragmented, and is clearly a product of years of tinkering by many different people. I feel we should take a step back and organise this important text in a much more presentable and informative way. Below are two images of the interface; before, and after my proposal.
As you can see, my proposal is simpler, clearer and prettier than the current situation. I'd also like that a similar one be created, identical except for the removal of the third 'create account' line, for users who are logged in. I'd also hope that its display could be turned off in user preferences. Anxietycello ( talk) 15:48, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
Drawn up a new draft, adding the suggestions given. Header moved to the sides to shrink the box and remove whitespace. The code I used to make the text and boxes can be found at User:Anxietycello/Interface. Anxietycello ( talk) 14:15, 31 August 2009 (UTC)
Ok, I can see that the idea for the box I started with is not being happily accepted, for both aesthetic and practical reasons. Perhaps a simpler reform would be better recieved? Forget the top box for now, and lets focus on the mess of text below the edit box. As I said before, it is fragmented, and is clearly a product of years of tinkering by many different people. It is also a highly important peice of information, one that people should be able to easily read and understand. I therefore propose the above re-organisation. Any thoughts? Anxietycello ( talk) 00:56, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm honestly not trying to be a stick in the mud here, but I'm really wondering why this discussion is occurring here rather then on the
Usability study page. This is exactly what they are tasked with studying and improving, and they have the money, resources, time, and backing of the WMF to actually implement changes. Their also smack dab in the middle of evaluating exactly what this is attempting to address, so your suggestions and comments would be much more likely to have an impact there regardless.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
06:02, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
We talked about this a little bit, above. There should be a method to edit the minor flag and at least your own edit summaries. The easiest way that I can think of to implement that would be to add them as editable fields to the old revision view of a page. That page is missing the edit summary anyway, so this is technically two enhancements.
Bug 20511
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
05:31, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
wikipedia has <code></code> <u></u> <b></b> <i></i> <s> </s> but is missing very useful tags such as
CSS
or <acronym title="North Atlantic Treaty Organisation">NATO</acronym> which would really help with the readability of articles. This would make it so users wouldn't have to scroll up to the top of the page to remember what an acronym stood for. Personally, I think all acronyms/abbreviations should use this tag. We could start by just enabling the feature.
Dragonsshadows (
talk)
16:08, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
<acronym>
is to be obsolete in HTML 5, but <abbr>
is listed as what should be used in its place
[5] and it says that they should be treated the same
[6].
Mr.
Z-man
16:34, 5 September 2009 (UTC){{
tooltip}}
, which uses the title attribute, available on most (X)HTML elements: CSS 2 {{
abbr}}
, which uses the abbr attribute:
IMF , and {{
abbrlink}}
which wikilinks the term:
IMF At present, if you go to the "History" of an article, it is not easy to find when an article was first created if it has had a long history - for example, the article Criticism of Wikipedia has been in existence since at least August 2005 (I gave up back-tracking after then). Please forgive me if you are more informed about the mechanics of Wikipedia than me, as there may be an ansewr to this one already - is there a simple way to find out the date when an article was first created? If I am making a proposal here, it is to have something like a little note saying when an article was first created in the "History" of the article. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 20:42, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
(I am not sure if this is the right place for this proposal. I looked around but didn't find anywhere better...)
I have noticed that some "you've been blocked" messages that admins add to the talk page of a blocked user do not include the duration of the block. The length of the block can be found elsewhere, but it seems like a fundamental characteristic of the block and should be included in the blocked user's talk page entry. Is there some reason why it's not included? If not, I propose that the length of block always be included in such messages, and block templates be adjusted (docs and otherwise) to indicate the requirement. Alternatively, perhaps there is some way for the Wiki software to detect the length of the current block and the templates could be modified to use that mechanism and thus avoid the need for the admin to specify the information manually.
FYI, here is one recent example. (I am not criticizing the admin involved in that edit.) Here's is another example by a different admin who apparently added the length of the block by adding text that wasn't part of the template. — John Cardinal ( talk) 15:49, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
(outdent) The current situation doesn't seem rational to me: any blocked user who tries to edit is told they are blocked and for how long, yet some admins don't put the length of the block in the talk page entry where it's useful to other editors. It doesn't make sense to me that omitting the length of the block helps avoid collateral damage, as uninvolved editors who happen to use the same IP and try to edit will see the block info. Moreover, it's unlikely they'll see the talk page entry unless they are veterans, in which case they'll know how to find the block info. I thought through some other use cases and I don't think there are any where hiding the length of the block has any real benefit.
I can't accept arguments based on users not noticing information that we deliberately put into the message. It's irrational: if we put the info in the message, we intend the user to see it. If we don't want them to see it, we should leave it out. If we want some users to see it, and others not, well... how does it feel to want? Once we display the message, we can't control which readers notice and which ones don't.
On the other hand, the info is available and my proposal was only intended to make it more convenient to see it. There's clearly not consensus and while I don't agree, it's not a big deal. Thanks for considering this proposal. — John Cardinal ( talk) 15:06, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia will benefit greatly from photo tags. When looking for a picture of a specific person, every article on a person, place or thing can have itself tagged on specific pictures. Like that, when looking for a picture of "Barack Obama", all the pictures tagged with his name will appear. This will make editing much more convenient. Feed back ☎ 03:07, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
There are some articles which were nominated for deletion and the reult is "No consensus". Should we then be given information about the default position being keepig the article? ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 21:28, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
I can give an example - if you look at the article on Bob Taggart and go to its talk page, you can see that the article was nominated for deletion in August 2009; the tag on the talk page just says "The result of the discussion was no consensus". I guess that I am really saying that this tag needs modification, so that it should say something to the effect of "The result of the discussion was no consensus, and therefore the article is being kept, as that is the default position". ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:09, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
{{oldafdfull|page=<pagename>|date=<date of nom>|result='''keep'''}}
below the afd tag for easily copy/pasting them to the talk page. So it would be too much cost for a little benefit in any way we proceed.
Cenarium (
talk)
00:01, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
{{#ifeq:{{{result}}}|'''No consensus'''|'''No consensus[1]'''|{{{result|}}}}}
?) which would probably add some overhead but which would ultimate be one edit. -
Jarry1250 [ In the UK? Sign
the petition! ]
19:06, 4 September 2009 (UTC)Thank you Jarry 1250, that is the type of thing I had in mind. A template such as "No consensus - result = keep article (default position)" would be more informative than what there is at present, and would not require major editorial changes. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:13, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
I think it would be great to use the "what links here" and "what links from here" information for creating mind maps. The reader would only need to specify in how many "levels of links" he or she is interested. For example, I would like to see all "what links here" and up to two levels of articles linked from the current page, i.e. a map with the current page in the midle, pages linking to the current page, pages linked to from the current page ("at level 1") and pages linked to from these ("at level 2"). Anša ( talk) 12:22, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
Users who are being checkusered and accused of having sockpuppet accounts should have more privacy and the right to defend themselfs when banned/blocked. At the moment such users get blocked and banned without any warnings and have their private information displayed for everyone to see. They cannot edit or defend themselfs either.
My proposal is:
1.) Being more discreet about private information such as related IP-info (even when used for editing)
2.) The right to edit their talkpage so they can defend themselfs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 7853hgh ( talk • contribs) 14:12, 7 September 2009
A proposal to add a link to Wikinews articles in {{ Recent death}}. Please see Template_talk:Recent_death#Optional_link_to_a_Wikinews_obituary. Thank you for your time, Cirt ( talk) 17:25, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Greetings.
Korea Information Society Development Institute (KISDI), a government-affiliated research institute, conducts a research on motive for contribution as well as cultural characteristics of participants in collective intelligence sites as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers. (See www.kisdi.re.kr for the detailed information about our Institute.)
The survey aims to identify factors affecting Wikipedia users' usage and participation. Your responses are absolutely confidential and will only be used to extend our understanding of collective intelligence. We count on your responses to help us make policies for encouraging collective intelligence.
A small amazon gift card will be offered for those who complete the survey.
Thank you for your full cooperation.
Sincerely,
Joo-Seong Hwang | Senior Research Fellow | Convergence and Future Strategy Research Division
E-mail redacted
→ Click
I was just thinking that it would be nice to be able to mark pure vandalism edits as such, in a pages edit history. The benefit to that could be the ability to hide such edits if the viewer desires to do so (in the same manner as minor edits and bot edits can be "hidden").
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
07:31, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
What we should do is give everyone the ability to roll back (well, all autoconfirmed users, or everyone who asks for it - and strongly encourage people to ask for it - but take it away from the minority who abuse it). Then we could make rollback the standard recommended way of dealing with vandalism, and record rolled-back edits as vandalism edits. This could be used for all sorts of purposes - filtering watchlists and edit histories as suggested here, and automated tracking/warning/blocking of vandals (though obviously no automatic blocks just because a lot of your edits got rolled back). Obviously you'll get occasional misuse, as you do with every WP feature, but that shouldn't be a reason not to do it when it could provide such benefits.-- Kotniski ( talk) 17:48, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Doesn't the rollback tool already use tags to mark some rollbacks as "vandalism"? Personally, I think that access to the rollback and admin tools ought to be fairly automatic, but that's a whole other issue. My main thinking in bringing this up was just to add a relatively simple, and non-controversial, means of marking and "hiding" those edits ("Hiding" as in the ability to mask them out just like minor edits or bot edits can be currently). I can see where you're going, and I don't really disagree, but I just don't see that type of proposal going anywhere "politically". I think that this at least has a chance, and could even prove to be statistically useful down the road.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
16:56, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
Anyway yea, the proposal is to just add a simple flag, exactly like the minor flag, which we could add to posts. The simple implementation is to make it's use available when using the undo feature (to mark the edit being undone). The more involved implementation would be to ask to have the tick box on the edit page (I'm not sure what the correct name for this would be, but the version that you see when you click on the date link of an edit from the page history). That page could actually include check boxes for both, "minor" and "vandalism", and if it's your own edit, it could allow you to edit the summary as well.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
18:33, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
Bug#: 20510 filed for the "vandalism flag", specifically. Maybe it'll get somewhere, maybe not... It's a small thing, but I think it would be nice.
—
V = I * R (
talk to Ω)
05:25, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
I've seen "RVV" or "vandalism" in many edit summaries, when in fact that what was not what the reverted entry was. Sometimes it's pure disagreement or difference of opinion; sometimes the reverted editor was going by a different unit or spelling convention; and sometimes that editor had a different source of facts (sometimes more recent, sometimes older, sometimes just different). Often what seems obvious to the average reader (and thus the most recent editor-but-one) has been shown over extended discussion on a Talk Page to be inaccurate or imprecise, but that doesn't mean that the reverted edit wasn't made in good faith. The reversion might well be justified, but what was reverted wasn't necessarily vandalism. —— Shakescene ( talk) 20:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
It might be a good idea to implement a "vandalism reversion" flag, akin to the "minor edit" flag. Then again, the risk of abuse (which would inevitably lead to bad faith assumptions and large disputes) is concerning... – Juliancolton | Talk 01:44, 5 September 2009 (UTC)
I am talking about Wikipedia:Introduction, a page that welcomes our new users. The page has sandbox functionality, in other words, the users are free to make test edits there as long as the intro template stays untouched. Too bad it doesn't, and new editors may be greeted by something along the lines of "lol wikipedia is teh suxx0rz haxd" or "Get stuff online www.fakesite.com". This is mostly incompetence and misunderstanding the purpose of the page instead of actual vandalism, but to ensure that the page looks the way it's supposed to when a new user views it, I suggest we remove the sandbox functionality from this page altogether. Obviously, it's good to have a sandbox page for our newcomers, so I suggest editing our current sandbox template to point forward to Wikipedia:Introduction_2 (titled "Learn more about editing") so new editors wouldn't have to look for the next page of the introduction OR creating a new sandbox page between the first and the second introduction page. Any support, comments, suggestions? Kotiwalo ( talk) 19:03, 19 August 2009 (UTC)
(outdent)I have recently been watching the introduction page. No idea how that started, but I regularily check out the new user contributions and revert offensive or immature edits. It has begun to irk me that the message we use to greet newcomers is routinely vandalised into absolute nonsense. Wikipedia is not the place to read about ketchup farts, or at least a main page isn't.
I wish to propose that the page for editing WP:Introduction redirect to the page for editing WP:Sandbox. This way, new users can read the introduction, still click edit, and edit the sandbox instead of defacing the message that they just read. WP:Introduction could then be protected from editing. - ʄɭoʏɗiaɲ τ ¢ 14:01, 22 August 2009 (UTC)
Why not make it work the way {{
doc}}
works on protected templates (via transclusion of the sandbox -- in this case -- onto the protected intro page). That way the message stays intact, and you can have a special edit link right there (though the "edit this page" tab won't work right, unfortunately). Maybe have Cluebot and/or its friends lightly patrol the sandbox for profanity to stop that.
--
Thin
boy
00 @117, i.e.
01:48, 29 August 2009 (UTC)
“Categorization is a feature of Wikipedia's software, enabling pages to be placed in categories which can then be used by readers to find sets of articles on related topics. Categories can be defined as subcategories of other categories, allowing easy navigation between connected subject areas via a tree-like structure. This helps readers find articles on particular topics even if they don't know which articles exist or what they are called.”
However, the current system is not intuitive; it is hidden at the bottom of the page; it does not make the most of its navigational potential; category pages look unappealing.With the minimum change it should be possible to display the same information much more effectively. The following is suggested:
I would be pleased to discuss further with any programmers willing to give it a try. There are probably many other category-based improvements that could be achieved at the same time: a tool to edit and manage categories for example. Granitethighs ( talk) 10:32, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
Not entirely sure what this proposal would look like, but certainly categories are not currently doing their job very well, and it's mainly a problem that requires developer assistance (though various requests for improvements at Bugzilla have brought little effect). In fact I'd like to see categories dumped in favour of a far more natural and powerful system - some syntax for stating characteristics of article subjects ( {profession=singer;sex=male;birthdate=...;nationality=...}, that sort of thing), then users could search based on exactly what characteristics they chose, without editors constantly having to make judgments about what levels of categorization are going to be a help or a hindrance.-- Kotniski ( talk) 11:47, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
I find Categories rather confusing. They seem to a casual user as performing the same function as (A) the lists of ... in small type at the foot of pages and (B) the "List of ..." articles. In fact what is the functional advantage over a "List of" article?
Also category pages are confusing when (as very often happens) "There is one sub-category" which appears at the top and 134 regular entries underneath. As said above, the pages are more unattractive and do not seem to adopt the "house style" of a Wikipedia page. Sussexonian ( talk) 21:40, 7 September 2009 (UTC) In answer to the question of what is the advantage of a category over list, the answer can be summarized in one word - hierarchy. If you click on a category, and then go the bottom of that category, you will see that often the category is itself a member of a more superordinate category. I personally rather like the category system in Wikipedia - as do many other Wikipedians, as is evidenced by the Association of Categorist Wikipedians. After all, if one wishes to learn about the Linneaan division of the world, this could be an extremely useful tool. One might find that a gibbon is a primate, which in turn is in mammal, which in turn is a vertebrate, which in turn is a chordate and so on and so forth. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 22:55, 7 September 2009 (UTC)
when people create tables and mboxes and such things and they change the background color why do they automatically assume that the foreground color is going to be black? I use white forground and, while it works well enough for most of the pages that I actually use, a few pages (including some important ones) are nearly unreadable. when people change the background color they should also specify exactly what foreground color to use as well. would it be reasonable to ask that this be made into a policy? Lemmiwinks2 ( talk) 00:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
As I said in the discussion below on the proposal to introduce orange and green wikilinks, we must be careful not to confuse people with colour blindness (black and white text should not do this).
I read this article a couple of minutes ago:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/wikitrust/
Please, please don't implement this. Not only would this make reading articles difficult with this turned on, but I can only see this causing a lot of issues with 'truthiness'. Editors with get into discussions and, rather than coming to a consensus, they will simply let the edit color speak for itself.
I understand Wikimedia Foundation's interest in making Wikipedia seem more accurate to the eye of the general and scientific communities, (Despite Wikipedia already being the most expansive and accurate general source in existence. citation needed) but rainbow coloring pages doesn't seem like the way to do this. It's distracting, may actual reduce accuracy, and makes the page seem disjointed. Instead, let's extend the extension which shows page rankings under the page title and color codes page titles respectively to where it's used by default, as well as a link to a 'research safe' version of the article. (A recent history of the page with an equal or greater ranking.)
This method would not only ensure accuracy, but would also provide a standard, static-style encyclopedia which could be used reliably in a professional or academic context. 8bit ( talk) 05:41, 1 September 2009 (UTC)
In short, if the nationalists are quiet enough that nobody reverts the next FYROM, they will become trusted editors, and their POV will become trustworthy. God preserve this, and keep it far from us! Septentrionalis PMAnderson 15:47, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
Instead, let's take FA off the main page; the others can stay, they cause less harm. This would immediately reduce the amount of nationalist POV-pushing, where each national gang tries to get their national glory on the main page, like Samuel of Bulgaria - which was written out of the nationalist schoolbook of Bulgaria, vintage 1912. The source, and the article, give Samuel and his allies all the positive adjectives; his enemies, including his brother, get the negative ones. Fortunately Karanacs noticed this and declined the star, but that doesn't happen anywhere near often enough.
The useful aspects of FA and GA would continue; there would continue to be stars for ego-boo, and reviewers would continue to look at articles. About one time in three, as now, review would improve an article; actual harm would be rare, as now. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:10, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
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Note: This is a proposal I created on the Strategic Planning wiki. Since it is primarily relevant to the English Wikipedia I decided to post it here to get some feedback. GeometryGirl ( talk) 21:08, 6 September 2009 (UTC) Observations and backgroundWikipedia currently has two types of links: blue links (for existing articles) and red links (for nonexistent articles). The major benefits of blue links are navigational. As for red links, it has been shown that they stimulate article production. Indeed, Wikipedians want to "turn all links blue" and this has been, and still is, a major bolster to article production, especially for small Wikipedias. For larger Wikipedias, the focus is changing from article production to article amelioration, and the disappearing red links are losing their former impact. Details of proposalDescriptionAs an addition to the positive red links, orange links (or links of some other descriptive colour) could attest for articles in poor shape. For example, all stubs and start class articles could be linked to by orange links. Various implementations are possible, from offering orange links to every user by default, to limiting them to signed-in users. Potential benefitsThe potential benefits are similar to red links in prompting users to produce content. Orange links would encourage editors to expand and improve articles, as a support to the already existing red links that encourage editors to start articles. In effect, similarly to red links, orange links would drive editors to where work is needed. ExtensionsThe idea can be extended to different classes of articles. For example, we could have all featured and good articles be linked to by green links. This may incite viewers to read articles they would not have otherwise read, so as to drive users to quality content. Choice of coloursThe similarity between the orange and red colours is significant since stubs and start class articles are almost nonexistent, containing barely any information. As for the green colour for good and featured articles, it would reflect upon the green logo already used for good articles. A careful choice of colour should be made to minimize potential confusion for colour blind people. References
Discussion (orange links)This is an interesting and ingenious suggestion, and you have obviously thought out this proposal well.However, I am not too sure it would work. Many Wikipedians might prefer the simple task of having any article, no matter how small, linked by a blue link and red links for articles that are not in Wikipedia - to implement this change would mean much editing to Wikipedia. Perhaps it would be easier to reserve orange articles for those articles where, if you type a word in the box on the left, you get redirected elsewhere, i.e. where there is not an article with verbatim that name in Wikipedia, but there is an article on a similar topic. If we had the orange article as a marker of quality of an article, it could lead to edit wars on whether articles should be linked by red or orange links. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:45, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
a.stub:link {color: #ff6600;} a.stub:active {color: #ff6600;} a.stub:visited {color: #ff6600;} a.stub:hover {color: #ff6600; font-weight: bold;}
a.stub:visited {color: #cc5500;}
GeometryGirl invited me to comment here - I think that finding intuitive ways to highlight articles that need attention is a good idea. I do want to note that red links being somewhat annoying is probably a significant part of the reason they work - there's something particularly satisfactory about seeing an article with lots of red links "turn blue". That said, I do share the concern about making the reader experience potentially significantly more confusing. How about an implementation that adds a simple summary in an appropriate location, such as "22 articles linked from this one could use your help (expand)", which would then list the articles and the specific problems when expanded?-- Eloquence * 02:08, 9 September 2009 (UTC) |
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Wikipedia currently only has two types of links: the blue links for existing articles, and the red links for nonexistent articles. I propose to add a system of green links whereby any wikilink to a good or featured article would be coloured green. Q&A (and summary of discussion)
Discussion (green links)Please discuss here. In good wikispirit, I am leaving this proposal "open". Feel free to edit it! GeometryGirl ( talk) 14:05, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
In short, I very strongly oppose this, until FA and GA acquire a better population of reviewers, which I expect shortly after publication. My only edit would be to insert the word never as often as necessary. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 14:49, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Still not a fan of the change. We've got two colors for links (red and blue), with another derivative color (light blue), all of which is rather easy to determine rather quickly. Someone can click a green link and not see what the difference is once they've arrived at that page (as opposed to a redlink, where they are prompted to create the article, or a blue link, which is an article, or a light blue link, which is an interwiki link). Make it a gadget, that'd be fine, but implementing it as an actual standard feature of the wiki, no. EVula // talk // ☯ // 15:59, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Why should we want to make readers read particular articles that they're not really interested in? Aren't the FA and GA processes and categories themselves (and the "Featured content" link on every single page) enough by way of showing off?-- Kotniski ( talk) 16:15, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
I'm opposed to giving FA/GA articles special wikilink colors. We can't even get consensus on whether GA articles should have an icon on the article page, so I doubt there would be consensus for turning their wikilinks a special color. In general, I think that this system of multiple wikilinks colors would confuse most readers. I'm an experienced editor, and I don't think it would be very helpful. I am not more likely to click on a wikilink because the article is rated highly; I am likely to click on the wikilink if I am interested in the topic. Karanacs ( talk) 19:43, 8 September 2009 (UTC) Unlike most of the editors who have opined here, I don't think the MOS-creep problem is not nearly as prevalent or burdensome as some think it is, aside from the alt text requirement (which arose recently). However, I'm opposed to this wikicolor proposal because a) as Karanacs said, links are for topics relevant to the subject, not for high-quality articles; b) not all FAs and even more so GAs are created equal; and c) the extra colors would confuse and distract readers from what they are reading. Dabomb87 ( talk) 21:27, 8 September 2009 (UTC)
Thank you for raising this proposal, and for leaving a message on my userpage about it. It seems to me that the rationale for this proposal was different to your that for your above rationale for the "orange links" one - you took the view there that certain orange links would be a good way to get Wikipedians to improve certain articles, just how red wikilinks, you claimed there, help Wikipedians to create new articles. For this very reason, I am not too sure of this suggestion. This is only my own personal view, but I cannot quite work out why you may wish to draw attention to articles that do not need improvement. Please do not take that comment the wrong way - it is only my own humble view, and I expect you have good reasons for this proposal. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 19:55, 9 September 2009 (UTC) |
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For stubs, I suggest having the edit tab changed from edit this page to edit this stub. Why change "page" to "stub"?
Why orange?
Discussion (edit tab)Don't bite too hard! :) GeometryGirl ( talk) 11:56, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
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Dismissed for now
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For stubs, I suggest having the edit tab changed from edit this page to please edit this stub or please edit this stub or Please edit this stub pr Please edit this stub. Why change "page" to "stub"?
Why add "please"?
Why red?
Why green?
Why stubs?
For who?
Discuss (edit tab new proposal)Don't bite! GeometryGirl ( talk) 17:27, 9 September 2009 (UTC)
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Proposed at
WP:Stub
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I propose to change or something similar.
I have just had a thought. As any lecturer who has presented using overhead acetates or Powerpoint will know full well, one has to be very careful with choice of colours, so as not to confuse students who may suffer from colour blindness. Are you sure that your choice of colour scheme will not do this? One thing I should say is that perhaps the most common form of colour blindness is red-blue colour blindness - so perhaps you are right, we do not need to change the colours of wikilinks! ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:11, 9 September 2009 (UTC) I have a feeling I was actually thinking of red-green colour blindness - please, pleaes, consider this. Although I do not suffer from colour blindness myself, remember, Wikipedia should be accessible to all. ACEOREVIVED ( talk) 23:23, 9 September 2009 (UTC) FWIW, red-green is the most common form of colourblindness, followed by total colourblindness, then blue-yellow - though that's all beside the point. I have a question, though... why is this change being proposed? If it serves no purpose (and for the life of me I can't see what purpose it would serve), then it simply seems to be wasting effort. What difference does centring the text do other than moving the icon away from the left margin and potentially making formatting look odd in a few cases? Similarly, what difference would changing the colour make other than making readers wonder whether the stub message is a hyperlink? In both cases it would increase the visibility of the stub template (something which we've been doing as much as possible to avoid at WP:WSS - the more discreet a stub template is, the better), but other than that, it wouldn't really make for any other than a cosmetic change. By the way, King Oomie is right - changes to the stub template(s) are normally discussed over at either Template talk:Stub or at Talk:Stub. Indeed, there have been numerous suggestions on changing the look of stub templates there in the past in many different ways - including, IIRC, a rejected suggestion to centre stub messages. Grutness... wha? 01:27, 10 September 2009 (UTC) | to
The proposal in this box is shelved/withdrawn until the proposal in the next sub-section is resolved. (May be worth reading for background on that proposal, though) |
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The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it. |
Wikipedia:PEREN#Create_a_counter_of_people_watching_a_page There are more good editors than vandals. Even if making the counter visible and the 'unwatched pages' page public resulted in massive abuse, editors would quickly remedy the problem by adding unwatched pages to their watchlist. Can an admin tell us how many pages there are on the unwatched list? Reasons for doing this, or why the 'vandalism' objection is invalid:
What other reasons were given against this proposal? It might help if the PEREN page linked to the discussions. Without knowing what was said, the reasoning sounds like "the vandals would make this impossible", which is often a poor objection. –M T 03:50, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
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Vandalism is a problem on all pages, but it is a much larger problem on pages that, on average, have fewer or zero people watching them. One solution to this problem is Wikipedia_talk:Special:UnwatchedPages, which was requested by Jimbo, is accessible only to admins, is updated infrequently, and is therefore very difficult to 'clean out'. Another solution, advocated here, is to modify the recent-changes table in MediaWiki to grab the watcher-count from the watchlist table. We would then be able to create a "recent changes in unwatched articles" page. This page would let editors catch vandalism that would usually have gone unnoticed for long periods of time. It would also encourage editors to expand their watch-lists, and urge editors to contribute to fringe/stub articles that are seeing some recent activity. It would also allow us to finally address one of the WP:PERENs. To get this proposal off the ground, we would need:
Comments addressing any of these four points are especially welcome. –M T 19:38, 25 April 2009 (UTC)
Would there be some way of combining it with the recent "whitelist" list of autreviewers? That is, for there to be a list of recent changes to unwatched pages excluding those pages where the last change is by an autoreviewer? That way it would be easy to look for vandalism without checking pages where someone else has already reverted vandalism. That might well solve some of Excirial's concerns about multiple checks of the same recent edit. Grutness... wha? 02:09, 23 June 2009 (UTC)
Would it be a good idea to move this proposal into its own page, and if so, where should it be located? M 22:10, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
The proposal is to create a recent changes page for unwatched articles to prevent vandalism by modifying the recent-changes table in MediaWiki. (I'd really prefer not to see this one archived, since it would open up several useful features. It would permit Watched counters. A now-ignored bugfix in the watchlist code and the addition of a 'checked' watchlist row would then let you patrol your own watchlist. Adding a public-watchlist preference would then give us a passive form of Flagged revisions.) Though this is a software feature request, support from editors would help.