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Im not sure if it is possible but it would be nice if all words that have an article or page would automatically be links to those pages, but appearing like normal words unless you have the cursor upon them (or click them). So the Articles would appear as today but all archived words would be "hidden" links. This would maybe take more bandwidth but it would surely make the pedia more effective and integrated. / Minoya 08:53, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Is it possible to leave things looking the way they are, but have right clicks bring up the option of finding links to Wikitionary and other projects? -- Samuel Wantman 10:05, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
ELApro: Might an option be made available for a user to create/access a scaled down, elementary lay version of an article that is highly technical? This would eliminate the jargon and other technicalities that may be present in the parent article.
co-incidentally, i was just on my way here to suggest something similar.
basically, theres a problem with our target audience, i.e., given that our target audience is 'everyone', it's hard to get the depth and wordage of an article right, so that it's not too complicated for those who aren't allready knowledgable in the area, but still useful to those who are. eg, if i look up an article on genetics, then i dont want it too simple -- i want some complicated meat and bones, rather than an article that just puts simply what i allready know. on the other hands, i want articles that discuss maths to treat me like the mathematical retard that i am, and lay it out simple.
obviously, catering for me would piss other people off :-D. not catering for me pisses me, and similar people, off. so, you see the problem?
why not, at least for sci/tech articles, for decent articles (B-list or above, say), fork the article into simple, normal, advanced, and expert versions? example definitions could be:
simple presumes no background knowledge. aims to get the basic concept across, tho not neccesarily any details on how/why the concept is/works/etc
normal presumes basic/no background knowledge. aims to get the basic concept across, with some understanding of how/why the thing is/works/etc
advanced presumes some background knowledge. aims to get the concept fully accross, along with more detailed how and why
expert presumes deep background knowledge, and a reader that wants to fully and deeply comprehend the subject, and who is willing to wade through a complicated article to do so.
examples for, say, a tRNA article:
simple: understandable without any background knowledge: for those who are simply interested in knowing what tRNA is and what it does, not neccesarily understanding exactly how it works nor wading through complicated bio-molecular/genetic jibberish
normal understandable by someone without any above-basic background knowledge in biology/genetics, but possibly a bit confusing (i.e., they could, with effort, understand what tRNA is, and, broadly speaking, how it works, from the article). probably useful to A-level students as a primer, but less useful to BSCs.
advanced let the scientific jibberish fly! useful to people with biological training. with a background in molecular biology, someone could come away from the article understanding what tRNA is and how it works, tho not neccesarily with an exam-passing understanding
expert for people who allready know the subject really well, and who want more esoteric info on tRNA, such as bond-lengths, etc. incomprehensable to normal people, but makes wp useful on the subject of tRNA to people who would have to work with tRNA in a professional setting.
i knocked up an example. note that i did it really quickly, and, as articles, they're shit. they just aim to demonstrait what i'm talking about.
the tRNA article, slightly stripped down, then forked into simple, normal, advanced and expert versions. User:Dak/TRNA (edit the demo articles if you want, i'm not going to mind just because they're on my user space).
what'cher recon? theres some gaps (between, say, advanced and expert, imo), and the system could be extended: maybe article/concise (brief as possible), article/verbiose (long winded, covering every aspect, with the kind of stuff which is usually clipped from articles to keep them of a sane size), article/data (lists of different tRNA molecules, average bond-lengths, links to genetic sequences, melting point, average molecular weights, etc), etc. etc. etc... -- Dak 19:01, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
ELApro: I would assume that the old "Keep it simple" adage might apply. If there is a simplified version of the article in the Simplified English Wikipedia then there should be an auto-link function in the software to have the link created. This, by the way, might be similarly applied to WikiQuotes, or whatever other Wiki application exists for an article. Why not have an option to create a simplified lay person's page, if one does not exist and the current single option appears to be too complex for some lay reader. After a lay version is created, a lay version link from a normal Wiki page would be available for anyone considering the current main page too complex, and desiring a simplified introduction. Those satisfied with the original page can leave it as is, and those believing the original page is too complex, will either have an option to view a simplified presentation, or will have an option to create a simplified version. Let the users decide which original pages may or may not be suited to the typical lay person, by copying information from the lay page (if it exists) into the original page, and keeping the lay page simple. If an article is acceptably presented to all viewers, leave it as is. No changes necessary. Otherwise, an alternative option, only one, is available, linked from the original article. Any levels beyond two could be done by extracting information and customizing on one's own home computer, to suit one's individual taste.
ELApro: After an initial review of the Simple English Wikipedia, I would disagree. It seems to be precisely what was requested. The only thing that remains to be done is to link all existing articles, hopefully in a manner similar to that described above by Jonathan Kovaciny. This could be done either manually or automatically, but hopefully something could be done to ease or simplify the process. Thank you Jonathan for your valuable information and for seconding this proposal!
The end of Fair use has begun: Wikipedia:WikiProject Stop fair use -- ROBERTO DAN 17:44, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering if it was possible to list all the articles sorted by decreasing "what links here" number of links. That way, we'd have a pretty accurate measure of the importance of an article to the whole encyclopedia, both in content and community. We could work to make the most important articles GAs and FAs, without the constant debate about article importance that generally cripples COWs and improvement drives.-- SidiLemine 12:33, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
At the moment the only way the nature of an edit can be discovered is by clicking the 'diff' link, and using the edit summaries provided by the editors. However edit summaries provided are often of little or no use - anonymous vandalism with no edit summary being one example. What about the possibility of categorizing edits based on their nature, e.g. text removal, text change, text insertion, link insertion... the options could be as complicated or as simple as necessary. Display this information in brief form next to the edit summary, and it could be useful when browsing an article's history, recent changes or a watchlist. Mushin talk 06:35, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
/* */
as summary. A cheat, at best. —
Gennaro Prota
•Talk
17:05, 23 December 2006 (UTC)Since the wiktionary project has really taken off, how about including a little blurb "wiktionary has a definition of this word" (with a link, of course!) or something like that for wikipedia articles that are also featured in the wiktionary? I'm not sure if this would be best done with a bot walking through the wiktionary and adding tags to wikipedia or if the databases could be synced... Just an idea... 83.255.10.11 23:55, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I think the Random article link is interesting but unwieldly. I think it would be more interesting if the random article link had an option so one could make it a bit less random-- i.e. make it so one can semi-randomly select:
The above is related to "fuzzy searching"... by " fuzzy" I mean one that isn't so well defined in the search sense, i.e. inexact matching of search terms. It would be interesting if one could search articles by content, i.e. search articles for specific words (and get a list as output). Sometimes, I find it is not possible to remember the name of the article... but I remember the content. Google seems to be better at finding things then... than the Wikipedia's 'search' function. It would be interesting if Wikipedia had a search function (not unlike Google)... that has the option of generating a ranking of articles instead of taking one to one specific article. Nephron T| C 23:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I frequently come across small stub articles at incorrectly-najmed pages and move them to more appropriate titles. Almost inevitably, the pages also need further work such as wikifying, categorising, or re-stubbing. Currently, the "successful move" page reads:
It would be a huuge help if that could be tweaked slightly to become:
Any chance of adding that edit link? Pretty please? Grutness... wha? 23:00, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
The page "{{MediaWiki direct link}}" ( links) has been moved to " $2" ( ).
Please check whether this move has created any double redirects, and fix them as necessary.
Hi all,
There is a vote to allow the fair use of promotional photographs of living people. Some people believe the fair use policy currently disallows fair use of promotional photographs of living people if they occasionally make public appearances, others disagree with this. This proposal would clarify the issue.
Cedars 22:13, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia already has in place a spam blacklist which prevents page saves when certain URLs are detected on the page. I'd like to propose a similar type of system. It would not be a blanket refusal to save, but rather would pop up a warning (as we used to have with blank edit summaries before the autofill feature came along) when certain words are detected. The editor would still be able to save, but at least he would hav been alerted to this. It would be of great help to newbies especially. Words I'm targeting off the top of my head are things like "recent", "recently", "lately" etc. that should not be in a "permanent" encyclopedia article. I'm sure others could even think of different ways to take this, e.g. identifying certain adjectives as weasel words and peacock terms. Thoughts? Zun aid © Please rate me at Editor Review! 13:17, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Kind of a related idea: What about doing something like this for users that have been blocked in the last 90 days? Any time a recent vandal tried to add any word in a large list of common vandalism words, they'd have to go through an extra step before being able to save the page. On the "warning page" there would be an admonishment not to revandalize: "Based on keywords in your edit, it appears that you are attempting to vandalize this page. You may still proceed with your changes by clicking the Save Page button below, but be aware that your edit will be speedily reverted if any vandalism is confirmed." Then, a special note would be automatically appended to the edit summary highlighting the edit as possible vandalism. — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 15:12, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
In some cases, building consensus on Wikipedia does not work very well. It is slow. It often results in a bad answer/solution. It is prone to manipulation. And often, a number of average editors can make life miserable for some real expert in a field like physics or neuroscience, reverting their changes, getting into petty arguments with them, etc. When you read the academic literature about Wikipedia, this is one of the complaints. The library scientists also complain about problems with unqualified people cranking out nonsense in a strident contemptuous fashion and drowning out the more learned and qualified editors on Wikipedia. In interviews, Jimmy Wales often has mentioned the desire to attract more experts to write articles. I am wondering about possibly tilting the playing field a bit in favor of people who have demonstrated some recognized level of expertise in some area.
I propose that a system somewhat like that used by Yahoo! Answers be used. In Yahoo! Answers, a person can put a question forward and get quite a few answers to that question in a short period. They can either choose one of these as the "best", or put it up to a vote to the community which will then choose a "best" answer. The community can then vote after the fact in agreement that the best choice has been made, or can vote in disagreement. Points are accumulated along the way that then identify fairly rapidly those with recognized qualifications and reliability in a given field. Many times I wish I could have a question that arises on Wikipedia put to a vote. On a talk page, this rarely works. Some people have jury rigged votes on special pages, and that can work sometimes. If points were accumulated in a yahoo! answers fashion, and people could find a list of things to vote on easily, then the community could be surveyed easily on many issues that become sources of contention. This could even be used for noncontent-related dispute resolution. For example, I have had editors claiming to me that having citations was unencyclopedic. Of course, I could have tried to organize some sort of RfC or something to address this, but it is too cumbersome. If I could quickly put the matter to a vote, and get 35 votes to 2 to show he is wrong, and build up points in the meantime, then slowly people who are knowledgable and reasonable fonts of knowledge in certain areas will be identified, and people who are less reliable and less knowledgable will become known as well. This would also be an incentive to people to improve, to get a better score. Better scores need not come with extra priveleges; prestige is enough to drive people on Yahoo! Answers. I recently had a situation where an editor claimed he had taken the wording for his contribution (which was very lacking in several aspects) directly from the work of a famous person in the field (but did not attribute the writing to the famous person). I then expressed incredulity at this claim, given that the contribution was of such doubtful quality. I pointed out that this editor appeared to be:
I was met with a storm of indignation and accusations and attacks. The current dispute resolution system is too cumbersome to deal with this sort of thing. Therefore, there is lots of bullying instead. However, if something easy was available, the problem probably would have been resolved quickly without even resorting to dispute resolution, because even the existence of a way to easily publicly shame someone would encourage them to stay in line. Points might be accrued in different areas to produce a multidimensional score. Anyway, it is at least something to consider.-- Filll 07:29, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
No of course not. I just thought I would make the suggestion. I do not claim this is the solution the problems of Wikipedia. When one is brainstorming, one just throws ideas out for comment. Most of them are nonsense, but they might stimulate other ideas and who knows, sometimes something good comes out of it. I also suspect there are many "orphaned" articles out there. -- Filll 21:51, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
If I understood your proposal correctly, it aims to give expert views more weight in discussions/votes, and to introduce a simpler method of determining consensus. I remember Larry Sanger, and others, criticising Wikipedia for being anti-elitist, and this proposal would help address such criticism, and make it harder for trolls to game the system. A hypothetical situation where this would be useful would be a discussion where a troll tries to get a common misconception reported as a fact in the article, and an expert tries to stop him. -- J.L.W.S. The Special One 05:56, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Object This makes absolutely no sense at all. How can you know for sure that that person is an expert on the subject? Say an example: a neurologist decides to become a Wikiholic, and start posting stuff on Neuroscience. There is no way to confirm. Besides new editors i.e. in this case the neurologist, don't have friends in Wikipedia. Therefore their votes will be lower. And then they may leave.-- Foundby 10:56, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Whilst I'd agree that the current, consensus based, (effectively weighted democratic) system in Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed, I'm not convinced that this approach to dealing with that is adequate. You're essentially advocating a beauty contest based on a meta level rather than as it is now, on the content level. Until Wikipedia has some form of demonstrating expertise and utilising that in the validation of article content, we'll never get away from the rigging or pimping of votes whether on article page or in WP space. Notwithstanding that the tyrrany of ill-informed democracy does need dealing with. ALR 20:54, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Here is an idea for reducing vandalism: Require anonymous users to provide a valid e-mail address, which will be used to verify that the anon is serious about the edit and to permit identification of vandals. Here is the process:
Note that at the end of this process we will have a valid e-mail for the user, and some hope of identification if the edit is vandalism. I strongly doubt that any vandal will be eager to type in "me@myschool.edu", but if they do so and it is vandalism we can then contact "myschool" and advise them of the issue. We can also block e-mail addresses that are for vandals in that case.
Note that I am not calling for e-mail addresses to be placed in the edit history or in any place which is generally accessible. The e-mail addresses should be in a seperate place acessible only to sysops if not a much more restricted set of users. However, it should be a part of our policy that Wikipedia can use that information at its discression to track down and/or contact vandals, and that should be noted on the e-mail address query screen and in the confirmation e-mail itself. -- EMS | Talk 17:55, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't think editing by non-registered users should be allowed at all - the negatives far outweigh the positives. So giving anon IPs a hoop to jump through should be the least requirement. CyberAnth 04:18, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Ha ha ha! Oh wait... you were serious? Lets face it, if anonymous people have to go through this huge waste of time perhaps to only correct a spelling mistake, why edit wikipedia at all? Even if there is completely wrong information, most anonymous users dont want to spend their precious Sunday afternoon going through that process. And I honestly dont think this will stop vandals at all because those people that vandalize in the first place have way too uch time o their hands. -Charlie34
Really, this won't help against vandals. Only against people who have noticed "Wow! Edit button!" and decided to test it, but they aren't a problem. About the side effect, on many sites I often had a useful comment in mind, but didn't make it because of all the confirmation stuff. Not only it can backfire with spam, I just don't want to confirm all of that, after all, it's the site, not me, who needs it. CP/M comm | Wikipedia Neutrality Project| 15:28, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
I just read the interesting essay by
User:DV8 2XL, who left the project in August 2006.
Given that we seem to have a lot of eager ArbCom candidates, certainly more than the ones needed for the main ArbCom, and many with stellar records (none perfect but no human is), would it make sense to have lower level 'topical ArbComs' as
User:DV8 2XL suggests?
Imagine having, say, 6 such topical ArbComs, one for each of the current topics in
WP:Refdesk. They would focus on main article space disputes, and on cases where behavior is mostly
civil (or maybe we could add a dedicated
WP:CIVIL topical ArbCom) and the issues are more related to the core WP content policies, such as
WP:V,
WP:NOR,
WP:NOT,
WP:N, etc. They would have the same power to decide on remedies as the main ArbCom. All their decisions would be appealable to the main ArbCom, who would be able to summarily dismiss the appeal (hopefully in most cases) or accept it.
Of course each topical ArbCom would also be able to select its cases, suggesting continued efforts in other mediation venues where applicable.
The motivation is to clear backlog and deal with disputes much earlier than we do today, per
User:DV8 2XL's suggestions.
Any thoughts? Has this been suggested/rejected before?
Crum375
13:05, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
I suggest that articles which go unread for an extended period of time be automatically removed. After all, the goal of an encyclopedia is to transmit knowledge. So an article which is not being read is not a useful part of an encyclopedia.
It seems to me that the first thing to do is to obtain statistics on how often articles are being read, and get some idea of what consititutes an unread (or rarely read) atricle. Even without that, I would suggest the following standard for removing articles:
I suspect that this may result in the removal of a substantial number of articles, but if no one comes to Wikipedia looking for information on a given topic, is it at all fair to consider that subject notable? -- EMS | Talk 05:57, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
This idea is patently absurd. There are many notable encyclopedic subjects which people only rarely would need to know about or research. For example, who's going to look up minor Senators of Alabama from the 30's? However, that is no excuse to go about deleting them when the information they contain is useful and necessary to our encyclopedic nature. Encyclopedias, in case you haven't heard, are supposed to be all-encompassing. Why should we delete pages simply because they are not of popular interest? This would additionally give us an even stronger bias towards the temporal and current vs. the timeless and historical. Rejected. -- tjstrf talk 22:18, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Is this for real? This proposal is so absurd that it costs me a major effort to believe it was done in good faith. -- Ekjon Lok 22:23, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
What I am seeing are a lot of knee-jerk reactions, as if articles should be here because they are here. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collector of information. I really think that this is an idea that needs to be researched. How often are articles accessed? Are there articles which go largely unread? If so, what kind of content do those articles typically have? From there other questions will follow: Are these relatively unaccessed articles worth keeping? What do these articles say about the Wikipedia notability standads? Noone seems to have an answer to those questions. The concern about FA articles is valid, but I strongly doubt that topics which noone cares about become FA's. At the least Wikipedia should come to know how it is being used.
(BTW - I agree that blindly implementing this suggestion is a truly bad idea. You just plain don't do something like this unless you have a very good idea of what it is going to do.) -- EMS | Talk 03:25, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Good idea, wrong implementation. Instead of deleting them, have a Special:Unviewed page (or probably some better name) that would allow these articles to be identified. Then it gives people one more avenue to find articles that need to be reviewed. But certainly no automatic deletion. — Doug Bell talk 04:42, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia is mirrored all over the place. This means it is impossible to know whether an article has been read or not; you can only find out if it has been read on a particular service (eg Wikimedia). A statistical survey might yeild interesting information (it would be especially interesting to know how well the read frequency correlates with the edit frequency), but I don't think editorial decisions like this should be made on such a crude basis. Chris Thornett 19:24, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I just love the note at the top that says this was temporarily placed at perennial proposals. I'm a deletionist at heart but this is just a very very bad idea. And I won't even mention the useless technical complications that implementing this would entail. Quality articles are quality articles, regardless of whether or not they're read often. We already have plenty of resources allowing us to identify useless content: orphaned articles, linkless articles, short pages, neglected articles etc. Any attempt to make the deletion process automatic will undoubtedly lead to loss of valuable content. I have a hard time believeing this is a good faith proposal. Pascal.Tesson 06:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
While I agree that the idea of deleting (manually or automatically) long-unread articles is absurd, being able to view a list of pages that have not been viewed in a long time would be very useful, as User:Doug_Bell suggested. Special:ancientpages orders pages based on creation date, so Special:unviewedpages (wantonpages?) would sort them based on their last access date. This tool could be used to make sure esoteric pages are of acceptable quality. It would also be a way of finding hidden gems! - Kslays 21:33, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Dear God, the deletionists are at it again! No, this is an appalling proposal. Just because information is obscure and rarely accessed does not make it useless. I was the first person to check a 1940s book out of the university library where I work. Does that make it useless? No, of course it doesn't. For a start, I was interested enough in it to take it out! Let's just bin this proposal now and move on. -- Necrothesp 17:48, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Its not always apparent to people but have you ever considered that an unread article maybe simply undiscovered instead of ignored, Its like that time when Atari made an illegal tetris cartridge for Nintendo's NES system, and most of the cartridges were kept in a warehouse. At that time you could see adds offering $300 for one cartridge! They simply didnt know it was there and therefore did not pay the warehouse any attention. Its basically like that, if you dont know it is there you wont visit, you could probably shave off a good amount of content from wikipedia, simply because people dont know its there! I personally think that there shouldnt be a deletion of unread content. -Charlie34
Is it possible to set aside a day or week where members of the community go through every article and check for deador spam links? A comment could be posted on the talk page after each page is done. Something has to be done to deal with all these dead links and i was wondering if anyone else thinks this is a good idea. The Placebo Effect 13:30, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
It is mentioned under your research that he was born on December 18th when all other research states he was born December 21st. What is the correct dob? yiannimelas(at)gmail(dot)com thanks, yianni
The rollback button is great to undo bad edits, but it can piss off people having their work undone without an explanation. Rollback should only be used on obvious vandals that deserve no explanation, of course, but sometimes convenience trumps caution. - DavidWBrooks 21:50, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
popupRevertSummaryPrompt=true;
so it prompts me for an edit summary every time I do a revert, and I have a choice of either entering an edit summary or leaving the default summary for vandalism reverts.
Tra
(Talk)
22:10, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Might a box be made as to make the footnotes on a page less, well obnoxious if there are many. I have seen boxes where there is a link in the top right corner where it says "show" while the box is closed and "hide" while the box is open. This could be done in much the same way the table of contents are done. Now I don't know how to do it, so I bring it here. (Note: This idea was originally derrived by myself at Talk:RuneScape, having nearly 50 citations. However, I have seen a page with 137 citations, and this would make any and all Wikipedia pages look far more pleasing to the non-editing reader.) How plausible, if plausible at all, is this plan, and does anyone know how to make such a box in a non-intrusive way? Other Feedback? Thanks in advance, → p00rleno (lvl 78) ← ROCKS C RS 01:36, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Hi,
I tried to find a place to submit this, but ended up here. It's about a new post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation/2006-10-21#the_Book_of_Games_Volume_1_.28The_Ultimate_Guide_to_PC_.26_Video_Games.29
How long does it take before a new article is verified? I am the publisher of the book, and would like to contribute if I could. Is it possible to get in contact with someone that will work on the article? We could send a press copy of the book to the person.
-Bendik Stang
I went to http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/c:Lost , thinking it was some sort of new wikipedia-related technological thing. It turned to be a page about the television show "Lost". That wasn't my only discovery. I also discovered something about the show that I would have preferred to have seen on the show itself. In short, the page lacks any warning of spoilers. I propose to make a page created solely to alert people of possible spoilers before actually veiwing the page http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/c:Lost . Thank You —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jack Rabitt ( talk • contribs).
Hi, Beyond any doubt wikipedia is a lovely thing to have in our cyber world. I am a big fan of her. Though I dont have a very specific area of experties where i can be helpful to your project but i do have one suggestion. Like some other services like google, answers, yahoo and msn etc. I would suggest that wikipedia may like to launch a comprehensive and free toolbar for desktop use. I hope i may not have disappointed you with my suggestion. Thanx —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ccuuppiidd ( talk • contribs).
Hi I'd like to request a change on the placement of the search bar. I often forget where it is because of the awkward and almost unnoticible location. I think that if you moved the bar to a more visible area on the page, it would induce more browsing on the site. Thank you, and I think Wikipedia is awesome. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 76.171.242.137 ( talk) 09:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC).
A more obvious place would be in the upper left corner, above the globe. I realize that the more graphically inclined may strongly object to that, but if the goal is to make the reader experience as trouble-free as possible, the page shouldn't be treated as an art project. John Broughton | Talk 02:41, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Object I am used to it, and so will you.-- Foundby 10:58, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Have you noticed that when you type in wikipedia.org, there is a seachbrowser just underneath the logo? You have to try to miss that -Charlie34
I've just created a template Template:Link GA, it's works similar as the Template:Link FA. However it needs the MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki:Common.js to be updated to reflect this change. Is that a good idea to introduce this template? -- Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 05:58, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I would like to propose for Wikipedia to use logo variations created by members of the community to mark national and international awareness days, Remembrance Days, notable anniversaries, and observance days. Besides for the featured article, it is important to commemorate special days to show Wikipedia's support for bringing out more awareness of these issues and events. The logos would be chosen from contestants in a consensus of graphic artist users on a project page of its own. This project would be similar to google's [[ [1]|sketch contest]]. I would like us perhaps to be ready for our first wikilogo by Hanuka, Christmas and Eid ul-Adha! FrummerThanThou 05:43, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
#p-logo a { background-image: url(
http://mylogo.com/logo.png) !important; }
GeorgeMoney (
talk)
07:07, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Don't like the idea. With Google, they can detect what country you are in and provide you with an appropriate version of Google [2], where they can do cute and culturally appropriate things with the logo. I don't ever see there being a "U.S." version of Wikipedia, a British version, Canadian version, etc... There are very few holidays that are not specific to religions or certain countries. -- Aude ( talk) 17:42, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I cannot see this proposal anywhere; if I have missed it, please don't shout at me.
It seems quite clear to me that many serious new editors, who really want to help our project, do not come across the adopt-a-user setup, nor are they directed to it. I have adopted two users and, since doing so, I have been approached by three newbies with questions which, happily, I could answer. But they were unaware that they could have asked to be adopted. They had all received a {{ welcome}} template. I propose that the welcome templates be enlarged to include a link to WP:ADOPT. They then have the option of going there or not, but they will at least know about it.-- Anthony.bradbury 19:39, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
In support of Anthony.bradbury I would like the Adopt-a-user program to be linked from {{ welcome}}, but I do understand the concerns of Doc Tropics. I would like to ask what sort of time period / number we talking about, and where could we get such community evaluation done?
On the other hand the project has been running for a few months now - and we have currently over 65 adoptees - and so far (as far as I am aware) no complaints. Even if it was added to the welcome template, we could always removed it very quickly if there were problems encountered. Beyond a certain point I suppose it is an old circular argument - if we don't have any "official" support we can't advertise the service properly to increase our numbers, but we need to increase numbers before we are allowed "official" support. "Official" support is particularly important for this project because it would help us attract the newest of users (who are otherwise hard to reach).
On a similar and maybe less controversial note, it would be great if we could have a link inserted under Where to ask Questions at Help:Contents - please see Help talk:Contents to discuss. Thanks Lethaniol 15:00, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
As I mention elsewhere, I do not think that this program is so useful (while the idea is cute). The best way for a user to get involved would be contribute to articles, and the interaction which follows from there. Joining a wikiproject is also a good idea.
Besides, I believe that the {{ welcome}} template already has a bit too many links. If this project is found really useful, I'd suggest replacing one of the existing links than adding to it. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:09, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Just now I needed to propose the splitting of Category:Life simulation games into Biological simulation games and Social simulation games, and found the required cf* and cf*2 templates didn't exist. I ended up using a modified version of {{ cfr}} on WP:CFD and the generic {{ split}} (with the rarely-used discuss parameter to point to CSD instead of category talk) on the category page itself. But I bet this isn't the only time a category's been put up for splitting. Shouldn't there be templates to do it with? Neon Merlin 04:58, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I'll keep this short since most everything is explained elsewhere. Simply put, sometimes vandals are not fit to be reported to WP:AIV, but there should be a place where they can be kept track of. You may read the problem in detail at Wikipedia talk:Administrator intervention against vandalism#Removal of valid vandals, and I would appreciate any and all feedback on my possible solution, which is still in its early stages of being and is completely open to suggestions and constructive criticism. Dar- Ape 23:54, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Apologies if this has already been suggested, but it occurred to me that a Wiki search/toolbar would be really handy for those who reference Wikipedia often.
203.28.13.57 02:13, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, just discovered it, please disregard/remove the above.
203.28.13.57
02:20, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
What about a Wikidea. It could be like an open source think tank or blog that people could submit their ideas and people could work on them.
Before I'm overcome with boldness, let's try this here first (ok, I'll be bold with colons). Bottomline: {{ long}}, {{ Verylong}}, and {{ intro length}} should be deleted. Let me explain: these temporary templates are placed in articles that someone believes are overly long and requests that someone (ie. not me) transfers to a sub-article or summarizes the content. The flaw is that this is metadata: a comment and request (directed at editors who are familiar with the subject) concerning the structure of the article. This metadata belongs on the talk page: their raison d'être. Theoretically (as some templates say and most people ignore) the template-slapper should also leave an explanation on the talk page. Templates in the article should be addressed to the readers (ie. warnings of NPOV, unverified, current event, etc.). So this clever observation that the article is long should go on the talk page: not somewhere in the actual article. On the talk page the templates would be redundant with a section explaining how it is too verbose: so delete the templates. Right? : maclean 05:34, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to limit the number of user edit by implemeting an edit quota, this would for example limit the usefulness of sockpuppets and revert/edit wars that go on. The edit limits can be placed on let's say:
Regards,
Vodomar 20:30, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
In WP:AfD discussions, new accounts are frequently flagged as possible Single Purpose Account by a human editor, possibly a biased one.
A much fairer approach is to automatically flag all edits by "new" accounts with a link to a "Please be nice to our new Wikipedian" page. This page would have links to the don't-bite-the-newbie page as well as to the SPA page.
As a straw-man figure for "new" I would suggest any account with less than 30 days OR an older account with less than 20 edits is "new." Yes, I know it's not trivial to count the total # of edits, perhaps that can be done in the next software or database revision. Dfpc 04:23, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
I would like to propose Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline as a guideline to detail the necessary components of a fair use rationale. At present, it's kindof a moving target. Some pages have a detailed, bulleted rationale, while others have a one sentence "this picture identifies the subject". Patroling Category:All images with no fair use rationale, I've seen image pages that explicitly have something of a rationale that have been nominated for a speedy. So I would like for us to formalize what is required. I have also created Template:Fair use rationale that I am proposing we use as a template to assist users in creating an acceptable rationale. Please see Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline and the associated talk page to give your thoughts and ideas. BigDT 22:40, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
As was brought up a bit earlier at "Slidey Uppey Downey Idea" what about having a 'Top' link at the bottom of every page that links back to an anchor at the top. May not be useful for some small pages but for some long articles could benefit. It could go just above the "This page was last modified ..." text or even in the sidebar. C hris_huh talk 12:22, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
The last 12 months I have been working on project www.mobilebooks.org to have Project Gutenberg ebooks available on cheap cell / mobile phones. And that is not using WAP where the big fat telephone operators make big money to download. These ebooks are in java and work on most java enabled phones. Users can download them straight for the website without needing to pay big bucks for WAP. All this is of course for free, users can download the 5000+ ebooks for FREE.
Now the big question!!! I want to invest time to put the proper links so wiki users can download the cell phone ebooks straight from Wiki.
What do you guys say????
Thanks John Mizzi
There are an ever increasing number of fact books at Wikibooks, a Wikipedia sister-project, if you are interested in this aspect Wikibooks staff lounge is the contact point. Robinhw 10:24, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
In Wikibooks I could not see any ebooks. What I am proposing is for wiki users once in an author's page or books they can click on the link from wiki, hook their cheap cell/mobile phone to the PC and download the ebook to the phone so they can read it in the bus, plane or at night in pitch black darkness so their partner can sleep. A typical example will be Charles Dickens Cell/Mobile Phone e-books or to the ebook itself Oliver Twist - Cell/Mobile Phone Version. The objective of this project was to brink ebooks to the masses not just the elite with expensive PDAs. Cannot get simpler than that? John Mizzi 10:35, 17 December 2006 (GMT+1)
I agree with Sarah that, with the prominent Google ads and apparent conflict of interest, linking to the service from even a few articles would be seen as spam. Thousands boggles the mind. I could see one link, from the external links section of Project Gutenberg, but thousands of links, even on article talk pages, would be too much of a slippery slope for my liking. I can just see thwarted spammers adding their links to the talk pages, and pointing to this as a precedent. SWAdair 08:39, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
ELApro: Could a download link or site for just the Wiki word processor be made available. This is for the purpose of working off-line on say, adding a new article or new section. This would guarantee that offline formatting would conform to Wiki formatting. I have also had problems at times with losing information during long edits. I have been copying my text, as a backup, to Microsoft Notepad, but it sometimes adds such things as double spacing and loses certain characters.
ELApro: The links on the Help:External editors page to Template:Phh:External editors & MediaWiki 1.5 are dead. Thanks again Jonathan.
Is it possible to make major announcements about Wikibooks on the main Wikipedia page? Robinhw 11:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
What about one of your nice boxes with:
Wikibooks! From books for university such as Special Relativity to books for infants such as Big Cats Wikibooks has a book for everyone.
Robinhw 12:32, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Almost every Wikiproject has their own template to post in article talk pages. While this does allow users to find other articles in their favorite topics, some articles have several Wikiproject affiliations making some article talk pages very long and hard to convert to the new small template format. My plan is to create a template that can list all of the Wikiprojects an article is involved with, allow users to edit the Wikiprojects it lists, and display ratings and importance classes. Since I have almost no knowledge of template coding, I will need major help. I originally wanted to use the wikitable format using three columns: Wikiproject Name, Rating, and Importance:
Wikiproject | Rating | Importance | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Albums | A | Significant | |||
China | B | Core | |||
Microsoft Windows | A | Core |
...but that would mean restructuring the small template setup. I have concluded that I will probably need to use the messagebox format. How should I do this? Any thoughts? Improvements? Know anyone who would be interested in this project? Again, here's my to-do list again:
Thanks. - Blackjack48 04:31, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Hi all. I would like to revive the old feature request for Wikipedia:Branching support. What do you all think of the idea? Cheers, -- unforg e ttableid | how's my driving? 00:46, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Anyone interested in fair use templates should probably see the proposed merge at Template_talk:Game-cover#Merge. ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) 19:40, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I have an idea for making IPA symbols more comprehensible, using tooltips. I have made a template {{Ʒ}} that contains [[ʒ as in beige=beɪʒ|ʒ]], and then a redirect at [[ʒ as in beige=beɪʒ]] to the appropriate phonetic page. (Here it is without nowiki: ʒ, and here's a link to edit the template page: {{ Ʒ}}. The discussion of this concept is here: template talk:Ʒ. Without popups, this works wonderfully: someone who doesn't know IPA sees blue text, moves their mouse over the link, then sees the quickie pronunciation help in the tooltip, and if they want to know more, they click and get the appropriate article. The dev version of popups has now been fixed to work with this, but the production version of popups still is not compatible. Again, please do NOT comment here, instead comment at template talk:Ʒ. If and when this starts to get a clearer consensus on whether and how to move forward, I'll be posting this at (policy) and (technical). -- Homunq 16:20, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I wish to propose Automatic proposal and suggestion of words. That is when you search for say Etymology but misspell it(perhaps you write Etimology), a proposal is made of one or several similar words that actually exists and also a suggestion at the bottom asking if the user wants to start a new article under the searched name. As it is now, you have to go to google to find out, because google often gives you good suggestions. / Minoya 05:34, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok. I realize that edit summaries are supposed to be just that, a summary of the changes you made. I realise that some editors get really annoyed by long edit summaries. I realise that long edit summaries make it harder to peruse the article's history. I know people think long edit summaries clutter up watchlists. I understand the importance of brevity in edit summaries. I know that if it's too long and detailed to fit in the summary box, it's probably best to take it to the talk page anyhow.
However, detailed edit summaries are useful, especially when a page or change is likely to be contentious. Sometimes, if there is a long discussion on the talk page about a change and I go ahead and make it, I feel the need to expound in great detail in my edit summary just in case someone hasn't been following the talk page discussion, or to avoid bringing material to the talk page that would distract from an ongoing discussion. People often ask me to proofread things they've written, and in those instances I feel the need to go into detail about every little spelling or punctuation fix, no matter how minor.
Most of the time if I run out of space in the edit summary window it's only by 2-10 characters. Sometimes I can trim it down or abreviate words, but when I abreviate I worry that people don't know what "ptl rv, dab, link & mv cntnt" means, so I try to avoid abbreviations if possible.
I did a test in the sandbox, and it seems to me that the edit summary allows you 190 characters or so (I may have miscounted). Therefore I would like to propose an increase to 200 characters. It's a nice, even number that's easy to remember. It's only 10 characters more then the current limit and shouldn't clutter up histories and watchlists too bad, but yet will eliminate (for me at least) most instances where I'm trying to trim my edit summary to the point where it is illegible, but have good reasons for not taking it to the talk page.
I'm sure that this is something that should be taken to the developers, but it's also something that needs community consensus. Hence I'm proposing it here rather than bugzilla (not to mention I have no idea how bugzilla works, only that anything involving changes to the software should be proposed there). What do others think of a 10 character increase in the maximum length of edit summaries? ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) 15:21, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
<input tabindex='2' type='text' value="/* Long edit summaries */ " name='wpSummary' id='wpSummary' maxlength='200' size='60' />
I, LightbringerX, herby decree that a new branch of Wikipedia is adue. A Lyric pool in the form of other Wikimedia productions should be considered. I'm thinking 'Wikilyric' sounds pretty good.
how come the content of the "in the news section" is always the same articles ... ?, Thanks, Rod Brown 159.251.88.50 16:23, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't know if this is feasible, but it might help editors on Vandal Patrol if all articles could temporarily be automatically semi-protected when the
WP:WDEFCON reaches two. It would take an admin to invoke that level. This could help cut down on anonymous IPs attacking articles and enabling the VP to catch with article reversals if need be.
Ronbo76
01:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Strangely this is not in the list of perennial proposals, although it seems obvious, and I would guess someone suggested it already. The proposal is to limit articles with many associated specialised articles (of interest to fans only). There would be only one article on The Simpsons, Star Trek, Big Brother (TV series), individual computer games, professional wrestling, and so on. All derived articles, on individual episodes, sequels, characters, tournaments/competitions, scores, league tables, competitors, and so on would be moved to an entirely new project. This is both a policy proposal and a new project proposal, and the policy could only be implemented when such a project starts up. Paul111 12:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Wookieepedia is exactly what I had in mind, but for all fan-interest-only articles. Even if they are not visible without looking for them, they are still a distortion of content. Look at the new page creations, and you will see how many articles fall into this category. The best analogy is with recipes: policy excludes them all, ending all disputes on notability. Paul111 11:32, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
POV rears its ugly head. You'll be arguing to kingdom come over many of the articles as to whether or not they're fan-related. -- Dweller 11:55, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
I think there should be a site created for the sue of submiting lyrics for songs! This woule be a great addition to the Wikipedia creators!
I wondered if it would be possible to introduce some whizzy tec that'll make it possible to remove pages from the Watchlist from the main "my watchlist" page, rather than the alpha order full list?
I do RC patrol and consequently my Watchlist rapidly fills, making it more difficult to really watch the pages I want to keep an eye on. I'd find it easier to prune the list using the recency element of "my watchlist" than the alpha list.
Opinions welcomed. -- Dweller 10:05, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
When warning a vandal, you may wish to temporarily "watch" them for further vandalism. Similarly, after reverting vandalism, you may wish to temporarily "watch" the article for further vandalism. You may also wish to "watch" a request for adminship, or a nomination of an article for deletion (such discussions usually last 7 days). Once it's clear that vandalism has stopped, or the discussion has ended, there's no further need to watch the page, and it simply clutters your watchlist.
How about a "temporary watch" feature, which allows you to watch a page for a specified period of time, after which it is removed from your watchlist? -- J.L.W.S. The Special One 14:11, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I wondered if it would be possible to introduce some whizzy tec that'll make it possible to remove pages from the Watchlist from the main "my watchlist" page
How about a "temporary watch" feature, which allows you to watch a page for a specified period of time, after which it is removed from your watchlist?
— Omegatron 14:50, 17 January 2007 (UTC)Perhaps a user could set a "max number of watched items" parameter in his preferences. If he then adds a new watched item that takes him over his limit, the software would drop the oldest watched item from his list.
Following from my posting a few months ago about this subject on the perennial proposals board, As it seems there have been no replies I've come to the conclusion that it may not have been quite as perennial as I had thought. The few responses it's received on the other board have been very positive, and it's apparently already available on Wikipedia Commons. I've posted it here and now to see if it might get a wider response...
...I've been wondering about this for a while now - when a user recieves a new message on his/her talk page, they get that lovely and prominent "you have new messages" banner at the top of each page. Sometimes though, users want some down time away from wikipedia - to be honest I'd be suprised if that statement didn't account for the majority of users.
Given the purpose of talk pages (ie, for the community to get in touch with a user), would it not be to the benefit of both the community and the user if (just like almost every forum out there on the web), each registered user had an option in their preferences to recieve a simple email notification of a new message. Just like every forum out there of course, it would only send a notification for the first message, and not send one again until the user has visited the talk page.
Alternatively, A weekly email could be sent out with a summary of new talk page sections from over the last week, which would be perhaps useful in cases where a user is on an extended leave from wiki. I'm sorry if this has been brought up before, but I haven't seen anything about it. Any thoughts?
Dear ReyBrujo, the Wikimedia Commons page User talk:ReyBrujo has been changed on 21:47, 14 November 2006 by JeremyA, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ReyBrujo for the current version. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/?title=User_talk:ReyBrujo&diff=0&oldid=2978670 for all changes since your last visit. Editor's summary: Re: Album Covers Contact the editor: mail: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Emailuser/JeremyA wiki: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JeremyA There will be no other notifications in case of further changes unless you visit this page. You could also reset the notification flags for all your watched pages on your watchlist. Your friendly Wikimedia Commons notification system
Being notified of changes to articles on your watchlist and changes to your talk page are two different things. The server load would be much smaller if it only notified you of changes to your talk page. I would really like to see this enabled for talk pages only. — Omegatron 15:08, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like to suggest that, if possible, a "printer-friendly" version of Wikipedia articles be made available. As the web pages are constructed now, it is a very tedious process to copy and paste the rich information that is provided on any given subject.
James Gabe Oklahoma City January 18, 2007 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jamesgabe ( talk • contribs) 18:07, 18 January 2007 (UTC).
Hi, I'm a fan of both Google and Wikipedia and I use the wikipedia widget for my google homepage. Since google homepage doesn't allow to have more then one instance of the same widget, I'd gladly see a new version of the wiki widget allowing to me to have more then one query field for different languages. I use both it.wikipedia and en.wikipedia for different searches and I'd be very happy to have both query fields in the same homepage. Now, there is only the option to select a language. I'd be happy with one "add one more language" option, that allow to me to chose one more language for another query field. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.208.83.231 ( talk) 14:35, 18 January 2007 (UTC).
A fantastic feature would be a tool bar that would enable me to highlight an article (not for public display and not for editing purposes) but for display in the articles that I view within my own account when I have logged in.
Then when I am reading about something, I wouldn't feel I have to print the article and then highlight it, but just mouse highlight things. Then it would be great to save this highlighting to show up only in my account.
This suggestion outlines the only drawback to online learning as opposed to paper (and therefore mark-up-able) learning--wikipedia would be a pioneer!
What do you think?
I have a suggestion: to take all pages in the Wikipedia namespace (policies, essays, guidelines, etc.) and enclose them in the <noinclude> tag. What this will do is prevent transclusion or substitution of pages like WP:MOS, which in nearly no circumstances would require transclusion ({{Wikipedia:Manual of Style}} or substitution ({{subst:Wikipedia:Manual of Style}}) While this need not occur on short essays, or on Wikipedia pages that are meant to behave like templates, it seems good to me, and it will prevent abuse that could cause inconvenience for the page viewer and possibly Wikimedian servers. (Yes, there is WP:PERF for good faith editors, but purposely trying to slow down servers is different.)
Suppose that I write an essay and call it Wikipedia:Drunk driving, and the content is
...and suppose that the essay is (somehow) a couple of kilobytes long. There is no reason to transclude or substitute that (just link to it), so make the page content:
Or even better,
This seems like a good idea due to recent vandalism to User talk:68.39.174.238, which was met with this course of action, which I suggested to Tuxide on IRC. (The user that did this may need checkuser, but that's my passive opinion.) Doing this for all pages in the Wikipedia namespace (except for, as listed above, pages meant to behave like templates, and maybe short essays) can't hurt; and if it can, please tell me why. Thanks. Gracenotes T § 04:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
P.S. This could be extended to user pages.
Several come to
mind.
04:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
P.P.S. Hm, how about
User:Tuxide/Sandbox/Do not subst my user talk page? :p 04:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
I decided to stuff some WP:BEANS up my nose. check my userpage. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 06:39, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
This won't solve anything. Vandals will just find some way to vandalize wikipedia, including using subst to copy everything over as someone did to my talk page recently. Besides, we don't need to change thousands of pages just because of one instance of vandalism. That would just give the vandal a lot of attention, which we shouldn't be doing. Koweja 13:43, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
A lot of people complain that AfD is in some way "broken". Others disagree but acknowledge serious flaws. One common problem is bad articles on good subjects; people often !vote "keep and clean up", which often results in the article being kept but not cleaned up. So I have an idea:
I believe this will reduce the chances of crap articles on good subjects being deleted by those whose mission is to improve the quality of the encyclopaedia. And crap articles which are not remedied will be deleted, which is also good for the encyclopaedia. Finally, closing admins will have a middle ground between keep and delete in marginal cases, giving those who advocate keep a deadline to remedy the faults identified by others. Guy ( Help!) 12:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
What if we trial the idea? It doesn't nessecarily have to seriously affect XfD for the moment. Instead, if it works, it could be an organic process of change. All we would have to do is set up WikiProject Quality Control (ok, I know control may not be the best word, but that's what you get at the end of a factory line where quality of a "product" is checked.) or WikiProject Quality Assurance. I have no doubt that a fair number of people would join such a project, and it's sole aims would be twofold - Admins closing XfD's that have an indication that a cleanup is needed could a link to the article/AfD discussion on an "XfD cleanup list" at his/her discretion, and members of the project could add articles to a seperate "cleanup list" if something was felt to need real attention from the project (or some such. the latter is just an idea). The concentration of course would be on the XfD list.
As I say - it wouldn't need to be fully integrated into the XfD process. In fact, to start with it would be better not being integrated to start with and just having a closing admin doing it on a discretionary basis as part of a trial. It wouldn't need to be every XfD article that would apply - just a few would see if it works well or not to start with...
...Just an idea. Crimsone 18:56, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Whether this is a good idea or not seems to boil down to whether people think we should keep articles we will want in the long run, or delete them until they are of sufficient quality. Provided it passes notability and WP:NOT then we can have an article on it. But should we remove that article until it meets the other content policies, or leave it in a poorly-written state. I would be inclined towards the latter; I don't think deletion should be a reflection on the current state of the article, merely whether one could be written (I'm an eventualist, not an immediatist). Trebor 19:01, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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Im not sure if it is possible but it would be nice if all words that have an article or page would automatically be links to those pages, but appearing like normal words unless you have the cursor upon them (or click them). So the Articles would appear as today but all archived words would be "hidden" links. This would maybe take more bandwidth but it would surely make the pedia more effective and integrated. / Minoya 08:53, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Is it possible to leave things looking the way they are, but have right clicks bring up the option of finding links to Wikitionary and other projects? -- Samuel Wantman 10:05, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
ELApro: Might an option be made available for a user to create/access a scaled down, elementary lay version of an article that is highly technical? This would eliminate the jargon and other technicalities that may be present in the parent article.
co-incidentally, i was just on my way here to suggest something similar.
basically, theres a problem with our target audience, i.e., given that our target audience is 'everyone', it's hard to get the depth and wordage of an article right, so that it's not too complicated for those who aren't allready knowledgable in the area, but still useful to those who are. eg, if i look up an article on genetics, then i dont want it too simple -- i want some complicated meat and bones, rather than an article that just puts simply what i allready know. on the other hands, i want articles that discuss maths to treat me like the mathematical retard that i am, and lay it out simple.
obviously, catering for me would piss other people off :-D. not catering for me pisses me, and similar people, off. so, you see the problem?
why not, at least for sci/tech articles, for decent articles (B-list or above, say), fork the article into simple, normal, advanced, and expert versions? example definitions could be:
simple presumes no background knowledge. aims to get the basic concept across, tho not neccesarily any details on how/why the concept is/works/etc
normal presumes basic/no background knowledge. aims to get the basic concept across, with some understanding of how/why the thing is/works/etc
advanced presumes some background knowledge. aims to get the concept fully accross, along with more detailed how and why
expert presumes deep background knowledge, and a reader that wants to fully and deeply comprehend the subject, and who is willing to wade through a complicated article to do so.
examples for, say, a tRNA article:
simple: understandable without any background knowledge: for those who are simply interested in knowing what tRNA is and what it does, not neccesarily understanding exactly how it works nor wading through complicated bio-molecular/genetic jibberish
normal understandable by someone without any above-basic background knowledge in biology/genetics, but possibly a bit confusing (i.e., they could, with effort, understand what tRNA is, and, broadly speaking, how it works, from the article). probably useful to A-level students as a primer, but less useful to BSCs.
advanced let the scientific jibberish fly! useful to people with biological training. with a background in molecular biology, someone could come away from the article understanding what tRNA is and how it works, tho not neccesarily with an exam-passing understanding
expert for people who allready know the subject really well, and who want more esoteric info on tRNA, such as bond-lengths, etc. incomprehensable to normal people, but makes wp useful on the subject of tRNA to people who would have to work with tRNA in a professional setting.
i knocked up an example. note that i did it really quickly, and, as articles, they're shit. they just aim to demonstrait what i'm talking about.
the tRNA article, slightly stripped down, then forked into simple, normal, advanced and expert versions. User:Dak/TRNA (edit the demo articles if you want, i'm not going to mind just because they're on my user space).
what'cher recon? theres some gaps (between, say, advanced and expert, imo), and the system could be extended: maybe article/concise (brief as possible), article/verbiose (long winded, covering every aspect, with the kind of stuff which is usually clipped from articles to keep them of a sane size), article/data (lists of different tRNA molecules, average bond-lengths, links to genetic sequences, melting point, average molecular weights, etc), etc. etc. etc... -- Dak 19:01, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
ELApro: I would assume that the old "Keep it simple" adage might apply. If there is a simplified version of the article in the Simplified English Wikipedia then there should be an auto-link function in the software to have the link created. This, by the way, might be similarly applied to WikiQuotes, or whatever other Wiki application exists for an article. Why not have an option to create a simplified lay person's page, if one does not exist and the current single option appears to be too complex for some lay reader. After a lay version is created, a lay version link from a normal Wiki page would be available for anyone considering the current main page too complex, and desiring a simplified introduction. Those satisfied with the original page can leave it as is, and those believing the original page is too complex, will either have an option to view a simplified presentation, or will have an option to create a simplified version. Let the users decide which original pages may or may not be suited to the typical lay person, by copying information from the lay page (if it exists) into the original page, and keeping the lay page simple. If an article is acceptably presented to all viewers, leave it as is. No changes necessary. Otherwise, an alternative option, only one, is available, linked from the original article. Any levels beyond two could be done by extracting information and customizing on one's own home computer, to suit one's individual taste.
ELApro: After an initial review of the Simple English Wikipedia, I would disagree. It seems to be precisely what was requested. The only thing that remains to be done is to link all existing articles, hopefully in a manner similar to that described above by Jonathan Kovaciny. This could be done either manually or automatically, but hopefully something could be done to ease or simplify the process. Thank you Jonathan for your valuable information and for seconding this proposal!
The end of Fair use has begun: Wikipedia:WikiProject Stop fair use -- ROBERTO DAN 17:44, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering if it was possible to list all the articles sorted by decreasing "what links here" number of links. That way, we'd have a pretty accurate measure of the importance of an article to the whole encyclopedia, both in content and community. We could work to make the most important articles GAs and FAs, without the constant debate about article importance that generally cripples COWs and improvement drives.-- SidiLemine 12:33, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
At the moment the only way the nature of an edit can be discovered is by clicking the 'diff' link, and using the edit summaries provided by the editors. However edit summaries provided are often of little or no use - anonymous vandalism with no edit summary being one example. What about the possibility of categorizing edits based on their nature, e.g. text removal, text change, text insertion, link insertion... the options could be as complicated or as simple as necessary. Display this information in brief form next to the edit summary, and it could be useful when browsing an article's history, recent changes or a watchlist. Mushin talk 06:35, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
/* */
as summary. A cheat, at best. —
Gennaro Prota
•Talk
17:05, 23 December 2006 (UTC)Since the wiktionary project has really taken off, how about including a little blurb "wiktionary has a definition of this word" (with a link, of course!) or something like that for wikipedia articles that are also featured in the wiktionary? I'm not sure if this would be best done with a bot walking through the wiktionary and adding tags to wikipedia or if the databases could be synced... Just an idea... 83.255.10.11 23:55, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I think the Random article link is interesting but unwieldly. I think it would be more interesting if the random article link had an option so one could make it a bit less random-- i.e. make it so one can semi-randomly select:
The above is related to "fuzzy searching"... by " fuzzy" I mean one that isn't so well defined in the search sense, i.e. inexact matching of search terms. It would be interesting if one could search articles by content, i.e. search articles for specific words (and get a list as output). Sometimes, I find it is not possible to remember the name of the article... but I remember the content. Google seems to be better at finding things then... than the Wikipedia's 'search' function. It would be interesting if Wikipedia had a search function (not unlike Google)... that has the option of generating a ranking of articles instead of taking one to one specific article. Nephron T| C 23:18, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
I frequently come across small stub articles at incorrectly-najmed pages and move them to more appropriate titles. Almost inevitably, the pages also need further work such as wikifying, categorising, or re-stubbing. Currently, the "successful move" page reads:
It would be a huuge help if that could be tweaked slightly to become:
Any chance of adding that edit link? Pretty please? Grutness... wha? 23:00, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
The page "{{MediaWiki direct link}}" ( links) has been moved to " $2" ( ).
Please check whether this move has created any double redirects, and fix them as necessary.
Hi all,
There is a vote to allow the fair use of promotional photographs of living people. Some people believe the fair use policy currently disallows fair use of promotional photographs of living people if they occasionally make public appearances, others disagree with this. This proposal would clarify the issue.
Cedars 22:13, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia already has in place a spam blacklist which prevents page saves when certain URLs are detected on the page. I'd like to propose a similar type of system. It would not be a blanket refusal to save, but rather would pop up a warning (as we used to have with blank edit summaries before the autofill feature came along) when certain words are detected. The editor would still be able to save, but at least he would hav been alerted to this. It would be of great help to newbies especially. Words I'm targeting off the top of my head are things like "recent", "recently", "lately" etc. that should not be in a "permanent" encyclopedia article. I'm sure others could even think of different ways to take this, e.g. identifying certain adjectives as weasel words and peacock terms. Thoughts? Zun aid © Please rate me at Editor Review! 13:17, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Kind of a related idea: What about doing something like this for users that have been blocked in the last 90 days? Any time a recent vandal tried to add any word in a large list of common vandalism words, they'd have to go through an extra step before being able to save the page. On the "warning page" there would be an admonishment not to revandalize: "Based on keywords in your edit, it appears that you are attempting to vandalize this page. You may still proceed with your changes by clicking the Save Page button below, but be aware that your edit will be speedily reverted if any vandalism is confirmed." Then, a special note would be automatically appended to the edit summary highlighting the edit as possible vandalism. — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 15:12, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
In some cases, building consensus on Wikipedia does not work very well. It is slow. It often results in a bad answer/solution. It is prone to manipulation. And often, a number of average editors can make life miserable for some real expert in a field like physics or neuroscience, reverting their changes, getting into petty arguments with them, etc. When you read the academic literature about Wikipedia, this is one of the complaints. The library scientists also complain about problems with unqualified people cranking out nonsense in a strident contemptuous fashion and drowning out the more learned and qualified editors on Wikipedia. In interviews, Jimmy Wales often has mentioned the desire to attract more experts to write articles. I am wondering about possibly tilting the playing field a bit in favor of people who have demonstrated some recognized level of expertise in some area.
I propose that a system somewhat like that used by Yahoo! Answers be used. In Yahoo! Answers, a person can put a question forward and get quite a few answers to that question in a short period. They can either choose one of these as the "best", or put it up to a vote to the community which will then choose a "best" answer. The community can then vote after the fact in agreement that the best choice has been made, or can vote in disagreement. Points are accumulated along the way that then identify fairly rapidly those with recognized qualifications and reliability in a given field. Many times I wish I could have a question that arises on Wikipedia put to a vote. On a talk page, this rarely works. Some people have jury rigged votes on special pages, and that can work sometimes. If points were accumulated in a yahoo! answers fashion, and people could find a list of things to vote on easily, then the community could be surveyed easily on many issues that become sources of contention. This could even be used for noncontent-related dispute resolution. For example, I have had editors claiming to me that having citations was unencyclopedic. Of course, I could have tried to organize some sort of RfC or something to address this, but it is too cumbersome. If I could quickly put the matter to a vote, and get 35 votes to 2 to show he is wrong, and build up points in the meantime, then slowly people who are knowledgable and reasonable fonts of knowledge in certain areas will be identified, and people who are less reliable and less knowledgable will become known as well. This would also be an incentive to people to improve, to get a better score. Better scores need not come with extra priveleges; prestige is enough to drive people on Yahoo! Answers. I recently had a situation where an editor claimed he had taken the wording for his contribution (which was very lacking in several aspects) directly from the work of a famous person in the field (but did not attribute the writing to the famous person). I then expressed incredulity at this claim, given that the contribution was of such doubtful quality. I pointed out that this editor appeared to be:
I was met with a storm of indignation and accusations and attacks. The current dispute resolution system is too cumbersome to deal with this sort of thing. Therefore, there is lots of bullying instead. However, if something easy was available, the problem probably would have been resolved quickly without even resorting to dispute resolution, because even the existence of a way to easily publicly shame someone would encourage them to stay in line. Points might be accrued in different areas to produce a multidimensional score. Anyway, it is at least something to consider.-- Filll 07:29, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
No of course not. I just thought I would make the suggestion. I do not claim this is the solution the problems of Wikipedia. When one is brainstorming, one just throws ideas out for comment. Most of them are nonsense, but they might stimulate other ideas and who knows, sometimes something good comes out of it. I also suspect there are many "orphaned" articles out there. -- Filll 21:51, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
If I understood your proposal correctly, it aims to give expert views more weight in discussions/votes, and to introduce a simpler method of determining consensus. I remember Larry Sanger, and others, criticising Wikipedia for being anti-elitist, and this proposal would help address such criticism, and make it harder for trolls to game the system. A hypothetical situation where this would be useful would be a discussion where a troll tries to get a common misconception reported as a fact in the article, and an expert tries to stop him. -- J.L.W.S. The Special One 05:56, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Object This makes absolutely no sense at all. How can you know for sure that that person is an expert on the subject? Say an example: a neurologist decides to become a Wikiholic, and start posting stuff on Neuroscience. There is no way to confirm. Besides new editors i.e. in this case the neurologist, don't have friends in Wikipedia. Therefore their votes will be lower. And then they may leave.-- Foundby 10:56, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Whilst I'd agree that the current, consensus based, (effectively weighted democratic) system in Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed, I'm not convinced that this approach to dealing with that is adequate. You're essentially advocating a beauty contest based on a meta level rather than as it is now, on the content level. Until Wikipedia has some form of demonstrating expertise and utilising that in the validation of article content, we'll never get away from the rigging or pimping of votes whether on article page or in WP space. Notwithstanding that the tyrrany of ill-informed democracy does need dealing with. ALR 20:54, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Here is an idea for reducing vandalism: Require anonymous users to provide a valid e-mail address, which will be used to verify that the anon is serious about the edit and to permit identification of vandals. Here is the process:
Note that at the end of this process we will have a valid e-mail for the user, and some hope of identification if the edit is vandalism. I strongly doubt that any vandal will be eager to type in "me@myschool.edu", but if they do so and it is vandalism we can then contact "myschool" and advise them of the issue. We can also block e-mail addresses that are for vandals in that case.
Note that I am not calling for e-mail addresses to be placed in the edit history or in any place which is generally accessible. The e-mail addresses should be in a seperate place acessible only to sysops if not a much more restricted set of users. However, it should be a part of our policy that Wikipedia can use that information at its discression to track down and/or contact vandals, and that should be noted on the e-mail address query screen and in the confirmation e-mail itself. -- EMS | Talk 17:55, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't think editing by non-registered users should be allowed at all - the negatives far outweigh the positives. So giving anon IPs a hoop to jump through should be the least requirement. CyberAnth 04:18, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
Ha ha ha! Oh wait... you were serious? Lets face it, if anonymous people have to go through this huge waste of time perhaps to only correct a spelling mistake, why edit wikipedia at all? Even if there is completely wrong information, most anonymous users dont want to spend their precious Sunday afternoon going through that process. And I honestly dont think this will stop vandals at all because those people that vandalize in the first place have way too uch time o their hands. -Charlie34
Really, this won't help against vandals. Only against people who have noticed "Wow! Edit button!" and decided to test it, but they aren't a problem. About the side effect, on many sites I often had a useful comment in mind, but didn't make it because of all the confirmation stuff. Not only it can backfire with spam, I just don't want to confirm all of that, after all, it's the site, not me, who needs it. CP/M comm | Wikipedia Neutrality Project| 15:28, 23 December 2006 (UTC)
I just read the interesting essay by
User:DV8 2XL, who left the project in August 2006.
Given that we seem to have a lot of eager ArbCom candidates, certainly more than the ones needed for the main ArbCom, and many with stellar records (none perfect but no human is), would it make sense to have lower level 'topical ArbComs' as
User:DV8 2XL suggests?
Imagine having, say, 6 such topical ArbComs, one for each of the current topics in
WP:Refdesk. They would focus on main article space disputes, and on cases where behavior is mostly
civil (or maybe we could add a dedicated
WP:CIVIL topical ArbCom) and the issues are more related to the core WP content policies, such as
WP:V,
WP:NOR,
WP:NOT,
WP:N, etc. They would have the same power to decide on remedies as the main ArbCom. All their decisions would be appealable to the main ArbCom, who would be able to summarily dismiss the appeal (hopefully in most cases) or accept it.
Of course each topical ArbCom would also be able to select its cases, suggesting continued efforts in other mediation venues where applicable.
The motivation is to clear backlog and deal with disputes much earlier than we do today, per
User:DV8 2XL's suggestions.
Any thoughts? Has this been suggested/rejected before?
Crum375
13:05, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
I suggest that articles which go unread for an extended period of time be automatically removed. After all, the goal of an encyclopedia is to transmit knowledge. So an article which is not being read is not a useful part of an encyclopedia.
It seems to me that the first thing to do is to obtain statistics on how often articles are being read, and get some idea of what consititutes an unread (or rarely read) atricle. Even without that, I would suggest the following standard for removing articles:
I suspect that this may result in the removal of a substantial number of articles, but if no one comes to Wikipedia looking for information on a given topic, is it at all fair to consider that subject notable? -- EMS | Talk 05:57, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
This idea is patently absurd. There are many notable encyclopedic subjects which people only rarely would need to know about or research. For example, who's going to look up minor Senators of Alabama from the 30's? However, that is no excuse to go about deleting them when the information they contain is useful and necessary to our encyclopedic nature. Encyclopedias, in case you haven't heard, are supposed to be all-encompassing. Why should we delete pages simply because they are not of popular interest? This would additionally give us an even stronger bias towards the temporal and current vs. the timeless and historical. Rejected. -- tjstrf talk 22:18, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Is this for real? This proposal is so absurd that it costs me a major effort to believe it was done in good faith. -- Ekjon Lok 22:23, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
What I am seeing are a lot of knee-jerk reactions, as if articles should be here because they are here. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collector of information. I really think that this is an idea that needs to be researched. How often are articles accessed? Are there articles which go largely unread? If so, what kind of content do those articles typically have? From there other questions will follow: Are these relatively unaccessed articles worth keeping? What do these articles say about the Wikipedia notability standads? Noone seems to have an answer to those questions. The concern about FA articles is valid, but I strongly doubt that topics which noone cares about become FA's. At the least Wikipedia should come to know how it is being used.
(BTW - I agree that blindly implementing this suggestion is a truly bad idea. You just plain don't do something like this unless you have a very good idea of what it is going to do.) -- EMS | Talk 03:25, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Good idea, wrong implementation. Instead of deleting them, have a Special:Unviewed page (or probably some better name) that would allow these articles to be identified. Then it gives people one more avenue to find articles that need to be reviewed. But certainly no automatic deletion. — Doug Bell talk 04:42, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia is mirrored all over the place. This means it is impossible to know whether an article has been read or not; you can only find out if it has been read on a particular service (eg Wikimedia). A statistical survey might yeild interesting information (it would be especially interesting to know how well the read frequency correlates with the edit frequency), but I don't think editorial decisions like this should be made on such a crude basis. Chris Thornett 19:24, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
I just love the note at the top that says this was temporarily placed at perennial proposals. I'm a deletionist at heart but this is just a very very bad idea. And I won't even mention the useless technical complications that implementing this would entail. Quality articles are quality articles, regardless of whether or not they're read often. We already have plenty of resources allowing us to identify useless content: orphaned articles, linkless articles, short pages, neglected articles etc. Any attempt to make the deletion process automatic will undoubtedly lead to loss of valuable content. I have a hard time believeing this is a good faith proposal. Pascal.Tesson 06:03, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
While I agree that the idea of deleting (manually or automatically) long-unread articles is absurd, being able to view a list of pages that have not been viewed in a long time would be very useful, as User:Doug_Bell suggested. Special:ancientpages orders pages based on creation date, so Special:unviewedpages (wantonpages?) would sort them based on their last access date. This tool could be used to make sure esoteric pages are of acceptable quality. It would also be a way of finding hidden gems! - Kslays 21:33, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
Dear God, the deletionists are at it again! No, this is an appalling proposal. Just because information is obscure and rarely accessed does not make it useless. I was the first person to check a 1940s book out of the university library where I work. Does that make it useless? No, of course it doesn't. For a start, I was interested enough in it to take it out! Let's just bin this proposal now and move on. -- Necrothesp 17:48, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
Its not always apparent to people but have you ever considered that an unread article maybe simply undiscovered instead of ignored, Its like that time when Atari made an illegal tetris cartridge for Nintendo's NES system, and most of the cartridges were kept in a warehouse. At that time you could see adds offering $300 for one cartridge! They simply didnt know it was there and therefore did not pay the warehouse any attention. Its basically like that, if you dont know it is there you wont visit, you could probably shave off a good amount of content from wikipedia, simply because people dont know its there! I personally think that there shouldnt be a deletion of unread content. -Charlie34
Is it possible to set aside a day or week where members of the community go through every article and check for deador spam links? A comment could be posted on the talk page after each page is done. Something has to be done to deal with all these dead links and i was wondering if anyone else thinks this is a good idea. The Placebo Effect 13:30, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
It is mentioned under your research that he was born on December 18th when all other research states he was born December 21st. What is the correct dob? yiannimelas(at)gmail(dot)com thanks, yianni
The rollback button is great to undo bad edits, but it can piss off people having their work undone without an explanation. Rollback should only be used on obvious vandals that deserve no explanation, of course, but sometimes convenience trumps caution. - DavidWBrooks 21:50, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
popupRevertSummaryPrompt=true;
so it prompts me for an edit summary every time I do a revert, and I have a choice of either entering an edit summary or leaving the default summary for vandalism reverts.
Tra
(Talk)
22:10, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Might a box be made as to make the footnotes on a page less, well obnoxious if there are many. I have seen boxes where there is a link in the top right corner where it says "show" while the box is closed and "hide" while the box is open. This could be done in much the same way the table of contents are done. Now I don't know how to do it, so I bring it here. (Note: This idea was originally derrived by myself at Talk:RuneScape, having nearly 50 citations. However, I have seen a page with 137 citations, and this would make any and all Wikipedia pages look far more pleasing to the non-editing reader.) How plausible, if plausible at all, is this plan, and does anyone know how to make such a box in a non-intrusive way? Other Feedback? Thanks in advance, → p00rleno (lvl 78) ← ROCKS C RS 01:36, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
Hi,
I tried to find a place to submit this, but ended up here. It's about a new post: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creation/2006-10-21#the_Book_of_Games_Volume_1_.28The_Ultimate_Guide_to_PC_.26_Video_Games.29
How long does it take before a new article is verified? I am the publisher of the book, and would like to contribute if I could. Is it possible to get in contact with someone that will work on the article? We could send a press copy of the book to the person.
-Bendik Stang
I went to http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/c:Lost , thinking it was some sort of new wikipedia-related technological thing. It turned to be a page about the television show "Lost". That wasn't my only discovery. I also discovered something about the show that I would have preferred to have seen on the show itself. In short, the page lacks any warning of spoilers. I propose to make a page created solely to alert people of possible spoilers before actually veiwing the page http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/c:Lost . Thank You —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jack Rabitt ( talk • contribs).
Hi, Beyond any doubt wikipedia is a lovely thing to have in our cyber world. I am a big fan of her. Though I dont have a very specific area of experties where i can be helpful to your project but i do have one suggestion. Like some other services like google, answers, yahoo and msn etc. I would suggest that wikipedia may like to launch a comprehensive and free toolbar for desktop use. I hope i may not have disappointed you with my suggestion. Thanx —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Ccuuppiidd ( talk • contribs).
Hi I'd like to request a change on the placement of the search bar. I often forget where it is because of the awkward and almost unnoticible location. I think that if you moved the bar to a more visible area on the page, it would induce more browsing on the site. Thank you, and I think Wikipedia is awesome. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 76.171.242.137 ( talk) 09:50, 20 December 2006 (UTC).
A more obvious place would be in the upper left corner, above the globe. I realize that the more graphically inclined may strongly object to that, but if the goal is to make the reader experience as trouble-free as possible, the page shouldn't be treated as an art project. John Broughton | Talk 02:41, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Object I am used to it, and so will you.-- Foundby 10:58, 21 December 2006 (UTC)
Have you noticed that when you type in wikipedia.org, there is a seachbrowser just underneath the logo? You have to try to miss that -Charlie34
I've just created a template Template:Link GA, it's works similar as the Template:Link FA. However it needs the MediaWiki:Monobook.css and MediaWiki:Common.js to be updated to reflect this change. Is that a good idea to introduce this template? -- Shinjiman ⇔ ♨ 05:58, 2 December 2006 (UTC)
I would like to propose for Wikipedia to use logo variations created by members of the community to mark national and international awareness days, Remembrance Days, notable anniversaries, and observance days. Besides for the featured article, it is important to commemorate special days to show Wikipedia's support for bringing out more awareness of these issues and events. The logos would be chosen from contestants in a consensus of graphic artist users on a project page of its own. This project would be similar to google's [[ [1]|sketch contest]]. I would like us perhaps to be ready for our first wikilogo by Hanuka, Christmas and Eid ul-Adha! FrummerThanThou 05:43, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
#p-logo a { background-image: url(
http://mylogo.com/logo.png) !important; }
GeorgeMoney (
talk)
07:07, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Don't like the idea. With Google, they can detect what country you are in and provide you with an appropriate version of Google [2], where they can do cute and culturally appropriate things with the logo. I don't ever see there being a "U.S." version of Wikipedia, a British version, Canadian version, etc... There are very few holidays that are not specific to religions or certain countries. -- Aude ( talk) 17:42, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I cannot see this proposal anywhere; if I have missed it, please don't shout at me.
It seems quite clear to me that many serious new editors, who really want to help our project, do not come across the adopt-a-user setup, nor are they directed to it. I have adopted two users and, since doing so, I have been approached by three newbies with questions which, happily, I could answer. But they were unaware that they could have asked to be adopted. They had all received a {{ welcome}} template. I propose that the welcome templates be enlarged to include a link to WP:ADOPT. They then have the option of going there or not, but they will at least know about it.-- Anthony.bradbury 19:39, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
In support of Anthony.bradbury I would like the Adopt-a-user program to be linked from {{ welcome}}, but I do understand the concerns of Doc Tropics. I would like to ask what sort of time period / number we talking about, and where could we get such community evaluation done?
On the other hand the project has been running for a few months now - and we have currently over 65 adoptees - and so far (as far as I am aware) no complaints. Even if it was added to the welcome template, we could always removed it very quickly if there were problems encountered. Beyond a certain point I suppose it is an old circular argument - if we don't have any "official" support we can't advertise the service properly to increase our numbers, but we need to increase numbers before we are allowed "official" support. "Official" support is particularly important for this project because it would help us attract the newest of users (who are otherwise hard to reach).
On a similar and maybe less controversial note, it would be great if we could have a link inserted under Where to ask Questions at Help:Contents - please see Help talk:Contents to discuss. Thanks Lethaniol 15:00, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
As I mention elsewhere, I do not think that this program is so useful (while the idea is cute). The best way for a user to get involved would be contribute to articles, and the interaction which follows from there. Joining a wikiproject is also a good idea.
Besides, I believe that the {{ welcome}} template already has a bit too many links. If this project is found really useful, I'd suggest replacing one of the existing links than adding to it. Oleg Alexandrov ( talk) 16:09, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
Just now I needed to propose the splitting of Category:Life simulation games into Biological simulation games and Social simulation games, and found the required cf* and cf*2 templates didn't exist. I ended up using a modified version of {{ cfr}} on WP:CFD and the generic {{ split}} (with the rarely-used discuss parameter to point to CSD instead of category talk) on the category page itself. But I bet this isn't the only time a category's been put up for splitting. Shouldn't there be templates to do it with? Neon Merlin 04:58, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
I'll keep this short since most everything is explained elsewhere. Simply put, sometimes vandals are not fit to be reported to WP:AIV, but there should be a place where they can be kept track of. You may read the problem in detail at Wikipedia talk:Administrator intervention against vandalism#Removal of valid vandals, and I would appreciate any and all feedback on my possible solution, which is still in its early stages of being and is completely open to suggestions and constructive criticism. Dar- Ape 23:54, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
Apologies if this has already been suggested, but it occurred to me that a Wiki search/toolbar would be really handy for those who reference Wikipedia often.
203.28.13.57 02:13, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, just discovered it, please disregard/remove the above.
203.28.13.57
02:20, 19 December 2006 (UTC)
What about a Wikidea. It could be like an open source think tank or blog that people could submit their ideas and people could work on them.
Before I'm overcome with boldness, let's try this here first (ok, I'll be bold with colons). Bottomline: {{ long}}, {{ Verylong}}, and {{ intro length}} should be deleted. Let me explain: these temporary templates are placed in articles that someone believes are overly long and requests that someone (ie. not me) transfers to a sub-article or summarizes the content. The flaw is that this is metadata: a comment and request (directed at editors who are familiar with the subject) concerning the structure of the article. This metadata belongs on the talk page: their raison d'être. Theoretically (as some templates say and most people ignore) the template-slapper should also leave an explanation on the talk page. Templates in the article should be addressed to the readers (ie. warnings of NPOV, unverified, current event, etc.). So this clever observation that the article is long should go on the talk page: not somewhere in the actual article. On the talk page the templates would be redundant with a section explaining how it is too verbose: so delete the templates. Right? : maclean 05:34, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Is there a way to limit the number of user edit by implemeting an edit quota, this would for example limit the usefulness of sockpuppets and revert/edit wars that go on. The edit limits can be placed on let's say:
Regards,
Vodomar 20:30, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
In WP:AfD discussions, new accounts are frequently flagged as possible Single Purpose Account by a human editor, possibly a biased one.
A much fairer approach is to automatically flag all edits by "new" accounts with a link to a "Please be nice to our new Wikipedian" page. This page would have links to the don't-bite-the-newbie page as well as to the SPA page.
As a straw-man figure for "new" I would suggest any account with less than 30 days OR an older account with less than 20 edits is "new." Yes, I know it's not trivial to count the total # of edits, perhaps that can be done in the next software or database revision. Dfpc 04:23, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
I would like to propose Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline as a guideline to detail the necessary components of a fair use rationale. At present, it's kindof a moving target. Some pages have a detailed, bulleted rationale, while others have a one sentence "this picture identifies the subject". Patroling Category:All images with no fair use rationale, I've seen image pages that explicitly have something of a rationale that have been nominated for a speedy. So I would like for us to formalize what is required. I have also created Template:Fair use rationale that I am proposing we use as a template to assist users in creating an acceptable rationale. Please see Wikipedia:Fair use rationale guideline and the associated talk page to give your thoughts and ideas. BigDT 22:40, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
As was brought up a bit earlier at "Slidey Uppey Downey Idea" what about having a 'Top' link at the bottom of every page that links back to an anchor at the top. May not be useful for some small pages but for some long articles could benefit. It could go just above the "This page was last modified ..." text or even in the sidebar. C hris_huh talk 12:22, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
The last 12 months I have been working on project www.mobilebooks.org to have Project Gutenberg ebooks available on cheap cell / mobile phones. And that is not using WAP where the big fat telephone operators make big money to download. These ebooks are in java and work on most java enabled phones. Users can download them straight for the website without needing to pay big bucks for WAP. All this is of course for free, users can download the 5000+ ebooks for FREE.
Now the big question!!! I want to invest time to put the proper links so wiki users can download the cell phone ebooks straight from Wiki.
What do you guys say????
Thanks John Mizzi
There are an ever increasing number of fact books at Wikibooks, a Wikipedia sister-project, if you are interested in this aspect Wikibooks staff lounge is the contact point. Robinhw 10:24, 16 December 2006 (UTC)
In Wikibooks I could not see any ebooks. What I am proposing is for wiki users once in an author's page or books they can click on the link from wiki, hook their cheap cell/mobile phone to the PC and download the ebook to the phone so they can read it in the bus, plane or at night in pitch black darkness so their partner can sleep. A typical example will be Charles Dickens Cell/Mobile Phone e-books or to the ebook itself Oliver Twist - Cell/Mobile Phone Version. The objective of this project was to brink ebooks to the masses not just the elite with expensive PDAs. Cannot get simpler than that? John Mizzi 10:35, 17 December 2006 (GMT+1)
I agree with Sarah that, with the prominent Google ads and apparent conflict of interest, linking to the service from even a few articles would be seen as spam. Thousands boggles the mind. I could see one link, from the external links section of Project Gutenberg, but thousands of links, even on article talk pages, would be too much of a slippery slope for my liking. I can just see thwarted spammers adding their links to the talk pages, and pointing to this as a precedent. SWAdair 08:39, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
ELApro: Could a download link or site for just the Wiki word processor be made available. This is for the purpose of working off-line on say, adding a new article or new section. This would guarantee that offline formatting would conform to Wiki formatting. I have also had problems at times with losing information during long edits. I have been copying my text, as a backup, to Microsoft Notepad, but it sometimes adds such things as double spacing and loses certain characters.
ELApro: The links on the Help:External editors page to Template:Phh:External editors & MediaWiki 1.5 are dead. Thanks again Jonathan.
Is it possible to make major announcements about Wikibooks on the main Wikipedia page? Robinhw 11:24, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
What about one of your nice boxes with:
Wikibooks! From books for university such as Special Relativity to books for infants such as Big Cats Wikibooks has a book for everyone.
Robinhw 12:32, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Almost every Wikiproject has their own template to post in article talk pages. While this does allow users to find other articles in their favorite topics, some articles have several Wikiproject affiliations making some article talk pages very long and hard to convert to the new small template format. My plan is to create a template that can list all of the Wikiprojects an article is involved with, allow users to edit the Wikiprojects it lists, and display ratings and importance classes. Since I have almost no knowledge of template coding, I will need major help. I originally wanted to use the wikitable format using three columns: Wikiproject Name, Rating, and Importance:
Wikiproject | Rating | Importance | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Albums | A | Significant | |||
China | B | Core | |||
Microsoft Windows | A | Core |
...but that would mean restructuring the small template setup. I have concluded that I will probably need to use the messagebox format. How should I do this? Any thoughts? Improvements? Know anyone who would be interested in this project? Again, here's my to-do list again:
Thanks. - Blackjack48 04:31, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Hi all. I would like to revive the old feature request for Wikipedia:Branching support. What do you all think of the idea? Cheers, -- unforg e ttableid | how's my driving? 00:46, 15 December 2006 (UTC)
Anyone interested in fair use templates should probably see the proposed merge at Template_talk:Game-cover#Merge. ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) 19:40, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I have an idea for making IPA symbols more comprehensible, using tooltips. I have made a template {{Ʒ}} that contains [[ʒ as in beige=beɪʒ|ʒ]], and then a redirect at [[ʒ as in beige=beɪʒ]] to the appropriate phonetic page. (Here it is without nowiki: ʒ, and here's a link to edit the template page: {{ Ʒ}}. The discussion of this concept is here: template talk:Ʒ. Without popups, this works wonderfully: someone who doesn't know IPA sees blue text, moves their mouse over the link, then sees the quickie pronunciation help in the tooltip, and if they want to know more, they click and get the appropriate article. The dev version of popups has now been fixed to work with this, but the production version of popups still is not compatible. Again, please do NOT comment here, instead comment at template talk:Ʒ. If and when this starts to get a clearer consensus on whether and how to move forward, I'll be posting this at (policy) and (technical). -- Homunq 16:20, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
I wish to propose Automatic proposal and suggestion of words. That is when you search for say Etymology but misspell it(perhaps you write Etimology), a proposal is made of one or several similar words that actually exists and also a suggestion at the bottom asking if the user wants to start a new article under the searched name. As it is now, you have to go to google to find out, because google often gives you good suggestions. / Minoya 05:34, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
Ok. I realize that edit summaries are supposed to be just that, a summary of the changes you made. I realise that some editors get really annoyed by long edit summaries. I realise that long edit summaries make it harder to peruse the article's history. I know people think long edit summaries clutter up watchlists. I understand the importance of brevity in edit summaries. I know that if it's too long and detailed to fit in the summary box, it's probably best to take it to the talk page anyhow.
However, detailed edit summaries are useful, especially when a page or change is likely to be contentious. Sometimes, if there is a long discussion on the talk page about a change and I go ahead and make it, I feel the need to expound in great detail in my edit summary just in case someone hasn't been following the talk page discussion, or to avoid bringing material to the talk page that would distract from an ongoing discussion. People often ask me to proofread things they've written, and in those instances I feel the need to go into detail about every little spelling or punctuation fix, no matter how minor.
Most of the time if I run out of space in the edit summary window it's only by 2-10 characters. Sometimes I can trim it down or abreviate words, but when I abreviate I worry that people don't know what "ptl rv, dab, link & mv cntnt" means, so I try to avoid abbreviations if possible.
I did a test in the sandbox, and it seems to me that the edit summary allows you 190 characters or so (I may have miscounted). Therefore I would like to propose an increase to 200 characters. It's a nice, even number that's easy to remember. It's only 10 characters more then the current limit and shouldn't clutter up histories and watchlists too bad, but yet will eliminate (for me at least) most instances where I'm trying to trim my edit summary to the point where it is illegible, but have good reasons for not taking it to the talk page.
I'm sure that this is something that should be taken to the developers, but it's also something that needs community consensus. Hence I'm proposing it here rather than bugzilla (not to mention I have no idea how bugzilla works, only that anything involving changes to the software should be proposed there). What do others think of a 10 character increase in the maximum length of edit summaries? ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) 15:21, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
<input tabindex='2' type='text' value="/* Long edit summaries */ " name='wpSummary' id='wpSummary' maxlength='200' size='60' />
I, LightbringerX, herby decree that a new branch of Wikipedia is adue. A Lyric pool in the form of other Wikimedia productions should be considered. I'm thinking 'Wikilyric' sounds pretty good.
how come the content of the "in the news section" is always the same articles ... ?, Thanks, Rod Brown 159.251.88.50 16:23, 8 December 2006 (UTC)
I don't know if this is feasible, but it might help editors on Vandal Patrol if all articles could temporarily be automatically semi-protected when the
WP:WDEFCON reaches two. It would take an admin to invoke that level. This could help cut down on anonymous IPs attacking articles and enabling the VP to catch with article reversals if need be.
Ronbo76
01:23, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Strangely this is not in the list of perennial proposals, although it seems obvious, and I would guess someone suggested it already. The proposal is to limit articles with many associated specialised articles (of interest to fans only). There would be only one article on The Simpsons, Star Trek, Big Brother (TV series), individual computer games, professional wrestling, and so on. All derived articles, on individual episodes, sequels, characters, tournaments/competitions, scores, league tables, competitors, and so on would be moved to an entirely new project. This is both a policy proposal and a new project proposal, and the policy could only be implemented when such a project starts up. Paul111 12:30, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
Wookieepedia is exactly what I had in mind, but for all fan-interest-only articles. Even if they are not visible without looking for them, they are still a distortion of content. Look at the new page creations, and you will see how many articles fall into this category. The best analogy is with recipes: policy excludes them all, ending all disputes on notability. Paul111 11:32, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
POV rears its ugly head. You'll be arguing to kingdom come over many of the articles as to whether or not they're fan-related. -- Dweller 11:55, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
I think there should be a site created for the sue of submiting lyrics for songs! This woule be a great addition to the Wikipedia creators!
I wondered if it would be possible to introduce some whizzy tec that'll make it possible to remove pages from the Watchlist from the main "my watchlist" page, rather than the alpha order full list?
I do RC patrol and consequently my Watchlist rapidly fills, making it more difficult to really watch the pages I want to keep an eye on. I'd find it easier to prune the list using the recency element of "my watchlist" than the alpha list.
Opinions welcomed. -- Dweller 10:05, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
When warning a vandal, you may wish to temporarily "watch" them for further vandalism. Similarly, after reverting vandalism, you may wish to temporarily "watch" the article for further vandalism. You may also wish to "watch" a request for adminship, or a nomination of an article for deletion (such discussions usually last 7 days). Once it's clear that vandalism has stopped, or the discussion has ended, there's no further need to watch the page, and it simply clutters your watchlist.
How about a "temporary watch" feature, which allows you to watch a page for a specified period of time, after which it is removed from your watchlist? -- J.L.W.S. The Special One 14:11, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I wondered if it would be possible to introduce some whizzy tec that'll make it possible to remove pages from the Watchlist from the main "my watchlist" page
How about a "temporary watch" feature, which allows you to watch a page for a specified period of time, after which it is removed from your watchlist?
— Omegatron 14:50, 17 January 2007 (UTC)Perhaps a user could set a "max number of watched items" parameter in his preferences. If he then adds a new watched item that takes him over his limit, the software would drop the oldest watched item from his list.
Following from my posting a few months ago about this subject on the perennial proposals board, As it seems there have been no replies I've come to the conclusion that it may not have been quite as perennial as I had thought. The few responses it's received on the other board have been very positive, and it's apparently already available on Wikipedia Commons. I've posted it here and now to see if it might get a wider response...
...I've been wondering about this for a while now - when a user recieves a new message on his/her talk page, they get that lovely and prominent "you have new messages" banner at the top of each page. Sometimes though, users want some down time away from wikipedia - to be honest I'd be suprised if that statement didn't account for the majority of users.
Given the purpose of talk pages (ie, for the community to get in touch with a user), would it not be to the benefit of both the community and the user if (just like almost every forum out there on the web), each registered user had an option in their preferences to recieve a simple email notification of a new message. Just like every forum out there of course, it would only send a notification for the first message, and not send one again until the user has visited the talk page.
Alternatively, A weekly email could be sent out with a summary of new talk page sections from over the last week, which would be perhaps useful in cases where a user is on an extended leave from wiki. I'm sorry if this has been brought up before, but I haven't seen anything about it. Any thoughts?
Dear ReyBrujo, the Wikimedia Commons page User talk:ReyBrujo has been changed on 21:47, 14 November 2006 by JeremyA, see http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:ReyBrujo for the current version. See http://commons.wikimedia.org/?title=User_talk:ReyBrujo&diff=0&oldid=2978670 for all changes since your last visit. Editor's summary: Re: Album Covers Contact the editor: mail: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Emailuser/JeremyA wiki: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:JeremyA There will be no other notifications in case of further changes unless you visit this page. You could also reset the notification flags for all your watched pages on your watchlist. Your friendly Wikimedia Commons notification system
Being notified of changes to articles on your watchlist and changes to your talk page are two different things. The server load would be much smaller if it only notified you of changes to your talk page. I would really like to see this enabled for talk pages only. — Omegatron 15:08, 17 January 2007 (UTC)
I would like to suggest that, if possible, a "printer-friendly" version of Wikipedia articles be made available. As the web pages are constructed now, it is a very tedious process to copy and paste the rich information that is provided on any given subject.
James Gabe Oklahoma City January 18, 2007 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jamesgabe ( talk • contribs) 18:07, 18 January 2007 (UTC).
Hi, I'm a fan of both Google and Wikipedia and I use the wikipedia widget for my google homepage. Since google homepage doesn't allow to have more then one instance of the same widget, I'd gladly see a new version of the wiki widget allowing to me to have more then one query field for different languages. I use both it.wikipedia and en.wikipedia for different searches and I'd be very happy to have both query fields in the same homepage. Now, there is only the option to select a language. I'd be happy with one "add one more language" option, that allow to me to chose one more language for another query field. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.208.83.231 ( talk) 14:35, 18 January 2007 (UTC).
A fantastic feature would be a tool bar that would enable me to highlight an article (not for public display and not for editing purposes) but for display in the articles that I view within my own account when I have logged in.
Then when I am reading about something, I wouldn't feel I have to print the article and then highlight it, but just mouse highlight things. Then it would be great to save this highlighting to show up only in my account.
This suggestion outlines the only drawback to online learning as opposed to paper (and therefore mark-up-able) learning--wikipedia would be a pioneer!
What do you think?
I have a suggestion: to take all pages in the Wikipedia namespace (policies, essays, guidelines, etc.) and enclose them in the <noinclude> tag. What this will do is prevent transclusion or substitution of pages like WP:MOS, which in nearly no circumstances would require transclusion ({{Wikipedia:Manual of Style}} or substitution ({{subst:Wikipedia:Manual of Style}}) While this need not occur on short essays, or on Wikipedia pages that are meant to behave like templates, it seems good to me, and it will prevent abuse that could cause inconvenience for the page viewer and possibly Wikimedian servers. (Yes, there is WP:PERF for good faith editors, but purposely trying to slow down servers is different.)
Suppose that I write an essay and call it Wikipedia:Drunk driving, and the content is
...and suppose that the essay is (somehow) a couple of kilobytes long. There is no reason to transclude or substitute that (just link to it), so make the page content:
Or even better,
This seems like a good idea due to recent vandalism to User talk:68.39.174.238, which was met with this course of action, which I suggested to Tuxide on IRC. (The user that did this may need checkuser, but that's my passive opinion.) Doing this for all pages in the Wikipedia namespace (except for, as listed above, pages meant to behave like templates, and maybe short essays) can't hurt; and if it can, please tell me why. Thanks. Gracenotes T § 04:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
P.S. This could be extended to user pages.
Several come to
mind.
04:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
P.P.S. Hm, how about
User:Tuxide/Sandbox/Do not subst my user talk page? :p 04:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
I decided to stuff some WP:BEANS up my nose. check my userpage. Night Gyr ( talk/ Oy) 06:39, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
This won't solve anything. Vandals will just find some way to vandalize wikipedia, including using subst to copy everything over as someone did to my talk page recently. Besides, we don't need to change thousands of pages just because of one instance of vandalism. That would just give the vandal a lot of attention, which we shouldn't be doing. Koweja 13:43, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
A lot of people complain that AfD is in some way "broken". Others disagree but acknowledge serious flaws. One common problem is bad articles on good subjects; people often !vote "keep and clean up", which often results in the article being kept but not cleaned up. So I have an idea:
I believe this will reduce the chances of crap articles on good subjects being deleted by those whose mission is to improve the quality of the encyclopaedia. And crap articles which are not remedied will be deleted, which is also good for the encyclopaedia. Finally, closing admins will have a middle ground between keep and delete in marginal cases, giving those who advocate keep a deadline to remedy the faults identified by others. Guy ( Help!) 12:16, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
What if we trial the idea? It doesn't nessecarily have to seriously affect XfD for the moment. Instead, if it works, it could be an organic process of change. All we would have to do is set up WikiProject Quality Control (ok, I know control may not be the best word, but that's what you get at the end of a factory line where quality of a "product" is checked.) or WikiProject Quality Assurance. I have no doubt that a fair number of people would join such a project, and it's sole aims would be twofold - Admins closing XfD's that have an indication that a cleanup is needed could a link to the article/AfD discussion on an "XfD cleanup list" at his/her discretion, and members of the project could add articles to a seperate "cleanup list" if something was felt to need real attention from the project (or some such. the latter is just an idea). The concentration of course would be on the XfD list.
As I say - it wouldn't need to be fully integrated into the XfD process. In fact, to start with it would be better not being integrated to start with and just having a closing admin doing it on a discretionary basis as part of a trial. It wouldn't need to be every XfD article that would apply - just a few would see if it works well or not to start with...
...Just an idea. Crimsone 18:56, 18 January 2007 (UTC)
Whether this is a good idea or not seems to boil down to whether people think we should keep articles we will want in the long run, or delete them until they are of sufficient quality. Provided it passes notability and WP:NOT then we can have an article on it. But should we remove that article until it meets the other content policies, or leave it in a poorly-written state. I would be inclined towards the latter; I don't think deletion should be a reflection on the current state of the article, merely whether one could be written (I'm an eventualist, not an immediatist). Trebor 19:01, 18 January 2007 (UTC)