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I'm concerned especially about the short (one to five sentence) articles which describe chemicals, minerals, and the like. An exapmle is MDP2P. Articles like this are marked as stubs and often appear on the list of articles to be reviewed for deletion. I think that these articles should either
1) be protected from stub status;
2) be compiled into one article that describes each item.
The reason for this is that while the articles are short like a stub, and do not give extensive information, they usually give all the information that is available. So, articles such as these should have some kind of special 'acceptable short article' status. Either that, or there should be a Chemicals page (sort of like the list of chemical articles that exists now), a Minerals page, and so on.
This wasn't in the FAQ, so I'm bringing it up. Thanks. OES23 17:57, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Just to clear things up, I didn't mean this article in particular was nominated for deletion, but I was providing an example of the type of articles that are frequently nominated. OES23 13:53, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
The newly written proposal/essay/how-to/whatever Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language and its talk page essentially state that singular they is common practice on Wikipedia, apparently with the intent of promoting this as a good idea, and likewise state that this practice is frequently disputed. Outside opinion is requested on (1) how "common" this practice is, (2) how "frequently" the dispute is, and (3) whether people consider it a good idea. >Radiant< 14:13, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
There are ways to use non-sexist language without violating plurality, such as using the word "s/he". ACEOREVIVED 19:10, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
I've felt that we need a more organized system of managing articles for some time, but I'm getting tired of seeing an important article get trashed by a vandal, have the vandalism go by improperly fixed by a novice, and the article as a result deteriorate over time, with nobody being aware that anything has happened. We need a more organized system of article watching and regular review, though we just don't have the manpower to do it. Beginning with watchlists would be a start though. We need to be able to look at an article and know if it is being watched. If one watches an article for a while or spends some time going through the history section, one can probably figure out who seems to keep an eye on it. But this isn't good enough - an experienced editor should be able to obtain this information immediately and with certainty. If I find an article is being messed around with and nobody is repairing the damage, I want to know if there is somebody watching it or not. If not, somebody needs to; an appropriate Wikiproject could be contacted for example. If there is, they need to get their act together and do a better job of keeping it in good condition. If they can't do it alone, more watchers need to be recruited. We have the 'maintained' tag, but that has always tended to suggest the 'maintainer' is a scholar in that field. Ideally, we would have an expert on each subject watching that article, but anybody would be better than nothing.
Let me give an example from my experiences today. I visit the article animal, one of the most important in biology. I see it is somehow smaller than before. Something has happened. I go to the page history, replete with thousands of edits, and try to find what happened. Eventually I reach something almost two weeks ago that seems to be the problem: a vandal deleted sections, and a relatively new editor tried to fix it but missed some of the deletions [1]. If somebody was watching this article they would never not notice something that major. Yet it still happened, and nobody seems to be any wiser. The reality is that someone probably is watching this article and has let it slip by. But I have no way to be sure someone is watching it. And if there is, I can't exactly complain to them can I?
We need to put in place a system where people can see who is watching an article. If people don't wish others to know that information, perhaps they could opt out via preferences (though it is no more of a privacy issue than being able to look through their contributions really). Alternatively, people could add their name to the talk page or somewhere else as a 'watcher', or via some indirect means, e.g. adding a template that links to articles they watch on their user page and being able to find these (e.g. via 'what links here') from the page itself. Another option is letting people select articles from their watchlist that they publicly proclaim to be watching and thereby take responsibility for their maintenance and care. They could appear in bold on the list, for example.
One problem is that vandals can find unwatched articles, but most vandals are unlikely to even know about the watchlist system, let alone how to access that information, and I believe the benefits would outweigh the costs anyway. If it was a concern, don't let anons or even newly registered users see the information. Another is that users may no longer be active but still have things on their watchlist, or they may not go through their watchlist carefully. A way of excluding those who are currently inactive would help with the first issue. On the other hand, if they had to explicitly opt in as a watcher, there would be few people doing so at first, and they may feel reluctant to take on that responsibility. There will also be those that whine about 'ownership', even if the job of the so called 'owner' is nothing more than cleaning up graffiti. But we need to be more responsible for our encyclopedia. Someone coming here should have someone they can complain to if an article is not being looked after. There should be someone there who will get the vandalism that slips through recent changes. It's a very big task to embark on but we need to start working towards it. We need to work out how to put this in place and then get people involved. Hopefully in future we will be able to say that every article on Wikipedia has someone out there looking after it, and those that receive a lot of traffic will have a dozen such people - perhaps even someone watching 24/7, or near to it. We could even start a WikiProject - perhaps "Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality control", to implement and coordinate such an effort. Is anybody with me on this, or do we just want to hope that a disorganized system will catch all the problems by itself? Richard001 02:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Placing a template "This uses watches this page for vandalism" would be too trivial a thing for most purposes to place on a talk page, and it would require a lot of work for a person to manage them. If unwatched pages were a problem for vandals, we could solve the problem easily by only letting trusted users see the information, however we have no way of knowing telling apart trustworthy users from those who are not in an automated fashion. Even so, blocking users who have not been around X days and/or made X edits would almost certainly filter out any mischief. The administrators tool sounds useless, though it points out there are far too many articles not being watched, based on your description. People shouldn't have to become admins just to see such information though.
Having a public watchlist that is systematically gone through by people may be a functionally similar alternative or compliment. I'll think more on that possibility. Richard001 05:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Here's another case [2]: A driveby anon fiddling with a low profile chemistry article that I just happened to be watching. With an organized system of watching we could cover all the low profile pages systematically, avoiding this sort of crap. Richard001 00:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm advertising this page here as well because fewer people seem to read Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous). A.Z. 22:49, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
I am trying to connect with individuals in the wikipedia community who are interested in working on an open source programming project to create a visualized interface to map wikipedia. I have started to draft a proposal in my Sandbox, but am not sure where the most appropriate location is to post such a proposal or connect with interested people. Does anyone have suggestions, feedback, comments? Thanks! SlvrDreams 20:20, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Linking to off-wiki harassment is proposed at the suggestion of the arbitration committee. Please have a look. ← BenB4 06:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I think we need to require usernames for people to edit. 99% of the vandalism I see come from anon users.
Because its so easy to edit wikipedia (just click an article and click "edit") these vandalizers don't need to put much effort messing up pages.
The idea of a "everyone can edit" is ideal, but it doesn't work when we have vandals.
A required username will force vandals to make a username and takes a longer time for them to damage wikipedia. Requiring usernames will also curb vandals since they don't want to go in the trouble of making one. Good friend100 02:00, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
While about 97% of vandalism comes from anonymous users, about 76% or 82% of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, because if they have to, those inclined to vandalism are likely to take the 10 seconds to register.)
So we have a few different placeholder images that appear in articles that don't yet have portraits. (Of course a few people think that we shouldn't have them in articles at all. Maybe they don't want the general public to contribute their images? Or they're ashamed of the fact that it's a wiki? But that's beside the point...)
I've thought that the current images were an eyesore for quite a while, looking as if it were thrown together without much thought, and there've been a bunch of complaints on related talk pages, so I tried to make a better version that others could continue improving on. But it's apparently not liked, either, and was instantly reverted. :-)
I changed:
Compare the originals:
With mine:
Please provide opinions and alternative ideas. Keep in mind that they are used a few different ways; infoboxes, thumbnail frames, bare images, etc. — Omegatron 08:09, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Joe Blow | |
---|---|
Born | 2007-08-26 Wikimedia Commons |
Occupation | Placeholder |
Known for | Blue background |
Jay Gray | |
---|---|
Born | 2007-08-27 Wikimedia Commons |
Occupation | Placeholder |
Known for | Gray background, lighter silhouette, bold top text, -"one", no gaps at shoulders, head centered a bit |
The building image should be simpler and something that can similarly contain the text "No free image".
The thing I hated most about the current ones was the wording, and the lack of a comma in the female and neutral ones.
I also really don't like the use of "one" stylistically.
I agree that the use of "one" is not stylistically ideal
how far do we go in directly soliciting help from the general public? If we don't do it in text
So keeping "No free image" big and bold would be good (though without the serif/sans difference).
and would approve a switch to a version of the images with the same color scheme as before but with those improvements.
See Template:Infobox Album/No cover for a similar setup. — Omegatron 15:04, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
The new ones are better. I think we still need work on this though. Some members of WikiProject Cricket are less than pleased with me for putting those images on the cricket articles ... less hideous ones would be a REALLY GOOD IDEA - David Gerard 15:18, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, an improvement. Most importantly for me, the wording is a lot better. The idea that you can "own" photographs, or the entire paradigm of intellectual "property", is a point of view that not everyone agrees with. — Matt Crypto 19:01, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
I asked for help on
Wikipedia:Graphic_Lab/Images_to_improve#Placeholder_images, but no one seems to have noticed. If no one comments in a few days, we should just go with the blue or gray ones, and they can continue to be improved from there (like using a different building as the background). —
Omegatron 23:22, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
There is no appropriate
free image available. If you own copyright to an appropriate image, please consider contributing. |
I had a go at making an image like Image:Nocover-upload.png in the style of Image:No male portrait.svg for a 'there is no CD picture' thing. I'd like to know what people think, and if anybody still cares about these placeholder images.
Here's what it would look like in an article.
If you don't mind, can you direct all feedback to Wikipedia:Graphic_Lab/Images_to_improve#Placeholder_suggestion_for_CD. Changing the wording is probably the most important thing that needs doing. -- Dave the Rave (DTR) talk 16:16, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
"Village pump (proposals)/Archive AQ" | |
---|---|
Song | |
B-side | "Foo, Bar... and Baz" |
Would it be possible to have a Wikipedia newsletter delivered to users talk pages (perhaps with a bot or something)?-- Avant Guard 17:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi. I think it would be great if we could pick a contributor, then pick a diff of theirs, click on a button called "newer", and go their newer diff, then click on "newer" again, and go to the next newer diff, the same way we do with diffs on the same article or talk page. Would this be too hard to implement? Are there reasons not to do it? A.Z. 02:00, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Although this seems like a very stupid question, Should Wikipedia be using BCE and CE instead of BC and AD for Epochs and Eras? BurnMuffin Word, bro. 17:45, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
This follows from the merger thread three up: Wikipedia:General review. Radical streamlining. Marskell 09:52, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
I dunno if this is the right place to come but i think wikipedia needs an article on the causes of anti-semitism, because people know that jew-hatred exists and is one of the most prominent persecutionsin the world, but people don't seem to know anything about why jews are so hated, and what provoked the holocaust. Any thought? -- Andrew Hadland 2007 22:46, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I am making this as a very tentative suggestion. On the "Discussion" pages of articles on radio and television programmes, one frequently finds comments where Wikipedia readers seem more keen to give their views onthe programme, than to discuss the article's accuracy, comprehensiveness and style or structure. To prevent this, should we have, each month, a survey where Wikipedia readers can voice their favourite and least favourite television/ radio programmes? We would not even need to use Wiki software to analyse the data. ACEOREVIVED 19:20, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Adding a checksum feature would make it easier to see which revisions are the same version (to identify reverts, etc) — Random832 16:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
Up at the top of *this* page it says to make software suggestions to Bugzilla. Well I tried and tried but I cannot figure Bugzilla out to save my life. It seems to only be looking for Bugs that one has already encountered. I finally found something resembling a “suggestion box” but when I tried to send it it would say,
"To file this bug, you must first choose a component. If necessary, just guess."
Now as a non-programming type person, I have no idea what a “component” is, which makes it hard to guess. I guessed "Suggestion" but that didn't work, neither did leaving it blank. Or "Help". Then I tried “1.11” - I didn't know what that meant either but I saw it on the page so maybe it meant something...and words weren’t working so I thought maybe it was a numbers thing. To no avail.
This is really bad design. Wiki should not assume that people who contribute and have ideas, questions, and suggestions are programmers. I am pretty pissed that I wasted so much time trying to get the stupid thing to work. I even read all the FAQ stuff, which didn’t help either.
Bad design! Saudade7 13:29, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
WP:INSPECTOR (currently at User:PHDrillSergeant/house). This is an essay that I wrote today, based of a recent discussion of mine and a stroke of writer's fingers. I am wondering what you think of this, and ways that I can make this better. I doubt this will ever pass into guideline status, but as an essay I think it's great to go alongside WP:STUB. ~ PH DrillSergeant... § 03:56, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
A modest proposal. I post here as neutral ground; on GA talkpages people are naturally sympathetic to GA, while on FA people are often hostile. First, PR is perenially backlogged—plenty of noms, insufficient feedback. Second, there are systemic problems with GA that are brought up fairly regularly. The Wikipedia:Good article review notes rather melodramatically "This is not a Peer Review Process;". I hope that's not a shibboleth of the people involved in the process. I won't get into mechanics yet—there are various ways it might happen. I'd just like to see a show of hands if the idea might be further considered and then a workshop page can be started. Advantages:
As I say, the mechanics can wait. General feedback welcome. Marskell 13:28, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
In general, I like it; it could help address the backlog at peer review and some of the GA problems at the same time. However, currently peer review serves more than FA/GA needs, so I have two questions. How would a merged process handle
I would be against such an idea. Peer review must surely remain a completely optional and collaborative process, with no stick or carrot involved. It doesn't matter much that the peer review page is backlogged because most of us know that the way to get peer reviews is to ask someone we know, who we think will make useful suggestions; Wikipedia will always lack reviewers in whatever forum. It is rarely that one receives a peer review there out of the blue, though I think it is worth posting requests there, in case Wikipedia appears the work of cliques of friends.
I don't think GAC is equivalent to peer review, because it is institutionally jugemental, like FAC. GA is not a clear process, and we all have different views of it. For me, it is for articles with a smaller range, ones that are perhaps less comprehensive in sourcing. This last point doesn't mean that the sourcing is necessarily inferior: with some topics one learns very little more by turning to more and more sources. qp10qp 14:44, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I always thought the way to "fix" Peer Review would be to add a note formally encouraging submitters to also be reviewers. People submitting articles for Peer Review could encourage reviews for their article by reviewing another article already there, something like - "Here is my detailed review of your article. If you liked my suggestions, can you similarly review my article here?". Since there is no carrot of "passed peer review" there won't be any incentive to "pass" the other article, just to get detailed comments and opinions. -- AnonEMouse (squeak) 17:04, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I think one of the main reasons why GA & FA are so successful, and PR is not, in terms of numbers of reviewers, is that GA & FA are both connected to specific criteria and reviewers effectively "grade" an article based on that criteria. PR seems to be just a review, and reviewers aren't grading an article based on specific criteria; instead, they're just offering tips on how to improve the article based on very loose manual of style guidelines. GA & FA ask reviewers to effectively assign a grade (GA status or FA status), based on this criteria. If PR was more closely associated to the rating scale (stub, start, B, A), perhaps it would be more successful and attract reviewers. The difficulty here is that every single wikiproject is going to want to come up with their own criteria, which could be confusing to someone that reviews an article at the main PR page without being familiar with the specific wikiproject criteria. Dr. Cash 00:53, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
Comment May not be that relevant, but can I just say that I very much enjoy Peer Review, and see its value as quite different to FA/GA. In a peer review you can just go through all the things that occur to you that would improve an article, without worrying whether you've nailed all the problems. At FA/GA I feel I must go through all criteria, before I can give a pass/fail decision. This is why I very rarely vote at FA, and very rarely pass at GA. :) A lot of GA, and even FA, reviews don't make the kind of systematic assessment that perhaps they should. 4u1e 00:24, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Comment There are a lot of assessment and evaluation pages and methods around; GA, FA and PR, of course, but also the League of Copyeditors, and the A and B ratings from the WikiProjects, and the Stub and Start ratings. The current system is not producing top-quality encyclopedia articles as fast as we would like it to, and it can't scale well. There are other problems: for example, a commonly cited one is that it is not easy to find competent reviewers to assess the content of some of the more esoteric articles. These are not problems with any of the methods or pages; they're general problems.
I think it might be productive to establish a workshop page and request participation from all of the above groups, without any assertion that any of them are either the problem or the answer. Perhaps that workshop could address things in this order:
At that point there might be enough consensus on some of these issues to be able to go back to the list of existing resources and make concrete suggestions about how to make them all work better. Getting a group together that draws on the good and bad experience of each of these content-quality mechanisms might lead to some synthesis that would have incremental suggested improvements. Working on defining goals before solutions seems to me to have the best chance of succeeding. Mike Christie (talk) 01:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Erm, I think I'm at the right place to make a proposal. I was thinking that although wikipedia may not be censored, I believe we should have a template that warns users that "this article may contain content that some users may find inappropriate for younger readers." Or something along those lines —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hadseys ( talk • contribs) 19:11, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Not that Britannica is our standard... OES23 21:57, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I know that wikipedia is not censored, but I also know that some images out there may be disturbing to some viewers; I have previously had trouble with this myself. I can instruct my broswer to disable images, but not everyone can do that. I have worked out a compromise: perhaps we should institute a system in which potentially disturbing images (most likley human anatomy, usually injuries etc) should be hidden and replaced with a link saying "this image may be disturbing to some viewers" or something similar, with the option to display the image placed underneath this warning. I think this would be very useful for more squeamish viewers; admittedly it probably be annoying to put this in for all existing distrubing images, but I think worth considering. 211.30.132.2 11:01, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Since we have Wikipedia, WikiQuote, WikiNews, etc., why not run a parallel site called Wiki Trivia, and you can finally take all those intersting little factoids and Simpsons quotes that are littering otherwise encyclopedic articles, and find a home for them? 139.48.81.98 17:22, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
I wanted to suggest making a summary chart with the presidential candidates and their positions on different issues for the US presidential elections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.224.208.53 ( talk) 15:22, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Dear Folks, > How about adding a web link to your opening article pages that would link the > encyclopedia web page with the corresponding Wiki travel page? I like reading > your articles but it is awkward to then go to the travel web site page. Thanks > and keep up the good job! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flfruitcake ( talk • contribs) 14:18, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
I have a dynamic IP that regularly cycles through a series of IP addresses owned by my ISP, a lot of which have been exposed to wikipedia. As a result I'm regularly getting messages directed at prior users as early as 2004/2005. In one case I got banned because an admin assumed bad faith due to templates left for another editor (I removed an unsourced trivia section, and then found out the talk page for the IP I was using had received the full set of warnings the month before). As a result, there are several problems I can see with retaining messages on an IP talk page:
Hence I propose that the user/talk pages of anonymous IP addresses get deleted after a period of inactivity on behalf of that IP address (say 1 week or 1 month). That way we avoid sending messages to the wrong person and prevent a clutter of temporary pages that we don't need.
(sorry if there is a technical reason why this cannot be done. I'm under the assumption that the dates from special:contributions can be easily extracted, if this is not possible then maybe the time since the last edit on the IP's talk page should be the determining factor. I'm envisioning a semiautomated bot which can only access IP talk pages, with an admin checking that each one is valid)
124.184.171.224 13:03, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
(UTC)
In reference to a thread at ANI, [12], where a vandal recreated an old account that had been renamed. Don't want to create too much, well, bureaucracy for the bureaucrats, still want to leave the option open for new users to take the username. So how about when accounts are renamed, the old account name is automatically recreated by the bureaucrat potentially with some sort of template notice saying that to acquire the account name requires usurpation or something? Is it possible to balance this out with the standard redirects to the new userpages? Basically, let's add an extra step to obtain a username that has been in use. ~ Eliz 81 (C) 17:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't the lists of MMOGs ("List of MMOGs" and "List of free MMOGs") have another section on the page for each game? "contact info required?" This would tell whether or not you must give out contact information (phone number and/or email, and/or mailing address) in order to create/run a file/account on these games. Zantaggerung 01:45, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I've felt that we need a more organized system of managing articles for some time, but I'm getting tired of seeing an important article get trashed by a vandal, have the vandalism go by improperly fixed by a novice, and the article as a result deteriorate over time, with nobody being aware that anything has happened. We need a more organized system of article watching and regular review, though we just don't have the manpower to do it. Beginning with watchlists would be a start though. We need to be able to look at an article and know if it is being watched. If one watches an article for a while or spends some time going through the history section, one can probably figure out who seems to keep an eye on it. But this isn't good enough - an experienced editor should be able to obtain this information immediately and with certainty. If I find an article is being messed around with and nobody is repairing the damage, I want to know if there is somebody watching it or not. If not, somebody needs to; an appropriate Wikiproject could be contacted for example. If there is, they need to get their act together and do a better job of keeping it in good condition. If they can't do it alone, more watchers need to be recruited. We have the 'maintained' tag, but that has always tended to suggest the 'maintainer' is a scholar in that field. Ideally, we would have an expert on each subject watching that article, but anybody would be better than nothing.
Let me give an example from my experiences today. I visit the article animal, one of the most important in biology. I see it is somehow smaller than before. Something has happened. I go to the page history, replete with thousands of edits, and try to find what happened. Eventually I reach something almost two weeks ago that seems to be the problem: a vandal deleted sections, and a relatively new editor tried to fix it but missed some of the deletions [13]. If somebody was watching this article they would never not notice something that major. Yet it still happened, and nobody seems to be any wiser. The reality is that someone probably is watching this article and has let it slip by. But I have no way to be sure someone is watching it. And if there is, I can't exactly complain to them can I?
We need to put in place a system where people can see who is watching an article. If people don't wish others to know that information, perhaps they could opt out via preferences (though it is no more of a privacy issue than being able to look through their contributions really). Alternatively, people could add their name to the talk page or somewhere else as a 'watcher', or via some indirect means, e.g. adding a template that links to articles they watch on their user page and being able to find these (e.g. via 'what links here') from the page itself. Another option is letting people select articles from their watchlist that they publicly proclaim to be watching and thereby take responsibility for their maintenance and care. They could appear in bold on the list, for example.
One problem is that vandals can find unwatched articles, but most vandals are unlikely to even know about the watchlist system, let alone how to access that information, and I believe the benefits would outweigh the costs anyway. If it was a concern, don't let anons or even newly registered users see the information. Another is that users may no longer be active but still have things on their watchlist, or they may not go through their watchlist carefully. A way of excluding those who are currently inactive would help with the first issue. On the other hand, if they had to explicitly opt in as a watcher, there would be few people doing so at first, and they may feel reluctant to take on that responsibility. There will also be those that whine about 'ownership', even if the job of the so called 'owner' is nothing more than cleaning up graffiti. But we need to be more responsible for our encyclopedia. Someone coming here should have someone they can complain to if an article is not being looked after. There should be someone there who will get the vandalism that slips through recent changes. It's a very big task to embark on but we need to start working towards it. We need to work out how to put this in place and then get people involved. Hopefully in future we will be able to say that every article on Wikipedia has someone out there looking after it, and those that receive a lot of traffic will have a dozen such people - perhaps even someone watching 24/7, or near to it. We could even start a WikiProject - perhaps "Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality control", to implement and coordinate such an effort. Is anybody with me on this, or do we just want to hope that a disorganized system will catch all the problems by itself? Richard001 02:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Placing a template "This uses watches this page for vandalism" would be too trivial a thing for most purposes to place on a talk page, and it would require a lot of work for a person to manage them. If unwatched pages were a problem for vandals, we could solve the problem easily by only letting trusted users see the information, however we have no way of knowing telling apart trustworthy users from those who are not in an automated fashion. Even so, blocking users who have not been around X days and/or made X edits would almost certainly filter out any mischief. The administrators tool sounds useless, though it points out there are far too many articles not being watched, based on your description. People shouldn't have to become admins just to see such information though.
Having a public watchlist that is systematically gone through by people may be a functionally similar alternative or compliment. I'll think more on that possibility. Richard001 05:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Here's another case [14]: A driveby anon fiddling with a low profile chemistry article that I just happened to be watching. With an organized system of watching we could cover all the low profile pages systematically, avoiding this sort of crap. Richard001 00:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
There is a Graphviz extension to MediaWiki. Why don't you use it on Wikipedia? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz It would be awesome, and very useful for quickly making and collaborating on diagrams and graphs for articles. -- Frap 02:12, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
There's an important discussion going on at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. a.z. 01:05, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
After some of the discussion on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship, I've decided to try my hand at creating another desysopping proposal. Please read it over (a read of the RFC might help too) and discuss it on the talk page. Mr. Z-man 01:14, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
I propose an easy checkbox to turn off signature bots, and a template that makes it easier to sign for someone who forgot to sign.-- Filll 22:25, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I just stumbled upon Wikipedia:POV check. Seems like a semi-forgotten essay, but it has some templates and other pages (ex. Wikipedia:NPOV dispute) associated with it. How about we transform it into a noticeboard, where cases could be discussed on a one-by-one basis, as Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard and other noticeboards work so well?-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 23:54, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
This is a pretty minor suggestion in the grand scheme of things, but I was wondering: On category pages, there are plus signs (+) next to each category so you can expand the tree to see a category's sub-categories. Those plus signs also appear next to categories that don't have any sub-categories, and if you click that plus sign, you just get a message that says "no subcategories". This is kind of annoying to me. Could we possibly eliminate the plus sign next to categories that don't have any sub-categories, so that we can see at glance which categories are expandable and which aren't, without having to click on each one?
I know it's not very realistic, but Google for example will take this challenge on at some point, and you're supposed to be their match. So, what I am suggesting is taking the translator ten steps ahead - making it able to translate any sentence from any language to any language. It'll take AI experts and linguists, and a few trillion contributions from surfers who know 2 languages well(it would be trillions of trillions if not for deduction and induction software created by the AI and lingu experts), but what you'll get will be an almost perfect translator, allowing for example the immediate translation of any wiki article to all existing languages. -- 199.203.54.236 15:48, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
I think the illustration for this article is unnecessary and probably break some law of United States. What does mean the community? This can be located in a encyclopaedia like ours? ServusDei 21:11, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
I've removed the image. It's almost certainly illegal per 18USC2257. Quite apart from any issues of censorship, I don't think the Wikimedia foundation wants us to be committing felonies here. If there's an admin around, that image should be deleted and we should probably contact Paul Godwin to get a reading on how to deal with sexually explicit imagery around here. Wikidemo 20:47, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a ridiculous discussion. The intercourse article doesn't have a close-up photo of penetration, or any photo of humans having sex, for that matter; and it never would. Even if you want to make the argument that the photo doesn't depict actual contact between the partners, the intercourse article doesn't even contain a close-up photo of a penis approaching a vagina, and similarly, never would, because such a thing is pornographic and totally inappropriate for an encyclopedia. The same goes for fellatio, cunnilingus, oral sex, and countless other articles describing sex acts. They all contain drawings and textual descriptions of the act, which are enough. A close-up explicit photographic depiction is completely unnecessary and adds nothing to one's understanding of the subject. I challenge anyone to find an encyclopedia that does contain such material.
←Why would a drawing be preferable?
(ec)We aren't censored for you or for anyone else. There are subjects on here that you may find distastefu;l, but as long as ythey are presented in a neutrally worded and factually accurate manner then they should remain. The same goes for an image that illustrates a concept, we do not remove images because they offend your sensibilities - you don't like them, stay away from sexually orientated pages. Viridae Talk 04:11, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
So anyone has actually sent Mike Godwin an email yet? Could be there a chance that our former attorney, Brad Patrick, dealt with this issue before? User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 04:10, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
(←) Well, considering the topic, another related issue has been brought up at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Requiring reliable sources in media. It's regarding the video of an ejaculating penis in the Ejaculation article. Lara ❤ Love 04:59, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
As an outsider, the following comment. Some people argued that the image was "unencyclopedic" and "you would never see this image in an encyclopedia". That is simply not true (at least not outside the US). If a publisher was to release an "encyclopedia on sexacts" then there might be a reasonable chance that such an image would be included. Hell, there are countless Kama Sutra publications that contain photo's of all the sexual positions. To say that the photo is unencylopedic in the context of the article is simply rubbish. At most we are violating a US law. No more, no less. -- TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 12:03, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
As a man, wich tongue presents on this foto, I want to explain something.
We just wanted to illustrate article, nothing more. We don't have a plan to change Wikipedia to a pornographic resource. The low of the USA and Florida is unknown for us, so in many cases we guided by rules of Wikipedia and our intuition. On Commons we founded some fotos, that can be classified as pornographic in Russia. So, we decided, that foto of anilingus has no differences from (for example)
this or
this, and maded foto for article.
If our foto break some law of United States, it must be deleted from Wikipedia. But can somebody to make me know, there we can find text of the low, which prohibits foto of the anilingus in Wikipedia and allow foto of masturbation (or video of ejaculation)? (sorry for my English)--
FearChild 17:10, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
So the issues are:
What I think
Legally I see that having any nudity pictures in Wikipedia would be extremely difficult if we follow US law to the letter. However if someone volunteers, I'm sure Mike Godwin could set it up if desired as long as we are talking about just a few pictures by just a few people. In the end, I think that is something we should strive towards, though I doubt that with the current load on the Foundation it will happen any time soon.
If only America wasn't so Anal about nudity. Pun intended :D Unfortunately all we can really do here is wait for the Foundation, as stated before :( They are the legal entity that is affected here. -- TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 19:40, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
I was thinking we could convert the vandal warnings to the ambox style. I think it might make the warnings easy to see and know the level of the warning. Thanks! jonathan ( talk — contribs) 21:21, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
The Special:Random feature is an good one, but with 2+ million articles on Wikipedia, it becomes "too random". I would like a "take me to a random article" feature, that is narrower. So that I can find a random article in a topic of interest for me. So, that for example, I can easily find a random article on computers and science, and someone else can find a random article on animals, plants and nature, and someone else can find random articles on body, biology, medicine, etc. -- Frap 17:33, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
I asked once before if Wikipedia could provide links to the revisions of articles that passed the nom to become featured, and the response I got was that Wikipedia provides links to the revisions of the articles the day that they are featured on the main page. But all this provides a link to the initial paragraph [18]. I think that it's very important that Wikipedia provide links to the entire featured revisions of articles, not just the first paragraphs, because the quality of an article can deteriorate over time and articles can eventually lose their featured status. If this link is provided, a person will always have access to featured quality material, and being able to compare the current revision of the article to the earlier featured revision can aid in maintaining the article's quality and seeing if it still deserves it's featured status.-- Avant Guard 16:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
The sentence in the text about Prophet Muhammad, the sentence which regards to Quran says that there is no big difference between the Quran early in the history and the one publishing nowadays. It's wrong. It must be "there isn't any difference". Because Muslims believe Quran is the word of God, the word which can not be changed. If it can be changed then there would be no difference between Torah, Bible and Quran. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.114.107.227 ( talk) 21:26, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Would it be possible for users to protect their own userpages from editing by other users except admins?-- Avant Guard 16:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Following my previous suggestion here, I really think that a collapsable template for references and footnotes would be a good idea. Skimming over the article for Golden plates, and we can see that more than half of the article is references and footnotes. It makes the article look longer than it really is, and can be a pain in the butt when it comes to scrolling. Maybe we could device a way to put the refs and notes into a template and make use of the "hide/show" function. Or like I previously suggested, putting refs and notes in a separate page, and that page will be accessable alongside the top between "article" and "discussion". Oidia ( talk) 12:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
I accessed this entry on 8 October 2007 at 0026 ET (US). According to the quick information under his picture, it says he was a US President from 1945 until 2002. Just letting you know that the dates do not coincide with those stated in the article itself. Thank you for your time and sorry for the inconvenience.
Jamie Indiana —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.51.104.178 ( talk) 04:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Right now, there seems to be no place to find summaries of all the Wikipedia namespace pages, policies, and processes. What do you think about a Technical Directory, summarizing all things back-end? Here is a sample entry for quickpoll:
I know this isn't perfect, but the TD will be editable like everything else. It would be a great source to learn about things like BJAODN. So, once again, what do you think? ¿SFGiДnts! ¿Complain! ¿Analyze! ¿Review! 03:28, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Recently I began noticing various boxes and icons appearing on the "this needs attention" templates. But the icons and boxes stand out even more than the text. Before, you could skip them easily. Now they demand attention. It makes the whole encyclopedia look like a draft version with scribbles all over it, whereas to all but the pedantic wikipedian, it is a complete product, if still evolving. They get in the way of reading the text. The "this needs attention" box should be almost unnoticable. They are essentially footnotes. Categories and other systems make sure that they won't get completely missed. It's a rare page which hasn't been vandalised by one or more of these bossy templates. Where was the decision for big glossy templates with icons made and how can I precipitate its reversal? Quirkie 20:40, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
AFAIK, most of the templates already had the icons (unless people have been going to the "next step" and making icons, I stopped visiting WT:AMB a while ago). The nice thing about the new design is that you can easily hide the icons if you don't like them. Anomie 02:34, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
I really like the new template formats. They are much more dignified and professional looking than the old ones. The first one you see may be a little more eye-catching than before, but once you get used to them, their standardization and regularity makes them a lot less conspicuous than the older versions. If we wanted to downgrade them we could play around with the size and placement - thaqt would be a proposal for somewhere. Wikidemo 23:20, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
One of the benefits of the various maintenance templates, is that they encourage readers to become editors. Hence it could/can/has been argued that higher-visibility for these templates is a good thing. -- Quiddity 03:47, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Is that a fact, or just a supposition? It could probably be measured - check correlation between articles with boxes and number of edits. I suspect tho, that making the encyclopedia more readable is more likely to encourage the reader to participate than emphasizing that a very large number of articles could benefit from editing. Quirkie 18:37, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
I hope I'm putting this proposal in the right place, but I would like to propose that wikimeta's search results have a spell check thing on it. Similar to Google's "Did you mean _?" It would greatly help in looking for articles without having to look up the name in a dictionary. And please don't yell at me if I am putting this proposal in the wrong spot. Thanks-- Penubag 04:16, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
How do submit something or someone you feel should be in Wikipedia?
I am interested in submitting a person I know for a fact is searched for a lot on video sites and search engines. How can we see his name on Wikipedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.111.145.38 ( talk) 01:00, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Is there any consensus for a page — say, Special:Recentlinks — to be created to list all additions of external links in a similiar style to Special:Recentchanges? — Thomas H. Larsen 06:22, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
Make all headlines titled "References" have small text, so you don't have to manually add <div class="references-small"> to all articles all the time. -- Frap 23:07, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
Adding a checksum feature would make it easier to see which revisions are the same version (to identify reverts, etc) — Random832 16:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
With the growth of Wikipedia has come the inevitable growth of a de facto court of litigation that has a structure that many describe as unnecessarily convoluted. In particular, Wikipedia:Dispute resolution lists the steps roughly as
However, in parallel to this are issues involving problematic editors with user conduct issues. Though not outlined as clearly, the court of appeals process unofficially looks something like this:
My beef is with step number 3. Does anybody ever really take user conduct RfCs seriously? No. They are simply a way of gathering a bunch of people together to argue over which person/persons is/are "good" or "bad". Invariably the User conduct RfC ends up looking something like this:
What's the point? I mean really. We all knew that this was what the User:RfC was going to look like anyway and when the inevitable arbitration does happen, the arbitrators don't have the time to sift through all the B.S. to cull out the few decent pieces of evidence contained in that tripe.
So I say, why do we have these things? They are a ridiculous procedure and a waste of time.
GRRRR!
ScienceApologist 18:16, 9 October 2007 (UTC) Ali'i expanded some acronyms for clarity 19:28, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
I recently put Avis M. Dry in the category of "Deaths in January 2007", and any one who goes to her entry will see that there is a reference for the date of her death, "The Psychologist" for September 2007. However, on the talk-page of her death, I was told that an external link should be found for people who have passsed away. Can I suggest, however, that printed material is accepted as equally valuable citation material as the Internet? I have fears that if we merely allow other web resources to be seen as acceptable resources, many people will start to plagiarise other websites for Wikipedia articles. ACEOREVIVED 19:32, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest the creation of the pseudo-namespace S: or WS: to hold shortcuts that redirect to pages in the Special: namespace, such as S:WATCH redirecting to Special:Watchlist. I'd actually be a little surprised if this hadn't been suggested before, so if there's a project in the works on this topic already or a technical reason why this can't be done, please let me know. Also, if there's a better place to move forward with this concept, I'd be happy to take this topic somewhere a little more permanent than the Pump. -- Dachannien Talk Contrib 21:42, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
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I'm concerned especially about the short (one to five sentence) articles which describe chemicals, minerals, and the like. An exapmle is MDP2P. Articles like this are marked as stubs and often appear on the list of articles to be reviewed for deletion. I think that these articles should either
1) be protected from stub status;
2) be compiled into one article that describes each item.
The reason for this is that while the articles are short like a stub, and do not give extensive information, they usually give all the information that is available. So, articles such as these should have some kind of special 'acceptable short article' status. Either that, or there should be a Chemicals page (sort of like the list of chemical articles that exists now), a Minerals page, and so on.
This wasn't in the FAQ, so I'm bringing it up. Thanks. OES23 17:57, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Just to clear things up, I didn't mean this article in particular was nominated for deletion, but I was providing an example of the type of articles that are frequently nominated. OES23 13:53, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
The newly written proposal/essay/how-to/whatever Wikipedia:Gender-neutral language and its talk page essentially state that singular they is common practice on Wikipedia, apparently with the intent of promoting this as a good idea, and likewise state that this practice is frequently disputed. Outside opinion is requested on (1) how "common" this practice is, (2) how "frequently" the dispute is, and (3) whether people consider it a good idea. >Radiant< 14:13, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
There are ways to use non-sexist language without violating plurality, such as using the word "s/he". ACEOREVIVED 19:10, 22 September 2007 (UTC)
I've felt that we need a more organized system of managing articles for some time, but I'm getting tired of seeing an important article get trashed by a vandal, have the vandalism go by improperly fixed by a novice, and the article as a result deteriorate over time, with nobody being aware that anything has happened. We need a more organized system of article watching and regular review, though we just don't have the manpower to do it. Beginning with watchlists would be a start though. We need to be able to look at an article and know if it is being watched. If one watches an article for a while or spends some time going through the history section, one can probably figure out who seems to keep an eye on it. But this isn't good enough - an experienced editor should be able to obtain this information immediately and with certainty. If I find an article is being messed around with and nobody is repairing the damage, I want to know if there is somebody watching it or not. If not, somebody needs to; an appropriate Wikiproject could be contacted for example. If there is, they need to get their act together and do a better job of keeping it in good condition. If they can't do it alone, more watchers need to be recruited. We have the 'maintained' tag, but that has always tended to suggest the 'maintainer' is a scholar in that field. Ideally, we would have an expert on each subject watching that article, but anybody would be better than nothing.
Let me give an example from my experiences today. I visit the article animal, one of the most important in biology. I see it is somehow smaller than before. Something has happened. I go to the page history, replete with thousands of edits, and try to find what happened. Eventually I reach something almost two weeks ago that seems to be the problem: a vandal deleted sections, and a relatively new editor tried to fix it but missed some of the deletions [1]. If somebody was watching this article they would never not notice something that major. Yet it still happened, and nobody seems to be any wiser. The reality is that someone probably is watching this article and has let it slip by. But I have no way to be sure someone is watching it. And if there is, I can't exactly complain to them can I?
We need to put in place a system where people can see who is watching an article. If people don't wish others to know that information, perhaps they could opt out via preferences (though it is no more of a privacy issue than being able to look through their contributions really). Alternatively, people could add their name to the talk page or somewhere else as a 'watcher', or via some indirect means, e.g. adding a template that links to articles they watch on their user page and being able to find these (e.g. via 'what links here') from the page itself. Another option is letting people select articles from their watchlist that they publicly proclaim to be watching and thereby take responsibility for their maintenance and care. They could appear in bold on the list, for example.
One problem is that vandals can find unwatched articles, but most vandals are unlikely to even know about the watchlist system, let alone how to access that information, and I believe the benefits would outweigh the costs anyway. If it was a concern, don't let anons or even newly registered users see the information. Another is that users may no longer be active but still have things on their watchlist, or they may not go through their watchlist carefully. A way of excluding those who are currently inactive would help with the first issue. On the other hand, if they had to explicitly opt in as a watcher, there would be few people doing so at first, and they may feel reluctant to take on that responsibility. There will also be those that whine about 'ownership', even if the job of the so called 'owner' is nothing more than cleaning up graffiti. But we need to be more responsible for our encyclopedia. Someone coming here should have someone they can complain to if an article is not being looked after. There should be someone there who will get the vandalism that slips through recent changes. It's a very big task to embark on but we need to start working towards it. We need to work out how to put this in place and then get people involved. Hopefully in future we will be able to say that every article on Wikipedia has someone out there looking after it, and those that receive a lot of traffic will have a dozen such people - perhaps even someone watching 24/7, or near to it. We could even start a WikiProject - perhaps "Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality control", to implement and coordinate such an effort. Is anybody with me on this, or do we just want to hope that a disorganized system will catch all the problems by itself? Richard001 02:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Placing a template "This uses watches this page for vandalism" would be too trivial a thing for most purposes to place on a talk page, and it would require a lot of work for a person to manage them. If unwatched pages were a problem for vandals, we could solve the problem easily by only letting trusted users see the information, however we have no way of knowing telling apart trustworthy users from those who are not in an automated fashion. Even so, blocking users who have not been around X days and/or made X edits would almost certainly filter out any mischief. The administrators tool sounds useless, though it points out there are far too many articles not being watched, based on your description. People shouldn't have to become admins just to see such information though.
Having a public watchlist that is systematically gone through by people may be a functionally similar alternative or compliment. I'll think more on that possibility. Richard001 05:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Here's another case [2]: A driveby anon fiddling with a low profile chemistry article that I just happened to be watching. With an organized system of watching we could cover all the low profile pages systematically, avoiding this sort of crap. Richard001 00:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm advertising this page here as well because fewer people seem to read Wikipedia:Village pump (miscellaneous). A.Z. 22:49, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
I am trying to connect with individuals in the wikipedia community who are interested in working on an open source programming project to create a visualized interface to map wikipedia. I have started to draft a proposal in my Sandbox, but am not sure where the most appropriate location is to post such a proposal or connect with interested people. Does anyone have suggestions, feedback, comments? Thanks! SlvrDreams 20:20, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Linking to off-wiki harassment is proposed at the suggestion of the arbitration committee. Please have a look. ← BenB4 06:08, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
I think we need to require usernames for people to edit. 99% of the vandalism I see come from anon users.
Because its so easy to edit wikipedia (just click an article and click "edit") these vandalizers don't need to put much effort messing up pages.
The idea of a "everyone can edit" is ideal, but it doesn't work when we have vandals.
A required username will force vandals to make a username and takes a longer time for them to damage wikipedia. Requiring usernames will also curb vandals since they don't want to go in the trouble of making one. Good friend100 02:00, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
While about 97% of vandalism comes from anonymous users, about 76% or 82% of anonymous edits are intended to improve the encyclopedia. (Prohibiting IP edits would not eliminate 97% of all vandalism, because if they have to, those inclined to vandalism are likely to take the 10 seconds to register.)
So we have a few different placeholder images that appear in articles that don't yet have portraits. (Of course a few people think that we shouldn't have them in articles at all. Maybe they don't want the general public to contribute their images? Or they're ashamed of the fact that it's a wiki? But that's beside the point...)
I've thought that the current images were an eyesore for quite a while, looking as if it were thrown together without much thought, and there've been a bunch of complaints on related talk pages, so I tried to make a better version that others could continue improving on. But it's apparently not liked, either, and was instantly reverted. :-)
I changed:
Compare the originals:
With mine:
Please provide opinions and alternative ideas. Keep in mind that they are used a few different ways; infoboxes, thumbnail frames, bare images, etc. — Omegatron 08:09, 27 August 2007 (UTC)
Joe Blow | |
---|---|
Born | 2007-08-26 Wikimedia Commons |
Occupation | Placeholder |
Known for | Blue background |
Jay Gray | |
---|---|
Born | 2007-08-27 Wikimedia Commons |
Occupation | Placeholder |
Known for | Gray background, lighter silhouette, bold top text, -"one", no gaps at shoulders, head centered a bit |
The building image should be simpler and something that can similarly contain the text "No free image".
The thing I hated most about the current ones was the wording, and the lack of a comma in the female and neutral ones.
I also really don't like the use of "one" stylistically.
I agree that the use of "one" is not stylistically ideal
how far do we go in directly soliciting help from the general public? If we don't do it in text
So keeping "No free image" big and bold would be good (though without the serif/sans difference).
and would approve a switch to a version of the images with the same color scheme as before but with those improvements.
See Template:Infobox Album/No cover for a similar setup. — Omegatron 15:04, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
The new ones are better. I think we still need work on this though. Some members of WikiProject Cricket are less than pleased with me for putting those images on the cricket articles ... less hideous ones would be a REALLY GOOD IDEA - David Gerard 15:18, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, an improvement. Most importantly for me, the wording is a lot better. The idea that you can "own" photographs, or the entire paradigm of intellectual "property", is a point of view that not everyone agrees with. — Matt Crypto 19:01, 5 September 2007 (UTC)
I asked for help on
Wikipedia:Graphic_Lab/Images_to_improve#Placeholder_images, but no one seems to have noticed. If no one comments in a few days, we should just go with the blue or gray ones, and they can continue to be improved from there (like using a different building as the background). —
Omegatron 23:22, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
There is no appropriate
free image available. If you own copyright to an appropriate image, please consider contributing. |
I had a go at making an image like Image:Nocover-upload.png in the style of Image:No male portrait.svg for a 'there is no CD picture' thing. I'd like to know what people think, and if anybody still cares about these placeholder images.
Here's what it would look like in an article.
If you don't mind, can you direct all feedback to Wikipedia:Graphic_Lab/Images_to_improve#Placeholder_suggestion_for_CD. Changing the wording is probably the most important thing that needs doing. -- Dave the Rave (DTR) talk 16:16, 21 September 2007 (UTC)
"Village pump (proposals)/Archive AQ" | |
---|---|
Song | |
B-side | "Foo, Bar... and Baz" |
Would it be possible to have a Wikipedia newsletter delivered to users talk pages (perhaps with a bot or something)?-- Avant Guard 17:17, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi. I think it would be great if we could pick a contributor, then pick a diff of theirs, click on a button called "newer", and go their newer diff, then click on "newer" again, and go to the next newer diff, the same way we do with diffs on the same article or talk page. Would this be too hard to implement? Are there reasons not to do it? A.Z. 02:00, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Although this seems like a very stupid question, Should Wikipedia be using BCE and CE instead of BC and AD for Epochs and Eras? BurnMuffin Word, bro. 17:45, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
This follows from the merger thread three up: Wikipedia:General review. Radical streamlining. Marskell 09:52, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
I dunno if this is the right place to come but i think wikipedia needs an article on the causes of anti-semitism, because people know that jew-hatred exists and is one of the most prominent persecutionsin the world, but people don't seem to know anything about why jews are so hated, and what provoked the holocaust. Any thought? -- Andrew Hadland 2007 22:46, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I am making this as a very tentative suggestion. On the "Discussion" pages of articles on radio and television programmes, one frequently finds comments where Wikipedia readers seem more keen to give their views onthe programme, than to discuss the article's accuracy, comprehensiveness and style or structure. To prevent this, should we have, each month, a survey where Wikipedia readers can voice their favourite and least favourite television/ radio programmes? We would not even need to use Wiki software to analyse the data. ACEOREVIVED 19:20, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Adding a checksum feature would make it easier to see which revisions are the same version (to identify reverts, etc) — Random832 16:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
Up at the top of *this* page it says to make software suggestions to Bugzilla. Well I tried and tried but I cannot figure Bugzilla out to save my life. It seems to only be looking for Bugs that one has already encountered. I finally found something resembling a “suggestion box” but when I tried to send it it would say,
"To file this bug, you must first choose a component. If necessary, just guess."
Now as a non-programming type person, I have no idea what a “component” is, which makes it hard to guess. I guessed "Suggestion" but that didn't work, neither did leaving it blank. Or "Help". Then I tried “1.11” - I didn't know what that meant either but I saw it on the page so maybe it meant something...and words weren’t working so I thought maybe it was a numbers thing. To no avail.
This is really bad design. Wiki should not assume that people who contribute and have ideas, questions, and suggestions are programmers. I am pretty pissed that I wasted so much time trying to get the stupid thing to work. I even read all the FAQ stuff, which didn’t help either.
Bad design! Saudade7 13:29, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
WP:INSPECTOR (currently at User:PHDrillSergeant/house). This is an essay that I wrote today, based of a recent discussion of mine and a stroke of writer's fingers. I am wondering what you think of this, and ways that I can make this better. I doubt this will ever pass into guideline status, but as an essay I think it's great to go alongside WP:STUB. ~ PH DrillSergeant... § 03:56, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
A modest proposal. I post here as neutral ground; on GA talkpages people are naturally sympathetic to GA, while on FA people are often hostile. First, PR is perenially backlogged—plenty of noms, insufficient feedback. Second, there are systemic problems with GA that are brought up fairly regularly. The Wikipedia:Good article review notes rather melodramatically "This is not a Peer Review Process;". I hope that's not a shibboleth of the people involved in the process. I won't get into mechanics yet—there are various ways it might happen. I'd just like to see a show of hands if the idea might be further considered and then a workshop page can be started. Advantages:
As I say, the mechanics can wait. General feedback welcome. Marskell 13:28, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
In general, I like it; it could help address the backlog at peer review and some of the GA problems at the same time. However, currently peer review serves more than FA/GA needs, so I have two questions. How would a merged process handle
I would be against such an idea. Peer review must surely remain a completely optional and collaborative process, with no stick or carrot involved. It doesn't matter much that the peer review page is backlogged because most of us know that the way to get peer reviews is to ask someone we know, who we think will make useful suggestions; Wikipedia will always lack reviewers in whatever forum. It is rarely that one receives a peer review there out of the blue, though I think it is worth posting requests there, in case Wikipedia appears the work of cliques of friends.
I don't think GAC is equivalent to peer review, because it is institutionally jugemental, like FAC. GA is not a clear process, and we all have different views of it. For me, it is for articles with a smaller range, ones that are perhaps less comprehensive in sourcing. This last point doesn't mean that the sourcing is necessarily inferior: with some topics one learns very little more by turning to more and more sources. qp10qp 14:44, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I always thought the way to "fix" Peer Review would be to add a note formally encouraging submitters to also be reviewers. People submitting articles for Peer Review could encourage reviews for their article by reviewing another article already there, something like - "Here is my detailed review of your article. If you liked my suggestions, can you similarly review my article here?". Since there is no carrot of "passed peer review" there won't be any incentive to "pass" the other article, just to get detailed comments and opinions. -- AnonEMouse (squeak) 17:04, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I think one of the main reasons why GA & FA are so successful, and PR is not, in terms of numbers of reviewers, is that GA & FA are both connected to specific criteria and reviewers effectively "grade" an article based on that criteria. PR seems to be just a review, and reviewers aren't grading an article based on specific criteria; instead, they're just offering tips on how to improve the article based on very loose manual of style guidelines. GA & FA ask reviewers to effectively assign a grade (GA status or FA status), based on this criteria. If PR was more closely associated to the rating scale (stub, start, B, A), perhaps it would be more successful and attract reviewers. The difficulty here is that every single wikiproject is going to want to come up with their own criteria, which could be confusing to someone that reviews an article at the main PR page without being familiar with the specific wikiproject criteria. Dr. Cash 00:53, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
Comment May not be that relevant, but can I just say that I very much enjoy Peer Review, and see its value as quite different to FA/GA. In a peer review you can just go through all the things that occur to you that would improve an article, without worrying whether you've nailed all the problems. At FA/GA I feel I must go through all criteria, before I can give a pass/fail decision. This is why I very rarely vote at FA, and very rarely pass at GA. :) A lot of GA, and even FA, reviews don't make the kind of systematic assessment that perhaps they should. 4u1e 00:24, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Comment There are a lot of assessment and evaluation pages and methods around; GA, FA and PR, of course, but also the League of Copyeditors, and the A and B ratings from the WikiProjects, and the Stub and Start ratings. The current system is not producing top-quality encyclopedia articles as fast as we would like it to, and it can't scale well. There are other problems: for example, a commonly cited one is that it is not easy to find competent reviewers to assess the content of some of the more esoteric articles. These are not problems with any of the methods or pages; they're general problems.
I think it might be productive to establish a workshop page and request participation from all of the above groups, without any assertion that any of them are either the problem or the answer. Perhaps that workshop could address things in this order:
At that point there might be enough consensus on some of these issues to be able to go back to the list of existing resources and make concrete suggestions about how to make them all work better. Getting a group together that draws on the good and bad experience of each of these content-quality mechanisms might lead to some synthesis that would have incremental suggested improvements. Working on defining goals before solutions seems to me to have the best chance of succeeding. Mike Christie (talk) 01:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Erm, I think I'm at the right place to make a proposal. I was thinking that although wikipedia may not be censored, I believe we should have a template that warns users that "this article may contain content that some users may find inappropriate for younger readers." Or something along those lines —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hadseys ( talk • contribs) 19:11, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Not that Britannica is our standard... OES23 21:57, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
I know that wikipedia is not censored, but I also know that some images out there may be disturbing to some viewers; I have previously had trouble with this myself. I can instruct my broswer to disable images, but not everyone can do that. I have worked out a compromise: perhaps we should institute a system in which potentially disturbing images (most likley human anatomy, usually injuries etc) should be hidden and replaced with a link saying "this image may be disturbing to some viewers" or something similar, with the option to display the image placed underneath this warning. I think this would be very useful for more squeamish viewers; admittedly it probably be annoying to put this in for all existing distrubing images, but I think worth considering. 211.30.132.2 11:01, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Since we have Wikipedia, WikiQuote, WikiNews, etc., why not run a parallel site called Wiki Trivia, and you can finally take all those intersting little factoids and Simpsons quotes that are littering otherwise encyclopedic articles, and find a home for them? 139.48.81.98 17:22, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
I wanted to suggest making a summary chart with the presidential candidates and their positions on different issues for the US presidential elections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.224.208.53 ( talk) 15:22, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Dear Folks, > How about adding a web link to your opening article pages that would link the > encyclopedia web page with the corresponding Wiki travel page? I like reading > your articles but it is awkward to then go to the travel web site page. Thanks > and keep up the good job! —Preceding unsigned comment added by Flfruitcake ( talk • contribs) 14:18, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
I have a dynamic IP that regularly cycles through a series of IP addresses owned by my ISP, a lot of which have been exposed to wikipedia. As a result I'm regularly getting messages directed at prior users as early as 2004/2005. In one case I got banned because an admin assumed bad faith due to templates left for another editor (I removed an unsourced trivia section, and then found out the talk page for the IP I was using had received the full set of warnings the month before). As a result, there are several problems I can see with retaining messages on an IP talk page:
Hence I propose that the user/talk pages of anonymous IP addresses get deleted after a period of inactivity on behalf of that IP address (say 1 week or 1 month). That way we avoid sending messages to the wrong person and prevent a clutter of temporary pages that we don't need.
(sorry if there is a technical reason why this cannot be done. I'm under the assumption that the dates from special:contributions can be easily extracted, if this is not possible then maybe the time since the last edit on the IP's talk page should be the determining factor. I'm envisioning a semiautomated bot which can only access IP talk pages, with an admin checking that each one is valid)
124.184.171.224 13:03, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
(UTC)
In reference to a thread at ANI, [12], where a vandal recreated an old account that had been renamed. Don't want to create too much, well, bureaucracy for the bureaucrats, still want to leave the option open for new users to take the username. So how about when accounts are renamed, the old account name is automatically recreated by the bureaucrat potentially with some sort of template notice saying that to acquire the account name requires usurpation or something? Is it possible to balance this out with the standard redirects to the new userpages? Basically, let's add an extra step to obtain a username that has been in use. ~ Eliz 81 (C) 17:07, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
Shouldn't the lists of MMOGs ("List of MMOGs" and "List of free MMOGs") have another section on the page for each game? "contact info required?" This would tell whether or not you must give out contact information (phone number and/or email, and/or mailing address) in order to create/run a file/account on these games. Zantaggerung 01:45, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
I've felt that we need a more organized system of managing articles for some time, but I'm getting tired of seeing an important article get trashed by a vandal, have the vandalism go by improperly fixed by a novice, and the article as a result deteriorate over time, with nobody being aware that anything has happened. We need a more organized system of article watching and regular review, though we just don't have the manpower to do it. Beginning with watchlists would be a start though. We need to be able to look at an article and know if it is being watched. If one watches an article for a while or spends some time going through the history section, one can probably figure out who seems to keep an eye on it. But this isn't good enough - an experienced editor should be able to obtain this information immediately and with certainty. If I find an article is being messed around with and nobody is repairing the damage, I want to know if there is somebody watching it or not. If not, somebody needs to; an appropriate Wikiproject could be contacted for example. If there is, they need to get their act together and do a better job of keeping it in good condition. If they can't do it alone, more watchers need to be recruited. We have the 'maintained' tag, but that has always tended to suggest the 'maintainer' is a scholar in that field. Ideally, we would have an expert on each subject watching that article, but anybody would be better than nothing.
Let me give an example from my experiences today. I visit the article animal, one of the most important in biology. I see it is somehow smaller than before. Something has happened. I go to the page history, replete with thousands of edits, and try to find what happened. Eventually I reach something almost two weeks ago that seems to be the problem: a vandal deleted sections, and a relatively new editor tried to fix it but missed some of the deletions [13]. If somebody was watching this article they would never not notice something that major. Yet it still happened, and nobody seems to be any wiser. The reality is that someone probably is watching this article and has let it slip by. But I have no way to be sure someone is watching it. And if there is, I can't exactly complain to them can I?
We need to put in place a system where people can see who is watching an article. If people don't wish others to know that information, perhaps they could opt out via preferences (though it is no more of a privacy issue than being able to look through their contributions really). Alternatively, people could add their name to the talk page or somewhere else as a 'watcher', or via some indirect means, e.g. adding a template that links to articles they watch on their user page and being able to find these (e.g. via 'what links here') from the page itself. Another option is letting people select articles from their watchlist that they publicly proclaim to be watching and thereby take responsibility for their maintenance and care. They could appear in bold on the list, for example.
One problem is that vandals can find unwatched articles, but most vandals are unlikely to even know about the watchlist system, let alone how to access that information, and I believe the benefits would outweigh the costs anyway. If it was a concern, don't let anons or even newly registered users see the information. Another is that users may no longer be active but still have things on their watchlist, or they may not go through their watchlist carefully. A way of excluding those who are currently inactive would help with the first issue. On the other hand, if they had to explicitly opt in as a watcher, there would be few people doing so at first, and they may feel reluctant to take on that responsibility. There will also be those that whine about 'ownership', even if the job of the so called 'owner' is nothing more than cleaning up graffiti. But we need to be more responsible for our encyclopedia. Someone coming here should have someone they can complain to if an article is not being looked after. There should be someone there who will get the vandalism that slips through recent changes. It's a very big task to embark on but we need to start working towards it. We need to work out how to put this in place and then get people involved. Hopefully in future we will be able to say that every article on Wikipedia has someone out there looking after it, and those that receive a lot of traffic will have a dozen such people - perhaps even someone watching 24/7, or near to it. We could even start a WikiProject - perhaps "Wikipedia:WikiProject Quality control", to implement and coordinate such an effort. Is anybody with me on this, or do we just want to hope that a disorganized system will catch all the problems by itself? Richard001 02:33, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Placing a template "This uses watches this page for vandalism" would be too trivial a thing for most purposes to place on a talk page, and it would require a lot of work for a person to manage them. If unwatched pages were a problem for vandals, we could solve the problem easily by only letting trusted users see the information, however we have no way of knowing telling apart trustworthy users from those who are not in an automated fashion. Even so, blocking users who have not been around X days and/or made X edits would almost certainly filter out any mischief. The administrators tool sounds useless, though it points out there are far too many articles not being watched, based on your description. People shouldn't have to become admins just to see such information though.
Having a public watchlist that is systematically gone through by people may be a functionally similar alternative or compliment. I'll think more on that possibility. Richard001 05:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)
Here's another case [14]: A driveby anon fiddling with a low profile chemistry article that I just happened to be watching. With an organized system of watching we could cover all the low profile pages systematically, avoiding this sort of crap. Richard001 00:41, 5 October 2007 (UTC)
There is a Graphviz extension to MediaWiki. Why don't you use it on Wikipedia? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz It would be awesome, and very useful for quickly making and collaborating on diagrams and graphs for articles. -- Frap 02:12, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
There's an important discussion going on at Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship. a.z. 01:05, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
After some of the discussion on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Wikipedia:Requests for adminship, I've decided to try my hand at creating another desysopping proposal. Please read it over (a read of the RFC might help too) and discuss it on the talk page. Mr. Z-man 01:14, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
I propose an easy checkbox to turn off signature bots, and a template that makes it easier to sign for someone who forgot to sign.-- Filll 22:25, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I just stumbled upon Wikipedia:POV check. Seems like a semi-forgotten essay, but it has some templates and other pages (ex. Wikipedia:NPOV dispute) associated with it. How about we transform it into a noticeboard, where cases could be discussed on a one-by-one basis, as Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Noticeboard, Wikipedia:Fringe theories/Noticeboard and other noticeboards work so well?-- Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus | talk 23:54, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
This is a pretty minor suggestion in the grand scheme of things, but I was wondering: On category pages, there are plus signs (+) next to each category so you can expand the tree to see a category's sub-categories. Those plus signs also appear next to categories that don't have any sub-categories, and if you click that plus sign, you just get a message that says "no subcategories". This is kind of annoying to me. Could we possibly eliminate the plus sign next to categories that don't have any sub-categories, so that we can see at glance which categories are expandable and which aren't, without having to click on each one?
I know it's not very realistic, but Google for example will take this challenge on at some point, and you're supposed to be their match. So, what I am suggesting is taking the translator ten steps ahead - making it able to translate any sentence from any language to any language. It'll take AI experts and linguists, and a few trillion contributions from surfers who know 2 languages well(it would be trillions of trillions if not for deduction and induction software created by the AI and lingu experts), but what you'll get will be an almost perfect translator, allowing for example the immediate translation of any wiki article to all existing languages. -- 199.203.54.236 15:48, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
I think the illustration for this article is unnecessary and probably break some law of United States. What does mean the community? This can be located in a encyclopaedia like ours? ServusDei 21:11, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
I've removed the image. It's almost certainly illegal per 18USC2257. Quite apart from any issues of censorship, I don't think the Wikimedia foundation wants us to be committing felonies here. If there's an admin around, that image should be deleted and we should probably contact Paul Godwin to get a reading on how to deal with sexually explicit imagery around here. Wikidemo 20:47, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
I think this is a ridiculous discussion. The intercourse article doesn't have a close-up photo of penetration, or any photo of humans having sex, for that matter; and it never would. Even if you want to make the argument that the photo doesn't depict actual contact between the partners, the intercourse article doesn't even contain a close-up photo of a penis approaching a vagina, and similarly, never would, because such a thing is pornographic and totally inappropriate for an encyclopedia. The same goes for fellatio, cunnilingus, oral sex, and countless other articles describing sex acts. They all contain drawings and textual descriptions of the act, which are enough. A close-up explicit photographic depiction is completely unnecessary and adds nothing to one's understanding of the subject. I challenge anyone to find an encyclopedia that does contain such material.
←Why would a drawing be preferable?
(ec)We aren't censored for you or for anyone else. There are subjects on here that you may find distastefu;l, but as long as ythey are presented in a neutrally worded and factually accurate manner then they should remain. The same goes for an image that illustrates a concept, we do not remove images because they offend your sensibilities - you don't like them, stay away from sexually orientated pages. Viridae Talk 04:11, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
So anyone has actually sent Mike Godwin an email yet? Could be there a chance that our former attorney, Brad Patrick, dealt with this issue before? User:Zscout370 (Return Fire) 04:10, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
(←) Well, considering the topic, another related issue has been brought up at Wikipedia:Village pump (policy)#Requiring reliable sources in media. It's regarding the video of an ejaculating penis in the Ejaculation article. Lara ❤ Love 04:59, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
As an outsider, the following comment. Some people argued that the image was "unencyclopedic" and "you would never see this image in an encyclopedia". That is simply not true (at least not outside the US). If a publisher was to release an "encyclopedia on sexacts" then there might be a reasonable chance that such an image would be included. Hell, there are countless Kama Sutra publications that contain photo's of all the sexual positions. To say that the photo is unencylopedic in the context of the article is simply rubbish. At most we are violating a US law. No more, no less. -- TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 12:03, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
As a man, wich tongue presents on this foto, I want to explain something.
We just wanted to illustrate article, nothing more. We don't have a plan to change Wikipedia to a pornographic resource. The low of the USA and Florida is unknown for us, so in many cases we guided by rules of Wikipedia and our intuition. On Commons we founded some fotos, that can be classified as pornographic in Russia. So, we decided, that foto of anilingus has no differences from (for example)
this or
this, and maded foto for article.
If our foto break some law of United States, it must be deleted from Wikipedia. But can somebody to make me know, there we can find text of the low, which prohibits foto of the anilingus in Wikipedia and allow foto of masturbation (or video of ejaculation)? (sorry for my English)--
FearChild 17:10, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
So the issues are:
What I think
Legally I see that having any nudity pictures in Wikipedia would be extremely difficult if we follow US law to the letter. However if someone volunteers, I'm sure Mike Godwin could set it up if desired as long as we are talking about just a few pictures by just a few people. In the end, I think that is something we should strive towards, though I doubt that with the current load on the Foundation it will happen any time soon.
If only America wasn't so Anal about nudity. Pun intended :D Unfortunately all we can really do here is wait for the Foundation, as stated before :( They are the legal entity that is affected here. -- TheDJ ( talk • contribs) 19:40, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
I was thinking we could convert the vandal warnings to the ambox style. I think it might make the warnings easy to see and know the level of the warning. Thanks! jonathan ( talk — contribs) 21:21, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
The Special:Random feature is an good one, but with 2+ million articles on Wikipedia, it becomes "too random". I would like a "take me to a random article" feature, that is narrower. So that I can find a random article in a topic of interest for me. So, that for example, I can easily find a random article on computers and science, and someone else can find a random article on animals, plants and nature, and someone else can find random articles on body, biology, medicine, etc. -- Frap 17:33, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
I asked once before if Wikipedia could provide links to the revisions of articles that passed the nom to become featured, and the response I got was that Wikipedia provides links to the revisions of the articles the day that they are featured on the main page. But all this provides a link to the initial paragraph [18]. I think that it's very important that Wikipedia provide links to the entire featured revisions of articles, not just the first paragraphs, because the quality of an article can deteriorate over time and articles can eventually lose their featured status. If this link is provided, a person will always have access to featured quality material, and being able to compare the current revision of the article to the earlier featured revision can aid in maintaining the article's quality and seeing if it still deserves it's featured status.-- Avant Guard 16:03, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
The sentence in the text about Prophet Muhammad, the sentence which regards to Quran says that there is no big difference between the Quran early in the history and the one publishing nowadays. It's wrong. It must be "there isn't any difference". Because Muslims believe Quran is the word of God, the word which can not be changed. If it can be changed then there would be no difference between Torah, Bible and Quran. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.114.107.227 ( talk) 21:26, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Would it be possible for users to protect their own userpages from editing by other users except admins?-- Avant Guard 16:47, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Following my previous suggestion here, I really think that a collapsable template for references and footnotes would be a good idea. Skimming over the article for Golden plates, and we can see that more than half of the article is references and footnotes. It makes the article look longer than it really is, and can be a pain in the butt when it comes to scrolling. Maybe we could device a way to put the refs and notes into a template and make use of the "hide/show" function. Or like I previously suggested, putting refs and notes in a separate page, and that page will be accessable alongside the top between "article" and "discussion". Oidia ( talk) 12:43, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
I accessed this entry on 8 October 2007 at 0026 ET (US). According to the quick information under his picture, it says he was a US President from 1945 until 2002. Just letting you know that the dates do not coincide with those stated in the article itself. Thank you for your time and sorry for the inconvenience.
Jamie Indiana —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.51.104.178 ( talk) 04:27, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Right now, there seems to be no place to find summaries of all the Wikipedia namespace pages, policies, and processes. What do you think about a Technical Directory, summarizing all things back-end? Here is a sample entry for quickpoll:
I know this isn't perfect, but the TD will be editable like everything else. It would be a great source to learn about things like BJAODN. So, once again, what do you think? ¿SFGiДnts! ¿Complain! ¿Analyze! ¿Review! 03:28, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
Recently I began noticing various boxes and icons appearing on the "this needs attention" templates. But the icons and boxes stand out even more than the text. Before, you could skip them easily. Now they demand attention. It makes the whole encyclopedia look like a draft version with scribbles all over it, whereas to all but the pedantic wikipedian, it is a complete product, if still evolving. They get in the way of reading the text. The "this needs attention" box should be almost unnoticable. They are essentially footnotes. Categories and other systems make sure that they won't get completely missed. It's a rare page which hasn't been vandalised by one or more of these bossy templates. Where was the decision for big glossy templates with icons made and how can I precipitate its reversal? Quirkie 20:40, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
AFAIK, most of the templates already had the icons (unless people have been going to the "next step" and making icons, I stopped visiting WT:AMB a while ago). The nice thing about the new design is that you can easily hide the icons if you don't like them. Anomie 02:34, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
I really like the new template formats. They are much more dignified and professional looking than the old ones. The first one you see may be a little more eye-catching than before, but once you get used to them, their standardization and regularity makes them a lot less conspicuous than the older versions. If we wanted to downgrade them we could play around with the size and placement - thaqt would be a proposal for somewhere. Wikidemo 23:20, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
One of the benefits of the various maintenance templates, is that they encourage readers to become editors. Hence it could/can/has been argued that higher-visibility for these templates is a good thing. -- Quiddity 03:47, 4 October 2007 (UTC)
Is that a fact, or just a supposition? It could probably be measured - check correlation between articles with boxes and number of edits. I suspect tho, that making the encyclopedia more readable is more likely to encourage the reader to participate than emphasizing that a very large number of articles could benefit from editing. Quirkie 18:37, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
I hope I'm putting this proposal in the right place, but I would like to propose that wikimeta's search results have a spell check thing on it. Similar to Google's "Did you mean _?" It would greatly help in looking for articles without having to look up the name in a dictionary. And please don't yell at me if I am putting this proposal in the wrong spot. Thanks-- Penubag 04:16, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
How do submit something or someone you feel should be in Wikipedia?
I am interested in submitting a person I know for a fact is searched for a lot on video sites and search engines. How can we see his name on Wikipedia? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.111.145.38 ( talk) 01:00, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Is there any consensus for a page — say, Special:Recentlinks — to be created to list all additions of external links in a similiar style to Special:Recentchanges? — Thomas H. Larsen 06:22, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
Make all headlines titled "References" have small text, so you don't have to manually add <div class="references-small"> to all articles all the time. -- Frap 23:07, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
Adding a checksum feature would make it easier to see which revisions are the same version (to identify reverts, etc) — Random832 16:56, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
With the growth of Wikipedia has come the inevitable growth of a de facto court of litigation that has a structure that many describe as unnecessarily convoluted. In particular, Wikipedia:Dispute resolution lists the steps roughly as
However, in parallel to this are issues involving problematic editors with user conduct issues. Though not outlined as clearly, the court of appeals process unofficially looks something like this:
My beef is with step number 3. Does anybody ever really take user conduct RfCs seriously? No. They are simply a way of gathering a bunch of people together to argue over which person/persons is/are "good" or "bad". Invariably the User conduct RfC ends up looking something like this:
What's the point? I mean really. We all knew that this was what the User:RfC was going to look like anyway and when the inevitable arbitration does happen, the arbitrators don't have the time to sift through all the B.S. to cull out the few decent pieces of evidence contained in that tripe.
So I say, why do we have these things? They are a ridiculous procedure and a waste of time.
GRRRR!
ScienceApologist 18:16, 9 October 2007 (UTC) Ali'i expanded some acronyms for clarity 19:28, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
I recently put Avis M. Dry in the category of "Deaths in January 2007", and any one who goes to her entry will see that there is a reference for the date of her death, "The Psychologist" for September 2007. However, on the talk-page of her death, I was told that an external link should be found for people who have passsed away. Can I suggest, however, that printed material is accepted as equally valuable citation material as the Internet? I have fears that if we merely allow other web resources to be seen as acceptable resources, many people will start to plagiarise other websites for Wikipedia articles. ACEOREVIVED 19:32, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest the creation of the pseudo-namespace S: or WS: to hold shortcuts that redirect to pages in the Special: namespace, such as S:WATCH redirecting to Special:Watchlist. I'd actually be a little surprised if this hadn't been suggested before, so if there's a project in the works on this topic already or a technical reason why this can't be done, please let me know. Also, if there's a better place to move forward with this concept, I'd be happy to take this topic somewhere a little more permanent than the Pump. -- Dachannien Talk Contrib 21:42, 11 October 2007 (UTC)