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I'd like to make a suggestion not a minor one: redoing Wikipedia's article storage/retrieval method/system, or at least creating an add-on retrieval method to deal with one of Wikipedia's most problematic aspects: disambiguation - I'll outline only the latter suggestion here.
Today, typing "Cork" in the search field and and hitting "go" will take you to a contributor-created disambiguation page - yet once there the list contains far from all articles containing that term. Typing "Cork football" will send you to a "search results" page (as the article does not exist). My question is: would it be possible to automatically create disambiguation pages that resemble the second circumstance - a search results page? This should of course be applied to searches containing only single terms contained in many article titles, or multiple terms contained in many article titles.
The only problem posed by this method would be the organisation of the results returned - what order would results for a search for "Cork" be returned in? My only suggestion for now would be to sort them (upon retrieval) by their category, the latter transformed into a sub-heading under which would appear all articles in that category.
I also think it would be useful Wikipedia (and the above method) to assign (visibly or invisibly) Wikipedia articles to three 'base' categories: "people", "places" or "things". In my experience, search patterns seem to revolve around these, and presenting a contributor with this choice would cut search time drastically (if they choose to use it).
Wikipedia is trying hard to define itself as an encyclopaedia, but I find it has yet to adopt a method best for both the web media (technology) and the habits of web-users. I hope you don't mind my two cents - cheers. THEPROMENADER 06:46, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
Wiki has all the technology it needs to install a "google-like" search engine (and I already find it hard to imagine that, because of its media and structure, it doesn't have one already) or an automated disambiguation system, but perhaps the manpower (programming) is what needs to be "funded"; but really, these are not questions for we contributors. If an idea is good and good for Wiki, I'm sure that Wikipedia would be willing to invest if it is for its own better function/use. Cheers. THEPROMENADER 15:15, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
As a relative newcomer contributer but a longtime reader and 13 yrs of Yahoo and little less of googling, I must say the go and search buttons are about the most frustrating entities on the entire web (after porn and spam of course ) I've read many times that that Google searches are the way to go, well if that's the case and the underlying causes of this are finances, then let's just be done with go and search thereby reducing the workload for Wikipedia and just use a specific Google search tool on site... just as many other sites do-- Tallard 08:20, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been brought up before, but I didn't notice it in the list of perennial proposals. What do people think of adding this simple functionality to Wikipedia? Yes, it's very easy to copy the URL of an article from the address bar, but it would seem to be a rather convenient way to let others know about certain articles, and even to flag certain articles for one's own later reading. -- Lukobe 21:58, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
Good idea Lukobe. Zantaggerung 01:52, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
I haven't used Firefox for a while, but IE has this capability built in. I'm using IE 7 right now, so I'll just give that as an example. At the top of the page, there is a "Page" combo box next to an icon of a piece of paper and a pencil. If you click on the down arrow next to that icon, you get several options, including "Send page by E-mail" and "Send link by E-mail". Corvus cornix 21:46, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
For more details, see bugzilla:227. -- ais523 13:56, 5 October 2007 ( U T C)
As I recall from a while back, part of the problem is that Wikipedia doesn't want it's servers put on spam blacklists. Andrewjuren (talk) 22:42, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal:_Mandatory_noindex.2Fnofollow_for_User:_ns
I love the featured content...um, feature. I was wondering if there has been thought given to generating RSS feeds for the featured content. This would allow people to see at least a clip of the featured article in their blog-roll / reader software they use. If a small intro blurb to the article was provided via an RSS feed I would think some people would end up more inclined to click through.
It would allow users to see the content easily without having to remember to visit the site daily. Just my two cents, and I apologize if this has already been suggested and rejected, I didn't notice it anywhere on this page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dmcnelis ( talk • contribs) 3 August 2007.
A new type of welcomebot proposal is being discussed here.
See WP:ASO.
Hi there, I was wondering - why there does not exist a search toolbar of Wikipedia for internet browsers (like Google's one)? It will make information flow much faster! Any thoughts?
Thanks, S.
Commons uses a 'wizard' when uploading, to help people identify the correct licence. There is ongoing discussion about doing something on Wikipedia at MediaWiki talk:Uploadtext#Proposal for mass overhaul, matching Commons. Could people contribute to the discussion there? -- ais523 12:45, 4 May 2007 ( U T C)
Might it be possible to have a fixed left hand panel so that features such as "community portal" and, especially the search box are available at all times.
In editing I want to focus on a particular section in "Show Preview" mode and at the same time access the search box to help me research for further editing. (It's not a problem in "edit this page" mode as the edit screen scrolls and the search box is static at the left of the screen.) If I were to “compare selected versions” on the “history” page I reach a “difference between revisions” page and have the same problem. I lose the section of interest if I just use "home" on my keyboard to access the search box.
At the moment I set up a separate tab for Wikipedia home so that I have access to the search box, and a separate tab for Wiktionary. A fixed search box or a toolbar for search and Wiktionary (is that possible? costly?) would be very user friendly. -- User:Brenont 03:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I have been using this a few days and I think it is very close to being ready for prime time. There need to be conditionals based on screen height (javascript) and the number of interwikis, but this is a tremendous improvement. In order for this to get implemented though, this discussion has to move over to WP:VPT. If nobody objects in a day or so, I will be moving the thread. 1of3 15:30, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Is this what you're looking for? meta:Help:User_style/floating_quickbar — Omegatron 02:55, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
We now have over 400 featured lists and seem to be promoting in excess of 30 per month of late (41 in August and 42 in September). When Today's featured article (TFA) started ( 2004-02-22), they only had about 200 featured articles and were barely promoting 20 new ones per month. I think the quality of featured lists is at least as good as the quality of featured articles was when they started appearing on the main page. Thus, I am ready to open debate on a proposal to institute a List of the Day on the main page with nominations starting November 1 2007, voting starting December 1 2007 and main page appearances starting January 1 2008. For brevity, the proposal page does not discuss the details of eventual main page content, but since the work has already been done, you should consider this proposal assuming the eventual content will resemble the current content at the featured content page. Such output would probably start at the bottom of the main page. The proposal page does not debate whether starting with weekly list main page entries would be better than daily entries. However, I suspect persons in favor of weekly lists are really voicing opinions against lists on the main page since neither TFA nor Picture of the day started as weekly endeavors, to the best of my knowledge. See the List of the Day proposal and comment at WP:LOTDP and its talk page.-- TonyTheTiger ( t/ c/ bio/ tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 14:23, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
The Creative Commons copyright tags are a bit varied in their layout, and I think they should be standardized. Here are the differences I see:
To me, {{ cc-by-3.0}} looks the best stylistically, so my proposal would be to use it as the standard for all of them, with the following changes:
I don't think that the direct link to the image in {{ cc-by-sa}} is necessary, but I think it's used on all the CC tags on Commons, so perhaps it should be included for the sake of uniformity.
What do you think? -- Crazy Legs KC 09:36, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
When a disambiguation page exists, it may prevent some users (novice ones especially) from finding other relevant pages that show up in the search results for that term. For example, the disambig page Beds lists two items and a link to Bed (disambiguation). If you search for Beds, however, you get 23,000 results, at least some of which are probably of interest to someone who types Beds into the search box and hits Enter or clicks Go.
The current {{ Disambig}} template is worded like this:
Between those two sentences, I propose that we add:
I'm not sure on the most succinct way to word this. Any other thoughts? — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 18:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Any opposition to this change? If there is none within a week, could an admin please make the change? — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 19:47, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Go
expecting a Good Thing to happen. Ups, it is not happening! The root cause is not the broken disambiguation pages, but the Go
button acting not so intuitively.I was surprised not to already find this somewhere on the Wik, especially in perennial proposals or in the Project of Fun or similar locations. The proposal is this: set aside some corner of WP, either all the subpages of the format Wikipedia:Lexicon/whatever or some other subdivision (if it got hugely popular, perhaps its own namespace) and play Lexicon on it. I'm aware that isn't really what Wikipedia is designed for, games do not belong here, we are trying to be serious and spread information, take your games elsewhere, etc. But clearly, pretty much by definition, Wikipedia has the largest editing community of any wiki around, and a Lexicon hosted by WP or at least by Wikimedia would be sure to never die through inactivity--there would always be new people to step in for dropouts--and the lexicons would, I believe, be of superior quality to games cobbled together out of whoever you can find online. Thoughts?-- Mobius Soul 19:48, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Using the what links here feature, when it directs you to a very long article, is there any way, right now, to quickly find a specific link to a specific page within that article? Especially when the words used in the text are not the same as the title of the page linked to? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Blanchardb ( talk • contribs) 23:06, 13 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)
We of the Military history WikiProject have been planning to tag our style guide as part of the official MoS. In light of this, we would like to invite community comments regarding this; if you have any opinion, suggestions, and so forth, please drop by WT:MILHIST#MOS. Thanks! Kirill 20:31, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
There is a proposal to create a new group, either separately or under the umbrella of the WP:CVU, with the express purpose of creating a "mass discussion of vandalism and what to do about it" and the further suggestion at Wikipedia_talk:Counter-Vandalism_Unit#Help.21 that the group may also "also reorganize messy articles and re-classify wrongly-classified articles". Please contribute to the discussions at Wikipedia_talk:Counter-Vandalism_Unit#Help.21 and User talk:Gp75motorsports/Wikipedia Users' Alliance/CVU-WUA debate. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:12, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Why can't we put a "reply" link on talk page section headers? That would make it easier to reply, instead of having to section edit. Jonathan letters to the editor — things I've written 17:34, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
If a female actor is an actress, and a female waiter is a waitress, shouldn't a female writer be a writress?
Cizzam18 16:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
I have rebooted and rewritten the old proposal to allow for Wikipedia:Featured Lists to be placed on the main page. The prior proposal, which was losing ground and had no consensus, although well meaning, called for a complicated selection process for prospective Featured Lists on the Main Page. This proposal assumes the simplest possible selection process (chronological, similar to Today's Featured Picture), and asks not how a Featured List should appear on the main page, but whether or not Featured Lists should be on the main page in the first place. Please visit Wikipedia:Today's featured list and leave feedback at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured list. Thanks. -- Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 10:02, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
This is a request for a new feature in the MediaWiki software. On the article history page like http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Pedophilia&action=history I have to click a thousand times if I want to download all versions so I can grep them. Of course, I could write a shell script to do the job but that would burden the server and only help those who have the script. I think it would be better, if the version history page contained a prominent link to download the entire version history as Pedophilia,v in RCS format as created by multiple
ci -d$DATE -w$USER -l $ARTICLE
commands. Any volunteer implementors reading here? Roman Czyborra 11:34, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for the pointers to tools I hadn't known before. Special:Export is already helpful, but it is wasteful of bandwidth as it does not apply RCS diff compression, and it is limited to the 100 last revisions while I need a complete revision history. The WhodunitQuery is nice but limited to Microsoft Windows. So I still recommend my initial proposal be implemented. Roman Czyborra 08:35, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Articles have talk pages for suggesting improvement or the removal of errors IF it is not possible for the critic to simply make the changes themselves. While done in good faith, I find the litter of commnets often pasted on pages in parenthesis rather bad preentation for wikipeida, not to mention ugly and unnecessary (her is one example [ [4]] at the time of posting. I certainly don't remember such text insertions being as common in the past. I suggest what is picked up on is Edited or discussed in the relevant arenas instead Dainamo 07:37, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
I've been wondering, why are all the "page might not be neutral", "page needs cleanup", "page might be compromised by weasel words", "page lacks sufficient cowbell" templates in article space? They're horribly obtrusive, in many cases convey the opinion of the editor who has deigned to "drive-by tag" the article more than any measure to which they reflect consensus and are next to useless for the reader. That information on Wikipedia ought to be cross-referenced and taken with a grain of salt (much like any other source) is a fact unknown to virtually no regular browser of the site, and at any rate is a notion that would be much better conveyed with a small universal disclaimer rather than with humongous, descending, colorful, graphic-laden monstrosities of a template, equivalent in all respects to the much-deprecated "Under contruction!!" notice notoriously plaguing novice websites.
In what is in no way an invocation of Argumentum ad Jimbonem, I must note that the assertion "[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made" applies to exactly this sort of case. I suggest that Templates like these should be relocated to their respective discussion pages, and anticipating that this might very probably have already been suggested and rejected, would at least like a link to the obligatory behemoth discussion that took place so I can understand the rationale behind things being the way they are now. -- AceMyth 17:07, 8 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)
Some wiki-savvy creators of speedily deleted articles also add entries for the articles they create on disambiguation pages. Could a bot handle removing dab page entries which link only to a speedily deleted article? — Swpb talk | edits 13:09, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
When I enter Wikipedia I have to click on the search field before I can start typing my phrase. Why not have the cursor there automatically, as is the case for Google and other search engines?
Thanks.
Norman Sabin Montreal, Canada (email removed) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.68.209.238 ( talk) 18:35, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
I propose that we create a tag, to be placed at the head of an article that would war readers of possibly, disturbing or downright disgusting imageages contained therein. I know Wikipedia is not censored, and nor should it be however I do believe that we should WARN people, because let's be honest does the average reader ever read any of our principles, and in that vein, couldn't we cut down on the whole angry letter business if we were to take the "hot coffee is hot" approach? Comments, my friends.
Tennekis 23:32, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
[5] is old, and raises a number of issues that would be difficult to fix. But one issue raised strikes me as relatively easy to fix in the immediate term - the bloat of syntax necessary to include infoboxes and templates at the headers of both articles and talk pages such that many pages, when a user goes to edit them, have almost a full screen of text that is not human-readable before you get to the actual article text (which, while still syntax-laden, is at least mildly intuitive). This is a particular usability problem, because it falsely gives the impression that articles are hard to edit, and is deplorably newbie biting. It's a larger problem on talk pages, which are supposed to be where people go to ask questions.
This could easily be fixed by offloading infoboxes and other information that goes before the lead in an article and all talk page templates to a subpage designated as "Header" (i.e. The weather in London/Header). Then that subpage could be transcluded into the page with a single, short template call, thus drastically reducing the amount of screen real estate necessary to get to the stuff that most people will actually be editing.
The only disadvantage I can think of is that it makes editing infoboxes harder. But given how utterly terrible template syntax is, I don't think the added step of going to a subpage adds to the difficulty particularly. In practice, if you can't figure out how to go to the subpage, you probably shouldn't touch the big infobox.
Obviously some things we'd want to exclude from this - the major dispute tags spring to mind (Which I would say are unsourced, NPOV, inaccurate, and cleanup - no more, I should think, though I'm open to having my mind changed).
Thoughts on this? Ways the proposal could be improved? Particularly template-happy WikiProjects that need to be consulted on it first? Phil Sandifer 21:46, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
(undent) You know, the simplest solution to this would be to just add a "What's all this junk in the edit box?" link above the edit toolbar that links to, say, Help:Wikitext examples to explain it to new editors, perhaps in a new window so that they don't feel like they're being directed away from editing the page. If you really wanna get slick about it and make it non-intrusive for established editors, you could either add something to the user preferences to allow hiding that link, or move it below the Edit Summary editbox after n edits by a registered (i.e., non-IP) user, but those are optional and a lot more work. I just think doing this would be a simple way to help new editors figure out what the Wiki markup is, and make it a lot less intimidating for them to try their hand at editing articles. Rdfox 76 14:11, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
The editing window for the bulk of the articles is unreadable anyway because of all the citations. Try editing [6], for example. I don't think there's anything we can do about it.
I think Phil Sandifer has made an excellent suggestion and the only concerns appear to be practical. The fact that many user-pages already use this technique should allay some fears and I hope that Phil will continue to push this idea (a few mocked up examples would be a good start) and not let it drift forgotten into the VP archives. CIreland 17:16, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Currently the Manual of Style says to put en dashes in physical titles, as long as there is a redirect from the hyphenated version, for articles like Eye-hand span and Bose-Einstein condensate.
This is ok and all, but hard to type, so freehand links (like the above) generally become redirects, and URLs of the actual articles are a little complex ("Eye%E2%80%93hand_span"). I want to propose using the DISPLAYTITLE parameter instead, like we do for titles that start with a lowercase letter.
Thoughts? — Omegatron 02:46, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Redirects are fine, but when people type this stuff as wikilinks, they're going to type a hyphen 99% of the time. Why not make the article at the hyphen and just fix the punctuation with the DISPLAYTITLE option? — Omegatron 02:37, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Citation templates has two big failings when one is fumbling to figure out how to cite a kind of reference new to one's experience— 1) so much is crammed into it's columns, its hard to read any of it and 2) it doesn't define any of the fields (template parameters). In it's defense, it does provide a link to the full doc page with full detail, but I just noticed that about an hour back. (Perhaps
WP:CITET can be given one of those ugly IN YOUR FACE notice boxes highlighting that in the head section.)
In general
Category:Citation templates has been too cluttered to be of much use, too cryptic as well, and sort of playing a safe form of russian roulette when guessing whether that one would be better or suitable at all.
Burned by struggling for a media cite last week, I suggested a help page
(goto) here on Wikipedia_talk:Citation_templates. Well actually above 'here', but the current discussion will reveal a method was explored and that the feasibility of the page is established. (No reason to recap all that here--that's what I want consensus and comment on!)
The question is now whether to procede with a Wikipedia page creation, whether to cross-link it with the existing
Wikipedia:Citation templates page, and how (Whether we section
that, or have no back links from the new page to the alternative form [both would list the same templates, but display different information about same]).
Bottom line, I think the idea worthy, especially as once things are set up both the new variation on Wikipedia:Citation templates, and the new page ([[Wikipedia:Citation templates II?) can be written so changes on the source pages (template space /doc pages per
this method) automatically update the two complimentary compendiums. That should be obvious given the discussion. Cheers! //
Fra
nkB 21:10, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
The question is whether the community would agree there is value in having a new citation templates visual help page providing parameters as well as cut and paste representation. The current WP:CITET has examples, but no parameter defines. The test I ran shows the method I suggested in response to the answers to my original post, is quite feasible. The question is whether or not to put forth the effort. // Fra nkB 00:22, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
This blog includes a graph (which might not be accurate) which seems to indicate WP has gone through some sort of transition. Is this because:
Is this graph accurate? Does this indicate a need to change policies in any way? What does it mean?-- Filll 14:28, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
As it is often the case that you go to the main page of wikipedia to search, it would be useful if the text cursor automatically was in the search box, without you having to click in it (like on google) 130.88.168.247 18:38, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Please join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/User names#Change name or else.... Cheers, Melsaran ( talk) 15:46, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Just as we let users ' undo' a certain edit, I think the 'restore this version' feature should also be available. Often undo doesn't work or doesn't cover a series of vandal edits, and even with Twinkle I can't always use it on computers with IE7 as the only browser. Richard001 22:50, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
A lot of the page histories of articles I watch are nothing more than a school boy's play pen of vandalism and reversion. Is there some way we can mark vandalism in the page history? Of course, it's a subjective matter, but for cases that are just plainly vandalism, and edits that are just straight forward reversion, it would make the history section a lot easier to navigate, especially when finding a useful edit is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Richard001 22:29, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
One way this could work is for admin rollback to add a flag to the database hiding the revisions being rolled back, and for suitably trusted users (those with accounts more than four days old, or some new level of trust) a checkbox to set the flag would be available next to the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when using the "undo" feature or editing a previous revision. Viewing of history would omit such flagged versions by default, but a checkbox would enable anyone to see such flagged revisions (not dissimilar to the checkbox enabling or disabling viewing of minor edits in "Recent Changes").
I'm not at all sure whether the benefits of this would be worth the coding effort, the additional complexity to the interface, and the issues of dealing with those who might abuse the features, but it's certainly worth discussing.- gadfium 02:08, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
As far as i know there is currently no standard way to indicate if a source is not English. I may have missed this, but im pretty sure no such guideline exits.. So what about standardize the way to indicate the language of a cited source if it isn't English? Yzmo talk 19:33, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm fairly new to the process but it seems to me that each of these arbitration requests gets rather long rather fast. It might make things easier to have each case on a subpage and transclude them onto the main page, the way we do for deletion discussions. Any thoughts on that?
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I'd like to make a suggestion not a minor one: redoing Wikipedia's article storage/retrieval method/system, or at least creating an add-on retrieval method to deal with one of Wikipedia's most problematic aspects: disambiguation - I'll outline only the latter suggestion here.
Today, typing "Cork" in the search field and and hitting "go" will take you to a contributor-created disambiguation page - yet once there the list contains far from all articles containing that term. Typing "Cork football" will send you to a "search results" page (as the article does not exist). My question is: would it be possible to automatically create disambiguation pages that resemble the second circumstance - a search results page? This should of course be applied to searches containing only single terms contained in many article titles, or multiple terms contained in many article titles.
The only problem posed by this method would be the organisation of the results returned - what order would results for a search for "Cork" be returned in? My only suggestion for now would be to sort them (upon retrieval) by their category, the latter transformed into a sub-heading under which would appear all articles in that category.
I also think it would be useful Wikipedia (and the above method) to assign (visibly or invisibly) Wikipedia articles to three 'base' categories: "people", "places" or "things". In my experience, search patterns seem to revolve around these, and presenting a contributor with this choice would cut search time drastically (if they choose to use it).
Wikipedia is trying hard to define itself as an encyclopaedia, but I find it has yet to adopt a method best for both the web media (technology) and the habits of web-users. I hope you don't mind my two cents - cheers. THEPROMENADER 06:46, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
Wiki has all the technology it needs to install a "google-like" search engine (and I already find it hard to imagine that, because of its media and structure, it doesn't have one already) or an automated disambiguation system, but perhaps the manpower (programming) is what needs to be "funded"; but really, these are not questions for we contributors. If an idea is good and good for Wiki, I'm sure that Wikipedia would be willing to invest if it is for its own better function/use. Cheers. THEPROMENADER 15:15, 29 September 2007 (UTC)
As a relative newcomer contributer but a longtime reader and 13 yrs of Yahoo and little less of googling, I must say the go and search buttons are about the most frustrating entities on the entire web (after porn and spam of course ) I've read many times that that Google searches are the way to go, well if that's the case and the underlying causes of this are finances, then let's just be done with go and search thereby reducing the workload for Wikipedia and just use a specific Google search tool on site... just as many other sites do-- Tallard 08:20, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
Sorry if this has been brought up before, but I didn't notice it in the list of perennial proposals. What do people think of adding this simple functionality to Wikipedia? Yes, it's very easy to copy the URL of an article from the address bar, but it would seem to be a rather convenient way to let others know about certain articles, and even to flag certain articles for one's own later reading. -- Lukobe 21:58, 24 September 2007 (UTC)
Good idea Lukobe. Zantaggerung 01:52, 25 September 2007 (UTC)
I haven't used Firefox for a while, but IE has this capability built in. I'm using IE 7 right now, so I'll just give that as an example. At the top of the page, there is a "Page" combo box next to an icon of a piece of paper and a pencil. If you click on the down arrow next to that icon, you get several options, including "Send page by E-mail" and "Send link by E-mail". Corvus cornix 21:46, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
For more details, see bugzilla:227. -- ais523 13:56, 5 October 2007 ( U T C)
As I recall from a while back, part of the problem is that Wikipedia doesn't want it's servers put on spam blacklists. Andrewjuren (talk) 22:42, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Proposal:_Mandatory_noindex.2Fnofollow_for_User:_ns
I love the featured content...um, feature. I was wondering if there has been thought given to generating RSS feeds for the featured content. This would allow people to see at least a clip of the featured article in their blog-roll / reader software they use. If a small intro blurb to the article was provided via an RSS feed I would think some people would end up more inclined to click through.
It would allow users to see the content easily without having to remember to visit the site daily. Just my two cents, and I apologize if this has already been suggested and rejected, I didn't notice it anywhere on this page. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Dmcnelis ( talk • contribs) 3 August 2007.
A new type of welcomebot proposal is being discussed here.
See WP:ASO.
Hi there, I was wondering - why there does not exist a search toolbar of Wikipedia for internet browsers (like Google's one)? It will make information flow much faster! Any thoughts?
Thanks, S.
Commons uses a 'wizard' when uploading, to help people identify the correct licence. There is ongoing discussion about doing something on Wikipedia at MediaWiki talk:Uploadtext#Proposal for mass overhaul, matching Commons. Could people contribute to the discussion there? -- ais523 12:45, 4 May 2007 ( U T C)
Might it be possible to have a fixed left hand panel so that features such as "community portal" and, especially the search box are available at all times.
In editing I want to focus on a particular section in "Show Preview" mode and at the same time access the search box to help me research for further editing. (It's not a problem in "edit this page" mode as the edit screen scrolls and the search box is static at the left of the screen.) If I were to “compare selected versions” on the “history” page I reach a “difference between revisions” page and have the same problem. I lose the section of interest if I just use "home" on my keyboard to access the search box.
At the moment I set up a separate tab for Wikipedia home so that I have access to the search box, and a separate tab for Wiktionary. A fixed search box or a toolbar for search and Wiktionary (is that possible? costly?) would be very user friendly. -- User:Brenont 03:52, 6 October 2007 (UTC)
I have been using this a few days and I think it is very close to being ready for prime time. There need to be conditionals based on screen height (javascript) and the number of interwikis, but this is a tremendous improvement. In order for this to get implemented though, this discussion has to move over to WP:VPT. If nobody objects in a day or so, I will be moving the thread. 1of3 15:30, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
Is this what you're looking for? meta:Help:User_style/floating_quickbar — Omegatron 02:55, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
We now have over 400 featured lists and seem to be promoting in excess of 30 per month of late (41 in August and 42 in September). When Today's featured article (TFA) started ( 2004-02-22), they only had about 200 featured articles and were barely promoting 20 new ones per month. I think the quality of featured lists is at least as good as the quality of featured articles was when they started appearing on the main page. Thus, I am ready to open debate on a proposal to institute a List of the Day on the main page with nominations starting November 1 2007, voting starting December 1 2007 and main page appearances starting January 1 2008. For brevity, the proposal page does not discuss the details of eventual main page content, but since the work has already been done, you should consider this proposal assuming the eventual content will resemble the current content at the featured content page. Such output would probably start at the bottom of the main page. The proposal page does not debate whether starting with weekly list main page entries would be better than daily entries. However, I suspect persons in favor of weekly lists are really voicing opinions against lists on the main page since neither TFA nor Picture of the day started as weekly endeavors, to the best of my knowledge. See the List of the Day proposal and comment at WP:LOTDP and its talk page.-- TonyTheTiger ( t/ c/ bio/ tcfkaWCDbwincowtchatlotpsoplrttaDCLaM) 14:23, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
The Creative Commons copyright tags are a bit varied in their layout, and I think they should be standardized. Here are the differences I see:
To me, {{ cc-by-3.0}} looks the best stylistically, so my proposal would be to use it as the standard for all of them, with the following changes:
I don't think that the direct link to the image in {{ cc-by-sa}} is necessary, but I think it's used on all the CC tags on Commons, so perhaps it should be included for the sake of uniformity.
What do you think? -- Crazy Legs KC 09:36, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
When a disambiguation page exists, it may prevent some users (novice ones especially) from finding other relevant pages that show up in the search results for that term. For example, the disambig page Beds lists two items and a link to Bed (disambiguation). If you search for Beds, however, you get 23,000 results, at least some of which are probably of interest to someone who types Beds into the search box and hits Enter or clicks Go.
The current {{ Disambig}} template is worded like this:
Between those two sentences, I propose that we add:
I'm not sure on the most succinct way to word this. Any other thoughts? — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 18:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Any opposition to this change? If there is none within a week, could an admin please make the change? — Jonathan Kovaciny ( talk| contribs) 19:47, 3 October 2007 (UTC)
Go
expecting a Good Thing to happen. Ups, it is not happening! The root cause is not the broken disambiguation pages, but the Go
button acting not so intuitively.I was surprised not to already find this somewhere on the Wik, especially in perennial proposals or in the Project of Fun or similar locations. The proposal is this: set aside some corner of WP, either all the subpages of the format Wikipedia:Lexicon/whatever or some other subdivision (if it got hugely popular, perhaps its own namespace) and play Lexicon on it. I'm aware that isn't really what Wikipedia is designed for, games do not belong here, we are trying to be serious and spread information, take your games elsewhere, etc. But clearly, pretty much by definition, Wikipedia has the largest editing community of any wiki around, and a Lexicon hosted by WP or at least by Wikimedia would be sure to never die through inactivity--there would always be new people to step in for dropouts--and the lexicons would, I believe, be of superior quality to games cobbled together out of whoever you can find online. Thoughts?-- Mobius Soul 19:48, 19 September 2007 (UTC)
Using the what links here feature, when it directs you to a very long article, is there any way, right now, to quickly find a specific link to a specific page within that article? Especially when the words used in the text are not the same as the title of the page linked to? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Blanchardb ( talk • contribs) 23:06, 13 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)
We of the Military history WikiProject have been planning to tag our style guide as part of the official MoS. In light of this, we would like to invite community comments regarding this; if you have any opinion, suggestions, and so forth, please drop by WT:MILHIST#MOS. Thanks! Kirill 20:31, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
There is a proposal to create a new group, either separately or under the umbrella of the WP:CVU, with the express purpose of creating a "mass discussion of vandalism and what to do about it" and the further suggestion at Wikipedia_talk:Counter-Vandalism_Unit#Help.21 that the group may also "also reorganize messy articles and re-classify wrongly-classified articles". Please contribute to the discussions at Wikipedia_talk:Counter-Vandalism_Unit#Help.21 and User talk:Gp75motorsports/Wikipedia Users' Alliance/CVU-WUA debate. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 18:12, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Why can't we put a "reply" link on talk page section headers? That would make it easier to reply, instead of having to section edit. Jonathan letters to the editor — things I've written 17:34, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
If a female actor is an actress, and a female waiter is a waitress, shouldn't a female writer be a writress?
Cizzam18 16:24, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
I have rebooted and rewritten the old proposal to allow for Wikipedia:Featured Lists to be placed on the main page. The prior proposal, which was losing ground and had no consensus, although well meaning, called for a complicated selection process for prospective Featured Lists on the Main Page. This proposal assumes the simplest possible selection process (chronological, similar to Today's Featured Picture), and asks not how a Featured List should appear on the main page, but whether or not Featured Lists should be on the main page in the first place. Please visit Wikipedia:Today's featured list and leave feedback at Wikipedia talk:Today's featured list. Thanks. -- Jeffrey O. Gustafson - Shazaam! - <*> 10:02, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
This is a request for a new feature in the MediaWiki software. On the article history page like http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Pedophilia&action=history I have to click a thousand times if I want to download all versions so I can grep them. Of course, I could write a shell script to do the job but that would burden the server and only help those who have the script. I think it would be better, if the version history page contained a prominent link to download the entire version history as Pedophilia,v in RCS format as created by multiple
ci -d$DATE -w$USER -l $ARTICLE
commands. Any volunteer implementors reading here? Roman Czyborra 11:34, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
Thank you for the pointers to tools I hadn't known before. Special:Export is already helpful, but it is wasteful of bandwidth as it does not apply RCS diff compression, and it is limited to the 100 last revisions while I need a complete revision history. The WhodunitQuery is nice but limited to Microsoft Windows. So I still recommend my initial proposal be implemented. Roman Czyborra 08:35, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
Articles have talk pages for suggesting improvement or the removal of errors IF it is not possible for the critic to simply make the changes themselves. While done in good faith, I find the litter of commnets often pasted on pages in parenthesis rather bad preentation for wikipeida, not to mention ugly and unnecessary (her is one example [ [4]] at the time of posting. I certainly don't remember such text insertions being as common in the past. I suggest what is picked up on is Edited or discussed in the relevant arenas instead Dainamo 07:37, 19 October 2007 (UTC)
I've been wondering, why are all the "page might not be neutral", "page needs cleanup", "page might be compromised by weasel words", "page lacks sufficient cowbell" templates in article space? They're horribly obtrusive, in many cases convey the opinion of the editor who has deigned to "drive-by tag" the article more than any measure to which they reflect consensus and are next to useless for the reader. That information on Wikipedia ought to be cross-referenced and taken with a grain of salt (much like any other source) is a fact unknown to virtually no regular browser of the site, and at any rate is a notion that would be much better conveyed with a small universal disclaimer rather than with humongous, descending, colorful, graphic-laden monstrosities of a template, equivalent in all respects to the much-deprecated "Under contruction!!" notice notoriously plaguing novice websites.
In what is in no way an invocation of Argumentum ad Jimbonem, I must note that the assertion "[Wikipedia is] like a sausage: you might like the taste of it, but you don't necessarily want to see how it's made" applies to exactly this sort of case. I suggest that Templates like these should be relocated to their respective discussion pages, and anticipating that this might very probably have already been suggested and rejected, would at least like a link to the obligatory behemoth discussion that took place so I can understand the rationale behind things being the way they are now. -- AceMyth 17:07, 8 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)
Some wiki-savvy creators of speedily deleted articles also add entries for the articles they create on disambiguation pages. Could a bot handle removing dab page entries which link only to a speedily deleted article? — Swpb talk | edits 13:09, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
When I enter Wikipedia I have to click on the search field before I can start typing my phrase. Why not have the cursor there automatically, as is the case for Google and other search engines?
Thanks.
Norman Sabin Montreal, Canada (email removed) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.68.209.238 ( talk) 18:35, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
I propose that we create a tag, to be placed at the head of an article that would war readers of possibly, disturbing or downright disgusting imageages contained therein. I know Wikipedia is not censored, and nor should it be however I do believe that we should WARN people, because let's be honest does the average reader ever read any of our principles, and in that vein, couldn't we cut down on the whole angry letter business if we were to take the "hot coffee is hot" approach? Comments, my friends.
Tennekis 23:32, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
[5] is old, and raises a number of issues that would be difficult to fix. But one issue raised strikes me as relatively easy to fix in the immediate term - the bloat of syntax necessary to include infoboxes and templates at the headers of both articles and talk pages such that many pages, when a user goes to edit them, have almost a full screen of text that is not human-readable before you get to the actual article text (which, while still syntax-laden, is at least mildly intuitive). This is a particular usability problem, because it falsely gives the impression that articles are hard to edit, and is deplorably newbie biting. It's a larger problem on talk pages, which are supposed to be where people go to ask questions.
This could easily be fixed by offloading infoboxes and other information that goes before the lead in an article and all talk page templates to a subpage designated as "Header" (i.e. The weather in London/Header). Then that subpage could be transcluded into the page with a single, short template call, thus drastically reducing the amount of screen real estate necessary to get to the stuff that most people will actually be editing.
The only disadvantage I can think of is that it makes editing infoboxes harder. But given how utterly terrible template syntax is, I don't think the added step of going to a subpage adds to the difficulty particularly. In practice, if you can't figure out how to go to the subpage, you probably shouldn't touch the big infobox.
Obviously some things we'd want to exclude from this - the major dispute tags spring to mind (Which I would say are unsourced, NPOV, inaccurate, and cleanup - no more, I should think, though I'm open to having my mind changed).
Thoughts on this? Ways the proposal could be improved? Particularly template-happy WikiProjects that need to be consulted on it first? Phil Sandifer 21:46, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
(undent) You know, the simplest solution to this would be to just add a "What's all this junk in the edit box?" link above the edit toolbar that links to, say, Help:Wikitext examples to explain it to new editors, perhaps in a new window so that they don't feel like they're being directed away from editing the page. If you really wanna get slick about it and make it non-intrusive for established editors, you could either add something to the user preferences to allow hiding that link, or move it below the Edit Summary editbox after n edits by a registered (i.e., non-IP) user, but those are optional and a lot more work. I just think doing this would be a simple way to help new editors figure out what the Wiki markup is, and make it a lot less intimidating for them to try their hand at editing articles. Rdfox 76 14:11, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
The editing window for the bulk of the articles is unreadable anyway because of all the citations. Try editing [6], for example. I don't think there's anything we can do about it.
I think Phil Sandifer has made an excellent suggestion and the only concerns appear to be practical. The fact that many user-pages already use this technique should allay some fears and I hope that Phil will continue to push this idea (a few mocked up examples would be a good start) and not let it drift forgotten into the VP archives. CIreland 17:16, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
Currently the Manual of Style says to put en dashes in physical titles, as long as there is a redirect from the hyphenated version, for articles like Eye-hand span and Bose-Einstein condensate.
This is ok and all, but hard to type, so freehand links (like the above) generally become redirects, and URLs of the actual articles are a little complex ("Eye%E2%80%93hand_span"). I want to propose using the DISPLAYTITLE parameter instead, like we do for titles that start with a lowercase letter.
Thoughts? — Omegatron 02:46, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
Redirects are fine, but when people type this stuff as wikilinks, they're going to type a hyphen 99% of the time. Why not make the article at the hyphen and just fix the punctuation with the DISPLAYTITLE option? — Omegatron 02:37, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Citation templates has two big failings when one is fumbling to figure out how to cite a kind of reference new to one's experience— 1) so much is crammed into it's columns, its hard to read any of it and 2) it doesn't define any of the fields (template parameters). In it's defense, it does provide a link to the full doc page with full detail, but I just noticed that about an hour back. (Perhaps
WP:CITET can be given one of those ugly IN YOUR FACE notice boxes highlighting that in the head section.)
In general
Category:Citation templates has been too cluttered to be of much use, too cryptic as well, and sort of playing a safe form of russian roulette when guessing whether that one would be better or suitable at all.
Burned by struggling for a media cite last week, I suggested a help page
(goto) here on Wikipedia_talk:Citation_templates. Well actually above 'here', but the current discussion will reveal a method was explored and that the feasibility of the page is established. (No reason to recap all that here--that's what I want consensus and comment on!)
The question is now whether to procede with a Wikipedia page creation, whether to cross-link it with the existing
Wikipedia:Citation templates page, and how (Whether we section
that, or have no back links from the new page to the alternative form [both would list the same templates, but display different information about same]).
Bottom line, I think the idea worthy, especially as once things are set up both the new variation on Wikipedia:Citation templates, and the new page ([[Wikipedia:Citation templates II?) can be written so changes on the source pages (template space /doc pages per
this method) automatically update the two complimentary compendiums. That should be obvious given the discussion. Cheers! //
Fra
nkB 21:10, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
The question is whether the community would agree there is value in having a new citation templates visual help page providing parameters as well as cut and paste representation. The current WP:CITET has examples, but no parameter defines. The test I ran shows the method I suggested in response to the answers to my original post, is quite feasible. The question is whether or not to put forth the effort. // Fra nkB 00:22, 17 October 2007 (UTC)
This blog includes a graph (which might not be accurate) which seems to indicate WP has gone through some sort of transition. Is this because:
Is this graph accurate? Does this indicate a need to change policies in any way? What does it mean?-- Filll 14:28, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
As it is often the case that you go to the main page of wikipedia to search, it would be useful if the text cursor automatically was in the search box, without you having to click in it (like on google) 130.88.168.247 18:38, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
Please join the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Requests for comment/User names#Change name or else.... Cheers, Melsaran ( talk) 15:46, 15 October 2007 (UTC)
Just as we let users ' undo' a certain edit, I think the 'restore this version' feature should also be available. Often undo doesn't work or doesn't cover a series of vandal edits, and even with Twinkle I can't always use it on computers with IE7 as the only browser. Richard001 22:50, 9 October 2007 (UTC)
A lot of the page histories of articles I watch are nothing more than a school boy's play pen of vandalism and reversion. Is there some way we can mark vandalism in the page history? Of course, it's a subjective matter, but for cases that are just plainly vandalism, and edits that are just straight forward reversion, it would make the history section a lot easier to navigate, especially when finding a useful edit is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Richard001 22:29, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
One way this could work is for admin rollback to add a flag to the database hiding the revisions being rolled back, and for suitably trusted users (those with accounts more than four days old, or some new level of trust) a checkbox to set the flag would be available next to the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when using the "undo" feature or editing a previous revision. Viewing of history would omit such flagged versions by default, but a checkbox would enable anyone to see such flagged revisions (not dissimilar to the checkbox enabling or disabling viewing of minor edits in "Recent Changes").
I'm not at all sure whether the benefits of this would be worth the coding effort, the additional complexity to the interface, and the issues of dealing with those who might abuse the features, but it's certainly worth discussing.- gadfium 02:08, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
As far as i know there is currently no standard way to indicate if a source is not English. I may have missed this, but im pretty sure no such guideline exits.. So what about standardize the way to indicate the language of a cited source if it isn't English? Yzmo talk 19:33, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
I'm fairly new to the process but it seems to me that each of these arbitration requests gets rather long rather fast. It might make things easier to have each case on a subpage and transclude them onto the main page, the way we do for deletion discussions. Any thoughts on that?