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I would like to propose article editor improvement. Currently both the article's content, categories and interwikies are mixed together. As other language wikies develop, most articles will have a link to every other language article. Articles categorization is piling up. To aid newcommers (and some existing editors), I think the editor should have two edit boxes - one for the page content, and another to add all metadata: categories and interwikies, anything that is not shown in the article directly. No articles have to be changed - the split-up can be done dynamically. Meta-edit can have a dhtml show/hide button to simplify editing, plus maybe some javascript automation for new users. -- Yurik 09:25, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This may have been discussed to death elsewhere, but I'm curious as to why the Book Sources page doesn't participate in Amazon.com's affiliate program (or any other bookseller's cash-for-links) program. It would seem like an easy way for WP to raise money without any of the sort of compromises that come from advertising. jdb ❋ ( talk) 07:13, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
A proposal has been made to convert all British to American spellings. See Wikipedia:Standardize Spellings. Care to express your opinion? :-) - Omegatron 00:34, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
A proposal has been made that we convert all Wikipedia articles to Yoda-speak. See Wikipedia:Write like this we should. Grutness| hello? 07:03, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Village Pump is too big. All of the major sections are in One Big Page. The Pump should be divided into distinct pages.
I can never get the Pump to load on the first attempt; it usually takes several. In order to navigate to a more manageable section, I have to load the One Big Page first. It's slow for the user and hard on server resources.
Even the major sections -- News, Policy, Technical, etc. -- are way too big. Of course, any user can archive them, but most comments should remain visible for more than a day or two -- and a week's worth, let alone two, of comments in any one of these sections constitutes an excessively long page.
Can we not consider perhaps 2 or 3 additional major sections? I don't care along what lines; it's a technical division. Then, can we not put each major section on its own page, and reduce the current page to a directory, with links to each major section and its archives? — Xiong ( talk) 19:18, 2005 Mar 26 (UTC)
Well, I understand the transclusion, now that you point it out. Of course I can create some private directory into the Pump -- and by that I include putting {{ Villagepump}} in my user page, or some such workaround; {{ Villagepumppages}} might work better for this. As it stands, Community Portal has only a single link to the Pump, which displays as one, big, browser-breaking page. I'd be immediately appeased to see {{ Villagepumppages}} included within Community Portal.
You can only carry on a certain number of conversations within a single room. Even absent any structural reason for dividing the group, it's necessary. You're right that many users, including myself, lack a clear idea of where certain discussions should go -- Policy or Proposal? Technical or Assistance? There may not be a sure cure for this. People will tend to post questions wherever they feel they will get attention.
If structural division worked, this would be a foolish idea, but since it often does not, no harm is done. If some rooms get crowded, they may easily and naturally be divided, simply by adding another color room; I hope the problem of excessive page size would be eliminated before we run out of common colors.
Those who post to a given room will be more likely to find subsequent edits pertain to their concerns. Those who feel the need to watch over all the Pump may do so; I don't see this would increase their total workload -- more pages, but smaller ones. They can use {{ Villagepumppages}} to navigate to them all. — Xiong ( talk) 01:47, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
I would like to propose a project for schools and universities. Teachers can ask students to contribute to wikipedia as part of their class assignment, either in groups or individually. For example, a history teacher can ask students to research and write about some historical figure or event, science - about a new material or invention, and foreign languages - translation from/to interwiki.
Pros
Cons
TODO
-- Yurik 08:27, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Some articles are plagued by multiple stubs. Personally, I don't see it as a deadly crime. Some just don't like it. I think it is actually caused by the faulty design of the wiki syntax.
At first we have only {{msg:stub}} and no category flags. Then we have categories. Later, we have categorized stubs. We seemed to forget the fact that stub is only a quality of the article. We shall not use it as a categorization tool.
I propose that we abandon all categorized stubs and merge all {{stub}} and [[category:]] categories. If an article has the {{stub}} or {{substub}} flag and belongs to 6 categories, it will be listed under the stub or substub sections of said 6 categories.
This is much more efficient and consistent. -- Toytoy 09:51, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
My point is to categorize stubs using the [[category:]] categories and let {{stub}} become just a flag. Currently, "stub" and "category" have distinct categories. This is a waste.
Take the article Tomato for example, currently it is listed under three categories:
If you click each link, the wiki server shows you articles categorized under each category.
Under current method, you need to append three stub notices if you want to advertize it under three stub categories.
These stub categores are my inventions. Currently, there are much fewer stub categories and they are not hierarchal.
Using my method, if you append {{stub}} or {{substub}} in the article, the same article will read:
or
Without the {{stub}} flag, the wiki server will generate a list of both non-stub and stub articles (stub and stub articles will be marked). With the {{stub}} flag, the wiki server will generate a list of stub articles under each category.
Currently, stubs are categorized while substubs are not. This is not good enough. -- Toytoy 05:30, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
There is only one problem with your proposal... who would redevelop the software to support it? People have been bugging to have the ability to use a union function between two categories for some time now. Granted, it would be a lot easier if all the articles had some kind of option flag to mark if it needs improvement, etc. -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:32, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I found it difficult to post a new article. Specifically on U.S. coin mintages. This sort of specific information is at the heart of numismatics and could spark interest in numismasist. Generally people who are into coin collecting are into research and would be a perfect addition to this community. Unfortunately after beginning and making some progress on this work my internet connection was lost. This has never happened on any other webpage and I wonder if it is common here. It was discouraging to waste all of that time for nothing. Anyway I reccomend U.S. coin mintages as a topic (that is if you can write on this system). Thanks, Dan
I have written and posted a proposal and embryonic project page at Wikipedia:Merge lists to categories. The idea is to merge redundant lists into categories (preferably using automated processes such as scripts or bots). If you are for or against this, the talk page is open to comment. I have already carried out a test case between the article Gay icon and Category:Gay icons. Philwelch 23:49, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
What do you think? MediaWiki 1.5, maybe? Note the difference between some of the sentences. I think the addition of this would be good. r3m0t talk 10:27, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
First of all let me apologise if this has been discussed before. I don't really know what to call it so I am unable to search for it. With that said:
My friend and I had this really cool idea. It's similar to googlewhacking, if you've heard of that. Basically the concept is:
I've made a section on my forum for this, which you can check out at Wikirace.tk. You'll have to register to post of course.
Once more, I apologise if this has been done before.
Please leave comments on my talk page if possible. -- HMP22 06:42, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Check out Wikipedia:N degrees of separation I think this may be very similiar if not exactly what you're talking about. Jaberwocky6669 18:26, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
i just let current (electricity) sit there with "barbies and seals rule so much!" for 2 hours. that is horrible. maybe we should have some kind of award for people who revert vandalisms the quickest. maybe hold a record for the quickest reversion.
oh crap; this will just make people vandalize so they can revert themselves. oh well. i shot down my own idea. - Omegatron 01:01, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
How about a collection of psychological case studies on Wikipedia?!? Huh? Huh? Aint that a good idea? Whad't I tell ya? lol but seriously though wouldn't that be cool? It should be exhaustive with multiple case studies for each disorder. Old public domain case studies exist I'm sure. Jaberwocky6669 21:31, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
What if Wikimedia added a "Wiki-Law" similar to "FindLaw" that included all the public decisions on all the major cases in history. For example, the majority and minority opinion in Roe v. Wade, alongside some of the legal decisions made by the English Parlament. Replace Lexus-Nexus with something like this. Could get this in some format from the national archives to make the addition easier Nick Catalano 18:02, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This is the code for a navbox ( Template:Toolband), or will be with the changed outlined in Bugzilla:1707.
{| align=center class="toccolours" ! [[Tool (band)|Tool]] |- |align=center|[[Maynard James Keenan]] | [[Adam Jones]] | [[Danny Carey]] | [[Justin Chancellor]] | [[Paul d'Amour]] |- ![[Tool (band)#Discography|Discography]] |- |align=center|''[[Opiate (album)|Opiate]]'' | ''[[Undertow]]'' | ''[[Ænima]]'' | ''[[Salival]]'' | ''[[Lateralus]]'' |- !Popular Songs |- |align=center|"[[Stinkfist]]" | "[[Schism]]" | "[[Sober (song)|Sober]]" |- !Related articles |- |align=center|''[[Progressive rock]]'' | ''[[A Perfect Circle]]'' | ''[[Peach (band)|Peach]]'' |}
This is how it renders.
Tool |
---|
Maynard James Keenan | Adam Jones | Danny Carey | Justin Chancellor | Paul d'Amour |
Discography |
Opiate | Undertow | Ænima | Salival | Lateralus |
Popular Songs |
" Stinkfist" | " Schism" | " Sober" |
Related articles |
Progressive rock | A Perfect Circle | Peach |
Now, a user stylesheet could change that around to look like
Tool |
---|
Maynard James Keenan | Adam Jones | Danny Carey | Justin Chancellor | Paul d'Amour |
Discography |
Opiate | Undertow | Ænima | Salival | Lateralus |
Popular Songs |
" Stinkfist" | " Schism" | " Sober" |
Related articles |
Progressive rock | A Perfect Circle | Peach |
if they, I dunno, really liked limes or something, or thought the small text crammed into the body of the box was a poor idea. Someone with actual CSS skills could probably do something much, much cooler. The idea, really, is to allow navboxes to be written with purely semantic markup, styled after the fact with CSS. (The same might be possible with meta-templates, but CSS is really the place for it.)
Thoughts? Improvements? Stunningly brilliant and innovative applications of CSS? grendel| khan 17:55, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)
.toccolors th {background:#aaffaa;}
Here's my stab:
Edit | Tool |
---|---|
Band members | Maynard James Keenan | Adam Jones | Danny Carey | Justin Chancellor | Paul d'Amour |
Discography | Opiate | Undertow | Ænima | Salival | Lateralus |
Popular songs | " Stinkfist" | " Schism" | " Sober" |
Related articles | Progressive rock | A Perfect Circle | Peach |
What do you think? Noisy | Talk 15:19, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
Instead of changing .toccolours
, it may be better to create a new class (.navbox
?). Then users won't see any unexpected surprises all over wikipedia, and you can build the CSS and HTML freely, in the best possible way. It gets implemented under editors' control, and as a bonus you get to use a class name that makes sense. —
Michael
Z. 2005-03-23 17:13 Z
Good idea, except for those of us (me, for instance) who don't use Monobook. Styling of this sort is useless if it only appears in a single skin. See, rather, skins/common/common.css, which is included in every skin. I do agree that adding a .navbox class is a better idea than continuing to attempt to wrap .toccolours around everything. Good idea, that. I'm going to put a change on Bugzilla:1707. grendel| khan 19:12, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)
Why not make an option (disabled by default, and not availabe for non-logged in users) to display ads on wikipedia? It'd be optional, and only people that were willing to endure some annoyance in exchange for supporting the Wikipedia would do it. Those that didn't feel that much loyalty for the Wikipedia or just really hated ads wouldn't pick it. It wouldn't scare any prospective members away because anonymous users wouldn't see ads and when they registered an account it would be disabled by default. What do you guys think? -Cookiemobsta
I noticed a while back that sound files were routinely being requested for featured article candidates. Would it be useful to have page like Wikipedia:Picture requests for sound files: spoken text, pronunciation, music...? This might be a way of increasing the amount of sound available with articles. Gareth Hughes 15:54, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've been a long time viewer of Wikimedia, and I think it's brilliant stuff.
I've had an idea for awhile, and I think it's high time I brought it out. WikiStory - that is, an interactive story told by any number of storytellers, each story original, linked from various hypertext words that are prevalent towards that certain story.
For example, if you are telling a story about a man who killed a bear with his bare hands, and you mention that they fought in a certain forest, then that certain forest would be linked to another story, which is about that forest, or talks about that forest in greater detail, but is an altogether different story.
You could bridge genre with this sort of thing, telling a fictional, world-epic, of hundreds of different points of view, with hundreds of different stories - sort of like a human monolith of experience.
I'd be happy to discuss this more.
Just make a wikibook, explain the idea at the top and add your story. If it catches on you'll have plenty of support for making a separate page. WilliamJuhl 18:52, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hello,
I recently bought a 1GB SD card so that I could download the English Tomeraider Wikipedia to my Palm m515.
I quickly discovered that in this edition, people entries are not in order of surname but in order of first name. So, for instance, Erik Zachte would be under "E" and not under "Z". Apparently the German edition of Wikipedia is in surname order.
A lot of the time I look people up is that I can't remember their first names.
Doing a full search takes far too long.
So, all in all, I think something needs to be done; and I'd be willing to help.
I've had a short e-mail conversation with Erik Zachte about this. He was the one who suggested I raise it here. The conversation is appended to this post (apologies if that makes it rather long but as I know very little about Wikipedia technology I thought I'd better let Erik speak for himself rather than trying to paraphrase him and get it all wrong).
Anyway, I think this is important and, as I said, am willing to help. Unfortunately I don't speak Python although I have a smattering of Perl and Java.
What do you folk think?
If you are interested, please do e-mail me off-list at harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk
Harold Fuchs, London, England
Here's my e-mail correspondence with Erik.
start of e-mails ------------------
From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 11:03 Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries
Harold, what I meant was a project where aliasses would be added manually. The actual term on Wikipedia is 'redirect', an article named 'Fuchs, Harold' that only contains text
1. REDIRECTHarold Fuchs
When you request article 'Fuchs, Harold', you will automatically be redirected to 'Harold Fuchs'.
There are mass updates done by bots, mostly written in Python. But this would need thorough discussion first, and it probably would not qualify for complete automation, as there is too much ambiguity in detecting relevant articles and composing proper redirect. Some bots are half automated, proposing a change and waiting for an OK after manual inspection.
Just drop the question at the village pump and see what comes out of it.
Oh, you can help by improving an article. Below every article there is an edit button so that you can expand or correct the text. Thats the core idea of a wiki, where Wikipedia is shining example of. Contrary to intuition this low barrier does not hamper overall quality of the database.
More introductory info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal
Erik
.
Original Message-----
From: Harold Fuchs mailto:harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 09:43 To: Erik Zachte Subject: Re: Wikipedia Entries
Erik,
You said "If you are really motivated you could start a project to add aliasses for all people articles"
1. Is there a way to identify "people articles"? Or do you just mean an entry that starts with either <letters>[space]<letters>[space}<letters> (name1 name2 name3) or with <letters>[space]<letters> (name1 name2)? This would be very easy to program in Perl using regular expressions. One would have to allow for dots (John F. Kennedy) and hyphens
2. What do you mean by "add aliasses"? I was thinking about the following pseudo code: if the entry starts with 3 names then
add an entry in the form name3, name2 name1 "see" [link to] name1 name2 name3
elseif the entry starts with two names then
add an entry in the form name2, name1 "see" [link to] name1 name2
endif
Is this what you meant? Or?
For the 3-name case one could add two new entries. One would be for name3 name2, name1 to cover people with two surnames and the other for name3, name1 name2 to cover people with two "first" names
Unfortunately, The ^&*% English have made it harder. I just found an entry "A. A. B. Bussy" (four names). The complete entry is like this:
[M] Antoine Alexandre Brutus Bussy (May 29, 1794 - February 1, 1882) was a French Chemist. He was the first to prepare Magnesium in a coherent form in 1831. [image] - This biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .
Unfortunately it doesn't say how I can help Wikipedia :-(
Regards, Harold
Original Message -----
From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 12:22 AM Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries
Harold,
You might raise the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump which is a discussion forum for all kinds of things related to English Wikipedia.
I just realized that the category system offers some clues for which articles are about persons, but I have no idea how complete categorization is. There are also lists of famous scientists, sportsmen, politicians, that offer further clues.
If you are really motivated you could start a project to add aliasses for all people articles. This seems more feasible than the German templates. The hidden template system presupposes automated processing and I'm not sure many people would get enthusiastic to do his just for the TomeRaider version (German WIkipedia is also processed by other publishing software)
If after discussion you decide to give this a chance, you might add a project page, solicit coworkers and you might be amazed how many hands might be on the job, making it lighter work than you would expect, and a project that can be finished in weeks, or at most two months.
You could also discuss it at the Wikipedia mailling list, http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l but I would start with the Village Pump.
Cheers, Erik
Original Message-----
From: Harold Fuchs mailto:harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 12:56 To: Erik Zachte Subject: Re: Wikipedia Entries
Erik,
Thank you.
Although my surname is German I don't speak enough for the German Wikipedia to be useful to me
It is a shame that the English Wikipedians didn't adopt a more logical template. Is there someone I could talk (e-mail) to about it?
It seems to me that the English Wikipedia has been considerably devalued because of this.
Regards, Harold PS enjoy your Wikibreak
Original Message -----
From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 11:56 PM Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries
Hi Harold.
Sorry for late answer. I also think it was a bad choice to use this arrangement for articles about people.
If you were interested in the German Wikipedia I would have a solution: they have a standard template on all people pages, with first name, last name, date and place of birth, etc. It is strictly standardized as it is meant specifically for automatic processing, in fact the template is hidden from view and only visible while editing an article.
Example: Template:Personendaten
This would have been an ideal basis to generate redirects to the proper article with first and last name reversed. These alias records would have to be stored in a separate file and only added to the output when all input was processed and when no article with that name was already available (there are a lot of manually added 'redirects' already in the database)
However in the English database there is no such standard template (not yet, more concepts have been introduced by German Wikipedians and copied elsewhere).
Many articles about people start with year and place of birth in the first sentence. A script could do some fuzzy searching in the first 200 chars and make an educated guess if this is a biographic article, but of course this will be far from perfect, I think a 50-60% score would have to be called be a sucess.
Also if a name needs to be reversed, how to do that properly?
How to discern <first name >space<middle name>space<last name> from <first name>space<last name one>space<last name two> (lots of last names are made up of separate parts)
Anyway, I will take no action on this. I'm very definitely taking a step back from TomeRaider programming, other Wikipedia tasks are waiting and even more important I need a long wikibreak on the earliest occasion.
So maybe wait for the German concept to spread.
Best regards, Erik Zachte
Original Message-----
From: Harold Fuchs mailto:harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk Sent: Wednesday, 02 March 2005 02:56 To: epzachte@chello.nl Subject: Wikipedia Entries
Sir,
I have just downloaded the Wikipedia in Tomeraider format. Fantastic.
I'm puzzled though:
People seem to be entered in <firstName>[space]<lastName> format. So, for example, I would be entered as "Harold Fuchs" and not as "Fuchs, Harold".
This means that you have to know the person's first name to look them up - unless you are willing to wait however many hours it will take to search the database using Tomeraider's "Find" facility.
Often I don't know the person's first name and that is why I am looking them up (!!!).
Can anything be done? Obviously a script of some sort but how many "mistakes" would that make, where for example "Suez Canal" would get changed to "Canal, Suez" which is probably *not* what we want ... (not what I would want anyway).
Any thoughts?
Harold Fuchs London, England PS I think I can still remember how to write perl ...
The only way I can see to do this would be to descend through all the subcategories of Category:People, and to make sure there is a link from the categorised name to the actual name. This would miss uncategorised people, and it would also fail on people who were added to a category without a sort order or with an incorrect sort order, but this would be a minority of cases and probably not harmful.- gadfium 06:00, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Names like van Gogh, van den Burgh, de Sade and so on can be covered by rules implemented using a small set of "magic" words like "van", "de" and so on coupled with sensitivity to case so that "Van Morrison" is not confused with somebody whose surname happens to be "van Morrison".
It really seems to me that this is an important issue that should be resolved before the Wikipedia goes much further. A serious release to the "public" would cause the whole project, and the people associated with it, to become laughing stocks.
Harold Fuchs 23 March 2005, 19:00 GMT
Wikipedia could make a rule that names like Eduardo Nicolás Cruz Sánchez would come out as "Sánchez, Eduardo Nicolás Cruz", and "Vincent van Gogh" would come out as "Gough, Vincent van". The latter is perfectably acceptable in Dutch so I don't see why us heathen Brits should complain. IMHO, that would be a lot better than what exists today. And the "logic" is simple to explain and to understand.
Harold Fuchs 23 March 2005, 19:05 GMT
We need a good way for speakers of different language to cooperate in providing information about their native language. There are very few audio files in the pronunciation section of the commons, something that could be fixed by just a few native speakers with microphones, and any article or wikibook on a language could benefit greatly from edits by native speakers. I think something as small as a link for multilingual users in the things to do section(of every language) would help, but I would like to see a section in every wikipedia devoted to educating others about their language, where they can not only give lessons, but suggest music, movies leterature and other media. I'm sure that with all the accusations of cultural imperialism leveled against the united states we could at least get a lot of additions to the English wikipedia. However we go about it, I think that with some more international, interlingual cooperation, a large colaborative community project like wikipedia coould easily be the single best way of learning or learning about onother languages and cultures short of moving to their counties of origin.
I have seen lots of vandalism in external links. Just to promote their website the are linkinkg those pages . Yes we can argue like it is important and relavent data. I think instead of having seperate external links we can direct it to dmoz relavent directory. For example just take nutrition page you can see many website. Really it make any sense. It is my opinion. Actually today i have removed some external links and i got a message also why u r removing the useful website. Some websites are having one page relavent materials and that site is not at all in line with our interest. Please let me know u r opinion.I am not going to delete any links here after.
The spoiler template, as it now stands, simply warns readers they may not wish to proceed further. Why not revise it so that a link would be provided for non-spoiler information below the plot summary? (As a newbie, I worry that this might be over my head, so I'm suggesting it for someone else to take on). Lkjhgfdsa 21:39, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Doesn't always work well; for example, references and external links still belong at the bottom. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:14, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)
We have a solution, thanks to Korath. It is documented at Template talk:Spoiler top, and illustrated by example at Bovo-Bukh. Template talk:Spoilerbox is now obsolete, because Korath's solution is simply better. I would suggest that this should probably supersede Template:Spoiler as well. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:16, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
To whom it may concern:
One thing I would like to see is a printable version of Wikipedia pages. It would make it much easier for students to gather information, etc., because sometimes we encounter problems while transferring articles and their documentation into Word and other such programs. Maybe the feature's present and I can't see it.
This printing issue seems to be an ongoing one. We discussed this before. I can't remember what the outcome was. I think there should be a "printer friendly" button, myself. -- Munchkinguy 03:54, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I recently listed a page for deletion and the clear consensus - er, unanimous decision, was that it was an easy "transwiki". I looked at the pages and found nothing easy about it or its procedure. The link on Votes for Deletion go to the page Wikipedia:Transwiki log while Wikipedia:Transwiki oddly redirects to Wikipedia:Things to be moved to Wiktionary which claims to be mostly deprecated although it is the only transwiki page listed on Template:Page fixing tools. Most of the information on the procedure is listed at [ Meta:Transwiki]. Both Wikipedia Transwiki log and Meta:Transwiki suggest a block of boilerplate text to use but neither mention the at least five separate templates in use. Four of the tags are mentioned on Template:Deletiontools (At least they do now that I have fixed it.) and these four use categories to collect the articles. Template:Transwiki doesn't and seems to be mainly forgotten. I haven't found any template for foreign language transwikis. Surely there must be a better way to organize this material. I think a Wikipedia:Transwiki page should be created listing all the templates and the full procedure for actually moving the articles and with a link to Transwiki log. I think that it should be this page which is linked to from Vfd and this page should be linked in each template. We probably need a foreign template with the ability to add a comment on what language encyclopedia the transwiki should go to. While this would not address the inefficient process of actually moving the pages, it would help organize it and perhaps increase its visibility and draw more people to do the heavy work. The fact that Category:Move to Wiktionary has more than a thousand pending transfer argues that a better system needs to be developed but that probably requires a robot or some software changes. Rmhermen 16:21, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Dear wikipedians, i wish it was made possible to ask and answer more specific questions about wikipedia page's subject in a special tab that would be called "questions and answers". Something like google answers service, but categorized automatically according to wikipedia page subjects.
I am aware of the discussions tab, but i think it would be beneficial for exchange of knowledge to dedicate another tab solely for questions and answers related to the subject. A discussion tab really does not encourage to ask or answer questions. What the discussion tab seems to do is to cause debate about what kind of content should or shouldn't be in a page. I claim that the questions and answers tab would serve wikipedia users need for knowledge better than the discussion tab.
14th of march 2005, an active wikipedia user
Yes, being an avid fan of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," I realize this idea is a bit contrived and probably not feasible, but I see no reason why I shouldn't suggest it. Wikipedia's great appeal is that it has scores of information on a variety of topics, no? There are many things to be learned here, but we're not always at a computer. So, maybe a MobileWiki project could be started. A Wikipedia server could be dedicated to broadcasting to cellphone browsers, PDAs, and other forms of mobile electronic media so that people could at least read (probably not edit) articles from whereever they are. In an ideal universe there would be a separate device just for this with full color screen, but I realize that is a bit too idyllic.
However, just as the internet based itself on an existing network of telephone lines, Wikipedia could work off of existing cellphone technology and be able to "broadcast" good ol' wiki-fun over large portions of the globe. And I'm sure there is no shortage of good samaritans willing to act as intermediary signal boosters to let the Amazons partake as well.
I don't know, the concept of having a mobile repository of every conceivable piece of information you'd ever need right in the palm of your hands was a really groovy idea when Adams first came up with it, and now that we have the hard part, the actual compendium of information, it's only a minor yet natural step to making this information accessible regardless of location. As has been seen with the Trillian chat program's integration of Wikipedia into its own interface tells me that the wiki software is more than capable of being formatted in a variety of ways other than HTML.
My email address is rokenrol@gmail.com, my user name here is rokenrol. Tell me what you think.
I frequently browse Wikipedia using a wireless connection on my HP ipaq 4700, which has a 480x640 colour screen. It's quite useable in the "single column" mode of Pocket IE. I even edit using that machine sometimes. As wireless connections become more common, I can envisage a time when I have permanent connection to Wikipedia whereever I might be. No special software or servers are required for Wikipedia.- gadfium 00:19, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Try
Wikipedia:TomeRaider_database --
Alterego 08:07, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)
I just saw the "Category:Wikipedians", could we make something like "Category:Wikipedians interested in ..." or "Category:Wikipedians master in..." or "Category:Wikipedians doctorate in ..." or "Category:Wikipedians expert at ...". Roscoe x 22:25, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I propose a new form of page protection. Some pages are repeatedly, time and time again, vandalized by hit-and-run edits from anonymous IP addresses. Most IP addresses cannot be blocked since they are dynamic, etc. For example, 377 out of the last 500 edits on George W. Bush were vandalism and 90% of those were by IP addresses. That's a whole lot of effort spent by editors that could be spent elsewhere. You might say, fine, everyone watches those pages, so it's no big deal. However, it is a big deal because it seriously impedes any kind of forward progress on these pages, which also tend to be very poor articles (back and forth, negative edits vs. proponent responses).
The proposal is simply to allow semi-protection so that anonymous users would get something not too different from the "protected page" message (perhaps the same message even), but that registered accounts could edit away. Regular protection obviously does not address this problem.
I looked at the last 5000 edits on Wikipedia, about 628 were reversions. Of those, 459 seem to be edits made from an anonymous IP address. Now, which articles might be semi-protected? Some examples of articles that are frequently vandalized:
Daniel Quinlan 03:38, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)
It would be against SoftSecurity wiki principle. If anons will get a page explaining they have to register to vandalize the page, part of them will register and the vandalism will be harder to spot.
I'd prefer another proposed form of semi-protection - edits to such articles would become visible only after some delay / after beeing patrolled. -- Wikimol 23:44, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
See m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles and m:Posting by anonymous users should be limited, but not banned. I feel obliged to point out that these proposals usually don't go anywhere; people start off with "reasonable" limits, then others extend these limits, then others shoot the whole thing down as anti-wiki, then it all lingers until the new wave of people who notice that there's a lot of vandalism going on come with proposals. I'm not saying re-opening the discussion is pointless, mind you. Attitudes may shift, solutions may be re-evaluated. JRM 12:56, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
Two proposals on this question:
I would love to see an RSS feed of wikipedia's newest articles. Personally, I love to browse the site for any sort of information. If I could add an RSS link to Firefox and see what the newest pages are, I'd love it. I have a feeling many other people enjoy the link. Is this possible, I do not know how to even being making this happen, so I am leaving it to someone else.
thanks
--
24.30.19.8 03:29, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)Mark Bashuk, Marietta, GA
-- HMP22 06:38, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've started adding classifications to category pages. It is possible already without software upgrades, and I find it helpful navigating around category hierarchies. I've written a page which I hope can be approved as Wikipedia policy. It is at Wikipedia:Classification. To see an example of what it looks like, I've classified many of the Theatre categories . Check out Category:Altos and move up and down the Opera hierarchy. -- Samuel Wantman 12:29, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to link up the Wikipedia:Classification to Wikipedia:Categorization and some other pages. Is it safe to assume that silence assumes consent? (That is the norm for Consensus decision making) If not, what is the next step for approval? -- Samuel Wantman 20:54, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
As a member of the online forum www.classicaquasport.com I will be coordinating an effort to reconstruct the history of this well-known manufacturer of recreational power boats. The history is complicated by the fact that the original company, formed in 1967, went bankrupt before being purchased by current owner Genmar, and most historical documentation, both on the company itself and on the individual boat models, was lost. A collaborative, online effort might be the most efficient manner to reconstruct this history. I am seeking guidance as to whether to work within the Wikipedia environment, or to start a separate wiki. Stevedem 19:51, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I think it is quite clear that Pottermania has gripped many users, as is evident from the number of articles on the Harry Potter series. The coverage of this topic is not comprehensive; it is excessive. Counting the articles Category:Harry Potter and its subcategories, and roughly estimating the number that are in more than one category, I would suggest that there are about 250 to 300 articles on the subject, including several on characters who have never actually appeared in the book, but have only been spoken about. Worse yet, many are full of nothing more than speculation (see, for instance, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince).
As, of course, mere complaining would not be welcome, I would like to propose a solution to the problem. I hope, firstly, that the fans of this series who have contributed articles on the subject do not take this as an attack on them. Rather, it is only an attempt to improve article quality and standards. I propose, then, that a majority of these articles be redirected to the broader, main articles. The significant subjects (the books, movies, principal characters, and perhaps other important topics others may care to suggest) would have their own articles; all others would redirect to the appropriate pages, into which the material would be incorporated. We would not have such things as a page for each spell, plant, beast, or magazine that appears in the series. -- Emsworth 20:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Hear! Hear! When you consider the howls of 'not notable' that greet the creation of an article on someone who has 'only' published a book or two, or affected hundreds or thousands of people by being an inspirational teacher, this sort of nonsense is truly offensive (well, it's the howls of 'not notable' that are offensive, in fact, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about the hordes of editors who are appalled at the idea that someone else might be the subject of an article and not them). The notion of 'accuracy' is also largely empty; how can one be accurate about a character that doesn't even exist in the books? Here (and elsewhere) this needs a firm but fair (and consistent) hand. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:51, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Consolidation is an excellent idea. HP fans might take a cue from what's been done with Atlas Shrugged, which also has legions of rabid fans, but (fortunately) has been whittled down to a few large articles, rather than zillions of short ones. (There's also a section-by-section analysis, but on Wikibooks, not WP.) jdb ❋ ( talk) 02:35, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Consolidation is an excellent idea in many cases such as this. I say this not because we need to conserve pages (I am a follower of Wikipedia is not paper and largely an inclusionist), but because it's good article organization and helps people that are genuinely interested in the topic explore small bits of related info together rather than jumping around. It also avoids repetition of context and assumptions. Subjects requiring more explanation can be briefly explained and linked. A good example is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time characters. Indeed, consolidation might be useful outside the context of fiction articles, such as consolidating a number of stubs on 17th-century mathematicians or former presidents of Rwanda. Deco 11:14, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I feel this is a good idea. I have contributed bits and pieces to a few of the main Potter articles, and reckon we don't need dedicated articles for things like Mark Evans or Harry Potter and the Toenail of Icklibõgg. But I also feel that a huge over-consolidation would be wrong as well. There is a huge number of articles about different Pokemon characters, which really should be consolidated too. - Mark 13:54, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm pretty firm on saying that the Harry Potter material belongs in Wikipedia, and offhand 200-300 articles does not sound excessive, as long as they are the right ones and well written. Frankly, I think great coverage of something like Harry Potter is a great way to get a lot of young people interested in Wikipedia.
That said, I have nothing against consolidation. For example, minor characters about whom little can be said, might as well be redirects to substantive articles that cover those characters. I see two clues to what can be consolidated:
Jmabel | Talk 19:26, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
New idea to complement the idea of Wikiversity/books... WikiNotes - where anyone can post notes filling in the details between the lines of science books (and, in time, other books).
Description by example: most physics major textbooks (take Griffiths or Shankar or Sakurai) have lines of confusing text (that are often obscure in its long-paragraph form - better if rehashed as notes) and equations that seem to come out of nowhere (many steps in-between are omitted - better if all steps were shown).
WikiNotes would be a collection of open-source notes that fill in the confusing parts of textbooks. There should be no copy-right problems with the original textbooks, as WikiNotes would clarify the text, but not plagiarize it.
WikiNotes would be a valuable resource for students attempting to learn on their own. The barrier of not understanding a textbook shall be broken! It would also be a good resource for other students in prep for their courses.
I have been considering setting up a site like this for a long time now. With the advent of Media Wiki, something like this might actually work out (easily, too). Such a site would require ample publicity for enough people to contribute notes - thus, it'll be best to be called WikiNotes.
I can contribute a number of booknotes for WikiNotes once someone sets up the basic MediaWiki for it - or, if I gain permission to do so.
Tell me what you think at WikiNotesBrainstorm.
=( Yosofun 06:42, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC))
There is a vote proceeding over what name to use for the capital city of Poland during various periods of history. Please go to the Warsaw/Vote page to cast your vote. Rick K 23:22, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)
Countdown deletion, a new proposal for lifting some load off our unscalable deletion process! "The basic idea is that articles that start off as rubbish are put on probation: if nobody comes to improve them in seven days, they're out."
Let's all have a good time squeezing as much out of this proposal as possible. At worst we'll conclude that it's rubbish and we need something else. That would already be something, no? JRM 23:19, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)
Based on this year's experience, I thought a semi-serious policy for April Fool's Day was in order. I have proposed it at Wikipedia:Rules for Fools, please comment on the talk page.-- Eloquence * 02:47, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)
A few days ago I posted the following on the discussion page of the Knights Templar article. I'm repeating it here since I'm not sure if that is the appropriate place.
Temple Society/Tempelgesellschaft
The German and Hebrew editions of Wikipedia have articles on the German society founded by Christoph Hoffmann in 1861 de he. Extra-wiki sites can be found via this clusty search and this Google search (Yahoo only gives 17 results for: "Temple Society" "Christoph Hoffmann"). Could someone {I don't know enough} add a similar article in English {if one already exists I can't find it} with at least links between between it and this article. Michael {is this the accepted procedure for making comments?} Retrieved from " Talk:Knights_Templar"
Knights Templar
I know schools are a pretty touchy issue on Wiki at the moment but I don't think this should mean they couldn't be a little more organised. I've made a draft Template:School which borrows heavily from Template:University information. I havn't tried implementing the template anywhere yet. Comments and Suggestions please? LukeSurl 23:22, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The non-American, non- British, poliically correct word: School Administrator. -- Munchkinguy 19:37, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
That also sounds good. But "administration" is the way to refer to the Principal and Vice Principals grouped together. So I deduced that "administrator" would be the right term. -- Munchkinguy 03:52, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, this template being an article thing is creepy. This template should be a table, not a crazy fill-in-the-blanks template for an entire school article. -- Munchkinguy 16:03, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
As it is now, the template is completely useless, since it dictates the article structure. It should reverted to the previous state. Alfio 10:58, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I sort of reverted the template. Some of the things still listed there are a bit trivial, but I'll leave them there.... for now. -- Munchkinguy 19:11, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Here is a different proposition keep people from wasting time with the 3RR. Two technical changes would be needed:
Then if a level-2 user sees a level-1 user vandalizing, she/he can be banned from editing the page for 1 day (maybe longer after repeated abuse). Disputes between level-2 users should be solved by level-3 users.
Problems with dynamic IPs would be solvable: for example, allow only edits by logged-in users from that IP block. That way, others can still edit-- J heisenberg 13:15, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia? This is WikiPediaAid speaking. I say, maybe you should go for a Guinness World Record for say, Encylopedia website with most articles. Just goto their website and go for the record. I don't know if they will accept it or anything, but please try!
If you mean by "encyclopedia" an expert-written and peer-reviewed reference work, Nupedia was small. Yes, Wikipedia is large, but so what? You are comparing an apple and many oranges. If your definition of encyclopedia includes ancient and lost ones, China's Yongle Encyclopedia and Gujin tushu jicheng could had been even larger. However these two "encyclopedias" were compilations of published books and manuscripts. But Wikipedia also absorbed much of its contents from CIA World Fact Books, U.S. cities information, 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and many other public domain materials. -- Toytoy 15:17, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)
What else? Lotsofissues 21:37, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Are we the "largest collaborative project"? I'd say we're the largest collaborative (online) reference work, but largest collaborative project is a very braod claim. Depending how you define a collaborative project, things like the largest of either of the coaltions in WW1 or WW2 could hold the record for "a group of people working together towards the same goal". I'm sure there have been other large unpaid collaborations in the past. I don't know numbers but things that come immediately to mind as possible candidates are
How about a feature whereby users can state subjects they consider themselves to have specialist knowledge on? This would be to make it easier to match up users to pages needing attention, stubs and substubs.
Excuse me, I didn't realise, feel free to delete this article.
Don't worry you didn't. -- Ebz 22:04, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
(I think I saw that this has been proposed and rejected before, but what the hey...)
Whereas:
Therefore, I suggest having an option in Preferences that would allow users to disable showing any inline images in pages. (I mean things included from the Image: namespace, not LaTeX equations, skin images, tool buttons, etc.) The description and a link to the Image: namespace would be shown, and if they wanted to see the image they could click on the link.
Comments?
Nickptar 20:54, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The calculation of a day's lunar phase is not very difficult. Can the wiki server generate the image of the moon each day? I guess it is a nice idea to see today's moon in the article moon.
You need a good picture of the moon such as Image:Moon merged small.jpg, and generate 29 moon images. Save the images. And have the system copy the corresponding image to [[Image:Today's moon.jpg]] each day according to UTC.
It is also a good idea to generate the coordinates of planets and stars of a user-defined place but lunar phase is the easiest job. -- Toytoy 10:56, Apr 16, 2005 (UTC)
I would like to see some markup added to the Wiki language for marking up simple tables.
This is not a proposal for a whole new table syntax, which I don't think we need. Rather, I feel that a simplified table markup would be useful for making the simple boxes that are ubiquitous on WP. To see what I mean, take a look at the Taxobox over at Plant, or the infobox over at Portland, Oregon. The proposal is simply:
[*Heading*] :Row1 Item1, Row1 Item2 :Row2 Item1, Row2 Item2 :Row3 Item1, Row3 Item2 :Row4 Item1, Row4 Item2 [*Second Heading | background=red*] : Row1 Item1, Row1 Item2 ...etc...
Where the commas and colons are delimiters. The parsing is pretty simple, and there would be some restrictions, like no nested tables, no use of colspan or rowspan, and no commas or colons within a cell.
I'd like to point out a simplified table markup could help shift the focus from formatting to logical structure. That is, we should be able to think of a table as a list of lists, not a collection of cells. If I mark something up, I shouldn't think about the way the table is laid out, just as long as it preserves the logic. As an example, I could see the markup,
[*Plants*] :Picture, [[Image:A plant.jpg]] [*Scientific classification*] :Domain, Eukaryota :Kingdom, Plantae
Could be laid out as,
Plants | |
Picture | (some image) |
Scientific classification | |
Domain | Eukaryota |
Kingdom | Plantae |
But by simply passing a parameter, the editor could flip the orientation,
Plants | Picture | Scientific classification | Domain | Kingdom |
(some image) | Eukaryota | Plantae |
Or,
Plants | Scientific classification | |
Picture | Domain | Kingdom |
(some image) | Eukaryota | Plantae |
Or, we could skip the table all together and have it output as,
All of these convey the same information. Then the editor wouldn't have to think about layout, just logical structure. Well that's enough WikiPhilosophy for one night ;) -- 69.203.121.20 15:10, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC) (standing in for Sean Kelly.)
A competition is announced for the standardisation of talk page templates: see Wikipedia:Template standardisation – submit your entries before voting commences at the end of 24 April 2005. violet/riga (t) 19:51, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I was surprised to see that this page has not been translated into Arabic. Are there many pages about democracy in Arabic? This sounds like a good project for some high school kids in Iraq.
cheers. Rob
Not certain where the best place to propose this, I'll post it here: I've been noticing that our various articles on colo(u)rs are not necessarily consistent with each other, particularly when it comes to color spaces and RGB/ CMYK values. I therefore propose to create WikiProject Color as a framework for standardising our presentation of such information. Does anyone object? Am I duplicating effort? -- Phil | Talk 17:21, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)
Created. Now I need lots of help so it doesn't implode under its own weight. -- Phil | Talk 09:45, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)
The idea:
To make a wiki space dedicated to the documentation of hardware and thechnology.
History and rambling:
A few hours of scouering the internet with only a serial number as a starting point prompted the idea. I had this card for my pc and needed a driver for it and thought it would be easy to just look it up like in the old days when all the inhabitants of the web were tech-minded people and if you werent you had no means of logging on.
Now I eventually found the driver on a page dealing with issues like this and apparently the company making this card had gone bankrupt / stoped supporting the card / been bought or liquidated or taken over or whatever. But a user of the card had posted the driver on his personal website. Now some would say: "Why not just go to this site when you need something like driver / hardware info?" and I would say : "Well there are loads of those sites and most in thread form with old data and most of the time just questions with no answers! But the Wiki system is mutch better for this since the articles accumulate info instead of just piling up text like threads and with the wiki we would have connected us with the critical mass of people needed to make this work."
Anyway I think it would be awesome and useful even if the drivers themselves werent hosted it would be a good starting point.
Best regard to all yall.
Ágúst Rafnsson.
I am one of Wikipedians interested, for various reason, in articles that need translation. However, the current system for handling that is, IMO, pretty bad. The worst part is that we have a ton of different places for that. Consider:
Category:Wikipedia translation that contains:
Category:Pages needing translation and
Category:Translation requests. I know that these two categories are separate, the first being for non-English articles posted on English Wikipedia, and the second being for requests from other Wikipedias. However, it still makes it harder to follow. Next, we have
Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English, which is, apparently, the most often checked place by translators, but then again, there are many articles in
Category:Pages needing translation that are not on this page.
Next, lists of translators.
Wikipedia:Translators available and
Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Translators are really in need of merging, being two places with the same intention and different contents. My preference lies with a layout such as in
Wikipedia:Translators available, so you can browse by language.
My proposal is to have one big page for everything translation related, and not like
Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination. Something more along the lines of
Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress I guess. The translation center should have a section with a list of translators and a section with translation requests, both from other language Wikis and for non-English articles here. If it turns out to be long, might be split into two pages, but for heaven's sake, with good linking between those.
Next, I am strongly against having different categories for articles that need translation and I suggest just one - again, just one place for translators to check. There, a Wikipedian proficient in several languages, can click on the category and, by browsing titles, see what he might be able to translate.
The translation center page would allow people to easier post requests or not-English articles, and an added bonus is that they can browse the list of translators by language and leave a message on some translator's Talk page to request assistance.
I believe that boilerplates such as {{RoughTranslation|language}}, {{translationlang|de}} or {{translation}} will do well enough for marking different pages anyway. But the translation center would then be a unified place with ease of use.
Feel free to comment and/or flame me.
Solver 13:06, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If something like this is implemented, perhaps we'll never see the message "search is disabled for performance reasons" again.
1. That registered logged in users be able to set a default search engine preference for the search button, either "internal search" "Google" "Yahoo" or the "choice box" (the one that currently comes up when search is disabled") with "choice box" being the default preference for new users. An added bonus would be for "internal search" to be one of the "choice box" options.
2. That anonymous (not logged in) users only have access to Google or Yahoo. They would get a "choice box" without "internal search" as an option.
3. Some variation of the above.
Ron Ritzman 16:44, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think wikipedia should have a section for proposed articles. Users unsure if an article they wanted to create would be put on vfd right away, and didn't want to find out by making it. People could vote on wether an article was notable enough for wikipedia. Howabout1 16:37, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The FA and PR boxes, along with all the other possible talk page tags, look quite ugly when they are put together. There is no real consistancy, with different styles and sizes in use. I've made an example status/development box at User talk:Violetriga/statusdevelopment which makes it look, in my opinion, much better. It can also cope with, for example, multiple FAC nominations. Would it cause problems though, making it too difficult for the inexperienced to add tags? Comments, as ever, are more than welcome. violet/riga (t) 11:37, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It is very difficult to create articles like Ranks and Insignia of NATO as umploading such images one by one is a seriously painfull process. -- Cool Cat My Talk 01:10, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Tell me about it! (*cough* Cyrillic alphabet *cough* Early Cyrillic alphabet) Tabbed web browsing helps a lot. I command click on "Upload file" a bunch of times, then fly across the tabs and work on all the upload pages at once. — Michael Z. 2005-04-9 22:24 Z
So will this be adressed? -- Cool Cat My Talk 03:30, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm surprised that this hasn't been discussed before (or maybe I'm just ignorant), but wouldn't it be a good idea to have a spell check button (along with the bold button, underline button, signature button) at the top of the screen when editing articles. Hotmail has something similar in its email composer. Yes, I know there would probably be some issue with reigonal dialects of English, but that could be overcome in several ways. Thr spellign of Wikiepedia cood becom mush bettre, nda thr prefesinalsim of thr artikels woood increse! -- Munchkinguy 00:50, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Comment: Unfortuately I think any Wikipedia-based spell-checker would be a huge CPU hog and therefore would cause a performance hit. There is another solution, however. I'm using the Mozilla Firefox internet web browser along with the SpellBound extension. It comes with an American English word list, but a British English word list can easily be downloaded (as well as Canadian English, Australian English, several other versions of English, and multiple versions of other languages such as Spanish). The SpellBound extension works very well, except that it is slow if the article or talk page you are editing has become quite large. BlankVerse ∅ 16:24, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Safari and several other Mac web browsers already use the system's inline spell checker, which supports four kinds of English, ten other languages, and many more with the CocoAspell extension. If someone takes the time to develop a Wikipedia extension, I want to be able to turn it off completely. — Michael Z. 2005-04-9 16:42 Z
There supposedly already is a spell checker but it has been turned off because it hogs the servers. See Wikipedia:Typo. I've been using Firefox and the Spellbound extension to do spell checking. See User:Omegatron#Spell checker - Omegatron 19:52, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
One more reason to abandon MS Internet Explorer. All the hip Wiki kids are doing it! For more info about alternatives and add-ons, see Wikipedia:Browser notes. — Michael Z. 2005-04-9 22:14 Z
I do use Firefox... when I can, but I'm rarley at my computer and most other computers use Internet Explorer. Perhaps there should be a prominent link somewhere in the website that points out where this extention is. -- Munchkinguy 18:27, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I would like to create a group for Wikipedia editors and staff in LinkedIn ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn). For those of you who are not familiar with the service, it allows you to create a network of contacts and maintain them on-line. You obviously have immediate contact information for anyone on your contact list, but can request contact with any one of your contact's contacts, up to 4 degrees of separation. You can then search through your network of contacts and use them to search for jobs, hire someone, make a professional contact, and more. The service is free.
LinkedIn users create profiles, a type of on-line resume, and I felt that listing membership in Wikipedia would be prestigious.
I sent an e-mail to LinkedIn and received the following requirements to start the group:
LinkedIn’s current group functionality is absolutely free.
Five simple steps to setting up your group:
I am not quite sure who to list as the technical contact. Any thoughts? Are there enough LinkedIn users here to warrant this?
— this was posted by User:Theskaven diffs
Basically: Project on creating audio-articles from wikipedias articles
There are many good articles like the recent article of the day Military history of the Soviet Union which we could transform into audio format. It would be great for (pur)blind people etc. and nice for those who like to listen to audio books (while jogging or what ever :). Of course it is harder to update the audiofiles as against text obviously, but if we use good articles, that is to say selected articles that aren't NPOV etc., this shouldn't be a big deal.
This is the basic idea, I don't think I will be doing more than just getting it out (since I do not speak English natively, but perhaps I will do this in my language) but I'd like to see this happen. -- Friðrik Bragi Dýrfjörð 12:33, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Will anyone support me in advocating dropping SAMPA and IPA in articles - even my World Books on the shelf have plain English "pro-nuhn-see-ay-shuns" of things and people's names. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia for the average person not an encyclopedia for linguists. PMA 13:41, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I wondered what people thought about including Geo META data on wikipedia pages ? The geourl.org project maintains a database of pages which are About a given location, and several other services like AlltheGoodness and mappr are starting to use Geo Meta data in interesting ways.
My proposal: allow two optional attributes 'latitude' and 'longitude' on articles, and have this information embedded in the page in meta data e.g.
a page about Sydney Opera House would have attributes:
latitude = -33.8587 longitude = 151.2096
which would produce meta data like:
<meta name="geo.position" content="-33.8587;151.2096" />
which can then be used by search engines etc. to understand more about the content and by others to provide additional services. -- neilp 02:43, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
Discussion Moved to: WikiProject Rankings
This project is for the idea of having a ranking system in Wikipedia. Please discuss in talk and make suggestions here (if any)
I was reviewing several countries and their populations. All of the countries I looked at (smaller ones) referenced the List of Countries by Population. Yeaah! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population However, when I compared the population rankings, I received inconcistancies. For example, Vatican City is ranked as 192nd, yet Greenland is ranked as 210th, and American Samoa is ranked as 203rd.
I have only recently been aware of Wikipedia, so I am the Village Idiot around here. I seeking any particular method of resolution, but I was desiring consistency in the statistics. Is it possible for places which are dependent upon data, to populate its information automatically from a reference - like a table? If this could be done, then when that table is updated all of the dependent articles are automatically updated.
That was a specific instance. If I found this issue on my initial uses of Wikipedia, I can only assume that many other types of statistical data will be using either 1) different sources, or 2) using the same source but in inconsistant manners. If this can be addressed in any manner that would be great. (And I did not automatically update the articles as I was unsure which method should be used for ranking.)
A page where you can list a group of articles you watch for both vandalism and generally unproductive edits. Thus, I might watch all the main articles on European countries (e.g. Belarus, Finland, Germany) and someone else might watch all the history-ofs for European countries (e.g. History of Belarus, History of Finland, History of Germany). Or everyone on List of people by name: Roc-Ror to "Roe" and someone else from "Roe" to somewhere else... I'm not proposing any kind of special rights for those who add themselves to the list. It's just meant as a method of reducing redundancy. My watchlist is always very cluttered with time-consuming articles I have little investment in, and there's some stuff I don't want to remove since I think one else is watching it. I often don't check external links that are added to see if they're spam, but I wouldn't mind doing so on a selected subset of articles if I knew others were doing the same. Would anybody else be interested in this? Tuf-Kat 07:55, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)
(Newbie here)
Why do I have to be a different user in each language version? What if I speak (and contribute to) several languages?
I cannot see messages directed to me unless I log in (and check) into each different language I'm active in! That's annoying!
Please, I propose an universal account!
Thanks -- Tom-b 23:05, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Even more than the convenience factor, in my opinion a more important reason for universal accounts is user impersonation. There have been several instances of a disgruntled user from en going to another-language Wikipedia, registering under the name of the user who reverted or blocked him, and doing a bunch of vandalism. — Knowledge Seeker দ 00:25, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately, it'd take too much work to be feasable. Personally, I redirect (see m:User:Ilyanep) or put a line of info down ([ ru:User:Ilyanep] and [ es:User:Ilyanep]), and it works for me (especially because 97.5% of my contribs are to en, so it doesn't do me much inconvenience. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 00:39, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've found the binary nature of the current spoiler system irritating. A good example is the Orz (Star Control) article - those who have completed the game know quite a bit of the fictional race described within, but their actual nature remains a mystery. Over the years interviews with the designers and the like have given an amount of insight into them, but these tidbits can be almost as much of a spoiler to an old Star Control player as they'd be to someone not familiar with the game.
What I'd like to do is to use two different spoiler warnings. The standard one for those who haven't played the game, and another for those who have but have not specifically researched the Orz. I have no plans of making this an official policy, but would likely use it one or two times in the future if the situation warrants it (erring on the side of not if there's doubt.) What say you? -- Kizor 20:03, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have just started using Wikipedia, and I have noticed a case where, In the English interface, I searched for "Tucholsky" and got back a null result; Then, using the German interface, I searched for "Tucholsky" and got back an extensive multimedia page about Kurt Tucholsky.
I would think it useful for the Wiki software always to let the user know that information is available in other languages even if it is not available in the currently selected interface. A list of all Wiki entries matching the keyword should be presented where practical.
Admittedly, implementing this proposal has some difficulties. At least for proper nouns it could be done and would be very useful.
In any case, interlingual Wiki linking will become more important in the future when competent machine translation becomes available.
Currently for each edit on wikipedia creates a new line under my contrabutions. If I had the option to categorise it in such a way:
This would save a lot of bandwidth as less data is sent. I can still expand the category I want by clicking a + -- Cool Cat My Talk 01:07, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Probably a simple question: I have my own media wiki and pretend to make a total css makeover, so as not to look like other wikimedias.
I don´t find in th css style the box wich contains the wikipedia logo. Where can I find the logo itself to change it, and where can i find the layer that contains it, so I can change its position on the page?
I found many images on the monobook skin. One of them was the "headbg.jpg". Is that this grayscale book we see faintly at the wikipedias background? where is it hosted? where are the other icons (external link, lock, user logged etc) hosted (their adress)?
Thanks.-- Alexandre Van de Sande 15:02, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
6 Apr 05 1154 local
a) article: Surviving is insufficient. Survival includes psychology thereof; survival patterns; fires (types, schematics, purposes); equipment (tins, pouches, kits and the differences between them) for a variety of terrains and climates; knives (desirable aspects of survival knives); orienteering; map-and-compass; shelters (man-made and artificial); ground SAR; small craft safety and cold water training; cold weather techniques, et cetera.
b) I'm not a technical writer. I am a survival instructor and have a number of other SIs available to contact; I'm willing to provide a knowledge pool.
c) realize Wikipedia is generally not a "how-to"; no worries.
d) seek permission from community at large to i) create disambiguation page for Survival (Bob Marley album) and survival (art of staying alive) ii) commence pouring raw material into latter
e) seek cooperative effort in keeping with Wikipedia ideal in construction of ii) above
Corporal Chris Maxwell -- Esseye 10:02, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well, "survival" as the word is employed by professionals is agreed to mean "the art of staying alive" - but of course not everybody is a survival professional so I guess "outdoors" would be a Good Thing to mention. "Hmm...surviving your cat, post-surgery..." -- Esseye 07:11, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC) talk
Britanica generates MLA and APA citations for the page the user is viewing. A bottom "generate citations" link for each page would require minimal work. The reasons for doing this: 1. Britanica Online has a feature we don't! 2. Increase appearance of acknowledged cites to wikipedia in thousands of undergrad papers everyyear. Lotsofissues 22:21, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I just want to throw this idea around. I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a medical wiki (think WebMD wiki style.) I am a pharmacy technican, and such a wiki would be useful for me. Any thoughts? -- STDestiny 03:49, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
— Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 04:00, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There has to be a feature to encourage the generation of redirects. For example, when you start an article called Thomas Edison, you will want to generate a redirect for Thomas Alva Edison as well. Currently, you have to do it manually. This is boring.
How about that we place 3 or more additional fields under the edit window. In addition to "Edit summary", you enter suggested redirects. If each new article comes with several placeholder redirects, the possibility of duplication would minimize. I guess it's not a very difficult job for programmers.
Redirects are especially useful when you create biological articles. If you create an article for dog, you can create a redirect for Canis lupus familiaris. To many less known animals or plants, the binominal or trinominal name redirect can be very helpful. So far many such article lack these redirects.
If a redirect is taken. You may want to check if anyone had written an article on that subject before you. Or you may want to create a disamb page instead. -- Toytoy 00:17, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
Last week Wikipedia killed the great actor, Robert De Niro [5]. Today Michael Eisner appears to have died too. First, is Eisner dead? Secondly, should Recent deaths require citations (as Current events does) before listings can be made? The upside is that it prevents hoax listings (and I'd contend that hoaxes at Recent deaths are particularly harmful). The downside is instruction creep and the problem that lesser-known people may not have death cites available quickly. Please comment at Talk:Recent_deaths#Proposal:_listings_require_citations. -- John Fader ( talk | contribs) 00:52, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I would find it useful if when searching, one could be in the wikipedia, but in the search bar be able to type a command in that would search on the wiktionary or in wikispeicies. Thus, when you were in an article, and wanted the defenition of a word from the wiktionary you could search for with without having to go to the wiktionary main page and search from there. An example that I saw was on google, where you can type in Define:wikipedia and it will show the defenitions for wikipedia that it found. A change of this would be that you type in Define:wikipedia and it will show the wiktionary definition for it. Also, Species: Book: News: Quote: etc... Alphanoid 01:26, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm sure I'm not alone in having loads of items on my watchlist. First time I check it every day, I have to stop and think "which of these are new ones from when I logged off?" Would there be some easy way of adding a "last check at 00:00, day-month-year" at the top of the watchlist page, so that it's possible to know what has and hasn't been looked at? Grutness... wha? 02:51, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I've noticed something about disambiguation pages. Statistically speaking, they're the messiest and worst-written pages we have. They're disorganized, real slapdash jobs, full of content that belongs in articles but winds up in disambigs anyway. I just went to Category:Disambiguation and sifted through half a dozen or more pseudorandomly chosen pages. A couple of them were passable, a few were bad, and some were very bad. I was about to list the category on Cleanup in desperation, but then I decided that that was probably foolish. I think there should be a WikiProject:Disambig cleanup or something to that effect. It would work a little like the erstwhile Wiki Syntax or Spelling, except instead of having bots to generate lists of articles that need fixing, we'd just have the category listing. And the work involved in fixing each page would be nontrivial. -- Smack ( talk) 04:54, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
At the moment, when doing a long edit on an article, you have two choices: just keep typing and hope that you won't get a crash or an edit conflict, or save then re-open the editing function from the saved page. As anyone who's done much word-processing knows, the best thing to do so as not to lose your train of thought or lose what you've just typed, is save frequently and quickly, and carry on going straight away. At the moment, that is a fairly long-winded process. Has any thought ever been given to adding a third button under the edit box "Save and continue editing", so that the text is saved but you aren't returned to the "read-only" article page? Grutness| hello? 10:07, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps using {{ inuse}} could be useful. 4.250.168.217 12:02, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
What do people think about the idea of creating a sort of sub administrator? A new class of users, who have amassed a couple hundred edits or so (or however many people think a trustworthy user/one with a strong knowledge of Wikipedia, should have).
They would be granted the roll back button as well as a couple other basic tools and/or priveleges. This would make it much easier for a typical user like myself to stop vandalism. Perhaps even another, higher sort of user with the ability to delete newly created aricles that are vandalism.
Admission to this class would be either a quick vote, or an appointment by higher authorities. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, Thanks! Collins.mc 21:17, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Please comment on Wikipedia:Portalspace. – AB CD 17:29, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Is it feasible for the english wikipedia to be made available as a download for offline access ?
This would allow me & others to enjoy this fountain of knowledge anytime/anywhere (till the always connected era comes !). I could even pay for it a bit !!! Yaammm :-)
Even better would be to include a "sync" facility so the local copy could be kept uptodate.
Imagine the improved response time and pressure of maintaining RC omniscience lifted if every edit that fits the following criteria appeared in highlighted red in RC.
Would this demand too much of the server?
Also, what about adding IPs to a user watchlist?
Lotsofissues 10:19, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
This sounds like a really good proposal. I'd also note if an article increased in size by a substantial amount (e.g. I came accross a short stub that had been replaced by a huge number of copies of the phrase "pelican shit"). This would also catch the accidental page doubling that appears to be happening atm. Don't forget to add "pelican shit" and "Wikipedia is communism" to the list of vandal's favoured words.
Being able to see when a certian user has added to thier contributions would be a very useful addition to watchlists imho. As would being able to watch for additions to categories. Thryduulf 15:38, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
I like this idea generally. Since we do indeed know the common methods for vandalism, simple pattern matching can indeed help us correct the problems faster. We would just need some kind of process for maintaining the list of things to watch for, and we'd need to ensure that the pattern matching never becomes "over-sensitive." — Stevie is the man! Talk | Work 22:05, May 6, 2005 (UTC)
The thing that immediately springs to mind for determining the pattern matching criteria would be a list editable by admins only (to prevent vandalism and bloat) but with a world-writable talk page to allow suggestions for addition/removal, e.g. a few months ago I doubt anyone would have predicted needing "pelican shit" on such a list, and maybe in another couple of moths we'll find we need something as obscure as "octopi 1 wikipedia 0". I think that a minimum criteria for being on the list would be that 2 or 3 established users who frequent recent changes to agree that it would be of benefit. After no matches for a few months it may be apropriate to remove some entries to keep the list trim. Again I don't forsee removal without the agreement of a minimum of two or three established users who frequent recent changes. Based on the MediaWiki:Bad image list I assume that this would be technically possible. The page size detection would need another method though. Thryduulf 23:04, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
This seems like it would be a very useful feature. It may need to be restrained somewhat — for example, users can legitimately "vandalize" their own user pages — but should not be restrained to the point of treating admins, normal users, and anonymous users differently. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 00:12, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Octopodes or no octopodes, the concept is brilliant, if it can be made to work and filter propoerly. Grutness| hello? 01:32, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Who decides what to additions to the software will be worked on? I want to push this. Lotsofissues 00:52, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Although I find Wikipedia terrific, I notice that there is very little about the environment. I am in the process of creating an online 'keywords and concepts' source on environmental studies for my academic departmental community. Is there a way to work together so that what we produce enters your wonderful open source domain - whilst being accessible separately in our own free portal dedicated to environmental studies? In other words, is it possible to create a system wherein editorial changes can be made in either portal, subject to the conventions and rules of the Wikipedia, of course? Thank you for taking the time to read this.
RAVI RAJAN, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
1.831.459.4158 :: srrajan@ucsc.edu
In the usual WikiWay at the very least, something like this is possible. I don't think it would be very Wiki to produce an article parallelling your website, but information could 'naturally' be shared between the sources in the usual WikiWay. . . if there is not an article about a subject covered in your external site, create one!
also, it would be plenty Wiki to make plenty of links between these related articles, and the related teirs of your external site. of course, if you don't want to produce all those articles yourself, the easiest and most Wiki way to solicit some aid would be to create a stub with a link to your site and under the talk/discussion tab, you could inform a reader that your site contains more data and it would be nice to expand the wiki article.
if the wiki article becomes more comprihensive then your site (not at all unlikely) then you could certainly update your external site with the Wiki produced info.
MethodicEvolution 00:00, 2 May 2005 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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I would like to propose article editor improvement. Currently both the article's content, categories and interwikies are mixed together. As other language wikies develop, most articles will have a link to every other language article. Articles categorization is piling up. To aid newcommers (and some existing editors), I think the editor should have two edit boxes - one for the page content, and another to add all metadata: categories and interwikies, anything that is not shown in the article directly. No articles have to be changed - the split-up can be done dynamically. Meta-edit can have a dhtml show/hide button to simplify editing, plus maybe some javascript automation for new users. -- Yurik 09:25, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This may have been discussed to death elsewhere, but I'm curious as to why the Book Sources page doesn't participate in Amazon.com's affiliate program (or any other bookseller's cash-for-links) program. It would seem like an easy way for WP to raise money without any of the sort of compromises that come from advertising. jdb ❋ ( talk) 07:13, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
A proposal has been made to convert all British to American spellings. See Wikipedia:Standardize Spellings. Care to express your opinion? :-) - Omegatron 00:34, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
A proposal has been made that we convert all Wikipedia articles to Yoda-speak. See Wikipedia:Write like this we should. Grutness| hello? 07:03, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Village Pump is too big. All of the major sections are in One Big Page. The Pump should be divided into distinct pages.
I can never get the Pump to load on the first attempt; it usually takes several. In order to navigate to a more manageable section, I have to load the One Big Page first. It's slow for the user and hard on server resources.
Even the major sections -- News, Policy, Technical, etc. -- are way too big. Of course, any user can archive them, but most comments should remain visible for more than a day or two -- and a week's worth, let alone two, of comments in any one of these sections constitutes an excessively long page.
Can we not consider perhaps 2 or 3 additional major sections? I don't care along what lines; it's a technical division. Then, can we not put each major section on its own page, and reduce the current page to a directory, with links to each major section and its archives? — Xiong ( talk) 19:18, 2005 Mar 26 (UTC)
Well, I understand the transclusion, now that you point it out. Of course I can create some private directory into the Pump -- and by that I include putting {{ Villagepump}} in my user page, or some such workaround; {{ Villagepumppages}} might work better for this. As it stands, Community Portal has only a single link to the Pump, which displays as one, big, browser-breaking page. I'd be immediately appeased to see {{ Villagepumppages}} included within Community Portal.
You can only carry on a certain number of conversations within a single room. Even absent any structural reason for dividing the group, it's necessary. You're right that many users, including myself, lack a clear idea of where certain discussions should go -- Policy or Proposal? Technical or Assistance? There may not be a sure cure for this. People will tend to post questions wherever they feel they will get attention.
If structural division worked, this would be a foolish idea, but since it often does not, no harm is done. If some rooms get crowded, they may easily and naturally be divided, simply by adding another color room; I hope the problem of excessive page size would be eliminated before we run out of common colors.
Those who post to a given room will be more likely to find subsequent edits pertain to their concerns. Those who feel the need to watch over all the Pump may do so; I don't see this would increase their total workload -- more pages, but smaller ones. They can use {{ Villagepumppages}} to navigate to them all. — Xiong ( talk) 01:47, 2005 Mar 27 (UTC)
I would like to propose a project for schools and universities. Teachers can ask students to contribute to wikipedia as part of their class assignment, either in groups or individually. For example, a history teacher can ask students to research and write about some historical figure or event, science - about a new material or invention, and foreign languages - translation from/to interwiki.
Pros
Cons
TODO
-- Yurik 08:27, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Some articles are plagued by multiple stubs. Personally, I don't see it as a deadly crime. Some just don't like it. I think it is actually caused by the faulty design of the wiki syntax.
At first we have only {{msg:stub}} and no category flags. Then we have categories. Later, we have categorized stubs. We seemed to forget the fact that stub is only a quality of the article. We shall not use it as a categorization tool.
I propose that we abandon all categorized stubs and merge all {{stub}} and [[category:]] categories. If an article has the {{stub}} or {{substub}} flag and belongs to 6 categories, it will be listed under the stub or substub sections of said 6 categories.
This is much more efficient and consistent. -- Toytoy 09:51, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
My point is to categorize stubs using the [[category:]] categories and let {{stub}} become just a flag. Currently, "stub" and "category" have distinct categories. This is a waste.
Take the article Tomato for example, currently it is listed under three categories:
If you click each link, the wiki server shows you articles categorized under each category.
Under current method, you need to append three stub notices if you want to advertize it under three stub categories.
These stub categores are my inventions. Currently, there are much fewer stub categories and they are not hierarchal.
Using my method, if you append {{stub}} or {{substub}} in the article, the same article will read:
or
Without the {{stub}} flag, the wiki server will generate a list of both non-stub and stub articles (stub and stub articles will be marked). With the {{stub}} flag, the wiki server will generate a list of stub articles under each category.
Currently, stubs are categorized while substubs are not. This is not good enough. -- Toytoy 05:30, Mar 28, 2005 (UTC)
There is only one problem with your proposal... who would redevelop the software to support it? People have been bugging to have the ability to use a union function between two categories for some time now. Granted, it would be a lot easier if all the articles had some kind of option flag to mark if it needs improvement, etc. -- AllyUnion (talk) 10:32, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I found it difficult to post a new article. Specifically on U.S. coin mintages. This sort of specific information is at the heart of numismatics and could spark interest in numismasist. Generally people who are into coin collecting are into research and would be a perfect addition to this community. Unfortunately after beginning and making some progress on this work my internet connection was lost. This has never happened on any other webpage and I wonder if it is common here. It was discouraging to waste all of that time for nothing. Anyway I reccomend U.S. coin mintages as a topic (that is if you can write on this system). Thanks, Dan
I have written and posted a proposal and embryonic project page at Wikipedia:Merge lists to categories. The idea is to merge redundant lists into categories (preferably using automated processes such as scripts or bots). If you are for or against this, the talk page is open to comment. I have already carried out a test case between the article Gay icon and Category:Gay icons. Philwelch 23:49, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
What do you think? MediaWiki 1.5, maybe? Note the difference between some of the sentences. I think the addition of this would be good. r3m0t talk 10:27, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
First of all let me apologise if this has been discussed before. I don't really know what to call it so I am unable to search for it. With that said:
My friend and I had this really cool idea. It's similar to googlewhacking, if you've heard of that. Basically the concept is:
I've made a section on my forum for this, which you can check out at Wikirace.tk. You'll have to register to post of course.
Once more, I apologise if this has been done before.
Please leave comments on my talk page if possible. -- HMP22 06:42, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Check out Wikipedia:N degrees of separation I think this may be very similiar if not exactly what you're talking about. Jaberwocky6669 18:26, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
i just let current (electricity) sit there with "barbies and seals rule so much!" for 2 hours. that is horrible. maybe we should have some kind of award for people who revert vandalisms the quickest. maybe hold a record for the quickest reversion.
oh crap; this will just make people vandalize so they can revert themselves. oh well. i shot down my own idea. - Omegatron 01:01, Mar 24, 2005 (UTC)
How about a collection of psychological case studies on Wikipedia?!? Huh? Huh? Aint that a good idea? Whad't I tell ya? lol but seriously though wouldn't that be cool? It should be exhaustive with multiple case studies for each disorder. Old public domain case studies exist I'm sure. Jaberwocky6669 21:31, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
What if Wikimedia added a "Wiki-Law" similar to "FindLaw" that included all the public decisions on all the major cases in history. For example, the majority and minority opinion in Roe v. Wade, alongside some of the legal decisions made by the English Parlament. Replace Lexus-Nexus with something like this. Could get this in some format from the national archives to make the addition easier Nick Catalano 18:02, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This is the code for a navbox ( Template:Toolband), or will be with the changed outlined in Bugzilla:1707.
{| align=center class="toccolours" ! [[Tool (band)|Tool]] |- |align=center|[[Maynard James Keenan]] | [[Adam Jones]] | [[Danny Carey]] | [[Justin Chancellor]] | [[Paul d'Amour]] |- ![[Tool (band)#Discography|Discography]] |- |align=center|''[[Opiate (album)|Opiate]]'' | ''[[Undertow]]'' | ''[[Ænima]]'' | ''[[Salival]]'' | ''[[Lateralus]]'' |- !Popular Songs |- |align=center|"[[Stinkfist]]" | "[[Schism]]" | "[[Sober (song)|Sober]]" |- !Related articles |- |align=center|''[[Progressive rock]]'' | ''[[A Perfect Circle]]'' | ''[[Peach (band)|Peach]]'' |}
This is how it renders.
Tool |
---|
Maynard James Keenan | Adam Jones | Danny Carey | Justin Chancellor | Paul d'Amour |
Discography |
Opiate | Undertow | Ænima | Salival | Lateralus |
Popular Songs |
" Stinkfist" | " Schism" | " Sober" |
Related articles |
Progressive rock | A Perfect Circle | Peach |
Now, a user stylesheet could change that around to look like
Tool |
---|
Maynard James Keenan | Adam Jones | Danny Carey | Justin Chancellor | Paul d'Amour |
Discography |
Opiate | Undertow | Ænima | Salival | Lateralus |
Popular Songs |
" Stinkfist" | " Schism" | " Sober" |
Related articles |
Progressive rock | A Perfect Circle | Peach |
if they, I dunno, really liked limes or something, or thought the small text crammed into the body of the box was a poor idea. Someone with actual CSS skills could probably do something much, much cooler. The idea, really, is to allow navboxes to be written with purely semantic markup, styled after the fact with CSS. (The same might be possible with meta-templates, but CSS is really the place for it.)
Thoughts? Improvements? Stunningly brilliant and innovative applications of CSS? grendel| khan 17:55, 2005 Mar 22 (UTC)
.toccolors th {background:#aaffaa;}
Here's my stab:
Edit | Tool |
---|---|
Band members | Maynard James Keenan | Adam Jones | Danny Carey | Justin Chancellor | Paul d'Amour |
Discography | Opiate | Undertow | Ænima | Salival | Lateralus |
Popular songs | " Stinkfist" | " Schism" | " Sober" |
Related articles | Progressive rock | A Perfect Circle | Peach |
What do you think? Noisy | Talk 15:19, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
Instead of changing .toccolours
, it may be better to create a new class (.navbox
?). Then users won't see any unexpected surprises all over wikipedia, and you can build the CSS and HTML freely, in the best possible way. It gets implemented under editors' control, and as a bonus you get to use a class name that makes sense. —
Michael
Z. 2005-03-23 17:13 Z
Good idea, except for those of us (me, for instance) who don't use Monobook. Styling of this sort is useless if it only appears in a single skin. See, rather, skins/common/common.css, which is included in every skin. I do agree that adding a .navbox class is a better idea than continuing to attempt to wrap .toccolours around everything. Good idea, that. I'm going to put a change on Bugzilla:1707. grendel| khan 19:12, 2005 Mar 24 (UTC)
Why not make an option (disabled by default, and not availabe for non-logged in users) to display ads on wikipedia? It'd be optional, and only people that were willing to endure some annoyance in exchange for supporting the Wikipedia would do it. Those that didn't feel that much loyalty for the Wikipedia or just really hated ads wouldn't pick it. It wouldn't scare any prospective members away because anonymous users wouldn't see ads and when they registered an account it would be disabled by default. What do you guys think? -Cookiemobsta
I noticed a while back that sound files were routinely being requested for featured article candidates. Would it be useful to have page like Wikipedia:Picture requests for sound files: spoken text, pronunciation, music...? This might be a way of increasing the amount of sound available with articles. Gareth Hughes 15:54, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've been a long time viewer of Wikimedia, and I think it's brilliant stuff.
I've had an idea for awhile, and I think it's high time I brought it out. WikiStory - that is, an interactive story told by any number of storytellers, each story original, linked from various hypertext words that are prevalent towards that certain story.
For example, if you are telling a story about a man who killed a bear with his bare hands, and you mention that they fought in a certain forest, then that certain forest would be linked to another story, which is about that forest, or talks about that forest in greater detail, but is an altogether different story.
You could bridge genre with this sort of thing, telling a fictional, world-epic, of hundreds of different points of view, with hundreds of different stories - sort of like a human monolith of experience.
I'd be happy to discuss this more.
Just make a wikibook, explain the idea at the top and add your story. If it catches on you'll have plenty of support for making a separate page. WilliamJuhl 18:52, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Hello,
I recently bought a 1GB SD card so that I could download the English Tomeraider Wikipedia to my Palm m515.
I quickly discovered that in this edition, people entries are not in order of surname but in order of first name. So, for instance, Erik Zachte would be under "E" and not under "Z". Apparently the German edition of Wikipedia is in surname order.
A lot of the time I look people up is that I can't remember their first names.
Doing a full search takes far too long.
So, all in all, I think something needs to be done; and I'd be willing to help.
I've had a short e-mail conversation with Erik Zachte about this. He was the one who suggested I raise it here. The conversation is appended to this post (apologies if that makes it rather long but as I know very little about Wikipedia technology I thought I'd better let Erik speak for himself rather than trying to paraphrase him and get it all wrong).
Anyway, I think this is important and, as I said, am willing to help. Unfortunately I don't speak Python although I have a smattering of Perl and Java.
What do you folk think?
If you are interested, please do e-mail me off-list at harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk
Harold Fuchs, London, England
Here's my e-mail correspondence with Erik.
start of e-mails ------------------
From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 11:03 Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries
Harold, what I meant was a project where aliasses would be added manually. The actual term on Wikipedia is 'redirect', an article named 'Fuchs, Harold' that only contains text
1. REDIRECTHarold Fuchs
When you request article 'Fuchs, Harold', you will automatically be redirected to 'Harold Fuchs'.
There are mass updates done by bots, mostly written in Python. But this would need thorough discussion first, and it probably would not qualify for complete automation, as there is too much ambiguity in detecting relevant articles and composing proper redirect. Some bots are half automated, proposing a change and waiting for an OK after manual inspection.
Just drop the question at the village pump and see what comes out of it.
Oh, you can help by improving an article. Below every article there is an edit button so that you can expand or correct the text. Thats the core idea of a wiki, where Wikipedia is shining example of. Contrary to intuition this low barrier does not hamper overall quality of the database.
More introductory info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Community_Portal
Erik
.
Original Message-----
From: Harold Fuchs mailto:harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 09:43 To: Erik Zachte Subject: Re: Wikipedia Entries
Erik,
You said "If you are really motivated you could start a project to add aliasses for all people articles"
1. Is there a way to identify "people articles"? Or do you just mean an entry that starts with either <letters>[space]<letters>[space}<letters> (name1 name2 name3) or with <letters>[space]<letters> (name1 name2)? This would be very easy to program in Perl using regular expressions. One would have to allow for dots (John F. Kennedy) and hyphens
2. What do you mean by "add aliasses"? I was thinking about the following pseudo code: if the entry starts with 3 names then
add an entry in the form name3, name2 name1 "see" [link to] name1 name2 name3
elseif the entry starts with two names then
add an entry in the form name2, name1 "see" [link to] name1 name2
endif
Is this what you meant? Or?
For the 3-name case one could add two new entries. One would be for name3 name2, name1 to cover people with two surnames and the other for name3, name1 name2 to cover people with two "first" names
Unfortunately, The ^&*% English have made it harder. I just found an entry "A. A. B. Bussy" (four names). The complete entry is like this:
[M] Antoine Alexandre Brutus Bussy (May 29, 1794 - February 1, 1882) was a French Chemist. He was the first to prepare Magnesium in a coherent form in 1831. [image] - This biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by .
Unfortunately it doesn't say how I can help Wikipedia :-(
Regards, Harold
Original Message -----
From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Tuesday, March 08, 2005 12:22 AM Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries
Harold,
You might raise the issue at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump which is a discussion forum for all kinds of things related to English Wikipedia.
I just realized that the category system offers some clues for which articles are about persons, but I have no idea how complete categorization is. There are also lists of famous scientists, sportsmen, politicians, that offer further clues.
If you are really motivated you could start a project to add aliasses for all people articles. This seems more feasible than the German templates. The hidden template system presupposes automated processing and I'm not sure many people would get enthusiastic to do his just for the TomeRaider version (German WIkipedia is also processed by other publishing software)
If after discussion you decide to give this a chance, you might add a project page, solicit coworkers and you might be amazed how many hands might be on the job, making it lighter work than you would expect, and a project that can be finished in weeks, or at most two months.
You could also discuss it at the Wikipedia mailling list, http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l but I would start with the Village Pump.
Cheers, Erik
Original Message-----
From: Harold Fuchs mailto:harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk Sent: Tuesday, 08 March 2005 12:56 To: Erik Zachte Subject: Re: Wikipedia Entries
Erik,
Thank you.
Although my surname is German I don't speak enough for the German Wikipedia to be useful to me
It is a shame that the English Wikipedians didn't adopt a more logical template. Is there someone I could talk (e-mail) to about it?
It seems to me that the English Wikipedia has been considerably devalued because of this.
Regards, Harold PS enjoy your Wikibreak
Original Message -----
From: Erik Zachte To: Harold Fuchs Sent: Sunday, March 06, 2005 11:56 PM Subject: RE: Wikipedia Entries
Hi Harold.
Sorry for late answer. I also think it was a bad choice to use this arrangement for articles about people.
If you were interested in the German Wikipedia I would have a solution: they have a standard template on all people pages, with first name, last name, date and place of birth, etc. It is strictly standardized as it is meant specifically for automatic processing, in fact the template is hidden from view and only visible while editing an article.
Example: Template:Personendaten
This would have been an ideal basis to generate redirects to the proper article with first and last name reversed. These alias records would have to be stored in a separate file and only added to the output when all input was processed and when no article with that name was already available (there are a lot of manually added 'redirects' already in the database)
However in the English database there is no such standard template (not yet, more concepts have been introduced by German Wikipedians and copied elsewhere).
Many articles about people start with year and place of birth in the first sentence. A script could do some fuzzy searching in the first 200 chars and make an educated guess if this is a biographic article, but of course this will be far from perfect, I think a 50-60% score would have to be called be a sucess.
Also if a name needs to be reversed, how to do that properly?
How to discern <first name >space<middle name>space<last name> from <first name>space<last name one>space<last name two> (lots of last names are made up of separate parts)
Anyway, I will take no action on this. I'm very definitely taking a step back from TomeRaider programming, other Wikipedia tasks are waiting and even more important I need a long wikibreak on the earliest occasion.
So maybe wait for the German concept to spread.
Best regards, Erik Zachte
Original Message-----
From: Harold Fuchs mailto:harold@wolfeden.demon.co.uk Sent: Wednesday, 02 March 2005 02:56 To: epzachte@chello.nl Subject: Wikipedia Entries
Sir,
I have just downloaded the Wikipedia in Tomeraider format. Fantastic.
I'm puzzled though:
People seem to be entered in <firstName>[space]<lastName> format. So, for example, I would be entered as "Harold Fuchs" and not as "Fuchs, Harold".
This means that you have to know the person's first name to look them up - unless you are willing to wait however many hours it will take to search the database using Tomeraider's "Find" facility.
Often I don't know the person's first name and that is why I am looking them up (!!!).
Can anything be done? Obviously a script of some sort but how many "mistakes" would that make, where for example "Suez Canal" would get changed to "Canal, Suez" which is probably *not* what we want ... (not what I would want anyway).
Any thoughts?
Harold Fuchs London, England PS I think I can still remember how to write perl ...
The only way I can see to do this would be to descend through all the subcategories of Category:People, and to make sure there is a link from the categorised name to the actual name. This would miss uncategorised people, and it would also fail on people who were added to a category without a sort order or with an incorrect sort order, but this would be a minority of cases and probably not harmful.- gadfium 06:00, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Names like van Gogh, van den Burgh, de Sade and so on can be covered by rules implemented using a small set of "magic" words like "van", "de" and so on coupled with sensitivity to case so that "Van Morrison" is not confused with somebody whose surname happens to be "van Morrison".
It really seems to me that this is an important issue that should be resolved before the Wikipedia goes much further. A serious release to the "public" would cause the whole project, and the people associated with it, to become laughing stocks.
Harold Fuchs 23 March 2005, 19:00 GMT
Wikipedia could make a rule that names like Eduardo Nicolás Cruz Sánchez would come out as "Sánchez, Eduardo Nicolás Cruz", and "Vincent van Gogh" would come out as "Gough, Vincent van". The latter is perfectably acceptable in Dutch so I don't see why us heathen Brits should complain. IMHO, that would be a lot better than what exists today. And the "logic" is simple to explain and to understand.
Harold Fuchs 23 March 2005, 19:05 GMT
We need a good way for speakers of different language to cooperate in providing information about their native language. There are very few audio files in the pronunciation section of the commons, something that could be fixed by just a few native speakers with microphones, and any article or wikibook on a language could benefit greatly from edits by native speakers. I think something as small as a link for multilingual users in the things to do section(of every language) would help, but I would like to see a section in every wikipedia devoted to educating others about their language, where they can not only give lessons, but suggest music, movies leterature and other media. I'm sure that with all the accusations of cultural imperialism leveled against the united states we could at least get a lot of additions to the English wikipedia. However we go about it, I think that with some more international, interlingual cooperation, a large colaborative community project like wikipedia coould easily be the single best way of learning or learning about onother languages and cultures short of moving to their counties of origin.
I have seen lots of vandalism in external links. Just to promote their website the are linkinkg those pages . Yes we can argue like it is important and relavent data. I think instead of having seperate external links we can direct it to dmoz relavent directory. For example just take nutrition page you can see many website. Really it make any sense. It is my opinion. Actually today i have removed some external links and i got a message also why u r removing the useful website. Some websites are having one page relavent materials and that site is not at all in line with our interest. Please let me know u r opinion.I am not going to delete any links here after.
The spoiler template, as it now stands, simply warns readers they may not wish to proceed further. Why not revise it so that a link would be provided for non-spoiler information below the plot summary? (As a newbie, I worry that this might be over my head, so I'm suggesting it for someone else to take on). Lkjhgfdsa 21:39, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Doesn't always work well; for example, references and external links still belong at the bottom. -- Jmabel | Talk 01:14, Mar 18, 2005 (UTC)
We have a solution, thanks to Korath. It is documented at Template talk:Spoiler top, and illustrated by example at Bovo-Bukh. Template talk:Spoilerbox is now obsolete, because Korath's solution is simply better. I would suggest that this should probably supersede Template:Spoiler as well. -- Jmabel | Talk 18:16, Mar 25, 2005 (UTC)
To whom it may concern:
One thing I would like to see is a printable version of Wikipedia pages. It would make it much easier for students to gather information, etc., because sometimes we encounter problems while transferring articles and their documentation into Word and other such programs. Maybe the feature's present and I can't see it.
This printing issue seems to be an ongoing one. We discussed this before. I can't remember what the outcome was. I think there should be a "printer friendly" button, myself. -- Munchkinguy 03:54, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I recently listed a page for deletion and the clear consensus - er, unanimous decision, was that it was an easy "transwiki". I looked at the pages and found nothing easy about it or its procedure. The link on Votes for Deletion go to the page Wikipedia:Transwiki log while Wikipedia:Transwiki oddly redirects to Wikipedia:Things to be moved to Wiktionary which claims to be mostly deprecated although it is the only transwiki page listed on Template:Page fixing tools. Most of the information on the procedure is listed at [ Meta:Transwiki]. Both Wikipedia Transwiki log and Meta:Transwiki suggest a block of boilerplate text to use but neither mention the at least five separate templates in use. Four of the tags are mentioned on Template:Deletiontools (At least they do now that I have fixed it.) and these four use categories to collect the articles. Template:Transwiki doesn't and seems to be mainly forgotten. I haven't found any template for foreign language transwikis. Surely there must be a better way to organize this material. I think a Wikipedia:Transwiki page should be created listing all the templates and the full procedure for actually moving the articles and with a link to Transwiki log. I think that it should be this page which is linked to from Vfd and this page should be linked in each template. We probably need a foreign template with the ability to add a comment on what language encyclopedia the transwiki should go to. While this would not address the inefficient process of actually moving the pages, it would help organize it and perhaps increase its visibility and draw more people to do the heavy work. The fact that Category:Move to Wiktionary has more than a thousand pending transfer argues that a better system needs to be developed but that probably requires a robot or some software changes. Rmhermen 16:21, Mar 14, 2005 (UTC)
Dear wikipedians, i wish it was made possible to ask and answer more specific questions about wikipedia page's subject in a special tab that would be called "questions and answers". Something like google answers service, but categorized automatically according to wikipedia page subjects.
I am aware of the discussions tab, but i think it would be beneficial for exchange of knowledge to dedicate another tab solely for questions and answers related to the subject. A discussion tab really does not encourage to ask or answer questions. What the discussion tab seems to do is to cause debate about what kind of content should or shouldn't be in a page. I claim that the questions and answers tab would serve wikipedia users need for knowledge better than the discussion tab.
14th of march 2005, an active wikipedia user
Yes, being an avid fan of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," I realize this idea is a bit contrived and probably not feasible, but I see no reason why I shouldn't suggest it. Wikipedia's great appeal is that it has scores of information on a variety of topics, no? There are many things to be learned here, but we're not always at a computer. So, maybe a MobileWiki project could be started. A Wikipedia server could be dedicated to broadcasting to cellphone browsers, PDAs, and other forms of mobile electronic media so that people could at least read (probably not edit) articles from whereever they are. In an ideal universe there would be a separate device just for this with full color screen, but I realize that is a bit too idyllic.
However, just as the internet based itself on an existing network of telephone lines, Wikipedia could work off of existing cellphone technology and be able to "broadcast" good ol' wiki-fun over large portions of the globe. And I'm sure there is no shortage of good samaritans willing to act as intermediary signal boosters to let the Amazons partake as well.
I don't know, the concept of having a mobile repository of every conceivable piece of information you'd ever need right in the palm of your hands was a really groovy idea when Adams first came up with it, and now that we have the hard part, the actual compendium of information, it's only a minor yet natural step to making this information accessible regardless of location. As has been seen with the Trillian chat program's integration of Wikipedia into its own interface tells me that the wiki software is more than capable of being formatted in a variety of ways other than HTML.
My email address is rokenrol@gmail.com, my user name here is rokenrol. Tell me what you think.
I frequently browse Wikipedia using a wireless connection on my HP ipaq 4700, which has a 480x640 colour screen. It's quite useable in the "single column" mode of Pocket IE. I even edit using that machine sometimes. As wireless connections become more common, I can envisage a time when I have permanent connection to Wikipedia whereever I might be. No special software or servers are required for Wikipedia.- gadfium 00:19, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Try
Wikipedia:TomeRaider_database --
Alterego 08:07, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)
I just saw the "Category:Wikipedians", could we make something like "Category:Wikipedians interested in ..." or "Category:Wikipedians master in..." or "Category:Wikipedians doctorate in ..." or "Category:Wikipedians expert at ...". Roscoe x 22:25, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I propose a new form of page protection. Some pages are repeatedly, time and time again, vandalized by hit-and-run edits from anonymous IP addresses. Most IP addresses cannot be blocked since they are dynamic, etc. For example, 377 out of the last 500 edits on George W. Bush were vandalism and 90% of those were by IP addresses. That's a whole lot of effort spent by editors that could be spent elsewhere. You might say, fine, everyone watches those pages, so it's no big deal. However, it is a big deal because it seriously impedes any kind of forward progress on these pages, which also tend to be very poor articles (back and forth, negative edits vs. proponent responses).
The proposal is simply to allow semi-protection so that anonymous users would get something not too different from the "protected page" message (perhaps the same message even), but that registered accounts could edit away. Regular protection obviously does not address this problem.
I looked at the last 5000 edits on Wikipedia, about 628 were reversions. Of those, 459 seem to be edits made from an anonymous IP address. Now, which articles might be semi-protected? Some examples of articles that are frequently vandalized:
Daniel Quinlan 03:38, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)
It would be against SoftSecurity wiki principle. If anons will get a page explaining they have to register to vandalize the page, part of them will register and the vandalism will be harder to spot.
I'd prefer another proposed form of semi-protection - edits to such articles would become visible only after some delay / after beeing patrolled. -- Wikimol 23:44, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)
See m:Anonymous users should not be allowed to edit articles and m:Posting by anonymous users should be limited, but not banned. I feel obliged to point out that these proposals usually don't go anywhere; people start off with "reasonable" limits, then others extend these limits, then others shoot the whole thing down as anti-wiki, then it all lingers until the new wave of people who notice that there's a lot of vandalism going on come with proposals. I'm not saying re-opening the discussion is pointless, mind you. Attitudes may shift, solutions may be re-evaluated. JRM 12:56, 2005 Mar 14 (UTC)
Two proposals on this question:
I would love to see an RSS feed of wikipedia's newest articles. Personally, I love to browse the site for any sort of information. If I could add an RSS link to Firefox and see what the newest pages are, I'd love it. I have a feeling many other people enjoy the link. Is this possible, I do not know how to even being making this happen, so I am leaving it to someone else.
thanks
--
24.30.19.8 03:29, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)Mark Bashuk, Marietta, GA
-- HMP22 06:38, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I've started adding classifications to category pages. It is possible already without software upgrades, and I find it helpful navigating around category hierarchies. I've written a page which I hope can be approved as Wikipedia policy. It is at Wikipedia:Classification. To see an example of what it looks like, I've classified many of the Theatre categories . Check out Category:Altos and move up and down the Opera hierarchy. -- Samuel Wantman 12:29, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to link up the Wikipedia:Classification to Wikipedia:Categorization and some other pages. Is it safe to assume that silence assumes consent? (That is the norm for Consensus decision making) If not, what is the next step for approval? -- Samuel Wantman 20:54, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
As a member of the online forum www.classicaquasport.com I will be coordinating an effort to reconstruct the history of this well-known manufacturer of recreational power boats. The history is complicated by the fact that the original company, formed in 1967, went bankrupt before being purchased by current owner Genmar, and most historical documentation, both on the company itself and on the individual boat models, was lost. A collaborative, online effort might be the most efficient manner to reconstruct this history. I am seeking guidance as to whether to work within the Wikipedia environment, or to start a separate wiki. Stevedem 19:51, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I think it is quite clear that Pottermania has gripped many users, as is evident from the number of articles on the Harry Potter series. The coverage of this topic is not comprehensive; it is excessive. Counting the articles Category:Harry Potter and its subcategories, and roughly estimating the number that are in more than one category, I would suggest that there are about 250 to 300 articles on the subject, including several on characters who have never actually appeared in the book, but have only been spoken about. Worse yet, many are full of nothing more than speculation (see, for instance, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince).
As, of course, mere complaining would not be welcome, I would like to propose a solution to the problem. I hope, firstly, that the fans of this series who have contributed articles on the subject do not take this as an attack on them. Rather, it is only an attempt to improve article quality and standards. I propose, then, that a majority of these articles be redirected to the broader, main articles. The significant subjects (the books, movies, principal characters, and perhaps other important topics others may care to suggest) would have their own articles; all others would redirect to the appropriate pages, into which the material would be incorporated. We would not have such things as a page for each spell, plant, beast, or magazine that appears in the series. -- Emsworth 20:58, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Hear! Hear! When you consider the howls of 'not notable' that greet the creation of an article on someone who has 'only' published a book or two, or affected hundreds or thousands of people by being an inspirational teacher, this sort of nonsense is truly offensive (well, it's the howls of 'not notable' that are offensive, in fact, but there seems to be nothing that can be done about the hordes of editors who are appalled at the idea that someone else might be the subject of an article and not them). The notion of 'accuracy' is also largely empty; how can one be accurate about a character that doesn't even exist in the books? Here (and elsewhere) this needs a firm but fair (and consistent) hand. Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 23:51, 27 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Consolidation is an excellent idea. HP fans might take a cue from what's been done with Atlas Shrugged, which also has legions of rabid fans, but (fortunately) has been whittled down to a few large articles, rather than zillions of short ones. (There's also a section-by-section analysis, but on Wikibooks, not WP.) jdb ❋ ( talk) 02:35, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Consolidation is an excellent idea in many cases such as this. I say this not because we need to conserve pages (I am a follower of Wikipedia is not paper and largely an inclusionist), but because it's good article organization and helps people that are genuinely interested in the topic explore small bits of related info together rather than jumping around. It also avoids repetition of context and assumptions. Subjects requiring more explanation can be briefly explained and linked. A good example is The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time characters. Indeed, consolidation might be useful outside the context of fiction articles, such as consolidating a number of stubs on 17th-century mathematicians or former presidents of Rwanda. Deco 11:14, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I feel this is a good idea. I have contributed bits and pieces to a few of the main Potter articles, and reckon we don't need dedicated articles for things like Mark Evans or Harry Potter and the Toenail of Icklibõgg. But I also feel that a huge over-consolidation would be wrong as well. There is a huge number of articles about different Pokemon characters, which really should be consolidated too. - Mark 13:54, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm pretty firm on saying that the Harry Potter material belongs in Wikipedia, and offhand 200-300 articles does not sound excessive, as long as they are the right ones and well written. Frankly, I think great coverage of something like Harry Potter is a great way to get a lot of young people interested in Wikipedia.
That said, I have nothing against consolidation. For example, minor characters about whom little can be said, might as well be redirects to substantive articles that cover those characters. I see two clues to what can be consolidated:
Jmabel | Talk 19:26, Mar 23, 2005 (UTC)
New idea to complement the idea of Wikiversity/books... WikiNotes - where anyone can post notes filling in the details between the lines of science books (and, in time, other books).
Description by example: most physics major textbooks (take Griffiths or Shankar or Sakurai) have lines of confusing text (that are often obscure in its long-paragraph form - better if rehashed as notes) and equations that seem to come out of nowhere (many steps in-between are omitted - better if all steps were shown).
WikiNotes would be a collection of open-source notes that fill in the confusing parts of textbooks. There should be no copy-right problems with the original textbooks, as WikiNotes would clarify the text, but not plagiarize it.
WikiNotes would be a valuable resource for students attempting to learn on their own. The barrier of not understanding a textbook shall be broken! It would also be a good resource for other students in prep for their courses.
I have been considering setting up a site like this for a long time now. With the advent of Media Wiki, something like this might actually work out (easily, too). Such a site would require ample publicity for enough people to contribute notes - thus, it'll be best to be called WikiNotes.
I can contribute a number of booknotes for WikiNotes once someone sets up the basic MediaWiki for it - or, if I gain permission to do so.
Tell me what you think at WikiNotesBrainstorm.
=( Yosofun 06:42, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC))
There is a vote proceeding over what name to use for the capital city of Poland during various periods of history. Please go to the Warsaw/Vote page to cast your vote. Rick K 23:22, Apr 4, 2005 (UTC)
Countdown deletion, a new proposal for lifting some load off our unscalable deletion process! "The basic idea is that articles that start off as rubbish are put on probation: if nobody comes to improve them in seven days, they're out."
Let's all have a good time squeezing as much out of this proposal as possible. At worst we'll conclude that it's rubbish and we need something else. That would already be something, no? JRM 23:19, 2005 Apr 3 (UTC)
Based on this year's experience, I thought a semi-serious policy for April Fool's Day was in order. I have proposed it at Wikipedia:Rules for Fools, please comment on the talk page.-- Eloquence * 02:47, Apr 3, 2005 (UTC)
A few days ago I posted the following on the discussion page of the Knights Templar article. I'm repeating it here since I'm not sure if that is the appropriate place.
Temple Society/Tempelgesellschaft
The German and Hebrew editions of Wikipedia have articles on the German society founded by Christoph Hoffmann in 1861 de he. Extra-wiki sites can be found via this clusty search and this Google search (Yahoo only gives 17 results for: "Temple Society" "Christoph Hoffmann"). Could someone {I don't know enough} add a similar article in English {if one already exists I can't find it} with at least links between between it and this article. Michael {is this the accepted procedure for making comments?} Retrieved from " Talk:Knights_Templar"
Knights Templar
I know schools are a pretty touchy issue on Wiki at the moment but I don't think this should mean they couldn't be a little more organised. I've made a draft Template:School which borrows heavily from Template:University information. I havn't tried implementing the template anywhere yet. Comments and Suggestions please? LukeSurl 23:22, 11 Mar 2005 (UTC)
The non-American, non- British, poliically correct word: School Administrator. -- Munchkinguy 19:37, 14 Mar 2005 (UTC)
That also sounds good. But "administration" is the way to refer to the Principal and Vice Principals grouped together. So I deduced that "administrator" would be the right term. -- Munchkinguy 03:52, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, this template being an article thing is creepy. This template should be a table, not a crazy fill-in-the-blanks template for an entire school article. -- Munchkinguy 16:03, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
As it is now, the template is completely useless, since it dictates the article structure. It should reverted to the previous state. Alfio 10:58, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I sort of reverted the template. Some of the things still listed there are a bit trivial, but I'll leave them there.... for now. -- Munchkinguy 19:11, 5 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Here is a different proposition keep people from wasting time with the 3RR. Two technical changes would be needed:
Then if a level-2 user sees a level-1 user vandalizing, she/he can be banned from editing the page for 1 day (maybe longer after repeated abuse). Disputes between level-2 users should be solved by level-3 users.
Problems with dynamic IPs would be solvable: for example, allow only edits by logged-in users from that IP block. That way, others can still edit-- J heisenberg 13:15, 1 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia? This is WikiPediaAid speaking. I say, maybe you should go for a Guinness World Record for say, Encylopedia website with most articles. Just goto their website and go for the record. I don't know if they will accept it or anything, but please try!
If you mean by "encyclopedia" an expert-written and peer-reviewed reference work, Nupedia was small. Yes, Wikipedia is large, but so what? You are comparing an apple and many oranges. If your definition of encyclopedia includes ancient and lost ones, China's Yongle Encyclopedia and Gujin tushu jicheng could had been even larger. However these two "encyclopedias" were compilations of published books and manuscripts. But Wikipedia also absorbed much of its contents from CIA World Fact Books, U.S. cities information, 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and many other public domain materials. -- Toytoy 15:17, Apr 18, 2005 (UTC)
What else? Lotsofissues 21:37, 18 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Are we the "largest collaborative project"? I'd say we're the largest collaborative (online) reference work, but largest collaborative project is a very braod claim. Depending how you define a collaborative project, things like the largest of either of the coaltions in WW1 or WW2 could hold the record for "a group of people working together towards the same goal". I'm sure there have been other large unpaid collaborations in the past. I don't know numbers but things that come immediately to mind as possible candidates are
How about a feature whereby users can state subjects they consider themselves to have specialist knowledge on? This would be to make it easier to match up users to pages needing attention, stubs and substubs.
Excuse me, I didn't realise, feel free to delete this article.
Don't worry you didn't. -- Ebz 22:04, 17 Apr 2005 (UTC)
(I think I saw that this has been proposed and rejected before, but what the hey...)
Whereas:
Therefore, I suggest having an option in Preferences that would allow users to disable showing any inline images in pages. (I mean things included from the Image: namespace, not LaTeX equations, skin images, tool buttons, etc.) The description and a link to the Image: namespace would be shown, and if they wanted to see the image they could click on the link.
Comments?
Nickptar 20:54, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The calculation of a day's lunar phase is not very difficult. Can the wiki server generate the image of the moon each day? I guess it is a nice idea to see today's moon in the article moon.
You need a good picture of the moon such as Image:Moon merged small.jpg, and generate 29 moon images. Save the images. And have the system copy the corresponding image to [[Image:Today's moon.jpg]] each day according to UTC.
It is also a good idea to generate the coordinates of planets and stars of a user-defined place but lunar phase is the easiest job. -- Toytoy 10:56, Apr 16, 2005 (UTC)
I would like to see some markup added to the Wiki language for marking up simple tables.
This is not a proposal for a whole new table syntax, which I don't think we need. Rather, I feel that a simplified table markup would be useful for making the simple boxes that are ubiquitous on WP. To see what I mean, take a look at the Taxobox over at Plant, or the infobox over at Portland, Oregon. The proposal is simply:
[*Heading*] :Row1 Item1, Row1 Item2 :Row2 Item1, Row2 Item2 :Row3 Item1, Row3 Item2 :Row4 Item1, Row4 Item2 [*Second Heading | background=red*] : Row1 Item1, Row1 Item2 ...etc...
Where the commas and colons are delimiters. The parsing is pretty simple, and there would be some restrictions, like no nested tables, no use of colspan or rowspan, and no commas or colons within a cell.
I'd like to point out a simplified table markup could help shift the focus from formatting to logical structure. That is, we should be able to think of a table as a list of lists, not a collection of cells. If I mark something up, I shouldn't think about the way the table is laid out, just as long as it preserves the logic. As an example, I could see the markup,
[*Plants*] :Picture, [[Image:A plant.jpg]] [*Scientific classification*] :Domain, Eukaryota :Kingdom, Plantae
Could be laid out as,
Plants | |
Picture | (some image) |
Scientific classification | |
Domain | Eukaryota |
Kingdom | Plantae |
But by simply passing a parameter, the editor could flip the orientation,
Plants | Picture | Scientific classification | Domain | Kingdom |
(some image) | Eukaryota | Plantae |
Or,
Plants | Scientific classification | |
Picture | Domain | Kingdom |
(some image) | Eukaryota | Plantae |
Or, we could skip the table all together and have it output as,
All of these convey the same information. Then the editor wouldn't have to think about layout, just logical structure. Well that's enough WikiPhilosophy for one night ;) -- 69.203.121.20 15:10, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC) (standing in for Sean Kelly.)
A competition is announced for the standardisation of talk page templates: see Wikipedia:Template standardisation – submit your entries before voting commences at the end of 24 April 2005. violet/riga (t) 19:51, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I was surprised to see that this page has not been translated into Arabic. Are there many pages about democracy in Arabic? This sounds like a good project for some high school kids in Iraq.
cheers. Rob
Not certain where the best place to propose this, I'll post it here: I've been noticing that our various articles on colo(u)rs are not necessarily consistent with each other, particularly when it comes to color spaces and RGB/ CMYK values. I therefore propose to create WikiProject Color as a framework for standardising our presentation of such information. Does anyone object? Am I duplicating effort? -- Phil | Talk 17:21, Apr 12, 2005 (UTC)
Created. Now I need lots of help so it doesn't implode under its own weight. -- Phil | Talk 09:45, Apr 13, 2005 (UTC)
The idea:
To make a wiki space dedicated to the documentation of hardware and thechnology.
History and rambling:
A few hours of scouering the internet with only a serial number as a starting point prompted the idea. I had this card for my pc and needed a driver for it and thought it would be easy to just look it up like in the old days when all the inhabitants of the web were tech-minded people and if you werent you had no means of logging on.
Now I eventually found the driver on a page dealing with issues like this and apparently the company making this card had gone bankrupt / stoped supporting the card / been bought or liquidated or taken over or whatever. But a user of the card had posted the driver on his personal website. Now some would say: "Why not just go to this site when you need something like driver / hardware info?" and I would say : "Well there are loads of those sites and most in thread form with old data and most of the time just questions with no answers! But the Wiki system is mutch better for this since the articles accumulate info instead of just piling up text like threads and with the wiki we would have connected us with the critical mass of people needed to make this work."
Anyway I think it would be awesome and useful even if the drivers themselves werent hosted it would be a good starting point.
Best regard to all yall.
Ágúst Rafnsson.
I am one of Wikipedians interested, for various reason, in articles that need translation. However, the current system for handling that is, IMO, pretty bad. The worst part is that we have a ton of different places for that. Consider:
Category:Wikipedia translation that contains:
Category:Pages needing translation and
Category:Translation requests. I know that these two categories are separate, the first being for non-English articles posted on English Wikipedia, and the second being for requests from other Wikipedias. However, it still makes it harder to follow. Next, we have
Wikipedia:Pages needing translation into English, which is, apparently, the most often checked place by translators, but then again, there are many articles in
Category:Pages needing translation that are not on this page.
Next, lists of translators.
Wikipedia:Translators available and
Wikipedia:Wikipedians/Translators are really in need of merging, being two places with the same intention and different contents. My preference lies with a layout such as in
Wikipedia:Translators available, so you can browse by language.
My proposal is to have one big page for everything translation related, and not like
Wikipedia:Multilingual coordination. Something more along the lines of
Wikipedia:Vandalism in progress I guess. The translation center should have a section with a list of translators and a section with translation requests, both from other language Wikis and for non-English articles here. If it turns out to be long, might be split into two pages, but for heaven's sake, with good linking between those.
Next, I am strongly against having different categories for articles that need translation and I suggest just one - again, just one place for translators to check. There, a Wikipedian proficient in several languages, can click on the category and, by browsing titles, see what he might be able to translate.
The translation center page would allow people to easier post requests or not-English articles, and an added bonus is that they can browse the list of translators by language and leave a message on some translator's Talk page to request assistance.
I believe that boilerplates such as {{RoughTranslation|language}}, {{translationlang|de}} or {{translation}} will do well enough for marking different pages anyway. But the translation center would then be a unified place with ease of use.
Feel free to comment and/or flame me.
Solver 13:06, 12 Apr 2005 (UTC)
If something like this is implemented, perhaps we'll never see the message "search is disabled for performance reasons" again.
1. That registered logged in users be able to set a default search engine preference for the search button, either "internal search" "Google" "Yahoo" or the "choice box" (the one that currently comes up when search is disabled") with "choice box" being the default preference for new users. An added bonus would be for "internal search" to be one of the "choice box" options.
2. That anonymous (not logged in) users only have access to Google or Yahoo. They would get a "choice box" without "internal search" as an option.
3. Some variation of the above.
Ron Ritzman 16:44, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I think wikipedia should have a section for proposed articles. Users unsure if an article they wanted to create would be put on vfd right away, and didn't want to find out by making it. People could vote on wether an article was notable enough for wikipedia. Howabout1 16:37, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
The FA and PR boxes, along with all the other possible talk page tags, look quite ugly when they are put together. There is no real consistancy, with different styles and sizes in use. I've made an example status/development box at User talk:Violetriga/statusdevelopment which makes it look, in my opinion, much better. It can also cope with, for example, multiple FAC nominations. Would it cause problems though, making it too difficult for the inexperienced to add tags? Comments, as ever, are more than welcome. violet/riga (t) 11:37, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
It is very difficult to create articles like Ranks and Insignia of NATO as umploading such images one by one is a seriously painfull process. -- Cool Cat My Talk 01:10, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Tell me about it! (*cough* Cyrillic alphabet *cough* Early Cyrillic alphabet) Tabbed web browsing helps a lot. I command click on "Upload file" a bunch of times, then fly across the tabs and work on all the upload pages at once. — Michael Z. 2005-04-9 22:24 Z
So will this be adressed? -- Cool Cat My Talk 03:30, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I'm surprised that this hasn't been discussed before (or maybe I'm just ignorant), but wouldn't it be a good idea to have a spell check button (along with the bold button, underline button, signature button) at the top of the screen when editing articles. Hotmail has something similar in its email composer. Yes, I know there would probably be some issue with reigonal dialects of English, but that could be overcome in several ways. Thr spellign of Wikiepedia cood becom mush bettre, nda thr prefesinalsim of thr artikels woood increse! -- Munchkinguy 00:50, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Comment: Unfortuately I think any Wikipedia-based spell-checker would be a huge CPU hog and therefore would cause a performance hit. There is another solution, however. I'm using the Mozilla Firefox internet web browser along with the SpellBound extension. It comes with an American English word list, but a British English word list can easily be downloaded (as well as Canadian English, Australian English, several other versions of English, and multiple versions of other languages such as Spanish). The SpellBound extension works very well, except that it is slow if the article or talk page you are editing has become quite large. BlankVerse ∅ 16:24, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Safari and several other Mac web browsers already use the system's inline spell checker, which supports four kinds of English, ten other languages, and many more with the CocoAspell extension. If someone takes the time to develop a Wikipedia extension, I want to be able to turn it off completely. — Michael Z. 2005-04-9 16:42 Z
There supposedly already is a spell checker but it has been turned off because it hogs the servers. See Wikipedia:Typo. I've been using Firefox and the Spellbound extension to do spell checking. See User:Omegatron#Spell checker - Omegatron 19:52, Apr 9, 2005 (UTC)
One more reason to abandon MS Internet Explorer. All the hip Wiki kids are doing it! For more info about alternatives and add-ons, see Wikipedia:Browser notes. — Michael Z. 2005-04-9 22:14 Z
I do use Firefox... when I can, but I'm rarley at my computer and most other computers use Internet Explorer. Perhaps there should be a prominent link somewhere in the website that points out where this extention is. -- Munchkinguy 18:27, 13 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I would like to create a group for Wikipedia editors and staff in LinkedIn ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkedIn). For those of you who are not familiar with the service, it allows you to create a network of contacts and maintain them on-line. You obviously have immediate contact information for anyone on your contact list, but can request contact with any one of your contact's contacts, up to 4 degrees of separation. You can then search through your network of contacts and use them to search for jobs, hire someone, make a professional contact, and more. The service is free.
LinkedIn users create profiles, a type of on-line resume, and I felt that listing membership in Wikipedia would be prestigious.
I sent an e-mail to LinkedIn and received the following requirements to start the group:
LinkedIn’s current group functionality is absolutely free.
Five simple steps to setting up your group:
I am not quite sure who to list as the technical contact. Any thoughts? Are there enough LinkedIn users here to warrant this?
— this was posted by User:Theskaven diffs
Basically: Project on creating audio-articles from wikipedias articles
There are many good articles like the recent article of the day Military history of the Soviet Union which we could transform into audio format. It would be great for (pur)blind people etc. and nice for those who like to listen to audio books (while jogging or what ever :). Of course it is harder to update the audiofiles as against text obviously, but if we use good articles, that is to say selected articles that aren't NPOV etc., this shouldn't be a big deal.
This is the basic idea, I don't think I will be doing more than just getting it out (since I do not speak English natively, but perhaps I will do this in my language) but I'd like to see this happen. -- Friðrik Bragi Dýrfjörð 12:33, 26 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Will anyone support me in advocating dropping SAMPA and IPA in articles - even my World Books on the shelf have plain English "pro-nuhn-see-ay-shuns" of things and people's names. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia for the average person not an encyclopedia for linguists. PMA 13:41, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I wondered what people thought about including Geo META data on wikipedia pages ? The geourl.org project maintains a database of pages which are About a given location, and several other services like AlltheGoodness and mappr are starting to use Geo Meta data in interesting ways.
My proposal: allow two optional attributes 'latitude' and 'longitude' on articles, and have this information embedded in the page in meta data e.g.
a page about Sydney Opera House would have attributes:
latitude = -33.8587 longitude = 151.2096
which would produce meta data like:
<meta name="geo.position" content="-33.8587;151.2096" />
which can then be used by search engines etc. to understand more about the content and by others to provide additional services. -- neilp 02:43, 2005 Apr 12 (UTC)
Discussion Moved to: WikiProject Rankings
This project is for the idea of having a ranking system in Wikipedia. Please discuss in talk and make suggestions here (if any)
I was reviewing several countries and their populations. All of the countries I looked at (smaller ones) referenced the List of Countries by Population. Yeaah! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population However, when I compared the population rankings, I received inconcistancies. For example, Vatican City is ranked as 192nd, yet Greenland is ranked as 210th, and American Samoa is ranked as 203rd.
I have only recently been aware of Wikipedia, so I am the Village Idiot around here. I seeking any particular method of resolution, but I was desiring consistency in the statistics. Is it possible for places which are dependent upon data, to populate its information automatically from a reference - like a table? If this could be done, then when that table is updated all of the dependent articles are automatically updated.
That was a specific instance. If I found this issue on my initial uses of Wikipedia, I can only assume that many other types of statistical data will be using either 1) different sources, or 2) using the same source but in inconsistant manners. If this can be addressed in any manner that would be great. (And I did not automatically update the articles as I was unsure which method should be used for ranking.)
A page where you can list a group of articles you watch for both vandalism and generally unproductive edits. Thus, I might watch all the main articles on European countries (e.g. Belarus, Finland, Germany) and someone else might watch all the history-ofs for European countries (e.g. History of Belarus, History of Finland, History of Germany). Or everyone on List of people by name: Roc-Ror to "Roe" and someone else from "Roe" to somewhere else... I'm not proposing any kind of special rights for those who add themselves to the list. It's just meant as a method of reducing redundancy. My watchlist is always very cluttered with time-consuming articles I have little investment in, and there's some stuff I don't want to remove since I think one else is watching it. I often don't check external links that are added to see if they're spam, but I wouldn't mind doing so on a selected subset of articles if I knew others were doing the same. Would anybody else be interested in this? Tuf-Kat 07:55, Apr 10, 2005 (UTC)
(Newbie here)
Why do I have to be a different user in each language version? What if I speak (and contribute to) several languages?
I cannot see messages directed to me unless I log in (and check) into each different language I'm active in! That's annoying!
Please, I propose an universal account!
Thanks -- Tom-b 23:05, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Even more than the convenience factor, in my opinion a more important reason for universal accounts is user impersonation. There have been several instances of a disgruntled user from en going to another-language Wikipedia, registering under the name of the user who reverted or blocked him, and doing a bunch of vandalism. — Knowledge Seeker দ 00:25, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Unfortunately, it'd take too much work to be feasable. Personally, I redirect (see m:User:Ilyanep) or put a line of info down ([ ru:User:Ilyanep] and [ es:User:Ilyanep]), and it works for me (especially because 97.5% of my contribs are to en, so it doesn't do me much inconvenience. — Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 00:39, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've found the binary nature of the current spoiler system irritating. A good example is the Orz (Star Control) article - those who have completed the game know quite a bit of the fictional race described within, but their actual nature remains a mystery. Over the years interviews with the designers and the like have given an amount of insight into them, but these tidbits can be almost as much of a spoiler to an old Star Control player as they'd be to someone not familiar with the game.
What I'd like to do is to use two different spoiler warnings. The standard one for those who haven't played the game, and another for those who have but have not specifically researched the Orz. I have no plans of making this an official policy, but would likely use it one or two times in the future if the situation warrants it (erring on the side of not if there's doubt.) What say you? -- Kizor 20:03, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I have just started using Wikipedia, and I have noticed a case where, In the English interface, I searched for "Tucholsky" and got back a null result; Then, using the German interface, I searched for "Tucholsky" and got back an extensive multimedia page about Kurt Tucholsky.
I would think it useful for the Wiki software always to let the user know that information is available in other languages even if it is not available in the currently selected interface. A list of all Wiki entries matching the keyword should be presented where practical.
Admittedly, implementing this proposal has some difficulties. At least for proper nouns it could be done and would be very useful.
In any case, interlingual Wiki linking will become more important in the future when competent machine translation becomes available.
Currently for each edit on wikipedia creates a new line under my contrabutions. If I had the option to categorise it in such a way:
This would save a lot of bandwidth as less data is sent. I can still expand the category I want by clicking a + -- Cool Cat My Talk 01:07, 8 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Probably a simple question: I have my own media wiki and pretend to make a total css makeover, so as not to look like other wikimedias.
I don´t find in th css style the box wich contains the wikipedia logo. Where can I find the logo itself to change it, and where can i find the layer that contains it, so I can change its position on the page?
I found many images on the monobook skin. One of them was the "headbg.jpg". Is that this grayscale book we see faintly at the wikipedias background? where is it hosted? where are the other icons (external link, lock, user logged etc) hosted (their adress)?
Thanks.-- Alexandre Van de Sande 15:02, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC)
6 Apr 05 1154 local
a) article: Surviving is insufficient. Survival includes psychology thereof; survival patterns; fires (types, schematics, purposes); equipment (tins, pouches, kits and the differences between them) for a variety of terrains and climates; knives (desirable aspects of survival knives); orienteering; map-and-compass; shelters (man-made and artificial); ground SAR; small craft safety and cold water training; cold weather techniques, et cetera.
b) I'm not a technical writer. I am a survival instructor and have a number of other SIs available to contact; I'm willing to provide a knowledge pool.
c) realize Wikipedia is generally not a "how-to"; no worries.
d) seek permission from community at large to i) create disambiguation page for Survival (Bob Marley album) and survival (art of staying alive) ii) commence pouring raw material into latter
e) seek cooperative effort in keeping with Wikipedia ideal in construction of ii) above
Corporal Chris Maxwell -- Esseye 10:02, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
Well, "survival" as the word is employed by professionals is agreed to mean "the art of staying alive" - but of course not everybody is a survival professional so I guess "outdoors" would be a Good Thing to mention. "Hmm...surviving your cat, post-surgery..." -- Esseye 07:11, 7 Apr 2005 (UTC) talk
Britanica generates MLA and APA citations for the page the user is viewing. A bottom "generate citations" link for each page would require minimal work. The reasons for doing this: 1. Britanica Online has a feature we don't! 2. Increase appearance of acknowledged cites to wikipedia in thousands of undergrad papers everyyear. Lotsofissues 22:21, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I just want to throw this idea around. I was wondering if anyone would be interested in a medical wiki (think WebMD wiki style.) I am a pharmacy technican, and such a wiki would be useful for me. Any thoughts? -- STDestiny 03:49, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
— Ilγαηερ (Tαlκ) 04:00, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
There has to be a feature to encourage the generation of redirects. For example, when you start an article called Thomas Edison, you will want to generate a redirect for Thomas Alva Edison as well. Currently, you have to do it manually. This is boring.
How about that we place 3 or more additional fields under the edit window. In addition to "Edit summary", you enter suggested redirects. If each new article comes with several placeholder redirects, the possibility of duplication would minimize. I guess it's not a very difficult job for programmers.
Redirects are especially useful when you create biological articles. If you create an article for dog, you can create a redirect for Canis lupus familiaris. To many less known animals or plants, the binominal or trinominal name redirect can be very helpful. So far many such article lack these redirects.
If a redirect is taken. You may want to check if anyone had written an article on that subject before you. Or you may want to create a disamb page instead. -- Toytoy 00:17, Apr 6, 2005 (UTC)
Last week Wikipedia killed the great actor, Robert De Niro [5]. Today Michael Eisner appears to have died too. First, is Eisner dead? Secondly, should Recent deaths require citations (as Current events does) before listings can be made? The upside is that it prevents hoax listings (and I'd contend that hoaxes at Recent deaths are particularly harmful). The downside is instruction creep and the problem that lesser-known people may not have death cites available quickly. Please comment at Talk:Recent_deaths#Proposal:_listings_require_citations. -- John Fader ( talk | contribs) 00:52, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I would find it useful if when searching, one could be in the wikipedia, but in the search bar be able to type a command in that would search on the wiktionary or in wikispeicies. Thus, when you were in an article, and wanted the defenition of a word from the wiktionary you could search for with without having to go to the wiktionary main page and search from there. An example that I saw was on google, where you can type in Define:wikipedia and it will show the defenitions for wikipedia that it found. A change of this would be that you type in Define:wikipedia and it will show the wiktionary definition for it. Also, Species: Book: News: Quote: etc... Alphanoid 01:26, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)
I'm sure I'm not alone in having loads of items on my watchlist. First time I check it every day, I have to stop and think "which of these are new ones from when I logged off?" Would there be some easy way of adding a "last check at 00:00, day-month-year" at the top of the watchlist page, so that it's possible to know what has and hasn't been looked at? Grutness... wha? 02:51, 10 May 2005 (UTC)
I've noticed something about disambiguation pages. Statistically speaking, they're the messiest and worst-written pages we have. They're disorganized, real slapdash jobs, full of content that belongs in articles but winds up in disambigs anyway. I just went to Category:Disambiguation and sifted through half a dozen or more pseudorandomly chosen pages. A couple of them were passable, a few were bad, and some were very bad. I was about to list the category on Cleanup in desperation, but then I decided that that was probably foolish. I think there should be a WikiProject:Disambig cleanup or something to that effect. It would work a little like the erstwhile Wiki Syntax or Spelling, except instead of having bots to generate lists of articles that need fixing, we'd just have the category listing. And the work involved in fixing each page would be nontrivial. -- Smack ( talk) 04:54, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
At the moment, when doing a long edit on an article, you have two choices: just keep typing and hope that you won't get a crash or an edit conflict, or save then re-open the editing function from the saved page. As anyone who's done much word-processing knows, the best thing to do so as not to lose your train of thought or lose what you've just typed, is save frequently and quickly, and carry on going straight away. At the moment, that is a fairly long-winded process. Has any thought ever been given to adding a third button under the edit box "Save and continue editing", so that the text is saved but you aren't returned to the "read-only" article page? Grutness| hello? 10:07, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps using {{ inuse}} could be useful. 4.250.168.217 12:02, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
What do people think about the idea of creating a sort of sub administrator? A new class of users, who have amassed a couple hundred edits or so (or however many people think a trustworthy user/one with a strong knowledge of Wikipedia, should have).
They would be granted the roll back button as well as a couple other basic tools and/or priveleges. This would make it much easier for a typical user like myself to stop vandalism. Perhaps even another, higher sort of user with the ability to delete newly created aricles that are vandalism.
Admission to this class would be either a quick vote, or an appointment by higher authorities. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated, Thanks! Collins.mc 21:17, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Please comment on Wikipedia:Portalspace. – AB CD 17:29, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Is it feasible for the english wikipedia to be made available as a download for offline access ?
This would allow me & others to enjoy this fountain of knowledge anytime/anywhere (till the always connected era comes !). I could even pay for it a bit !!! Yaammm :-)
Even better would be to include a "sync" facility so the local copy could be kept uptodate.
Imagine the improved response time and pressure of maintaining RC omniscience lifted if every edit that fits the following criteria appeared in highlighted red in RC.
Would this demand too much of the server?
Also, what about adding IPs to a user watchlist?
Lotsofissues 10:19, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
This sounds like a really good proposal. I'd also note if an article increased in size by a substantial amount (e.g. I came accross a short stub that had been replaced by a huge number of copies of the phrase "pelican shit"). This would also catch the accidental page doubling that appears to be happening atm. Don't forget to add "pelican shit" and "Wikipedia is communism" to the list of vandal's favoured words.
Being able to see when a certian user has added to thier contributions would be a very useful addition to watchlists imho. As would being able to watch for additions to categories. Thryduulf 15:38, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
I like this idea generally. Since we do indeed know the common methods for vandalism, simple pattern matching can indeed help us correct the problems faster. We would just need some kind of process for maintaining the list of things to watch for, and we'd need to ensure that the pattern matching never becomes "over-sensitive." — Stevie is the man! Talk | Work 22:05, May 6, 2005 (UTC)
The thing that immediately springs to mind for determining the pattern matching criteria would be a list editable by admins only (to prevent vandalism and bloat) but with a world-writable talk page to allow suggestions for addition/removal, e.g. a few months ago I doubt anyone would have predicted needing "pelican shit" on such a list, and maybe in another couple of moths we'll find we need something as obscure as "octopi 1 wikipedia 0". I think that a minimum criteria for being on the list would be that 2 or 3 established users who frequent recent changes to agree that it would be of benefit. After no matches for a few months it may be apropriate to remove some entries to keep the list trim. Again I don't forsee removal without the agreement of a minimum of two or three established users who frequent recent changes. Based on the MediaWiki:Bad image list I assume that this would be technically possible. The page size detection would need another method though. Thryduulf 23:04, 6 May 2005 (UTC)
This seems like it would be a very useful feature. It may need to be restrained somewhat — for example, users can legitimately "vandalize" their own user pages — but should not be restrained to the point of treating admins, normal users, and anonymous users differently. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 00:12, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Octopodes or no octopodes, the concept is brilliant, if it can be made to work and filter propoerly. Grutness| hello? 01:32, 7 May 2005 (UTC)
Who decides what to additions to the software will be worked on? I want to push this. Lotsofissues 00:52, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Although I find Wikipedia terrific, I notice that there is very little about the environment. I am in the process of creating an online 'keywords and concepts' source on environmental studies for my academic departmental community. Is there a way to work together so that what we produce enters your wonderful open source domain - whilst being accessible separately in our own free portal dedicated to environmental studies? In other words, is it possible to create a system wherein editorial changes can be made in either portal, subject to the conventions and rules of the Wikipedia, of course? Thank you for taking the time to read this.
RAVI RAJAN, Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064
1.831.459.4158 :: srrajan@ucsc.edu
In the usual WikiWay at the very least, something like this is possible. I don't think it would be very Wiki to produce an article parallelling your website, but information could 'naturally' be shared between the sources in the usual WikiWay. . . if there is not an article about a subject covered in your external site, create one!
also, it would be plenty Wiki to make plenty of links between these related articles, and the related teirs of your external site. of course, if you don't want to produce all those articles yourself, the easiest and most Wiki way to solicit some aid would be to create a stub with a link to your site and under the talk/discussion tab, you could inform a reader that your site contains more data and it would be nice to expand the wiki article.
if the wiki article becomes more comprihensive then your site (not at all unlikely) then you could certainly update your external site with the Wiki produced info.
MethodicEvolution 00:00, 2 May 2005 (UTC)