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I already asked this question at the Dutch wiki, but here I'll go: For historians it is pretty important to have good sources about the opinions of people in the past. Wikipedia is a good project, which shows the interests and points of view of a lot people. Is it a idea to make a offline-copy of the whole wikipedia every year or so? I don't know exactly how much spacy on the harddisc wikipedia needs if we would do it that way, but it would be nice. Of cource we would only need the articles, not the editing software. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? I heard of a copy from 2001, but is there also a more recent copy? Effeietsanders 08:06, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It struck me that to speed the discovery of vandalism, pumping out diffs at a high rate on a specific page, thereby getting rid of the Recentchanges middleman, may be a good idea.
It would be similar in structure to Slashdot's Meta Moderation system: a designated page, perhaps Special:Monitor, would pump out X number of recent diffs made within the last Y days, on one single page, for the purpose of fast eyeballing.
This would cut out the "middleman" of Recentchanges for those on janitorial duty; only the refresh button needs to be repeatedly abused in order to view massive amounts of diffs and scan for vandalism at a very fast rate.
The details of the method by which diffs are chosen for display can be left to people with more expertise, but I'll offer up some suggestions:
Only suggestions, I don't know enough about the throughput of changes and the number of janitors on duty at any given time to know which method is more feasible. But I believe a Monitor page would greatly facilitate the speedy discovery of vandalism.
-- Znode 05:40, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)
Can we add a function to display a "Last update: 6 months ago" message on an article's header if that article hasn't been edited for a while, say, over 6 months. If I see such a message, I'll be more skeptical with the information.
This is not a good solution. Sometimes people edit a page to fix a typo or adjust layout. A page with outdated information may have been edited multiple times without the needed update (for example: the current U.S. president: Richard Nixon). -- Toytoy 18:03, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
I think more needs to be done to encourage users to use this feature, especially on controversial articles. Far too few people make proper and regular use of it. I propose that edit summaries be made compulsory for articles with neutrality/POV disputes (possibly through the mediawiki software?). How might I propose this to become official policy? Its only a guideline at the moment. ( Wikipedia:Edit summary) Deus Ex 15:31, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
i often thought of a certain thing but didn't know what it is called. like what the various parts of a barrel are called, what parts usually constitute a castle and stuff like that. these things are often tedious to find out and it would be nice if this would be addressed in a more systematical way in wikipedia.
like a standard box of links kinda like:
harddrives usually consist of
platter read write head ...
harddrives are a common part of
computers mp3 players whatever
harddrives are commonly associated with:
(dunno ... think castles - knights, siege, ...)
somehow like that.
most of this information is of course already there but like i said ...
it would benefit from a more systematical approach.
anyway ... just felt the need to post this.
not much of a wikipedia expert ... dunno if something like this was already discussed/dismissed or something. not even sure if this is the correct place to post this. Sorry if it isnt.
please comment
On the RfAr/RFC page, Maurreen suggested splitting the article RfCs into the main Wikipedia catergories, Culture, Geography, History, Life, Mathematics, Science, Society, and Technology. Could be a way of getting more responses, by breaking down the list into more digestable sized chunks, and allowing people with specific interests to pick up on items which may be of interest. Thoughts here please! Dan100 07:43, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)
Hi,
There are lots of owners of (e.g. University-based) websites who would be happy for the research content (projects/articles) of their websites to be copied onto Wikipedia pages. Could Wikipedia come up with a logo which website owners could put at the bottom of their websites which says something like "feel free to copy the contents of this article which I have written and use it (word-for-word or otherwise) as the basis of a Wikipedia article without copyright restrictions"? A wiki page with external links to all of these websites would also be required (or an easy way of searching for the logo in Google). It's a lot less effort for a busy postdoc researcher to stick a logo on all his/her articles than it is to wikify all the articles and put them onto wikipedia. If the material was worth copying, then I'm sure there will be plenty of Wikipedians to do it!
Rnt20 18:51, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I decided to act myself, and have created a Wiki page which is designed to help website owners at the following location:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adding_a_GFDL_license_to_your_webpage
I have also added the following footer (or something similar) to some of my webpages:
<TABLE><TR><TD VALIGN=CENTER><IMG SRC="http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~nevec/outreach/gfdl.png"></TD><TD VALIGN=CENTER><B>GFDLcontent</B>. The work on this page, and in the project subsections linked to by this page are covered by a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License">GFDL</A> license, and the author states that the text and images can be copied within the restrictions of this license (e.g. the material can be copied into free encyclopedias such as <A HREF="www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</A>). Please <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adding_a_GFDL_license_to_your_webpage">add a footer</a> like this to your own webpages to promote free access to knowledge.</TD></TR></TABLE><!--Please also list your webpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_GFDL_content_on_the_internet-->
See e.g. http://www.geocities.com/robert_tubbs/page1.html
The non-word GFDLcontent is included so that Google searches can find this footer.
Please tell me (urgently!) whether there are any problems with this. Otherwise I will try to get the same footer added to lots of University webpages at several different Universities. Rnt20 10:19, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
NO MEMBER ONLY EDITING!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think that there should be a place that stubs and arcticles that need serious editing are temporally moved to. What do you think?
I strongly disagree with members only editing. what if someone browzing the Wiki notices something wrong or something he could add. He probably wouldn't take the time to become a member to make just a few changes. (Left by anon 141.156.241.63)
I would like to see a preferences option for members that would display some statistics about who edited the currently viewed page. I.e. whether the page was created by a member; edited by a non-member; number of edits; last edit, &c. That way a random page viewer might get some quick clues without going to the history page. — RJH 02:15, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wired Magazine has an article, " Wiki Targets How-To Buffs" on WikiHow, a website dedicated to "how-to" information. Wikipedia does not have a clear policy on whether how-to information belongs in Wikipedia:
Furthmore there is a separate How-tos bookshelf at Wikibooks. As a matter of practicality, there should only be a single global wiki on a given area to maximize the community size needed to ensure the success of the community. IMHO how-to info belongs in Wikipedia and we should subsume Wikihow content. If Wikipedia does not want that information, we should VfD all our "how-to"s to move that information to WikiHow to aid in their success (and maybe encourage them to move into WikiCities, but that's a separate discussion.) What do others think? Samw 03:07, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I suggested generating a properly formatted reference for each article so that students would save time and credit Wikipedia more. Auto citations have become a standard part of any online reference. Britannica, the Oxford DNB, etc. all leave a proper reference at the bottom of articles. Months before when I first asked if Wikipedia could also incorporate this feature, someone thought it could be accomplished after permalinks for every version were implemmented. Now that permalinks are a part of Wikipedia - would adding the reference feature to the toolbox be easily accomplished?
lots of issues | leave me a message 2 July 2005 14:03 (UTC)
<div> To cite this article, you can use the following: "{{PAGENAME}}". ''Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia''. Revision dated {{REVISIONTIME}} (UTC), {{REVISIONDAY}} {{REVISIONMONTH}} {{REVISIONYEAR}}. Accessed {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}. Available from <http://en.wikipedia.org/?{{PAGENAMEE}}&oldid={{REVISIONID}}>. </div>
Take a look at the bottom of this encarta article. On the bottom of every page they tell people how they can cite that encarta article. Wouldn't it be nice if we did that also? We could add a template to the bottom of every page giving MLA style or, even better, we could make a special page which would output a whole bunch of different citing styles. We always have lots of people asking how to cite us and I bet there are people who don't want to cite wikipedia because of the diffuclty. This link is Broken 18:36, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I brought this up once already, but I think it still needs to be addressed. The condition of the english-language wikipedia's directory is horrific compared to that of the German-language wikipedia's (de.wikipedia.org then click on "Artikel nach Themen") I have talked with user:Spangineer about doing something with a combination of the portals system into the directories, and addition of new portals, etc., but neither of us can offer the immense amount of time needed to work on this sort of project. Please talk to one of us if you are interested in helping in any way.
PS: Is there any way I can keep this from being deleted? Because I think it is very important to the user-friendliness of Wikipedia. Clarkefreak ∞ 01:14, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Another option could be expansion of DDC and LOC. -- Arcadian 22:47, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
This would make a great WikiProject for a few people. -- Jmabel | Talk July 2, 2005 04:19 (UTC)
See also french translation fr:Wikipédia:Portail-- Ste281 5 July 2005 19:15 (UTC)
A while ago, section headings like ==section==, ===section===, etc, had numbered labelings (ie: 2 section; 3 another section; 3.1 subsection, etc). However, it seems to be removed. I personally think that it was useful, and I'm sure some other contributors feel the same way. Maybe there should be an option to control this in the Preferences menu? -- Ixfd64 2005 July 1 20:22 (UTC)
I think the Image:Sound-icon.png in the header should be linked to Category:Spoken articles. - Roy Boy 800 1 July 2005 15:57 (UTC)
This is really two ideas I came up with after noticing one of those copyright notices (saying you can only copy 5%) in one of my local libraries.
Let me know what you think here or on my discussion page. If this is in the wrong place, please can someone move it to the correct place. Thanks, John Cross 1 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)
I've noticed Category:Spoken articles has a gallery of recently submitted media at the bottom. I've implemented a program that scrapes the wikipedia's html and generates an RSS feed with the ogg/vorbis spoken articles as enclosures, but shouldn't wikipedia be able to do this automatically?
The experimental feed is at http://dingoskidneys.com/~dholth/spokenwikipedia.xml and the program to generate it minus any recent local revisions is at http://dingoskidneys.com/~dholth/spokenwikipedia.py .
The feed includes 75 ogg vorbis files and instructs a podcatcher like bashpodder to download 450 megabytes of spoken wikipedia. I would like guidelines on what total enclosure size might be considered reasonable and what might be considered harmful before attempting to give a spoken wikipedia podcast a greater audience.
Also, as a student of current spoken wikipedia intent on producing new ones, I would like a RSS with every of approx. 110 spoken wikipedia articles enclosed, for convenient study of the existing works.
DanielHolth 1 July 2005 05:45 (UTC)
My wife and I often listen to books on tape. There's a lack of free content out there. If I were to record myself reading a public-domain book, and release it into the public domain, it would be a large file, even in ogg format. Would Wikimedia be willing to host it? Where would be an appropriate place for it? Commons? Wikisource? Thanks, – Quadell ( talk) ( sleuth) 18:36, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)
I just went through the history of front page articles and someone (user Lolwtf) uploaded a horrible picture, then he/she (from what I know) used an ip address (64.26.109.9) to reuse that image on two occasions on two articles. I was wondering is it much work to allow only people who have contributed a certain number of articles (10 maybe) to be allowed to upload an image. I was also wondering why was the image not removed immediately? It is still there!! If not delete it at least replace it with something - blank dot maybe. I looked some more and the image was on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion for deletion. Going through the bureaucratic procedure of wikipedia the image will still be there for a week.
Could an Admin place the following tag in this Special Page? {{CategoryTOC}}. The page is Special:Listusers. It would make it easier to browes, in my opinion. Thanks. -- Admiral Roo June 29, 2005 19:47 (UTC)
My proposal is to change the format of Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) as follows: There would be only three sections to this page:
Advantages
Disadvantages
Please discuss on talk page.
It would be nice if Special:Listusers was made easier for filtering. The list for users and admins has been merged for this new version of MediaWiki. For example, I can select so that only admins are listed, but when I click "next 500", etc, it shows regular users again. I know that I can add "&limit=500" to the original URL, but not everyone knows that trick... :o -- Ixfd64 2005 June 29 02:56 (UTC)
Wikipedia recently upgraded to a new wiki software version, but there is a feature that I had hoped would be in it.
Whenever you click on the history tab, there are several numbers at the bottom - 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, etc. that gives you the "results per page" feature. However, I really want a "last" and "first" feature - that is - I can hop right to the beginning of a page's history to see how it began as an article. That way, I don't have to press the "next 500" button over and over again to see the article's beginning.
Hope this will be in the next version of the wiki software. — Stevey7788 ( talk) 28 June 2005 20:18 (UTC)
Could an authorized admin create a link to bug reports for all of mediawiki's navigation links page? Thanks. -- Admiral Roo June 28, 2005 14:53 (UTC)
This is a suggestion that might be related to the perennial proposal, "Filter or Site for Young Students" but offering an alternative solution to filtering for concerned parents. It would also bring certain other advantages.
I propose an off-shoot/fork of the the EN wikipedia, targeted for children. I envision articles with a reading level of, say, 12 years (hopefully without becoming patronising!). Emphasis would be on articles with an obvious attraction to children. Articles covering objectionable material could/would be avoided without impacting the main wikipedia. Articles on complex topics (e.g. the high-level mathematics articles) could be provided at a much more appropriate level.
Has this proposal been offered before? Is there any interest in such a "en-junior" for children? Would anyone else be prepared to help on such a project? Stewart Adcock 28 June 2005 11:22 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest the addition of a shortcut to remove items from a person's watchlist.
Currently, the "My watchlist" page boasts the usual list of latest updates such as
Would it be too difficult to make it instead show this?
It would save having to farf between a couple of pages when trying to change a watchlist. Grutness... wha? 04:57, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, but I just thought it might be useful if a watched page pops up near the top of your watchlist that you no longer want to watch, to just be able to remove it straight from the top page. (hmmm...did that parse OK?). BTW, I've clicked on "Mark pages visited", but nothing's appearing in bold. Does the "last visit" function not work properly, or am I doing something wrong? Grutness... wha? 28 June 2005 13:52 (UTC)
I also would like this option. Rd232 28 June 2005 21:23 (UTC)
So that the editors can see how many people are coming to pages they frequent? Non-users part is optional, but I'd like to actually see how many people are going to the George W. Bush page or any other ones that I'm working on. Doesn't have to be complex webtrends statistics, just a simple number since a certain date. -- kizzle 00:55, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)
Would it be a good idea to have administrator usernames have a different color? This feature would help people catch admin impersonators quickly (as opposed to having to go to Special:Listadmins). -- Ixfd64 05:15, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)
I agree that admins shouldn't have special colours, etc. — but what do you have against colour in general? (I only ask because I want to know.) Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 13:25, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It would be fantastic if every place name and every historic place name had a map.
I'd like to propose that the list of births and deaths in year articles should be restricted to figures of major international repute. If we listed everyone with a Wikipedia article in these categories, the year articles would be dominated by them (e.g. 1944 would contain over 800 births). If people wish to spin off the articles for, say, Births in 1944 article, then fine (although this should have more detail than just the Category of course). Average Earthman 22:50, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
To help users evaluate page histories, display the size of a page version in the history, or possibly the change in page size (in % and/or kb) caused by each edit. This would make it easier to spot major changes worth looking at in more detail. Rd232 22:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
How about revising the WikiMedia software so that along with each edit, a hashed version of the editor's IP address would be listed in the edit history? That way, it would be possible to determine if two users have the same IP address, without actually giving away their IP address. Joo-joo eyeball 15:23, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In the special page Upload file, which is apparently protected from editing by guys like me, there are two instances where "license" is spelled "licence". Everywhere else on the upload page, the word is spelled "license". I propose that those instances where the word is spelled "licence" be changed to "license" for consistency with the rest of the page. H Padleckas 01:09, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I for one am sick to death of seeing "artical" in wikipedia, mostly on discussion pages, but still, these people sound like morons. It's article.
Is there anything that can be done about this? Perhaps a subst:template for user pages? An awareness campaign? Or would it be easier to just contact the people at Oxford and get them to change the spelling of the word?
-- Robojames 15:41, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
If someone wants to do a lot of people a big wiki-favor, please create a macro for automated conversion of an existing article's citations to a footnote system. For instance, Convention on Psychotropic Substances needs to be converted to footnotes, but that would be rather time-consuming to do manually. There are probably hundreds or thousands of articles in need of such conversion. Please take a look and see what you think. Thanks! Remember me 14:35, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hi! I'm from Ukrainian wikipedia. Recently I have translated article about Gavrilo Princip. I need to put images in my article, and there are some in English article. But images in English article is not images from WikiCommons. How about to create a special tag, like [[Image:en:Example]] or something like that, which would put images in my article from articles from other Wikipedias? It will be easier for me and for servers. 13.06.05 Please contact me
There's no simple way to link to images in other Wikipedias, but the process of transferring is not so hard.
Image syntax should not need to be changed unless the filename has changed -- [[Image:Foo.jpg]] will look first for a file named "Foo.jpg" on the local wiki; if it finds one, it will use the local one, if not, it will look at Commons and use that one. — Catherine\ talk 21:05, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You could create the following template in the Hungarian wiki: "Template:CrossWikiImage".
<img src=" http://{{{1}}}.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:{{{2}}}">
Then when you wanted to reference the page, you could use the following template:
{{ CrossWikiImage|en|Gavrilloprincip.jpg }}
It's not a perfect solution, but it might be a reasonable workaround until the software supports cross language images. And because it would be implemented as a template, it would be easy to change if/when the software changes.-- Arcadian 22:58, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You know how in user preferences you can set your date to display a certain way if an article has the date within parenthesis (or something like that)? I hit upon an idea. How about putting unstandard spellings of words within parenthesis and then they would display according to the setting you indicate in your user preferences? If you speak American english then someone who wrote in British english would put nonstandard words in parens and then that word would render in american english. Did I explain myself well?? Jaberwocky6669 02:58, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
Ah, I get it now. Originially I thought that British spellings could simply be bracketed [[]], but as I was about to explain it I realize that doing it that way would only convert British spellings to American but not American to British! Thanks for showing me the light. Jaberwocky6669 June 29, 2005 16:23 (UTC)
First, have I put this question in the right place? If not, can someone please tell me where it should go?
I have this idea for a brilliant long distance walk. I would like to tell
How about a Wikiatlas? It can collect various maps, historical maps, etc.
Has the inclusion of W3C validation buttons been considered before? It would be a small (88x31) image link, which fits perfectly at the bottom of the page with the Wikimedia and MediaWiki logos. Wikipedia is confirmed valid XHTML by W3C's tool, though we're just short of compliant with their CSS validator. Phoenix-forgotten 01:25, 2005 July 12 (UTC)
Hydnjo made an interesting point on the help desk. At the moment, there's no simple way for a reader (as opposed to a Wikipedian) to tell how long ago an article became featured. That matters to some extent, because there is some chance that the article has gone downhill since featuring. Obviously that's the exception not the rule, but if we're honest we'll admit to ourselves that it could happen especially for more controversial articles.
He proposed that we change the featured template to show when the article became featured, not just the fact that it is. I like the idea also. Any thoughts? Isomorphic 04:52, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Has the idea of creating a (possibly automated) rating system ever been floated? Sort of like eBay, the system could track how many times a user gets reverted. A rating system would track the number of edits to reverts the user has. When a 'mischevious' user makes an edit, it is flagged under Recent Changes as suspect.
Each image version should have its own copyright tag in order to avoid someone to change it when he updates the image (or intentionally). -- Zimbricchio 23:26, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
One of the most important issues of wikipedia is that its work contains little reference. Could wikipedia form a referencing taskforce, like what wikipedia has done with the cleanup taskforce? Elixir of Life July 7, 2005 11:12 (UTC)
This form uses the inputbox extension to place a {{test}} message on a user talk page.
The advantage is that the {{test}} message is editable, like it had been placed there with subst before the page is saved, making it easier to customize.
Links to related templates will appear above the edit box. These can be changed at Template:Test intro.
Enter the user name (with the User_talk: prefix) in the box below, and click "create article" to add a test message to that user's talk page.
You can access the same page using a URL like [4] (replacing 'Testingggg' with an actual user name). It will only work for users that have no talk page yet. Angela . July 6, 2005 02:07 (UTC)
I would like to propose a new page called Wikipedia:Bully which would clearly define behavior which, while not vandalism, is unacceptable for Wikipedia. There is a fine line on this site between people offering comments and people simply attacking other users and articles. In particular, the following items would make someone a wikipedia bully
Those are just a few examples. The main difference between a Wikipedia Bully and a Vandal would be that the bully doesnt actually mess around with the articles, only attacks and bashes people who work on articles that they dont see as worthy to be on Wikipedia. Just an idea at this stage. What do folks think? - Husnock 5 July 2005 09:09 (UTC)
Some of the behavior you describe is in Wikipedia:Troll. Calling users names is considered a personal attack.The problem however isn't defining them, it is dealing with them...-- Fenice 5 July 2005 09:15 (UTC)
It's not clear to me what the purpose of this page would be. Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 6 July 2005 09:29 (UTC)
Hello All:
I am making a first post to Wikipedia.
The basic question I have concerns how the rights of corporations have changed since 1789. It is my understanding that corporations had charter rights of limited duration previous to a supreme court decision, I believe in a footnote changing the status to full individual rights of a citizen.
where would one go to find written commentary on this issue.
Go to wikipedia:reference desk and ask it there. Howabout1 Talk to me! July 4, 2005 16:05 (UTC)
When you edit a page, underneath the edit window you get all the templates used on the page, then the special charatcer insert box. All fine and dandy, unless you're working on a page like Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria, Wikipedia:Templates for deletion, or one of the Wikipedia:Templates type lists, on which there may be 50 or more templates. Adding special characters from the insert box can be a real chore then, scrolling up and down to find the items you want. Is there any way of swapping the order these things appear, so that the list of templates is after the special character box? Grutness... wha? 4 July 2005 12:48 (UTC)
This isn't on the "perennials" page; I don't know if it has been looked at. Please see my questions on Talk:Webring about whether a WP can be linked into a Webring. Robin Patterson 4 July 2005 03:38 (UTC)
Would it be beyond the scope of the Wikipedia for musicians to have a tour history section, wherein tour histories can be compiled with setlists, links to audio of the concert (legal ones like etree.org, of course...), etc? I know that many fansites of bands and artists try to compile this information, but perhaps it would be much better to do this here?
Would this be a WikiProject idea or more of an idea requiring an independent Wiki? I could easily see this becoming fairly complex and leading to cross-references with other musicians (guest appearances), database searches, recording sources, etc. -- Girolamo Savonarola July 4, 2005 03:05 (UTC)
This feels like an idea that someone mentions every so often but which cannot be implemented for whatever reason. If this is the case then feel free to delete this post (which I guess you should anyway); but I'd greatly appreciate having a message dropped into my Talk Page.
Anyway, here's my idea. I was just looking at an article that featured a link to eBay. The link didn't work, because the sale had closed. It wasn't in any way important that I could access the link, except in a kind of "how cool is that, it really _did_ get sold on eBay!" kind of way. But I suppose one could make the point that references such as this one serve as a reference.
This is the second time this has happened to me with eBay links in the last week or so. eBay takes down listings for sold items quite quickly, I think.
Would it not be possible in situations such as these (websites such as BBC.co.uk keep an excellent archive, but I'm sure there are other examples where archived but nonetheless useful data is not available) to, for example, take a screencap of the page, or using HTTPTrack to download the site, and then publish it in some sense through Wikipedia. I guess there might be copyright infringments with this, and my knowledge of US Copyright law is not strong enough for me to know whether this is "fair use" or not.
Just an idea... -- James Kemp 4 July 2005 00:10 (UTC)
I believe that this page should be permanantely protected. For many users it is the second page they see at Wikipedia, and it is too often and too easily vandalised. Tests should be redirected to the sandbox, where they belong. Many editors are put off, I believe, by seeing vandalism and trolling on there when they go to find out about Wikipedia. With protection, new users can get a full introduction un-interrupted. Hedley 3 July 2005 23:14 (UTC)
Ok, here is my idea. A collaborative music score. I know this doesn't belong in Wikipedia, but if it were worth it to do this, where could it go? Jaberwocky6669 04:27, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)
Would it be a bad idea to change "Random page" to "Random article" for accuracy? See my post on MediaWiki talk:Randompage. -- Ixfd64 18:44, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)
I suggest that we breakup some controversial articles if possible. We can keep the core concept in the original article and make it as short as possible, and place details in many sub-articles. If a part is protected because of a debate, it will not affect other parts. -- Toytoy 14:07, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
I also think they should break up articles. That way they don't block the whole content. Take a look at section the section #Split the George W. Bush article to diversify the location of content below on this same page. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 20:25, July 9, 2005 (UTC)
I can't see the archive. Has it disappeared? Bobblewik (talk) 13:02, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There was a proposal titled Create date object method' independent of link method. Can anyone point out to me where it went? Bobblewik (talk) 30 June 2005 19:10 (UTC)
I personally like to manually type www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article to get to a certain article, which conveniently gets redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article automatically. However, this does not work when typed with caps lock on (e.g. WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/ARTICLE does not work). This can be fixed as follows:
- make /WIKI/ redirect to /wiki/ - make /ARTICLE redirect to /Article if ARTICLE does not exist but Article does.
Dear...to whomever this may concern,
This place is just the best thing the collective human mind could have come up with. It is a pure and (seemingly) free expression of knowledge. There is only one small issue that i am amazed has not been dealt with yet: colours. Black on white background is horrendously bad for the eyes. When i read articles, i always have to select the text, which then makes it white on dark-blue. Why is there not a button to change the CSS to a more pleasing colour? I would suggest white text on dark-blue.
Otherwise: perfect.
To get an idea of what can be achieved, see the Gallery of user styles — yes you can have flourecent green text on black if you still miss those old phosphor monitors. For guidance on how to do it, see m:User_styles. -- Solipsist 14:11, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
WikiProject Echo is looking for participants to integrate information from other-language Wikipedias into the English one. The scope is to find articles present in another Wikipedia but not this one, and echo and translate them here. Some language skills recommended. R adiant _>|< 13:25, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Since we have a List of commercials anyways, why not a List of famous slogans?
Hi all, I am PhatRita, a medical student. I have been following the pages in human anatomy and physiology and indeed a lot of medical subjects such as embryology. The pages there are a mess. Human anatomy faces problems with terminology (eg whether to use lay or professional. Other problems include that with redirection, eg arm represents the whole of the upper limb which would be wrong in anatomical terms. There are problems which involves the interlinking of human anatomy and animal anatomy which results in complex and sometimes unreadable pages. The other problem would be the lack of application of this anatomy to clinical topics, for example the wrist and carpal tunnel syndrome. A lot of articles are stubs, and others which are not are one senteced and therefore should be. In human physiology, the entry is a stub. It was under COTW consideration and got phased out due to lack of votes to keep it in running.
I am proposing a preclinical medicine project which resembles that of the Clinical Medicine talk page, with focus on preclinical topics like anatomy and physiology. The topic will provide the following main points:
please mail me with suggestions or interest
PhatRita 11:43, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
With all the emphasis on poverty and hunger relief in Africa, we have a rather unique approach to attacking this problem. We do not give money, we give practical assistance. Please look at www.hivessavelives.com. We would welcome cooperation with you and perhaps linking to your website.
Our Project Director, Linda Whitby, can be contacted on +44 01273 302586 or by e-mail to lwhitby@tiscali.co.uk. She would be delighted to hear from you.
Best regards.
Richard Unwin Founder Hives Save Lives – Africa
Just like the Watchlist edit page. This would make the Watchlist much easier to.. watch. Also, talk pages should have their own section. -- pile0nades talk | contribs 04:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
There used to be a link to the
Sandbox on the Main Page, but it got removed (possibly due to the fact that the Sandbox was getting used too much and new users were getting confusing edit conflicts). Therefore, I propose that there be multiple Sandboxes, all in a sandbox namespace (such as sandbox:
or test:
). The current Sandbox page would show a listing of all existing sandboxes, and possibly an inputbox to quickly create a new sandbox.
Advantages:
And since there will be more than one, we could give the sandbox namespace a more extendible name (such as "Playground").
DrZoidberg 15:19, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
There are already several. Look at the template. Howabout1 Talk to me! 18:08, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
sandbox:
, and they could all easily be found by searching for pages that start with sandbox:
. Plus, playing with page moves and redirects will not be a problem!!
DrZoidberg 19:12, 20 July 2005 (UTC)I think it's fine as it is. Howabout1 Talk to me! 19:31, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
A name space is more than simply shoving "String:" in front of the article title. -- Cyrius| ✎ 20:06, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Another possibility would be to have a link in the Sandbox header which points at [[User:~~~/Sandbox]], where the current user's name is inserted. I don't see a current variable which allows doing that. ( SEWilco 06:17, 23 July 2005 (UTC))
Arguments for and against drug prohibition is the greatest page in Wikipedia! By that I mean, both sides get to state their case, AND both sides get to respond to their opposition, AND nobody is getting into an edit war (as far as I can tell). In my opinion, EVERY controversial topic should have a page like this. With, of course, a category or listing which points to all of them. -- Ravenswood 22:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
I'll add more as I think of things... -- Ravenswood 22:24, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
See the page I reference. It seems to be relatively free of edit wars, for the simple reason that both sides get their own 'turf' on the same page.
Typical Wiki page:
(original): Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.
(edit): Marijuana is harmless and should be legal.
(edit:) Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.
(etc)
Point-Counterpoint page:
(original):
(edit):
Unlike a typical Wiki page, there is no reason for a user to edit the page to re-state that Marijuana is dangerous. It's already there, in black and white. If they do any editing, it will be only to beef up the statement which is already there:
(edit):
And at this point, both sides agree to let the reader decide which is the better argument. The absolute worst-case scenario is that the argument gets repeated one time in the opposing section:
Edit wars shouldn't happen because each side should only be editing "their" paragraphs. An edit to an enemy paragraph designed to weaken the argument can be fixed as easily as any other vandalism. -- Ravenswood 01:59, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
Ok, I'm reasonably certain this must have been proposed before, but since I found no reference on it, I thought I might as well be bold and propose it. How about a trivia format for "side-track" information within the articles themselves? Here's a cute example:
Wouldn't people like to find out this kind of stuff? Thank you at least for reading all this! Cheers, Gutza 21:20, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
HOW MANY ARTICLES MUST THIS TAKE UP?! Example : Heathrow_Terminals_1,2,3_railway_station Category 16:34, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Discussion in need of people. -- MarSch 09:56, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure where I'm supposed to suggest this kind of thing, so I'll start here. This is my proposal: a voluntary system where users are able to declare their geographic location, industry and general expertise so they could receive custom-tailored alerts regarding article and image requests relevant to their personal data. This way someone requesting an article on, say, a landmark in Boston could send the request to users in Boston. Someone requesting an image of a piece of military equipment would have their request go to members of the armed forces. Someone wanting an image of a city in China could make sure that people in the area know of the request. It seems to me that such a system would greatly increase the number, quality and speed of contributions. Let me know what you guys think.-- Daveswagon 15:15, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
I feel that since they are so close to the same thing, that conservation should be moved to a sub category of enviromentlism, or otherwise linked. Since the categories dont have active talk pages, I am posting it here for feedback. IreverentReverend 14:27, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
here is part of the intor from enviromentalism: It is a social movement which seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, education and activism in order to protect natural resources.
Here is part of the intro from conservation movment: The Conservation movement seeks to protect plant and animal species from harmful human influences.
That is what I based linking them on, seems to me that conservation is a subset of enviromentalism based on that, and in my experiance, other than enviromentalists being more political and on the fringe(often times... never see a conservation group acting like peta, alf, elf, or the like), they are basically the same... IreverentReverend 17:33, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Forgive the slightly obscure section heading, but I was struggling for alternatives. Anyway, my suggestion (credit: Essjay & Ilyanep) is to create Wikipedia:Toolbox, and probably WP:TB as well. This would be along the lines of User:Smoddy/Tools. Does anyone have any objection to this? Cheers, smoddy 18:35, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I learned earlier today what leaving these kinds of tools in obvious places can do; see here. I still think it has a lot of potential, but perhaps we should keep it out of the main line of sight. -- Essjay · Talk 20:32, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure by the rapid fire way he did it that he was using the tool; my mistake for leaving it out in the open. However, I definately think it has promise. We're constantly hearing from new users how hard it is to find some things, but established users have no problem finding them, so I say we tuck it away in one of the not-so-dark corners of the wiki where good users can find it and vandals won't see it. -- Essjay · Talk 20:40, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps a similar thing could be added as a special page accessible only by admins. violet/riga (t) 20:44, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to have an [edit] link (not the same as "edit this page") at the top of articles so people don't have to download the whole article's source code just to edit something at the top. Take this page for example. The headline "Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)" would have an [edit] link on the right side of the page, just like normal headlines do.
This can be done already by h4x0ring the section edit url. Like This. That link will let you edit the top of the page only. The "section=0" means the top of the page. -- pile0nades talk | contribs 12:00, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I just tested this on my user page and found no glitches. See this diff. I added some random text with the "edit this page" link, then removed it using the "section=0" link. -- pile0nades talk | contribs 12:11, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Could you add <charinsert>s on MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning/ja like MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning?-- っ 15:44, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Hi! Seeing that I originated the article on the Deaths in Ciudad Juarez, and, as Puerto Rican, I worry about the wellfare of all fellow Latin Americans in general, I wonder if anyone has written an article about the deaths and dissapearances of people during the Pinochet presidency. If not, Im interested in making an npov, very well researched article about it.
Thanks and God bless!
Sincerely yours, Antonio Latinos unidos por Siempre Martin
Since they are not just four (ex John, Paul, George and Ringo), but about 38, and divided into five eras, I thought I should make this,..what do you guys think?
Antonio should've been a Menudo Martin
All the time I go to articles and find PD-labelled images. I'd like to bung a Commons tag on them and send them away, but the backlog of "now on Commons" is already huge. Plus there's also the problem of copying over versions and histories (as identified in the Criteria for Speedy Deletion poll).
Is it technically possible for all related data (not just the current image version) to be transferred, by bot or by human, from WP/WB/etc. to the Commons?
I think it's really a shame that we have this huge collection of images that ought to be on the Commons but currently have no way of getting them there except manually, and that cancels out uploader and version information.
So, what do you think? Is this possible? Is it stupid? Or is it just too much hard work? Garrett Talk 03:38, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm not so sure, for three reasons:
I am trying to work up the courage to start a WikiProject to address the last problem: it is much too large to be dealt with by a single user. Physchim62 11:50, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
Still, it's a problem... Garrett Talk 23:39, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Voting is now open on a proposal to amend the Manual of Style regarding era designations (the BC/AD vs. BCE/CE debate). Kaldari 19:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Since others have already voiced some concern about controversial articles, I will add to the discussion here.
While I love the wiki, I have noticed that some articles are much more heated than others. For instance, the Islam page is currently under tight control. As I live in a very Muslim neighborhood in London, I can appreciate that. Those opposed to Islam may attempt to abuse the public mind by changing the tone of the article. However, the Islam article is not the only article that could be controversial. For that matter, any religious article (why are people always getting riled up?) could breed serious controversy. The Roman Catholic Church article has a fair share of criticism, much of which I hear as the voice of some disgruntled Catholic. I would strongly favor removal of the these whining critics. The wiki is about content, NOT criticism. Let readers draw their own conclusions and make their own criticisms. There is no reason to include that in an encyclopedia. If the wiki cannot separate the two, the wiki will end up being branded as yet another web board, full of rants and raves. Fortunately, the Catholic University, University of Notre Dame, article has been spared. However, another religious school--Brigham Young University--has not been spared. The article contains two tones of voice--an objective one and another that is, well, another voice. The Brigham Young University article is much different than, say, Oxford University or Harvard University article, whose President has been a source of controversy within the past year.
I think wikipedia can become better than the best (Britannica) which does not include a critics section, but in order to do so must be wary of letting a few people ruin it for the masses.
Is it my imagination, or is the current "global" sandbox useless? I was just about to compose some text there (amongst several other people doing the same thing), but then someone blanked the whole page (losing the 4-5 then-current experiments), and while I was figuring out how to revert it, someone else blanked it again. Clearly it gets trashed all the time, which it seems to me would make it uselessly frustrating for someone trying to actually use it to test out some text or markup that required more than one editing cycle.
I've since learned that there are, in effect, per-user sandboxes that you can create as subpages of your user page. And that's fine.
So my suggestion is: is there any way we could change the many prominent "you can test edits in the sandbox" links to somehow suggest using your user page in this way, instead?
Steve Summit 18:11, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
On each edit page is an extensive list of self-inserting links for special characters, but (a) it uses Javascript which I rarely have turned on, and (b) it (that is, the complete list) displays ridiculously slowly on my browser, bogging down each and every edit page. I'd like to be bold and edit it myself to slap a <javascript> tag around it so that it doesn't display on non-Javascript-enabled browsers (which obviously won't be able to use it anyway) at all, but I don't know how to edit the edit template itself. But is this a good idea? Steve Summit 18:03, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
#editpage-specialchars { display: none}
I have the opposite problem: I like to display the characters but not the copyright notice etc., but they are within the id editpage-copywarn. Patrick 07:37, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Dear all,
An idea: a wiki for geographic information, e.g. maps or thematic coverages.
The maps included could be downloaded in various formats, e.g. PNG, GIF, JPG, PNM (for raster formats), or in a standard vector format. Thematic coverages could be stored / downloaded in an open spec/format, perhaps using a format like what PostGIS uses.
Wikipedia is good for storing textual information; this idea would cover spatial information.
My meek proposal is a constructive version of our existing VfDs. Instead of creating an article that you're not sure about, you could put it on VfA and get commentary (for a week or so) about whether or not the article topic is up to Wikipedia's standards. At the end of the week, the votes would be tallied and the result of the vote put on your user talk page. Almafeta 23:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Eh, what the heck, nobody will notice this plug anyway. Wikipedia:Countdown deletion is nothing like this but is vaguely related. In spirit. Yeah, that's it. JRM · Talk 19:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
I would like see more PostScript codes available on Wikipedia for display of special characters. I'm tired of having to look up the numerical Unicode codes for every single special character whose code I don't know by heart. I'm also tired of having to learn by heart those counter-intuitive Unicode numbers. For example, why doesn't the schwa appear when I type &schwa;? Things like "ì" ("igrave" for i with grave accent) or "ε" (epsilon) work, but many others don't. Why didn't Wikipedia adopt all PostScript codes at once? It would be more economical for users to learn to type those semi-intuitive PostScript codes than those counter-intuitive Unicode codes. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 22:39, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
As has been shown on the VP, some new users get baddly bitten by innocently creating articles that fall into the speedy deletion criteria without knowing of their existance. Here's an example of a new user feeling attacked due to getting a partially written article speedily deleted.
There is a simple change that would help with this problem: a well-formed warning on MediaWiki:Newarticletext providing a link to WP:CSD. Some new users who otherwise would never know of the existance of Speedy Deletion would read it, and not create articles that would fall under it's criteria. This would be a win for everyone.
I brought this up on the talk page about a month ago, and got no response, hopefully this will generate one. I've listed a possible text at MediaWiki talk:Newarticletext#Adding_a_speedy_deletion_warning - feel free to comment either here or there; I'll move any comments added here to the talk page when this discussion is archived. JesseW 06:55, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
That would save everyone a bunch of trouble. Howabout1 Talk to me! 22:41, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
I support this. I added a slight revision at Newarticletext#Adding_a_speedy_deletion_warning but the precise version doesn't matter to me. DES 22:50, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Seems like a good idea. Rd232 10:00, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
It should be possible to choose whether to download images or not when requesting an article (for speed pourposes) but, more important, when downloading a wiki-dump, for space pourposes.
Moreover make it possible to tag an image as 'needed' to signal images that are indispensable for understanding the article (like a graph on a math article).
So let the user choose if to download the only-text dump, the one with only 'needed' images or the complete one.
Don't shoot me!! This came to my mind because I have to leave on holyday with my notebook and I need the wiki math section but I have no disk space. -- Zimbricchio 23:51, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
-- Zimbricchio 15:17, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
Good idea, bad idea, if you know what I mean. Garrett Talk 01:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
As far as articles goes, just set your web browser preferences. Pretty much all web browsers let you disable image downloading, since on low-speed lines this can be the difference between "responsive" and "unbearable." In Firefox, select edit/preferences, select teh "web features" left-hand-side tab, and unclick "load images". Dwheeler 04:01, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
Speaking of reference, I think there should be more "reference desks", each one for a different topic. That way we would create division of labor, and the answers of the "reference desks" would get answered more easily. 2004-12-29T22:45Z July 9, 2005 17:51 (UTC)
I'm sure I'm not alone in being tired of creating the following kind of links:
[[largemouth bass|largemouth]], [[smallmouth bass|smallmouth]], and [[white bass]]
For the many, many cases where you want a link with alternative text display where the alternative text is a substring of the link text, I would propose that a markup be added such as
[[~largemouth~ bass]], [[~smallmouth~ bass]], and [[white bass]]
which would mean only display the text enclosed in tildes. This would be in addition to the pipe markup, not a replacement for it. Could save a lot of typing, and besides, it's more elegant. ;-) -- Mwanner July 7, 2005 18:40 (UTC)
The user script approach would considerably limit the number of users who could employ it. And the pipe character strikes me as being too easily confused with the present markup, which must be retained. And while I am surprised to find that tilde (~) is not a character available on all keyboards (isn't this how posts are signed?), I have no problem with substituting the caret for the tilde. Might look slightly more intuitive, too.
I'll hold off another day or two before submitting to Bugzilla, in case other suggestions/objections arise. -- Mwanner 13:54, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
I've been here about a month now, poking about, looking for articles that need cleaning up. But, just when I think I've finally found all the categories and pages listing articles in need of help, I discover a whole new set. This has become confusing and tiresome, so I started a list to keep them straight.
Some of these pages are just links to other categories/pages. However, most of them are lists of articles. I did a rough count, finding more than 13,200 articles listed. There is no easy way to tell what articles may be duplicated in this count and this total does not include the 19 large dump files of the punctuation project. Also, the Wikipedia:Pages_needing_ attention (802 articles and subpage 540) and Special:Ancient_pages (1,051) lists do not specify what sort of fix has been requested, so these may include stubs and who knows what else.
Limiting this to just those categories/pages that call for actual editing, not disambiguation, fact-checking, copyright, etc., here is my list so far.
To my mind, this is a mess of major proportions, both awful and awesome. I checked around the Village Pump and found no mention of this, which was a surprise. Doesn't anyone else have a problem with this? Or is it just too vast to even discuss?
Although it is difficult to pick out a structure here, the articles seem to have been sorted out according to three schemes: 1) when someone requested a fix; 2) what sort of fix was requested; and 3) alphabetically by title with a very few subject subcategories.
I can understand why it might be useful to have three different ways of sorting articles. What bothers me is that I only stumbled on some of these huge lists by accident, while poking about. I suspect a massive duplication of effort and content and I can verify that there is serious confusion for a newbie such as myself (which may turn off those who are eager to help).
In keeping with the Wikipedia exhortation to be bold, I have a few ideas on how to address this.
Well, now. There. I've been bold. I await your responses. Jekoko 29 June 2005 19:53 (UTC)
I'm thinking that our stub categories could be complemented by "Help" categories. That is, we could have something like "Foo articles that need help" or "... need special help", if they need cleanup or wikification or are disputed, etc.
That way these articles (and possibly categories) might be more likely to get the attention of people who care more and know more about the given subject.
The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. Maurreen (talk) 08:18, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
this may have been brought up before but I didn't see anything about it when I read the other topics.
I'd like it if Wikipedia would incorporate music files into some entries. For example a classical muscian should also have music files in their entries just as they have picture files. On this subject we really need to break free from the conventional conception of what an encyclopedia should be.
Dear all
I am writting about the issue of Macedonia, Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian Slavs (like Wikipedia calls the Macedonians) and the problem between Macedonia and Greece about the term Macedonia. Rant snipped
Here is a link to the whole text of my complaint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Neutral_Wikipedia.3F
Or whatever it's called - "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Possible I missed it before but it seems new. Is there an ongoing discussion of this somewhere? I think it's too wordy, should go back to just "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Tualha ( Talk) 00:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)
Map of pangasinan
http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/towncity.htm
http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/map.htm
http://www.pangasinan.org/surfmap.htm
I hope wikipedia could make a detailed political map of pangasinan with its towns and cities.
I see a lot of redirections of articles merely because the search engine is case-sensitive. Would it not be better to make the search engine non-case-sensitive, just like Yahoo and Googles, so that these redirections can be avoided?
Also, it would be good if the search engine can propose the closest alternative keywords, should there be a typo error or if the user does not know the correct spelling. Isn't this what other search engines are doing? PM Poon 14:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Ed's rash actions today got me to thinking about the different proposals to reform the Deletion process. So I have created a page to discuss these proposals and try and extract some implementable policy from them. Wikipedia:Deletion reform. Note the "please edit" note. Thanks! humble fool ® Deletion Reform 20:51, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
For more on this issue see:
Paul August ☎ 15:01, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
A couple months ago a user noted that most vandals don't necessary add junk, they delete and change information as well, and so the template ought to read that their edits have been "reverted" not "removed". I agreed, and have made several prompting comments in the talk page ever since to see if anyone else cares or has an opinion, but since the template is protected I can't be bold and change anything myself. No one has yet voiced any opinions. Should the change be made, or are there reasons against? — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
What with featured articles and featured pictures, I think it may be approaching time to establish a process for featured sounds. This would be for recorded music as well as for "sound portrait"-type illustrations of articles: birdsong, the shouts of a crowded marketplace, a running steam engine. I think Spoken Wikipedia articles, though, as they are basically text-based, wouldn't be appropriate for this (though of course they would be improved by the inclusion of these sounds). I realize that there aren't many sounds on Wikipedia as of yet, but I think that establishing a featuring process will encourage more exceptional recordings to be collected by Wikipedians. What do you all think?-- Pharos 23:16, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
I installed MediaWiki. It set up fine. I adjusted the pages and modified one graphic, following instructions. I can manipulate the main page and some of the help pages, and I've added categories, but I can't get it to add stories. Every time I do a search, instead of offering to allow me to add something on the subject, it says "trying full text search" and won't offer a link to establish a new subject.
What is going wrong?
Would it be possible to add extra metadata to a wiki article that contains GPS coordinates? This way, if you happened upon an area of interest with your Wikipedia-linked cell phone, it might discover an interesting tidbit of information that geographically hot. For instance, you might be wandering around the shores of Thermopylae in Greece and get a history lesson, or you might be driving along I-90 near Mitchell, South Dakota, and receive a download about the Corn Palace. I think it would be neat and not terribly difficult, but of course I'd like to propose this to the gods of Wikipedia.
I've suggested a cease-fire on eras, at the Village pump. Maurreen (talk) 09:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to propose a nutrition information template (infobox) for the various food articles. It should be possible using CSS to build a template that looks a lot like the nutrition information provided on the sizes of boxes, rather than scanning in the image. Anybody interested? Thanks! — RJH 21:54, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
There are large numbers of images tagged as being "fair use" on Wikipedia. These range from the eminently reasonable (there would be no other way to get an equivilent image; an example would be Image:1966 final bobby moore.jpg) to the completely unreasonable (another image could easily be gained; this is particularly true of cars—an example would be Image:2000 Dodge Intrepid.jpg). These invalid "fair use" images damage Wikipedia's reputation (imagine the librarians when they discovered that we were using these images: what an example to set to the children!), and they also lay us open to suits for copyright infringement. I feel this is an unacceptable state of affairs. I am therefore proposing setting up Wikipedia:Fair use validation, as a process to validate fair use claims before sending them to WP:IfD. IfD doesn't really allow proper discussion, as it is a very cloistered and busy page. A proper fair use forum would allow us to clarify fair use claims, improve the copyright status of the encyclopedia and Wikipedia's reputation in all. Do people think this is a good idea? Are you with me? Cheers, [[smoddy]] 20:25, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
People asking questions at the Reference Desk or elsewhere often leave their email addresses for other to contact them. Well-meaning wikipedians then often remove these email addresses, to prevent address harvesters from collecting their addresses for spam. However, does this action do anything? Unlike a regular web page, our archives are freely explorable, and easy for a spider to reach through the links to the history we provide. We think of them as disappearing, but to a machine a previous version of a page is just another web page.
Would there be no way for these email addresses to be abolished? Obviously we can say that it's the poster's own darn fault and leave it at that, but I think that it's important that there ought to be some way to permanently delete information from a page on Wikipedia. Imagine if someone's kid or jealous ex decided to post their credit card details on a page. There would be no way to permanently delete that information without deleting the entire page, which we obviously couldn't do if it were an established article.
I propose that a system be implemented in which an admin be able to permanently expunge a version of a page and replace it with a version without the unwanted information. The page history would simply skip that version, or show that it had existed and was replaced. As much as technically possible, we ought to implement a system such that there should be no way for a spider or harvester to collect email addresses or other vital information — accidentally or maliciously posted — simply by crawling though our pages. — Asbestos | Talk 14:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Admins can selectively delete revisions from a page. It's just a very tedious process (especially on pages with massive histories), and will tend not to be done unless there's an extremely good reason for it. Cyrius 16:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
The same problem came up on Harry Potter recently, when someone posted a copy of the book. It was quickly reverted. However, the page had 3000 edits, so it would have taken the admin one heck of a long time to do it. Therefore a request was made for a developer to do it, as they can run a very simple SQL query. So the short answer to the original question is no, but others can. Whether they will is a different matter. Cheers, [[smoddy]] 16:40, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Is there any way to get hit statistics for a specific page? Like so an author can track how long people stay on a page and what they do when they get there. Website analysis software is very popular and highly useful to all webmasters. Aren't we all webmasters in a way? I think it would be useful to know how my changes affect the flow of traffic between pages for one. I propose that a statistics tab be added to every page right alongside of the other "tabs": discussion, history, watch, etc. Tubelius 09:54, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
There’s someone proposing a policy to close some minor, slow-growing, “hopeless” wikipedias on the wikimedia meta-wiki. (see [5]) This proposal is the enemy to the openness of the whole wikipedia community. I come here to inform you to express your opinion there. I think it's OK to use your own language on on the talk page. Thank you. -- Theodoranian19:58, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
I noticed that some content in the wikipedia: namespace and quite some self-related content in the article namespace could use some collaboration, and am starting to devellop the idea of a Wikipedia-related collaboration. Are there any people interested? Circeus 17:42, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia talk:Community Portal#Next wiki-week
About a week ago, I created an indicator system to note whether I am online or not at a given time. Several other users who had been using different systems (or no system at all) have picked up on it and begun using it. In an effort to offer it to a larger audience, I've created Wikipedia:Status. Please take a look and offer thoughts; if you like it, consider giving it a test drive. -- Essjay · Talk 05:55, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I am considering starting a medicine collaboration of the fortnight (of course, it could be a week if there were enough people), and I would like to see if there is any interest in participating in this. As I see it, this would involve both pre-clicinal topics (like anatomy, biochemistry, and so on) and clinical topics (diseases, laboratory tests, surgical procedures, and so on). Lay people would be very welcome—both to express a desire for specific articles to be improved, and to help ensure that the articles aren't too technical (or at least that the broad themes can be easily understood). Of course, no one would be obligated to help. Would anyone be interested? If so, please leave a note here or on my talk page. Thanks! — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:06, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
Can we please bring the copyright notice to the top ( Ideal example)? Copy and paste dumping is pervasive among anons (easily verifiable if you patrol the new article creation page). The current note is either being ignored or unseen. Despite the bold caps text, the note could be easily unseen by a drop in once or twice editor, who will not bother to scan group of text that the copyright note is buried in. I consider discouraging copyright the most important instruction we can give, so can we please bring it from the bottom to the top? lots of issues | leave me a message 01:25, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
This would make history pages look MUCH better IMHO.It would work like this: With the option on, you look at a history page (say, of George W. Bush) and things like this would be gone (this was pulled right off the top, lol):
# (cur) (last) 03:19, 10 August 2005 Zzyzx11 m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by NoSeptember) # (cur) (last) 03:17, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 # (cur) (last) 03:16, 10 August 2005 NoSeptember m (→Presidential campaigns - more concise) # (cur) (last) 03:04, 10 August 2005 Bmicomp m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gidonb) # (cur) (last) 03:01, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 # (cur) (last) 02:54, 10 August 2005 Gidonb (rv; sick!) # (cur) (last) 02:53, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 (Fuck Bush and Fuck the War in Iraq. Bush is a War Criminal and is well known to be a Cocksucker of the First Order) # (cur) (last) 02:50, 10 August 2005 Everyking m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gamaliel) # (cur) (last) 02:49, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 # (cur) (last) 01:34, 10 August 2005 Gamaliel m (Reverted edits by 70.150.37.32 to last version by MONGO) # (cur) (last) 01:33, 10 August 2005 70.150.37.32
This option would do exactly this: hide from the history page, any edits made using the rollback button that admins have, and the edit that was reverted by it. Hopefully this wouldn't be spoofable by vandals marking their edits as minor and putting in there edit summary "Reverted edits by [anon ip] to last version by [username]". Are rollback edits marked in any special way so vandals cannot spoof it? Of course, reverts by non-admin users would still show though.
Also, in the process, it would also not alert articles on your watchlist. The watchlist pulls the most recent edit, and it would only put it at the top if you open your watchlist before it was reverted by an admin. Of course you could still use the diff and old version links since it is only hiding it, not deleting it.
I think this would also discourage vandals since their 30 seconds of fame wont be seen by as many people.
What do you think of this proposal? -- pile0nades talk | contribs 09:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
according to a Yahoo newsline dated (20050805) J. Wales said "There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed" (note added 20050810: it appears that J. Wales never said that)
a motion follows. this boils down to a proposal for modification of the Wikipedia's underlying Mediawiki software but I'm pretty sure that the idea can be consideraly enhanced on the Wikipedia side, therefore I submit it here, hoping that interested parties will share their thoughts.
our objectives are:
the proposed method:
in order to do so each Wikipedia article may have more than one status:
any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such checked version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)
this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status :-) because the personal profile (preferences) of each registered user will state 'raw' by default and (for registered and anonymous visitors) upon each article display a new tab will offer access to the various other 'statused' version when such versions exists
those various articles status will be expressed by cryptographic seals. it is not mandatory as most functions proposed here can be implemented using standard version-tracking tricks (taging, branching...) but some people may want to have their screwed articles published with a forged status and try to tamper the servers or network connection. let's integrate security concerns as soon as possible the [ WebDSign protocol] may be the technical foundation of such seals.
all the processes (requesting-delivering-managing certificates, sealing, obtaining information about a seal...) will be done using a Web navigator.
in order to produce a seal one needs a digital certificate (X.509 or OpenPGP (PGP-GPG)), delivered (X.509) or signed (PGP) by a Certification_Authority (CA), which will be Wikipedia organization. anyone can check that a given certificate (and all informations it stores) was issued by a given CA.
any Wikipedia contributor will carry only one Wikipedia certificate, which will store many attributes stating various useful parameters. it is just like the usual username-password pair.
any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.
using the existing set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of informations produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) can establish a 'confidence score' for each author. the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute (named 'wpexpert') listing the name of the categories of expertise of their carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography').
in each category this first college of 'wpexperts' will be enabled to form a college in order to elect world-known 'experts' of the field. the CA will produce certificates for them, with an 'expert' attribute storing the pertinent categories names. at first they may be not very interested in participatinf but as more and more will somewhat do emulation will raise their involvement
moreover any registered Wikipedia user may have a certificate in order to express that he agrees/likes (or disagrees/dislikes) some chunk of information in an article.
Subramanian kindly pointed to me that User:Sam_Spade/Policy_Proposals is pertinent. it leads to a huge number of interesting ideas, especially meta:Article_validation_proposals, which may be helped or help this proposal.
Now for the votes and opinions:
Just now I found I was blocked from editing. Gah. The first time it happened I had to sit it out, but this time around I have my amazing wiki-moulding powers so was able to unblock myself, largely for the point of making this post.
Many users, unfortunately including myself, are stuck with crappy ISPs, but the average user isn't going to want to sit through three-hour phone conversations with clueless 20-something brunettes finally ending with some sort of "three months free access" cop-out, rather than an expensive hardware upgrade. So maybe WE should do something.
I think there needs to be some sort of logged-in protection. So if you're a logged-in user you are OK, even if your logged-out IP just got blocked.
Alternately, if that allows people to log out and vandalise then log in and continue editing innocently, maybe have it for admins only since they're so "trustworthy".
Or something. Anyway, see what you think. Feel free to add fertiliser or weedkiller to this sprouting idea. :) Garrett Talk 13:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
I believe this discussion should be moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals). -- cesarb 18:10, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't know where to look for someone or a company who would be interested in a word game that I'm developing that is fun for adults and could also be used as a good tool for teaching and promoting kids on how to form the basics of sentences and using wrods in the proper context. Does any one know what would be the best way to present this to a board game manufacturer for consideration? Frank Eggleston
Please visit the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Macedonia#Let.27s_finally_SOLVE_this_issue...
I sterbinski 13:14, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
I propose after identifying any chronic vandal, we should turn a switch, and that user will be cookied into a parallel version of Wikipedia almost indistinguishable from the real Wikipedia. There will be no indication of banishment for the user. He can vandalize to his content, unresponded to, so that he can admire his "victory". The theory goes that trolls need an audience that interacts with their behavior. Remove all response and this troll will become dejected and forget the hobby. It's also a very funny joke for us to play on vile brats.
To make this simple, the front page, current events, etc. will disappear. The landing page of Trollworld will be a Google like simple search page. The header will announce the new rebranded sleek Wikipedia. I don't expect the typical malicious vandal, a 15 year old pothead, to catch on.
lots of issues |
leave me a message 01:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Looking for comments on a new way to present filmographies in actor articles for improved consistency, less IMDb thievery, etc. I put together a test in my userspace and I'm looking for opinions before rolling it into any articles. Thanks! RADICALBENDER ★ 21:02, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
The {{ welcome}} template is the very first thing many users see. Unfortunately, recently it has been growing out of proportions, as some people think that answers to any possible question a newbie might have must be covered in the template. This has lead to a huge welcome page, a screenful on my computer, and it happened at least several times that new users just deleted or moved the welcome template I put on their talk page.
I suggest removing some of the links from there, which are covered in the help pages anyway, and just make a prominent link to the help page. Also, I believe is an overkill to tell the newbies about the Wikipedia:Topical index (who the heck reads that one).
My trimmed version of the welcome template is available at Template:Welcome/Proposed version 1. Again, it is the original with some links cut out. I wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov 20:08, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
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I already asked this question at the Dutch wiki, but here I'll go: For historians it is pretty important to have good sources about the opinions of people in the past. Wikipedia is a good project, which shows the interests and points of view of a lot people. Is it a idea to make a offline-copy of the whole wikipedia every year or so? I don't know exactly how much spacy on the harddisc wikipedia needs if we would do it that way, but it would be nice. Of cource we would only need the articles, not the editing software. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? I heard of a copy from 2001, but is there also a more recent copy? Effeietsanders 08:06, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It struck me that to speed the discovery of vandalism, pumping out diffs at a high rate on a specific page, thereby getting rid of the Recentchanges middleman, may be a good idea.
It would be similar in structure to Slashdot's Meta Moderation system: a designated page, perhaps Special:Monitor, would pump out X number of recent diffs made within the last Y days, on one single page, for the purpose of fast eyeballing.
This would cut out the "middleman" of Recentchanges for those on janitorial duty; only the refresh button needs to be repeatedly abused in order to view massive amounts of diffs and scan for vandalism at a very fast rate.
The details of the method by which diffs are chosen for display can be left to people with more expertise, but I'll offer up some suggestions:
Only suggestions, I don't know enough about the throughput of changes and the number of janitors on duty at any given time to know which method is more feasible. But I believe a Monitor page would greatly facilitate the speedy discovery of vandalism.
-- Znode 05:40, 2005 Jun 14 (UTC)
Can we add a function to display a "Last update: 6 months ago" message on an article's header if that article hasn't been edited for a while, say, over 6 months. If I see such a message, I'll be more skeptical with the information.
This is not a good solution. Sometimes people edit a page to fix a typo or adjust layout. A page with outdated information may have been edited multiple times without the needed update (for example: the current U.S. president: Richard Nixon). -- Toytoy 18:03, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
I think more needs to be done to encourage users to use this feature, especially on controversial articles. Far too few people make proper and regular use of it. I propose that edit summaries be made compulsory for articles with neutrality/POV disputes (possibly through the mediawiki software?). How might I propose this to become official policy? Its only a guideline at the moment. ( Wikipedia:Edit summary) Deus Ex 15:31, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
i often thought of a certain thing but didn't know what it is called. like what the various parts of a barrel are called, what parts usually constitute a castle and stuff like that. these things are often tedious to find out and it would be nice if this would be addressed in a more systematical way in wikipedia.
like a standard box of links kinda like:
harddrives usually consist of
platter read write head ...
harddrives are a common part of
computers mp3 players whatever
harddrives are commonly associated with:
(dunno ... think castles - knights, siege, ...)
somehow like that.
most of this information is of course already there but like i said ...
it would benefit from a more systematical approach.
anyway ... just felt the need to post this.
not much of a wikipedia expert ... dunno if something like this was already discussed/dismissed or something. not even sure if this is the correct place to post this. Sorry if it isnt.
please comment
On the RfAr/RFC page, Maurreen suggested splitting the article RfCs into the main Wikipedia catergories, Culture, Geography, History, Life, Mathematics, Science, Society, and Technology. Could be a way of getting more responses, by breaking down the list into more digestable sized chunks, and allowing people with specific interests to pick up on items which may be of interest. Thoughts here please! Dan100 07:43, Jun 12, 2005 (UTC)
Hi,
There are lots of owners of (e.g. University-based) websites who would be happy for the research content (projects/articles) of their websites to be copied onto Wikipedia pages. Could Wikipedia come up with a logo which website owners could put at the bottom of their websites which says something like "feel free to copy the contents of this article which I have written and use it (word-for-word or otherwise) as the basis of a Wikipedia article without copyright restrictions"? A wiki page with external links to all of these websites would also be required (or an easy way of searching for the logo in Google). It's a lot less effort for a busy postdoc researcher to stick a logo on all his/her articles than it is to wikify all the articles and put them onto wikipedia. If the material was worth copying, then I'm sure there will be plenty of Wikipedians to do it!
Rnt20 18:51, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I decided to act myself, and have created a Wiki page which is designed to help website owners at the following location:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adding_a_GFDL_license_to_your_webpage
I have also added the following footer (or something similar) to some of my webpages:
<TABLE><TR><TD VALIGN=CENTER><IMG SRC="http://www.strw.leidenuniv.nl/~nevec/outreach/gfdl.png"></TD><TD VALIGN=CENTER><B>GFDLcontent</B>. The work on this page, and in the project subsections linked to by this page are covered by a <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License">GFDL</A> license, and the author states that the text and images can be copied within the restrictions of this license (e.g. the material can be copied into free encyclopedias such as <A HREF="www.wikipedia.org">Wikipedia</A>). Please <A HREF="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Adding_a_GFDL_license_to_your_webpage">add a footer</a> like this to your own webpages to promote free access to knowledge.</TD></TR></TABLE><!--Please also list your webpage at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_GFDL_content_on_the_internet-->
See e.g. http://www.geocities.com/robert_tubbs/page1.html
The non-word GFDLcontent is included so that Google searches can find this footer.
Please tell me (urgently!) whether there are any problems with this. Otherwise I will try to get the same footer added to lots of University webpages at several different Universities. Rnt20 10:19, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
NO MEMBER ONLY EDITING!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I think that there should be a place that stubs and arcticles that need serious editing are temporally moved to. What do you think?
I strongly disagree with members only editing. what if someone browzing the Wiki notices something wrong or something he could add. He probably wouldn't take the time to become a member to make just a few changes. (Left by anon 141.156.241.63)
I would like to see a preferences option for members that would display some statistics about who edited the currently viewed page. I.e. whether the page was created by a member; edited by a non-member; number of edits; last edit, &c. That way a random page viewer might get some quick clues without going to the history page. — RJH 02:15, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Wired Magazine has an article, " Wiki Targets How-To Buffs" on WikiHow, a website dedicated to "how-to" information. Wikipedia does not have a clear policy on whether how-to information belongs in Wikipedia:
Furthmore there is a separate How-tos bookshelf at Wikibooks. As a matter of practicality, there should only be a single global wiki on a given area to maximize the community size needed to ensure the success of the community. IMHO how-to info belongs in Wikipedia and we should subsume Wikihow content. If Wikipedia does not want that information, we should VfD all our "how-to"s to move that information to WikiHow to aid in their success (and maybe encourage them to move into WikiCities, but that's a separate discussion.) What do others think? Samw 03:07, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I suggested generating a properly formatted reference for each article so that students would save time and credit Wikipedia more. Auto citations have become a standard part of any online reference. Britannica, the Oxford DNB, etc. all leave a proper reference at the bottom of articles. Months before when I first asked if Wikipedia could also incorporate this feature, someone thought it could be accomplished after permalinks for every version were implemmented. Now that permalinks are a part of Wikipedia - would adding the reference feature to the toolbox be easily accomplished?
lots of issues | leave me a message 2 July 2005 14:03 (UTC)
<div> To cite this article, you can use the following: "{{PAGENAME}}". ''Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia''. Revision dated {{REVISIONTIME}} (UTC), {{REVISIONDAY}} {{REVISIONMONTH}} {{REVISIONYEAR}}. Accessed {{CURRENTDAY}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}. Available from <http://en.wikipedia.org/?{{PAGENAMEE}}&oldid={{REVISIONID}}>. </div>
Take a look at the bottom of this encarta article. On the bottom of every page they tell people how they can cite that encarta article. Wouldn't it be nice if we did that also? We could add a template to the bottom of every page giving MLA style or, even better, we could make a special page which would output a whole bunch of different citing styles. We always have lots of people asking how to cite us and I bet there are people who don't want to cite wikipedia because of the diffuclty. This link is Broken 18:36, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I brought this up once already, but I think it still needs to be addressed. The condition of the english-language wikipedia's directory is horrific compared to that of the German-language wikipedia's (de.wikipedia.org then click on "Artikel nach Themen") I have talked with user:Spangineer about doing something with a combination of the portals system into the directories, and addition of new portals, etc., but neither of us can offer the immense amount of time needed to work on this sort of project. Please talk to one of us if you are interested in helping in any way.
PS: Is there any way I can keep this from being deleted? Because I think it is very important to the user-friendliness of Wikipedia. Clarkefreak ∞ 01:14, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Another option could be expansion of DDC and LOC. -- Arcadian 22:47, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
This would make a great WikiProject for a few people. -- Jmabel | Talk July 2, 2005 04:19 (UTC)
See also french translation fr:Wikipédia:Portail-- Ste281 5 July 2005 19:15 (UTC)
A while ago, section headings like ==section==, ===section===, etc, had numbered labelings (ie: 2 section; 3 another section; 3.1 subsection, etc). However, it seems to be removed. I personally think that it was useful, and I'm sure some other contributors feel the same way. Maybe there should be an option to control this in the Preferences menu? -- Ixfd64 2005 July 1 20:22 (UTC)
I think the Image:Sound-icon.png in the header should be linked to Category:Spoken articles. - Roy Boy 800 1 July 2005 15:57 (UTC)
This is really two ideas I came up with after noticing one of those copyright notices (saying you can only copy 5%) in one of my local libraries.
Let me know what you think here or on my discussion page. If this is in the wrong place, please can someone move it to the correct place. Thanks, John Cross 1 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)
I've noticed Category:Spoken articles has a gallery of recently submitted media at the bottom. I've implemented a program that scrapes the wikipedia's html and generates an RSS feed with the ogg/vorbis spoken articles as enclosures, but shouldn't wikipedia be able to do this automatically?
The experimental feed is at http://dingoskidneys.com/~dholth/spokenwikipedia.xml and the program to generate it minus any recent local revisions is at http://dingoskidneys.com/~dholth/spokenwikipedia.py .
The feed includes 75 ogg vorbis files and instructs a podcatcher like bashpodder to download 450 megabytes of spoken wikipedia. I would like guidelines on what total enclosure size might be considered reasonable and what might be considered harmful before attempting to give a spoken wikipedia podcast a greater audience.
Also, as a student of current spoken wikipedia intent on producing new ones, I would like a RSS with every of approx. 110 spoken wikipedia articles enclosed, for convenient study of the existing works.
DanielHolth 1 July 2005 05:45 (UTC)
My wife and I often listen to books on tape. There's a lack of free content out there. If I were to record myself reading a public-domain book, and release it into the public domain, it would be a large file, even in ogg format. Would Wikimedia be willing to host it? Where would be an appropriate place for it? Commons? Wikisource? Thanks, – Quadell ( talk) ( sleuth) 18:36, Jun 24, 2005 (UTC)
I just went through the history of front page articles and someone (user Lolwtf) uploaded a horrible picture, then he/she (from what I know) used an ip address (64.26.109.9) to reuse that image on two occasions on two articles. I was wondering is it much work to allow only people who have contributed a certain number of articles (10 maybe) to be allowed to upload an image. I was also wondering why was the image not removed immediately? It is still there!! If not delete it at least replace it with something - blank dot maybe. I looked some more and the image was on the page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Images_and_media_for_deletion for deletion. Going through the bureaucratic procedure of wikipedia the image will still be there for a week.
Could an Admin place the following tag in this Special Page? {{CategoryTOC}}. The page is Special:Listusers. It would make it easier to browes, in my opinion. Thanks. -- Admiral Roo June 29, 2005 19:47 (UTC)
My proposal is to change the format of Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals) as follows: There would be only three sections to this page:
Advantages
Disadvantages
Please discuss on talk page.
It would be nice if Special:Listusers was made easier for filtering. The list for users and admins has been merged for this new version of MediaWiki. For example, I can select so that only admins are listed, but when I click "next 500", etc, it shows regular users again. I know that I can add "&limit=500" to the original URL, but not everyone knows that trick... :o -- Ixfd64 2005 June 29 02:56 (UTC)
Wikipedia recently upgraded to a new wiki software version, but there is a feature that I had hoped would be in it.
Whenever you click on the history tab, there are several numbers at the bottom - 10, 20, 50, 100, 500, etc. that gives you the "results per page" feature. However, I really want a "last" and "first" feature - that is - I can hop right to the beginning of a page's history to see how it began as an article. That way, I don't have to press the "next 500" button over and over again to see the article's beginning.
Hope this will be in the next version of the wiki software. — Stevey7788 ( talk) 28 June 2005 20:18 (UTC)
Could an authorized admin create a link to bug reports for all of mediawiki's navigation links page? Thanks. -- Admiral Roo June 28, 2005 14:53 (UTC)
This is a suggestion that might be related to the perennial proposal, "Filter or Site for Young Students" but offering an alternative solution to filtering for concerned parents. It would also bring certain other advantages.
I propose an off-shoot/fork of the the EN wikipedia, targeted for children. I envision articles with a reading level of, say, 12 years (hopefully without becoming patronising!). Emphasis would be on articles with an obvious attraction to children. Articles covering objectionable material could/would be avoided without impacting the main wikipedia. Articles on complex topics (e.g. the high-level mathematics articles) could be provided at a much more appropriate level.
Has this proposal been offered before? Is there any interest in such a "en-junior" for children? Would anyone else be prepared to help on such a project? Stewart Adcock 28 June 2005 11:22 (UTC)
I'd like to suggest the addition of a shortcut to remove items from a person's watchlist.
Currently, the "My watchlist" page boasts the usual list of latest updates such as
Would it be too difficult to make it instead show this?
It would save having to farf between a couple of pages when trying to change a watchlist. Grutness... wha? 04:57, 27 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Yes, but I just thought it might be useful if a watched page pops up near the top of your watchlist that you no longer want to watch, to just be able to remove it straight from the top page. (hmmm...did that parse OK?). BTW, I've clicked on "Mark pages visited", but nothing's appearing in bold. Does the "last visit" function not work properly, or am I doing something wrong? Grutness... wha? 28 June 2005 13:52 (UTC)
I also would like this option. Rd232 28 June 2005 21:23 (UTC)
So that the editors can see how many people are coming to pages they frequent? Non-users part is optional, but I'd like to actually see how many people are going to the George W. Bush page or any other ones that I'm working on. Doesn't have to be complex webtrends statistics, just a simple number since a certain date. -- kizzle 00:55, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)
Would it be a good idea to have administrator usernames have a different color? This feature would help people catch admin impersonators quickly (as opposed to having to go to Special:Listadmins). -- Ixfd64 05:15, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)
I agree that admins shouldn't have special colours, etc. — but what do you have against colour in general? (I only ask because I want to know.) Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 13:25, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
It would be fantastic if every place name and every historic place name had a map.
I'd like to propose that the list of births and deaths in year articles should be restricted to figures of major international repute. If we listed everyone with a Wikipedia article in these categories, the year articles would be dominated by them (e.g. 1944 would contain over 800 births). If people wish to spin off the articles for, say, Births in 1944 article, then fine (although this should have more detail than just the Category of course). Average Earthman 22:50, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
To help users evaluate page histories, display the size of a page version in the history, or possibly the change in page size (in % and/or kb) caused by each edit. This would make it easier to spot major changes worth looking at in more detail. Rd232 22:59, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)
How about revising the WikiMedia software so that along with each edit, a hashed version of the editor's IP address would be listed in the edit history? That way, it would be possible to determine if two users have the same IP address, without actually giving away their IP address. Joo-joo eyeball 15:23, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
In the special page Upload file, which is apparently protected from editing by guys like me, there are two instances where "license" is spelled "licence". Everywhere else on the upload page, the word is spelled "license". I propose that those instances where the word is spelled "licence" be changed to "license" for consistency with the rest of the page. H Padleckas 01:09, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)
I for one am sick to death of seeing "artical" in wikipedia, mostly on discussion pages, but still, these people sound like morons. It's article.
Is there anything that can be done about this? Perhaps a subst:template for user pages? An awareness campaign? Or would it be easier to just contact the people at Oxford and get them to change the spelling of the word?
-- Robojames 15:41, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
If someone wants to do a lot of people a big wiki-favor, please create a macro for automated conversion of an existing article's citations to a footnote system. For instance, Convention on Psychotropic Substances needs to be converted to footnotes, but that would be rather time-consuming to do manually. There are probably hundreds or thousands of articles in need of such conversion. Please take a look and see what you think. Thanks! Remember me 14:35, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Hi! I'm from Ukrainian wikipedia. Recently I have translated article about Gavrilo Princip. I need to put images in my article, and there are some in English article. But images in English article is not images from WikiCommons. How about to create a special tag, like [[Image:en:Example]] or something like that, which would put images in my article from articles from other Wikipedias? It will be easier for me and for servers. 13.06.05 Please contact me
There's no simple way to link to images in other Wikipedias, but the process of transferring is not so hard.
Image syntax should not need to be changed unless the filename has changed -- [[Image:Foo.jpg]] will look first for a file named "Foo.jpg" on the local wiki; if it finds one, it will use the local one, if not, it will look at Commons and use that one. — Catherine\ talk 21:05, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You could create the following template in the Hungarian wiki: "Template:CrossWikiImage".
<img src=" http://{{{1}}}.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:{{{2}}}">
Then when you wanted to reference the page, you could use the following template:
{{ CrossWikiImage|en|Gavrilloprincip.jpg }}
It's not a perfect solution, but it might be a reasonable workaround until the software supports cross language images. And because it would be implemented as a template, it would be easy to change if/when the software changes.-- Arcadian 22:58, 24 Jun 2005 (UTC)
You know how in user preferences you can set your date to display a certain way if an article has the date within parenthesis (or something like that)? I hit upon an idea. How about putting unstandard spellings of words within parenthesis and then they would display according to the setting you indicate in your user preferences? If you speak American english then someone who wrote in British english would put nonstandard words in parens and then that word would render in american english. Did I explain myself well?? Jaberwocky6669 02:58, Jun 13, 2005 (UTC)
Ah, I get it now. Originially I thought that British spellings could simply be bracketed [[]], but as I was about to explain it I realize that doing it that way would only convert British spellings to American but not American to British! Thanks for showing me the light. Jaberwocky6669 June 29, 2005 16:23 (UTC)
First, have I put this question in the right place? If not, can someone please tell me where it should go?
I have this idea for a brilliant long distance walk. I would like to tell
How about a Wikiatlas? It can collect various maps, historical maps, etc.
Has the inclusion of W3C validation buttons been considered before? It would be a small (88x31) image link, which fits perfectly at the bottom of the page with the Wikimedia and MediaWiki logos. Wikipedia is confirmed valid XHTML by W3C's tool, though we're just short of compliant with their CSS validator. Phoenix-forgotten 01:25, 2005 July 12 (UTC)
Hydnjo made an interesting point on the help desk. At the moment, there's no simple way for a reader (as opposed to a Wikipedian) to tell how long ago an article became featured. That matters to some extent, because there is some chance that the article has gone downhill since featuring. Obviously that's the exception not the rule, but if we're honest we'll admit to ourselves that it could happen especially for more controversial articles.
He proposed that we change the featured template to show when the article became featured, not just the fact that it is. I like the idea also. Any thoughts? Isomorphic 04:52, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Has the idea of creating a (possibly automated) rating system ever been floated? Sort of like eBay, the system could track how many times a user gets reverted. A rating system would track the number of edits to reverts the user has. When a 'mischevious' user makes an edit, it is flagged under Recent Changes as suspect.
Each image version should have its own copyright tag in order to avoid someone to change it when he updates the image (or intentionally). -- Zimbricchio 23:26, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
One of the most important issues of wikipedia is that its work contains little reference. Could wikipedia form a referencing taskforce, like what wikipedia has done with the cleanup taskforce? Elixir of Life July 7, 2005 11:12 (UTC)
This form uses the inputbox extension to place a {{test}} message on a user talk page.
The advantage is that the {{test}} message is editable, like it had been placed there with subst before the page is saved, making it easier to customize.
Links to related templates will appear above the edit box. These can be changed at Template:Test intro.
Enter the user name (with the User_talk: prefix) in the box below, and click "create article" to add a test message to that user's talk page.
You can access the same page using a URL like [4] (replacing 'Testingggg' with an actual user name). It will only work for users that have no talk page yet. Angela . July 6, 2005 02:07 (UTC)
I would like to propose a new page called Wikipedia:Bully which would clearly define behavior which, while not vandalism, is unacceptable for Wikipedia. There is a fine line on this site between people offering comments and people simply attacking other users and articles. In particular, the following items would make someone a wikipedia bully
Those are just a few examples. The main difference between a Wikipedia Bully and a Vandal would be that the bully doesnt actually mess around with the articles, only attacks and bashes people who work on articles that they dont see as worthy to be on Wikipedia. Just an idea at this stage. What do folks think? - Husnock 5 July 2005 09:09 (UTC)
Some of the behavior you describe is in Wikipedia:Troll. Calling users names is considered a personal attack.The problem however isn't defining them, it is dealing with them...-- Fenice 5 July 2005 09:15 (UTC)
It's not clear to me what the purpose of this page would be. Mel Etitis ( Μελ Ετητης) 6 July 2005 09:29 (UTC)
Hello All:
I am making a first post to Wikipedia.
The basic question I have concerns how the rights of corporations have changed since 1789. It is my understanding that corporations had charter rights of limited duration previous to a supreme court decision, I believe in a footnote changing the status to full individual rights of a citizen.
where would one go to find written commentary on this issue.
Go to wikipedia:reference desk and ask it there. Howabout1 Talk to me! July 4, 2005 16:05 (UTC)
When you edit a page, underneath the edit window you get all the templates used on the page, then the special charatcer insert box. All fine and dandy, unless you're working on a page like Wikipedia:WikiProject Stub sorting/Criteria, Wikipedia:Templates for deletion, or one of the Wikipedia:Templates type lists, on which there may be 50 or more templates. Adding special characters from the insert box can be a real chore then, scrolling up and down to find the items you want. Is there any way of swapping the order these things appear, so that the list of templates is after the special character box? Grutness... wha? 4 July 2005 12:48 (UTC)
This isn't on the "perennials" page; I don't know if it has been looked at. Please see my questions on Talk:Webring about whether a WP can be linked into a Webring. Robin Patterson 4 July 2005 03:38 (UTC)
Would it be beyond the scope of the Wikipedia for musicians to have a tour history section, wherein tour histories can be compiled with setlists, links to audio of the concert (legal ones like etree.org, of course...), etc? I know that many fansites of bands and artists try to compile this information, but perhaps it would be much better to do this here?
Would this be a WikiProject idea or more of an idea requiring an independent Wiki? I could easily see this becoming fairly complex and leading to cross-references with other musicians (guest appearances), database searches, recording sources, etc. -- Girolamo Savonarola July 4, 2005 03:05 (UTC)
This feels like an idea that someone mentions every so often but which cannot be implemented for whatever reason. If this is the case then feel free to delete this post (which I guess you should anyway); but I'd greatly appreciate having a message dropped into my Talk Page.
Anyway, here's my idea. I was just looking at an article that featured a link to eBay. The link didn't work, because the sale had closed. It wasn't in any way important that I could access the link, except in a kind of "how cool is that, it really _did_ get sold on eBay!" kind of way. But I suppose one could make the point that references such as this one serve as a reference.
This is the second time this has happened to me with eBay links in the last week or so. eBay takes down listings for sold items quite quickly, I think.
Would it not be possible in situations such as these (websites such as BBC.co.uk keep an excellent archive, but I'm sure there are other examples where archived but nonetheless useful data is not available) to, for example, take a screencap of the page, or using HTTPTrack to download the site, and then publish it in some sense through Wikipedia. I guess there might be copyright infringments with this, and my knowledge of US Copyright law is not strong enough for me to know whether this is "fair use" or not.
Just an idea... -- James Kemp 4 July 2005 00:10 (UTC)
I believe that this page should be permanantely protected. For many users it is the second page they see at Wikipedia, and it is too often and too easily vandalised. Tests should be redirected to the sandbox, where they belong. Many editors are put off, I believe, by seeing vandalism and trolling on there when they go to find out about Wikipedia. With protection, new users can get a full introduction un-interrupted. Hedley 3 July 2005 23:14 (UTC)
Ok, here is my idea. A collaborative music score. I know this doesn't belong in Wikipedia, but if it were worth it to do this, where could it go? Jaberwocky6669 04:27, Jun 27, 2005 (UTC)
Would it be a bad idea to change "Random page" to "Random article" for accuracy? See my post on MediaWiki talk:Randompage. -- Ixfd64 18:44, 2005 Jun 26 (UTC)
I suggest that we breakup some controversial articles if possible. We can keep the core concept in the original article and make it as short as possible, and place details in many sub-articles. If a part is protected because of a debate, it will not affect other parts. -- Toytoy 14:07, Jun 26, 2005 (UTC)
I also think they should break up articles. That way they don't block the whole content. Take a look at section the section #Split the George W. Bush article to diversify the location of content below on this same page. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 20:25, July 9, 2005 (UTC)
I can't see the archive. Has it disappeared? Bobblewik (talk) 13:02, 26 Jun 2005 (UTC)
There was a proposal titled Create date object method' independent of link method. Can anyone point out to me where it went? Bobblewik (talk) 30 June 2005 19:10 (UTC)
I personally like to manually type www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article to get to a certain article, which conveniently gets redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article automatically. However, this does not work when typed with caps lock on (e.g. WWW.WIKIPEDIA.ORG/WIKI/ARTICLE does not work). This can be fixed as follows:
- make /WIKI/ redirect to /wiki/ - make /ARTICLE redirect to /Article if ARTICLE does not exist but Article does.
Dear...to whomever this may concern,
This place is just the best thing the collective human mind could have come up with. It is a pure and (seemingly) free expression of knowledge. There is only one small issue that i am amazed has not been dealt with yet: colours. Black on white background is horrendously bad for the eyes. When i read articles, i always have to select the text, which then makes it white on dark-blue. Why is there not a button to change the CSS to a more pleasing colour? I would suggest white text on dark-blue.
Otherwise: perfect.
To get an idea of what can be achieved, see the Gallery of user styles — yes you can have flourecent green text on black if you still miss those old phosphor monitors. For guidance on how to do it, see m:User_styles. -- Solipsist 14:11, 24 July 2005 (UTC)
WikiProject Echo is looking for participants to integrate information from other-language Wikipedias into the English one. The scope is to find articles present in another Wikipedia but not this one, and echo and translate them here. Some language skills recommended. R adiant _>|< 13:25, July 23, 2005 (UTC)
Since we have a List of commercials anyways, why not a List of famous slogans?
Hi all, I am PhatRita, a medical student. I have been following the pages in human anatomy and physiology and indeed a lot of medical subjects such as embryology. The pages there are a mess. Human anatomy faces problems with terminology (eg whether to use lay or professional. Other problems include that with redirection, eg arm represents the whole of the upper limb which would be wrong in anatomical terms. There are problems which involves the interlinking of human anatomy and animal anatomy which results in complex and sometimes unreadable pages. The other problem would be the lack of application of this anatomy to clinical topics, for example the wrist and carpal tunnel syndrome. A lot of articles are stubs, and others which are not are one senteced and therefore should be. In human physiology, the entry is a stub. It was under COTW consideration and got phased out due to lack of votes to keep it in running.
I am proposing a preclinical medicine project which resembles that of the Clinical Medicine talk page, with focus on preclinical topics like anatomy and physiology. The topic will provide the following main points:
please mail me with suggestions or interest
PhatRita 11:43, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
With all the emphasis on poverty and hunger relief in Africa, we have a rather unique approach to attacking this problem. We do not give money, we give practical assistance. Please look at www.hivessavelives.com. We would welcome cooperation with you and perhaps linking to your website.
Our Project Director, Linda Whitby, can be contacted on +44 01273 302586 or by e-mail to lwhitby@tiscali.co.uk. She would be delighted to hear from you.
Best regards.
Richard Unwin Founder Hives Save Lives – Africa
Just like the Watchlist edit page. This would make the Watchlist much easier to.. watch. Also, talk pages should have their own section. -- pile0nades talk | contribs 04:38, 21 July 2005 (UTC)
There used to be a link to the
Sandbox on the Main Page, but it got removed (possibly due to the fact that the Sandbox was getting used too much and new users were getting confusing edit conflicts). Therefore, I propose that there be multiple Sandboxes, all in a sandbox namespace (such as sandbox:
or test:
). The current Sandbox page would show a listing of all existing sandboxes, and possibly an inputbox to quickly create a new sandbox.
Advantages:
And since there will be more than one, we could give the sandbox namespace a more extendible name (such as "Playground").
DrZoidberg 15:19, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
There are already several. Look at the template. Howabout1 Talk to me! 18:08, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
sandbox:
, and they could all easily be found by searching for pages that start with sandbox:
. Plus, playing with page moves and redirects will not be a problem!!
DrZoidberg 19:12, 20 July 2005 (UTC)I think it's fine as it is. Howabout1 Talk to me! 19:31, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
A name space is more than simply shoving "String:" in front of the article title. -- Cyrius| ✎ 20:06, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Another possibility would be to have a link in the Sandbox header which points at [[User:~~~/Sandbox]], where the current user's name is inserted. I don't see a current variable which allows doing that. ( SEWilco 06:17, 23 July 2005 (UTC))
Arguments for and against drug prohibition is the greatest page in Wikipedia! By that I mean, both sides get to state their case, AND both sides get to respond to their opposition, AND nobody is getting into an edit war (as far as I can tell). In my opinion, EVERY controversial topic should have a page like this. With, of course, a category or listing which points to all of them. -- Ravenswood 22:05, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
I'll add more as I think of things... -- Ravenswood 22:24, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
See the page I reference. It seems to be relatively free of edit wars, for the simple reason that both sides get their own 'turf' on the same page.
Typical Wiki page:
(original): Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.
(edit): Marijuana is harmless and should be legal.
(edit:) Marijuana is dangerous and should be illegal.
(etc)
Point-Counterpoint page:
(original):
(edit):
Unlike a typical Wiki page, there is no reason for a user to edit the page to re-state that Marijuana is dangerous. It's already there, in black and white. If they do any editing, it will be only to beef up the statement which is already there:
(edit):
And at this point, both sides agree to let the reader decide which is the better argument. The absolute worst-case scenario is that the argument gets repeated one time in the opposing section:
Edit wars shouldn't happen because each side should only be editing "their" paragraphs. An edit to an enemy paragraph designed to weaken the argument can be fixed as easily as any other vandalism. -- Ravenswood 01:59, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
Ok, I'm reasonably certain this must have been proposed before, but since I found no reference on it, I thought I might as well be bold and propose it. How about a trivia format for "side-track" information within the articles themselves? Here's a cute example:
Wouldn't people like to find out this kind of stuff? Thank you at least for reading all this! Cheers, Gutza 21:20, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
HOW MANY ARTICLES MUST THIS TAKE UP?! Example : Heathrow_Terminals_1,2,3_railway_station Category 16:34, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Discussion in need of people. -- MarSch 09:56, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
I'm not sure where I'm supposed to suggest this kind of thing, so I'll start here. This is my proposal: a voluntary system where users are able to declare their geographic location, industry and general expertise so they could receive custom-tailored alerts regarding article and image requests relevant to their personal data. This way someone requesting an article on, say, a landmark in Boston could send the request to users in Boston. Someone requesting an image of a piece of military equipment would have their request go to members of the armed forces. Someone wanting an image of a city in China could make sure that people in the area know of the request. It seems to me that such a system would greatly increase the number, quality and speed of contributions. Let me know what you guys think.-- Daveswagon 15:15, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
I feel that since they are so close to the same thing, that conservation should be moved to a sub category of enviromentlism, or otherwise linked. Since the categories dont have active talk pages, I am posting it here for feedback. IreverentReverend 14:27, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
here is part of the intor from enviromentalism: It is a social movement which seeks to influence the political process by lobbying, education and activism in order to protect natural resources.
Here is part of the intro from conservation movment: The Conservation movement seeks to protect plant and animal species from harmful human influences.
That is what I based linking them on, seems to me that conservation is a subset of enviromentalism based on that, and in my experiance, other than enviromentalists being more political and on the fringe(often times... never see a conservation group acting like peta, alf, elf, or the like), they are basically the same... IreverentReverend 17:33, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Forgive the slightly obscure section heading, but I was struggling for alternatives. Anyway, my suggestion (credit: Essjay & Ilyanep) is to create Wikipedia:Toolbox, and probably WP:TB as well. This would be along the lines of User:Smoddy/Tools. Does anyone have any objection to this? Cheers, smoddy 18:35, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I learned earlier today what leaving these kinds of tools in obvious places can do; see here. I still think it has a lot of potential, but perhaps we should keep it out of the main line of sight. -- Essjay · Talk 20:32, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
I'm pretty sure by the rapid fire way he did it that he was using the tool; my mistake for leaving it out in the open. However, I definately think it has promise. We're constantly hearing from new users how hard it is to find some things, but established users have no problem finding them, so I say we tuck it away in one of the not-so-dark corners of the wiki where good users can find it and vandals won't see it. -- Essjay · Talk 20:40, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps a similar thing could be added as a special page accessible only by admins. violet/riga (t) 20:44, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I think it would be useful to have an [edit] link (not the same as "edit this page") at the top of articles so people don't have to download the whole article's source code just to edit something at the top. Take this page for example. The headline "Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)" would have an [edit] link on the right side of the page, just like normal headlines do.
This can be done already by h4x0ring the section edit url. Like This. That link will let you edit the top of the page only. The "section=0" means the top of the page. -- pile0nades talk | contribs 12:00, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
I just tested this on my user page and found no glitches. See this diff. I added some random text with the "edit this page" link, then removed it using the "section=0" link. -- pile0nades talk | contribs 12:11, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Could you add <charinsert>s on MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning/ja like MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning?-- っ 15:44, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Hi! Seeing that I originated the article on the Deaths in Ciudad Juarez, and, as Puerto Rican, I worry about the wellfare of all fellow Latin Americans in general, I wonder if anyone has written an article about the deaths and dissapearances of people during the Pinochet presidency. If not, Im interested in making an npov, very well researched article about it.
Thanks and God bless!
Sincerely yours, Antonio Latinos unidos por Siempre Martin
Since they are not just four (ex John, Paul, George and Ringo), but about 38, and divided into five eras, I thought I should make this,..what do you guys think?
Antonio should've been a Menudo Martin
All the time I go to articles and find PD-labelled images. I'd like to bung a Commons tag on them and send them away, but the backlog of "now on Commons" is already huge. Plus there's also the problem of copying over versions and histories (as identified in the Criteria for Speedy Deletion poll).
Is it technically possible for all related data (not just the current image version) to be transferred, by bot or by human, from WP/WB/etc. to the Commons?
I think it's really a shame that we have this huge collection of images that ought to be on the Commons but currently have no way of getting them there except manually, and that cancels out uploader and version information.
So, what do you think? Is this possible? Is it stupid? Or is it just too much hard work? Garrett Talk 03:38, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
Hmm, I'm not so sure, for three reasons:
I am trying to work up the courage to start a WikiProject to address the last problem: it is much too large to be dealt with by a single user. Physchim62 11:50, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
Still, it's a problem... Garrett Talk 23:39, 19 July 2005 (UTC)
Voting is now open on a proposal to amend the Manual of Style regarding era designations (the BC/AD vs. BCE/CE debate). Kaldari 19:50, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Since others have already voiced some concern about controversial articles, I will add to the discussion here.
While I love the wiki, I have noticed that some articles are much more heated than others. For instance, the Islam page is currently under tight control. As I live in a very Muslim neighborhood in London, I can appreciate that. Those opposed to Islam may attempt to abuse the public mind by changing the tone of the article. However, the Islam article is not the only article that could be controversial. For that matter, any religious article (why are people always getting riled up?) could breed serious controversy. The Roman Catholic Church article has a fair share of criticism, much of which I hear as the voice of some disgruntled Catholic. I would strongly favor removal of the these whining critics. The wiki is about content, NOT criticism. Let readers draw their own conclusions and make their own criticisms. There is no reason to include that in an encyclopedia. If the wiki cannot separate the two, the wiki will end up being branded as yet another web board, full of rants and raves. Fortunately, the Catholic University, University of Notre Dame, article has been spared. However, another religious school--Brigham Young University--has not been spared. The article contains two tones of voice--an objective one and another that is, well, another voice. The Brigham Young University article is much different than, say, Oxford University or Harvard University article, whose President has been a source of controversy within the past year.
I think wikipedia can become better than the best (Britannica) which does not include a critics section, but in order to do so must be wary of letting a few people ruin it for the masses.
Is it my imagination, or is the current "global" sandbox useless? I was just about to compose some text there (amongst several other people doing the same thing), but then someone blanked the whole page (losing the 4-5 then-current experiments), and while I was figuring out how to revert it, someone else blanked it again. Clearly it gets trashed all the time, which it seems to me would make it uselessly frustrating for someone trying to actually use it to test out some text or markup that required more than one editing cycle.
I've since learned that there are, in effect, per-user sandboxes that you can create as subpages of your user page. And that's fine.
So my suggestion is: is there any way we could change the many prominent "you can test edits in the sandbox" links to somehow suggest using your user page in this way, instead?
Steve Summit 18:11, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
On each edit page is an extensive list of self-inserting links for special characters, but (a) it uses Javascript which I rarely have turned on, and (b) it (that is, the complete list) displays ridiculously slowly on my browser, bogging down each and every edit page. I'd like to be bold and edit it myself to slap a <javascript> tag around it so that it doesn't display on non-Javascript-enabled browsers (which obviously won't be able to use it anyway) at all, but I don't know how to edit the edit template itself. But is this a good idea? Steve Summit 18:03, 14 July 2005 (UTC)
#editpage-specialchars { display: none}
I have the opposite problem: I like to display the characters but not the copyright notice etc., but they are within the id editpage-copywarn. Patrick 07:37, 15 July 2005 (UTC)
Dear all,
An idea: a wiki for geographic information, e.g. maps or thematic coverages.
The maps included could be downloaded in various formats, e.g. PNG, GIF, JPG, PNM (for raster formats), or in a standard vector format. Thematic coverages could be stored / downloaded in an open spec/format, perhaps using a format like what PostGIS uses.
Wikipedia is good for storing textual information; this idea would cover spatial information.
My meek proposal is a constructive version of our existing VfDs. Instead of creating an article that you're not sure about, you could put it on VfA and get commentary (for a week or so) about whether or not the article topic is up to Wikipedia's standards. At the end of the week, the votes would be tallied and the result of the vote put on your user talk page. Almafeta 23:46, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Eh, what the heck, nobody will notice this plug anyway. Wikipedia:Countdown deletion is nothing like this but is vaguely related. In spirit. Yeah, that's it. JRM · Talk 19:08, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
I would like see more PostScript codes available on Wikipedia for display of special characters. I'm tired of having to look up the numerical Unicode codes for every single special character whose code I don't know by heart. I'm also tired of having to learn by heart those counter-intuitive Unicode numbers. For example, why doesn't the schwa appear when I type &schwa;? Things like "ì" ("igrave" for i with grave accent) or "ε" (epsilon) work, but many others don't. Why didn't Wikipedia adopt all PostScript codes at once? It would be more economical for users to learn to type those semi-intuitive PostScript codes than those counter-intuitive Unicode codes. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 22:39, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
As has been shown on the VP, some new users get baddly bitten by innocently creating articles that fall into the speedy deletion criteria without knowing of their existance. Here's an example of a new user feeling attacked due to getting a partially written article speedily deleted.
There is a simple change that would help with this problem: a well-formed warning on MediaWiki:Newarticletext providing a link to WP:CSD. Some new users who otherwise would never know of the existance of Speedy Deletion would read it, and not create articles that would fall under it's criteria. This would be a win for everyone.
I brought this up on the talk page about a month ago, and got no response, hopefully this will generate one. I've listed a possible text at MediaWiki talk:Newarticletext#Adding_a_speedy_deletion_warning - feel free to comment either here or there; I'll move any comments added here to the talk page when this discussion is archived. JesseW 06:55, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
That would save everyone a bunch of trouble. Howabout1 Talk to me! 22:41, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
I support this. I added a slight revision at Newarticletext#Adding_a_speedy_deletion_warning but the precise version doesn't matter to me. DES 22:50, 20 July 2005 (UTC)
Seems like a good idea. Rd232 10:00, 22 July 2005 (UTC)
It should be possible to choose whether to download images or not when requesting an article (for speed pourposes) but, more important, when downloading a wiki-dump, for space pourposes.
Moreover make it possible to tag an image as 'needed' to signal images that are indispensable for understanding the article (like a graph on a math article).
So let the user choose if to download the only-text dump, the one with only 'needed' images or the complete one.
Don't shoot me!! This came to my mind because I have to leave on holyday with my notebook and I need the wiki math section but I have no disk space. -- Zimbricchio 23:51, 9 July 2005 (UTC)
-- Zimbricchio 15:17, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
Good idea, bad idea, if you know what I mean. Garrett Talk 01:40, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
As far as articles goes, just set your web browser preferences. Pretty much all web browsers let you disable image downloading, since on low-speed lines this can be the difference between "responsive" and "unbearable." In Firefox, select edit/preferences, select teh "web features" left-hand-side tab, and unclick "load images". Dwheeler 04:01, July 17, 2005 (UTC)
Speaking of reference, I think there should be more "reference desks", each one for a different topic. That way we would create division of labor, and the answers of the "reference desks" would get answered more easily. 2004-12-29T22:45Z July 9, 2005 17:51 (UTC)
I'm sure I'm not alone in being tired of creating the following kind of links:
[[largemouth bass|largemouth]], [[smallmouth bass|smallmouth]], and [[white bass]]
For the many, many cases where you want a link with alternative text display where the alternative text is a substring of the link text, I would propose that a markup be added such as
[[~largemouth~ bass]], [[~smallmouth~ bass]], and [[white bass]]
which would mean only display the text enclosed in tildes. This would be in addition to the pipe markup, not a replacement for it. Could save a lot of typing, and besides, it's more elegant. ;-) -- Mwanner July 7, 2005 18:40 (UTC)
The user script approach would considerably limit the number of users who could employ it. And the pipe character strikes me as being too easily confused with the present markup, which must be retained. And while I am surprised to find that tilde (~) is not a character available on all keyboards (isn't this how posts are signed?), I have no problem with substituting the caret for the tilde. Might look slightly more intuitive, too.
I'll hold off another day or two before submitting to Bugzilla, in case other suggestions/objections arise. -- Mwanner 13:54, July 12, 2005 (UTC)
I've been here about a month now, poking about, looking for articles that need cleaning up. But, just when I think I've finally found all the categories and pages listing articles in need of help, I discover a whole new set. This has become confusing and tiresome, so I started a list to keep them straight.
Some of these pages are just links to other categories/pages. However, most of them are lists of articles. I did a rough count, finding more than 13,200 articles listed. There is no easy way to tell what articles may be duplicated in this count and this total does not include the 19 large dump files of the punctuation project. Also, the Wikipedia:Pages_needing_ attention (802 articles and subpage 540) and Special:Ancient_pages (1,051) lists do not specify what sort of fix has been requested, so these may include stubs and who knows what else.
Limiting this to just those categories/pages that call for actual editing, not disambiguation, fact-checking, copyright, etc., here is my list so far.
To my mind, this is a mess of major proportions, both awful and awesome. I checked around the Village Pump and found no mention of this, which was a surprise. Doesn't anyone else have a problem with this? Or is it just too vast to even discuss?
Although it is difficult to pick out a structure here, the articles seem to have been sorted out according to three schemes: 1) when someone requested a fix; 2) what sort of fix was requested; and 3) alphabetically by title with a very few subject subcategories.
I can understand why it might be useful to have three different ways of sorting articles. What bothers me is that I only stumbled on some of these huge lists by accident, while poking about. I suspect a massive duplication of effort and content and I can verify that there is serious confusion for a newbie such as myself (which may turn off those who are eager to help).
In keeping with the Wikipedia exhortation to be bold, I have a few ideas on how to address this.
Well, now. There. I've been bold. I await your responses. Jekoko 29 June 2005 19:53 (UTC)
I'm thinking that our stub categories could be complemented by "Help" categories. That is, we could have something like "Foo articles that need help" or "... need special help", if they need cleanup or wikification or are disputed, etc.
That way these articles (and possibly categories) might be more likely to get the attention of people who care more and know more about the given subject.
The discussion is at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Categories. Maurreen (talk) 08:18, 4 August 2005 (UTC)
this may have been brought up before but I didn't see anything about it when I read the other topics.
I'd like it if Wikipedia would incorporate music files into some entries. For example a classical muscian should also have music files in their entries just as they have picture files. On this subject we really need to break free from the conventional conception of what an encyclopedia should be.
Dear all
I am writting about the issue of Macedonia, Republic of Macedonia, Macedonian Slavs (like Wikipedia calls the Macedonians) and the problem between Macedonia and Greece about the term Macedonia. Rant snipped
Here is a link to the whole text of my complaint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28policy%29#Neutral_Wikipedia.3F
Or whatever it's called - "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". Possible I missed it before but it seems new. Is there an ongoing discussion of this somewhere? I think it's too wordy, should go back to just "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Tualha ( Talk) 00:37, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
Moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals)
Map of pangasinan
http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/towncity.htm
http://www.pangasinan.gov.ph/theprovince/map.htm
http://www.pangasinan.org/surfmap.htm
I hope wikipedia could make a detailed political map of pangasinan with its towns and cities.
I see a lot of redirections of articles merely because the search engine is case-sensitive. Would it not be better to make the search engine non-case-sensitive, just like Yahoo and Googles, so that these redirections can be avoided?
Also, it would be good if the search engine can propose the closest alternative keywords, should there be a typo error or if the user does not know the correct spelling. Isn't this what other search engines are doing? PM Poon 14:56, 2 August 2005 (UTC)
Ed's rash actions today got me to thinking about the different proposals to reform the Deletion process. So I have created a page to discuss these proposals and try and extract some implementable policy from them. Wikipedia:Deletion reform. Note the "please edit" note. Thanks! humble fool ® Deletion Reform 20:51, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
For more on this issue see:
Paul August ☎ 15:01, August 3, 2005 (UTC)
A couple months ago a user noted that most vandals don't necessary add junk, they delete and change information as well, and so the template ought to read that their edits have been "reverted" not "removed". I agreed, and have made several prompting comments in the talk page ever since to see if anyone else cares or has an opinion, but since the template is protected I can't be bold and change anything myself. No one has yet voiced any opinions. Should the change be made, or are there reasons against? — Asbestos | Talk 16:03, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
What with featured articles and featured pictures, I think it may be approaching time to establish a process for featured sounds. This would be for recorded music as well as for "sound portrait"-type illustrations of articles: birdsong, the shouts of a crowded marketplace, a running steam engine. I think Spoken Wikipedia articles, though, as they are basically text-based, wouldn't be appropriate for this (though of course they would be improved by the inclusion of these sounds). I realize that there aren't many sounds on Wikipedia as of yet, but I think that establishing a featuring process will encourage more exceptional recordings to be collected by Wikipedians. What do you all think?-- Pharos 23:16, 31 July 2005 (UTC)
I installed MediaWiki. It set up fine. I adjusted the pages and modified one graphic, following instructions. I can manipulate the main page and some of the help pages, and I've added categories, but I can't get it to add stories. Every time I do a search, instead of offering to allow me to add something on the subject, it says "trying full text search" and won't offer a link to establish a new subject.
What is going wrong?
Would it be possible to add extra metadata to a wiki article that contains GPS coordinates? This way, if you happened upon an area of interest with your Wikipedia-linked cell phone, it might discover an interesting tidbit of information that geographically hot. For instance, you might be wandering around the shores of Thermopylae in Greece and get a history lesson, or you might be driving along I-90 near Mitchell, South Dakota, and receive a download about the Corn Palace. I think it would be neat and not terribly difficult, but of course I'd like to propose this to the gods of Wikipedia.
I've suggested a cease-fire on eras, at the Village pump. Maurreen (talk) 09:39, 29 July 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to propose a nutrition information template (infobox) for the various food articles. It should be possible using CSS to build a template that looks a lot like the nutrition information provided on the sizes of boxes, rather than scanning in the image. Anybody interested? Thanks! — RJH 21:54, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
There are large numbers of images tagged as being "fair use" on Wikipedia. These range from the eminently reasonable (there would be no other way to get an equivilent image; an example would be Image:1966 final bobby moore.jpg) to the completely unreasonable (another image could easily be gained; this is particularly true of cars—an example would be Image:2000 Dodge Intrepid.jpg). These invalid "fair use" images damage Wikipedia's reputation (imagine the librarians when they discovered that we were using these images: what an example to set to the children!), and they also lay us open to suits for copyright infringement. I feel this is an unacceptable state of affairs. I am therefore proposing setting up Wikipedia:Fair use validation, as a process to validate fair use claims before sending them to WP:IfD. IfD doesn't really allow proper discussion, as it is a very cloistered and busy page. A proper fair use forum would allow us to clarify fair use claims, improve the copyright status of the encyclopedia and Wikipedia's reputation in all. Do people think this is a good idea? Are you with me? Cheers, [[smoddy]] 20:25, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
People asking questions at the Reference Desk or elsewhere often leave their email addresses for other to contact them. Well-meaning wikipedians then often remove these email addresses, to prevent address harvesters from collecting their addresses for spam. However, does this action do anything? Unlike a regular web page, our archives are freely explorable, and easy for a spider to reach through the links to the history we provide. We think of them as disappearing, but to a machine a previous version of a page is just another web page.
Would there be no way for these email addresses to be abolished? Obviously we can say that it's the poster's own darn fault and leave it at that, but I think that it's important that there ought to be some way to permanently delete information from a page on Wikipedia. Imagine if someone's kid or jealous ex decided to post their credit card details on a page. There would be no way to permanently delete that information without deleting the entire page, which we obviously couldn't do if it were an established article.
I propose that a system be implemented in which an admin be able to permanently expunge a version of a page and replace it with a version without the unwanted information. The page history would simply skip that version, or show that it had existed and was replaced. As much as technically possible, we ought to implement a system such that there should be no way for a spider or harvester to collect email addresses or other vital information — accidentally or maliciously posted — simply by crawling though our pages. — Asbestos | Talk 14:09, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Admins can selectively delete revisions from a page. It's just a very tedious process (especially on pages with massive histories), and will tend not to be done unless there's an extremely good reason for it. Cyrius 16:26, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
The same problem came up on Harry Potter recently, when someone posted a copy of the book. It was quickly reverted. However, the page had 3000 edits, so it would have taken the admin one heck of a long time to do it. Therefore a request was made for a developer to do it, as they can run a very simple SQL query. So the short answer to the original question is no, but others can. Whether they will is a different matter. Cheers, [[smoddy]] 16:40, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Is there any way to get hit statistics for a specific page? Like so an author can track how long people stay on a page and what they do when they get there. Website analysis software is very popular and highly useful to all webmasters. Aren't we all webmasters in a way? I think it would be useful to know how my changes affect the flow of traffic between pages for one. I propose that a statistics tab be added to every page right alongside of the other "tabs": discussion, history, watch, etc. Tubelius 09:54, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
There’s someone proposing a policy to close some minor, slow-growing, “hopeless” wikipedias on the wikimedia meta-wiki. (see [5]) This proposal is the enemy to the openness of the whole wikipedia community. I come here to inform you to express your opinion there. I think it's OK to use your own language on on the talk page. Thank you. -- Theodoranian19:58, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
I noticed that some content in the wikipedia: namespace and quite some self-related content in the article namespace could use some collaboration, and am starting to devellop the idea of a Wikipedia-related collaboration. Are there any people interested? Circeus 17:42, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
See also Wikipedia talk:Community Portal#Next wiki-week
About a week ago, I created an indicator system to note whether I am online or not at a given time. Several other users who had been using different systems (or no system at all) have picked up on it and begun using it. In an effort to offer it to a larger audience, I've created Wikipedia:Status. Please take a look and offer thoughts; if you like it, consider giving it a test drive. -- Essjay · Talk 05:55, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
I am considering starting a medicine collaboration of the fortnight (of course, it could be a week if there were enough people), and I would like to see if there is any interest in participating in this. As I see it, this would involve both pre-clicinal topics (like anatomy, biochemistry, and so on) and clinical topics (diseases, laboratory tests, surgical procedures, and so on). Lay people would be very welcome—both to express a desire for specific articles to be improved, and to help ensure that the articles aren't too technical (or at least that the broad themes can be easily understood). Of course, no one would be obligated to help. Would anyone be interested? If so, please leave a note here or on my talk page. Thanks! — Knowledge Seeker দ 04:06, July 25, 2005 (UTC)
Can we please bring the copyright notice to the top ( Ideal example)? Copy and paste dumping is pervasive among anons (easily verifiable if you patrol the new article creation page). The current note is either being ignored or unseen. Despite the bold caps text, the note could be easily unseen by a drop in once or twice editor, who will not bother to scan group of text that the copyright note is buried in. I consider discouraging copyright the most important instruction we can give, so can we please bring it from the bottom to the top? lots of issues | leave me a message 01:25, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
This would make history pages look MUCH better IMHO.It would work like this: With the option on, you look at a history page (say, of George W. Bush) and things like this would be gone (this was pulled right off the top, lol):
# (cur) (last) 03:19, 10 August 2005 Zzyzx11 m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by NoSeptember) # (cur) (last) 03:17, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 # (cur) (last) 03:16, 10 August 2005 NoSeptember m (→Presidential campaigns - more concise) # (cur) (last) 03:04, 10 August 2005 Bmicomp m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gidonb) # (cur) (last) 03:01, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 # (cur) (last) 02:54, 10 August 2005 Gidonb (rv; sick!) # (cur) (last) 02:53, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 (Fuck Bush and Fuck the War in Iraq. Bush is a War Criminal and is well known to be a Cocksucker of the First Order) # (cur) (last) 02:50, 10 August 2005 Everyking m (Reverted edits by 172.153.39.187 to last version by Gamaliel) # (cur) (last) 02:49, 10 August 2005 172.153.39.187 # (cur) (last) 01:34, 10 August 2005 Gamaliel m (Reverted edits by 70.150.37.32 to last version by MONGO) # (cur) (last) 01:33, 10 August 2005 70.150.37.32
This option would do exactly this: hide from the history page, any edits made using the rollback button that admins have, and the edit that was reverted by it. Hopefully this wouldn't be spoofable by vandals marking their edits as minor and putting in there edit summary "Reverted edits by [anon ip] to last version by [username]". Are rollback edits marked in any special way so vandals cannot spoof it? Of course, reverts by non-admin users would still show though.
Also, in the process, it would also not alert articles on your watchlist. The watchlist pulls the most recent edit, and it would only put it at the top if you open your watchlist before it was reverted by an admin. Of course you could still use the diff and old version links since it is only hiding it, not deleting it.
I think this would also discourage vandals since their 30 seconds of fame wont be seen by as many people.
What do you think of this proposal? -- pile0nades talk | contribs 09:03, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
according to a Yahoo newsline dated (20050805) J. Wales said "There may soon be so-called stable contents. In this case, we'd freeze the pages whose quality is undisputed" (note added 20050810: it appears that J. Wales never said that)
a motion follows. this boils down to a proposal for modification of the Wikipedia's underlying Mediawiki software but I'm pretty sure that the idea can be consideraly enhanced on the Wikipedia side, therefore I submit it here, hoping that interested parties will share their thoughts.
our objectives are:
the proposed method:
in order to do so each Wikipedia article may have more than one status:
any Wikimedia visitor will be able to state in his profile that, upon reading, [s]he wants to obtain the last version of any article which reached a given status. if there is no such checked version the immediate 'lower' status will be published (this is recursive)
this will not in any way annoy the reader who does not care about all those darn article status :-) because the personal profile (preferences) of each registered user will state 'raw' by default and (for registered and anonymous visitors) upon each article display a new tab will offer access to the various other 'statused' version when such versions exists
those various articles status will be expressed by cryptographic seals. it is not mandatory as most functions proposed here can be implemented using standard version-tracking tricks (taging, branching...) but some people may want to have their screwed articles published with a forged status and try to tamper the servers or network connection. let's integrate security concerns as soon as possible the [ WebDSign protocol] may be the technical foundation of such seals.
all the processes (requesting-delivering-managing certificates, sealing, obtaining information about a seal...) will be done using a Web navigator.
in order to produce a seal one needs a digital certificate (X.509 or OpenPGP (PGP-GPG)), delivered (X.509) or signed (PGP) by a Certification_Authority (CA), which will be Wikipedia organization. anyone can check that a given certificate (and all informations it stores) was issued by a given CA.
any Wikipedia contributor will carry only one Wikipedia certificate, which will store many attributes stating various useful parameters. it is just like the usual username-password pair.
any administrator will obtain a certificate in order to let him/her give the status 'unpolluted' to any article.
using the existing set of articles an automagic analysis of the volume of informations produced and its relative stability ('unpolluted' status, age and amount of readers) can establish a 'confidence score' for each author. the administrators will use those scores and deliver certificates to the best authors. those certificates will be qualified by an attribute (named 'wpexpert') listing the name of the categories of expertise of their carrier (themes, for example 'mathematics' or 'geography').
in each category this first college of 'wpexperts' will be enabled to form a college in order to elect world-known 'experts' of the field. the CA will produce certificates for them, with an 'expert' attribute storing the pertinent categories names. at first they may be not very interested in participatinf but as more and more will somewhat do emulation will raise their involvement
moreover any registered Wikipedia user may have a certificate in order to express that he agrees/likes (or disagrees/dislikes) some chunk of information in an article.
Subramanian kindly pointed to me that User:Sam_Spade/Policy_Proposals is pertinent. it leads to a huge number of interesting ideas, especially meta:Article_validation_proposals, which may be helped or help this proposal.
Now for the votes and opinions:
Just now I found I was blocked from editing. Gah. The first time it happened I had to sit it out, but this time around I have my amazing wiki-moulding powers so was able to unblock myself, largely for the point of making this post.
Many users, unfortunately including myself, are stuck with crappy ISPs, but the average user isn't going to want to sit through three-hour phone conversations with clueless 20-something brunettes finally ending with some sort of "three months free access" cop-out, rather than an expensive hardware upgrade. So maybe WE should do something.
I think there needs to be some sort of logged-in protection. So if you're a logged-in user you are OK, even if your logged-out IP just got blocked.
Alternately, if that allows people to log out and vandalise then log in and continue editing innocently, maybe have it for admins only since they're so "trustworthy".
Or something. Anyway, see what you think. Feel free to add fertiliser or weedkiller to this sprouting idea. :) Garrett Talk 13:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
I believe this discussion should be moved to Wikipedia:Village pump (perennial proposals). -- cesarb 18:10, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I don't know where to look for someone or a company who would be interested in a word game that I'm developing that is fun for adults and could also be used as a good tool for teaching and promoting kids on how to form the basics of sentences and using wrods in the proper context. Does any one know what would be the best way to present this to a board game manufacturer for consideration? Frank Eggleston
Please visit the following link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Macedonia#Let.27s_finally_SOLVE_this_issue...
I sterbinski 13:14, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
I propose after identifying any chronic vandal, we should turn a switch, and that user will be cookied into a parallel version of Wikipedia almost indistinguishable from the real Wikipedia. There will be no indication of banishment for the user. He can vandalize to his content, unresponded to, so that he can admire his "victory". The theory goes that trolls need an audience that interacts with their behavior. Remove all response and this troll will become dejected and forget the hobby. It's also a very funny joke for us to play on vile brats.
To make this simple, the front page, current events, etc. will disappear. The landing page of Trollworld will be a Google like simple search page. The header will announce the new rebranded sleek Wikipedia. I don't expect the typical malicious vandal, a 15 year old pothead, to catch on.
lots of issues |
leave me a message 01:23, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
Looking for comments on a new way to present filmographies in actor articles for improved consistency, less IMDb thievery, etc. I put together a test in my userspace and I'm looking for opinions before rolling it into any articles. Thanks! RADICALBENDER ★ 21:02, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
The {{ welcome}} template is the very first thing many users see. Unfortunately, recently it has been growing out of proportions, as some people think that answers to any possible question a newbie might have must be covered in the template. This has lead to a huge welcome page, a screenful on my computer, and it happened at least several times that new users just deleted or moved the welcome template I put on their talk page.
I suggest removing some of the links from there, which are covered in the help pages anyway, and just make a prominent link to the help page. Also, I believe is an overkill to tell the newbies about the Wikipedia:Topical index (who the heck reads that one).
My trimmed version of the welcome template is available at Template:Welcome/Proposed version 1. Again, it is the original with some links cut out. I wonder what people think. Oleg Alexandrov 20:08, 6 August 2005 (UTC)