This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212
A discussion started about automating date preferences. I think it is worthy of further discussion.
Here is the original text:
Does anybody know how to implement this? Bobblewik 13:38, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
I wonder why a new element type is introduced here. Why can we not use a template for this (vaguely similar to the style already in use for geographic coordinates):
{{date |any date having month in text or following ISO}}
{{date dmy|numeric date with day first}}
{{date mdy|numeric date with month first}}
The first form like {{date | 30 May, 2005}} would accept any of "30 May 2005", "30 May, 2005", "May 30 2005", "May 30, 2005", "2005-05-30", "30 May", "May 30", "2005"
The second and third would accept "30-05-2005" and "05-30-2005" respectively.
−
Woodstone 10:50, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
I've observed several situations in which access to pieces of information would be helpful. A shared database could be accessed through a modification to Template behavior which would allow manipulation of retrieved data.
Using {{Data:Country/USA}} within a template may convert to Article=United States|President=George W. Bush|Continent=North America
Several possible uses are suggested:
Perhaps this can be provided primarily through the existing Template code.
( SEWilco 13:50, 6 August 2005 (UTC))
Reuters, as quoted by Yahoo!, reports Wikipedia will impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, quoting Jimmy Wales. Slashdot picked this story up. Later text seems to suggest this is really a separation of "stable" and "draft" versions. Does this mean there's a plan to implement an article validation proposal, and if so, what's been decided? If it's just continuing to be discussed, could someone say so? If not, could someone say that too? The article makes it sound like there's new news, but that doesn't make it so...! Sorry for asking a "question" in Village pump, but it seemed like a major proposal issue if there IS such a change and worth discussing. Dwheeler 01:21, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
Is there any way to get an RSS feed set up for Wikipedia featured articles? Or articles as they're featured on the main page? (Cross-posted at "technical".) – Quadell ( talk) ( sleuth) 19:42, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
... podcast! Wouldn't it be great with a weekly show that discussed what has been going on in wikipedia for the last week? "Well, the arbcom is up for relection, any surprises this year Willmcv?" "Yes, it turns out that recently admined and bureocrated gkhan is running. And he is looking good! Also in the race, DrZoidberg!"
All jokes aside, wouldn't it be a nice wikiproject? We certainly have people able to do it (see WP:SPOKEN). Sortof like the Signpost but spoken! A good way to keep up with all the things going on. And with the wonder of Skype there could be interviews with a number of interesting wikipedians. (ohh, and by the way, I picked Willmcw because he is active in WP:SPOKEN, no other reason :P) gkhan 08:19, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Not certain if this has been proposed. I did a lite search and didn't find anything. But I was thinking of a 'phone book' of the world - for us common folk. There could be a common template to ad photos. Perhaps 3 image slots for different ages like 'baby', 'young adult', and 'mature adult', or something along those lines. There could be fields to supply as much or as little information as possible. Nothing personal such as SSN and street address or any of that nature. Since the whole world would be participating information gathered would have to be linear, in that it's applicable to everyone and each could relate to. Such as
Where born: Year born: Maiden name: Sir name: Syblings
It could turn out to be a short bio that is updated or deleted at will. How to prevent same name entries and the like, I haven't really thought of yet. Just thinking out loud right now.
Just thinking out loud. If anyone from Wikipedia would like to pick this thought up, I would be happy to help in any way.
info at jamescalvin dot com
I created Template:talkheader as something that could go on the top of every Talk page (a) to welcome newbies on any page they land on and (b) to remind regulars of key points whenever they visit a talk page. It'll only really work with a software change to make it automatically appear on every talk page, but for now it can be tested and developed, and we can see what people think. Rd232 19:57, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
If this Wikipedia wants to remain a living, growing, and ever improving project.... I suspect it will have no choice but to admit its POV, and to place a very clear disclaimer as to the difficulty it has with maintaining accurate information. For whatever reason, this wiki is having some troubles, maybe for its extraordinary growth rate, thus a bit like a clumsy and oafish teenager... or maybe because it has attracted so many people from Public Relations, Media, and even the intelligence community, NOT because it is such a reliable source for information, but rather unfortunately, because of its powerful dynamic to mold Knowledge, Opinion, and for what people falsely carry away as "Fact".
Place a disclaimer Mr Wales, front page and center. Tell people what exactly an open-source wiki is, and remind them in much stronger words that anyone, ANYONE can come here to add knowledge, just as easily as they can bend it.... the honorable future of Wikpedia may depend on this. 3chester4 14:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I am the creator of You Can with Beakman & Jax, an educational comic strip that's in about 250 newspapers. The CBS TV show Beakman's World was created from the comic in the early 90s. A company called bonus.com has offered file serving (and a salary) to me for the comic's archives. They are no longer able to do this and I lose file serving on August 31, 2005.
I'm looking to get the files served elsewhere, like here maybe. I know there is no salary here, but I'd still like the files offered to teachers and students without me needing to pay for file serving. Or, if you have other thoughts, please be in touch.
If anyone want to discuss this with me the best thing is to contact e by eMail at myQuestion@beakman.com. You can look through the files at http://bonus.com. Then click the Strategy button.
best,
Jok Church
I used to read those too! lots of issues | leave me a message 22:43, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Screenshot of Encarta Dynamic Timeline
I hope this has not been suggested already and if it has, I apologize in advance. Could not find it with a search through the village pump.
I've been using WikiPedia for quite a while now and I have to say that my MSN Encarta installation has been fairly dormant since I found WikiPedia. There is however a couple of things I find really fun and useful with the Encarta implementation. One of these is the Dynamic Timeline feature in Encarta. Take a look at the screenshot above and note the back and forward arrows and the zoom capability in the bottom right hand corner.
I know that implementing something like this would break the html-only / no dynamic content pattern that most of wikipedia seems to adhere to, but I think this would be a high-value-add add-on to wikipedia and people who would like to use it could install a java applet that would display the time line, people who do not want java applets on their machine could just skip using the feature.
I am a java developer with a fair amount of Swing experience and would be interested in contributing to a project like this.
-- Mbjarland 11:38, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Very interesting. I've been wanting to start a similar kind of project, a branching geneology of influences, laid out chronologically, so you could connect wikipedia articles about artists, authors, or thinkers to their influences and followers. Whether or not it has a connecting feature, a dynamic timeline with zoom features would really facilitate browsing specific areas of the Wikipedia. Adding organization like this would improve the value of the content. Is there a simple way to have a visual space with text be open to edits in wiki style?
--mlove 8 August 2005
Please take a look at Wikipedia:Featured topics for a proposal regarding featured collections of articles. violet/riga (t) 14:50, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
(Proof of concept included, please see below)
This is a proposal for a tool which could potentially speed up pathfinding within the "auxiliary" pages of Wikipedia. This proposal doesn't intend to improve the content, or anything related to the content within the articles -- it's only meant to help with pathfinding for users, both old and new, among the increasing number of help pages, policies, sub-projects, formats, and so on (most of you probably know what I mean -- remember the last time you searched for "that" format, or "that" policy, or "that" project" you knew about, but didn't know where to look for?).
The two issues this proposal wishes to address are response speed and structure within the "auxiliary" pages structure, many of us have a relatively hard time browsing. The response speed is an issue because the servers need to (a) format all pages from Wiki sources to HTML, which involves high CPU loads (the data is cached, but it still involves a caching layer to check on), and (b) include all bells and whistles, such as the navigation box, CSS, headers and footers, which involves a bandwidth load.
My proposal is to create a relatively simple tool in Macromedia Flash for browsing the Wikipedia structure -- a Wikipedia Map tool. This tool would read XML files stored within Wikipedia (and thus subject to the same Wiki concept as the rest of the site), and render the structure in an easy-to-understand fashion. The XML files don't need to be pre-parsed by the Wikimedia servers, and they are quite small files. The XML files are retrieved on-demand, depending on what the user is interested in -- I expect the average XML file (which makes up a tree level) would be around 4-5 KB long, as opposed to the typical Wikipedia page, which includes an overhead of around 20 KB (the overhead of the HTML alone is around 20 KB, I'm not talking about actual content, or CSS, or images, or JavaScript).
I have created a proof of concept (i.e. ugly and with very little content) Flash file for this proposal -- unfortunately Wikipedia doesn't currently support this type of media, so I had to place it off-site, at this location. The left side shows the map sections, and the right side shows the links within the sections. Only the first sub-sections are working at this time (i.e. "For New Users" and "About the Project"), but the links should all be working.
You will notice that the tool isn't lightning-fast -- that's because, due to the Flash security limitations, it can't load XML files from other sites than the one which hosts the Flash files. Therefore I had to make the Flash connect to my local server, which connects to Wikipedia -- so instead of your browser retrieving the data directly from Wikipedia, you go through my server, which is located in Romania (pretty far from most of you).
If you want to experiment with tweaking the links and structure, the XML files it uses are the following: first page, for new users, and about the project (the files are on the Romanian Wikipedia because I'm an admin there and I can delete them -- didn't want to spam the English project with useless files). If you want to edit those XML files, you need to right-click on the blank image presented in the links in this paragraph, save the file locally, edit it without changing its name, click on "Încarcă o nouă versiune a acestui fişier" back on the page linked here, pick the edited file, edit "Nume fişier destinaţie" to have the "png" extension (instead of "xml" as default), click on "Trimite fişier" and then click on "Salvează fişierul" in the resulting page.
The procedure for editing the XML files is that complicated because Wikipedia doesn't currently support XML files natively either, so you can't edit the file inline -- they have to be stored as PNG files, as far as the Wikipedia server understands.
As I said, this is only a proof of concept, so please don't judge its merits by its current looks, speed or ease of editing alone -- it currently can't excel in any of those areas because objective reasons related to the current implementation of the Wikipedia software on one hand, and its looks aren't exceptional because it would be stupid to invest a lot of time in a proof of concept before I get at least some feedback on. However, if I get enough positive feedback, I can push for this tool, and for making XML files native to Wikipedia (which wouldn't be a bad thing anyway) -- and I would work on it a lot more. So, please do let me know what you think by adding comments in this section!
Thank you for at least reading this!
-- Gutza 00:16, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
We always face a problem of wrong titles when dealing with articles whose titles begin with a lower case letter, e.g pH. The best solution is yet to add a template as follows:
It's just the same blunder when I was editing the article am730. But recently I've discovered a very interesting template in the Chinese wikipedia to change the title of the article, see the Chinese version of pH. Then I contacted User:Zhengzhu, one of the system administrator of the Chinese wikipedia, and this's his reply:
I think this "template" would be of much avail to our current system. :-D -- Jerry Crimson Mann 14:23, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Is there a way to lock a picture to one article to prevent a valid image in one context being used to vandalise other articles? Two examples: One anonymous user keeps using the valid image of a penis, which is on the Penis page, to vandalise scores of user pages. Another keeps using images of Darth Vader and other Star Wars images to vandalise the page on Pope Benedict XVI. Locking the pages isn't an option. The vandal may disappear for two weeks, then suddenly reappear and begin inserting the images over and over again until they are blocked, at which time they reappear using another IP, then another to keep doing it.
Some of the images that they were using but which weren't in any real article were deleted immediately but users don't want to have to propose the deletion of valid pictures. But it is gone beyond a joke at this stage; I once had to delete the penis picture of 20 user pages in 10 minutes once, then delete Darth Vader three times off the pope's page. I blocked the vandal only to find that he had come back and put the penis picture on another batch of user pages again. Locking a picture into one page with a valid article so that it could not be used elsewhere (and there is not likely to be much need throughout Wikipedia for a picture of a penis or a picture of a minor Star Wars character off their own article) would solve the problem.
FearÉIREANN\ (caint) 19:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
The feature to prevent an image from appearing inline is mentioned in this post. I realise that isn't quite what you wanted, but it should be possible to program a similar feature which blocks a named image from appearing other than on one or more named pages.- gadfium 01:47, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
every president meets with other leaders. state leaders like to meet with other state leaders. Adding a picture of George W. Bush and the said state leader in any of these articles is unnecessary and excessive and it adds NOTHING to the article.
just test it. go to an article on a president of another country, and most of the times, there will be some photo of George W. Bush that shouldn't be there. Unless George W. Bush has some personal or political connections to this person, like Tony Blair, adding a photo of him is just stupid.
I believe that there should be a kind of page protection on Wikipedia, which, instead of blocking all non-admins, only blocks anonymous users, or anonymous users and accounts that are (say) less than a week old. The vast, vast majority of the on vandalism persistent wikipedia comes from anonymous and brand new users, and is usually dealt with by protecting the page. I think that introducing a semiprotected status for pages would help deal with vandalism and spamming without preventing normal editing of the page.
I believe this would require a change to the software (could be wrong) and so I'm testing the waters here before proposing it on bugzilla. Any thoughts? Yelyos July 3, 2005 23:10 (UTC)
I presented something like this earlier on. It has vanised for some odd reason. Atricles such as george W bush and many others need a semi protected status. We could put edit quotas to some articles such as george w bush, bill clinton etc. The quota could be for example 100 edits, Would at least slow down vandalism if not halt it. I am not sure if blocking annon users completely off of such articles is good. Some annons contribute a lot. -- Cool Cat My Talk 7 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)
I'm somewhat conflicted on the issue. While it's immediately obvious how useful it would be, what worries me is its affect on Wikipedia's social structure. At the moment, there seems to be a de-facto standard that, while you may have to register to participate in policymaking and other meta-stuff, editing can generally be done as easily by anons as by logged in users. Also, currently the only restrictions that have been placed on registered accounts have been for Arbcom/Foundation voting. Would it be wise to implement something that might change this? CXI 03:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
I, too, think the "semi-protect" status is a good idea. An anonymous vandal with a dynamic IP can easily dodge bans, whereas one who must create an account has at least that small piece of tediousness to take up his time. A semi-protect status would give Wikipedia admins another, more fine-tuned tool between full open-editing and full non-admin lock. I don't think even semi-protection should be an article's usual state, of course.
Also consider that if a repeat vandal with an IP shared by other people has his IP banned, the ban will also hurt others who use that IP. If he has to create his own account (or accounts) to do his damage, then banning that account will only hurt that user. --
Mr. Billion 05:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Monitoring entier wiki data flow for several weeks I noticed several articles such as George W. Bush end up vandalised too frequently. While {Protecting} the article is a very bad idea as we want users to edit articles, putting edit caps on certain frequently vandalised articles maybe usefull. Granted its not absolute protection but it would make first edit vandalisms imposible for such articlers. Dynamic IP's such as various AOL vandals abused (as well as many others) use their IP to vandalise on first edit. -- Cool Cat My Talk 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)
What I propose is some sort of an edit cap, number not being outragous, but also being time consuming to achive. Since wikipedia has over 600,000 articles I do not believe people will have difficulty reaching cap. This prevents vandalism by inconviniancing vandals. -- Cool Cat My Talk 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)
Users like Evilmonkey, myself and other RC patrolers will revert pages but because of articles like George W. Bush which get vandalisedmultiple times in an hour by a number of IP's at times make RC patrolers job harder each day as more such articles appear. -- Cool Cat My Talk 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)
Well, it appears that that vandal has resurfaced. He's been over on the Dick Cheney page posting the same pictures. Huh. Well, guys, it looks like my little plan has caused you to think twice about who can edit the Bush page. By doing my vandal streak this morning, I have succeeded in causing this cebate on whether to limit who can submit contributions to this article. Looks like you just can't keep an old Bush vandal down. Like I said, if you take the other choice, and decide not to allow only registered sers to contribute, then Ill satrt anoter one of the vandal streaks. Even if you do allow only registered members to contribute, I have a couple of registered names, that have existed for quite a while. Let the debates begin! Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush"
I think this has enough support to start a wiki project. -- Cool Cat My Talk 03:04, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I tentatively suggest the following for discussion:
- the public face of the wikipedia be placed on a time delay- only versions of articles stable for more than a certain amount (1 day?) will be served to the normal public.
- meanwhile watchlists and edits and logged in editors views will update in realtime.
The idea is that this is an encyclopedia, and hence nothing is supposed to change that quickly, meanwhile the delay gives editors a chance to remove vandalism. Doing this would also discourage vandalism since the vandals wouldn't even see their own edits, and the vandalism gets fixed before any harm was done. Meanwhile, well intentioned edits would go through. WolfKeeper
We the editors of the George W. Bush page request that some sort of option (only available to admins) can be set on certain pages that are frequent targets of vandalism. I know a widespread policy of such a nature is not a good idea, but on certain pages, it would cut the amount of work down a tremendous amount, and since it would only be enabled/disabled by admins, its usage would be highly discretionary. -- kizzle July 9, 2005 15:57 (UTC)
Are you proposing a semi-protection? There's a failing proposal about just that above. Howabout1 Talk to me! July 9, 2005 16:12 (UTC)
I personally take offense to the statement "we the editors of George W. Bush", I edit the article at times and have not made up my mind on the issue of semiprotection and I think that Kizzle should only speak for himself and not for the thousands of other users who edit that article. Jtkiefer
I suggest that you split the article into various sections. First of all, the article is too long. Look at the stats:
You could make a separate article for every section. That way you would diversify the location of the content, and "vandals" would be less encouraged to make any changes to so many articles. When you have all the content about George W. Bush in one page, "vandals" know that it's easy to disorganize the article. If you had various articles, each for every stage of Bush's life, then the "vandals" would get too lazy to change anything.
To put it differently, if "vandals" know they can disrupt everything by editing one single article, they are gonna do it. Just split the article. On the main article you keep the summary about Bush, and then you make hyperlinks to every section about his life. That way it would also be easier to expand every section. When you have all the thing in one article, it's just more error-prone and vulnerable to "vandals". 2004-12-29T22:45Z July 9, 2005 17:44 (UTC)
To respond to both of you, quite honestly I don't find any convincing arguments against the proposal mentioned before mine to "semi-protect" a frequently vandalized page from anon-ips. In addition, with all due respect, my characterization of the discussion is that the proponents of this concept are bringing forth convincing arguments whereas opposition is mostly absent from the entry. If the only setback to such an action is that it would create more vandals, the type of people who would register an account simply to vandalize already have accounts. In addition, the ability on such a semi-protected page to effectively combat roving IP vandalism seems to greatly out-weigh any minor inconveniences such a proposal would create. By only allowing logged-in users to edit highly vandalized pages, we increase our ability to effectively monitor and control vandalism with little repercussion to the good-intentioned editor. I don't think its fair to simply rely on editors to combat vandalism when the page reaches 30+ vandalisms a day. --
kizzle July 9, 2005 18:48 (UTC)
Then say that in that proposal, not here. Howabout1 Talk to me! July 9, 2005 18:59 (UTC)
You know, then I think you should use both strategies, first of all, forcing users to register, and, secondly, spread the content accross different articles, so it gets more difficult to "vandalize". To those people who say it's not worth the effort to force users to log in, I say that Wikipedia should experiment first, and then we see if it works or not. If it doesn't work, then you reenable users to edit without logging in. Take also a look at #Breakup controversial articles. A user proposed the same thing. To me it makes sense. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 20:23, July 9, 2005 (UTC)
In addition to this, I'd like to see a one-click option that automatically reports the user and supplies the questionable modification directly to the Admins. I think this would be much more efficient than doing it manually. Ereinion File:RAHSymbol.JPG 05:14, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
So Admins, what happens now considering overwhelming support? -- kizzle 00:07, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
I don't understand. No offense, but what good is a proposals section if an option with overwhelming support simply gets archived with no action on it? -- kizzle 16:39, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
Of course not :). Just didn't understand hierarchy of where i needed to direct such a proposal. By the way, there is a current bug now. I would highly suggest people interested in this idea to login to bugzilla and voice your opinion, as we have one person who wants to close it simply due to an across-the-board belief of letting anons edit, and another who does not feel there is concensus, despite a great deal of support above, which is enough at this stage to keep it in limbo. -- kizzle 22:43, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
A new proposal has been written to allow admins to block people that make frequent personal attacks (but only if the admin is an uninvolved party). Please visit and give your comments. It is still in the discussion stage, so no voting please. R adiant _>|< 09:39, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
I want to start a new project called "Psychotherapy and counseling". I have a list of articles that would fall under here, and more could be added. I don't know what to do or how to begin. The wikipedia:project page was not much help. whicky1978 18:15, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
I'm suggesing a change in the software that allows users to watch only talk pages, not articles themselves. It's useful if a user posts a comment or a question on a talk page and is watching it waiting for a reply, but is not interested in the article itself. CG 17:35, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
It doesn't seem worth the developers' while. It may be usefull, but not usefull enough to do. Father Howabout1 Talk to me! 17:38, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
I'm about to create a collaboration project (like the Wikipedia:Collaborations of the week) for Unusual articles, and I'm asking for your opinion: should I make it a weekly collaboration (I'm not a fan of this), monthly, or more originaly every April Fool's day? CG 15:11, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
There is a proposal to add a Portal: namespace at Wikipedia:Portal namespace. Please vote there - even if you think there are already enough votes! – AB C D ✉ 00:30, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Now, I realize I'm going to sound a little bit unfair, knowing that Wikipedia's supposed to be all about "everyone can contribute at any time whether they've registered or not," but here's the deal: my proposal is that we not allow anyone from an AOL IP to make edits unless they are registered and logged in. The reason for this is that basically, the "rotating IP" nature of AOL makes it literally impossible to put a halt to vandalism from an AOL user.
Case in point -- every few days, a vandal comes along, goes through every single Street Fighter character, and removes the formatting which organizes the " Street Fighter characters" category by last name (as you can see from the history of just about every single character with a last name). I then spend about ten minutes reverting this vandalism. This person is on an AOL IP, has not registered (or at least not logged in), and thus there is no way to stop them due to the rotating IP. They even went onto my user page and removed a conversation I had with someone else about the revert war. Anyone have any other ideas about how this might be dealt with? -- Yar Kramer 20:43, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
I fully support the idea. At least it would allow us to block an individual and so target the block, even if it has to be done repeatedly. The situation with randon AOL IPs has become impossible and is causing widespread problems. FearÉIREANN\ (caint) 21:53, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
The best solution would be better identifying tools. There are obvious traits to vandal editing (a short list of words, blanking, repeat exclamation marks, etc.). If vandal likely edits could be highlighted in yellow in RC, the nuisance would wreck less havoc and we wouldn't have to resort to blocking. lots of issues | leave me a message 00:53, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
It's a proposal: how about a "Who's watching" link along with "What links here" and "Related changes" that lists all the user who are watching this particular page. I think it would be useful to estimate the popularity of the page. We could also make a [[Special:Most watched]] that list articles that have the biggest number of people watching it. CG 14:17, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
This is more of a heads up and an attempt to "advertise" this project to more people that may be interested. Wikiversity has been a project that has languished on Wikibooks for some time, and there is a discussion about where it needs to go from here. If you want to get involved with deciding its fate and where it belongs, you are encouraged to join in on the discussions on Meta. -- Robert Horning 17:24, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
A second Wikipedia tagline at the top right of every page has been proposed at Wikipedia:Proposed update of MediaWiki:Tagline. Consensus is building to add "All articles are user-contributed." at top right of pages. Interested contributers please visit this page and comment. -- Sitearm | Talk 04:11, 2005 August 16 (UTC)
Flickr has this cool function where you can just click 'blog this' from any picture and it lets you add text and then goes straight to your blog and adds an posting.
Wikipedia could do this too. I'm always finding interesting stuff that I'd like to blog.
You need me to be a member and enter my blog login details.
And you need to set it up so that the entry is well presented in blogs, including images, or links back to the page. You're not a picture though, so I guess it should be the page title and an abstract or the first 100 characters?
Or you can blog a pic you find on Wikipedia?
The other option is just to spit out some html and people can cut and paste it as they please?
We surely have (too) many lists already but I think that this one would be useful:
Lacking a list (scratch #1) could we at least provide within the featured template the date of featured publication. Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to you comments.
hydnjo
talk 23:07, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I propose that Wikipedia purchase site licenses for services like ProQuest Historical Newspapers and LexisNexis. These are just select examples of research services that could be helpful to Wikipedia editors. If the site licenses were purchased, Wikipedia editors would be able to get interesting new forms of information, such as case law and back newspapers. I already see editors asking each other to use university and work accounts for these services. It would be better, however, if Wikipedia had its own license. This would be invaluable in our constant effort to cite our sources as well as in doing more deep research. Superm401 | Talk 04:45, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
For a little while now there have been aditional template message tags added to Redirect pages in the form of:
Which clarifies the reason for the redirect. (e.g Ayer's Rock is an alternate name for Uluru).
One such popular tag is {{R with possibilities}} which makes explicit that the redirect goes to a subtopic of the article, and perhaps a whole article with this name could or should be created future.
My proposal is to change the names of these special tags to make them more memorable, better clarified, and more useful. And to do it now, while these templates are relatively new and unknown.
Existing | Proposed |
{{R from abbreviation}} | {{R abbreviation}} |
{{R from misspelling}} | {{misspelling}} * (see 4th point below) |
{{R from alternate spelling}} | {{R alternate}} |
{{R for alternate capitalisation}} | |
{{R from alternate name}} | |
{{R from alternate language}} | |
{{R from ASCII}} | |
{{R from plural}} | {{R plural}} |
{{R from related word}} | {{R related term}} |
{{R with possibilities}} | {{R subtopic}} |
{{R to disambiguation page}} | {{R disambiguate}} |
{{R for as of}} | {{R as of}} |
{{R from shortcut}} | {{R shortcut}} |
{{R to sort name}} | {{R sort}} |
{{R from scientific name}} | {{R scientific name}} |
Firstly, I'd like to remove the word "from". so instead of {{R from related word}} we'd just have {{R related word}}. This would make it easier to remember the tag, as some use "from", some "for", and others "to". I don't think there is any ambiguity, and the full meaning can be understood from the category page.
Secondly, {{R subtopic}} is much more clear than {{R with possibilities}}
Thirdly, instead of categories based on the original list of what redirects are used for, I'd like to make it categories based on what the special tags can be used for. Misspelling, for instannce, is useful in that it lets the reader know that it's not just an alternative name but a misspelling. (unfortunately that information is hidden at present, but I imagine in future the reader will be told they were redirected from a misspelling.) Also in future, perhaps the "what links here" will tell you which redirect pages are misspellings. That's useful documentation. It means links to misspellings cna be found easily, etc.
On the other hand, whether a redirect is counted as an alternate name or alternate language, I think is less generally useful, and only makes it more difficult to categorise redirects. Likewise for whether something is a different spelling, or just using ASCII. So I propose to lump all the "alternates" together, so long as they are all correct alternatives. This would bring the number of tags down from 13 to nine.
Fourthly, make "misspelling" its own tag, which can be combined with others.
E.g. Air's Rock would become:
as it is a misspelling of an alternate name.
Fifthly (ok these ordinal numbers are getting silly), {{R to disambiguation page}} to {{R disambiguate}}. "to disambiguation page" is not really clear, it really means someone should disambiguate the link that lead them there, not only that it redirects to a disambiguation page. And some other minor changes. See list below.
Finally, Any more suggestions? What about redirects from a misspelling of an alternate name? Is there a way to do a heirarchy of these things, like categories?
I don't know how these changes would be implemented. I assume someone would have to write a script, unless there are ways of migrating more elegantly. I also don't know what the appropriate Wikibureaucracy process is to get these changes implemented. I figure someone just has to do it. Comments welcome.
This proposal also been posted to Wikipedia_talk:Template_messages/Redirect_pages
— Pengo 02:36, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Would the developers be willing to put in a #top link next to the button at the top of each ==Section== or ===Subsection===? I think most browsers now automatically predefine the top line of an HTML page as <a name=#top></a>. Alternatively, it shouldn't be so difficult (I say, as I sit here coaching from my easy chair) to predefine all the article pages as a hidden #top. Thoughts? Comments? Popcorn? Tomer TALK 23:14, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
What do people think about creating a third desk called "Wikipedia:Grammar desk". I think that there are enough grammar queens on Wikipedia to monitor and answer questions. I think that such a desk would be useful, and would help improve the quality of writing here. I propose that a FAQ page be attached. Any comments? Ground Zero 19:04, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
(copied from User talk:Ground Zero) wikipedia:WikiProject Grammar was designed for that purpose, but appears to have sadly gone unused. (That brings up another question: where should the adjective have gone in the previous sentence?) Anyway, I think it would be good to revive that project, and maybe set up a wikipedia:English style FAQ, where we highlight the most frequent spelling and grammar problems on wikipedia pages, and talk about why they are incorrect. For example, the commas, its/it's and which/that, and common spelling mistakes like noticable/noticeable and inital/initial (I've spent the last few days fixing those!) Graham 01:59, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
Ground Zero and Graham: firstly, excuse me if this makes little sense: I have just arisen. Secondly, I agree totally with what you both propose. I think that it is rather detrimental to Wikipedia that there is not much in the way of grammar discussion. As you both know, fixing spelling and grammar is a very silent job; we often just find mistakes and fix them, but this does not stop the same mistakes from being made repeatedly. It would be far more productive to discuss failings of grammar, spelling, punctuation and general style on one easily accessible page. It would be great to have our deliberations on one page, rather than on thousands of unique pages. Furthermore, I find that nearly all the errors that I correct are on pages that no one has ever tagged for copyediting. I should bet that many Wikipedians have qualms over style when they read articles, but do not wish to engage in a wasteful fight with the original article writer. I think that people would be more enthusiastic if they could refer their opinion for general debate. Templates could be added onto pages with a message like ‘some of this article’s grammatical accuracy is disputed’, with a link to the discussion on the grammar desk. The petitioner could explain why they find something wrong, and we could all give our opinions. This zone would not be solely reserved for debates about particular pages, but about grammar questions in general. (I can think of many, such as: why should there be an apostrophe s after numbers?) The discussions could help to formulate a more comprehensive style and grammar FAQ. I think that any centralised system has to be better than the current adhocracy. Sometimes, we have to be vigilantes, but it is more constructive to have consensus.
(By the way, as for the question about the adjective, I do not particularly see why split infinitives are such a crime. I think that language should be both as clear and as precise as possible; unlike the use of commas, I feel that unnaturally convoluting a sentence to ensure that there is no split infinitive does not enhance a sentence’s clarity. However, that is just my opinion.) IINAG 10:27, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I do a fair bit of copyediting on Canadian politics and history pages, and some elsewhere. I always work to improve the quality of the writing since no-one "owns" the articles. If someone reverts one of my improvements, I don't worry about it unless it is a reversion to something that is unambiguously wrong. I might fix a split infinitive because I think it is poor style, but I'm not going to spend any time arguing with someone who changes it back. There is so much poor writing here that it is beeter to spend time fixing things on which I won't get arguments.
And this is where my proposal comes from. An editor created hundreds of articles about Canadian electoral districts using the phrase "xxxx was a former electoral district". I fixed that mistake (xxxx is still a former district), amongst others, in dozens of articles before the original writer intervene to tell me that there was nothing wrong with the way s/he had written it originally. I ended up at the Wikipedia:Reference desk, for want of anywhere else to go, to get other editors to help resolve the disagreement. That worked, and convinced me that a specialized desk would be a useful tool for resolving grammatical disputes, and would contribute to improving the writing on Wikipedia by giving people an obvious place to go to ask questions.
So I wanted to canvass other views before I go ahead and create this page as a branch from Wikipedia:Ask a question. Ground Zero 15:47, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
Hello, everyone. I am glad to see unanimous support so far for these proposals. As you have pointed out, we would not strive to form a sort of homogenous style, discarding all regional differences; this would be rather counterproductive. I know that it would make me slightly consternated if people should pick on my British spelling, or how I learnt semi-colons, for example. Instead of being autocratic, I could see such a desk as a forum for maintaining a high level of clarity in Wikipedia’s articles; as a way to reduce grammatical confusion. The ‘excellent prose’ to which we aspire has to be prose that transmits information both sparingly and accurately. Many bad pieces of grammar, such as Ground Zero’s example, fly under the radar; at the minute, an error can only be remedied if someone reads the page, and notices the error. A new, consolidated system would establish an accord over what is imprecise and what is just simply doctrinaire. Having had such discussions, we will be able to remedy repeated errors more quickly in the future.
(In my opinion, incidentally, when I read the sentences 'X was a former district,' I think that it X was abolished, or in a state of abeyance, and then someone brought it back. In fact, the preterite and the word 'former' usually suggest to me a thing that was disposed of, until being reinstated. There are some exceptions to this. 'Persona Xsapat was a former pupil at Idiot College, Swindon' is clear, despite being a tad ungrammatical, because not many people on Wikipedia can be said to have attended school and then returned to it. 'Al Gore was a former Vice President' or 'John Major was a former prime minister' seem definite past to me, due to context: I cannot think of many Vice Presidents of America who lost the job and then regained it; I can only think of four Prime Ministers who lost the job and regained it since the days of Gladstone and Disræli. Of course, the sentence 'previously, Al Gore was Vice President', or 'Al Gore is a former Vice President' is far clearer to me than using the word former. This could be one of the many things that we could debate and resolve on the grammar desk. I think that it could be not only a useful tool for disambiguation, but also a rather interesting insight into how contributors see the language. IINAG 20:06, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Because of the recent heavy discussion about adding a second Wikipedia tagline, additional proposed updates to the main tagline are being documented here. All interested contributers please participate and comment in this important discussion. -- Sitearm | Talk 05:11, 2005 August 18 (UTC)
I have noticed that it can be hard to tell what is happening when looking at maps of battles, generally a number of pictures of the same map with different arrows drawn on it is used.
I think we should design a flash program that allows battles to be 'replayed' in real time.
The map could be of a single battle like Gettysburg or of a campaign like the eastern front of WW2- It could even be used as an 'empire map' showing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
Eventually we could chart the whole of humanity on one huge map showing every nations expansion and contraction.
A good example of something similar to this is Iraq Casualties, which is a map of Iraq which shows the location of every casualty over time and location. Imagine if this was a map of the world and showed every battle fought since 0 BC.
A few "fluffy" comments:
— Nowhither 05:56, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I am proposing having a translation of Wikipedia into Pennsylvania German. I have taught myself the language and would be willing to write some articles, but I'd like to know if anyone else would be interested and be able to collaborate with me on this. For those of you who don't know, Pennsylvania German, or Pennsylvania Dutch, is spoken to some degree by about 100,000 people in the mid-atlantic and midwestern U.S. It is unintelligible to speakers of regular German (Deutsch) but many of the words are similar.
This would be a great way to make a contribution to reviving the language. In southeastern Pennsylvania, the language is dying. Most of those who speak it only speak a little bit, and the ones that are fluent are all over 40-50 years old./
If anyone would be with me on this, please send me an email to joshcampfield@gmail.com or reply to this thread.
Thank you very much!
I noticed a few times there are things that I search for on wikipedia that don't have articles, but do however have wiktionary entries. I suggest that the search page have in addition to the links "create a page" and "request the page" it also have "check the other wikimedia pages" and provide links to that specific search at wiktionary, wikibooks, etc.
I noticed the senator infobox recently and was concerned that it was too-focused on a senator's senate career and neglects previous political offices held (such as being a congressman, or, in rare cases, having held multiple senator positions in different states). Furthermore, the senator infobox puts too much information in that is better left for the succession boxes at the bottom of the articles, namely the successor and predecessor.
Thus, I came up with the general politician infobox (link above; see in action at this example article). It does not have successors and predecessors, and has space for many previous offices held to be displayed. I also added in the term of the offices, but that could be removed as well. In addition, displaying information regarding spouses is made optional, as sometimes finding information regarding spouses can be difficult.
So I bring this here for general comment and community input, just to see if this could potentially replace the senate infobox and others (such as the president infobox; although that position is at such a level that previous offices could be placed aside), and if it is set up well or need some adjustment. Thanks. -- tomf688< TALK> 23:35, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
Following discussion on the Wikipedia mailing list, I have created Wikipedia:Nominations for WikiMedals. The idea is to create a system of positive recognition of Wikipedia contributions. Like it? Think it's a stupid idea? Please vote at that page. - Jakew 12:04, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
After many months of discussion, there is a proposal to allow some duplication of articles in Categories and their child Subcategories in a few specified cases. Basically, duplication would be allowed for three reasons:
For more about this, and to take part in the discussion, please go to: Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#Updating_the_section_on_category_duplications. -- Samuel Wantman 06:00, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
is there any plans in motion to extend the media format choices? i.e. wmv, rm, etc....more choices than ogg?
thank you
I have begun an exclusionist, ethnocentric, anti-German argument on the subject of eszet (ß) in English Wikipedia. You are invited to express your disgust with me on the Manual of Style talk page. :-) -- Tysto 21:54, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
This discussion has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Provenance---- Carl Hewitt 13:19, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Its would enhance the process of creating articles. As it is, one has to chance for different categories, often I'm in the alternative between "Swedish municipalities" or "Municipalities in Sweden", "Municipalities of Sweden", (substitute with rivers, cities, etc). So I'd like to see the categories in preview mode, instead of after saving. -- Fred- Chess 08:11, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
Often when looking through history of an article I wonder why a particular editor has added an item, and ocasionally the urge becomes strong enough to ask the editor. Yet the history links to the editor's user page, rather than the user talk page, making the process just that fraction longer. is there any reason why a link to both user page and talk page couldn't be listed in article histories - much like they are on a personal watchlist? Grutness... wha? 09:32, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Please could you add the link Allpages to the search box, under the "GO" and "Search" buttons? A lot of users uses this page as a way to find an article, and it would be better if they don't have to access it by the Special:Specialpages. CG 09:24, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
It has been proposed to rename Wikipedia:Votes for deletion to Wikipedia:Pages for deletion, to remove the word "votes" from the title and to be more consistent with our other "X for deletion" areas. It has also been proposed to rename Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion to Wikipedia:Deletion review. This has been announced in several places, but the discussion is in one place: Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Name_change_.28again.29. Uncle G 16:35:52, 2005-08-26 (UTC)
Okay, who wouldn't love a spell checker for new articles on wikipedia? Tell me, who wouldn't? Yeah, spell checkers aren't infailable (sp? see why we need a checker?), but it will be a start. However, I want support before I follow the procedures to 'change the software'. So, who supports?
British or American spelling? There are many different correct spellings of the same word. This has been shot down many, many times. Howabout1 Talk to me! 23:32, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
Give the editor a choice between Brit or American spelling. It would be great for assuring an article was one or the other, which it is supposed to be, especially given that it isn't made clear exactly how one is to write/spell in American as a Brit and vice/versa, let alone use the correct grammar, SqueakBox 23:45, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
okay then..... HereToHelp
But shouldn't we encourge the people who want to contribute but don't want to reasearch their brains out? *cough, me, cough* HereToHelp 02:53, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Go contribute!!!! Yay! You can do it! You can do it! Sorry for the sarcasm, but how would a spell checker encourage people who don't want to reasearch? Howabout1 Talk to me! 02:57, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
The current version of the google bar (it's compatible with firefox) has a good spellchecker built in. This link is Broken 14:45, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Rather than select either US or British English, I would prefer that the spellchecker always accept either spelling. Many articles, such as the one on tea, have both US and British sections, so would be expected to have both spellings in various places. I currently cut and paste things I write to a spellchecker. Unfortunately, it goes far beyond spellchecking and gives silly advice on grammar and when to spell out numbers, too. It also has trouble with the markup brackets and such. As for the comment that spellcheckers aren't perfect, well of course not. Cars aren't perfect either, but we don't ban them. Both require an intelligent operator paying attention to what they are doing. Also note that a local word list (stored as a cookie ?) to supplement the official list would be useful, so proper names you encounter frequently wouldn't keep flagging errors. StuRat 00:06, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
I have proposed text, at Wikipedia talk:Stub#Proposed "depth of coverage" standard to try to captue in words the notion thaqt what a stub is cannot be solely defined by a mere mechanical counting of words, sentances, or paragraphs. Please visit and comment. DES (talk) 23:18, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I respect Wikipedia's rules, until October 1st that is, and so will not recreate the WikiProject for the letter. However it was irresponsible to Speedy Delete it, that just ensures no one will see our message. I am reproducing the letter here. TheMessenger 18:54, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Addendum: I would like to find a more public place to host this letter and I am therefor soliciting advice on this issue. TheMessenger 18:54, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
In light of the recent Willy attacks, I suggest that developers add an account creation log, or a page showing up to the 500 newest registered users. This could really help in fighting vandal accounts. -- Ixfd64 20:27, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
I believe the current image link logic is to first search the local area, say en.wikipedia, for images under the specified name, then, if not found there, search Wikimedia Commons under the same name. I propose keeping this logic the same, but also allowing "c:" to be specified in front of the name of an image on a link to bypass the search in the local area and only look for the image under Wikimedia Commons. This would solve this current problem:
If the second user does intend to change the illustration in the article, they could always edit the article and remove the new "c:" flag. Note that this logic is similar to the "w:" flag used in WikiNews to point to a Wikipedia article, versus a WikiNews article with the same name. This logic could also apply to other Wikimedia Commons files, or only images, whichever is felt to be the best option by the majority.
StuRat 20:46, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I tried to submit this to bugzilla, but it didn't let me stay logged in.
I think that now that many people on wikimedia commons are using a template called "Self", where it is inserted "I, the creator of this file release it with this license: [eg gfdl]", the name is often not shown on the image description page. I wonder if not the upload history of the commons image therefore should also be shown on the description page on respective wikipedias?
Fred- Chess 08:22, August 26, 2005 (UTC)
Actually, it would be a simple matter to alter those "Self" templates to say "I, User:X, the creator of..."-- Pharos 08:38, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps there should be a tag like the above for articles that pass VfD as "no consensus", seeing as how there's probably something wrong with them and articles that pass VfD with something wrong with them are rarely cleaned up. ~~ N ( t/ c) 22:26, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I think that all image uploads (not just uploads of new images) should be shown in user contributions. This could help keep track of vandals who like to replace images. Also, all Wikimedia wikis should have this feature, not just Wikipedia. -- Ixfd64 18:29, 2005 August 25 (UTC)
I have made a preliminary proposal to allow speedy deletion of copyvio material, see Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Preliminary_proposal.
It is preliminary because i want to see how it could be improved, please go and say what you think! (even if it is just "Support" or "Oppose") Martin - The non-blue non-moose 09:17, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
This is food for thought and discussion more than a proposal. It could be useful to change the way some processes are centralized.
For example, conceiveably on "Page A" (more less like a project or portal), we could have all RFCs, VFDs, CFDs, etc., related to "A". And a similar page for "B", and so on, as needed.
I don't mean that these would be detailed division, but perhaps along the lines of the eight or so main categories listed on the main page.
Then we could consider doing away with all or most of the now central pages. Thoughts? Maurreen (talk) 08:07, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
My idea is for a variant on the "featured article" concept. It would feature a reasonably well written article on a topic that is not widely known to the general public. The article would not have to meet the same standards as the featured article for quality, but must have enough content and accuracy that people reading the article will have received a quality introduction to the topic. The purpose of this feature would be to give such a topic a bit of exposure that could lead to it becoming more popular. The name "Featured Obscurity" is only a suggestion at this point. Feel free to give your opinions on the name as well as the idea. CanadaGirl 09:30, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
It occured to me that perhaps there should be a status of user between logged-in and administrator. Quite often recently, I've seen situations in which I wanted to say "Regular users shouldn't be able to do that" but I couldn't, because that would mean only admins could, which I didn't want. I'm thinking there should be a "trusted" status that editors can be given upon consensus of five trusted users, or one admin. The status could be used to allow, for example, the below. The specific actions are off the top of my head and not the real proposal. They can change. What would people think about this if it were technically feasible? Superm401 | Talk 04:08, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
1. Move pages. 2. Create templates 3. Do automated reversions.
I like it. Regular users can do 1 and 2 though, and there's a proposal somewhere to give us non-admins rollback. Im don't think this will get too much support, though. Howabout1 Talk to me! 04:13, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
I don't like that idea. There are back logs everywhere because they are admin only. Making basic things admin and trusted only would make it worse. Howabout1 Talk to me! 14:37, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
I like that one. Howabout1 Talk to me! 00:14, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
I like the idea, but think the threshold to become a "trusted editor" should be lower, to avoid creating additional backlogs. In my opinion, if one current trusted editor or admin will vouch for the person, that should be enough. At the start we may need an even lower threshold, since there won't be any trusted editors to approve others. Perhaps anyone who has made more than 100 contributions could be approved ? We could also remove the "trusted editor" status from those who abuse it, perhaps the "5 trusted user" level would be right for that. StuRat 01:07, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
I think it should be a little harder to get it. Maybe 2 admins/trusted's to make it. I don't think moves should be made trusted only, they are a basic function. I think of it as just editing the title. T's should get rollback and maybe editing protected pages. Howabout1 Talk to me! 04:38, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
I'm not really liking this idea now, I'd like them to have rollback, maybe edit protecteds, but limiting ordinary user's powers to give to another class is bad. I've seen cases where people register only to upload. Howabout1 Talk to me! 15:50, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
I don't like discontinuous social controls. It's an analog world.
I don't see any need or value to creating yet another class of editors. We have already far too much trouble with the many classes we have; it took me weeks to figure out the hierarchy as it is.
We do need to control -- in a smooth, continuous, analog fashion -- access to Project and Community features. There are too many of these to list in a short comment. It's not just page moves and rollbacks; all editing, all participation in the Community needs to be subject to some sort of liberal, non-threatening, realistic limits.
At the recent BAR Camp, I spent about an hour discussing my ideas for such controls. The key is that we must balance the needs of the anon and new user against those of long-time editors and against those of our passive readership. Achieving such a balance with distinct classes of user is a crude approach.
I can't do everything at once. When I have time, if I can possibly do so without getting kicked out of my apartment and being thrown starving into the street, I will work on a detailed proposal. — Xiong 熊 talk * 23:58, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
A simple compromise that would reduce substantially some of the concerns raised, though admittedly not stop them, would be to make some privileges available to registered users only, possibly as follows:
Sure, it is simple for people to register, but it is also far easier to keep track of registered users than anons, and there's the psychological factor that - even though we can't tell much about a user from their user name, the registered user will feel more identified than the anonymous user, and will therefore be a little more wary. Grutness... wha? 01:27, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Isn't all of that already in place? And I don't understand why everyone can't have rollback? Is there any way it can be harmful? Howabout1 Talk to me! 01:57, August 23, 2005 (UTC)
I don't think anons can upload images, and I'd say most of the thme anons vote's aren't counted. I still think rollback should be more freely available, but I also don't like the 3RR. Howabout1 Talk to me! 03:16, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
A number of proposals for further speedy category renaming criteria have been made at the above page. Opinions are sought. Steve block talk 21:07, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Being French but living in the UK, I am in a position to read and edit articles both in French and English (if pushed hard I could possibly read some Spanish and German artcles too).
I find it a little frustrating that, while Wikipedia has branched to many different languages, it remains so pigeonholed (so to speak) and does not allow searches across the board. While it would not necessarily be true in the English to other language way, I am pretty sure that many people (especially since they are internet users) of none English speaking countries could be interested and able to read articles from the English version. To have results for all languages in one search would be quite helpful, I think.
Also I have had to create accounts both the English and French Wikipedias. Why not allow for "multiwiki" accounts which would allow contributers to navigate from one Wikipedia to another?
Thank you
abc site:wikipedia.org
Whatever my PoV is on the matter, I should refer you to WP:POINT. Physchim62 01:02, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Would it be possible to split the block-list? It's getting very big, and it takes a long time to load. -- Ixfd64 20:28, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
Yay! They did it! Thanks! :) -- Ixfd64 01:36, 2005 August 28 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration is being used as a tribunal to try people accused of misdemeanor (alleged bad behavior). That ain't right. It contaminates the arbitration comittee who should be spending their capital fairly arbitrating CONTENT disputes. There should be some kind of court established to give charges against the accused a fair trial before you cain him. 8^)
This would also take a big case load off the aribitration committee.
Arbitration and tribunal are two entirely different things.
Arbitration is the process by which two parties to an unresolved dispute JOINTLY submit their differences to the judgment of an impartial person. [1]
A tribunal is a court of justice before which an accused is brought for justice after being provided with a summons citing precisely what sections of the code he is charged with violating, and specifically what particular actions of his are alleged to be violations of the code. [2] -- 67.182.157.6 21:23, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
The "Cease trolling" comment is just more of your standard obscurantist sophistry of argument _ad hominem_, because you are trying to "poison the well" concerning the contributor, right? Now, to stick to the issue, if the arbitration committee is not the last recourse on the list (see graphic at right), after failure of attempted negotiation and mediation as means of resolving a CONTENT DISPUTE, then where would I find an accurate list of steps in resolving a CONTENT DISPUTE?-- 172.196.75.230 07:44, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Wikinfo may not have many friends at Wikipedia but I think they had one good idea: green links. With the incredible growth of Wikipedia and the tendency of overlinking, 'What links here', one of our most useful features in "building the web", has too often become crowded with irrelevancy. We need to split wikilinks into two types: those that register on 'What links here' and those that do not. Green links would generally be the type of thing that it would be appropriate to put in a 'See also', and would highlight the most important relevant info, while blue links would serve more for background information. The rule would be: does this article actually have something to say about the linked topic? I think this might help solve the problem of, say, linking to [[New York City]] (see, I didn't do it here!) in every biographical article about anyone who has ever happened to visit that metropolis.-- Pharos 01:29, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
I solved the problem of contentious, questionable content some time ago. Perhaps now, we're ready to entertain a realistic compromise. Please see Wikipedia:Toby. — Xiong 熊 talk * 22:20, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
We really need some moderate voices in this discussion.
Toby is neutral, and does his very best to serve both sides of this contentious issue fairly. For those who wish to see everything and brook no interference, Toby will neven be in your way. For those who think just about everything (including a fat tenor in a tux) should be heard, but not seen, Toby stands ready to do your bidding.
I find it disheartening to think that this Community is so polarized that it consists only of extremists who find it impossible to tolerate even discussion of a compromise. I'm sure there are many moderates, too -- but sensibly, moderates don't think there's much here to make a fuss about. Your voice needs to be heard in support of moderation. Thank You! — Xiong 熊 talk * 19:27, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
What must I do? Get down on my knees and beg? Offer to wash editors' socks by hand if they get involved? If moderate voices stay out of contentious debates, then these debates will be dominated by extremists! Right now, as I read over Toby's Talk, all I see are remarks that tell me most editors (a) haven't read the proposal, (b) haven't read anybody else's comments, and couldn't care less. They have read exactly enough to see that it's a moderate proposal for potentially questionable content management. Details don't concern them, only their fanatic agendas -- violently opposed.
Toby is not perfect. Toby is not a even a god. Hey, Toby's just a little guy! He can help, but that's about it. No question about it: Toby will make a lot of folks mad. He won't do enough to satisfy some, and he'll do too much for some others to tolerate. That sounds just about right to me. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to keep everybody happy.
Right now, we've got Original Toby and Simple Toby to talk about. Either one is guaranteed to cool off contentious debate over potentially questionable content and its management. I promise! In either flavor, Toby touches nothing -- alters no content -- but allows users to choose how the site is rendered for them. That's all. How can choice be bad?
Fanatics on one side say, essentially, "We don't care if we can't see this. Nobody must be allowed to see it." Fanatics on the other side of the chasm say, "We don't care if they don't want to see it; we insist they do, lest they fail to contribute to it." There is not a thing in the world I can do to reconcile these extremes -- not if I were the god-king Jimbo himself.
But there is a great mass of editors who would just be happy if they could see what they wanted to see, and could choose not to see other stuff. Toby will do this. But of course, your moderate voices are not heard in the debate, since you don't think it is a really big deal.
PLEASE! THINK! READ! COMMENT! Toby is just a little guy. He needs your help -- now! — Xiong 熊 talk * 10:47, 2005 August 29 (UTC)
Until recently, it wasn't possible to put interlanguage links in templates since those links would be included in any page on which the template was used. However, it's now possible to specify that any content inside <noinclude> tags will display only on the original page, and not in any pages where that content is included.
This has various uses, but the first one I'd like to propose is that templates get interlanguage links. See, for example, simple:Template:Delete. This would make it much easier for people who edit across languages but don't edit one of those languages enough to know where the templates are. Are there any objections to this?
It works on any page, not just templates. See my sandbox for example.
Angela . 00:32, August 22, 2005 (UTC)
noinclude will be very useful, thanks! (Now, howbout a way to disable category inclusion, so we can get even the Wikipedia:Template messages pages out of all those categories... ;-) JesseW 01:49, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I've created a Template:if template template which can remove all templates from a category. It's based on the genric Template:if. -- josh 01:55, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Why doesn't Wikimedia liscence MediaWiki, the software they use to run Wikipedia, to other organisations for a fee? MediaWiki is the perfect tool for groups of people to pool together large amounts of fragmented knowledge. The most valuable asset of most organisations is their collective knowledge and expertise, and so their ability to manage it is crucial to their success (whatever that may be). If Wikimedia could market it (which should be easy), I think there would be an enormous demand for it. And most importantly Wikimedia could support itself without (I think) violating its ethos.
Rob Watson
15/08/05
P.S. Apologies if this has come up a lot already, but I'm new to this, and I think it's too good an idea not to share :-)
Says who? (in a friendly, rhetorical way). Besides, my main point is that Wikimedia should do more to sell (not necessarily for money) the MediaWiki software. I think many organisations would find it, or something like it (do alternatives exist?), extremely valuable, but they probably just haven't considered it. Personally I think they should capitilise on it, so that they no longer have to rely on donations. Still keep it free for individual and personal use, but at least charge cooperations for it. As the article you linked to points out, free software is open, but not always free - "free as in speech, not beer". -- RW 20:29, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your responses. I accept the legal arguments for why they couldn't sell it, though not the philosophical ones. The links you put in, Gkhan, refer to the content of wikipedia, not the software. As you said, Meelar, probably the best way for them to generate some revenue is through tech support/consultancy. Anyway, here's hoping that Wikipedia becomes more than a means to unlock copyright. Rather it becomes synonymous with managing knowledge more effectively. -- RW 23:28, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
I think the idea is a fine one, and the free software claims people have been saying don't apply, unless you want to restrict the access of people to the software - if you just want to charge people for the software, you can do that fine with free software, they just don't have to get it from you. The way I think this would work is for someone who was interested in doing this would set up a seperate company, start selling Mediawiki, and, assuming they made money, donate some of it back to the Wikimedia Foundation. That way, if it fails, the Foundation isn't in debt for it. JesseW 01:26, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I would like to propose splitting Cram Schools from hagwons in terms of definition. The term hagwon is used quite frequently in terms of teaching in Asia, however very little is mentioned on Wikipedia about hagwons. Davidpdx
I know there is no real 'standard', but i would like to see a 'rough notes' section added to articles. This would be at the end, hand contain a brief over view in bullet points about the article, ie, for 'Digital Cameras': - Digital Cameras are Camaeras in wich the photogrphic image is stored in digital format rather than on film. -etc.
Just a suggestion, - David
Given that the term "wifebeater" in reference to a tank top is considered by some to be offensive, perhaps that word in the article on Cletus Spuckler should be changed to "tank top."
There's a feature in Mediawiki were you could link to subpages by typing [[/SUBPAGE]] instead of [[PAGE/SUBPAGE]], but the display of the link is [[/SUBPAGE]] (with a slash mark) and not [[SUBPAGE]]. That's why I'm suggesting that whenever this feature is used, the link displays as [[SUBPAGE]] (the slash mark is removed). I suggest also to use [[//SUBPAGE]] to keep the slash mark as it displays [[/SUBPAGE]]. CG 12:19, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
Please discuss the disposition of these articles, whether it is better to have them in the project namespace at Wikipedia or in the main namespace at Wikibooks (some possibly merged in with the existing wikibooks Using The GIMP, Using OpenOffice.org, and Microsoft Word User's Manual), at Wikipedia talk:Graphics in two modes/move. Uncle G 14:13:53, 2005-09-05 (UTC)
Please visit Wikipedia:Gallery namespace for the proposal of a new namespace for the categorization of images. CG 08:42, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
The article Able Danger is demonstrating one of the problems with Wikipedia. If you have a faction that is intent on peddling a conspiracy story driven by partisan blogs it is very difficult to get balance.
The article is currently locked (not by me). I am not sure that many people who are interested in acheiving an NPOV are going to want to work on it as anyone who objects to the world according to Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is going to be attacked as a "liar" and a "national socialist" (i.e. NAZI). Time Magazine is also accused of 'lying'.
If the Able Danger conspiracy story is true then the Bush Administration is currently engaged in the biggest coverup since Watergate - to protect the reputation of Bill Clinton. Am I the only person who finds such a claim to be somewhat unlikely?
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (proposals). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212
A discussion started about automating date preferences. I think it is worthy of further discussion.
Here is the original text:
Does anybody know how to implement this? Bobblewik 13:38, 6 August 2005 (UTC)
I wonder why a new element type is introduced here. Why can we not use a template for this (vaguely similar to the style already in use for geographic coordinates):
{{date |any date having month in text or following ISO}}
{{date dmy|numeric date with day first}}
{{date mdy|numeric date with month first}}
The first form like {{date | 30 May, 2005}} would accept any of "30 May 2005", "30 May, 2005", "May 30 2005", "May 30, 2005", "2005-05-30", "30 May", "May 30", "2005"
The second and third would accept "30-05-2005" and "05-30-2005" respectively.
−
Woodstone 10:50, August 7, 2005 (UTC)
I've observed several situations in which access to pieces of information would be helpful. A shared database could be accessed through a modification to Template behavior which would allow manipulation of retrieved data.
Using {{Data:Country/USA}} within a template may convert to Article=United States|President=George W. Bush|Continent=North America
Several possible uses are suggested:
Perhaps this can be provided primarily through the existing Template code.
( SEWilco 13:50, 6 August 2005 (UTC))
Reuters, as quoted by Yahoo!, reports Wikipedia will impose stricter editorial rules to prevent vandalism of its content, quoting Jimmy Wales. Slashdot picked this story up. Later text seems to suggest this is really a separation of "stable" and "draft" versions. Does this mean there's a plan to implement an article validation proposal, and if so, what's been decided? If it's just continuing to be discussed, could someone say so? If not, could someone say that too? The article makes it sound like there's new news, but that doesn't make it so...! Sorry for asking a "question" in Village pump, but it seemed like a major proposal issue if there IS such a change and worth discussing. Dwheeler 01:21, August 6, 2005 (UTC)
Is there any way to get an RSS feed set up for Wikipedia featured articles? Or articles as they're featured on the main page? (Cross-posted at "technical".) – Quadell ( talk) ( sleuth) 19:42, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
... podcast! Wouldn't it be great with a weekly show that discussed what has been going on in wikipedia for the last week? "Well, the arbcom is up for relection, any surprises this year Willmcv?" "Yes, it turns out that recently admined and bureocrated gkhan is running. And he is looking good! Also in the race, DrZoidberg!"
All jokes aside, wouldn't it be a nice wikiproject? We certainly have people able to do it (see WP:SPOKEN). Sortof like the Signpost but spoken! A good way to keep up with all the things going on. And with the wonder of Skype there could be interviews with a number of interesting wikipedians. (ohh, and by the way, I picked Willmcw because he is active in WP:SPOKEN, no other reason :P) gkhan 08:19, August 5, 2005 (UTC)
Not certain if this has been proposed. I did a lite search and didn't find anything. But I was thinking of a 'phone book' of the world - for us common folk. There could be a common template to ad photos. Perhaps 3 image slots for different ages like 'baby', 'young adult', and 'mature adult', or something along those lines. There could be fields to supply as much or as little information as possible. Nothing personal such as SSN and street address or any of that nature. Since the whole world would be participating information gathered would have to be linear, in that it's applicable to everyone and each could relate to. Such as
Where born: Year born: Maiden name: Sir name: Syblings
It could turn out to be a short bio that is updated or deleted at will. How to prevent same name entries and the like, I haven't really thought of yet. Just thinking out loud right now.
Just thinking out loud. If anyone from Wikipedia would like to pick this thought up, I would be happy to help in any way.
info at jamescalvin dot com
I created Template:talkheader as something that could go on the top of every Talk page (a) to welcome newbies on any page they land on and (b) to remind regulars of key points whenever they visit a talk page. It'll only really work with a software change to make it automatically appear on every talk page, but for now it can be tested and developed, and we can see what people think. Rd232 19:57, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
If this Wikipedia wants to remain a living, growing, and ever improving project.... I suspect it will have no choice but to admit its POV, and to place a very clear disclaimer as to the difficulty it has with maintaining accurate information. For whatever reason, this wiki is having some troubles, maybe for its extraordinary growth rate, thus a bit like a clumsy and oafish teenager... or maybe because it has attracted so many people from Public Relations, Media, and even the intelligence community, NOT because it is such a reliable source for information, but rather unfortunately, because of its powerful dynamic to mold Knowledge, Opinion, and for what people falsely carry away as "Fact".
Place a disclaimer Mr Wales, front page and center. Tell people what exactly an open-source wiki is, and remind them in much stronger words that anyone, ANYONE can come here to add knowledge, just as easily as they can bend it.... the honorable future of Wikpedia may depend on this. 3chester4 14:26, 3 August 2005 (UTC)
I am the creator of You Can with Beakman & Jax, an educational comic strip that's in about 250 newspapers. The CBS TV show Beakman's World was created from the comic in the early 90s. A company called bonus.com has offered file serving (and a salary) to me for the comic's archives. They are no longer able to do this and I lose file serving on August 31, 2005.
I'm looking to get the files served elsewhere, like here maybe. I know there is no salary here, but I'd still like the files offered to teachers and students without me needing to pay for file serving. Or, if you have other thoughts, please be in touch.
If anyone want to discuss this with me the best thing is to contact e by eMail at myQuestion@beakman.com. You can look through the files at http://bonus.com. Then click the Strategy button.
best,
Jok Church
I used to read those too! lots of issues | leave me a message 22:43, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
Screenshot of Encarta Dynamic Timeline
I hope this has not been suggested already and if it has, I apologize in advance. Could not find it with a search through the village pump.
I've been using WikiPedia for quite a while now and I have to say that my MSN Encarta installation has been fairly dormant since I found WikiPedia. There is however a couple of things I find really fun and useful with the Encarta implementation. One of these is the Dynamic Timeline feature in Encarta. Take a look at the screenshot above and note the back and forward arrows and the zoom capability in the bottom right hand corner.
I know that implementing something like this would break the html-only / no dynamic content pattern that most of wikipedia seems to adhere to, but I think this would be a high-value-add add-on to wikipedia and people who would like to use it could install a java applet that would display the time line, people who do not want java applets on their machine could just skip using the feature.
I am a java developer with a fair amount of Swing experience and would be interested in contributing to a project like this.
-- Mbjarland 11:38, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
Very interesting. I've been wanting to start a similar kind of project, a branching geneology of influences, laid out chronologically, so you could connect wikipedia articles about artists, authors, or thinkers to their influences and followers. Whether or not it has a connecting feature, a dynamic timeline with zoom features would really facilitate browsing specific areas of the Wikipedia. Adding organization like this would improve the value of the content. Is there a simple way to have a visual space with text be open to edits in wiki style?
--mlove 8 August 2005
Please take a look at Wikipedia:Featured topics for a proposal regarding featured collections of articles. violet/riga (t) 14:50, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
(Proof of concept included, please see below)
This is a proposal for a tool which could potentially speed up pathfinding within the "auxiliary" pages of Wikipedia. This proposal doesn't intend to improve the content, or anything related to the content within the articles -- it's only meant to help with pathfinding for users, both old and new, among the increasing number of help pages, policies, sub-projects, formats, and so on (most of you probably know what I mean -- remember the last time you searched for "that" format, or "that" policy, or "that" project" you knew about, but didn't know where to look for?).
The two issues this proposal wishes to address are response speed and structure within the "auxiliary" pages structure, many of us have a relatively hard time browsing. The response speed is an issue because the servers need to (a) format all pages from Wiki sources to HTML, which involves high CPU loads (the data is cached, but it still involves a caching layer to check on), and (b) include all bells and whistles, such as the navigation box, CSS, headers and footers, which involves a bandwidth load.
My proposal is to create a relatively simple tool in Macromedia Flash for browsing the Wikipedia structure -- a Wikipedia Map tool. This tool would read XML files stored within Wikipedia (and thus subject to the same Wiki concept as the rest of the site), and render the structure in an easy-to-understand fashion. The XML files don't need to be pre-parsed by the Wikimedia servers, and they are quite small files. The XML files are retrieved on-demand, depending on what the user is interested in -- I expect the average XML file (which makes up a tree level) would be around 4-5 KB long, as opposed to the typical Wikipedia page, which includes an overhead of around 20 KB (the overhead of the HTML alone is around 20 KB, I'm not talking about actual content, or CSS, or images, or JavaScript).
I have created a proof of concept (i.e. ugly and with very little content) Flash file for this proposal -- unfortunately Wikipedia doesn't currently support this type of media, so I had to place it off-site, at this location. The left side shows the map sections, and the right side shows the links within the sections. Only the first sub-sections are working at this time (i.e. "For New Users" and "About the Project"), but the links should all be working.
You will notice that the tool isn't lightning-fast -- that's because, due to the Flash security limitations, it can't load XML files from other sites than the one which hosts the Flash files. Therefore I had to make the Flash connect to my local server, which connects to Wikipedia -- so instead of your browser retrieving the data directly from Wikipedia, you go through my server, which is located in Romania (pretty far from most of you).
If you want to experiment with tweaking the links and structure, the XML files it uses are the following: first page, for new users, and about the project (the files are on the Romanian Wikipedia because I'm an admin there and I can delete them -- didn't want to spam the English project with useless files). If you want to edit those XML files, you need to right-click on the blank image presented in the links in this paragraph, save the file locally, edit it without changing its name, click on "Încarcă o nouă versiune a acestui fişier" back on the page linked here, pick the edited file, edit "Nume fişier destinaţie" to have the "png" extension (instead of "xml" as default), click on "Trimite fişier" and then click on "Salvează fişierul" in the resulting page.
The procedure for editing the XML files is that complicated because Wikipedia doesn't currently support XML files natively either, so you can't edit the file inline -- they have to be stored as PNG files, as far as the Wikipedia server understands.
As I said, this is only a proof of concept, so please don't judge its merits by its current looks, speed or ease of editing alone -- it currently can't excel in any of those areas because objective reasons related to the current implementation of the Wikipedia software on one hand, and its looks aren't exceptional because it would be stupid to invest a lot of time in a proof of concept before I get at least some feedback on. However, if I get enough positive feedback, I can push for this tool, and for making XML files native to Wikipedia (which wouldn't be a bad thing anyway) -- and I would work on it a lot more. So, please do let me know what you think by adding comments in this section!
Thank you for at least reading this!
-- Gutza 00:16, 12 August 2005 (UTC)
We always face a problem of wrong titles when dealing with articles whose titles begin with a lower case letter, e.g pH. The best solution is yet to add a template as follows:
It's just the same blunder when I was editing the article am730. But recently I've discovered a very interesting template in the Chinese wikipedia to change the title of the article, see the Chinese version of pH. Then I contacted User:Zhengzhu, one of the system administrator of the Chinese wikipedia, and this's his reply:
I think this "template" would be of much avail to our current system. :-D -- Jerry Crimson Mann 14:23, 10 August 2005 (UTC)
Is there a way to lock a picture to one article to prevent a valid image in one context being used to vandalise other articles? Two examples: One anonymous user keeps using the valid image of a penis, which is on the Penis page, to vandalise scores of user pages. Another keeps using images of Darth Vader and other Star Wars images to vandalise the page on Pope Benedict XVI. Locking the pages isn't an option. The vandal may disappear for two weeks, then suddenly reappear and begin inserting the images over and over again until they are blocked, at which time they reappear using another IP, then another to keep doing it.
Some of the images that they were using but which weren't in any real article were deleted immediately but users don't want to have to propose the deletion of valid pictures. But it is gone beyond a joke at this stage; I once had to delete the penis picture of 20 user pages in 10 minutes once, then delete Darth Vader three times off the pope's page. I blocked the vandal only to find that he had come back and put the penis picture on another batch of user pages again. Locking a picture into one page with a valid article so that it could not be used elsewhere (and there is not likely to be much need throughout Wikipedia for a picture of a penis or a picture of a minor Star Wars character off their own article) would solve the problem.
FearÉIREANN\ (caint) 19:31, 7 August 2005 (UTC)
The feature to prevent an image from appearing inline is mentioned in this post. I realise that isn't quite what you wanted, but it should be possible to program a similar feature which blocks a named image from appearing other than on one or more named pages.- gadfium 01:47, 8 August 2005 (UTC)
every president meets with other leaders. state leaders like to meet with other state leaders. Adding a picture of George W. Bush and the said state leader in any of these articles is unnecessary and excessive and it adds NOTHING to the article.
just test it. go to an article on a president of another country, and most of the times, there will be some photo of George W. Bush that shouldn't be there. Unless George W. Bush has some personal or political connections to this person, like Tony Blair, adding a photo of him is just stupid.
I believe that there should be a kind of page protection on Wikipedia, which, instead of blocking all non-admins, only blocks anonymous users, or anonymous users and accounts that are (say) less than a week old. The vast, vast majority of the on vandalism persistent wikipedia comes from anonymous and brand new users, and is usually dealt with by protecting the page. I think that introducing a semiprotected status for pages would help deal with vandalism and spamming without preventing normal editing of the page.
I believe this would require a change to the software (could be wrong) and so I'm testing the waters here before proposing it on bugzilla. Any thoughts? Yelyos July 3, 2005 23:10 (UTC)
I presented something like this earlier on. It has vanised for some odd reason. Atricles such as george W bush and many others need a semi protected status. We could put edit quotas to some articles such as george w bush, bill clinton etc. The quota could be for example 100 edits, Would at least slow down vandalism if not halt it. I am not sure if blocking annon users completely off of such articles is good. Some annons contribute a lot. -- Cool Cat My Talk 7 July 2005 13:53 (UTC)
I'm somewhat conflicted on the issue. While it's immediately obvious how useful it would be, what worries me is its affect on Wikipedia's social structure. At the moment, there seems to be a de-facto standard that, while you may have to register to participate in policymaking and other meta-stuff, editing can generally be done as easily by anons as by logged in users. Also, currently the only restrictions that have been placed on registered accounts have been for Arbcom/Foundation voting. Would it be wise to implement something that might change this? CXI 03:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)
I, too, think the "semi-protect" status is a good idea. An anonymous vandal with a dynamic IP can easily dodge bans, whereas one who must create an account has at least that small piece of tediousness to take up his time. A semi-protect status would give Wikipedia admins another, more fine-tuned tool between full open-editing and full non-admin lock. I don't think even semi-protection should be an article's usual state, of course.
Also consider that if a repeat vandal with an IP shared by other people has his IP banned, the ban will also hurt others who use that IP. If he has to create his own account (or accounts) to do his damage, then banning that account will only hurt that user. --
Mr. Billion 05:07, 11 July 2005 (UTC)
Monitoring entier wiki data flow for several weeks I noticed several articles such as George W. Bush end up vandalised too frequently. While {Protecting} the article is a very bad idea as we want users to edit articles, putting edit caps on certain frequently vandalised articles maybe usefull. Granted its not absolute protection but it would make first edit vandalisms imposible for such articlers. Dynamic IP's such as various AOL vandals abused (as well as many others) use their IP to vandalise on first edit. -- Cool Cat My Talk 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)
What I propose is some sort of an edit cap, number not being outragous, but also being time consuming to achive. Since wikipedia has over 600,000 articles I do not believe people will have difficulty reaching cap. This prevents vandalism by inconviniancing vandals. -- Cool Cat My Talk 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)
Users like Evilmonkey, myself and other RC patrolers will revert pages but because of articles like George W. Bush which get vandalisedmultiple times in an hour by a number of IP's at times make RC patrolers job harder each day as more such articles appear. -- Cool Cat My Talk 4 July 2005 07:14 (UTC)
Well, it appears that that vandal has resurfaced. He's been over on the Dick Cheney page posting the same pictures. Huh. Well, guys, it looks like my little plan has caused you to think twice about who can edit the Bush page. By doing my vandal streak this morning, I have succeeded in causing this cebate on whether to limit who can submit contributions to this article. Looks like you just can't keep an old Bush vandal down. Like I said, if you take the other choice, and decide not to allow only registered sers to contribute, then Ill satrt anoter one of the vandal streaks. Even if you do allow only registered members to contribute, I have a couple of registered names, that have existed for quite a while. Let the debates begin! Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:George_W._Bush"
I think this has enough support to start a wiki project. -- Cool Cat My Talk 03:04, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I tentatively suggest the following for discussion:
- the public face of the wikipedia be placed on a time delay- only versions of articles stable for more than a certain amount (1 day?) will be served to the normal public.
- meanwhile watchlists and edits and logged in editors views will update in realtime.
The idea is that this is an encyclopedia, and hence nothing is supposed to change that quickly, meanwhile the delay gives editors a chance to remove vandalism. Doing this would also discourage vandalism since the vandals wouldn't even see their own edits, and the vandalism gets fixed before any harm was done. Meanwhile, well intentioned edits would go through. WolfKeeper
We the editors of the George W. Bush page request that some sort of option (only available to admins) can be set on certain pages that are frequent targets of vandalism. I know a widespread policy of such a nature is not a good idea, but on certain pages, it would cut the amount of work down a tremendous amount, and since it would only be enabled/disabled by admins, its usage would be highly discretionary. -- kizzle July 9, 2005 15:57 (UTC)
Are you proposing a semi-protection? There's a failing proposal about just that above. Howabout1 Talk to me! July 9, 2005 16:12 (UTC)
I personally take offense to the statement "we the editors of George W. Bush", I edit the article at times and have not made up my mind on the issue of semiprotection and I think that Kizzle should only speak for himself and not for the thousands of other users who edit that article. Jtkiefer
I suggest that you split the article into various sections. First of all, the article is too long. Look at the stats:
You could make a separate article for every section. That way you would diversify the location of the content, and "vandals" would be less encouraged to make any changes to so many articles. When you have all the content about George W. Bush in one page, "vandals" know that it's easy to disorganize the article. If you had various articles, each for every stage of Bush's life, then the "vandals" would get too lazy to change anything.
To put it differently, if "vandals" know they can disrupt everything by editing one single article, they are gonna do it. Just split the article. On the main article you keep the summary about Bush, and then you make hyperlinks to every section about his life. That way it would also be easier to expand every section. When you have all the thing in one article, it's just more error-prone and vulnerable to "vandals". 2004-12-29T22:45Z July 9, 2005 17:44 (UTC)
To respond to both of you, quite honestly I don't find any convincing arguments against the proposal mentioned before mine to "semi-protect" a frequently vandalized page from anon-ips. In addition, with all due respect, my characterization of the discussion is that the proponents of this concept are bringing forth convincing arguments whereas opposition is mostly absent from the entry. If the only setback to such an action is that it would create more vandals, the type of people who would register an account simply to vandalize already have accounts. In addition, the ability on such a semi-protected page to effectively combat roving IP vandalism seems to greatly out-weigh any minor inconveniences such a proposal would create. By only allowing logged-in users to edit highly vandalized pages, we increase our ability to effectively monitor and control vandalism with little repercussion to the good-intentioned editor. I don't think its fair to simply rely on editors to combat vandalism when the page reaches 30+ vandalisms a day. --
kizzle July 9, 2005 18:48 (UTC)
Then say that in that proposal, not here. Howabout1 Talk to me! July 9, 2005 18:59 (UTC)
You know, then I think you should use both strategies, first of all, forcing users to register, and, secondly, spread the content accross different articles, so it gets more difficult to "vandalize". To those people who say it's not worth the effort to force users to log in, I say that Wikipedia should experiment first, and then we see if it works or not. If it doesn't work, then you reenable users to edit without logging in. Take also a look at #Breakup controversial articles. A user proposed the same thing. To me it makes sense. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 20:23, July 9, 2005 (UTC)
In addition to this, I'd like to see a one-click option that automatically reports the user and supplies the questionable modification directly to the Admins. I think this would be much more efficient than doing it manually. Ereinion File:RAHSymbol.JPG 05:14, July 11, 2005 (UTC)
So Admins, what happens now considering overwhelming support? -- kizzle 00:07, July 13, 2005 (UTC)
I don't understand. No offense, but what good is a proposals section if an option with overwhelming support simply gets archived with no action on it? -- kizzle 16:39, July 19, 2005 (UTC)
Of course not :). Just didn't understand hierarchy of where i needed to direct such a proposal. By the way, there is a current bug now. I would highly suggest people interested in this idea to login to bugzilla and voice your opinion, as we have one person who wants to close it simply due to an across-the-board belief of letting anons edit, and another who does not feel there is concensus, despite a great deal of support above, which is enough at this stage to keep it in limbo. -- kizzle 22:43, July 20, 2005 (UTC)
A new proposal has been written to allow admins to block people that make frequent personal attacks (but only if the admin is an uninvolved party). Please visit and give your comments. It is still in the discussion stage, so no voting please. R adiant _>|< 09:39, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
I want to start a new project called "Psychotherapy and counseling". I have a list of articles that would fall under here, and more could be added. I don't know what to do or how to begin. The wikipedia:project page was not much help. whicky1978 18:15, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
I'm suggesing a change in the software that allows users to watch only talk pages, not articles themselves. It's useful if a user posts a comment or a question on a talk page and is watching it waiting for a reply, but is not interested in the article itself. CG 17:35, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
It doesn't seem worth the developers' while. It may be usefull, but not usefull enough to do. Father Howabout1 Talk to me! 17:38, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
I'm about to create a collaboration project (like the Wikipedia:Collaborations of the week) for Unusual articles, and I'm asking for your opinion: should I make it a weekly collaboration (I'm not a fan of this), monthly, or more originaly every April Fool's day? CG 15:11, August 13, 2005 (UTC)
There is a proposal to add a Portal: namespace at Wikipedia:Portal namespace. Please vote there - even if you think there are already enough votes! – AB C D ✉ 00:30, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Now, I realize I'm going to sound a little bit unfair, knowing that Wikipedia's supposed to be all about "everyone can contribute at any time whether they've registered or not," but here's the deal: my proposal is that we not allow anyone from an AOL IP to make edits unless they are registered and logged in. The reason for this is that basically, the "rotating IP" nature of AOL makes it literally impossible to put a halt to vandalism from an AOL user.
Case in point -- every few days, a vandal comes along, goes through every single Street Fighter character, and removes the formatting which organizes the " Street Fighter characters" category by last name (as you can see from the history of just about every single character with a last name). I then spend about ten minutes reverting this vandalism. This person is on an AOL IP, has not registered (or at least not logged in), and thus there is no way to stop them due to the rotating IP. They even went onto my user page and removed a conversation I had with someone else about the revert war. Anyone have any other ideas about how this might be dealt with? -- Yar Kramer 20:43, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
I fully support the idea. At least it would allow us to block an individual and so target the block, even if it has to be done repeatedly. The situation with randon AOL IPs has become impossible and is causing widespread problems. FearÉIREANN\ (caint) 21:53, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
The best solution would be better identifying tools. There are obvious traits to vandal editing (a short list of words, blanking, repeat exclamation marks, etc.). If vandal likely edits could be highlighted in yellow in RC, the nuisance would wreck less havoc and we wouldn't have to resort to blocking. lots of issues | leave me a message 00:53, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
It's a proposal: how about a "Who's watching" link along with "What links here" and "Related changes" that lists all the user who are watching this particular page. I think it would be useful to estimate the popularity of the page. We could also make a [[Special:Most watched]] that list articles that have the biggest number of people watching it. CG 14:17, August 11, 2005 (UTC)
This is more of a heads up and an attempt to "advertise" this project to more people that may be interested. Wikiversity has been a project that has languished on Wikibooks for some time, and there is a discussion about where it needs to go from here. If you want to get involved with deciding its fate and where it belongs, you are encouraged to join in on the discussions on Meta. -- Robert Horning 17:24, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
A second Wikipedia tagline at the top right of every page has been proposed at Wikipedia:Proposed update of MediaWiki:Tagline. Consensus is building to add "All articles are user-contributed." at top right of pages. Interested contributers please visit this page and comment. -- Sitearm | Talk 04:11, 2005 August 16 (UTC)
Flickr has this cool function where you can just click 'blog this' from any picture and it lets you add text and then goes straight to your blog and adds an posting.
Wikipedia could do this too. I'm always finding interesting stuff that I'd like to blog.
You need me to be a member and enter my blog login details.
And you need to set it up so that the entry is well presented in blogs, including images, or links back to the page. You're not a picture though, so I guess it should be the page title and an abstract or the first 100 characters?
Or you can blog a pic you find on Wikipedia?
The other option is just to spit out some html and people can cut and paste it as they please?
We surely have (too) many lists already but I think that this one would be useful:
Lacking a list (scratch #1) could we at least provide within the featured template the date of featured publication. Thanks for your consideration and I look forward to you comments.
hydnjo
talk 23:07, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
I propose that Wikipedia purchase site licenses for services like ProQuest Historical Newspapers and LexisNexis. These are just select examples of research services that could be helpful to Wikipedia editors. If the site licenses were purchased, Wikipedia editors would be able to get interesting new forms of information, such as case law and back newspapers. I already see editors asking each other to use university and work accounts for these services. It would be better, however, if Wikipedia had its own license. This would be invaluable in our constant effort to cite our sources as well as in doing more deep research. Superm401 | Talk 04:45, August 4, 2005 (UTC)
For a little while now there have been aditional template message tags added to Redirect pages in the form of:
Which clarifies the reason for the redirect. (e.g Ayer's Rock is an alternate name for Uluru).
One such popular tag is {{R with possibilities}} which makes explicit that the redirect goes to a subtopic of the article, and perhaps a whole article with this name could or should be created future.
My proposal is to change the names of these special tags to make them more memorable, better clarified, and more useful. And to do it now, while these templates are relatively new and unknown.
Existing | Proposed |
{{R from abbreviation}} | {{R abbreviation}} |
{{R from misspelling}} | {{misspelling}} * (see 4th point below) |
{{R from alternate spelling}} | {{R alternate}} |
{{R for alternate capitalisation}} | |
{{R from alternate name}} | |
{{R from alternate language}} | |
{{R from ASCII}} | |
{{R from plural}} | {{R plural}} |
{{R from related word}} | {{R related term}} |
{{R with possibilities}} | {{R subtopic}} |
{{R to disambiguation page}} | {{R disambiguate}} |
{{R for as of}} | {{R as of}} |
{{R from shortcut}} | {{R shortcut}} |
{{R to sort name}} | {{R sort}} |
{{R from scientific name}} | {{R scientific name}} |
Firstly, I'd like to remove the word "from". so instead of {{R from related word}} we'd just have {{R related word}}. This would make it easier to remember the tag, as some use "from", some "for", and others "to". I don't think there is any ambiguity, and the full meaning can be understood from the category page.
Secondly, {{R subtopic}} is much more clear than {{R with possibilities}}
Thirdly, instead of categories based on the original list of what redirects are used for, I'd like to make it categories based on what the special tags can be used for. Misspelling, for instannce, is useful in that it lets the reader know that it's not just an alternative name but a misspelling. (unfortunately that information is hidden at present, but I imagine in future the reader will be told they were redirected from a misspelling.) Also in future, perhaps the "what links here" will tell you which redirect pages are misspellings. That's useful documentation. It means links to misspellings cna be found easily, etc.
On the other hand, whether a redirect is counted as an alternate name or alternate language, I think is less generally useful, and only makes it more difficult to categorise redirects. Likewise for whether something is a different spelling, or just using ASCII. So I propose to lump all the "alternates" together, so long as they are all correct alternatives. This would bring the number of tags down from 13 to nine.
Fourthly, make "misspelling" its own tag, which can be combined with others.
E.g. Air's Rock would become:
as it is a misspelling of an alternate name.
Fifthly (ok these ordinal numbers are getting silly), {{R to disambiguation page}} to {{R disambiguate}}. "to disambiguation page" is not really clear, it really means someone should disambiguate the link that lead them there, not only that it redirects to a disambiguation page. And some other minor changes. See list below.
Finally, Any more suggestions? What about redirects from a misspelling of an alternate name? Is there a way to do a heirarchy of these things, like categories?
I don't know how these changes would be implemented. I assume someone would have to write a script, unless there are ways of migrating more elegantly. I also don't know what the appropriate Wikibureaucracy process is to get these changes implemented. I figure someone just has to do it. Comments welcome.
This proposal also been posted to Wikipedia_talk:Template_messages/Redirect_pages
— Pengo 02:36, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Would the developers be willing to put in a #top link next to the button at the top of each ==Section== or ===Subsection===? I think most browsers now automatically predefine the top line of an HTML page as <a name=#top></a>. Alternatively, it shouldn't be so difficult (I say, as I sit here coaching from my easy chair) to predefine all the article pages as a hidden #top. Thoughts? Comments? Popcorn? Tomer TALK 23:14, August 18, 2005 (UTC)
What do people think about creating a third desk called "Wikipedia:Grammar desk". I think that there are enough grammar queens on Wikipedia to monitor and answer questions. I think that such a desk would be useful, and would help improve the quality of writing here. I propose that a FAQ page be attached. Any comments? Ground Zero 19:04, 16 August 2005 (UTC)
(copied from User talk:Ground Zero) wikipedia:WikiProject Grammar was designed for that purpose, but appears to have sadly gone unused. (That brings up another question: where should the adjective have gone in the previous sentence?) Anyway, I think it would be good to revive that project, and maybe set up a wikipedia:English style FAQ, where we highlight the most frequent spelling and grammar problems on wikipedia pages, and talk about why they are incorrect. For example, the commas, its/it's and which/that, and common spelling mistakes like noticable/noticeable and inital/initial (I've spent the last few days fixing those!) Graham 01:59, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
Ground Zero and Graham: firstly, excuse me if this makes little sense: I have just arisen. Secondly, I agree totally with what you both propose. I think that it is rather detrimental to Wikipedia that there is not much in the way of grammar discussion. As you both know, fixing spelling and grammar is a very silent job; we often just find mistakes and fix them, but this does not stop the same mistakes from being made repeatedly. It would be far more productive to discuss failings of grammar, spelling, punctuation and general style on one easily accessible page. It would be great to have our deliberations on one page, rather than on thousands of unique pages. Furthermore, I find that nearly all the errors that I correct are on pages that no one has ever tagged for copyediting. I should bet that many Wikipedians have qualms over style when they read articles, but do not wish to engage in a wasteful fight with the original article writer. I think that people would be more enthusiastic if they could refer their opinion for general debate. Templates could be added onto pages with a message like ‘some of this article’s grammatical accuracy is disputed’, with a link to the discussion on the grammar desk. The petitioner could explain why they find something wrong, and we could all give our opinions. This zone would not be solely reserved for debates about particular pages, but about grammar questions in general. (I can think of many, such as: why should there be an apostrophe s after numbers?) The discussions could help to formulate a more comprehensive style and grammar FAQ. I think that any centralised system has to be better than the current adhocracy. Sometimes, we have to be vigilantes, but it is more constructive to have consensus.
(By the way, as for the question about the adjective, I do not particularly see why split infinitives are such a crime. I think that language should be both as clear and as precise as possible; unlike the use of commas, I feel that unnaturally convoluting a sentence to ensure that there is no split infinitive does not enhance a sentence’s clarity. However, that is just my opinion.) IINAG 10:27, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I do a fair bit of copyediting on Canadian politics and history pages, and some elsewhere. I always work to improve the quality of the writing since no-one "owns" the articles. If someone reverts one of my improvements, I don't worry about it unless it is a reversion to something that is unambiguously wrong. I might fix a split infinitive because I think it is poor style, but I'm not going to spend any time arguing with someone who changes it back. There is so much poor writing here that it is beeter to spend time fixing things on which I won't get arguments.
And this is where my proposal comes from. An editor created hundreds of articles about Canadian electoral districts using the phrase "xxxx was a former electoral district". I fixed that mistake (xxxx is still a former district), amongst others, in dozens of articles before the original writer intervene to tell me that there was nothing wrong with the way s/he had written it originally. I ended up at the Wikipedia:Reference desk, for want of anywhere else to go, to get other editors to help resolve the disagreement. That worked, and convinced me that a specialized desk would be a useful tool for resolving grammatical disputes, and would contribute to improving the writing on Wikipedia by giving people an obvious place to go to ask questions.
So I wanted to canvass other views before I go ahead and create this page as a branch from Wikipedia:Ask a question. Ground Zero 15:47, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
Hello, everyone. I am glad to see unanimous support so far for these proposals. As you have pointed out, we would not strive to form a sort of homogenous style, discarding all regional differences; this would be rather counterproductive. I know that it would make me slightly consternated if people should pick on my British spelling, or how I learnt semi-colons, for example. Instead of being autocratic, I could see such a desk as a forum for maintaining a high level of clarity in Wikipedia’s articles; as a way to reduce grammatical confusion. The ‘excellent prose’ to which we aspire has to be prose that transmits information both sparingly and accurately. Many bad pieces of grammar, such as Ground Zero’s example, fly under the radar; at the minute, an error can only be remedied if someone reads the page, and notices the error. A new, consolidated system would establish an accord over what is imprecise and what is just simply doctrinaire. Having had such discussions, we will be able to remedy repeated errors more quickly in the future.
(In my opinion, incidentally, when I read the sentences 'X was a former district,' I think that it X was abolished, or in a state of abeyance, and then someone brought it back. In fact, the preterite and the word 'former' usually suggest to me a thing that was disposed of, until being reinstated. There are some exceptions to this. 'Persona Xsapat was a former pupil at Idiot College, Swindon' is clear, despite being a tad ungrammatical, because not many people on Wikipedia can be said to have attended school and then returned to it. 'Al Gore was a former Vice President' or 'John Major was a former prime minister' seem definite past to me, due to context: I cannot think of many Vice Presidents of America who lost the job and then regained it; I can only think of four Prime Ministers who lost the job and regained it since the days of Gladstone and Disræli. Of course, the sentence 'previously, Al Gore was Vice President', or 'Al Gore is a former Vice President' is far clearer to me than using the word former. This could be one of the many things that we could debate and resolve on the grammar desk. I think that it could be not only a useful tool for disambiguation, but also a rather interesting insight into how contributors see the language. IINAG 20:06, 19 August 2005 (UTC)
Because of the recent heavy discussion about adding a second Wikipedia tagline, additional proposed updates to the main tagline are being documented here. All interested contributers please participate and comment in this important discussion. -- Sitearm | Talk 05:11, 2005 August 18 (UTC)
I have noticed that it can be hard to tell what is happening when looking at maps of battles, generally a number of pictures of the same map with different arrows drawn on it is used.
I think we should design a flash program that allows battles to be 'replayed' in real time.
The map could be of a single battle like Gettysburg or of a campaign like the eastern front of WW2- It could even be used as an 'empire map' showing the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.
Eventually we could chart the whole of humanity on one huge map showing every nations expansion and contraction.
A good example of something similar to this is Iraq Casualties, which is a map of Iraq which shows the location of every casualty over time and location. Imagine if this was a map of the world and showed every battle fought since 0 BC.
A few "fluffy" comments:
— Nowhither 05:56, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
I am proposing having a translation of Wikipedia into Pennsylvania German. I have taught myself the language and would be willing to write some articles, but I'd like to know if anyone else would be interested and be able to collaborate with me on this. For those of you who don't know, Pennsylvania German, or Pennsylvania Dutch, is spoken to some degree by about 100,000 people in the mid-atlantic and midwestern U.S. It is unintelligible to speakers of regular German (Deutsch) but many of the words are similar.
This would be a great way to make a contribution to reviving the language. In southeastern Pennsylvania, the language is dying. Most of those who speak it only speak a little bit, and the ones that are fluent are all over 40-50 years old./
If anyone would be with me on this, please send me an email to joshcampfield@gmail.com or reply to this thread.
Thank you very much!
I noticed a few times there are things that I search for on wikipedia that don't have articles, but do however have wiktionary entries. I suggest that the search page have in addition to the links "create a page" and "request the page" it also have "check the other wikimedia pages" and provide links to that specific search at wiktionary, wikibooks, etc.
I noticed the senator infobox recently and was concerned that it was too-focused on a senator's senate career and neglects previous political offices held (such as being a congressman, or, in rare cases, having held multiple senator positions in different states). Furthermore, the senator infobox puts too much information in that is better left for the succession boxes at the bottom of the articles, namely the successor and predecessor.
Thus, I came up with the general politician infobox (link above; see in action at this example article). It does not have successors and predecessors, and has space for many previous offices held to be displayed. I also added in the term of the offices, but that could be removed as well. In addition, displaying information regarding spouses is made optional, as sometimes finding information regarding spouses can be difficult.
So I bring this here for general comment and community input, just to see if this could potentially replace the senate infobox and others (such as the president infobox; although that position is at such a level that previous offices could be placed aside), and if it is set up well or need some adjustment. Thanks. -- tomf688< TALK> 23:35, August 17, 2005 (UTC)
Following discussion on the Wikipedia mailing list, I have created Wikipedia:Nominations for WikiMedals. The idea is to create a system of positive recognition of Wikipedia contributions. Like it? Think it's a stupid idea? Please vote at that page. - Jakew 12:04, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
After many months of discussion, there is a proposal to allow some duplication of articles in Categories and their child Subcategories in a few specified cases. Basically, duplication would be allowed for three reasons:
For more about this, and to take part in the discussion, please go to: Wikipedia_talk:Categorization#Updating_the_section_on_category_duplications. -- Samuel Wantman 06:00, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
is there any plans in motion to extend the media format choices? i.e. wmv, rm, etc....more choices than ogg?
thank you
I have begun an exclusionist, ethnocentric, anti-German argument on the subject of eszet (ß) in English Wikipedia. You are invited to express your disgust with me on the Manual of Style talk page. :-) -- Tysto 21:54, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
This discussion has been moved to Wikipedia talk:Provenance---- Carl Hewitt 13:19, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Its would enhance the process of creating articles. As it is, one has to chance for different categories, often I'm in the alternative between "Swedish municipalities" or "Municipalities in Sweden", "Municipalities of Sweden", (substitute with rivers, cities, etc). So I'd like to see the categories in preview mode, instead of after saving. -- Fred- Chess 08:11, August 24, 2005 (UTC)
Often when looking through history of an article I wonder why a particular editor has added an item, and ocasionally the urge becomes strong enough to ask the editor. Yet the history links to the editor's user page, rather than the user talk page, making the process just that fraction longer. is there any reason why a link to both user page and talk page couldn't be listed in article histories - much like they are on a personal watchlist? Grutness... wha? 09:32, 27 August 2005 (UTC)
Please could you add the link Allpages to the search box, under the "GO" and "Search" buttons? A lot of users uses this page as a way to find an article, and it would be better if they don't have to access it by the Special:Specialpages. CG 09:24, August 27, 2005 (UTC)
It has been proposed to rename Wikipedia:Votes for deletion to Wikipedia:Pages for deletion, to remove the word "votes" from the title and to be more consistent with our other "X for deletion" areas. It has also been proposed to rename Wikipedia:Votes for undeletion to Wikipedia:Deletion review. This has been announced in several places, but the discussion is in one place: Wikipedia talk:Votes for deletion#Name_change_.28again.29. Uncle G 16:35:52, 2005-08-26 (UTC)
Okay, who wouldn't love a spell checker for new articles on wikipedia? Tell me, who wouldn't? Yeah, spell checkers aren't infailable (sp? see why we need a checker?), but it will be a start. However, I want support before I follow the procedures to 'change the software'. So, who supports?
British or American spelling? There are many different correct spellings of the same word. This has been shot down many, many times. Howabout1 Talk to me! 23:32, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
Give the editor a choice between Brit or American spelling. It would be great for assuring an article was one or the other, which it is supposed to be, especially given that it isn't made clear exactly how one is to write/spell in American as a Brit and vice/versa, let alone use the correct grammar, SqueakBox 23:45, August 19, 2005 (UTC)
okay then..... HereToHelp
But shouldn't we encourge the people who want to contribute but don't want to reasearch their brains out? *cough, me, cough* HereToHelp 02:53, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Go contribute!!!! Yay! You can do it! You can do it! Sorry for the sarcasm, but how would a spell checker encourage people who don't want to reasearch? Howabout1 Talk to me! 02:57, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
The current version of the google bar (it's compatible with firefox) has a good spellchecker built in. This link is Broken 14:45, 20 August 2005 (UTC)
Rather than select either US or British English, I would prefer that the spellchecker always accept either spelling. Many articles, such as the one on tea, have both US and British sections, so would be expected to have both spellings in various places. I currently cut and paste things I write to a spellchecker. Unfortunately, it goes far beyond spellchecking and gives silly advice on grammar and when to spell out numbers, too. It also has trouble with the markup brackets and such. As for the comment that spellcheckers aren't perfect, well of course not. Cars aren't perfect either, but we don't ban them. Both require an intelligent operator paying attention to what they are doing. Also note that a local word list (stored as a cookie ?) to supplement the official list would be useful, so proper names you encounter frequently wouldn't keep flagging errors. StuRat 00:06, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
I have proposed text, at Wikipedia talk:Stub#Proposed "depth of coverage" standard to try to captue in words the notion thaqt what a stub is cannot be solely defined by a mere mechanical counting of words, sentances, or paragraphs. Please visit and comment. DES (talk) 23:18, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I respect Wikipedia's rules, until October 1st that is, and so will not recreate the WikiProject for the letter. However it was irresponsible to Speedy Delete it, that just ensures no one will see our message. I am reproducing the letter here. TheMessenger 18:54, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Addendum: I would like to find a more public place to host this letter and I am therefor soliciting advice on this issue. TheMessenger 18:54, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
In light of the recent Willy attacks, I suggest that developers add an account creation log, or a page showing up to the 500 newest registered users. This could really help in fighting vandal accounts. -- Ixfd64 20:27, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
I believe the current image link logic is to first search the local area, say en.wikipedia, for images under the specified name, then, if not found there, search Wikimedia Commons under the same name. I propose keeping this logic the same, but also allowing "c:" to be specified in front of the name of an image on a link to bypass the search in the local area and only look for the image under Wikimedia Commons. This would solve this current problem:
If the second user does intend to change the illustration in the article, they could always edit the article and remove the new "c:" flag. Note that this logic is similar to the "w:" flag used in WikiNews to point to a Wikipedia article, versus a WikiNews article with the same name. This logic could also apply to other Wikimedia Commons files, or only images, whichever is felt to be the best option by the majority.
StuRat 20:46, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
I tried to submit this to bugzilla, but it didn't let me stay logged in.
I think that now that many people on wikimedia commons are using a template called "Self", where it is inserted "I, the creator of this file release it with this license: [eg gfdl]", the name is often not shown on the image description page. I wonder if not the upload history of the commons image therefore should also be shown on the description page on respective wikipedias?
Fred- Chess 08:22, August 26, 2005 (UTC)
Actually, it would be a simple matter to alter those "Self" templates to say "I, User:X, the creator of..."-- Pharos 08:38, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Perhaps there should be a tag like the above for articles that pass VfD as "no consensus", seeing as how there's probably something wrong with them and articles that pass VfD with something wrong with them are rarely cleaned up. ~~ N ( t/ c) 22:26, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I think that all image uploads (not just uploads of new images) should be shown in user contributions. This could help keep track of vandals who like to replace images. Also, all Wikimedia wikis should have this feature, not just Wikipedia. -- Ixfd64 18:29, 2005 August 25 (UTC)
I have made a preliminary proposal to allow speedy deletion of copyvio material, see Wikipedia_talk:Criteria_for_speedy_deletion#Preliminary_proposal.
It is preliminary because i want to see how it could be improved, please go and say what you think! (even if it is just "Support" or "Oppose") Martin - The non-blue non-moose 09:17, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
This is food for thought and discussion more than a proposal. It could be useful to change the way some processes are centralized.
For example, conceiveably on "Page A" (more less like a project or portal), we could have all RFCs, VFDs, CFDs, etc., related to "A". And a similar page for "B", and so on, as needed.
I don't mean that these would be detailed division, but perhaps along the lines of the eight or so main categories listed on the main page.
Then we could consider doing away with all or most of the now central pages. Thoughts? Maurreen (talk) 08:07, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
My idea is for a variant on the "featured article" concept. It would feature a reasonably well written article on a topic that is not widely known to the general public. The article would not have to meet the same standards as the featured article for quality, but must have enough content and accuracy that people reading the article will have received a quality introduction to the topic. The purpose of this feature would be to give such a topic a bit of exposure that could lead to it becoming more popular. The name "Featured Obscurity" is only a suggestion at this point. Feel free to give your opinions on the name as well as the idea. CanadaGirl 09:30, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
It occured to me that perhaps there should be a status of user between logged-in and administrator. Quite often recently, I've seen situations in which I wanted to say "Regular users shouldn't be able to do that" but I couldn't, because that would mean only admins could, which I didn't want. I'm thinking there should be a "trusted" status that editors can be given upon consensus of five trusted users, or one admin. The status could be used to allow, for example, the below. The specific actions are off the top of my head and not the real proposal. They can change. What would people think about this if it were technically feasible? Superm401 | Talk 04:08, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
1. Move pages. 2. Create templates 3. Do automated reversions.
I like it. Regular users can do 1 and 2 though, and there's a proposal somewhere to give us non-admins rollback. Im don't think this will get too much support, though. Howabout1 Talk to me! 04:13, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
I don't like that idea. There are back logs everywhere because they are admin only. Making basic things admin and trusted only would make it worse. Howabout1 Talk to me! 14:37, August 20, 2005 (UTC)
I like that one. Howabout1 Talk to me! 00:14, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
I like the idea, but think the threshold to become a "trusted editor" should be lower, to avoid creating additional backlogs. In my opinion, if one current trusted editor or admin will vouch for the person, that should be enough. At the start we may need an even lower threshold, since there won't be any trusted editors to approve others. Perhaps anyone who has made more than 100 contributions could be approved ? We could also remove the "trusted editor" status from those who abuse it, perhaps the "5 trusted user" level would be right for that. StuRat 01:07, 21 August 2005 (UTC)
I think it should be a little harder to get it. Maybe 2 admins/trusted's to make it. I don't think moves should be made trusted only, they are a basic function. I think of it as just editing the title. T's should get rollback and maybe editing protected pages. Howabout1 Talk to me! 04:38, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
I'm not really liking this idea now, I'd like them to have rollback, maybe edit protecteds, but limiting ordinary user's powers to give to another class is bad. I've seen cases where people register only to upload. Howabout1 Talk to me! 15:50, August 21, 2005 (UTC)
I don't like discontinuous social controls. It's an analog world.
I don't see any need or value to creating yet another class of editors. We have already far too much trouble with the many classes we have; it took me weeks to figure out the hierarchy as it is.
We do need to control -- in a smooth, continuous, analog fashion -- access to Project and Community features. There are too many of these to list in a short comment. It's not just page moves and rollbacks; all editing, all participation in the Community needs to be subject to some sort of liberal, non-threatening, realistic limits.
At the recent BAR Camp, I spent about an hour discussing my ideas for such controls. The key is that we must balance the needs of the anon and new user against those of long-time editors and against those of our passive readership. Achieving such a balance with distinct classes of user is a crude approach.
I can't do everything at once. When I have time, if I can possibly do so without getting kicked out of my apartment and being thrown starving into the street, I will work on a detailed proposal. — Xiong 熊 talk * 23:58, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
A simple compromise that would reduce substantially some of the concerns raised, though admittedly not stop them, would be to make some privileges available to registered users only, possibly as follows:
Sure, it is simple for people to register, but it is also far easier to keep track of registered users than anons, and there's the psychological factor that - even though we can't tell much about a user from their user name, the registered user will feel more identified than the anonymous user, and will therefore be a little more wary. Grutness... wha? 01:27, 23 August 2005 (UTC)
Isn't all of that already in place? And I don't understand why everyone can't have rollback? Is there any way it can be harmful? Howabout1 Talk to me! 01:57, August 23, 2005 (UTC)
I don't think anons can upload images, and I'd say most of the thme anons vote's aren't counted. I still think rollback should be more freely available, but I also don't like the 3RR. Howabout1 Talk to me! 03:16, August 25, 2005 (UTC)
A number of proposals for further speedy category renaming criteria have been made at the above page. Opinions are sought. Steve block talk 21:07, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
Being French but living in the UK, I am in a position to read and edit articles both in French and English (if pushed hard I could possibly read some Spanish and German artcles too).
I find it a little frustrating that, while Wikipedia has branched to many different languages, it remains so pigeonholed (so to speak) and does not allow searches across the board. While it would not necessarily be true in the English to other language way, I am pretty sure that many people (especially since they are internet users) of none English speaking countries could be interested and able to read articles from the English version. To have results for all languages in one search would be quite helpful, I think.
Also I have had to create accounts both the English and French Wikipedias. Why not allow for "multiwiki" accounts which would allow contributers to navigate from one Wikipedia to another?
Thank you
abc site:wikipedia.org
Whatever my PoV is on the matter, I should refer you to WP:POINT. Physchim62 01:02, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Would it be possible to split the block-list? It's getting very big, and it takes a long time to load. -- Ixfd64 20:28, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
Yay! They did it! Thanks! :) -- Ixfd64 01:36, 2005 August 28 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration is being used as a tribunal to try people accused of misdemeanor (alleged bad behavior). That ain't right. It contaminates the arbitration comittee who should be spending their capital fairly arbitrating CONTENT disputes. There should be some kind of court established to give charges against the accused a fair trial before you cain him. 8^)
This would also take a big case load off the aribitration committee.
Arbitration and tribunal are two entirely different things.
Arbitration is the process by which two parties to an unresolved dispute JOINTLY submit their differences to the judgment of an impartial person. [1]
A tribunal is a court of justice before which an accused is brought for justice after being provided with a summons citing precisely what sections of the code he is charged with violating, and specifically what particular actions of his are alleged to be violations of the code. [2] -- 67.182.157.6 21:23, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
The "Cease trolling" comment is just more of your standard obscurantist sophistry of argument _ad hominem_, because you are trying to "poison the well" concerning the contributor, right? Now, to stick to the issue, if the arbitration committee is not the last recourse on the list (see graphic at right), after failure of attempted negotiation and mediation as means of resolving a CONTENT DISPUTE, then where would I find an accurate list of steps in resolving a CONTENT DISPUTE?-- 172.196.75.230 07:44, 26 August 2005 (UTC)
Wikinfo may not have many friends at Wikipedia but I think they had one good idea: green links. With the incredible growth of Wikipedia and the tendency of overlinking, 'What links here', one of our most useful features in "building the web", has too often become crowded with irrelevancy. We need to split wikilinks into two types: those that register on 'What links here' and those that do not. Green links would generally be the type of thing that it would be appropriate to put in a 'See also', and would highlight the most important relevant info, while blue links would serve more for background information. The rule would be: does this article actually have something to say about the linked topic? I think this might help solve the problem of, say, linking to [[New York City]] (see, I didn't do it here!) in every biographical article about anyone who has ever happened to visit that metropolis.-- Pharos 01:29, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
I solved the problem of contentious, questionable content some time ago. Perhaps now, we're ready to entertain a realistic compromise. Please see Wikipedia:Toby. — Xiong 熊 talk * 22:20, 2005 August 22 (UTC)
We really need some moderate voices in this discussion.
Toby is neutral, and does his very best to serve both sides of this contentious issue fairly. For those who wish to see everything and brook no interference, Toby will neven be in your way. For those who think just about everything (including a fat tenor in a tux) should be heard, but not seen, Toby stands ready to do your bidding.
I find it disheartening to think that this Community is so polarized that it consists only of extremists who find it impossible to tolerate even discussion of a compromise. I'm sure there are many moderates, too -- but sensibly, moderates don't think there's much here to make a fuss about. Your voice needs to be heard in support of moderation. Thank You! — Xiong 熊 talk * 19:27, 2005 August 26 (UTC)
What must I do? Get down on my knees and beg? Offer to wash editors' socks by hand if they get involved? If moderate voices stay out of contentious debates, then these debates will be dominated by extremists! Right now, as I read over Toby's Talk, all I see are remarks that tell me most editors (a) haven't read the proposal, (b) haven't read anybody else's comments, and couldn't care less. They have read exactly enough to see that it's a moderate proposal for potentially questionable content management. Details don't concern them, only their fanatic agendas -- violently opposed.
Toby is not perfect. Toby is not a even a god. Hey, Toby's just a little guy! He can help, but that's about it. No question about it: Toby will make a lot of folks mad. He won't do enough to satisfy some, and he'll do too much for some others to tolerate. That sounds just about right to me. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to keep everybody happy.
Right now, we've got Original Toby and Simple Toby to talk about. Either one is guaranteed to cool off contentious debate over potentially questionable content and its management. I promise! In either flavor, Toby touches nothing -- alters no content -- but allows users to choose how the site is rendered for them. That's all. How can choice be bad?
Fanatics on one side say, essentially, "We don't care if we can't see this. Nobody must be allowed to see it." Fanatics on the other side of the chasm say, "We don't care if they don't want to see it; we insist they do, lest they fail to contribute to it." There is not a thing in the world I can do to reconcile these extremes -- not if I were the god-king Jimbo himself.
But there is a great mass of editors who would just be happy if they could see what they wanted to see, and could choose not to see other stuff. Toby will do this. But of course, your moderate voices are not heard in the debate, since you don't think it is a really big deal.
PLEASE! THINK! READ! COMMENT! Toby is just a little guy. He needs your help -- now! — Xiong 熊 talk * 10:47, 2005 August 29 (UTC)
Until recently, it wasn't possible to put interlanguage links in templates since those links would be included in any page on which the template was used. However, it's now possible to specify that any content inside <noinclude> tags will display only on the original page, and not in any pages where that content is included.
This has various uses, but the first one I'd like to propose is that templates get interlanguage links. See, for example, simple:Template:Delete. This would make it much easier for people who edit across languages but don't edit one of those languages enough to know where the templates are. Are there any objections to this?
It works on any page, not just templates. See my sandbox for example.
Angela . 00:32, August 22, 2005 (UTC)
noinclude will be very useful, thanks! (Now, howbout a way to disable category inclusion, so we can get even the Wikipedia:Template messages pages out of all those categories... ;-) JesseW 01:49, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I've created a Template:if template template which can remove all templates from a category. It's based on the genric Template:if. -- josh 01:55, 28 August 2005 (UTC)
Why doesn't Wikimedia liscence MediaWiki, the software they use to run Wikipedia, to other organisations for a fee? MediaWiki is the perfect tool for groups of people to pool together large amounts of fragmented knowledge. The most valuable asset of most organisations is their collective knowledge and expertise, and so their ability to manage it is crucial to their success (whatever that may be). If Wikimedia could market it (which should be easy), I think there would be an enormous demand for it. And most importantly Wikimedia could support itself without (I think) violating its ethos.
Rob Watson
15/08/05
P.S. Apologies if this has come up a lot already, but I'm new to this, and I think it's too good an idea not to share :-)
Says who? (in a friendly, rhetorical way). Besides, my main point is that Wikimedia should do more to sell (not necessarily for money) the MediaWiki software. I think many organisations would find it, or something like it (do alternatives exist?), extremely valuable, but they probably just haven't considered it. Personally I think they should capitilise on it, so that they no longer have to rely on donations. Still keep it free for individual and personal use, but at least charge cooperations for it. As the article you linked to points out, free software is open, but not always free - "free as in speech, not beer". -- RW 20:29, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
Thanks for your responses. I accept the legal arguments for why they couldn't sell it, though not the philosophical ones. The links you put in, Gkhan, refer to the content of wikipedia, not the software. As you said, Meelar, probably the best way for them to generate some revenue is through tech support/consultancy. Anyway, here's hoping that Wikipedia becomes more than a means to unlock copyright. Rather it becomes synonymous with managing knowledge more effectively. -- RW 23:28, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
I think the idea is a fine one, and the free software claims people have been saying don't apply, unless you want to restrict the access of people to the software - if you just want to charge people for the software, you can do that fine with free software, they just don't have to get it from you. The way I think this would work is for someone who was interested in doing this would set up a seperate company, start selling Mediawiki, and, assuming they made money, donate some of it back to the Wikimedia Foundation. That way, if it fails, the Foundation isn't in debt for it. JesseW 01:26, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
I would like to propose splitting Cram Schools from hagwons in terms of definition. The term hagwon is used quite frequently in terms of teaching in Asia, however very little is mentioned on Wikipedia about hagwons. Davidpdx
I know there is no real 'standard', but i would like to see a 'rough notes' section added to articles. This would be at the end, hand contain a brief over view in bullet points about the article, ie, for 'Digital Cameras': - Digital Cameras are Camaeras in wich the photogrphic image is stored in digital format rather than on film. -etc.
Just a suggestion, - David
Given that the term "wifebeater" in reference to a tank top is considered by some to be offensive, perhaps that word in the article on Cletus Spuckler should be changed to "tank top."
There's a feature in Mediawiki were you could link to subpages by typing [[/SUBPAGE]] instead of [[PAGE/SUBPAGE]], but the display of the link is [[/SUBPAGE]] (with a slash mark) and not [[SUBPAGE]]. That's why I'm suggesting that whenever this feature is used, the link displays as [[SUBPAGE]] (the slash mark is removed). I suggest also to use [[//SUBPAGE]] to keep the slash mark as it displays [[/SUBPAGE]]. CG 12:19, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
Please discuss the disposition of these articles, whether it is better to have them in the project namespace at Wikipedia or in the main namespace at Wikibooks (some possibly merged in with the existing wikibooks Using The GIMP, Using OpenOffice.org, and Microsoft Word User's Manual), at Wikipedia talk:Graphics in two modes/move. Uncle G 14:13:53, 2005-09-05 (UTC)
Please visit Wikipedia:Gallery namespace for the proposal of a new namespace for the categorization of images. CG 08:42, September 5, 2005 (UTC)
The article Able Danger is demonstrating one of the problems with Wikipedia. If you have a faction that is intent on peddling a conspiracy story driven by partisan blogs it is very difficult to get balance.
The article is currently locked (not by me). I am not sure that many people who are interested in acheiving an NPOV are going to want to work on it as anyone who objects to the world according to Fox News and Bill O'Reilly is going to be attacked as a "liar" and a "national socialist" (i.e. NAZI). Time Magazine is also accused of 'lying'.
If the Able Danger conspiracy story is true then the Bush Administration is currently engaged in the biggest coverup since Watergate - to protect the reputation of Bill Clinton. Am I the only person who finds such a claim to be somewhat unlikely?