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An exchange from my talk page:
I am very surprized that my idea of wikipedia calendar was met with indifference and urge to kill.
I have a feeling that wikipedia will not die any time soon. What's wrong with keeping track of our own history, of notable events? Of course, really notable accomplishments should go into the global calendar. But IMO we have plenty of events of "local pride", so to say, which are notable for the wikipedia community.
I am not particularly zealous about this my idea, and I have no problems with deletion of what I've already done. But I'd like to hear a broader reaction first. mikka (t) 21:35, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
THE IDEA: Another forum to discuss what the vision should be about before it is shaped by outside interests that are in conflict with the success of wikipedia. Seigenthaler has become a kind of conduit for others to assert their own agendas.
The media has an agenda to report and grab attention, "salaciate." Apparently, Mr. Seigenthaler has a need for attention as well. Academia is another critic of wikipedia. These gatekeepers are threatened by its populism: The constructs of Wikipedia are excellent and continues to excel. There is nothing like it for providing a central voice for people to communicate and nothing like it for people to glean information. Its popularity and usuage is evidence of this.
The whole Seigenthaler incident points to a need for strong leadership.
Wikipedia should not attempt to follow the insistence or pressure of media, academia and other gatekeepers therefore become another gatekeeper or delimiter for voice and information.
The attacks from someone as prudish as Seigenthaler should have been expected. Also there should be some idea of how to respond to such incidents in advance. This is leadership. Wikipedia cannot and does not have to kowtow to anyone. This is also leadership.
It would be great for those that care about wikipedia to have some say as to what the response should be to continued and perhaps increasing attacks or criticism from those who do not share in the success of this project.
An example of what could be done is a collaborative effort to define statements (a kind of press release) that can be reported to the media to buttress concerns or attacks. This allows the formidable collective intelligence of wikipedia users to weigh in against competing pressures...again from other interests that do not share in wikipedia's success.
I use mainly korean wikipedia. I suggest, Korea counter + English Conter + Commons + Source + etc... so, "All" counter will be good!! WonYong 10:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Reading down a list of Civil Wars I see that First Sudanese Civil War is listed under F and Second Sudanese Civil War is therefore under S. These should surely betogether in any index? I appreciate the category sort will work on the first word. If this cannot be overcome simply, would it not make sense to favour titles that avoid this problem such as Sudanese Civil War (first). Having World War I and World War II is already prefered to First World War and Second World War which are redirects. Is this already governed by a manual of style or soemthing that can be discussed for change. If so I propose it. Dainamo 13:03, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
is there any way possible to add some sort of sorting filter to "what links here" in the same way as user contribs? So, for example you could click on "What links here" and find all the talk pages, or user pages, or wikipedia-space pages alone that link to a page? I think it would be a useful thing to have. Grutness... wha? 11:37, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
I propose every year starting with 2005 Wikipedia produce a vetted "Best of Wikipedia - (year)" with as many articles as can be reviewed, improved and approved and provided as a stable can't be edited publication both on the internet and in print. I know lots of work along these lines is currently going on. It's the once a year, "Best of" part I haven't heard from anyone else yet. WAS 4.250 16:15, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Restricted image licenses is a proposal to accept a slightly more limited license for images, one which might be acceptable to many content creators/copyright owners who are not willing to release images under the GFDL. Your comments and views are welcome. DES (talk) 04:53, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
How? Template:Tl -- Perfecto Canada 03:28, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Aw that's no fun. How many articles are using it, I'm curious. My browser almost crashed finding out. Is it over 10,000? -- Perfecto Canada 03:40, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Are you sure? -- Perfecto Canada 03:55, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Don't I get an award for pointing this out? I saved the project a big disgrace, and this proves my trustworthiness and self-control. -- Perfecto Canada 04:24, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I made a template - Template:lookfrom, which links to all pages starting with those letters. How best to integrate this into Wikipedia? -- For One World 19:15, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I am aware that there has been some debate over using British vs. American spellings of English. I propose a new tag and corresponding profile setting that provides both settings, such as [[dialect:color|colour]] or something like that. We could probably even have the server autodetect the country to provide American spellings for people in the U.S. and Brittish spellings for people in the U.K. (we'd still have to decide on a default for other countries & for users whose country can't be determined.) Phantom784 22:05, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
{{ Maintained}}
I will be starting a new template for the top portion of talk pages, which will list something to this effect: "This article is maintained by the following users. Contact them regarding verification and sources." Users who either helped write the majority of a page (such as a featured article) or users knowledgeable about the subject, can add their names to the template and will be listed as points of contact for readers requesting verification of the page's contents. It also lets readers know that the page is being watched for any vandalisms. Any suggestions? — 0918 BRIAN • 2005-12-13 21:56
The idea goes somewhat against the wiki culture. It could suggest a kind of "ownership" of pages. From the history of an article it is not difficult to find out which users actively working on it. The template would risk becoming outdated. − Woodstone 23:13, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
WikiProject Adding templates | This article is part of the Big orange templates WikiProject, which aims to expand Wikipedia's coverage of talk pages with templates on them. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks. |
Ummm, how is this useful compared to, say, the History tab, or the talk page? I don't mean to be too snarky, but when folks introduce weirdness into an article where I'm one of the few experts, they find out about it pretty quickly from my watchlist lighting up. Geogre 13:48, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I just had an idea that I thought I would propose and see if it floats - currently there is a way to tag an edit as minor; I propose that edits can also be marked as a revert - either automatically (by editing an outdated version of the page) or manually (like marking an edit as minor). I know conventions exist, but if the functionality were identical to minor edits then one could for instance hide reverts on watchlists, and identifying three reverts could be made easier. Neo 04:59, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
I have a credit card that supports the American Medical Student Association. When I signed up, they said that 1% of my purchases would go to AMSA, and while I can't specifically find that on the website, it does say "Carry the card that supports your chosen profession." Here is a similar Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, credit card. I would definitely carry a credit card that supports Wikipedia and helps buy new servers as I go about daily business. -- Truc-HaMD Thu 24 Nov 05 12:22 -800 UTC
Sounds like a good idea to me. +sj + 20:48, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
please allow donations in other currencies like rupee
One way to make vandalism obvious would be to automatically highlight any recent changes in the text with a slightly off-white color. This would make it impossible to introduce very subtle changes (such as adding a "not" or modifying a link) without becoming visible.
It would also draw attention to recent edits, because either they or what used to be in their place is likely to deserve improvement.
This would require a change to the rendering engine so that it would automatically consult recent versions.
This is a more scalable method than page validation, only requiring more CPU cycles, zero moderator cycles.
I think it would be handy to have templates that are invisible at view time, but pop up and alert the user when they go to edit a page. Such a thing would have many applications: alerting a user to the history of a page, conventions (eg, "Use British spelling here"), letting users know whether restructuring changes are likely to be appreciated by other users, warning users not to add the same piece of information which has been added hundreds of times before...
I'm sure someone will reply that all these should go on the talk page. Well, who reads talk page history before making changes, anyway? :)
This old chestnut is a perennial discussion: the suffix "ize" is not an American trait. Most words in British English that end with this suffix can be "ise" or "ize" (there are some exceptions as there are words that should end in "ise" in American English. In fact the OED prefers the use of "ize" as do many accademic sources. [1]. "ise" in British/commonwealth English seems to have crept into use more over the course of the latter twentieth century (find any old English dictionary and you will srtuggle to find "ise"). It has reached such ubiquity outside accademic circles that many British/Commonwealth readers often mistake the "ize" as Ameircan. Most dictionaries now list both suffixes as acceptable in British English, but if we are writning an international project and we have a choice, it makes sense to use the spelling that would be usiversally acceptable to all English Speakers and matches other existing links.
I propose the logic should also apply to examples such as Gaol and Jail in British English and Ketchup and Catsup in American English). Dainamo 13:13, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I've suggested permanently protecting a range of high-volume templates in order to lessen the impact of vandalism on the hardware. See Wikipedia_talk:Protection_policy#Template_protection. -- bainer ( talk) 23:09, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
How about replacing the requested articles on Special:Recentchanges with the current CotWs? Since anons can't create new articles anymore, it makes sense to do something that they can more easily participate in -- there'd be a lot of general copyediting and tweaking. Wikipedia has an article on everything notable that is not obscure, I think, and the vast majority of people have no inclination and/or resources to do the required research. CotWs tend to be general subjects that a lot of people can help out in (and that interest a lot of people). We could have the general Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week and one or two of the more specialized ones (and active ones, as a bonus, this would be an incentive for more active CotWs) on a rotating basis. Tuf-Kat 07:41, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
With most people using higher and higher desktop resolutions (1600x1200 here), I find it sometimes really hard to read through an article seeing as the text spans over the whole width of the screen (imagine having to read a 30cm large page). Wouldn't it be possible to force a smaller column width for readability's sake?
Please note that this has no effect on my IE6 browser (it's ok in firefox) − Woodstone 15:51, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
Hello fellow editors, I posted at WP:MoS's talk page before I found out about this page. Please see Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Wikilinks_when_quoting for my original policy query. If I may re-phrase myself I'd say that wikilinks in quotes should not be used or with great caution as they may impose the editor's bias on the quote. Though its a matter of enriching articles vs. fear of corruption of statements I'd say that the latter outweigh the benefits. Scoo 11:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Piped link says "Do not use piped links to create " easter egg links"". Follow that everywhere including while quoting and the problem goes away. WAS 4.250 16:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I see that there's a large French speakers community in Wikipedia. Is anyone a fan of creating a collaboration project much like the Spanish Translation of the Week, since there's a lot of great featured french articles. CG 20:55, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Given that when I first came here, ( September 2002) we had less than 100,000 articles and this was not foreseen, and now we are up to 800,000+ articles, I say a small celebration should be in hand when that 1,000,000th article is created. Maybe a banner congratulating the poster and the article written, provided it actually is an article and not some sort of vandalism, vanity, etc. What do you guys think?
God bless
Antonio Me Me Me for 1,000,000th!!! Martin
We should also think about the fact that if we intend to make a big deal out of it, there will be all sorts of cretins and yahoos waiting in the wings, hovering over their "submit" buttons, ready to pounce the instant the existing count reaches 999,999, so they can proclaim that their silly troll article on creative navel bubble gum moulding (or worse) is the millionth. It occurs to me that one way to guard against this would be to inject some deliberate noise -- a random, plus-or-minus fudge factor of 100 or so -- into the published "total article" count. That'd make it harder to "game", but an admin with access to the database could still determine, after the fact, what the truly 1,000,000th article had been. Steve Summit ( talk) 20:47, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm a daily wikipedia user and contributor, and I use wiki for any information I need for projects. Even though I trust the content in wikipedia many teachers and professionals do not like wikipedia being used as a source. They say it isn't relieble. I have two suggestions to fix this.
Thank you very much orginal contributor: User:Aytakin on 2005-12-07 22:37:33 +0100
Have some professional and more knowledgeable editors checking the work of contributors.
I had the exact same thought earlier today when I used Wikipedia as a reference. It sounds cheap with the "free" in there. Replacing it with something along the lines of "Non-Profit" Encyclopedia makes it sound more authoritative. Ereinion 03:47, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
No one should be using an encyclopedia as more than a starting point in any kind of serious research, anyways. Voyager640 06:18, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
It isn't reliable. I'm a big fan of wikipedia. But at this point it isn't reliable. You could start your own web site where you have a staff comb over every article and then call say it was derived from wikipedia or whatever the lic will allow.-- Gbleem 15:38, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. Good expository writing is always a balance between telling too much and telling too little, between crisp prose and thorough explanation.
The tensions arise largely because readers come to articles with a wide range of needs, knowledge and interpretive skills. Consider, as an extreme example, the information content of an article about a new heart-bypass surgery technique. The text and vocabulary that is (immediately) useful to a patient with a high-school education is very different from the text that is useful to a cardiac surgeon.
For the extreme example above, the best compromise possible in a single article is copious hyperlinking in the context of a summary discussion. For less extreme cases, however, an ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
For example, the three paragraphs above might appear in elided form as shown below.
It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. ... An ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
In the above paragraph, the elision required the word 'an' to be capitalized in the elided form. This is a small example of a general case. To be useful, a well-defined ellipsis markup needs to support replacement text so that both the elided and expanded versions are grammatically correct.
The exact markup syntax should, of course, be determined by the WikiMedia developers. The visual indicators should clearly indicate the presence of an expandable elision and yet be minimal enough that normal reading is not disrupted. I've used the tradition three-dot ellipsis in my example but it is not clear whether this is the best choice for an indicator that is also a hyperlink that expands inline. At the very least, the ellipsis indicator should be obedient to browser settings for hyperlink coloring and decoration.
From an editor's point of view, ellipsis markup offers an alternative way to compress long articles without information loss. For the reader, expanding an ellipsis would, in my opinion, be less disruptive to the flow of comprehension than transitioning away from the page under consideration via hyperlinks.
-- Michael.f.ellis 16:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
We want to have all the articles reviewed, to prevent hoaxes and increase the quality of the articles. I propose to form boards of reviewers at each WikiProject and Wikiportal each board adopts a group of categories related to their Project/Portal. We can also form a wildcard review board for the categories that are not adopted by any project.
A member of a review board should be a registered user with at least a few months of experience, never founded to commit hoaxes and other bad faith editions, who has some good quality contributions in the field of the board. The board can be originally elected by the participants of the project/portal and then co-opted by the consensus of the board members or by additional voting. For the wildcard review board lets say that the administrators are the original wildcard board.
What do the reviewers - they review articles on their adopted categories. If an article is reviewed does not mean that it is a perfect article. It only means that it is not a hoax, that it is not in a vandalized stage and that all the applicable tags are there. If it a stub, than it labelled as a stub, it it POV then it is labelled as POV, if it needs clean up - it labelled for clean up, if a minor fact is dubious - than it clearly marked as dubious, etc. If an article already was reviewed, than the next review means that it is clearly in better state than it was at the previous review. If the article became worse since the last review the reviewed status should be withdrawn. If there are arguments between the reviewers, than the decision should be voted (probably by consensus as with the adminships), if there is no consensus it goes in RfC, Arb com etc.
After reviewing an article, the reviewer leaves a template message, showing the name of the board, his own name and the date at the bottom of the article. He/she also clearly marks "Article was reviewed by the board member" in the edit summary. Reviewer can not review an article if he was a major contributor to it ( or the major contributor to the changes since the last review, if the article was already reviewed). For people who are not official reviewers leave messages masquerading as a review should be a blockable offence.
In future, if we will have a large pull of reviewed article we could have a GUI switch between the latest reviewed version and the development version as well as "revert to the latest reviewed version" button. We could also have a separate colors for the links to the reviewed and non-reviewed articles, toolbox for the reviewers, etc.
Advantages: improves quality by forcing systematical reviews, starting point for checking - comparing with the latest reviewed version, CD distributions should be done based on the latest reviewed version if they are available. I also hope the decision would curb revert wars and give some recognition to good participants of particular projects abakharev 09:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Noticed its placement when reverting something on Jimmy Wales, could that link be moved to the same line and font size (right justified) as "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." - Roy Boy 800 20:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
As a relatively inexperienced user, I notice that one of the things I don't really know how to do is to cite sources for an article, especially non-Internet ones. There is no button or text box for inserting citations, and no link to information on what style of bibliographic citation I should use to cite a book or article. If I follow the "help" link on the far left, I'm taken to a page with a multitude of links, many of which seem like they *might* help me with citing sources, but it's hard to be sure. (I'm not even sure what a wiki-bibliography should be called: "Sources"? "Bibliography"? "Further Reading"?).
Since the lack of internet and, especially, non-internet, sources is a big problem for wikipedia articles, I would suggest considering how the "edit" page might be changed to make it easier to cite articles, and to indicate that such citations are generally expected, and appreciated. Changes might include a text-box for citations, or buttons for "add web citation" or "add non-internet citation" or just prominant "Adding Citations" help button located near the "save page" button. I'm not sure how this could best be implemented. But in my humble opinon, it would be very beneficial to wikipedia to encourage people to include better citations by making it easier to do so.
[On preview: Ok I just noticed that the "edit" page includes a helpful link from the word "sources." But it's hidden in what seems like legal fine-print: ("Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. By editing here, you agree to license your contributions under the GFDL.") But this info should be more visible, and citing should be made a more integrated and normal part of the editing process, I think.] -- ThaddeusFrye 17:09, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Is there a Wikiproject: Cuba around here? If not, I propose we have one. -- Antonio Not Marti but Martin
I just ran across MIT's OpenCourseWare. Darned impressive resource. I was thinking that we should probably add to External Links wherever relevant, but I don't want to be accused of spamming (on behalf of an institution to which I have no connection, by the way) so I thought I'd come here first and see what others think. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:40, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm glad I checked in here! -- Jmabel | Talk 01:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
It sometimes happens that defmaatory contnet, information that violates privacy, copyvio content, or a personal attack can be placed in an edit summery. In this case there is no way to get rid of the damaging content short of compeltely deleting the articel and recreatign it at a different name without its history, or else having a developer make direct changes in the DB. This is true sience even deleted edit summeries are now visible to any user who looks at the history and clicks "view nn deleted edits". See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive50# Edit Summery Vandalism on Judith Krug for an example.
Also, rather more often, an edit summery can be highly misleading.
I propose that the software be changed so that admins, or some more limited group (perhaps B'crats?) be enabled to change existing edit summeries. Use of this feature should of course be logged: the log should should the articel title, the revision timestamp, and the old and new edit summeries. (Alternatively this feature might be limited to the summeries of deleted revisions.)
I know this will require a software change, and must be propsoed on MediaZilla, but there is no point in askign the developers for this unless there is soem support for havign such a feature. If this proposal gets soem support, i will log a feature request. DES (talk) 21:20, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
another proposal: If an registered user has edited an article and left the summary field blank he should get the chance to add a summary later for his own edits.-- 84.169.52.4 19:02, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
And while we're at it, how about the ability to preview the summary. If I put a misspelled link in it there is no way to know or fix it until it is too late. -- Samuel Wantman 11:43, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
I think that it would be nice if the logs and deleted edits ( Kate's Tool) for blocked users were accessible from the block list. Often times, blocked users would have nothing showing up in their contributions. If the user wasn't blocked for an inappropriate username, it can be very time-consuming to check what they have done. This mainly applies to image-upload vandals and users who create nonsense pages. Anyone agree with me? -- Ixfd64 04:11, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
It's my opinion that an ellipsis markup would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. Used effectively, it would allow editors and authors to improve the readability of long articles without deleting information or hyperlinking to another article. The basic idea is to have a symbol that indicates the presence of additional text. When clicked it would expand the text inline.
I think ellipsis is needed because good expository writing is always a balance between telling too much and telling too little, between crisp prose and thorough explanation. The tensions arise largely because readers come to articles with a wide range of needs, knowledge, and interpretive skills. Consider, as an extreme example, the information content of an article about a new heart-bypass surgery technique. The text and vocabulary that is (immediately) useful to a patient with a high-school education is very different from the text that is useful to a cardiac surgeon. For this example, I believe most of us would agree that the best compromise possible in a single article is copious hyperlinking in the body of a summary discussion.
But there are many less extreme cases where an ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
For example, the three paragraphs above might appear in elided form as shown below.
It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. ... An ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
In the above paragraph, the elision required the word 'an' to be capitalized in the elided form. This is a small example of a general case. To be useful, a well-defined ellipsis markup needs to support replacement text so that both the elided and expanded versions are grammatically correct.
The exact markup syntax should, of course, be determined by the WikiMedia developers. The visual indicators should clearly indicate the presence of an expandable elision and yet be minimal enough that normal reading is not disrupted. I've used the traditional three-dot ellipsis in my example but it is not clear whether this is the best choice for an indicator that is also a hyperlink that expands inline. At the very least, the ellipsis indicator should be obedient to browser settings for hyperlink coloring and decoration.
From an editor's point of view, ellipsis markup offers an alternative way to compress long articles without information loss. For the reader, expanding an ellipsis would, in my opinion, be less disruptive to the flow of comprehension than transitioning away from the page under consideration via hyperlinks.
-- Michael.f.ellis 16:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Here is a modest proposal which is bound to get me flamed to a crisp: Why not use the space under the toolbox for google pageads? It would not be invasive, there is blank space there anyway, and it would bring in so much money that it could be discontinued after one year, leaving enough funding to keep the foundation in hardware for a decade. Maybe we could, instead of having a fundraiser every now and then, make December the PageAd month. -- Slashme 11:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Maybe it's just because I'm a registered user, but wouldn't it be wiser to make the ads visible to anon. users before registered users? After all, registered users tend to contribute more than anonymous users, and we're less likely to click on the ads. But I would say the best would simply be to make the ads visible to all. The faster we make our target, the faster we can ditch the ads. Here's a thought: Make the ads come on at the same time as a fundraiser. If the ads irritate you enough, you'll pay to get rid of them ;-)
As an aside, to see what they would look like, see the Uncyclopedia main page. -- Slashme 12:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that:
But if the community is dead set against it, who am I to stand against the masses? When was the last vote held? How overwhelming was the vote? -- Slashme 13:52, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Wow. After reading that petition, I realized just how hypersensitive some wikipedians are, and just what a hornets nest it indeed is (thanks Shimgray!). Is it just a vocal minority that believes that the trustees of WikiMedia are here for personal enrichment, or would a couple of PageAds really cause a large rebellion? Maybe if they took a closer look at the WikiMedia Budget, and compared it to any real-world company, they'd be a bit more understanding. Really, $33,000 is not a lot of money to pay 2 full-time and 2 part-time staff. Almost all the money goes to hardware!
Anyway, the reason that I raised this here was that I didn't know where to find this kind of information. Is this not by now a frequently-enough asked question to go into the FAQ? -- Slashme 17:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
For the foreseeable future, fundraising alone should be able to continue to pay to keep the server farm humming and the foundation running at minimally acceptable levels (that is, if we spend 25% of the year fundraising). Doing more than that will require grants and large donations. At the same time we *all* need to understand that, by choosing to *not* have something like GoogleAds we are giving up millions of dollars of revenue each quarter. The mission of the foundation is to freely give every single person access to the sum of human knowledge and to do so in their own language. Revenue from something like GoogleAds could be used to expand our reach outside of areas where cheap high-speed Internet access is ubiquitous. We often forget that that still accounts for the great majority of humanity. But we can't do something like that without community support. Just make sure your decisions in this matter are fully informed and not the result of a gut reaction against advertising. BTW, I'm talking for myself and not at all in any official capacity as a foundation officer. --
mav 18:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Not that I'm against the whole idea, but it is worth pointing out why people don't like it. Wikipedia's trustworthiness (such as it is) depends on it's only being subject to the sway of its editors and not external forces. Suppose we become dependent on Google Ads, and an article criticizes one of google's endeavors. What do we do if Google says, remove the critical article or we will pull the ads from your page? I'm not saying google would do that, but it would put wikipedia in quite a bind. Either we sacrifice the encyclopedia or change our content slightly. Even if this were to never happen, people would definately accuse us of doing it. This is why Consumer Reports doesn't do advertising. Not because they couldn't still be objective, but because no one could trust that they were. --best, kevin kzollman][ talk 02:04, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Maybe if we just had PageAds on during our fundraisers, it would on the one hand allay fears of manipulation, and also make the fundraisers shorter. As for the discussion at the VP, where is the best place to discuss issues like this? -- Slashme 06:26, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
For us, money is not nearly as important as goodwill. We are doing fine on the money side, so gambling with goodwill is unnecessary and dangerous. The Spanish Wikipedia broke off when Larry Sanger mentioned the possibility of his salary being covered by advertising in the future. I am sure that the German Wikipedia would break off if advertising were initiated; indeed their fundraising message right now says "Help us keep Wikipedia and its sister project in the public domain and free of advertising in the future".
If you want to see Wikipedia with ads, check out about.com. They have good content, but everybody hates it. Nobody contributes to such a site: deep down, you're afraid that somebody will profit from your work other than you. (Which is true: the advertisers profit.)
Advertisements are inherently POV. It doesn't make sense to remove spammed links from the articles, and then invite them back in to the highest bidder in the form of Google ads.
And regarding the point that mav raises above (it's also one of Jimbo's talking points): we might need advertising money in the future to distribute encyclopedias to people without net access. To that I say: If we ever got our act together and produced anything that's worthy of distribution, philanthropic organizations would be more than happy to fund it. Money is never an issue in these things, there are plenty of rich foundations eager to give it away; you just write up a decent proposal and that's that. AxelBoldt 16:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikimedia should use a system similar to OpenID to avoid the hassle of needing to sign up for a separate account on each sister project. It would mean that if I want to post on fr:, just to make some minor adjustment but I can't be bothered opening an account, I would be able to post as "pfctdayelise from en:w:", more or less. You would still be able to open a separate account if you had a serious interest in multiple projects, but it could be very handy especially for a project like commons, where most people are not interested in hanging around, but just uploading their photos and then going back to their "main" project. It would also mean people with accounts on other wikis could start articles here without needing to sign up for an account.
It is used at the moment on blogs/livejournal. It would probably require some modification for the wikimedia projects, but I think it could be a workable solution to this annoying problem, and it seems more realistic than scrapping everyone's account and starting again with a centralised database, or somehow merging all the existing accounts together into a centralised database. pfctdayelise 03:57, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to contribute to the French to English translations and am having a hard time understanding what is going on!
One of my confusions comes from the translation status. I seem to be finding several articles which are listed under the "Requested" translations, even though they appear to be status "Done". I noticed someone else found it a "shambles" in their words, so I'm not the only one!
Is there a way to move these articles automatically, or does someone need to monitor/clean it up? Should the choice of status be limited by using a pull-down menu?
Having a tutorial called "How to translate an article" would also be very helpful, as the instructions are written from the point of view of the person requesting the translation, but not the person who's going to do it.
Thanks for all your thoughts & help (I've a headache trying to get to grips with it all)
-- Carolille 17:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
WHEREAS Featured Articles represent the best work of Wikipedia, and
WHEREAS Featured Articles should be edited with extra care if doing major revisions, as community consensus has approved of the current version, and
WHEREAS Featured Articles are a major step forward Wikipedia 1.0+, and ultimately printed/CD-based wikipedias, where all articles go through community appraisal
THEREFORE, Featured Articles should be visibly distinguished; and
WHEREAS the English Wikipedia has no distinguishment of Featued Articles on the article itself (only on talk pages), and
WHEREAS other Wikipedias have successfully adopted various distinguishments,
NOW, THEREFORE,
I propose all articles to include the template FeaturedSmall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FeaturedSmall
What it does: It places a small yellow star in the top right corner of featured articles, followed by the text "ARTICLENAME is a Featured Article"
This template is already successfully used on other wikipedias, such as the Italian Wikipedia, for distinguishment of featured articles (see http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6rfuknattleikur).
The template is not overly pompeous, it does not "brag" the article excessively, and does NOT convey the message that it is "elite" compared to others. As well, it does NOT look restrictive or critical of change. It does, however, display the featured status of the article right ON the article, without need to go to the talk page.
I propose that all Wikipedia Featured Articles use this template.
It would need to be minorly adjusted (from "top:72px" to "top:10px") once the Fundraising Drive is over, for proper layout, but otherwise it will be stable.
Articles having the template would look exactly like the article on the Italian wikipedia I gave the link to. I also chose ONE (since there was no community consensus yet) English article to use the template on, and it will be there unless someone decides to revert it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond
Some discussion has already occured at the Technical board, where I inquired why don't we use them, and I found out it is used in some wikipedias but not others. So, I propose we use it here.
If adopted, the FeaturedSmall template should be locked, since it would be present on over 700 pages. Elvarg 03:01, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
For the 977th time, NO. One of the important things about Wikipedia is that it be easily replicable. This means it is very important to keep metadata out of articles -- metadata makes replicating our content elsewhere very difficult. Featured articles are (by definition) supposed to explify our best standards and practicies. This means keeping them free of metadata. Raul654 20:40, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
I was looking for Christmas and birthday presents lately, and since the subject is as much a Wikipedian as I am, I was looking into the possibility of somehow combining the fundraising with the Christmas/Birthday aspect. However, I did not find any such way. Why is there no possibility to present someone with a donation to Wikipedia as a gift? The person in question would have loved to get a certificate saying "You're holding 20€ worth of free knowledge in your hands." or something. Of course, I could easily produce something like that myself, but that's not the same thing. I'd want to give out something official.
Shezoid 15:41, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking about all of the pictures that needed to be taken of Delaware and I was wondering if noticeboards for regions should be created? My first thought was making the noticeboard (basically a request board too) in the wikipedian category. I'll create a little example that should be tweaked a lot in Category talk:Wikipedians in Delaware. I want to know what other users think. I think it would be useful since I pass a bunch of these things on a weekly basis but I have no clue what Delaware related articles are on wikipedia because Delaware is not the most interesting thing in my mind. Is there a better place than category pages? Should this be done? What uses beyong localized image requests does it have? etc. etc. gren グレン 17:56, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
For Wikipedia's 5th anniversary, I think it would be nice to have the featured article to be Wikipedia. -- Wookiebaca 22:06, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
As including a source is now (and has been for some time) required, I think it'd make sense to include a "Source" edit box (in addition to the box for "Description"). This would encourage users to include a source (be it a URL or a note saying it was scanned from a newspaper or screencapped by the uploader, or whatever). Ideally this "Source" box would add a new section (similar to how the license drop down box adds a "License" section) called, logically, "Source". :P As a side note, is there anyplace else I should suggest this (and future image upload suggestions)? — Locke Cole 02:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, this must have been the wrong spot. :-| — Locke Cole 19:12, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Page validiation, but not as on the tin. All edits would still emediately come out on the page, but they would have to be approved by a wikipedia admin. If the current version is not a accepted one, a note is put on the top of the page with a link to the last approved version of the article. Such a feauture could make the world for Wikipedias credibility. Aye? ThorRune 10:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
There seems to be no possibility of sponsoring a single article or a category of articles now. However, I'd propose a mechanism to to just that, which would work in conjunction with the above-mentioned gift certificates. It would work as follows:
This way, I could make sure that a certain article of my interest would get special attention, donate money to Wikipedia and give out small portions of Wikipedia as presents. Three flies in one strike!
Shezoid 16:06, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
I thought I'd better bring this here before I create it. Basically, I think we need an {{update}} template. The template would be placed at the top of articles which need updating, much like cleanup/wikify/npov/etc are. It would be useful in keeping Wikipedia up to date, as many articles as written well, and then forgotten about. Types of article which need this template most are ones on sport seasons, weekly or monthly events and chart musicians. The template could also spawn, maybe, a maintenance WikiProject dedicated to keeping Wikipedia updated. Once the article is updated, like with cleanup, the template is removed. I feel this template could become essential - There's nothing worse than out-of-date knowledge. Hedley 02:21, 27 December 2005 (UTC) Add: The template exists, but it's not something in wide use, like it's been hidden somewhere and isn't used. Hedley 02:25, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
In Special:Newpages, articles already deleted should be redlinked or otherwise indicate they no longer exist. -- Quarl 10:10, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I propose an officially sanctioned campaign to rid Wikipedia of excessive wikification of years and dates on the grounds that:
1. Only wikifying dates of the initial statement of the year and possibly the initial statement of the date if there is a significant anniversary related to the article subject is useful. All else is pointless and unnecessary.
2. There are many articles out there where not only are the first instance of dates and years wikified, regardless of whether these are significant dates or not, but every single date in the article, down to the day is wikified. Sometimes people even wikify the month and the day separately, for every single time the date is mentioned. All this should be clearly redundant - repeat wikification of the exact same phrase that isn't a date every time it occurs in an article is typically targetted for editing quickly. But repeat wikification of dates is very widespread and generally goes unedited.
3. There is a widespread misperception that excessive repeat wikification of dates is some kind of Wikipedia standard, when its not. It should be made clear that it isn't.
4. Overwikification of dates reduces the visual emphasis on properly wikified terms and phrases. Overwikfication of dates damages the user-friendliness of Wikipedia rather than enhances it.
What do other people think?
Bwithh 21:27, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal becuase, as Raul said, this would cause the date preference not to function and we'd be involved in more edit wars like the BC/BCE mess. Leave well enough alone. User:Zoe| (talk) 01:14, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
However, none of the above argumentns apply to unlinking year and otehr date elementsa that are not part of complete dates, and on which date prefereces do not work anyway. The Manual of Style already strongly discourages linking such dates. Have a look at recent edits to User:DESiegel/Date Test to see the kinds of things I am referring to. DES (talk) 01:19, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I totally agree. The only catch is that some sort of alternate date preferences formatting that doesn't require linking must be done first. -- Cyde Weys vote talk 01:30, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
As of now, the news items on the main page do not link to any concrete article that would contain further information. Ofen I read a news item and would like to find out more, but don't know where. The link to the sister project Wikinews below the items is of course prominent, but not all of the news items are also listed on Wikinews and if, they have to be found.
I would propose to create some kind of link ("more info here"/"more"/...) to a full article on Wikinews for every Main Page news item.
mmtux
talk 23:00, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Hi
I was a bit disappointed regarding the negative publicity surrounding the Wikipedia recently Although I have used the site many times when looking for something from simple to complex topics and found it great I have not contributed to a post
I would like to suggest the following to prevent further abuse of a very good tool and concept.
Charge any user who wants to contribute an article a 1 time deposit fee of 50 USD. For every article which they submit they are billed 5 dollars which is deducted from this amount. If the article goes through a time period of six months without anyone proclaiming it to be false or incorrect. The 5 dollars are added back to the persons account. Should the article be found to be false. The person who entered it is offered the opportunity to correct the entry. Should they refuse to do so they lose the 50 dollars. Where mistakes are innocent the user loses the 5 dollars but may submit the next article for free.
This covers admin costs and prevents those intent on destroying the wikipedia from succeeding. Good Luck ! Uven
That goes against the 'spirit' of Wikipedia, and will deter people from contributing. Any cost to the contributor should be avoided. But thanks anyway! Yellowmellow45 18:18, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree, any cost, even if refunded, would only hamper the project. I know I wouldn't contribute under those conditions. -- Falcorian 18:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
This would dimnish contributions by 95%-99%. Not workable. Lotsofissues 00:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
2 things to note here A) Wikipedia is a non-profit orginazation so if we started charging people money that could get us in some legal trouble and B) A large percentage of contributers are teenagers or young adult who eithier don't have access to a credit card or can't risk loosing $5 an article. Deathawk 02:22, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
I appreciate that you're thinking about the problem Uven; I think the site needs some out-of-the-box ideas like yours. Petty "edit wars" are already are already a problem. Imagine how bad the arguments would become if people were screaming about their five bucks! Mikeblas 18:22, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
The other day, someone went through the Joseph Stalin article and practically wiki-linked every second word. Can we please stop this? For example, the word "bar", the word "books"...I could go on and on...
Do we really think that someone would look up Stalin, and then while reading the article, have the urge to link to the article on "bar" with its myriad meanings, or the generic "books"?
I do hope that this is not gonna become a trend...it adds nothing to any article.
Camillus talk| contribs 23:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
There is guidance at:
One of the root causes of overlinking is that square brackets are used for two entirely different functions (date preferences, article linking). This leads to a popular misconception that all date elements must be linked, including solitary years such as 2004. The Joseph Stalin example article suffers from this problem right now. Another root cause is that we have no objective data on which links are useful to readers, so we rely on subjective judgement of each editor. Thus there is an inherent tendancy for linking and an inherent opposition to delinking. Bobblewik 15:57, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
HOW ABOUT THIS: Wikilink every word. Turn off all the links and make every word effectively a wikilink. Of course some words will not point anywhere but then those are less likely to be words clicked on..but not always. Besides, if someone wants to click on any word, they may just need a definition or something. Who knows, we all have different interests and needs.
AN ANSWER: I have a suggestion that which might be a good compromise and make everyone happy. I created a software called LinkZu a while ago. What it does is basically allow any text on a webpage become a link by hilighting the text. It would effectively make every word on a page capable of being a wikilink but at the discretion of each individual visitor. It is javascript and I've tested it out in just about every browser and it works well. I know when I am looking at wiki articles I use the wikilinks a lot and even copy and paste text that isn't linked into the wiki search. I do sell the software, but I'd be willing to GPL the thing for use on wiki, no one buys it anyway. Check out the website(www.linzku.com) for a demonstration of how it works. I think once you educate wiki users on its functionality it would be an awesome addition to wikipedia. -- Schirinos 22:39, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
See WP:APPROVE. Don't worry, edits wouldn't be held hostage until approval. — MESSEDROCKER ( talk) 20:11, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
This isn't so much a proposal as a problem that I'm not sure how to solve. I recently hit the random article link, and up came Manas Journal. At first it didn't look like a copyvio to me because of the links. Looking at the history made me suspicious, and I did a Google search, and sure enough it was an egregious copyvio.
I marked it with the usual template and went to inform the user and found they'd already received a warning about another article. My natural response was to check their user contributions. My sad discovery was that they had added copyrighted material to all of the following articles, most of which he created, most of them over 90 days ago:
I templated them all and added them to Wikipedia:Copyright_problems/2005_December_27 (except one, which he simply added material to; I removed it and left a notice on the talk page). Needless to say, this sets a worrisome precedent: in all this time, only one of the user's many copyvio pages was caught, and no action was ever taken against them - they went on creating these things for weeks. I think the user's tendency to add links disguised their origin.
So my question: how do we prevent this kind of thing from happening again? How do we detect and stop habitual copyright violators? Deco 09:38, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Copyright violations on Wikipedia are far more common than most people realize and a portion of it goes undetected for a long time or completely undetected . For example, a lot of articles sent to cleanup and most of the articles longer than a paragraph sent for wikification are copyright violations. During one wikifying session, I wikified about 5 articles and reported 40 copyright violations. It's rather disturbing when someone does a lot of wikification work, but their name never shows up at Copyright Problems. Some of the copyright violations have been extensively edited by veteran editors and admins and most have been edited by some watching Recent Changes. Most of them are blatant and all people need to do is to look out for them. Almost all of the rest can be caught be searching Google.
As for habitual violators, I think they should be warned once or twice and then banned indefinitely. -- Kjkolb 09:57, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
To automate several tasks, a drop down menu could be displayed on the top of every article. This would simplify processes such as the deletion process. -- mmtux\ talk 00:40, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
It would be soooo useful if all Wikisearches for one spelling (eg colour) automatically also searched the other (color). Failing that, stick an automatic reminder on the search results page?
I know it should be obvious to search both, but how many readers will think of this? I'm a professional editor who has worked in both genres, and it's taken me two days to remember to check the US spellings (was editing existing articles about printing - written in C'wealth sp). Apologies if this is an oldie, tho I haven't found refs anywhere. JackyR 18:59, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I find myself often changing links like " San Francisco, California" to " San Francisco, California, USA". How about we use templates like {{San Francisco, California}} becomes [[San Francisco, California|San Francisco]], [[California]], [[United States|USA]]. -- Quarl 10:31, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
{{
San Francisco, California}}
" --
Quarl 22:56, 27 December 2005 (UTC)Some time ago several tags were moved from the articles to the relevant talk pages since they were considered to be editors' tools and not relevant for the reader. However lack of credibility is and will continue to be a major critisism against Wikipedia. That an article has received more than the average level of scrutiny is not irrelevant for reader. Currently it's left to the new user to discover that FA process exist at all. Fornadan (t) 03:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Looking for feedback on this. - Roy Boy 800 02:31, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Images that are excessively large can at times be difficult for users on lower-end machines.. per a complaint in the Featured Picture Candidate article. Apparently some browsers are also unable to even open images that are excessively large. Now when you click an image you are taken to a page that has a scaled version of the image along with a link to the high-res version.. could there possibly be intermediate sizes created by the system when an image is excessively large..? drumguy"font-family:verdana; font-size:9pt;">8800"font-family:verdana; font-size:9pt;"> - speak? 23:34, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Avoid monoculture. Use a different peice of software to handle all the discussion of meta-wikipedia affairs. Perhaps something that is not (gasp) a wiki, but something designed for goverment of a wiki. Let us not get caught up in a cycle of blind faith. Let's build some software. Kurt Gödel says what? Let's take a look at this thing form the outside. Lilhinx 09:37, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm suggesting something that makes Special:Contributions displays only the last edit made in a page (like the Watchlist). CG 14:16, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Fresh from a discussion about commercial advertising masquerading as legitimate articles ( User talk:HasBeen), I come with a proposal to help reduce abuse of the Wikipaedia project as I see it from the invasion of both professional marketing and grass-roots covert advertising from e-teams.
The proposal: all articles about individual music albums and singles be copied into the relevant group or individual's biography, the deleted as stand-alone entries.
Is this important? Yes, it is very important indeed. With Wikipaedia set to be a global source of information, the inclusion of a stand-alone article in the project legitimises its contents for almost all-time! Given that the source material for most of these entries are the press releases of the various big music corporations, what was a marketing lie yesterday suddenly becomes music history tommorrow just by cut and paste into one of our user-friendly fields.
This proposal would help stem the tide of blatant advertising that is choking this excellent project. By way of example (and please don't feel victimised, it's just that this article was the first one that caught my attention being on the front page (!)) please see Cool (song). This is nothing more than a commercial for a product, and also begs the question, who is going to type the word "cool" into our search engine in the future specifically looking for this ephemeral pop song?
By moving the contents of this stand-alone article to the bio the information adds to the whole body of data on the particular group or individual, and the impact of the advert is massively reduced. Yes, the same would apply for the Beatles too, their estates still make money from promoting products (as does Michael Jackson, for the time being...)
Other marketing professionals: please note the e-teamers at work in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rich Girl, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/What You Waiting For?, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Luxurious (song). Could you or I boast such an army of vigilant subjects to spread brand loyalty? Also note the personalisation of the argument in favour of addressing the points made: they have been coached well. (I hasten to add that not all respondents were e-teamers! Some very helpfully guided my argument here.)
Now I ask the nightmare question: what if one of our internet-junkie, wikiholic admin team was also an e-teamer? They could pass blatant advertising off as legitimate, and there would be precious little we could say in defence.
I appreciate that this is only a small step, and that there is an argument that this seems a strange place to "draw the line" as it were. (Indeed, could such a policy work for films? Probably not...) However, by chasing away overt marketing ploys in the music industry, we can be more vigilant for a similar abuses in, say, the field of books or politics.-- HasBeen 09:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. A blanket ban on albums or singles sounds like an unnecessary rule. Instead, each album and single should be judged on its merits. Andjam 14:06, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Where would you go from here? Deletion of all movies and television shows? Deletion of all articles about books? Zoe ( 216.234.130.130 17:42, 23 December 2005 (UTC))
I am sure that there are many singles and albums that have articles of their own and don't need them. I'm equally sure that I wouldn't want to make a rule to say that no singles or albums deserve articles of their own. Are you really saying that we should make The Beatles into Wikipedia's largest article? Or that featured article Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me) should be rolled into The Tempations? Or that Kind of Blue should be rolled into Miles Davis, despite the role that John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Cannonball Adderley played on the album? This seems like just a bad idea. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:05, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
This proposal is simply ridiculous. There are countless singles that are ingrained in American culture and have been for decades, like " Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and " American Pie". Likewise there are albums that have had wide-reaching influence in the development of genres, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. You can't say these don't stand on their own. That said, I'm unsure whether many ephemeral pop singles are any more notable than a single issue of a magazine, but like the latter they certainly get a lot of exposure. Deco 19:43, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
I think the labrinthine reference stuff (policy, formatting info, etc.) could use a search feature, perhaps a "side-wiki" of its own. Even as an administrator, I have to look things up often, and it's often difficult and time consuming. There must be a better way.
Anyway, I'm just voicing my frustration and not being able to find some things and invite anyone to either comment, make suggestions, or bite my head off for having missed something obvious. -- DanielCD 20:51, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
One of the major costs for wikipedia is currently hardware. For the expendable computers lower down in the information chain, would it be practical to use second-hand computers donated by wikipedians? Andjam 12:38, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
This has been suggested before. I can't remember the page, but apparently the WikiMedia foundation has filled up its racks already, and a larger computer room would be more expensive than more computers. Or something of the kind. I'll check this out soon... -- Slashme 12:56, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
I came across Meta:What we use the money for, and there's a minor mention of the possibility of donating hardware, but the page is pretty old - it's only had minor updates since 2004. Andjam 23:59, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
I would like TOC that are somewhat limited, for example a TOC only showing level-2 headings, and TOC that only shows headings under given header → Aza Toth 19:06, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
One of the reasons we get so many articles on advertising and non-notable websites, as well as link spam in established articles, is because Wikipedia's Google rank is so high, and any outgoing links get a big boost on Google. One way to stop this is to force the "nofollow" attribute on all external links. Many wikis already do this due to spam. -- Quarl 23:00, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Thothica for an example of AFDs plagued with sock puppets and/or forum recruitment, with stated reason for article of non-notable website being to enhance visibility of the website. My user page has also been childishly vandalized recently, my best guess is the sock puppets from this AFD (he also vandalized User:Perfecto). -- Quarl 23:35, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Would it be possible to have the nofollow take effect only on new articles? If we did this than advetisments would have to stay on Wikipedia for a set amount of time (say 3 months) before they are allowed to become an external link. At the same time old "proven" aricles could be exported if they have not been deleted in 3 months. Thus We can keep the long term links, but remove one "plus" for advertisers. Can it be done, or is this not possible? Eagle ( talk) ( desk)
Eagle's suggestion is a good one but I just don't know how practical it is. Yes, of course it's possible, but it may not be an easy thing to do. The thing is this won't have much of an impact, because links are awarded PageRank values according to the popularity of the page it was linked from. A brand new article, even though it is on Wikipedia, is not going to have nearly the same weight as a link on a popular article. Still, the most important part of our efforts is going to be fleecing out the crap links on the popular articles. Despite this, I don't think nofollow should be removed. I run my own website and it is very useful to look at the stats and see where the inbound links are coming from. Also, this is sort of like "Build the web" ( WP:WEB) on an Internet scale. I don't think it should be done away with; we just need to stay vigilant against link spam. -- Cyde Weys vote talk 20:34, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
is there a program to download wikipedia as a database so it can be viewed offline? i don't know much about programing but it seems like it would be easy to take the pages and make them avalable offline
Hey there boys and girls. I just had an idea, although it's pretty belated.. Well, i always go to watch Manchester United when they're at home, and today was no exception. Now, i know that there's a lot of football fans out there who wouldn't mind reporting on the games they go see for their home team, and through that - i was thinking of making a project; WikiFootball, to cover the news and events of football in the UK, but was unsure how the wiki-foundation views such projects?
Appreciate any clarity! Cheers. Spum 22:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
The solution I propose to the edit wars that have come to plaque wikipedia is to allow users to select their own terminal edit of wikipedia entries. This enables citations to wikipedia to rely on a stable source and eliminates the grievance of some who object to the edits others do to their work. Here's how it would work:
1) Say there are two warring editors, Joe and Mary. Users could have their account configured to accept the most recent Joe edit as definitive or the most recent Mary edit.
2) Each user will be able to have a whitelist of editors they accept and/or a blacklist of those they reject. Although blacklisting is more efficient, the use of sock puppets may force whitelisting to be the norm. If a user chooses both, she will have to decide whether blacklisting or whitelisting will take priority. She will also have to decide whether to white or black list unsigned edits. Although allowing unsigned edits will be more efficient, sock puppetry may require not accepting anonymous and previously-unknown editors. However, acceptance of new editors can spread quickly, because of:
3) Black or white lists can incorporate other lists by reference, even in inverse (taking someone's else black list as a white list, for example. A gameable proposition, so possibly ill-advised). So if I like Joe's edits, I may decide also to incorporate Joe's white list. This will be a reference, not a static value, so if Joe changes an entry on his list, it will cascade through to all who include his list in theirs.
4) In practice, this will probably aggregate up into a few big megalists reflecting the major political or other orientations on controversial issues. New users, or those interested in primarily being readers, can come to accept one or a few lists regarded as definitive. There should also be way of passing a list name as a query string, so that it can part of a URL. This enables readers to select a version to peruse. This version can also be in a cookie, so a user can consistently have a list that is applied to wikipedia for him.
5) This does mean that, while anyone will still be able to edit wikipedia, one will have to get accepted by a major list or two to have one's edits show up widely. This is helpful for problems like the insertion of libelous material, though it is not a complete solution to this. Material inserted by unknown editors will not be widely visible at first. However, if a whitelisted editor touches a post after you have made changes, any changes you made that the whitelisted editor did not revert will be present in that editor's version. Hence, you do not personally have to be widely whitelisted to have your material seen.
6) If this is structured as suggested, there will be a 1:1 correspondence between users and lists (although lists may be null for some users). This means the lists can take names derived from the usernames, e..g., Joe's list, which would simplify matters. Implementation of this would be non-trivial, but shouldn't be terribly difficult. I would be happy to contribute to implementing this if desired. I would emphasize that accepting an editor as part of your list should be kept independent of accepting his list.
7) There would be some performance hit to doing this. I don't have enough information about the nuts and bolts of how wikipedia works and what resources it has to evaluate whether this would be a serious obstacle.
8) It may be desired to make an exception to a white or black listing for a particular article. This obviously could be done, but may not be demanded enough to merit doing. Edits of a particular entry could always be made visible by letting a white listed editor touch them.
9) Users will have to get educated about this to make good use of it. However, it doesn't seem like the edit wars are going away, so I think it is worth biting this bullet. After all, users had to learn to use wikipedia itself, and still learn it every day.
69.109.179.193 03:58, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Hieronymous 00:48, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
First of all, I wanted to properly sign this. I don't know why it came out anon before, but if it does again, I am Hieronymous, and this is my proposal.
I don't think that one whitelist will become that standard, but that three or four will, and those will overlap largely on non-controversial editors. I haven't been editing here lately, but my impression is that the edit wars are getting more and more serious and require more and more resources to manage, and that the results are starting to undermine the credibility of the project. Anon users can be treated as a single entity and white or black listed as a group. As for the labor involved in compiling lists, I think the fact that the lists can include others be reference and therefore and fully aggregable will be of use here. Thanks for the feedback.
Let me amplify that previous point. There is some number of people who edit wikipedia. Call that X. X changes, generally increases, over time, but is a fixed quantity at any given time. The number of people who will potentially make lists is also X. The number of controversial editors is some number less than X, my guess is much less, but obviously no greater. Therefore the number of people potentially compiling list is at least as great as the number of people to be listed. The fact that lists can incorporate one another means that all kinds of network and hierarchical efficiences come into play. This is, evidently, how Google primarily works. In short, I don't think it's as much work as it sounds, and whitelisting, specifically, would be fairly easy to maintain once in place.
Hieronymous 00:56, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
Not sure where else to post this to get a fair sampling of input, so I'm asking one & all here.
I've finally accumulated/stumbled across enough piles of information to make it feasible to create an article on every community in Ethiopia: a smaller-scale equivalent to the original Rambot (I'm thinking of calling my bot the RasTafariBot. ;-). Now, the degree of coverage will reflect just how much information I have about each community, to wit:
I'll answer one question before it is asked: why so many stubs? First, I consider them "stubs" because, having read so much about the subject, I know there's more to be written about many of these places than would be contained in one or two paragraphs. Second, & more importantly, the reason so many of these proposed articles will be stubs is that faced with a choice between sharing an insufficient, yet useful, amount of information or waiting until these articles are comprehensive -- I'm siding with sharing the information that I have. Part of the hope of Wikipedia is that if one person starts an article, even if it is not finished, another person will contribute her/his incomplete chunk of knowledge on the subject, & so on until we have a finished article.
And FWIW, of the 3 choices above, I'm happiest with the second. Unless over 90% of the feedback insists every one of those possible articles should be written, & folks are willing to struggle with the challenge having thousands of stubs about Ethiopian villages poses, I won't act on the first choice.
Now that I've had my say, I'm listening. -- llywrch 01:00, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
I would love to see an article on every town and village in the world. User:Rambot was created specifically to create an article on very town and village in the US, based on the 2000 census. We should have the same level of available information for every community in every country. User:Zoe| (talk) 19:38, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Option 2 gets my vote; Rambot had a good deal more info from the US Census data than we would get out of most of the stubs in Option 1, it sounds like. — Bunchofgrapes ( talk) 19:44, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Woodstone, you've raised the question that was in the back of my mind when I posted this RfC: what is the minimum amount of information should we expect to have in a geographical stub? I feel that it helps no one to create thousands of stubs for villages which say little more than (to pick a real & possible example): "Boramà Guddo is a village in Ethiopia at Latitude 85° 40' and longitude 40° 47'". Even adding the administrative region each lie in, & the elevation & population figure to me fails to justify its creation -- especially when there will be thousands of stubs like this. (And I suspect this would cause a headache for the folks trying to break these stubs into smaller, usable groupings.) The articles that the Ram-bot created had more information than this example.
Since this information is readily available for download & reuse on the Web -- the site I found has zipfiles containing a total of about five million geographical names & their latitude & longitude for the entire non-US world -- it's only a matter of time before some well-meaning yet naive editor starts creating tens of thousands of these stubs. This act would heavily impact Wikipedia, at the least making the "Random article" function practically useless. So any thoughts about a "recommended minimum geo-stub content rquirement", & what it should cover? -- llywrch 18:14, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I request help from anyone concerned with policy to assist here where a problem is most apparent Talk:Pope_Pius_XII#Visible_1_1_2006_Impossibility_of_a_Serious_Article, and to consider the a.r.t./'article resolution template' I suggested here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vatican_Bank#WP__Article_resolution_template. The template is not a template in the wiki form but more in the general working sense. I have proposed fair inclusion of mutually incompatible arguments before, but here I happened to place the closest I see to being useful. I have to say to reasonable users that there is a problem, which is essentially one of un-acceptable truth, as, in fact, I have yet to be presented with any hard source denying the hard source upon which -it appears- the truth does rest.Therefore I see the necessity to allow conjectural faith-based argumentation to be run in a controlled parallel manner. At present there are no possibilities of any consensus, nor will there be so long as history is claimed by faith. The whole template is a bit wooly, but better than the blood falling from the running sores in various spots in WP. Can we perhaps work it up to get over these endless edit wars? Thanks EffK 01:27, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
For some reason I posted this initially on Jimbo's talk page; figured I should put it here as well. - Roy Boy 800 17:22, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Hey, as long as this is totally separate from Wikipedia ... why the hell not? -- Cyde Weys vote talk 17:25, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, and it could be like any user can collaboratively edit anyone else's date profile and ad. Bwithh 19:10, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
We can call it nnbiowiki. - Splash talk 23:07, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to bring this suggestion over from Wikipedia_talk:Section. It suggests a configurable maximum heading level for a section to be included in an article's Table of Contents. Anything below the level is ignored by the TOC, but remains as a heading in the article body. The example given is Timpani article, which has subheadings that, while important to the article, are far too detailed to be included in the TOC.
As well as setting the level globally, there should also be a function to set it on a branch-by-branch basis, for flexibility. -- Tom Edwards 13:24, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Out of frustration with the bluntness of AfD and speedy deletion procedures, I've created Template:Nothanks-vanity for welcoming new users who create vanity articles. Questions, comments, and insults are welcome at my talk page. Gazpacho 04:28, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
When a page is displayed in edit mode, would it be possible to display the contributor's name or IP address of that particulr edit. At present, if one views the history, a contributor's name is available, but if reverting to a previous version, as soon as you go to edit mode, the information isn't on your screen. Therefore if you want to write an edit comment such as 'revert to last version by so-and-so', you have to flip back to the history (or have a good memory, not easy for IP addresses, I find). This surely would be a very small change that would streamline reversion quite nicely. Or is there a way to do it already thaty I haven't spotted? Comments? Graham 01:18, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
http://sam.zoy.org/wikipedia/godmode-light.js
→
Aza
Toth 12:15, 28 December 2005 (UTC)I agree. This information is useful when writing edit summaries, and already exists. Why not have it available where needed? (I'd also like to see an edit summary preview when I do a Show Preview while we're at it) LloydSommerer 02:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia suffers the same weakness as Google when it comes to searching for a Book, Song, Film, or Standard. It deals in Phrases, without distinguishing whether they relate to Concepts or objects (the basic default assumption), or descriptions of concepts or objects in other form.
I suggest that Book:Ghost could be used for the book page, Film:Ghost for the film page etc. and of course just Ghost for the object/concept page. This would reduce the need for Disambiguation pages, which increasingly get in the way of searches, since so many things exist also as book or film titles. It also could be of particular use in searching for Standards. A page like Standard:ITU-R 468 (test page I created) could be much more easily searched for.
Note that MetaCategories describe the Nature of the page, not the nature of its content, and this distinguishes them from Categories. The category Standards for example is a mish-mash of articles about standards, standards bodies, articles about standards bodies, etc. Using the prefix Book: in the title of every book page would seem to have no disadvantage. It could still be redirected to from the top of a normal page, but would allow direct searching too. -- Lindosland 00:56, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
You have not taken in what I wrote Cyrius! As I explained, MetaCategories are not about content (topic) as categories are. They are about the fundamental nature (intent) of the page. Thus every Standard: pages would present a standard. They would not just be pages under the broad category 'to do with standards', which includes descriptions of standards bodies etc. Rather, they would BE standards, (albeit in summarised form - perhaps better headed Standardsum). With Books and films it actually goes a bit deeper, because a page that begins Book: should, strictly, actually BE a book (or at least the exact text of a book), and while this is appropriate to MetaCategories on the Web, it is not currently within the remit of Wikipedia. Strictly, the MetaCategory Booksum: would be appropriate, meaning that the nature of the page was a 'summary of a book'. Whether we use Booksum: or Book: depends on whether we anticipate the extension of metacategories to the Web as a whole (where they would help Google searching enormously!). Similarly categories like Songlyric: and Song could exist, the latter being the actual download. Again you see the 'intention' of the page - to provide a song lyric or a song download. -- Lindosland 13:06, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
I think it might be a good idea to have a "PDA" version of Wikipedia. I was thinking simple HTML, limited graphics, designed for a small screen, mostly text only and not too many frames. Is anyone with me on this idea?
I have created {{ editprotected}} to request edits to protected pages. -- Zondor 06:00, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
Very often, when I've added specific fact references to an well-fleshed out article, I provide the direct quote from the source that I cite, after the citation. I have been asked to start a discussion on this, and I have done so on Wikipedia:Citing sources. Please comment there. Thanks! JesseW, the juggling janitor 08:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
I've posted a proposal about categories and subcategories here. Please take a look. I'd appreciate feedback. The proposal concerns the relationship of categories and their topic articles, situations when articles may be in both a category and its subcategories, and some other general guidelines for categorization. These topics have been under discussion for many months (or should I say years!) This isn't quite to the vote stage, but it is getting close. Thanks. -- Samuel Wantman 08:51, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
When I was new around here, and in need of the assistance of an Admin, I was very uncertain how to find one. Now that I am an admin, I have some suggestions of how Amins can be more visible:
All these posting should be presented as a way of offering assistance, and not to convey that big brother is watching. -- Samuel Wantman 09:51, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
All these comments are correct, but perhaps I'm not stating my point well. To a new user, the method of finding and getting the help of an admin when needed is not obvious. Isn't helping new users a role of admins? How should they find us? Admins were selected because they have the trust of the community. As such, they should be setting good visible examples of behavior and not flaunting their minimal powers. -- Samuel Wantman 22:51, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
What if we put a link to the list of admins on Template:Welcome, saying something like, "these people may be helpful".-- Pharos 22:58, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately, having admins editing side-by-side with non-admins in the open can have an influence on the editing experience; in other words, participation in the process can influence the process. This is because there are a very few editor/admins who have strayed over the line separating editorship and adminship, to the detriment of all admin reputations (I don't know how pervasive this impression is, but it does rear its head from time to time in various places). I believe I made a suggestion that has been shuffled into the history of some talk page that when an editor receives an adminship a new username should be created that is the original username + some suffix ... maybe simply "admin", so that User:RosanneRosannadanna would have a second account User:RosanneRosannadanna_admin. This would have several positive effects; first, it would allow complete separation of admin and non-admin roles; second, it would allow complete visibility of all actions conducted by the user while in the admin role; third, it would allow a specific and automated measure of admin activity or inactivity. Think of this as issuing a uniform to admins, a uniform that should be worn while conducting admin-related business and not worn while going about the routine business of being Joe Editor, Expert on Widgets and Widget Flanges. I am not an admin, but if this dichotomy of roles were established I would consider self-nominating for an adminship, and I don't think I am alone in that feeling. User:Ceyockey ( talk to me) 23:39, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't think this is a good idea for two reasons:
xaosflux Talk/ CVU 05:29, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Just made the above template because i noticed that a lot of articles were just lists, and would be much better off just splitting the links down and then adding category tags in there, the pages really should be category listed anyway. For an example, please check Illnesses related to poor nutrition.
Spum 13:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
I do, and Spum's idea makes sense. Although the two are complementary, sometimes the wrong one is used. A collection of items that's simply an alphabetical list is better as a category; a collection of items which need to be in some specific order or have extra information, or would have a lot of (to be filled) red links is better as a list. For that reason I'd also suggest a complementary template to go in categories that might be better as lists. BUT (and it's a biggie), this needs to be coordinated with AFD and CFD, rather than done off one person's bat, since categorising what was a list involves deleting the list (AFD), and listifying a category involves deletion of the category (CFD). Grutness... wha? 22:33, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
I hereby propose WikiEffort, the wiki counterpart of BOINC.
Comments welcome-- Joris Gillis 09:36, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
It's an interesting idea. Maybe even suggest two different tasks. You're more likely to get something that interests the user, and you have the "Which colour would you like it in?" type of hard-sell. Maybe you could have a box which says:
Would you rather: *Write a short article on the topic " Sabine-Southwestern War" *Improve an article on the topic " Meditation" or *Proofread the article on the topic Albert_Wesker?
selecting one requested article, one article that needs to be taken to featured status, and one article in need of copy-editing. -- Slashme 11:55, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
Oh, right. That seems sensible too ;-] -- Slashme 12:33, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
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An exchange from my talk page:
I am very surprized that my idea of wikipedia calendar was met with indifference and urge to kill.
I have a feeling that wikipedia will not die any time soon. What's wrong with keeping track of our own history, of notable events? Of course, really notable accomplishments should go into the global calendar. But IMO we have plenty of events of "local pride", so to say, which are notable for the wikipedia community.
I am not particularly zealous about this my idea, and I have no problems with deletion of what I've already done. But I'd like to hear a broader reaction first. mikka (t) 21:35, 9 December 2005 (UTC)
THE IDEA: Another forum to discuss what the vision should be about before it is shaped by outside interests that are in conflict with the success of wikipedia. Seigenthaler has become a kind of conduit for others to assert their own agendas.
The media has an agenda to report and grab attention, "salaciate." Apparently, Mr. Seigenthaler has a need for attention as well. Academia is another critic of wikipedia. These gatekeepers are threatened by its populism: The constructs of Wikipedia are excellent and continues to excel. There is nothing like it for providing a central voice for people to communicate and nothing like it for people to glean information. Its popularity and usuage is evidence of this.
The whole Seigenthaler incident points to a need for strong leadership.
Wikipedia should not attempt to follow the insistence or pressure of media, academia and other gatekeepers therefore become another gatekeeper or delimiter for voice and information.
The attacks from someone as prudish as Seigenthaler should have been expected. Also there should be some idea of how to respond to such incidents in advance. This is leadership. Wikipedia cannot and does not have to kowtow to anyone. This is also leadership.
It would be great for those that care about wikipedia to have some say as to what the response should be to continued and perhaps increasing attacks or criticism from those who do not share in the success of this project.
An example of what could be done is a collaborative effort to define statements (a kind of press release) that can be reported to the media to buttress concerns or attacks. This allows the formidable collective intelligence of wikipedia users to weigh in against competing pressures...again from other interests that do not share in wikipedia's success.
I use mainly korean wikipedia. I suggest, Korea counter + English Conter + Commons + Source + etc... so, "All" counter will be good!! WonYong 10:32, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Reading down a list of Civil Wars I see that First Sudanese Civil War is listed under F and Second Sudanese Civil War is therefore under S. These should surely betogether in any index? I appreciate the category sort will work on the first word. If this cannot be overcome simply, would it not make sense to favour titles that avoid this problem such as Sudanese Civil War (first). Having World War I and World War II is already prefered to First World War and Second World War which are redirects. Is this already governed by a manual of style or soemthing that can be discussed for change. If so I propose it. Dainamo 13:03, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
is there any way possible to add some sort of sorting filter to "what links here" in the same way as user contribs? So, for example you could click on "What links here" and find all the talk pages, or user pages, or wikipedia-space pages alone that link to a page? I think it would be a useful thing to have. Grutness... wha? 11:37, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
I propose every year starting with 2005 Wikipedia produce a vetted "Best of Wikipedia - (year)" with as many articles as can be reviewed, improved and approved and provided as a stable can't be edited publication both on the internet and in print. I know lots of work along these lines is currently going on. It's the once a year, "Best of" part I haven't heard from anyone else yet. WAS 4.250 16:15, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Restricted image licenses is a proposal to accept a slightly more limited license for images, one which might be acceptable to many content creators/copyright owners who are not willing to release images under the GFDL. Your comments and views are welcome. DES (talk) 04:53, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
How? Template:Tl -- Perfecto Canada 03:28, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Aw that's no fun. How many articles are using it, I'm curious. My browser almost crashed finding out. Is it over 10,000? -- Perfecto Canada 03:40, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Are you sure? -- Perfecto Canada 03:55, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
Don't I get an award for pointing this out? I saved the project a big disgrace, and this proves my trustworthiness and self-control. -- Perfecto Canada 04:24, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I made a template - Template:lookfrom, which links to all pages starting with those letters. How best to integrate this into Wikipedia? -- For One World 19:15, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I am aware that there has been some debate over using British vs. American spellings of English. I propose a new tag and corresponding profile setting that provides both settings, such as [[dialect:color|colour]] or something like that. We could probably even have the server autodetect the country to provide American spellings for people in the U.S. and Brittish spellings for people in the U.K. (we'd still have to decide on a default for other countries & for users whose country can't be determined.) Phantom784 22:05, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
{{ Maintained}}
I will be starting a new template for the top portion of talk pages, which will list something to this effect: "This article is maintained by the following users. Contact them regarding verification and sources." Users who either helped write the majority of a page (such as a featured article) or users knowledgeable about the subject, can add their names to the template and will be listed as points of contact for readers requesting verification of the page's contents. It also lets readers know that the page is being watched for any vandalisms. Any suggestions? — 0918 BRIAN • 2005-12-13 21:56
The idea goes somewhat against the wiki culture. It could suggest a kind of "ownership" of pages. From the history of an article it is not difficult to find out which users actively working on it. The template would risk becoming outdated. − Woodstone 23:13, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
WikiProject Adding templates | This article is part of the Big orange templates WikiProject, which aims to expand Wikipedia's coverage of talk pages with templates on them. If you would like to participate, you can edit this article, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks. |
Ummm, how is this useful compared to, say, the History tab, or the talk page? I don't mean to be too snarky, but when folks introduce weirdness into an article where I'm one of the few experts, they find out about it pretty quickly from my watchlist lighting up. Geogre 13:48, 14 December 2005 (UTC)
I just had an idea that I thought I would propose and see if it floats - currently there is a way to tag an edit as minor; I propose that edits can also be marked as a revert - either automatically (by editing an outdated version of the page) or manually (like marking an edit as minor). I know conventions exist, but if the functionality were identical to minor edits then one could for instance hide reverts on watchlists, and identifying three reverts could be made easier. Neo 04:59, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
I have a credit card that supports the American Medical Student Association. When I signed up, they said that 1% of my purchases would go to AMSA, and while I can't specifically find that on the website, it does say "Carry the card that supports your chosen profession." Here is a similar Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE, credit card. I would definitely carry a credit card that supports Wikipedia and helps buy new servers as I go about daily business. -- Truc-HaMD Thu 24 Nov 05 12:22 -800 UTC
Sounds like a good idea to me. +sj + 20:48, 7 December 2005 (UTC)
please allow donations in other currencies like rupee
One way to make vandalism obvious would be to automatically highlight any recent changes in the text with a slightly off-white color. This would make it impossible to introduce very subtle changes (such as adding a "not" or modifying a link) without becoming visible.
It would also draw attention to recent edits, because either they or what used to be in their place is likely to deserve improvement.
This would require a change to the rendering engine so that it would automatically consult recent versions.
This is a more scalable method than page validation, only requiring more CPU cycles, zero moderator cycles.
I think it would be handy to have templates that are invisible at view time, but pop up and alert the user when they go to edit a page. Such a thing would have many applications: alerting a user to the history of a page, conventions (eg, "Use British spelling here"), letting users know whether restructuring changes are likely to be appreciated by other users, warning users not to add the same piece of information which has been added hundreds of times before...
I'm sure someone will reply that all these should go on the talk page. Well, who reads talk page history before making changes, anyway? :)
This old chestnut is a perennial discussion: the suffix "ize" is not an American trait. Most words in British English that end with this suffix can be "ise" or "ize" (there are some exceptions as there are words that should end in "ise" in American English. In fact the OED prefers the use of "ize" as do many accademic sources. [1]. "ise" in British/commonwealth English seems to have crept into use more over the course of the latter twentieth century (find any old English dictionary and you will srtuggle to find "ise"). It has reached such ubiquity outside accademic circles that many British/Commonwealth readers often mistake the "ize" as Ameircan. Most dictionaries now list both suffixes as acceptable in British English, but if we are writning an international project and we have a choice, it makes sense to use the spelling that would be usiversally acceptable to all English Speakers and matches other existing links.
I propose the logic should also apply to examples such as Gaol and Jail in British English and Ketchup and Catsup in American English). Dainamo 13:13, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I've suggested permanently protecting a range of high-volume templates in order to lessen the impact of vandalism on the hardware. See Wikipedia_talk:Protection_policy#Template_protection. -- bainer ( talk) 23:09, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
How about replacing the requested articles on Special:Recentchanges with the current CotWs? Since anons can't create new articles anymore, it makes sense to do something that they can more easily participate in -- there'd be a lot of general copyediting and tweaking. Wikipedia has an article on everything notable that is not obscure, I think, and the vast majority of people have no inclination and/or resources to do the required research. CotWs tend to be general subjects that a lot of people can help out in (and that interest a lot of people). We could have the general Wikipedia:Collaboration of the week and one or two of the more specialized ones (and active ones, as a bonus, this would be an incentive for more active CotWs) on a rotating basis. Tuf-Kat 07:41, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
With most people using higher and higher desktop resolutions (1600x1200 here), I find it sometimes really hard to read through an article seeing as the text spans over the whole width of the screen (imagine having to read a 30cm large page). Wouldn't it be possible to force a smaller column width for readability's sake?
Please note that this has no effect on my IE6 browser (it's ok in firefox) − Woodstone 15:51, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
Hello fellow editors, I posted at WP:MoS's talk page before I found out about this page. Please see Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style#Wikilinks_when_quoting for my original policy query. If I may re-phrase myself I'd say that wikilinks in quotes should not be used or with great caution as they may impose the editor's bias on the quote. Though its a matter of enriching articles vs. fear of corruption of statements I'd say that the latter outweigh the benefits. Scoo 11:34, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Piped link says "Do not use piped links to create " easter egg links"". Follow that everywhere including while quoting and the problem goes away. WAS 4.250 16:43, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
I see that there's a large French speakers community in Wikipedia. Is anyone a fan of creating a collaboration project much like the Spanish Translation of the Week, since there's a lot of great featured french articles. CG 20:55, 12 December 2005 (UTC)
Given that when I first came here, ( September 2002) we had less than 100,000 articles and this was not foreseen, and now we are up to 800,000+ articles, I say a small celebration should be in hand when that 1,000,000th article is created. Maybe a banner congratulating the poster and the article written, provided it actually is an article and not some sort of vandalism, vanity, etc. What do you guys think?
God bless
Antonio Me Me Me for 1,000,000th!!! Martin
We should also think about the fact that if we intend to make a big deal out of it, there will be all sorts of cretins and yahoos waiting in the wings, hovering over their "submit" buttons, ready to pounce the instant the existing count reaches 999,999, so they can proclaim that their silly troll article on creative navel bubble gum moulding (or worse) is the millionth. It occurs to me that one way to guard against this would be to inject some deliberate noise -- a random, plus-or-minus fudge factor of 100 or so -- into the published "total article" count. That'd make it harder to "game", but an admin with access to the database could still determine, after the fact, what the truly 1,000,000th article had been. Steve Summit ( talk) 20:47, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm a daily wikipedia user and contributor, and I use wiki for any information I need for projects. Even though I trust the content in wikipedia many teachers and professionals do not like wikipedia being used as a source. They say it isn't relieble. I have two suggestions to fix this.
Thank you very much orginal contributor: User:Aytakin on 2005-12-07 22:37:33 +0100
Have some professional and more knowledgeable editors checking the work of contributors.
I had the exact same thought earlier today when I used Wikipedia as a reference. It sounds cheap with the "free" in there. Replacing it with something along the lines of "Non-Profit" Encyclopedia makes it sound more authoritative. Ereinion 03:47, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
No one should be using an encyclopedia as more than a starting point in any kind of serious research, anyways. Voyager640 06:18, 11 December 2005 (UTC)
It isn't reliable. I'm a big fan of wikipedia. But at this point it isn't reliable. You could start your own web site where you have a staff comb over every article and then call say it was derived from wikipedia or whatever the lic will allow.-- Gbleem 15:38, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. Good expository writing is always a balance between telling too much and telling too little, between crisp prose and thorough explanation.
The tensions arise largely because readers come to articles with a wide range of needs, knowledge and interpretive skills. Consider, as an extreme example, the information content of an article about a new heart-bypass surgery technique. The text and vocabulary that is (immediately) useful to a patient with a high-school education is very different from the text that is useful to a cardiac surgeon.
For the extreme example above, the best compromise possible in a single article is copious hyperlinking in the context of a summary discussion. For less extreme cases, however, an ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
For example, the three paragraphs above might appear in elided form as shown below.
It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. ... An ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
In the above paragraph, the elision required the word 'an' to be capitalized in the elided form. This is a small example of a general case. To be useful, a well-defined ellipsis markup needs to support replacement text so that both the elided and expanded versions are grammatically correct.
The exact markup syntax should, of course, be determined by the WikiMedia developers. The visual indicators should clearly indicate the presence of an expandable elision and yet be minimal enough that normal reading is not disrupted. I've used the tradition three-dot ellipsis in my example but it is not clear whether this is the best choice for an indicator that is also a hyperlink that expands inline. At the very least, the ellipsis indicator should be obedient to browser settings for hyperlink coloring and decoration.
From an editor's point of view, ellipsis markup offers an alternative way to compress long articles without information loss. For the reader, expanding an ellipsis would, in my opinion, be less disruptive to the flow of comprehension than transitioning away from the page under consideration via hyperlinks.
-- Michael.f.ellis 16:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
We want to have all the articles reviewed, to prevent hoaxes and increase the quality of the articles. I propose to form boards of reviewers at each WikiProject and Wikiportal each board adopts a group of categories related to their Project/Portal. We can also form a wildcard review board for the categories that are not adopted by any project.
A member of a review board should be a registered user with at least a few months of experience, never founded to commit hoaxes and other bad faith editions, who has some good quality contributions in the field of the board. The board can be originally elected by the participants of the project/portal and then co-opted by the consensus of the board members or by additional voting. For the wildcard review board lets say that the administrators are the original wildcard board.
What do the reviewers - they review articles on their adopted categories. If an article is reviewed does not mean that it is a perfect article. It only means that it is not a hoax, that it is not in a vandalized stage and that all the applicable tags are there. If it a stub, than it labelled as a stub, it it POV then it is labelled as POV, if it needs clean up - it labelled for clean up, if a minor fact is dubious - than it clearly marked as dubious, etc. If an article already was reviewed, than the next review means that it is clearly in better state than it was at the previous review. If the article became worse since the last review the reviewed status should be withdrawn. If there are arguments between the reviewers, than the decision should be voted (probably by consensus as with the adminships), if there is no consensus it goes in RfC, Arb com etc.
After reviewing an article, the reviewer leaves a template message, showing the name of the board, his own name and the date at the bottom of the article. He/she also clearly marks "Article was reviewed by the board member" in the edit summary. Reviewer can not review an article if he was a major contributor to it ( or the major contributor to the changes since the last review, if the article was already reviewed). For people who are not official reviewers leave messages masquerading as a review should be a blockable offence.
In future, if we will have a large pull of reviewed article we could have a GUI switch between the latest reviewed version and the development version as well as "revert to the latest reviewed version" button. We could also have a separate colors for the links to the reviewed and non-reviewed articles, toolbox for the reviewers, etc.
Advantages: improves quality by forcing systematical reviews, starting point for checking - comparing with the latest reviewed version, CD distributions should be done based on the latest reviewed version if they are available. I also hope the decision would curb revert wars and give some recognition to good participants of particular projects abakharev 09:31, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Noticed its placement when reverting something on Jimmy Wales, could that link be moved to the same line and font size (right justified) as "From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia." - Roy Boy 800 20:59, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
As a relatively inexperienced user, I notice that one of the things I don't really know how to do is to cite sources for an article, especially non-Internet ones. There is no button or text box for inserting citations, and no link to information on what style of bibliographic citation I should use to cite a book or article. If I follow the "help" link on the far left, I'm taken to a page with a multitude of links, many of which seem like they *might* help me with citing sources, but it's hard to be sure. (I'm not even sure what a wiki-bibliography should be called: "Sources"? "Bibliography"? "Further Reading"?).
Since the lack of internet and, especially, non-internet, sources is a big problem for wikipedia articles, I would suggest considering how the "edit" page might be changed to make it easier to cite articles, and to indicate that such citations are generally expected, and appreciated. Changes might include a text-box for citations, or buttons for "add web citation" or "add non-internet citation" or just prominant "Adding Citations" help button located near the "save page" button. I'm not sure how this could best be implemented. But in my humble opinon, it would be very beneficial to wikipedia to encourage people to include better citations by making it easier to do so.
[On preview: Ok I just noticed that the "edit" page includes a helpful link from the word "sources." But it's hidden in what seems like legal fine-print: ("Content must not violate any copyright and must be based on verifiable sources. By editing here, you agree to license your contributions under the GFDL.") But this info should be more visible, and citing should be made a more integrated and normal part of the editing process, I think.] -- ThaddeusFrye 17:09, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Is there a Wikiproject: Cuba around here? If not, I propose we have one. -- Antonio Not Marti but Martin
I just ran across MIT's OpenCourseWare. Darned impressive resource. I was thinking that we should probably add to External Links wherever relevant, but I don't want to be accused of spamming (on behalf of an institution to which I have no connection, by the way) so I thought I'd come here first and see what others think. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:40, 17 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm glad I checked in here! -- Jmabel | Talk 01:09, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
It sometimes happens that defmaatory contnet, information that violates privacy, copyvio content, or a personal attack can be placed in an edit summery. In this case there is no way to get rid of the damaging content short of compeltely deleting the articel and recreatign it at a different name without its history, or else having a developer make direct changes in the DB. This is true sience even deleted edit summeries are now visible to any user who looks at the history and clicks "view nn deleted edits". See Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/IncidentArchive50# Edit Summery Vandalism on Judith Krug for an example.
Also, rather more often, an edit summery can be highly misleading.
I propose that the software be changed so that admins, or some more limited group (perhaps B'crats?) be enabled to change existing edit summeries. Use of this feature should of course be logged: the log should should the articel title, the revision timestamp, and the old and new edit summeries. (Alternatively this feature might be limited to the summeries of deleted revisions.)
I know this will require a software change, and must be propsoed on MediaZilla, but there is no point in askign the developers for this unless there is soem support for havign such a feature. If this proposal gets soem support, i will log a feature request. DES (talk) 21:20, 8 December 2005 (UTC)
another proposal: If an registered user has edited an article and left the summary field blank he should get the chance to add a summary later for his own edits.-- 84.169.52.4 19:02, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
And while we're at it, how about the ability to preview the summary. If I put a misspelled link in it there is no way to know or fix it until it is too late. -- Samuel Wantman 11:43, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
I think that it would be nice if the logs and deleted edits ( Kate's Tool) for blocked users were accessible from the block list. Often times, blocked users would have nothing showing up in their contributions. If the user wasn't blocked for an inappropriate username, it can be very time-consuming to check what they have done. This mainly applies to image-upload vandals and users who create nonsense pages. Anyone agree with me? -- Ixfd64 04:11, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
It's my opinion that an ellipsis markup would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. Used effectively, it would allow editors and authors to improve the readability of long articles without deleting information or hyperlinking to another article. The basic idea is to have a symbol that indicates the presence of additional text. When clicked it would expand the text inline.
I think ellipsis is needed because good expository writing is always a balance between telling too much and telling too little, between crisp prose and thorough explanation. The tensions arise largely because readers come to articles with a wide range of needs, knowledge, and interpretive skills. Consider, as an extreme example, the information content of an article about a new heart-bypass surgery technique. The text and vocabulary that is (immediately) useful to a patient with a high-school education is very different from the text that is useful to a cardiac surgeon. For this example, I believe most of us would agree that the best compromise possible in a single article is copious hyperlinking in the body of a summary discussion.
But there are many less extreme cases where an ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
For example, the three paragraphs above might appear in elided form as shown below.
It's my opinion that an ellipsis operator would be a useful addition to the wiki editing toolbox. ... An ellipsis indicator (e.g. '...' ) would allow short sections of text to be hidden from the main flow until the reader either clicks the indicator or changes a preference setting so that the full text of the article is displayed.
In the above paragraph, the elision required the word 'an' to be capitalized in the elided form. This is a small example of a general case. To be useful, a well-defined ellipsis markup needs to support replacement text so that both the elided and expanded versions are grammatically correct.
The exact markup syntax should, of course, be determined by the WikiMedia developers. The visual indicators should clearly indicate the presence of an expandable elision and yet be minimal enough that normal reading is not disrupted. I've used the traditional three-dot ellipsis in my example but it is not clear whether this is the best choice for an indicator that is also a hyperlink that expands inline. At the very least, the ellipsis indicator should be obedient to browser settings for hyperlink coloring and decoration.
From an editor's point of view, ellipsis markup offers an alternative way to compress long articles without information loss. For the reader, expanding an ellipsis would, in my opinion, be less disruptive to the flow of comprehension than transitioning away from the page under consideration via hyperlinks.
-- Michael.f.ellis 16:13, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Here is a modest proposal which is bound to get me flamed to a crisp: Why not use the space under the toolbox for google pageads? It would not be invasive, there is blank space there anyway, and it would bring in so much money that it could be discontinued after one year, leaving enough funding to keep the foundation in hardware for a decade. Maybe we could, instead of having a fundraiser every now and then, make December the PageAd month. -- Slashme 11:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Maybe it's just because I'm a registered user, but wouldn't it be wiser to make the ads visible to anon. users before registered users? After all, registered users tend to contribute more than anonymous users, and we're less likely to click on the ads. But I would say the best would simply be to make the ads visible to all. The faster we make our target, the faster we can ditch the ads. Here's a thought: Make the ads come on at the same time as a fundraiser. If the ads irritate you enough, you'll pay to get rid of them ;-)
As an aside, to see what they would look like, see the Uncyclopedia main page. -- Slashme 12:11, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
It seems to me that:
But if the community is dead set against it, who am I to stand against the masses? When was the last vote held? How overwhelming was the vote? -- Slashme 13:52, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Wow. After reading that petition, I realized just how hypersensitive some wikipedians are, and just what a hornets nest it indeed is (thanks Shimgray!). Is it just a vocal minority that believes that the trustees of WikiMedia are here for personal enrichment, or would a couple of PageAds really cause a large rebellion? Maybe if they took a closer look at the WikiMedia Budget, and compared it to any real-world company, they'd be a bit more understanding. Really, $33,000 is not a lot of money to pay 2 full-time and 2 part-time staff. Almost all the money goes to hardware!
Anyway, the reason that I raised this here was that I didn't know where to find this kind of information. Is this not by now a frequently-enough asked question to go into the FAQ? -- Slashme 17:47, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
For the foreseeable future, fundraising alone should be able to continue to pay to keep the server farm humming and the foundation running at minimally acceptable levels (that is, if we spend 25% of the year fundraising). Doing more than that will require grants and large donations. At the same time we *all* need to understand that, by choosing to *not* have something like GoogleAds we are giving up millions of dollars of revenue each quarter. The mission of the foundation is to freely give every single person access to the sum of human knowledge and to do so in their own language. Revenue from something like GoogleAds could be used to expand our reach outside of areas where cheap high-speed Internet access is ubiquitous. We often forget that that still accounts for the great majority of humanity. But we can't do something like that without community support. Just make sure your decisions in this matter are fully informed and not the result of a gut reaction against advertising. BTW, I'm talking for myself and not at all in any official capacity as a foundation officer. --
mav 18:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
Not that I'm against the whole idea, but it is worth pointing out why people don't like it. Wikipedia's trustworthiness (such as it is) depends on it's only being subject to the sway of its editors and not external forces. Suppose we become dependent on Google Ads, and an article criticizes one of google's endeavors. What do we do if Google says, remove the critical article or we will pull the ads from your page? I'm not saying google would do that, but it would put wikipedia in quite a bind. Either we sacrifice the encyclopedia or change our content slightly. Even if this were to never happen, people would definately accuse us of doing it. This is why Consumer Reports doesn't do advertising. Not because they couldn't still be objective, but because no one could trust that they were. --best, kevin kzollman][ talk 02:04, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Maybe if we just had PageAds on during our fundraisers, it would on the one hand allay fears of manipulation, and also make the fundraisers shorter. As for the discussion at the VP, where is the best place to discuss issues like this? -- Slashme 06:26, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
For us, money is not nearly as important as goodwill. We are doing fine on the money side, so gambling with goodwill is unnecessary and dangerous. The Spanish Wikipedia broke off when Larry Sanger mentioned the possibility of his salary being covered by advertising in the future. I am sure that the German Wikipedia would break off if advertising were initiated; indeed their fundraising message right now says "Help us keep Wikipedia and its sister project in the public domain and free of advertising in the future".
If you want to see Wikipedia with ads, check out about.com. They have good content, but everybody hates it. Nobody contributes to such a site: deep down, you're afraid that somebody will profit from your work other than you. (Which is true: the advertisers profit.)
Advertisements are inherently POV. It doesn't make sense to remove spammed links from the articles, and then invite them back in to the highest bidder in the form of Google ads.
And regarding the point that mav raises above (it's also one of Jimbo's talking points): we might need advertising money in the future to distribute encyclopedias to people without net access. To that I say: If we ever got our act together and produced anything that's worthy of distribution, philanthropic organizations would be more than happy to fund it. Money is never an issue in these things, there are plenty of rich foundations eager to give it away; you just write up a decent proposal and that's that. AxelBoldt 16:49, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikimedia should use a system similar to OpenID to avoid the hassle of needing to sign up for a separate account on each sister project. It would mean that if I want to post on fr:, just to make some minor adjustment but I can't be bothered opening an account, I would be able to post as "pfctdayelise from en:w:", more or less. You would still be able to open a separate account if you had a serious interest in multiple projects, but it could be very handy especially for a project like commons, where most people are not interested in hanging around, but just uploading their photos and then going back to their "main" project. It would also mean people with accounts on other wikis could start articles here without needing to sign up for an account.
It is used at the moment on blogs/livejournal. It would probably require some modification for the wikimedia projects, but I think it could be a workable solution to this annoying problem, and it seems more realistic than scrapping everyone's account and starting again with a centralised database, or somehow merging all the existing accounts together into a centralised database. pfctdayelise 03:57, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
I'd like to contribute to the French to English translations and am having a hard time understanding what is going on!
One of my confusions comes from the translation status. I seem to be finding several articles which are listed under the "Requested" translations, even though they appear to be status "Done". I noticed someone else found it a "shambles" in their words, so I'm not the only one!
Is there a way to move these articles automatically, or does someone need to monitor/clean it up? Should the choice of status be limited by using a pull-down menu?
Having a tutorial called "How to translate an article" would also be very helpful, as the instructions are written from the point of view of the person requesting the translation, but not the person who's going to do it.
Thanks for all your thoughts & help (I've a headache trying to get to grips with it all)
-- Carolille 17:00, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
WHEREAS Featured Articles represent the best work of Wikipedia, and
WHEREAS Featured Articles should be edited with extra care if doing major revisions, as community consensus has approved of the current version, and
WHEREAS Featured Articles are a major step forward Wikipedia 1.0+, and ultimately printed/CD-based wikipedias, where all articles go through community appraisal
THEREFORE, Featured Articles should be visibly distinguished; and
WHEREAS the English Wikipedia has no distinguishment of Featued Articles on the article itself (only on talk pages), and
WHEREAS other Wikipedias have successfully adopted various distinguishments,
NOW, THEREFORE,
I propose all articles to include the template FeaturedSmall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:FeaturedSmall
What it does: It places a small yellow star in the top right corner of featured articles, followed by the text "ARTICLENAME is a Featured Article"
This template is already successfully used on other wikipedias, such as the Italian Wikipedia, for distinguishment of featured articles (see http://is.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6rfuknattleikur).
The template is not overly pompeous, it does not "brag" the article excessively, and does NOT convey the message that it is "elite" compared to others. As well, it does NOT look restrictive or critical of change. It does, however, display the featured status of the article right ON the article, without need to go to the talk page.
I propose that all Wikipedia Featured Articles use this template.
It would need to be minorly adjusted (from "top:72px" to "top:10px") once the Fundraising Drive is over, for proper layout, but otherwise it will be stable.
Articles having the template would look exactly like the article on the Italian wikipedia I gave the link to. I also chose ONE (since there was no community consensus yet) English article to use the template on, and it will be there unless someone decides to revert it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond
Some discussion has already occured at the Technical board, where I inquired why don't we use them, and I found out it is used in some wikipedias but not others. So, I propose we use it here.
If adopted, the FeaturedSmall template should be locked, since it would be present on over 700 pages. Elvarg 03:01, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
For the 977th time, NO. One of the important things about Wikipedia is that it be easily replicable. This means it is very important to keep metadata out of articles -- metadata makes replicating our content elsewhere very difficult. Featured articles are (by definition) supposed to explify our best standards and practicies. This means keeping them free of metadata. Raul654 20:40, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
I was looking for Christmas and birthday presents lately, and since the subject is as much a Wikipedian as I am, I was looking into the possibility of somehow combining the fundraising with the Christmas/Birthday aspect. However, I did not find any such way. Why is there no possibility to present someone with a donation to Wikipedia as a gift? The person in question would have loved to get a certificate saying "You're holding 20€ worth of free knowledge in your hands." or something. Of course, I could easily produce something like that myself, but that's not the same thing. I'd want to give out something official.
Shezoid 15:41, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
I was thinking about all of the pictures that needed to be taken of Delaware and I was wondering if noticeboards for regions should be created? My first thought was making the noticeboard (basically a request board too) in the wikipedian category. I'll create a little example that should be tweaked a lot in Category talk:Wikipedians in Delaware. I want to know what other users think. I think it would be useful since I pass a bunch of these things on a weekly basis but I have no clue what Delaware related articles are on wikipedia because Delaware is not the most interesting thing in my mind. Is there a better place than category pages? Should this be done? What uses beyong localized image requests does it have? etc. etc. gren グレン 17:56, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
For Wikipedia's 5th anniversary, I think it would be nice to have the featured article to be Wikipedia. -- Wookiebaca 22:06, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
As including a source is now (and has been for some time) required, I think it'd make sense to include a "Source" edit box (in addition to the box for "Description"). This would encourage users to include a source (be it a URL or a note saying it was scanned from a newspaper or screencapped by the uploader, or whatever). Ideally this "Source" box would add a new section (similar to how the license drop down box adds a "License" section) called, logically, "Source". :P As a side note, is there anyplace else I should suggest this (and future image upload suggestions)? — Locke Cole 02:00, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
Yeah, this must have been the wrong spot. :-| — Locke Cole 19:12, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
Page validiation, but not as on the tin. All edits would still emediately come out on the page, but they would have to be approved by a wikipedia admin. If the current version is not a accepted one, a note is put on the top of the page with a link to the last approved version of the article. Such a feauture could make the world for Wikipedias credibility. Aye? ThorRune 10:25, 16 December 2005 (UTC)
There seems to be no possibility of sponsoring a single article or a category of articles now. However, I'd propose a mechanism to to just that, which would work in conjunction with the above-mentioned gift certificates. It would work as follows:
This way, I could make sure that a certain article of my interest would get special attention, donate money to Wikipedia and give out small portions of Wikipedia as presents. Three flies in one strike!
Shezoid 16:06, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
I thought I'd better bring this here before I create it. Basically, I think we need an {{update}} template. The template would be placed at the top of articles which need updating, much like cleanup/wikify/npov/etc are. It would be useful in keeping Wikipedia up to date, as many articles as written well, and then forgotten about. Types of article which need this template most are ones on sport seasons, weekly or monthly events and chart musicians. The template could also spawn, maybe, a maintenance WikiProject dedicated to keeping Wikipedia updated. Once the article is updated, like with cleanup, the template is removed. I feel this template could become essential - There's nothing worse than out-of-date knowledge. Hedley 02:21, 27 December 2005 (UTC) Add: The template exists, but it's not something in wide use, like it's been hidden somewhere and isn't used. Hedley 02:25, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
In Special:Newpages, articles already deleted should be redlinked or otherwise indicate they no longer exist. -- Quarl 10:10, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I propose an officially sanctioned campaign to rid Wikipedia of excessive wikification of years and dates on the grounds that:
1. Only wikifying dates of the initial statement of the year and possibly the initial statement of the date if there is a significant anniversary related to the article subject is useful. All else is pointless and unnecessary.
2. There are many articles out there where not only are the first instance of dates and years wikified, regardless of whether these are significant dates or not, but every single date in the article, down to the day is wikified. Sometimes people even wikify the month and the day separately, for every single time the date is mentioned. All this should be clearly redundant - repeat wikification of the exact same phrase that isn't a date every time it occurs in an article is typically targetted for editing quickly. But repeat wikification of dates is very widespread and generally goes unedited.
3. There is a widespread misperception that excessive repeat wikification of dates is some kind of Wikipedia standard, when its not. It should be made clear that it isn't.
4. Overwikification of dates reduces the visual emphasis on properly wikified terms and phrases. Overwikfication of dates damages the user-friendliness of Wikipedia rather than enhances it.
What do other people think?
Bwithh 21:27, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal becuase, as Raul said, this would cause the date preference not to function and we'd be involved in more edit wars like the BC/BCE mess. Leave well enough alone. User:Zoe| (talk) 01:14, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
However, none of the above argumentns apply to unlinking year and otehr date elementsa that are not part of complete dates, and on which date prefereces do not work anyway. The Manual of Style already strongly discourages linking such dates. Have a look at recent edits to User:DESiegel/Date Test to see the kinds of things I am referring to. DES (talk) 01:19, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I totally agree. The only catch is that some sort of alternate date preferences formatting that doesn't require linking must be done first. -- Cyde Weys vote talk 01:30, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
As of now, the news items on the main page do not link to any concrete article that would contain further information. Ofen I read a news item and would like to find out more, but don't know where. The link to the sister project Wikinews below the items is of course prominent, but not all of the news items are also listed on Wikinews and if, they have to be found.
I would propose to create some kind of link ("more info here"/"more"/...) to a full article on Wikinews for every Main Page news item.
mmtux
talk 23:00, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Hi
I was a bit disappointed regarding the negative publicity surrounding the Wikipedia recently Although I have used the site many times when looking for something from simple to complex topics and found it great I have not contributed to a post
I would like to suggest the following to prevent further abuse of a very good tool and concept.
Charge any user who wants to contribute an article a 1 time deposit fee of 50 USD. For every article which they submit they are billed 5 dollars which is deducted from this amount. If the article goes through a time period of six months without anyone proclaiming it to be false or incorrect. The 5 dollars are added back to the persons account. Should the article be found to be false. The person who entered it is offered the opportunity to correct the entry. Should they refuse to do so they lose the 50 dollars. Where mistakes are innocent the user loses the 5 dollars but may submit the next article for free.
This covers admin costs and prevents those intent on destroying the wikipedia from succeeding. Good Luck ! Uven
That goes against the 'spirit' of Wikipedia, and will deter people from contributing. Any cost to the contributor should be avoided. But thanks anyway! Yellowmellow45 18:18, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
I agree, any cost, even if refunded, would only hamper the project. I know I wouldn't contribute under those conditions. -- Falcorian 18:51, 18 December 2005 (UTC)
This would dimnish contributions by 95%-99%. Not workable. Lotsofissues 00:14, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
2 things to note here A) Wikipedia is a non-profit orginazation so if we started charging people money that could get us in some legal trouble and B) A large percentage of contributers are teenagers or young adult who eithier don't have access to a credit card or can't risk loosing $5 an article. Deathawk 02:22, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
I appreciate that you're thinking about the problem Uven; I think the site needs some out-of-the-box ideas like yours. Petty "edit wars" are already are already a problem. Imagine how bad the arguments would become if people were screaming about their five bucks! Mikeblas 18:22, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
The other day, someone went through the Joseph Stalin article and practically wiki-linked every second word. Can we please stop this? For example, the word "bar", the word "books"...I could go on and on...
Do we really think that someone would look up Stalin, and then while reading the article, have the urge to link to the article on "bar" with its myriad meanings, or the generic "books"?
I do hope that this is not gonna become a trend...it adds nothing to any article.
Camillus talk| contribs 23:58, 6 December 2005 (UTC)
There is guidance at:
One of the root causes of overlinking is that square brackets are used for two entirely different functions (date preferences, article linking). This leads to a popular misconception that all date elements must be linked, including solitary years such as 2004. The Joseph Stalin example article suffers from this problem right now. Another root cause is that we have no objective data on which links are useful to readers, so we rely on subjective judgement of each editor. Thus there is an inherent tendancy for linking and an inherent opposition to delinking. Bobblewik 15:57, 13 December 2005 (UTC)
HOW ABOUT THIS: Wikilink every word. Turn off all the links and make every word effectively a wikilink. Of course some words will not point anywhere but then those are less likely to be words clicked on..but not always. Besides, if someone wants to click on any word, they may just need a definition or something. Who knows, we all have different interests and needs.
AN ANSWER: I have a suggestion that which might be a good compromise and make everyone happy. I created a software called LinkZu a while ago. What it does is basically allow any text on a webpage become a link by hilighting the text. It would effectively make every word on a page capable of being a wikilink but at the discretion of each individual visitor. It is javascript and I've tested it out in just about every browser and it works well. I know when I am looking at wiki articles I use the wikilinks a lot and even copy and paste text that isn't linked into the wiki search. I do sell the software, but I'd be willing to GPL the thing for use on wiki, no one buys it anyway. Check out the website(www.linzku.com) for a demonstration of how it works. I think once you educate wiki users on its functionality it would be an awesome addition to wikipedia. -- Schirinos 22:39, 19 December 2005 (UTC)
See WP:APPROVE. Don't worry, edits wouldn't be held hostage until approval. — MESSEDROCKER ( talk) 20:11, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
This isn't so much a proposal as a problem that I'm not sure how to solve. I recently hit the random article link, and up came Manas Journal. At first it didn't look like a copyvio to me because of the links. Looking at the history made me suspicious, and I did a Google search, and sure enough it was an egregious copyvio.
I marked it with the usual template and went to inform the user and found they'd already received a warning about another article. My natural response was to check their user contributions. My sad discovery was that they had added copyrighted material to all of the following articles, most of which he created, most of them over 90 days ago:
I templated them all and added them to Wikipedia:Copyright_problems/2005_December_27 (except one, which he simply added material to; I removed it and left a notice on the talk page). Needless to say, this sets a worrisome precedent: in all this time, only one of the user's many copyvio pages was caught, and no action was ever taken against them - they went on creating these things for weeks. I think the user's tendency to add links disguised their origin.
So my question: how do we prevent this kind of thing from happening again? How do we detect and stop habitual copyright violators? Deco 09:38, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Copyright violations on Wikipedia are far more common than most people realize and a portion of it goes undetected for a long time or completely undetected . For example, a lot of articles sent to cleanup and most of the articles longer than a paragraph sent for wikification are copyright violations. During one wikifying session, I wikified about 5 articles and reported 40 copyright violations. It's rather disturbing when someone does a lot of wikification work, but their name never shows up at Copyright Problems. Some of the copyright violations have been extensively edited by veteran editors and admins and most have been edited by some watching Recent Changes. Most of them are blatant and all people need to do is to look out for them. Almost all of the rest can be caught be searching Google.
As for habitual violators, I think they should be warned once or twice and then banned indefinitely. -- Kjkolb 09:57, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
To automate several tasks, a drop down menu could be displayed on the top of every article. This would simplify processes such as the deletion process. -- mmtux\ talk 00:40, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
It would be soooo useful if all Wikisearches for one spelling (eg colour) automatically also searched the other (color). Failing that, stick an automatic reminder on the search results page?
I know it should be obvious to search both, but how many readers will think of this? I'm a professional editor who has worked in both genres, and it's taken me two days to remember to check the US spellings (was editing existing articles about printing - written in C'wealth sp). Apologies if this is an oldie, tho I haven't found refs anywhere. JackyR 18:59, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
I find myself often changing links like " San Francisco, California" to " San Francisco, California, USA". How about we use templates like {{San Francisco, California}} becomes [[San Francisco, California|San Francisco]], [[California]], [[United States|USA]]. -- Quarl 10:31, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
{{
San Francisco, California}}
" --
Quarl 22:56, 27 December 2005 (UTC)Some time ago several tags were moved from the articles to the relevant talk pages since they were considered to be editors' tools and not relevant for the reader. However lack of credibility is and will continue to be a major critisism against Wikipedia. That an article has received more than the average level of scrutiny is not irrelevant for reader. Currently it's left to the new user to discover that FA process exist at all. Fornadan (t) 03:18, 15 December 2005 (UTC)
Looking for feedback on this. - Roy Boy 800 02:31, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Images that are excessively large can at times be difficult for users on lower-end machines.. per a complaint in the Featured Picture Candidate article. Apparently some browsers are also unable to even open images that are excessively large. Now when you click an image you are taken to a page that has a scaled version of the image along with a link to the high-res version.. could there possibly be intermediate sizes created by the system when an image is excessively large..? drumguy"font-family:verdana; font-size:9pt;">8800"font-family:verdana; font-size:9pt;"> - speak? 23:34, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Avoid monoculture. Use a different peice of software to handle all the discussion of meta-wikipedia affairs. Perhaps something that is not (gasp) a wiki, but something designed for goverment of a wiki. Let us not get caught up in a cycle of blind faith. Let's build some software. Kurt Gödel says what? Let's take a look at this thing form the outside. Lilhinx 09:37, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I'm suggesting something that makes Special:Contributions displays only the last edit made in a page (like the Watchlist). CG 14:16, 26 December 2005 (UTC)
Fresh from a discussion about commercial advertising masquerading as legitimate articles ( User talk:HasBeen), I come with a proposal to help reduce abuse of the Wikipaedia project as I see it from the invasion of both professional marketing and grass-roots covert advertising from e-teams.
The proposal: all articles about individual music albums and singles be copied into the relevant group or individual's biography, the deleted as stand-alone entries.
Is this important? Yes, it is very important indeed. With Wikipaedia set to be a global source of information, the inclusion of a stand-alone article in the project legitimises its contents for almost all-time! Given that the source material for most of these entries are the press releases of the various big music corporations, what was a marketing lie yesterday suddenly becomes music history tommorrow just by cut and paste into one of our user-friendly fields.
This proposal would help stem the tide of blatant advertising that is choking this excellent project. By way of example (and please don't feel victimised, it's just that this article was the first one that caught my attention being on the front page (!)) please see Cool (song). This is nothing more than a commercial for a product, and also begs the question, who is going to type the word "cool" into our search engine in the future specifically looking for this ephemeral pop song?
By moving the contents of this stand-alone article to the bio the information adds to the whole body of data on the particular group or individual, and the impact of the advert is massively reduced. Yes, the same would apply for the Beatles too, their estates still make money from promoting products (as does Michael Jackson, for the time being...)
Other marketing professionals: please note the e-teamers at work in Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Rich Girl, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/What You Waiting For?, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Luxurious (song). Could you or I boast such an army of vigilant subjects to spread brand loyalty? Also note the personalisation of the argument in favour of addressing the points made: they have been coached well. (I hasten to add that not all respondents were e-teamers! Some very helpfully guided my argument here.)
Now I ask the nightmare question: what if one of our internet-junkie, wikiholic admin team was also an e-teamer? They could pass blatant advertising off as legitimate, and there would be precious little we could say in defence.
I appreciate that this is only a small step, and that there is an argument that this seems a strange place to "draw the line" as it were. (Indeed, could such a policy work for films? Probably not...) However, by chasing away overt marketing ploys in the music industry, we can be more vigilant for a similar abuses in, say, the field of books or politics.-- HasBeen 09:31, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
Wikipedia is not a bureaucracy. A blanket ban on albums or singles sounds like an unnecessary rule. Instead, each album and single should be judged on its merits. Andjam 14:06, 23 December 2005 (UTC)
Where would you go from here? Deletion of all movies and television shows? Deletion of all articles about books? Zoe ( 216.234.130.130 17:42, 23 December 2005 (UTC))
I am sure that there are many singles and albums that have articles of their own and don't need them. I'm equally sure that I wouldn't want to make a rule to say that no singles or albums deserve articles of their own. Are you really saying that we should make The Beatles into Wikipedia's largest article? Or that featured article Just My Imagination (Running Away with Me) should be rolled into The Tempations? Or that Kind of Blue should be rolled into Miles Davis, despite the role that John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and Cannonball Adderley played on the album? This seems like just a bad idea. -- Jmabel | Talk 06:05, 24 December 2005 (UTC)
This proposal is simply ridiculous. There are countless singles that are ingrained in American culture and have been for decades, like " Somewhere Over the Rainbow" and " American Pie". Likewise there are albums that have had wide-reaching influence in the development of genres, such as Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. You can't say these don't stand on their own. That said, I'm unsure whether many ephemeral pop singles are any more notable than a single issue of a magazine, but like the latter they certainly get a lot of exposure. Deco 19:43, 25 December 2005 (UTC)
I think the labrinthine reference stuff (policy, formatting info, etc.) could use a search feature, perhaps a "side-wiki" of its own. Even as an administrator, I have to look things up often, and it's often difficult and time consuming. There must be a better way.
Anyway, I'm just voicing my frustration and not being able to find some things and invite anyone to either comment, make suggestions, or bite my head off for having missed something obvious. -- DanielCD 20:51, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
One of the major costs for wikipedia is currently hardware. For the expendable computers lower down in the information chain, would it be practical to use second-hand computers donated by wikipedians? Andjam 12:38, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
This has been suggested before. I can't remember the page, but apparently the WikiMedia foundation has filled up its racks already, and a larger computer room would be more expensive than more computers. Or something of the kind. I'll check this out soon... -- Slashme 12:56, 20 December 2005 (UTC)
I came across Meta:What we use the money for, and there's a minor mention of the possibility of donating hardware, but the page is pretty old - it's only had minor updates since 2004. Andjam 23:59, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
I would like TOC that are somewhat limited, for example a TOC only showing level-2 headings, and TOC that only shows headings under given header → Aza Toth 19:06, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
One of the reasons we get so many articles on advertising and non-notable websites, as well as link spam in established articles, is because Wikipedia's Google rank is so high, and any outgoing links get a big boost on Google. One way to stop this is to force the "nofollow" attribute on all external links. Many wikis already do this due to spam. -- Quarl 23:00, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
See Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Thothica for an example of AFDs plagued with sock puppets and/or forum recruitment, with stated reason for article of non-notable website being to enhance visibility of the website. My user page has also been childishly vandalized recently, my best guess is the sock puppets from this AFD (he also vandalized User:Perfecto). -- Quarl 23:35, 27 December 2005 (UTC)
Would it be possible to have the nofollow take effect only on new articles? If we did this than advetisments would have to stay on Wikipedia for a set amount of time (say 3 months) before they are allowed to become an external link. At the same time old "proven" aricles could be exported if they have not been deleted in 3 months. Thus We can keep the long term links, but remove one "plus" for advertisers. Can it be done, or is this not possible? Eagle ( talk) ( desk)
Eagle's suggestion is a good one but I just don't know how practical it is. Yes, of course it's possible, but it may not be an easy thing to do. The thing is this won't have much of an impact, because links are awarded PageRank values according to the popularity of the page it was linked from. A brand new article, even though it is on Wikipedia, is not going to have nearly the same weight as a link on a popular article. Still, the most important part of our efforts is going to be fleecing out the crap links on the popular articles. Despite this, I don't think nofollow should be removed. I run my own website and it is very useful to look at the stats and see where the inbound links are coming from. Also, this is sort of like "Build the web" ( WP:WEB) on an Internet scale. I don't think it should be done away with; we just need to stay vigilant against link spam. -- Cyde Weys vote talk 20:34, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
is there a program to download wikipedia as a database so it can be viewed offline? i don't know much about programing but it seems like it would be easy to take the pages and make them avalable offline
Hey there boys and girls. I just had an idea, although it's pretty belated.. Well, i always go to watch Manchester United when they're at home, and today was no exception. Now, i know that there's a lot of football fans out there who wouldn't mind reporting on the games they go see for their home team, and through that - i was thinking of making a project; WikiFootball, to cover the news and events of football in the UK, but was unsure how the wiki-foundation views such projects?
Appreciate any clarity! Cheers. Spum 22:35, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
The solution I propose to the edit wars that have come to plaque wikipedia is to allow users to select their own terminal edit of wikipedia entries. This enables citations to wikipedia to rely on a stable source and eliminates the grievance of some who object to the edits others do to their work. Here's how it would work:
1) Say there are two warring editors, Joe and Mary. Users could have their account configured to accept the most recent Joe edit as definitive or the most recent Mary edit.
2) Each user will be able to have a whitelist of editors they accept and/or a blacklist of those they reject. Although blacklisting is more efficient, the use of sock puppets may force whitelisting to be the norm. If a user chooses both, she will have to decide whether blacklisting or whitelisting will take priority. She will also have to decide whether to white or black list unsigned edits. Although allowing unsigned edits will be more efficient, sock puppetry may require not accepting anonymous and previously-unknown editors. However, acceptance of new editors can spread quickly, because of:
3) Black or white lists can incorporate other lists by reference, even in inverse (taking someone's else black list as a white list, for example. A gameable proposition, so possibly ill-advised). So if I like Joe's edits, I may decide also to incorporate Joe's white list. This will be a reference, not a static value, so if Joe changes an entry on his list, it will cascade through to all who include his list in theirs.
4) In practice, this will probably aggregate up into a few big megalists reflecting the major political or other orientations on controversial issues. New users, or those interested in primarily being readers, can come to accept one or a few lists regarded as definitive. There should also be way of passing a list name as a query string, so that it can part of a URL. This enables readers to select a version to peruse. This version can also be in a cookie, so a user can consistently have a list that is applied to wikipedia for him.
5) This does mean that, while anyone will still be able to edit wikipedia, one will have to get accepted by a major list or two to have one's edits show up widely. This is helpful for problems like the insertion of libelous material, though it is not a complete solution to this. Material inserted by unknown editors will not be widely visible at first. However, if a whitelisted editor touches a post after you have made changes, any changes you made that the whitelisted editor did not revert will be present in that editor's version. Hence, you do not personally have to be widely whitelisted to have your material seen.
6) If this is structured as suggested, there will be a 1:1 correspondence between users and lists (although lists may be null for some users). This means the lists can take names derived from the usernames, e..g., Joe's list, which would simplify matters. Implementation of this would be non-trivial, but shouldn't be terribly difficult. I would be happy to contribute to implementing this if desired. I would emphasize that accepting an editor as part of your list should be kept independent of accepting his list.
7) There would be some performance hit to doing this. I don't have enough information about the nuts and bolts of how wikipedia works and what resources it has to evaluate whether this would be a serious obstacle.
8) It may be desired to make an exception to a white or black listing for a particular article. This obviously could be done, but may not be demanded enough to merit doing. Edits of a particular entry could always be made visible by letting a white listed editor touch them.
9) Users will have to get educated about this to make good use of it. However, it doesn't seem like the edit wars are going away, so I think it is worth biting this bullet. After all, users had to learn to use wikipedia itself, and still learn it every day.
69.109.179.193 03:58, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
Hieronymous 00:48, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
First of all, I wanted to properly sign this. I don't know why it came out anon before, but if it does again, I am Hieronymous, and this is my proposal.
I don't think that one whitelist will become that standard, but that three or four will, and those will overlap largely on non-controversial editors. I haven't been editing here lately, but my impression is that the edit wars are getting more and more serious and require more and more resources to manage, and that the results are starting to undermine the credibility of the project. Anon users can be treated as a single entity and white or black listed as a group. As for the labor involved in compiling lists, I think the fact that the lists can include others be reference and therefore and fully aggregable will be of use here. Thanks for the feedback.
Let me amplify that previous point. There is some number of people who edit wikipedia. Call that X. X changes, generally increases, over time, but is a fixed quantity at any given time. The number of people who will potentially make lists is also X. The number of controversial editors is some number less than X, my guess is much less, but obviously no greater. Therefore the number of people potentially compiling list is at least as great as the number of people to be listed. The fact that lists can incorporate one another means that all kinds of network and hierarchical efficiences come into play. This is, evidently, how Google primarily works. In short, I don't think it's as much work as it sounds, and whitelisting, specifically, would be fairly easy to maintain once in place.
Hieronymous 00:56, 1 January 2006 (UTC)
Not sure where else to post this to get a fair sampling of input, so I'm asking one & all here.
I've finally accumulated/stumbled across enough piles of information to make it feasible to create an article on every community in Ethiopia: a smaller-scale equivalent to the original Rambot (I'm thinking of calling my bot the RasTafariBot. ;-). Now, the degree of coverage will reflect just how much information I have about each community, to wit:
I'll answer one question before it is asked: why so many stubs? First, I consider them "stubs" because, having read so much about the subject, I know there's more to be written about many of these places than would be contained in one or two paragraphs. Second, & more importantly, the reason so many of these proposed articles will be stubs is that faced with a choice between sharing an insufficient, yet useful, amount of information or waiting until these articles are comprehensive -- I'm siding with sharing the information that I have. Part of the hope of Wikipedia is that if one person starts an article, even if it is not finished, another person will contribute her/his incomplete chunk of knowledge on the subject, & so on until we have a finished article.
And FWIW, of the 3 choices above, I'm happiest with the second. Unless over 90% of the feedback insists every one of those possible articles should be written, & folks are willing to struggle with the challenge having thousands of stubs about Ethiopian villages poses, I won't act on the first choice.
Now that I've had my say, I'm listening. -- llywrch 01:00, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
I would love to see an article on every town and village in the world. User:Rambot was created specifically to create an article on very town and village in the US, based on the 2000 census. We should have the same level of available information for every community in every country. User:Zoe| (talk) 19:38, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Option 2 gets my vote; Rambot had a good deal more info from the US Census data than we would get out of most of the stubs in Option 1, it sounds like. — Bunchofgrapes ( talk) 19:44, 29 December 2005 (UTC)
Woodstone, you've raised the question that was in the back of my mind when I posted this RfC: what is the minimum amount of information should we expect to have in a geographical stub? I feel that it helps no one to create thousands of stubs for villages which say little more than (to pick a real & possible example): "Boramà Guddo is a village in Ethiopia at Latitude 85° 40' and longitude 40° 47'". Even adding the administrative region each lie in, & the elevation & population figure to me fails to justify its creation -- especially when there will be thousands of stubs like this. (And I suspect this would cause a headache for the folks trying to break these stubs into smaller, usable groupings.) The articles that the Ram-bot created had more information than this example.
Since this information is readily available for download & reuse on the Web -- the site I found has zipfiles containing a total of about five million geographical names & their latitude & longitude for the entire non-US world -- it's only a matter of time before some well-meaning yet naive editor starts creating tens of thousands of these stubs. This act would heavily impact Wikipedia, at the least making the "Random article" function practically useless. So any thoughts about a "recommended minimum geo-stub content rquirement", & what it should cover? -- llywrch 18:14, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
I request help from anyone concerned with policy to assist here where a problem is most apparent Talk:Pope_Pius_XII#Visible_1_1_2006_Impossibility_of_a_Serious_Article, and to consider the a.r.t./'article resolution template' I suggested here at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vatican_Bank#WP__Article_resolution_template. The template is not a template in the wiki form but more in the general working sense. I have proposed fair inclusion of mutually incompatible arguments before, but here I happened to place the closest I see to being useful. I have to say to reasonable users that there is a problem, which is essentially one of un-acceptable truth, as, in fact, I have yet to be presented with any hard source denying the hard source upon which -it appears- the truth does rest.Therefore I see the necessity to allow conjectural faith-based argumentation to be run in a controlled parallel manner. At present there are no possibilities of any consensus, nor will there be so long as history is claimed by faith. The whole template is a bit wooly, but better than the blood falling from the running sores in various spots in WP. Can we perhaps work it up to get over these endless edit wars? Thanks EffK 01:27, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
For some reason I posted this initially on Jimbo's talk page; figured I should put it here as well. - Roy Boy 800 17:22, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Hey, as long as this is totally separate from Wikipedia ... why the hell not? -- Cyde Weys vote talk 17:25, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Yeah, and it could be like any user can collaboratively edit anyone else's date profile and ad. Bwithh 19:10, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
We can call it nnbiowiki. - Splash talk 23:07, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to bring this suggestion over from Wikipedia_talk:Section. It suggests a configurable maximum heading level for a section to be included in an article's Table of Contents. Anything below the level is ignored by the TOC, but remains as a heading in the article body. The example given is Timpani article, which has subheadings that, while important to the article, are far too detailed to be included in the TOC.
As well as setting the level globally, there should also be a function to set it on a branch-by-branch basis, for flexibility. -- Tom Edwards 13:24, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Out of frustration with the bluntness of AfD and speedy deletion procedures, I've created Template:Nothanks-vanity for welcoming new users who create vanity articles. Questions, comments, and insults are welcome at my talk page. Gazpacho 04:28, 30 December 2005 (UTC)
When a page is displayed in edit mode, would it be possible to display the contributor's name or IP address of that particulr edit. At present, if one views the history, a contributor's name is available, but if reverting to a previous version, as soon as you go to edit mode, the information isn't on your screen. Therefore if you want to write an edit comment such as 'revert to last version by so-and-so', you have to flip back to the history (or have a good memory, not easy for IP addresses, I find). This surely would be a very small change that would streamline reversion quite nicely. Or is there a way to do it already thaty I haven't spotted? Comments? Graham 01:18, 22 December 2005 (UTC)
http://sam.zoy.org/wikipedia/godmode-light.js
→
Aza
Toth 12:15, 28 December 2005 (UTC)I agree. This information is useful when writing edit summaries, and already exists. Why not have it available where needed? (I'd also like to see an edit summary preview when I do a Show Preview while we're at it) LloydSommerer 02:52, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia suffers the same weakness as Google when it comes to searching for a Book, Song, Film, or Standard. It deals in Phrases, without distinguishing whether they relate to Concepts or objects (the basic default assumption), or descriptions of concepts or objects in other form.
I suggest that Book:Ghost could be used for the book page, Film:Ghost for the film page etc. and of course just Ghost for the object/concept page. This would reduce the need for Disambiguation pages, which increasingly get in the way of searches, since so many things exist also as book or film titles. It also could be of particular use in searching for Standards. A page like Standard:ITU-R 468 (test page I created) could be much more easily searched for.
Note that MetaCategories describe the Nature of the page, not the nature of its content, and this distinguishes them from Categories. The category Standards for example is a mish-mash of articles about standards, standards bodies, articles about standards bodies, etc. Using the prefix Book: in the title of every book page would seem to have no disadvantage. It could still be redirected to from the top of a normal page, but would allow direct searching too. -- Lindosland 00:56, 31 December 2005 (UTC)
You have not taken in what I wrote Cyrius! As I explained, MetaCategories are not about content (topic) as categories are. They are about the fundamental nature (intent) of the page. Thus every Standard: pages would present a standard. They would not just be pages under the broad category 'to do with standards', which includes descriptions of standards bodies etc. Rather, they would BE standards, (albeit in summarised form - perhaps better headed Standardsum). With Books and films it actually goes a bit deeper, because a page that begins Book: should, strictly, actually BE a book (or at least the exact text of a book), and while this is appropriate to MetaCategories on the Web, it is not currently within the remit of Wikipedia. Strictly, the MetaCategory Booksum: would be appropriate, meaning that the nature of the page was a 'summary of a book'. Whether we use Booksum: or Book: depends on whether we anticipate the extension of metacategories to the Web as a whole (where they would help Google searching enormously!). Similarly categories like Songlyric: and Song could exist, the latter being the actual download. Again you see the 'intention' of the page - to provide a song lyric or a song download. -- Lindosland 13:06, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
I think it might be a good idea to have a "PDA" version of Wikipedia. I was thinking simple HTML, limited graphics, designed for a small screen, mostly text only and not too many frames. Is anyone with me on this idea?
I have created {{ editprotected}} to request edits to protected pages. -- Zondor 06:00, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
Very often, when I've added specific fact references to an well-fleshed out article, I provide the direct quote from the source that I cite, after the citation. I have been asked to start a discussion on this, and I have done so on Wikipedia:Citing sources. Please comment there. Thanks! JesseW, the juggling janitor 08:53, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
I've posted a proposal about categories and subcategories here. Please take a look. I'd appreciate feedback. The proposal concerns the relationship of categories and their topic articles, situations when articles may be in both a category and its subcategories, and some other general guidelines for categorization. These topics have been under discussion for many months (or should I say years!) This isn't quite to the vote stage, but it is getting close. Thanks. -- Samuel Wantman 08:51, 4 January 2006 (UTC)
When I was new around here, and in need of the assistance of an Admin, I was very uncertain how to find one. Now that I am an admin, I have some suggestions of how Amins can be more visible:
All these posting should be presented as a way of offering assistance, and not to convey that big brother is watching. -- Samuel Wantman 09:51, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
All these comments are correct, but perhaps I'm not stating my point well. To a new user, the method of finding and getting the help of an admin when needed is not obvious. Isn't helping new users a role of admins? How should they find us? Admins were selected because they have the trust of the community. As such, they should be setting good visible examples of behavior and not flaunting their minimal powers. -- Samuel Wantman 22:51, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
What if we put a link to the list of admins on Template:Welcome, saying something like, "these people may be helpful".-- Pharos 22:58, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Unfortunately, having admins editing side-by-side with non-admins in the open can have an influence on the editing experience; in other words, participation in the process can influence the process. This is because there are a very few editor/admins who have strayed over the line separating editorship and adminship, to the detriment of all admin reputations (I don't know how pervasive this impression is, but it does rear its head from time to time in various places). I believe I made a suggestion that has been shuffled into the history of some talk page that when an editor receives an adminship a new username should be created that is the original username + some suffix ... maybe simply "admin", so that User:RosanneRosannadanna would have a second account User:RosanneRosannadanna_admin. This would have several positive effects; first, it would allow complete separation of admin and non-admin roles; second, it would allow complete visibility of all actions conducted by the user while in the admin role; third, it would allow a specific and automated measure of admin activity or inactivity. Think of this as issuing a uniform to admins, a uniform that should be worn while conducting admin-related business and not worn while going about the routine business of being Joe Editor, Expert on Widgets and Widget Flanges. I am not an admin, but if this dichotomy of roles were established I would consider self-nominating for an adminship, and I don't think I am alone in that feeling. User:Ceyockey ( talk to me) 23:39, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
I don't think this is a good idea for two reasons:
xaosflux Talk/ CVU 05:29, 3 January 2006 (UTC)
Just made the above template because i noticed that a lot of articles were just lists, and would be much better off just splitting the links down and then adding category tags in there, the pages really should be category listed anyway. For an example, please check Illnesses related to poor nutrition.
Spum 13:48, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
I do, and Spum's idea makes sense. Although the two are complementary, sometimes the wrong one is used. A collection of items that's simply an alphabetical list is better as a category; a collection of items which need to be in some specific order or have extra information, or would have a lot of (to be filled) red links is better as a list. For that reason I'd also suggest a complementary template to go in categories that might be better as lists. BUT (and it's a biggie), this needs to be coordinated with AFD and CFD, rather than done off one person's bat, since categorising what was a list involves deleting the list (AFD), and listifying a category involves deletion of the category (CFD). Grutness... wha? 22:33, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
I hereby propose WikiEffort, the wiki counterpart of BOINC.
Comments welcome-- Joris Gillis 09:36, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
It's an interesting idea. Maybe even suggest two different tasks. You're more likely to get something that interests the user, and you have the "Which colour would you like it in?" type of hard-sell. Maybe you could have a box which says:
Would you rather: *Write a short article on the topic " Sabine-Southwestern War" *Improve an article on the topic " Meditation" or *Proofread the article on the topic Albert_Wesker?
selecting one requested article, one article that needs to be taken to featured status, and one article in need of copy-editing. -- Slashme 11:55, 5 January 2006 (UTC)
Oh, right. That seems sensible too ;-] -- Slashme 12:33, 5 January 2006 (UTC)