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One problem with IP edits is that we have no way of knowing if someone has already looked it over for vandalism. So one edit might be reviewed by twenty users and found OK, while another article's edit might be reviewed by no-one because everyone presumed someone else was doing it. It would be a great help if there was a tick box that admins or general signed in users could tick just to say "User 'x' read this article". That way we could spread our limited checking resources more efficiently.
For admins fighting vandalism, rollback is a vital tool. But it allows no explanation to be given. To leave an explanation, one has to do the slower process of opening up an older version and saving it with an edit summary. An option to type a rollback explanation would be great help, combining rollback speed with the ability to explain. FearÉIREANN \ (caint) 21:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
I am in the unfortunate position that I can edit Wikipedia from home, but not while I am at work. My employer has a proxy server and several hundred thousand people within the organisation all appear to post from one ip address. I am sure this is not the only situation like this around the world. It severely restricts participation from a huge number of excellent potential editors. I suggest the logic of the block list be amended so that the status of a user is tested first, then the ip address they are posting from. If the user is a long term editor with a good record then editing should be allowed regardless of the ip address. Anonymous edits from blocked ip ranges should be blocked as usual. New accounts from people within blocked ip ranges could be set up through administrators, who could require proper identification through an exchange of e-mail.
The vast majority of vandalism is just casual joking about and sandboxing by IP users, I suggest therefore that only allowing a change to be saved once it has been previewed will drastically reduce this type of vandalism. Martin 10:52, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
A few of the articles are attacked based around times in schools or geographically. Example - I see a lot of schools IP vandalizing certain articles each morning just prior to school or college starting (?). Sometimes there may be attacks on some controversial articles based on geography. These times are pretty much predictable and repeatable. It would be nice to prevent attack with sprotection and other protection schemes based on time. This would allow anons or even regular users (for full protected articles) to contribute while stopping the majority of attack. -- Supercoop 15:29, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I discussed it on the mailing list and I think I'd share some ideas with advertising on wikipedia. As some of you may have noticed, some websites copy the content of wikipedia and have some advertisement on the right-hand side of the page. This is a google-like adword style (nothing flashy) that is related to the text of the article. I know advertising is controvertial but here's a suggestion (it's not only my ideas, others helped).
There are several caveats (apparently) with this technique. At least 1/3 of the income must come from donations, so a way to control for it must be found. On the other side, would could advertise that there's a donation matching, like "for every dollar you give, wikipedia receives three". There are also other legal/accounting issues that are over my head. Also, another caveat is the "sell-out" factor. There a concern, legitimate I think, that advertising might go against POV.
Very strong oppose Some people seem to want to push advertising for the sake of it. The financial position appears to be sound - sound enough at least for the fundraiser to be late again - and the server reliablility is much better than it was a year ago. There is no current financial problem to address. Wikipedia is pure, so let's keep it that way. One thing you can be sure of is that having ads won't encourage more good editors to join. Sumahoy 02:25, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
I think it's more accurate to say that some people want to oppose advertising just for the sake of it. As though something is impure about text ads. — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 23:04, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Several people have been working on a proposal document discussing this exact topic. Please Help us at User:NeilTarrant/PageAds Danny Beardsley 08:43, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't see a need for them, but opt-in ads for registered users would be harmless. The usual knees are jerking, of course. — Matt Crypto 09:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
This is a bad idea. Introducing any ads is likely to reduce donations. Introducing ads in a way that will only produce a small amount of revenue might reduce donations by more than the amount of new income generated. Bhoeble 23:10, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
Strong oppose. Wikipedia is nonprofit. This goes against the very nature of Wikipedia and will ruin it. The very thing that makes Wikipedia so unique and such a powerful force is its freedom. But that did give me an idea: how about another totally unaffiliated website that skins over Wikipedia that has ads on it, and all proceeds are donated directly to Wikipedia? Sort of like what Answers.com does, only trying to help Wikipedia, not freeloading it. And it will be made very clear that this is not original content, but rather just an optional way for persons who don't mind AdWords to donate financially. It is very obvious that Wikipedia needs more funding. They key point would be that somebody else administers it, and that it is made very clear that it is not affiliated in any way with Wikipedia. It's just a thought anyway. Comments, please. michaelb 19:24, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Extreme oppose—Not only my personal dislike of internet advertising, but especially to avoid even the mere appearance or rumor of conflicts of interest. Ardric47 07:30, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Apparently there were proposals for a spell-checker, but they were thrown out because of fears of the software "correcting" things that didn't need correcting. Currently a lot of spelling fixes are done as separate edits, with AWB, Wikipedia:Typo, Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings, Spellbound, etc. Maybe a better method would be to have the Mediawiki software look for words and display them on preview? Like you press preview and it underlines the words a special way or something. "Underlined words may be misspelled." That would help to reduce errors in a human-controlled way while not interrupting work or making tons of extra edits just for spell fixes. — Omegatron 16:20, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Would it use British or American spelling, or would there be an option in Preferences? A recipe for endless confusion as spelling switches from one to the other and back! - Runcorn 22:15, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Definitely better to use Google than the internal search facility; the only problem is the time lag before Google picks up changes. But that's off-topic. - Runcorn 16:35, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Google Toolbar has a built in spell checker for textboxes and forms on web pages. It functions much in the same way as the spell checker in microsoft word does. Danny Beardsley 08:01, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
The idea of a Spell Checker seems like a good one to me. It should just point out the words, not change them automatically. On the other hand, just copying and pasting the writing into Word or a similar program could also do the trick. -- Matterbug 22:55, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree with the idea, I don't want to copy everything into Word everytime I want to make an edit. But I think we need a spellcheck for the seach engine first. Pseudoanonymous 23:45, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I have made a proposal at Wikipedia_talk:Interlanguage_links#Interlanguage_link_order_(again). Please review it, so hopefully we can finally settle on a standard order for the inter wiki links. Martin 21:33, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
A new and improved version of Wikipedia:Wikiethics is posted for all Wikipedians to discuss and make suggestions for an improvement... Assert your role in the global Wikipedia community and give your opinion today...it matters! Netpari 20:28, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
I have created a new vandal template, template:IPvandal, the main difference from template:vandal being that it removes the pagemove lookup, as such a feature is unessesary for IP users, and replaces it with a WHOIS lookup keyed to the user in question-- {anon iso − 8859 − 1 janitor} 18:17, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
It says,
but this isn't technically correct as you can "watch" red-linked articles by going to the "create this article" screen. The page hasn't been deleted as it has not been created in the first place. Perhaps have something like,
Skinnyweed 15:51, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
I would like to see a series on Church of England Cathedrals, with one of those grey boxes with hyperlinks to articles on CofE cathedrals in the bottom of the article.
Lofty 10:45, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
There's a renaming request at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 May 4#Category:Top 10 to Category:Top 8 which seems in violation of the neutral point of view policies, given that we are ultimately arguing over what are the top however many categories on Wikipedia. Steve block Talk 20:50, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
Could there be a bolded message to categorize new articles when a user is creating a new article. - Roy Boy 800 22:54, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
There is a huge amount of stuff going on on WP - task forces, stubcatting, regional notice boards, wikiprojects, collaborations of the week/fortnight/whenever... I've been thinking that it would be a good idea to have an at least partially definitive "Wikipedia Directory", at least to record what is going on at a national and regional level. Since many new editors like to make contributions about the area where they live, it would be nice to be able to send them to a page where they can find out what we currently have on their local area, what we still need doing there (stub expansions, photo requests, maybe translation requests as well), who is there who could help (there are categories of Wikipedians by region, it would be good to get some mileage out of them!) and where they can go to co-ordinate effort with other editors (regional notice boards, projects, task forces etc). As a taster, would someone like to have a look at User:TheGrappler/North America directory, which is a very rough mock-up of a North America directory of Wikipedia activities. It has a bunch of countries (ranging from the USA, with all of its attached activities, to minor island countries that seriously lack article depth and contributor numbers) presented to a range of detail (I didn't finish sorting out the individual U.S. states and Canadian provinces, but the ones that are complete give a taste of how it could look, with effort). A useful extension would be to include "useful resources" in the table for each country e.g. if there is a handy reference site, or somewhere that provides copyleft images suitable for uploading to Commons. Do people think that what I have produced so far, if extended, would be useful for either themselves or for new users trying to get to grips with the Wiki-myriad? What could be done to make it more useful? TheGrappler 11:55, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Might i suggest an intresting idea that you could perfomr with your resources, but first af all let me tell you that there are some few things in this world which bring me such much joy and hope in the human race just as wikipedia does, this is such an excitating emotion that only those who have been part of such inovetive project as the French Enciclopaedia, the French Revolution, The Industrial Revolution, Printing Press cloud have felt, i can mearley imagine where this projec might lead us all.
I have an intresting propossal that you might be able to execute, why don´t you do a section of wiki where entire cities are historically portraied so that the people arround the world take good pictures of the important building in their city and us the people produce an acount if each of the cities historical buildings, and the interface of this section could bethat of a touristic guided tour, another idea is to let mayor universities around the world to be entrusted wuth the further progress of a wiki section, for example physich could be entrusted to cambridge and law could be entrusted to harvard.
Thank you so much for the gift that you are creating for humanity evolution all arround the globe.
Alejandro Lyman Chandler
Hello,
> > I have a suggestion, can it be possible to arrange all your data in a sort > of interactive, expandable, timeline? One that expands to all areas within > a colapsable timeline and has links to related topics. > Of course it would follow in the spirit of user-made enciclopaedia. > I think it would help the Understanding of Knowledge a great deal to see > time-scaled correlations of knowledge grafically. > I think it would thrive. > > Any way there's my two cents' worth. > > Yours Sincerly, > > Andrés Cañas. > >
When I joined Wikipedia over a year ago vandalism (and general bad editing, such as spamming) was a problem, but it was small enough such that it could be dealt with. Today is seems to me that vandalism is becoming uncontrollable, we seem to have forgotten what we are here to do (make a damn good encyclopedia!), and we seem more focused on "vandal fighting" or whatever, as if that was the original point of this project.
Vandalism is getting so bad now that much is just simply not reverted within a satisfactory period of time, and all too often that which is reverted is not reverted properly, and previous vandalisms are edited into the article.
Monitoring and reverting vandalism also wastes much time, particularly of our best editors, who would otherwise actually be making articles better.
Vandalism heavily damages our credibility, putting off potential good editors, and specifically academics and the like, who ultimately are the key people we need to build a respected resource.
It seems to me that the present philosophy of "wiki" is one suitable to a small project, as Wikipedia was a few years ago, whereas now it is one of the most popular websites on the planet, now we don't need to worry about finding new editors, we need to worry about finding the right editors (i.e. not vandals and spammers etc.).
I think we are approaching a decision, where we either have to decide whether this project is some kind of social experiment, in which case nothing need change, or if this project is to build an encyclopedia, in which case we are going to have to adapt our concept of "wiki".
Two possible ideas are to either only allow editing of mainspace articles for users with registered email addresses, or have some form of stable article, that can't be directly edited by anyone. Either way, something needs to change. Martin 15:04, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree vandalism is becoming more and more prevalent. In the last few weeks most of my time has been spent on vandalism watch. Yesterday when I signed on to my watchlist 45% of it consisted of vandalism reversions by users. Some articles seem to experience nothing but vandalism, reversion, vandalism, reversion etc etc.
I wonder whether anonymous edits should not be banned - so that no one could edit without logging in. This will not prevent people setting up multiple IDs, but it ought to hinder those who work from multiple IP addreses that any anyway merely a series of number that mean little to most of us. There may need to be a slight change to the software, so that one cannot lose an edit in progress, because one's connection or log in fails, for example by ensuring that a page that cnnot be saved automatically comes up as a preview. Peterkingiron 00:07, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Somewhere here an editor was complaining that another editor persisted in trying to introduce material about Asperger syndrome into the Albert Einstein article. A major article that has to cover a lot of ground cannot often include links to all auxilliary or tangential subjects. without breaking the flow.
It might therefore be useful to have a convention for linking to the What links here page for the article. Something like:
Space does not permit all aspects of this subject to be referred to here. For other articles that may contain further information relating to "Article name", please see What links here or press [alt-j].
This could of course be done as a Template ({{backlinks}}). It would benefit from certain improvements to the MediaWiki software, in particular ability to restrict to the main namespace [2] and to sort according to some kind of relevance or popularity. It would also need consensus to adopt this convention and document it on relevant Wikipedia pages. -- Cedders tk 15:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
If there is justification for the link, why not fork off a separate article, such as Albert Einstein and Asperger's syndrome (properly linked from the main Einstein page, of course), and put the link there? If there is no justification for the link, then it shouldn't be there at all. User:Zoe| (talk) 16:39, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Cedders, I think you may be on to something really worthwhile here. I'd like to spin an idea out of this concept of inter-article relevance for a second. Obviously one of the great innovations of Wikipedia is the ability to quickly follow 'trees' of knowledge both vertically and horizontally, allowing for users to develop a sense of both the breadth and depth of a subject by examining its context and history. As the project grows, it should be possible to become, literally, an expert on a given area of study simply by following enough of the appropriate links. But which links to follow, and in what order, is not always obvious, especially if you want to study efficiently.
In that sense, it could be very useful to have a tool that showed users, for a given article, which articles other users arrived from, and which they departed to. Zooming out, this would allow for a kind of conceptual roadmap -- a set of beaten paths, if you will -- that would not only help users usefully navigate families of concepts, but also provide a set of invaluable data about inter-article usage patterns, and maybe, eventually, the nature of the conceptual relationships themselves. It's the Wikipedia equivalent of "Users who Bought this Book Also Bought" -- except that instead of being a marketing tool, it would be one that streamlined learning.
It takes your garden-variety linking to the next level. The way it is now, all links are created equal, a state that results in lots of irrelevant connections, and does little to reveal the nuanced webs of relevance that bind all concepts. Knowing the best routes between ideas could solve the irrelevant links problem by just showing users what other users have done. Better even than the 'tree' or 'beaten path' or Amazon.com analogy is this: imagine a library where books were connected by glowing threads. The stronger the connection between two books, the brighter the thread would be. Everything is connected, of course, but you'd be able to make out patterns within the web that would indicate which shelf you ought to go to next. Who decides what's relevant to what? Well, everyone, of course. -- HarpooneerX 08:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
You know, I've seen kids use Wikipedia (Simple English if they know about it) a lot lately and sometimes they can get confused with the whole interface and stuff. Like some kids who wander into the talk pages and kind of "vandalise" it. Also, since this is an encyclopedia, it has articles on many items, some of which are not appropriate for young users. So, maybe, we could design a kid-friendly UI, non editable, and features. I could explain everything right now, but so far, what do you think? Crad0010 00:27, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. In addition to wikipedia being simply a plain old encyclopedia without its vast open-source capabilities, I have a positive attitude towards kids getting to see all of the information on wikipedia. The only inappropriate content to be viewed by anyone, in my opinion, is biased content. Wikipedia is not biased. Regardless of the subject matter, I view wikipedia as a great resource to be used by kids. Besides, they'll be exposed to the more "mature" subject matter later on in their lives anyways. Having wikipedia provide a preliminary understanding of these subjects for children as opposed to their peers doing it in an immature and uninformative way has to be a good thing. -- Matt0401 22:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, but protecting kids from Wikipedia is a bad idea. Smoke comes out of my ears and nose whenever I hear someone bring this topic up. -- Osbus 01:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Here's another view. Many schools forbid outside communication, by editing the Wikipedia it could be classed as communicating. If the school finds editing fine, they can unblock the Wikipedia (many schools use a whitelist system). Computerjoe 's talk 15:33, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
I am employed by the education department of an Australian state government. I work in schools every day. Unfortunately I am unable to recommend Wikipedia as an educational resource in schools because some of the content is inappropriate. The word inappropriate may not be strong enough. It is actually illegal to expose some Wikipedia content to minors in many jurisdictions.
The only realistic solution to this problem would be to create a seperate project Wikipedia Junior that mirrors copies of Wikipedia articles verified not to contain inappropriate content. Such a project would be massive, but could attract funding from the education departments of countries around the world.
What constitutes inappropriate content is a contentious issue however, and the definition may vary according to culture. Since the content would be protected, a standardised article tagging system could be used to filter content according to each nation's cultural or legal requirements.
-- Dave 02:03, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Earlier discussion of a closely related question can be found here - you may find it interesting/helpful. FreplySpang (talk) 02:21, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
A Wikipedia edition for kids is not only a bad idea, but a costly one too. Where will we get the money? And to whoever said that edu. departments over the world could help, why would they do this when they already have what they think is a perfectly good resource, other encyclopedias (i.e. Britanica.)? -- Osbus 18:17, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
A while back, the Wikimedia Foundation received a grant to get started on a project for making books for children: see m:Wikijunior. — THIS IS MESSED OCKER (TALK) 00:51, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
The idea is interesting, but I don't think it is fair. I myself am 15 and use Wikipedia for research and browsing. Wikipedia should be about covering all topics, and kids often have more knowledge about certain subjects than adults do (and vice versa). I believe they are an important part of the process. -- Matterbug 22:53, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
I disagree with the idea of having a wikipedia for kids, we don't know whether everything on wikipedia is accurate. Even if we have a formal peer review system and checked the accuracy of everything, we still need experts to check everything over. Until we created a stable wikipedia v1.00 I don't think we should make a wikipedia for kids. We know how to use wikipedia, kids don't they will think whatever they read is accurate; and that is fatal on something like wikipedia. I don't want some kid to think that John Seigenthaler, Sr. attempted to kill JFK. Pseudoanonymous 23:41, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Woman have breast's men have penis's and people do drugs. thats just a fact of life, nothing to hide any one from. user:Zerath13
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Childrens'_Wikipedia may be of interest. -- PinchasC | £€åV€ m€ å m€§§åg€ 01:36, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Have we thought about making pages in user space not indexed by search engines, so that our internal chatter does not come up on Google, etc? I assume we already do so for article talk pages, since I don't generally see them come up in a Google search.
I think not indexing should be explored for user space for the following reasons
In a nutshell, I can think of only one reason to keep these pages indexed in search engines - backup when our search dies - but many why to delete.
Comments? I looked around in perennial proposals and did not find this discussed; if it is, please let me know. -- Martinp 22:08, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree with this. We shouldn't be clogging the internet with our user/talk pages (Although I think the Wikipedia space is fine). Broken Segue 02:54, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering if we could have a feature to edit SVG images sort of wikistyle like we do for articles. It would help graphic artists immensely instead of repeatedly uploading large files for minor ammendments. Regards, =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:30, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I think it would be easier to fill in needed facts if the [ citation needed template directed a person to an edit screen where they could fill in the reference info and submit it. Ch u ck (척뉴넘) 06:12, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed an inconvenience with the use of Wikipedia. Whenever I do a Google search, specifically for example an image, and the result is on Wikipedia, the moment I click on the link, I can never go back to the search page. I have to log back onto Google and start my search again. It would be really nice if the 'back' button got me back to the site on which I was previously, instead of trapping me on Wikipedia. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.241.6.206 ( talk • contribs)
I ever accessed WP using an Innostream A10 telephone and to my surprise, it loaded quite nicely, albeit a different layout and design. I can still view (some, due to the (occasional) "page cannot be displayed" error) articles and pictures quite nicely. In some pages, the navigation toolbar and the tabs at the top can be found by scrolling all the way to the bottom. This makes me interested to see if any guide is available on how to view and edit pages on WP (including logging in) using a telephone capable of using GPRS, WAP or even 3G. It can be a guide that is named: "Guide to using WP on a telephone" or equivalent. Any comments? -- Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 02:40, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed interwiki links on the main pages of many other wikipedias. See for instance nl:Hoofdpagina, ca:Portada, it:Pagina principale, hu:Kezdőlap, fi:Etusivu, etcetera. The English wikipedia seems to be one of the few wikipedias without interwiki links on the main page. Why is this, and how would you feel about those links being added to the main page? Aecis Apple knocker Flophouse 16:49, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
when is wikipedia going to get a browser toolbar, a la google? i keep waiting for them to put one out but they havent done it yet. that would be handy as hell. has this even been discussed? if not you should drop the idea. it would be great. now when i want to wiki something i just type in the thing in google and add "wiki" to my search. would be much easier with a separate toolbar.
I propose a new rule saying that in voting:
Any objections?? Georgia guy 19:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
At the moment, we place
Template:Sandbox ({{Sandox}} <!--Please do not edit the above section-->) on the page
Wiktionary:Sandbox. This is confusing to some newcomers, it doesn't look professional, and it often gets deleted, which then has to be replaced by an experienced user. On the other hand we have
MediaWiki:Newarticletext,
MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning and several other messages under the
MediaWiki namespace. I propose a similar feature (MediaWiki:Sandbox) be set up, then a function
could be placed in
MediaWiki:Monobook.js, something like var pagetitle = document.getElementById('content').getElementsByTagName('h1').item(0).firstChild.nodeValue; if (pagetitle.search(/^Wiktionary:Sandbox$/) != -1)
... In this way, a message would be shown at the top of the Sandbox instead of being in the Sandbox. Avoiding the need to periodically replace the Sandbox message. This could also be used for other discussion pages such as this Village pump. The main thing is that something has to be changed by the developpers to add a new MediaWiki page allowing the contents to show at the top of a specified page in
MediaWiki:Monobook.js. Perhaps we could file a bug report allowing for just such a change? What do you think? --
Shibo77 14:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Hello all, i'm back after a somewhat long respite, with a somewhat strange idea. After listening intuitively to radio shows of Ricky Gervais, i thought of the idea of giving "Honorary Editorship" to people like ricky - celebrities who have expressed an interest in charity and freedom. By "Honorary" i don't mean giving them any special priviledges, just providing them with the idea that we would enjoy them to be a member of the wikipedia -- having seasoned editors and admins just show him the ropes quickly..
I know he's a busy man, but i think it'd be mutually beneficial for both parties because, as you may or may not know, he has recently created an advert for a Prostate cancer charity, and i can't get the idea out of my head that, because he's a very scholarly guy, who has himself admitted to being enflamed by the quest and thirst for knowledge, that he would be very up on the idea. I can't say for definate he will like it, but i have a hunch that he just might.. who knows; if he likes it as much as we do, he may even drop it in some interviews here and there, and get the wikipedia more widespread appeal and attention.
Any feedback on the matter is very much appreciated! The magical Spum-dandy 15:11, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
I think it would be a good idea to start having arbitrators who aren't sysops. There really is no need for it to be admins who work there, just editors with certain qualifications (i.e. edit count, block record). Maybe there could be Arb's and Admins and we could make a RFArb. It seems like the admins now are the judge and jury, and that's not a good system. In real life, everyday people (I know Wikipedia is different and is not a democracy) are selected to be on a jury. Just my two cents, Ch u ck (척뉴넘) 05:56, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
It occured to me that it would be a potentially good idea to make, for varying subjects, pages that list renowned items in a catagory. For instance, much like the "wonders of the world", there are images that are well known and of historic importance. A article listing historic photographs, such as " The Unknown Rebel" or the picture of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, might be a useful addition. Though there are some obvious problems, like which photos are important enough to warrant inclusion or wether or not a photo has meaning (or the same meaning) in all cultures, it might be a good idea, much like we have featured articles or images, to have an article dealing with historic photos. I would appreciate seeing feedback on this.
Also, please note that though I used the concept of important photos in this example, this could apply to anything, like important movies (AFI 100 years, 100 movies) or drugs (pennicillin) or books.
-Oniamien
I made a template for brainstorming pages in the project namespace. This could be a semi-formal procedure, but with no need for a special policy or guideline. At least, I think it could be an interesting internal mechanism, how'bout you?
(And yes, I know, brainstormings have already been done without this. This is just about facilitating/formalizing the task) Flammifer 08:27, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
As wikipedia becomes more all-encompassing, everyone will start to use it alot more as both a reference and for leisure reading. This is a positve development. However, the color scheme of wikipedia is not as easy on the eyes as it could be. Research has been done as to the adverse effects of reading black text from white backgrounds (even in printed text), as well as the problems associated with reading from an electronic display of some sort. As it is, black text on a white background means that readers are essentially starting at a lightbulb while they read, inducing headaches and limiting reading sessions. If the background were to be darker than the text, it would be much more enjoyable. Perhaps black or brown or gray with a yellowish or bluish text? I don't know anything about design prinicples, only that webpages with this sort of presentation are much easier to read for extended periods of time. Is there any way this might happen? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Johngalt513 ( talk • contribs)
I have also been turning the brightness of my monitor down in order to read more easily. This modification would undoubtedly ease many user's and Wiki writer's/editor's eyes. Is there any chance that this proposal will go through? How can I work for that? Does anyone have any information on the longterm effects of text-reading from an a illuminated display? I imagine research has been done extensively on television, which has a comparable lit screen, but I feel like focusing much more closely, and in greater proximity to, on screen would possibly be worse than extended televesion-watching. johngalt513 17:33, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia.org- I am a HUGE fan of your website. I think it is the most amazing site in recent years! I have a suggestion for your site's slogan...
"Wikipedia: Where your thirst for knowledge can be quenched!"
Enjoy, Daniel Pesis dlpesis-AT-wisc.edu
Unfortunately, the phrase is a bit clichè and doesn't reflect what Wikipedia really is. Thanks for the input though, and don't listen to Skinnyweed. -- Osbus 22:40, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia has many many projects aimed at improving the content in various ways, however, this is all rather opaque to a new wikipedia editor such as me, and I guess even more so for a new wikipedia user. What about featuring projects on a regular basis on the main page, so as to drive potential editors who may not otherwise know how they can be useful ?
Currently, the main page holds a link at the bottom to Wikipedia:Community Portal, which is in that spirit, however, it's a little overwhelming, and not very obvious from the main page.
I have a proposal for a search bar for Wikipedia that is part of the Browser that people use to access the internet. It would work like the Google Search bar. You would type in what you are searching for in the bar and the result would open up in a new page or the same page in Wikipedia. I will great increase the ease to access Wikipedia when surfing. I propose the bar be called 'Wikibar' Thank you for taking the time to consider my proposal From Perry S. John pjohn_iii@hotmail.com
Add this:
javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection(); if(!q){void(q=prompt('Wikipedia keywords:',''))}; if(q)location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search='+escape(q);else location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/';})()
as a bookmark in your toolbar. See also Bookmarklet 71.199.123.24 04:54, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Mozilla Firefox has a Wikipedia search built-in. If you want to, you can download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/. Andrew 22:44, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
The practice of Ostracism in all of the Wikimedia projects, especially in the Wiktionary and Wikipedia projects, has an extremely negative impact on both intellectual and financial contributors and I would imagine on their contributions as well. The practice of Ostracism is as simple as referring to anyone as a troll or making a comment like Don't feed the trolls. Rudeness and arrogance are not what the Wiktionary or the Wikipedia are all about yet the practice of Ostracism is in full swing.
I therefore propose that it be uplifted from the deep, dark and dank quarters of the dungeon guards and be acknowledged as an official Wikimedia philosophy so that its users can be recognized for what they believe and accepted or rejected by those of a like or differing mind. I make this proposal because Ostracism is being practiced to such a full extent that its existence can be neither hidden or denied. -- PCE 20:53, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Not sure if this is the appropriate place for this posting, if not i'd be obliged if it was moved to a more suitable place by a more experienced user than myself. It has struck me in my limited time as a user of Wikipedia that the "search" engine is a bit of an oxymoron. It appears to be more of a database index. It seems incapable of discerning that two identical searches, one with capitals the other without, are looking for the same article. Is there a possibility that the search engine could be changed/developed to ignore whether capitals so that less redirected articles are required? I am completely unawares as to the technical difficulty of this so you will have to excuse me if I am asking something that is alot more difficult than it appears. Regards. Grahams Child 16 May 06
Just seeking some input, what would people think of {{ summarizeto}} and {{ summarizefrom}} variants of the merge templates for articles where summarization is not done properly? See german language for an example. The template would probably feed into the same category. Circeus 13:56, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
Following banned user Zephram Stark's attempt to rewrite WP:SOCK using two sockpuppet accounts, there is a proposal to limit the editing of policy pages either to admins, or to editors with six months editing experience and 1,000 edits to articles. Please vote and comment at Wikipedia:Editing policy pages. SlimVirgin (talk) 19:10, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Often when reporting a current vandal to WP:AIV no administrator shows up to block the vandal for almost 5 minutes. In that time, I (or whoever reported the vandal) has to go chasing the vandal around Wikipedia reverting his/her disruptive edits until he/she is blocked. I think it would be nice to have a box pop up (like the "you have new messages" box) on the pages of admins when a report is made to WP:AIV. What do you think? — M e ts501 talk 22:36, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
hello every one!
i have notice a small functional problem. The links are opening in the same window and not in a new one. I think that is might be confusing especially for the external URLs because if one click to visit a link that lead to an external site then he have to click the back button of his browser several times in order to return to the page of Wikipedia, but if the window of the external URL was opened in a new window he could simply close this window.
keep up the good work...
There is ongoing debate about a name change at Wikipedia:Community Justice. There is a need for outside views, and input would be appreciated! Info can be found on the project's talk page. -- Osbus 14:52, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Two metadata templates, including the featured star template {{ featured article}} that alerts readers to featured articles and the spoken word icon {{ Spoken Wikipedia}} that links to the spoken version of articles, have been nominated for deletion. These are templates that place the and icons in the right-hand corner of articles. If you wish to have input on the proposed deletion, you can discuss the proposal here.
Cedars 04:35, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Wiki should have a section where experts explain how technology works, using both historical and recent public domain patents, their utility should be explained for us which cannot decifer techno-jiddish
It would be very helpful to have hit counters for each article; this would give us a more precise way (than volume of vandalism or news articles) to focus attention on the articles that are getting viewed the most. From what I understand, the MediaWiki software has the capability; is it computational load that is the problem, or is there some other reason why Wikipedia doesn't do this already?-- ragesoss 20:01, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. It sure would be nice to have a more recent, fuller version of this (including portals and other spaces).-- ragesoss 03:11, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
Logging in can be made easier for users and for the servers by replacing the "Log in" link, with two small text boxes, for the user name and password respectively, and a button labeled "Log in". The boxes could be filled by default with the text "name" and "password", or have a text label next to each box. After loggin in, the user is automatically taken to the page s/he was viewing before. If the authentication fails, the user may instead be taken to a small "try again" page as currently, until authentication succeeds. This would simplify the log-in process a lot and encourage users to log in. It would also reduce the amount of data sent to and from the servers. - Pgan002 04:47, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
What will happen to Wikipedia in a disaster of global proportions such as the end of civilization? As humanity's greatest compilation of knowledge, Wikipedia must survive so that our race does not descend into a long dark age. What if nuclear weapons cause an electromagnetic pulse which destroys all electronic equipment? The CD project is a good start, which will guarantee survival assuming that people burn enough copies and that CD drives are still available after the crisis, but that alone is not enough. There should be human-readable copies as well, for example on paper, but paper is too easily destroyed by water and fire. We must learn from the mistakes of the Library of Alexandria and use modern technology to overcome them. Ideally Wikipedia should be engraved on metal plates like the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, and if possible it should be sent into outer space as well, in case the Earth is totally destroyed and it must become our legacy to any other intelligent life in the universe. What if books and other intellectual pursuits become outlawed as in Fahrenheit 451? Wikipedia articles should be memorized, which is well within the range of practicality since we have more users than articles... — Keenan Pepper 06:53, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I cannot remember where I saw it (there's a website somewhere) but a group out in Los Alamos was asked to devise a method for sending a message 100,000 years into the future. Now, such a question has two major problems - finding a medium that will survive 100,000 years, and encoding the message in such a way that it will be readable despite 100 millenia of language drift. The answer the devised was ingenius. The would take a baseball-sized steel sphere, and use a laser to microprint information onto it (something like 300,000 pages worth). The informaition would be in plain text, not requiring anything more sophisticated than a microscope to read it. And they would print 25,000 of them and spread them across the world - chances are, at least one will survive that far into the future. As far as langauge drift, they would print it in 10 langauges, including english, latin, chinese, hebrew, and spanish - in order that it become a rosetta stone. Raul654 07:06, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
It would be helpful and mutually advantageous to gather articles together to form study guides. In other words, have what is essentially an overview of, say, linguistics, by including in deliberate order all the articles that pertain to the subject. This way a student could form a skeletal understanding of the whole of a given subject matter, and have a table of contents to refer back to.
There should be different study guides for different levels of study, too. An introductory, advanced, and so on.
I am not well versed in wikipedia vernacular or computer code, but I hope this is of some help.
alex
I've recently become fascinated with the idea of idea markets (for instance You can bet on idea markets). Essentially, ideas become a financial vehicle. Some idea markets use virtual money, others use real money. I think that most wikipedians would be against a real money system, and SEC regulations might get tricky. With virtual money, these objections might be minimized (not totally eliminated, as for instance SEC v. SG, Ltd.).
How it would work
In theory, this solves several problems. If, say, an article a person owns shares in is vandalized, then they might 1. sell some shares, or 2. have a interest in maintaining that article's value and therefore remove the vandalism. Secondly, it would provide an interesting perspective on the structure and dynamics of wikipedia. For instance, I, for one, would be interested in many articles, if only there were some metric for determining their value besides using my own brain. Sometimes thinking is hard. A lesson from competitive free markets is that the market does much of the thinking for you. Thirdly, it might encourage people to be more involved with wikipedia.
A fair objection is that people wouldn't be interested in accumulating virtual money. However, the Hollywood Stock Exchange has had some success with this model. A more important objection is that the value of a stock wouldn't be based on anything other than other people's opinions. I'm not an economist, so I don't know about that.
Have a great proposal or discussion to bring up with the community? Want to lead an informal discussion about it at Wikimania? See below, re: ideas for conference events:
{{ wm06-annc}}
+sj + 23:28, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
Please see my post; I'd love to hear community opinions! (Please be gentle, this is my first foray into the community.) -- DanDanRevolution 05:00, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm planning to expand Cat:Images for cleanup by adding a new category for images with digital watermarking, and a cleanup template to sort images into the category. (Presumably we would want to replace all watermarked images with non-watermarked alternatives in the long run.) In people's experiences, would this be useful? And if so, what steps should I take to integrate this into Wikipedia's structure properly (so that editors will be able to find it)? – Unint 00:11, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
I have a list of several random proposals on my user page. Pcu123456789 21:47, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I posted a few months ago stating that Wikipedians should anticipate the split of Serbia and Montenegro and create/expand the seperate articles for each so as not to be caught out. However, I got shot down by several Serb users, but I thought now that the matter has been settled perhaps we can launch some drive to create/expand these articles, which are very poor in both quantity and quality. I have placed a small list here, but there will be many more areas to cover. Grunners 17:50, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia_talk:How_to_archive_a_talk_page#Permalink_archiving_is_underrated. Thanks. -- DanDanRevolution 07:29, 23 May 2006 (UTC) Update: This issue is, generally, resolved. -- DanDanRevolution 14:17, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I was told to post here, after posting at the Beauro's noticboard.
I was wondering if a group could be made (hopefully with me in it), and a very low, restricted block privlidge's be given. Perhaps no more than say an hour, so it at least immobilises the Vandal, and gives Admin enough time to look into the case, and give a longer block if necessary. I understand that it's a big priv, and should be used very carefully, and perhaps have a system like WP:RFR did, where you could report abuses of power etc.
Thanks In Advance. -- Deon555 03:11, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I have suggested at Template talk:Db-attack, that {{ db-attack}} should have a message telling people that they should blank the contents of the attack page. This would help keep attacks out of Google cache and wiki mirrors, while the page waits for admin action. -- Rob 20:12, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering if there is a naming convention that deals with capitalization of specific events, like earthquakes, floods and fires, or if one could be created. I could not find anything specific at Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Right now, it seems to be left up to the creator or decided on a case by case basis. For example, there is Johnstown Flood and Burchardi flood, Great Chilean Earthquake and Whittier Narrows earthquake, Reichstag fire and Great Chicago Fire. I'm not sure which version is most favored. I got a lot of results capitalized and uncapitalized when I searched Google. It appeared that the uncapitalized versions may be favored in academic writing, with journalists and other sources favoring capitalization. However, it also varied individually and it's too small of a sample size to make any accurate judgment. I prefer the capitalized versions because they are specific events and "flood", "fire" and "earthquake" are part of their names. However, lowercase would be okay if it would make the names consistent. -- Kjkolb 01:31, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed that many users have placed a link of the form:
on their user talk pages. I think this is a very good idea for several reasons:
For all three of these reasons, but mostly because of the ease of use for new users, I would like to propose that a leave message link be added automatically to the top of every user talk page. I can see no real downsides, so long as we leave some formatting freedom to allow users control over their own talk pages. Any comments/suggestions are welcome. Thanks. Cool3 21:46, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Especially in template blocks with lots of names I would like to be able to make all the names non breaking, i.e. [[First Last]]. However if I do that it tries to link to page with a space in the name.
My proposal: just like spaces in links are automatically converted to underscores also convert to an underscore.
Or perhaps some other symbol to use that will mean non breaking space. A __ maybe? (Since it has special treatment right now.) i.e. [[First__Last]] will become First Last with a link to First_Last.
A symbol might be a good idea since I can imagine this being used a lot (see the uses section of nbsp). 71.199.123.24 04:46, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Please take the time to review my (revised) proposal for AfD reform. Thank you for your consideration. El_C 12:47, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
I think that sometimes, wikitables are hard to read and would benefit from having so-called "striped" rows. It's possible to do this pretty easily with some JS and CSS. I've tested this in my own CSS space and found that it works quite well.
Here's an example of how a table should look like with some small JS and CSS additions:
You type... | You see... | ||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
{| class="wikitable-striped" |+ Table tags ! Tag ! Description |- | <table> | Defines a table |- | <th> | Defines a header |- | <tr> | Defines a row |- | <td> | Defines a cell |- | <caption> | Defines a caption |} |
|
I think that this would make new tables that use this CSS class much more readable. Since it uses a new CSS class rather than the old one, it also won't break any old tables or cause discontent for those who don't like the stripes.
To get this to work, you'll need the JavaScript:
var stripe = function() { // This function will add stripes to all tables that have the "wikitable-striped" class attribute. var tables = document.getElementsByTagName("table"); for (var a = 0; a != tables.length; a++) { var table = tables[a]; if (!table) { return; } // If there are no tables, abort. if (table.getAttribute("class") == "wikitable-striped") { var tbodies = table.getElementsByTagName("tbody"); for (var b = 0; b < tbodies.length; b++) { var even = true; // We start with an even stripe. var trs = tbodies[b].getElementsByTagName("tr"); for (var c = 0; c < trs.length; c++) { if (even) { trs[c].className += "even"; } else { trs[c].className += "odd"; } even = !even; } } } } } // Perform the striping. window.onload = stripe;
... and the modified CSS:
table.wikitable, table.prettytable, table.wikitable-striped { margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaaaaa solid; border-collapse: collapse; } table.wikitable th, table.wikitable td, table.prettytable th, table.prettytable td, table.wikitable-striped th, table.wikitable-striped td { border: 1px #aaaaaa solid; padding: 0.2em; } table.wikitable th, table.prettytable th, table.wikitable-striped th { background: #e8e8e8; text-align: center; } table.wikitable caption, table.prettytable caption, table.wikitable-striped caption { margin-left: inherit; margin-right: inherit; } tbody tr.even td { background: #eee; } tbody tr.odd td { background: #f9f9f9; }
Note: the CSS was also changed slightly to make colors with the striped tables more visible. Normal wikitable headers would also get a background of #e8e8e8; with this change, although we can of course always change that if this is not desired. Anyway, if there is support for this, please let me know. I, for one, think this is nice. It would be best to do it in PHP, of course, but this will do for now. — Michiel Sikma, 05:18, 22 May 2006 (UTC) PS: this discussion was originally initiated at Village pump (technical) but then moved over here.
Can this be made modular, having the striping be independent of other Wikitable formatting? One should be able to use <table class="striped">
to apply the stripes only, and both classes <table class="wikitable striped">
to also have all the other wikitable formatting. With background tone defining every row, there is absolutely no reason to also add table borders.
How about striping rows in groups of three? This has been used to good effect in a number of articles, for example Romanization of Ukrainian#Table of romanization systems.
This may be a bit much to ask, but can this be smart about table headers, implementing a third background colour for them (e.g., the link above)? I suppose wikitext would have to allow <thead>
and <tbody>
for this to be implemented.
And why not maximize the contrast, using #fff for the white rows instead of #f9f9f9? — Michael Z. 2006-05-22 15:00 Z
Could we formalize this whole process, and allow Administrators or Users to come up with Change Requests. This form would detail exactly what is required. The requests could be logged into a tracking system, like Test Director as an example. The Change Requests could go before the Administrators on say a Monthly basis. At that stage they could be prioritized for implementation or dropped. Wallie 08:38, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Ack! What a nightmare! Why don't you just make the edits yourself, that's what Wikipedia is designed for. User:Zoe| (talk) 19:33, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Not for edits! For new proposals. For example, next month's suggestion, buy Zoe a new Porsche. Wallie 22:11, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Where Wikipedians can book a meeting with their favorite admin. Wallie 21:42, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I may have been looking in the wrong place but I couldn't find anything which lists which are the most searched articles. I'm thinking along the lines of Google Zeitgeist or eBay Pulse. Yorkshiresky 17:29 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to propose that the Japanese tile in the Wikipedia logo be slightly altered to better represent the pronunciation of "Wikipedia" in Japanese. The Japanese tile is the one directly above the "W".
If you view the logo in the upper left corner of http://ja.wikipedia.org/ you will notice that while the graphic part of the logo is the same, the text for Wikipedia does not match the symbols in the tile.
It is written "ウィキペディア". The first character, ウ, represents 'u', but when ィ is attached it shifts the pronunciation to something closely resembling 'wi'.
The artist who made the Wikipedia logo almost had it right. He used ワ as the first character (wa), and attached ィ to shift the pronunciation to what only could be considered to be 'wi'.
The problem is that this combination is very rare in Japanese, and the pronunciation is ambiguous. When asked how to pronounce the ワィ in the Wikipedia logo, Japanese people often respond with a confused, "...wai? wi?... wai?". On the other hand, when confronted with ウィ, as I propose (and which is used in all Japanese writings of the word Wikipedia), all Japanese people will respond with an appropriate 'wi'.
The truth is, the Japanese language lost the 'wi' sound centuries ago, but everyone seems to agree that the closest thing to it is the combination ウィ.
How hard would it be to change that ワ to a ウ? (ワィ ウィ)
Wesarnquist 07:51, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
When I first started using wikipedia, it was fairly easy to find the articles I was looking for, but the pages are often messy and confusing. I have a few ideas:
1 - Add a "new users" function to wikipedia, whether it is a link on the navigation bar or something that appears in the user's functions. This could include an article link to a 'new user' article that would tell the user how Wikipedia works, what portals, articles, stubs, etc. are, how to start and edit articles, etc.
2 - Add a "create new article" and "sandbox" link in the navigation bar - they are really hard to find.
3 - A nicer looking User Interface might be good too, if possible. It might just be a change in the arrangement of everything, to make it easier to understand and use.
Someone should write an extension and enable on Wikipedia a <html> tag. The nowiki tag not only disables wikitext, but also disables html tags. The html tag should allow users to directly code html for whihc wikitext and templsates are insufficient. E.g. they could create a custom form by simply adding this text to a wikipedia page.
<!-- This displays a random wikipedia image in place of google logo on google wikipedia search --> <html> <div style="width:130px;float:left;text-align:center;position:relative;top:-8px"> <a href="http://www.google.com/" style="padding:0;background-image:none"> <img src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/special:random/image" alt="Google" style="border:none" /></a></div> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search" style="margin-left:135px"> <div> <input type="hidden" name="domains" value="en.wikipedia.org" /> <input type="hidden" name="num" value="50" /> <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="utf-8" /> <input type="hidden" name="oe" value="utf-8" /> <input type="text" name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value="gsgs" /> <input type="submit" name="btnG" value="Google Search" /> </div> <div style="font-size:90%"> <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" id="gwiki" value="en.wikipedia.org" checked="checked" /><label for="gwiki">Wikipedia</label> <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" id="gWWW" value="" /><label for="gWWW">WWW</label> </div> </form> </html>
A new proposal regarding Trivia sections in articles has been created. Input is appreciated! -- Osbus 00:59, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Some discussions which recently took place on Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates found some support for the idea of a static version of wikipedia, and the notion that the tools that work so well for developing articles become our enemy when considering articles which can be considered finished. WP:STABLE proposed the marking of revisions in the article history; a new idea is under development which goes a step further and seeks to separate the finished articles from those in development by creating static versions of finished articles which would be the default view for visitors, and which would only be editable by a subset of users. A 'live' version would still exist and improvements could be incorporated into the static version.
The incentive to vandalise that comes from seeing the results instantly would be removed, for articles with static versions. The authoritativeness of static versions would be greater than live versions because the reader could be sure that no vital facts had recently been changed maliciously.
Details of the idea and full discussion of the numerous advantages it could bring are at Wikipedia:Static version. Your comments are invited. Worldtraveller 00:20, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
There are plenty of great ideas on here, but who is in charge of deciding to okay it? (for example, my syntax highlighting idea above)-- Max Talk (add) 22:46, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
I was going over the perennial proposals, and I saw the conflict over semi-protecting the entire project. After much thought, I wanted to add to the discussion. I found that, since I was using a school computer, I was blocked.
Blocked. Yes, some immature idiots, probably at a middle school (my school's IP adress conducts an entire school district), have gone and vandalized Jesus, and we—all ten thousand of us!—have been blocked. This naturally frustrates the living daylights out of me.
This got me to thinking—Why? I understand the need to prevent vandalism, but surely there's another way. I think there is.
If the software allows it, I propose that we have a new category of Wikipedians, called, for the moment, "Good Citizens". These are REGISTERED WIKIPEDIANS, who have never (or almost never) been cited for vandalism or maliciousness, who have at least, say, 100 edits to their names. Nomination could be by anybody, including oneself, and then reviewed by a sysop to certify that the applicant meets the standards.
Now what would a "Good Citizen" do? Essentially, the only thing that would distinguish a "Good Citizen" from any other Wikipedian is that, since this "Good Citizen" is exactly that, he/she would be given the right to edit from computers with blocked IPs when logged in.
I know what some of you might think—this creates an "aristocracy" in which most Wikipedians will be discriminated against. On the contrary, I think that most Wikipedians meet this standard. It would prevent the unfair blockage of good editors—for example, there have to be a few good editors out of ten thousand people in one of the best school districts in the state of Michigan—so long as they register and qualify. Perhaps a better term would be "Certified Non-Vandal", but "Good Citizen" is just as good in my opinion, and has a better ring to it.
And for those of you concerned about vandals getting "Good Citizen" status, any "Good Citizen" is on a policy of strict nonvandalism. Any "Good Citizen" who is cited for vandalism can, should, and will have his or her "Good Citizen" status revoked summarily. Perhaps, after a time, the status may be returned, but it would take a long time, a deep investigation, and a good explanation.
With that, I present my proposal to the WikiPublic. Lockesdonkey 20:38, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Question = When an IP gets blocked, does someone who is logged in but connects via that IP also get blocked? 'Cause if so that's lame. -- Username132 ( talk)
Yep. Lockesdonkey 19:37, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Can we include some of this on Wikipedia? WikiTeX It would really be awesome, especially for music and chemistry-related articles. — M e ts501 talk 22:20, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Holy carp! Just looking at that example page makes my mouth water! It's awesome! Especially the music: I didn't know it was that easy to typeset music readably. Brilliant!-- Slashme 10:24, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Similar to the barnstar and user templates, this is a counter that keeps track of Wikipedia "currency." Currency is earned automatically for different actions (such as page edits by byte count), but is meant more as a reward or gift. One can give others currency for helping with an article, finding information, or some other action, which can be put up as a request and accepted by others- once the task is completed, the originator can "accept" to pay the user for the task, adding currency to their counter. Creating a "task" template allows the payer to specify an action and close the task when the payer sees the task is finished.
Currency would also be given for acts of notoriety, resolving disputes, and other honorable actions. Since the currency is kept track of server side on a different server, users cannot edit their total, but can add or subtract by giving or paying to a specific user by typing the username and amount and hitting submit. Hopefully this will bring a sense of unimaginable chaos. Ihavenolife 01:55, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Hello, all: I've written up Wikipedia:Quasi-protection policy, a proposal similar to semi-protection that would effectively limit sleeper accounts used to vandalize articles linked from the Main Page. I know that I've written a lot, and at first glance, the proposal may seem daunting. However, I truly believe that this would immensely improve Wikipedia and implore you to read it through and offer your thoughts on the talk page. Thanks! Flcelloguy ( A note?) 22:49, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
Comments regarding a proposal at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (categories) that would make "in country" the naming convention for Landform by country categories would be very appreciated prior to a cfru. Kurieeto 22:24, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
One thing that bothers me about how this wiki handles whitespace it handles newlines. One single newline is ignored and two newlines means a new paragraph, but once it becomes more newlines then it starts to behave odd. It starts to add <br/>s and paragraphs containing <br/>s. I think that the behvior is on purpose but I still think that it is odd. It's probably there to make one newline in the source to mean one newline in the html, but is that a behaviour the editors want to have?
What this behaviour means is that additonal empty lines between papragraphs in the source will show up when the html page is generated, which I don't think that most editors desire. It's not often one wants to force newlines (other than to separate paragraphs) and in those few cases I think that <br/> would do.
What I propose is that addtional line breaks other than the first two will be ignore. 100 empty lines will be the same as one empty line. But one single line break should be handled as now. I think that this is the way LaTeX does it and also what I think is easiest for the editor since he doesn't have to care exatly how many empty line he has between paragraphs. And this changes wouldn't affect the readers other than making the layout more consistent. Another plus would be that my suggest behaviour makes more sense than the current with skins that separate paragraphs in other ways than newlines.
I have been around Wikipedia for some time now and I haven't seen this discussed anywhere. I personally think it is a quite major issue since it is easy to add too many newlines between paragraphs. Is this a no issue? What do you think about my suggestion? Jeltz talk 15:27, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Currently, source code in Wikipedia looks rather dull:
/* * This is fake Java code to demonstrate syntax coloring. * */ public static void main(String[] args) { String s = new String("This is a test"); char ch = 'c' + 123; }
Would it be better if syntax coloring could be applied to the code? Here is an example:
/* * This is fake Java code to demonstrate syntax coloring. * */ public static void main(String[] args) { String s = new String("This is a test"); char ch = 'c' + 123; }
To implement this, I had to use several <span>
tags to achieve this, which makes the code almost incomprehensible. What I am suggesting is a modification to
MediaWiki:Common.css or
MediaWiki:Monobook.css. We would define styles for various types of words in a syntax block:
/* CSS code */ syntax key { color:blue; font-weight:bold;} syntax string {color: maroon;} syntax char {color: orange;} syntax number {color: teal;} syntax comment {color: green;}
In the source code, we could simply write out:
<syntax> <comment>/** this is a comment</comment> <string>"Hey there!"</string> </syntax>
This makes future editing much simpler. If a certain user wished to customize the colors and styles, or turn them off, all he would need to do is modify his own CSS file. This would also pave the way for a possible syntax highlighting tool, much like the <math> tool. The parser would already have the styles in place.
Please, relay your thoughts to me. -- Max Talk (add) 04:04, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Instead of modifying the Common.css and Monobook.css, wouldnt it be practicable to use an extension such as this. You can find samples here -- Oblivious 11:12, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I have just created Wikipedia:Categorization of location, proposing a hierarchy of location-based categories. Once widely employed, these will allow the reader to quickly find articles about locations that are near that described by the article they're currently reading. All feedback welcome, as always. AxelBoldt 03:02, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm asking for this action since I have the feeling Wiki users fail to see hidden information because of automatic redirection. A simple link to the page where the first page is redirected to would do better in my point of view, since you would always first stop at that word which you really entered. Different opinions? Suggestions? Have a nice day! -- Tom David 16:18, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
Why this should be such a big problem to make one single click more? Yes I mean that the user should be forced to click an extra link. The information that one has been "redirected" is so small and almost invisible that every second user doesn't remark it. Well, think what you want. I don't like the automatic redirection. If you correct somebody always automaticaly, I'm not sure whether he will be able to correct himself one day on his own. -- Tom David 07:44, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
I have the feeling that some articles you can't find because of the automatic redirection, especially if you are a fast user (then you don't see everything), but it looks like everybody has to make his own experience concerning "being automated" :) -- Tom David 09:37, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Well, if web servers are regarded as encyclopedias, ok. Nevertheless, clicking on a link is not the same as entering a word in a search mask. It's clear that links should always point to the correct address. Anyway, perhaps it's better if one doesn't need to click too many times. Just let's make sure not to bury something useful behind a redirection... -- Tom David 17:34, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I feel that Wikipedia is in dire need (ok, not quite) of a computing reference desk, simply called, the computing desk, (not Computer Science or whatever) because of the immense number of programming language questions and people requesting advice on purchases, using the Science and Mathematics Reference desks out of lack of alternatives. It is not easy to find a suitable place to ask a computing question to a first time wikipedian, and as such, they tend to be distributed across all the desks... Simply make a computing desk. -- Eh-Steve 05:01, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
I suppose it would be for all computing questions, including the mundane powerpoint advice questions. But I think it should be turned into a project ASAP --
Eh-Steve 18:35, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
I thought it might be more useful to have "New Pages" easier to click on at the top left. Recent changes is useful to have in a smaller wiki where theres only a hundred or so changes a day, but whats the point in having it there to see hundreds of changes every minute? -- Astrokey 44 03:29, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
window.onload = Main; function Main() { changenavbox(); } function changenavbox() { document.getElementById('n-recentchanges').firstChild.innerHTML = 'New pages'; document.getElementById('n-recentchanges').childNodes[0].href = ' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Newpages; }
I'm fairly active in trying to copyedit the massive amounts of articles at Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit and I've found that there is no good way to prioritize them; no way to know which ones have been unchanged the longest. So I looked around the whole Cleanup section and the closest we have to that is {{ cleanup-date}} which is still limited to the month. So I was wondering if Wikipedia had DynamicPageList, and it doesn't. There is a modified version of the DPL called DPLforum that was originally made to be a forum. However, at Uncyclopedia, we also use it for the categorization of maintenance articles. They can be sorted by last edit, and provide a link to the page, the history, and display the last author. I think that this would help with prioritizing cleanup, but I recognize it is not the most efficient way of doing this. I'd like to propose that Wikipedia install an extension like this one for automating cleanup and such. I can easily contact the author of the extension if modifications are proposed, and if someone wants to write an extension similar but more effective (and less intensive on the database), that'd also be appreciated. Thoughts? -- Keitei ( talk) 08:47, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I suggest giving people the ability to have ads, such as google adwords. This would be good for 2 reasons, it would generate some more money to help run wikipedia, and often the ads are relevant and useful. I recomend that it be optional, and off by default, with something simple like a checkbox in preferences. I personally would turn them on as they are often useful, and people that dislike ads could choose not to turn them on (and unless they check their preferences every day, may not even know they can have them). A vertical ad block would fit quite nicely under the toolbox.
But a ton of people are virulently anti-ad, for some reason that's always baffled me, so the basically trivial income that voluntary ads would produce would in fact probably be outweighed by the backlash. — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 22:11, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
If saberwyn reads this I just hope he accepts my sincerest apologies. I should have been more careful about reading the policies and it was stupid of me to add this article without consulting those policies. In my defense, this was my first article and I was rather enthusiastic. I'm really sorry for the mess. Sqrlaway 01:07, 31 May 2006 (UTC)
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One problem with IP edits is that we have no way of knowing if someone has already looked it over for vandalism. So one edit might be reviewed by twenty users and found OK, while another article's edit might be reviewed by no-one because everyone presumed someone else was doing it. It would be a great help if there was a tick box that admins or general signed in users could tick just to say "User 'x' read this article". That way we could spread our limited checking resources more efficiently.
For admins fighting vandalism, rollback is a vital tool. But it allows no explanation to be given. To leave an explanation, one has to do the slower process of opening up an older version and saving it with an edit summary. An option to type a rollback explanation would be great help, combining rollback speed with the ability to explain. FearÉIREANN \ (caint) 21:40, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
I am in the unfortunate position that I can edit Wikipedia from home, but not while I am at work. My employer has a proxy server and several hundred thousand people within the organisation all appear to post from one ip address. I am sure this is not the only situation like this around the world. It severely restricts participation from a huge number of excellent potential editors. I suggest the logic of the block list be amended so that the status of a user is tested first, then the ip address they are posting from. If the user is a long term editor with a good record then editing should be allowed regardless of the ip address. Anonymous edits from blocked ip ranges should be blocked as usual. New accounts from people within blocked ip ranges could be set up through administrators, who could require proper identification through an exchange of e-mail.
The vast majority of vandalism is just casual joking about and sandboxing by IP users, I suggest therefore that only allowing a change to be saved once it has been previewed will drastically reduce this type of vandalism. Martin 10:52, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
A few of the articles are attacked based around times in schools or geographically. Example - I see a lot of schools IP vandalizing certain articles each morning just prior to school or college starting (?). Sometimes there may be attacks on some controversial articles based on geography. These times are pretty much predictable and repeatable. It would be nice to prevent attack with sprotection and other protection schemes based on time. This would allow anons or even regular users (for full protected articles) to contribute while stopping the majority of attack. -- Supercoop 15:29, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
I discussed it on the mailing list and I think I'd share some ideas with advertising on wikipedia. As some of you may have noticed, some websites copy the content of wikipedia and have some advertisement on the right-hand side of the page. This is a google-like adword style (nothing flashy) that is related to the text of the article. I know advertising is controvertial but here's a suggestion (it's not only my ideas, others helped).
There are several caveats (apparently) with this technique. At least 1/3 of the income must come from donations, so a way to control for it must be found. On the other side, would could advertise that there's a donation matching, like "for every dollar you give, wikipedia receives three". There are also other legal/accounting issues that are over my head. Also, another caveat is the "sell-out" factor. There a concern, legitimate I think, that advertising might go against POV.
Very strong oppose Some people seem to want to push advertising for the sake of it. The financial position appears to be sound - sound enough at least for the fundraiser to be late again - and the server reliablility is much better than it was a year ago. There is no current financial problem to address. Wikipedia is pure, so let's keep it that way. One thing you can be sure of is that having ads won't encourage more good editors to join. Sumahoy 02:25, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
I think it's more accurate to say that some people want to oppose advertising just for the sake of it. As though something is impure about text ads. — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 23:04, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Several people have been working on a proposal document discussing this exact topic. Please Help us at User:NeilTarrant/PageAds Danny Beardsley 08:43, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
I don't see a need for them, but opt-in ads for registered users would be harmless. The usual knees are jerking, of course. — Matt Crypto 09:02, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
This is a bad idea. Introducing any ads is likely to reduce donations. Introducing ads in a way that will only produce a small amount of revenue might reduce donations by more than the amount of new income generated. Bhoeble 23:10, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
Strong oppose. Wikipedia is nonprofit. This goes against the very nature of Wikipedia and will ruin it. The very thing that makes Wikipedia so unique and such a powerful force is its freedom. But that did give me an idea: how about another totally unaffiliated website that skins over Wikipedia that has ads on it, and all proceeds are donated directly to Wikipedia? Sort of like what Answers.com does, only trying to help Wikipedia, not freeloading it. And it will be made very clear that this is not original content, but rather just an optional way for persons who don't mind AdWords to donate financially. It is very obvious that Wikipedia needs more funding. They key point would be that somebody else administers it, and that it is made very clear that it is not affiliated in any way with Wikipedia. It's just a thought anyway. Comments, please. michaelb 19:24, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Extreme oppose—Not only my personal dislike of internet advertising, but especially to avoid even the mere appearance or rumor of conflicts of interest. Ardric47 07:30, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Apparently there were proposals for a spell-checker, but they were thrown out because of fears of the software "correcting" things that didn't need correcting. Currently a lot of spelling fixes are done as separate edits, with AWB, Wikipedia:Typo, Wikipedia:Lists of common misspellings, Spellbound, etc. Maybe a better method would be to have the Mediawiki software look for words and display them on preview? Like you press preview and it underlines the words a special way or something. "Underlined words may be misspelled." That would help to reduce errors in a human-controlled way while not interrupting work or making tons of extra edits just for spell fixes. — Omegatron 16:20, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
Would it use British or American spelling, or would there be an option in Preferences? A recipe for endless confusion as spelling switches from one to the other and back! - Runcorn 22:15, 27 April 2006 (UTC)
Definitely better to use Google than the internal search facility; the only problem is the time lag before Google picks up changes. But that's off-topic. - Runcorn 16:35, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
Google Toolbar has a built in spell checker for textboxes and forms on web pages. It functions much in the same way as the spell checker in microsoft word does. Danny Beardsley 08:01, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
The idea of a Spell Checker seems like a good one to me. It should just point out the words, not change them automatically. On the other hand, just copying and pasting the writing into Word or a similar program could also do the trick. -- Matterbug 22:55, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree with the idea, I don't want to copy everything into Word everytime I want to make an edit. But I think we need a spellcheck for the seach engine first. Pseudoanonymous 23:45, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I have made a proposal at Wikipedia_talk:Interlanguage_links#Interlanguage_link_order_(again). Please review it, so hopefully we can finally settle on a standard order for the inter wiki links. Martin 21:33, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
A new and improved version of Wikipedia:Wikiethics is posted for all Wikipedians to discuss and make suggestions for an improvement... Assert your role in the global Wikipedia community and give your opinion today...it matters! Netpari 20:28, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
I have created a new vandal template, template:IPvandal, the main difference from template:vandal being that it removes the pagemove lookup, as such a feature is unessesary for IP users, and replaces it with a WHOIS lookup keyed to the user in question-- {anon iso − 8859 − 1 janitor} 18:17, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
It says,
but this isn't technically correct as you can "watch" red-linked articles by going to the "create this article" screen. The page hasn't been deleted as it has not been created in the first place. Perhaps have something like,
Skinnyweed 15:51, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
I would like to see a series on Church of England Cathedrals, with one of those grey boxes with hyperlinks to articles on CofE cathedrals in the bottom of the article.
Lofty 10:45, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
There's a renaming request at Wikipedia:Categories for deletion/Log/2006 May 4#Category:Top 10 to Category:Top 8 which seems in violation of the neutral point of view policies, given that we are ultimately arguing over what are the top however many categories on Wikipedia. Steve block Talk 20:50, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
Could there be a bolded message to categorize new articles when a user is creating a new article. - Roy Boy 800 22:54, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
There is a huge amount of stuff going on on WP - task forces, stubcatting, regional notice boards, wikiprojects, collaborations of the week/fortnight/whenever... I've been thinking that it would be a good idea to have an at least partially definitive "Wikipedia Directory", at least to record what is going on at a national and regional level. Since many new editors like to make contributions about the area where they live, it would be nice to be able to send them to a page where they can find out what we currently have on their local area, what we still need doing there (stub expansions, photo requests, maybe translation requests as well), who is there who could help (there are categories of Wikipedians by region, it would be good to get some mileage out of them!) and where they can go to co-ordinate effort with other editors (regional notice boards, projects, task forces etc). As a taster, would someone like to have a look at User:TheGrappler/North America directory, which is a very rough mock-up of a North America directory of Wikipedia activities. It has a bunch of countries (ranging from the USA, with all of its attached activities, to minor island countries that seriously lack article depth and contributor numbers) presented to a range of detail (I didn't finish sorting out the individual U.S. states and Canadian provinces, but the ones that are complete give a taste of how it could look, with effort). A useful extension would be to include "useful resources" in the table for each country e.g. if there is a handy reference site, or somewhere that provides copyleft images suitable for uploading to Commons. Do people think that what I have produced so far, if extended, would be useful for either themselves or for new users trying to get to grips with the Wiki-myriad? What could be done to make it more useful? TheGrappler 11:55, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Might i suggest an intresting idea that you could perfomr with your resources, but first af all let me tell you that there are some few things in this world which bring me such much joy and hope in the human race just as wikipedia does, this is such an excitating emotion that only those who have been part of such inovetive project as the French Enciclopaedia, the French Revolution, The Industrial Revolution, Printing Press cloud have felt, i can mearley imagine where this projec might lead us all.
I have an intresting propossal that you might be able to execute, why don´t you do a section of wiki where entire cities are historically portraied so that the people arround the world take good pictures of the important building in their city and us the people produce an acount if each of the cities historical buildings, and the interface of this section could bethat of a touristic guided tour, another idea is to let mayor universities around the world to be entrusted wuth the further progress of a wiki section, for example physich could be entrusted to cambridge and law could be entrusted to harvard.
Thank you so much for the gift that you are creating for humanity evolution all arround the globe.
Alejandro Lyman Chandler
Hello,
> > I have a suggestion, can it be possible to arrange all your data in a sort > of interactive, expandable, timeline? One that expands to all areas within > a colapsable timeline and has links to related topics. > Of course it would follow in the spirit of user-made enciclopaedia. > I think it would help the Understanding of Knowledge a great deal to see > time-scaled correlations of knowledge grafically. > I think it would thrive. > > Any way there's my two cents' worth. > > Yours Sincerly, > > Andrés Cañas. > >
When I joined Wikipedia over a year ago vandalism (and general bad editing, such as spamming) was a problem, but it was small enough such that it could be dealt with. Today is seems to me that vandalism is becoming uncontrollable, we seem to have forgotten what we are here to do (make a damn good encyclopedia!), and we seem more focused on "vandal fighting" or whatever, as if that was the original point of this project.
Vandalism is getting so bad now that much is just simply not reverted within a satisfactory period of time, and all too often that which is reverted is not reverted properly, and previous vandalisms are edited into the article.
Monitoring and reverting vandalism also wastes much time, particularly of our best editors, who would otherwise actually be making articles better.
Vandalism heavily damages our credibility, putting off potential good editors, and specifically academics and the like, who ultimately are the key people we need to build a respected resource.
It seems to me that the present philosophy of "wiki" is one suitable to a small project, as Wikipedia was a few years ago, whereas now it is one of the most popular websites on the planet, now we don't need to worry about finding new editors, we need to worry about finding the right editors (i.e. not vandals and spammers etc.).
I think we are approaching a decision, where we either have to decide whether this project is some kind of social experiment, in which case nothing need change, or if this project is to build an encyclopedia, in which case we are going to have to adapt our concept of "wiki".
Two possible ideas are to either only allow editing of mainspace articles for users with registered email addresses, or have some form of stable article, that can't be directly edited by anyone. Either way, something needs to change. Martin 15:04, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree vandalism is becoming more and more prevalent. In the last few weeks most of my time has been spent on vandalism watch. Yesterday when I signed on to my watchlist 45% of it consisted of vandalism reversions by users. Some articles seem to experience nothing but vandalism, reversion, vandalism, reversion etc etc.
I wonder whether anonymous edits should not be banned - so that no one could edit without logging in. This will not prevent people setting up multiple IDs, but it ought to hinder those who work from multiple IP addreses that any anyway merely a series of number that mean little to most of us. There may need to be a slight change to the software, so that one cannot lose an edit in progress, because one's connection or log in fails, for example by ensuring that a page that cnnot be saved automatically comes up as a preview. Peterkingiron 00:07, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Somewhere here an editor was complaining that another editor persisted in trying to introduce material about Asperger syndrome into the Albert Einstein article. A major article that has to cover a lot of ground cannot often include links to all auxilliary or tangential subjects. without breaking the flow.
It might therefore be useful to have a convention for linking to the What links here page for the article. Something like:
Space does not permit all aspects of this subject to be referred to here. For other articles that may contain further information relating to "Article name", please see What links here or press [alt-j].
This could of course be done as a Template ({{backlinks}}). It would benefit from certain improvements to the MediaWiki software, in particular ability to restrict to the main namespace [2] and to sort according to some kind of relevance or popularity. It would also need consensus to adopt this convention and document it on relevant Wikipedia pages. -- Cedders tk 15:40, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
If there is justification for the link, why not fork off a separate article, such as Albert Einstein and Asperger's syndrome (properly linked from the main Einstein page, of course), and put the link there? If there is no justification for the link, then it shouldn't be there at all. User:Zoe| (talk) 16:39, 1 May 2006 (UTC)
Cedders, I think you may be on to something really worthwhile here. I'd like to spin an idea out of this concept of inter-article relevance for a second. Obviously one of the great innovations of Wikipedia is the ability to quickly follow 'trees' of knowledge both vertically and horizontally, allowing for users to develop a sense of both the breadth and depth of a subject by examining its context and history. As the project grows, it should be possible to become, literally, an expert on a given area of study simply by following enough of the appropriate links. But which links to follow, and in what order, is not always obvious, especially if you want to study efficiently.
In that sense, it could be very useful to have a tool that showed users, for a given article, which articles other users arrived from, and which they departed to. Zooming out, this would allow for a kind of conceptual roadmap -- a set of beaten paths, if you will -- that would not only help users usefully navigate families of concepts, but also provide a set of invaluable data about inter-article usage patterns, and maybe, eventually, the nature of the conceptual relationships themselves. It's the Wikipedia equivalent of "Users who Bought this Book Also Bought" -- except that instead of being a marketing tool, it would be one that streamlined learning.
It takes your garden-variety linking to the next level. The way it is now, all links are created equal, a state that results in lots of irrelevant connections, and does little to reveal the nuanced webs of relevance that bind all concepts. Knowing the best routes between ideas could solve the irrelevant links problem by just showing users what other users have done. Better even than the 'tree' or 'beaten path' or Amazon.com analogy is this: imagine a library where books were connected by glowing threads. The stronger the connection between two books, the brighter the thread would be. Everything is connected, of course, but you'd be able to make out patterns within the web that would indicate which shelf you ought to go to next. Who decides what's relevant to what? Well, everyone, of course. -- HarpooneerX 08:03, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
You know, I've seen kids use Wikipedia (Simple English if they know about it) a lot lately and sometimes they can get confused with the whole interface and stuff. Like some kids who wander into the talk pages and kind of "vandalise" it. Also, since this is an encyclopedia, it has articles on many items, some of which are not appropriate for young users. So, maybe, we could design a kid-friendly UI, non editable, and features. I could explain everything right now, but so far, what do you think? Crad0010 00:27, 11 April 2006 (UTC)
I disagree. In addition to wikipedia being simply a plain old encyclopedia without its vast open-source capabilities, I have a positive attitude towards kids getting to see all of the information on wikipedia. The only inappropriate content to be viewed by anyone, in my opinion, is biased content. Wikipedia is not biased. Regardless of the subject matter, I view wikipedia as a great resource to be used by kids. Besides, they'll be exposed to the more "mature" subject matter later on in their lives anyways. Having wikipedia provide a preliminary understanding of these subjects for children as opposed to their peers doing it in an immature and uninformative way has to be a good thing. -- Matt0401 22:16, 13 April 2006 (UTC)
Sorry, but protecting kids from Wikipedia is a bad idea. Smoke comes out of my ears and nose whenever I hear someone bring this topic up. -- Osbus 01:06, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
Here's another view. Many schools forbid outside communication, by editing the Wikipedia it could be classed as communicating. If the school finds editing fine, they can unblock the Wikipedia (many schools use a whitelist system). Computerjoe 's talk 15:33, 16 April 2006 (UTC)
I am employed by the education department of an Australian state government. I work in schools every day. Unfortunately I am unable to recommend Wikipedia as an educational resource in schools because some of the content is inappropriate. The word inappropriate may not be strong enough. It is actually illegal to expose some Wikipedia content to minors in many jurisdictions.
The only realistic solution to this problem would be to create a seperate project Wikipedia Junior that mirrors copies of Wikipedia articles verified not to contain inappropriate content. Such a project would be massive, but could attract funding from the education departments of countries around the world.
What constitutes inappropriate content is a contentious issue however, and the definition may vary according to culture. Since the content would be protected, a standardised article tagging system could be used to filter content according to each nation's cultural or legal requirements.
-- Dave 02:03, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
Earlier discussion of a closely related question can be found here - you may find it interesting/helpful. FreplySpang (talk) 02:21, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
A Wikipedia edition for kids is not only a bad idea, but a costly one too. Where will we get the money? And to whoever said that edu. departments over the world could help, why would they do this when they already have what they think is a perfectly good resource, other encyclopedias (i.e. Britanica.)? -- Osbus 18:17, 23 April 2006 (UTC)
A while back, the Wikimedia Foundation received a grant to get started on a project for making books for children: see m:Wikijunior. — THIS IS MESSED OCKER (TALK) 00:51, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
The idea is interesting, but I don't think it is fair. I myself am 15 and use Wikipedia for research and browsing. Wikipedia should be about covering all topics, and kids often have more knowledge about certain subjects than adults do (and vice versa). I believe they are an important part of the process. -- Matterbug 22:53, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
I disagree with the idea of having a wikipedia for kids, we don't know whether everything on wikipedia is accurate. Even if we have a formal peer review system and checked the accuracy of everything, we still need experts to check everything over. Until we created a stable wikipedia v1.00 I don't think we should make a wikipedia for kids. We know how to use wikipedia, kids don't they will think whatever they read is accurate; and that is fatal on something like wikipedia. I don't want some kid to think that John Seigenthaler, Sr. attempted to kill JFK. Pseudoanonymous 23:41, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Woman have breast's men have penis's and people do drugs. thats just a fact of life, nothing to hide any one from. user:Zerath13
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Childrens'_Wikipedia may be of interest. -- PinchasC | £€åV€ m€ å m€§§åg€ 01:36, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Have we thought about making pages in user space not indexed by search engines, so that our internal chatter does not come up on Google, etc? I assume we already do so for article talk pages, since I don't generally see them come up in a Google search.
I think not indexing should be explored for user space for the following reasons
In a nutshell, I can think of only one reason to keep these pages indexed in search engines - backup when our search dies - but many why to delete.
Comments? I looked around in perennial proposals and did not find this discussed; if it is, please let me know. -- Martinp 22:08, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree with this. We shouldn't be clogging the internet with our user/talk pages (Although I think the Wikipedia space is fine). Broken Segue 02:54, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering if we could have a feature to edit SVG images sort of wikistyle like we do for articles. It would help graphic artists immensely instead of repeatedly uploading large files for minor ammendments. Regards, =Nichalp «Talk»= 15:30, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I think it would be easier to fill in needed facts if the [ citation needed template directed a person to an edit screen where they could fill in the reference info and submit it. Ch u ck (척뉴넘) 06:12, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed an inconvenience with the use of Wikipedia. Whenever I do a Google search, specifically for example an image, and the result is on Wikipedia, the moment I click on the link, I can never go back to the search page. I have to log back onto Google and start my search again. It would be really nice if the 'back' button got me back to the site on which I was previously, instead of trapping me on Wikipedia. Thank you. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.241.6.206 ( talk • contribs)
I ever accessed WP using an Innostream A10 telephone and to my surprise, it loaded quite nicely, albeit a different layout and design. I can still view (some, due to the (occasional) "page cannot be displayed" error) articles and pictures quite nicely. In some pages, the navigation toolbar and the tabs at the top can be found by scrolling all the way to the bottom. This makes me interested to see if any guide is available on how to view and edit pages on WP (including logging in) using a telephone capable of using GPRS, WAP or even 3G. It can be a guide that is named: "Guide to using WP on a telephone" or equivalent. Any comments? -- Bruin_rrss23 (talk) 02:40, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
I've noticed interwiki links on the main pages of many other wikipedias. See for instance nl:Hoofdpagina, ca:Portada, it:Pagina principale, hu:Kezdőlap, fi:Etusivu, etcetera. The English wikipedia seems to be one of the few wikipedias without interwiki links on the main page. Why is this, and how would you feel about those links being added to the main page? Aecis Apple knocker Flophouse 16:49, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
when is wikipedia going to get a browser toolbar, a la google? i keep waiting for them to put one out but they havent done it yet. that would be handy as hell. has this even been discussed? if not you should drop the idea. it would be great. now when i want to wiki something i just type in the thing in google and add "wiki" to my search. would be much easier with a separate toolbar.
I propose a new rule saying that in voting:
Any objections?? Georgia guy 19:40, 6 May 2006 (UTC)
At the moment, we place
Template:Sandbox ({{Sandox}} <!--Please do not edit the above section-->) on the page
Wiktionary:Sandbox. This is confusing to some newcomers, it doesn't look professional, and it often gets deleted, which then has to be replaced by an experienced user. On the other hand we have
MediaWiki:Newarticletext,
MediaWiki:Anoneditwarning and several other messages under the
MediaWiki namespace. I propose a similar feature (MediaWiki:Sandbox) be set up, then a function
could be placed in
MediaWiki:Monobook.js, something like var pagetitle = document.getElementById('content').getElementsByTagName('h1').item(0).firstChild.nodeValue; if (pagetitle.search(/^Wiktionary:Sandbox$/) != -1)
... In this way, a message would be shown at the top of the Sandbox instead of being in the Sandbox. Avoiding the need to periodically replace the Sandbox message. This could also be used for other discussion pages such as this Village pump. The main thing is that something has to be changed by the developpers to add a new MediaWiki page allowing the contents to show at the top of a specified page in
MediaWiki:Monobook.js. Perhaps we could file a bug report allowing for just such a change? What do you think? --
Shibo77 14:42, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Hello all, i'm back after a somewhat long respite, with a somewhat strange idea. After listening intuitively to radio shows of Ricky Gervais, i thought of the idea of giving "Honorary Editorship" to people like ricky - celebrities who have expressed an interest in charity and freedom. By "Honorary" i don't mean giving them any special priviledges, just providing them with the idea that we would enjoy them to be a member of the wikipedia -- having seasoned editors and admins just show him the ropes quickly..
I know he's a busy man, but i think it'd be mutually beneficial for both parties because, as you may or may not know, he has recently created an advert for a Prostate cancer charity, and i can't get the idea out of my head that, because he's a very scholarly guy, who has himself admitted to being enflamed by the quest and thirst for knowledge, that he would be very up on the idea. I can't say for definate he will like it, but i have a hunch that he just might.. who knows; if he likes it as much as we do, he may even drop it in some interviews here and there, and get the wikipedia more widespread appeal and attention.
Any feedback on the matter is very much appreciated! The magical Spum-dandy 15:11, 5 May 2006 (UTC)
I think it would be a good idea to start having arbitrators who aren't sysops. There really is no need for it to be admins who work there, just editors with certain qualifications (i.e. edit count, block record). Maybe there could be Arb's and Admins and we could make a RFArb. It seems like the admins now are the judge and jury, and that's not a good system. In real life, everyday people (I know Wikipedia is different and is not a democracy) are selected to be on a jury. Just my two cents, Ch u ck (척뉴넘) 05:56, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
It occured to me that it would be a potentially good idea to make, for varying subjects, pages that list renowned items in a catagory. For instance, much like the "wonders of the world", there are images that are well known and of historic importance. A article listing historic photographs, such as " The Unknown Rebel" or the picture of Kim Phuc Phan Thi, might be a useful addition. Though there are some obvious problems, like which photos are important enough to warrant inclusion or wether or not a photo has meaning (or the same meaning) in all cultures, it might be a good idea, much like we have featured articles or images, to have an article dealing with historic photos. I would appreciate seeing feedback on this.
Also, please note that though I used the concept of important photos in this example, this could apply to anything, like important movies (AFI 100 years, 100 movies) or drugs (pennicillin) or books.
-Oniamien
I made a template for brainstorming pages in the project namespace. This could be a semi-formal procedure, but with no need for a special policy or guideline. At least, I think it could be an interesting internal mechanism, how'bout you?
(And yes, I know, brainstormings have already been done without this. This is just about facilitating/formalizing the task) Flammifer 08:27, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
As wikipedia becomes more all-encompassing, everyone will start to use it alot more as both a reference and for leisure reading. This is a positve development. However, the color scheme of wikipedia is not as easy on the eyes as it could be. Research has been done as to the adverse effects of reading black text from white backgrounds (even in printed text), as well as the problems associated with reading from an electronic display of some sort. As it is, black text on a white background means that readers are essentially starting at a lightbulb while they read, inducing headaches and limiting reading sessions. If the background were to be darker than the text, it would be much more enjoyable. Perhaps black or brown or gray with a yellowish or bluish text? I don't know anything about design prinicples, only that webpages with this sort of presentation are much easier to read for extended periods of time. Is there any way this might happen? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Johngalt513 ( talk • contribs)
I have also been turning the brightness of my monitor down in order to read more easily. This modification would undoubtedly ease many user's and Wiki writer's/editor's eyes. Is there any chance that this proposal will go through? How can I work for that? Does anyone have any information on the longterm effects of text-reading from an a illuminated display? I imagine research has been done extensively on television, which has a comparable lit screen, but I feel like focusing much more closely, and in greater proximity to, on screen would possibly be worse than extended televesion-watching. johngalt513 17:33, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia.org- I am a HUGE fan of your website. I think it is the most amazing site in recent years! I have a suggestion for your site's slogan...
"Wikipedia: Where your thirst for knowledge can be quenched!"
Enjoy, Daniel Pesis dlpesis-AT-wisc.edu
Unfortunately, the phrase is a bit clichè and doesn't reflect what Wikipedia really is. Thanks for the input though, and don't listen to Skinnyweed. -- Osbus 22:40, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia has many many projects aimed at improving the content in various ways, however, this is all rather opaque to a new wikipedia editor such as me, and I guess even more so for a new wikipedia user. What about featuring projects on a regular basis on the main page, so as to drive potential editors who may not otherwise know how they can be useful ?
Currently, the main page holds a link at the bottom to Wikipedia:Community Portal, which is in that spirit, however, it's a little overwhelming, and not very obvious from the main page.
I have a proposal for a search bar for Wikipedia that is part of the Browser that people use to access the internet. It would work like the Google Search bar. You would type in what you are searching for in the bar and the result would open up in a new page or the same page in Wikipedia. I will great increase the ease to access Wikipedia when surfing. I propose the bar be called 'Wikibar' Thank you for taking the time to consider my proposal From Perry S. John pjohn_iii@hotmail.com
Add this:
javascript:(function(){q=document.getSelection(); if(!q){void(q=prompt('Wikipedia keywords:',''))}; if(q)location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?search='+escape(q);else location.href='http://en.wikipedia.org/';})()
as a bookmark in your toolbar. See also Bookmarklet 71.199.123.24 04:54, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Mozilla Firefox has a Wikipedia search built-in. If you want to, you can download Firefox from http://www.mozilla.org/firefox/. Andrew 22:44, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
The practice of Ostracism in all of the Wikimedia projects, especially in the Wiktionary and Wikipedia projects, has an extremely negative impact on both intellectual and financial contributors and I would imagine on their contributions as well. The practice of Ostracism is as simple as referring to anyone as a troll or making a comment like Don't feed the trolls. Rudeness and arrogance are not what the Wiktionary or the Wikipedia are all about yet the practice of Ostracism is in full swing.
I therefore propose that it be uplifted from the deep, dark and dank quarters of the dungeon guards and be acknowledged as an official Wikimedia philosophy so that its users can be recognized for what they believe and accepted or rejected by those of a like or differing mind. I make this proposal because Ostracism is being practiced to such a full extent that its existence can be neither hidden or denied. -- PCE 20:53, 7 May 2006 (UTC)
Not sure if this is the appropriate place for this posting, if not i'd be obliged if it was moved to a more suitable place by a more experienced user than myself. It has struck me in my limited time as a user of Wikipedia that the "search" engine is a bit of an oxymoron. It appears to be more of a database index. It seems incapable of discerning that two identical searches, one with capitals the other without, are looking for the same article. Is there a possibility that the search engine could be changed/developed to ignore whether capitals so that less redirected articles are required? I am completely unawares as to the technical difficulty of this so you will have to excuse me if I am asking something that is alot more difficult than it appears. Regards. Grahams Child 16 May 06
Just seeking some input, what would people think of {{ summarizeto}} and {{ summarizefrom}} variants of the merge templates for articles where summarization is not done properly? See german language for an example. The template would probably feed into the same category. Circeus 13:56, 19 May 2006 (UTC)
Following banned user Zephram Stark's attempt to rewrite WP:SOCK using two sockpuppet accounts, there is a proposal to limit the editing of policy pages either to admins, or to editors with six months editing experience and 1,000 edits to articles. Please vote and comment at Wikipedia:Editing policy pages. SlimVirgin (talk) 19:10, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Often when reporting a current vandal to WP:AIV no administrator shows up to block the vandal for almost 5 minutes. In that time, I (or whoever reported the vandal) has to go chasing the vandal around Wikipedia reverting his/her disruptive edits until he/she is blocked. I think it would be nice to have a box pop up (like the "you have new messages" box) on the pages of admins when a report is made to WP:AIV. What do you think? — M e ts501 talk 22:36, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
hello every one!
i have notice a small functional problem. The links are opening in the same window and not in a new one. I think that is might be confusing especially for the external URLs because if one click to visit a link that lead to an external site then he have to click the back button of his browser several times in order to return to the page of Wikipedia, but if the window of the external URL was opened in a new window he could simply close this window.
keep up the good work...
There is ongoing debate about a name change at Wikipedia:Community Justice. There is a need for outside views, and input would be appreciated! Info can be found on the project's talk page. -- Osbus 14:52, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Two metadata templates, including the featured star template {{ featured article}} that alerts readers to featured articles and the spoken word icon {{ Spoken Wikipedia}} that links to the spoken version of articles, have been nominated for deletion. These are templates that place the and icons in the right-hand corner of articles. If you wish to have input on the proposed deletion, you can discuss the proposal here.
Cedars 04:35, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
Wiki should have a section where experts explain how technology works, using both historical and recent public domain patents, their utility should be explained for us which cannot decifer techno-jiddish
It would be very helpful to have hit counters for each article; this would give us a more precise way (than volume of vandalism or news articles) to focus attention on the articles that are getting viewed the most. From what I understand, the MediaWiki software has the capability; is it computational load that is the problem, or is there some other reason why Wikipedia doesn't do this already?-- ragesoss 20:01, 13 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks. It sure would be nice to have a more recent, fuller version of this (including portals and other spaces).-- ragesoss 03:11, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
Logging in can be made easier for users and for the servers by replacing the "Log in" link, with two small text boxes, for the user name and password respectively, and a button labeled "Log in". The boxes could be filled by default with the text "name" and "password", or have a text label next to each box. After loggin in, the user is automatically taken to the page s/he was viewing before. If the authentication fails, the user may instead be taken to a small "try again" page as currently, until authentication succeeds. This would simplify the log-in process a lot and encourage users to log in. It would also reduce the amount of data sent to and from the servers. - Pgan002 04:47, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
What will happen to Wikipedia in a disaster of global proportions such as the end of civilization? As humanity's greatest compilation of knowledge, Wikipedia must survive so that our race does not descend into a long dark age. What if nuclear weapons cause an electromagnetic pulse which destroys all electronic equipment? The CD project is a good start, which will guarantee survival assuming that people burn enough copies and that CD drives are still available after the crisis, but that alone is not enough. There should be human-readable copies as well, for example on paper, but paper is too easily destroyed by water and fire. We must learn from the mistakes of the Library of Alexandria and use modern technology to overcome them. Ideally Wikipedia should be engraved on metal plates like the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, and if possible it should be sent into outer space as well, in case the Earth is totally destroyed and it must become our legacy to any other intelligent life in the universe. What if books and other intellectual pursuits become outlawed as in Fahrenheit 451? Wikipedia articles should be memorized, which is well within the range of practicality since we have more users than articles... — Keenan Pepper 06:53, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I cannot remember where I saw it (there's a website somewhere) but a group out in Los Alamos was asked to devise a method for sending a message 100,000 years into the future. Now, such a question has two major problems - finding a medium that will survive 100,000 years, and encoding the message in such a way that it will be readable despite 100 millenia of language drift. The answer the devised was ingenius. The would take a baseball-sized steel sphere, and use a laser to microprint information onto it (something like 300,000 pages worth). The informaition would be in plain text, not requiring anything more sophisticated than a microscope to read it. And they would print 25,000 of them and spread them across the world - chances are, at least one will survive that far into the future. As far as langauge drift, they would print it in 10 langauges, including english, latin, chinese, hebrew, and spanish - in order that it become a rosetta stone. Raul654 07:06, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
It would be helpful and mutually advantageous to gather articles together to form study guides. In other words, have what is essentially an overview of, say, linguistics, by including in deliberate order all the articles that pertain to the subject. This way a student could form a skeletal understanding of the whole of a given subject matter, and have a table of contents to refer back to.
There should be different study guides for different levels of study, too. An introductory, advanced, and so on.
I am not well versed in wikipedia vernacular or computer code, but I hope this is of some help.
alex
I've recently become fascinated with the idea of idea markets (for instance You can bet on idea markets). Essentially, ideas become a financial vehicle. Some idea markets use virtual money, others use real money. I think that most wikipedians would be against a real money system, and SEC regulations might get tricky. With virtual money, these objections might be minimized (not totally eliminated, as for instance SEC v. SG, Ltd.).
How it would work
In theory, this solves several problems. If, say, an article a person owns shares in is vandalized, then they might 1. sell some shares, or 2. have a interest in maintaining that article's value and therefore remove the vandalism. Secondly, it would provide an interesting perspective on the structure and dynamics of wikipedia. For instance, I, for one, would be interested in many articles, if only there were some metric for determining their value besides using my own brain. Sometimes thinking is hard. A lesson from competitive free markets is that the market does much of the thinking for you. Thirdly, it might encourage people to be more involved with wikipedia.
A fair objection is that people wouldn't be interested in accumulating virtual money. However, the Hollywood Stock Exchange has had some success with this model. A more important objection is that the value of a stock wouldn't be based on anything other than other people's opinions. I'm not an economist, so I don't know about that.
Have a great proposal or discussion to bring up with the community? Want to lead an informal discussion about it at Wikimania? See below, re: ideas for conference events:
{{ wm06-annc}}
+sj + 23:28, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
Please see my post; I'd love to hear community opinions! (Please be gentle, this is my first foray into the community.) -- DanDanRevolution 05:00, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm planning to expand Cat:Images for cleanup by adding a new category for images with digital watermarking, and a cleanup template to sort images into the category. (Presumably we would want to replace all watermarked images with non-watermarked alternatives in the long run.) In people's experiences, would this be useful? And if so, what steps should I take to integrate this into Wikipedia's structure properly (so that editors will be able to find it)? – Unint 00:11, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
I have a list of several random proposals on my user page. Pcu123456789 21:47, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I posted a few months ago stating that Wikipedians should anticipate the split of Serbia and Montenegro and create/expand the seperate articles for each so as not to be caught out. However, I got shot down by several Serb users, but I thought now that the matter has been settled perhaps we can launch some drive to create/expand these articles, which are very poor in both quantity and quality. I have placed a small list here, but there will be many more areas to cover. Grunners 17:50, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia_talk:How_to_archive_a_talk_page#Permalink_archiving_is_underrated. Thanks. -- DanDanRevolution 07:29, 23 May 2006 (UTC) Update: This issue is, generally, resolved. -- DanDanRevolution 14:17, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Hi, I was told to post here, after posting at the Beauro's noticboard.
I was wondering if a group could be made (hopefully with me in it), and a very low, restricted block privlidge's be given. Perhaps no more than say an hour, so it at least immobilises the Vandal, and gives Admin enough time to look into the case, and give a longer block if necessary. I understand that it's a big priv, and should be used very carefully, and perhaps have a system like WP:RFR did, where you could report abuses of power etc.
Thanks In Advance. -- Deon555 03:11, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I have suggested at Template talk:Db-attack, that {{ db-attack}} should have a message telling people that they should blank the contents of the attack page. This would help keep attacks out of Google cache and wiki mirrors, while the page waits for admin action. -- Rob 20:12, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I was wondering if there is a naming convention that deals with capitalization of specific events, like earthquakes, floods and fires, or if one could be created. I could not find anything specific at Wikipedia:Naming conventions. Right now, it seems to be left up to the creator or decided on a case by case basis. For example, there is Johnstown Flood and Burchardi flood, Great Chilean Earthquake and Whittier Narrows earthquake, Reichstag fire and Great Chicago Fire. I'm not sure which version is most favored. I got a lot of results capitalized and uncapitalized when I searched Google. It appeared that the uncapitalized versions may be favored in academic writing, with journalists and other sources favoring capitalization. However, it also varied individually and it's too small of a sample size to make any accurate judgment. I prefer the capitalized versions because they are specific events and "flood", "fire" and "earthquake" are part of their names. However, lowercase would be okay if it would make the names consistent. -- Kjkolb 01:31, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
I have noticed that many users have placed a link of the form:
on their user talk pages. I think this is a very good idea for several reasons:
For all three of these reasons, but mostly because of the ease of use for new users, I would like to propose that a leave message link be added automatically to the top of every user talk page. I can see no real downsides, so long as we leave some formatting freedom to allow users control over their own talk pages. Any comments/suggestions are welcome. Thanks. Cool3 21:46, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Especially in template blocks with lots of names I would like to be able to make all the names non breaking, i.e. [[First Last]]. However if I do that it tries to link to page with a space in the name.
My proposal: just like spaces in links are automatically converted to underscores also convert to an underscore.
Or perhaps some other symbol to use that will mean non breaking space. A __ maybe? (Since it has special treatment right now.) i.e. [[First__Last]] will become First Last with a link to First_Last.
A symbol might be a good idea since I can imagine this being used a lot (see the uses section of nbsp). 71.199.123.24 04:46, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Please take the time to review my (revised) proposal for AfD reform. Thank you for your consideration. El_C 12:47, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
I think that sometimes, wikitables are hard to read and would benefit from having so-called "striped" rows. It's possible to do this pretty easily with some JS and CSS. I've tested this in my own CSS space and found that it works quite well.
Here's an example of how a table should look like with some small JS and CSS additions:
You type... | You see... | ||||||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
{| class="wikitable-striped" |+ Table tags ! Tag ! Description |- | <table> | Defines a table |- | <th> | Defines a header |- | <tr> | Defines a row |- | <td> | Defines a cell |- | <caption> | Defines a caption |} |
|
I think that this would make new tables that use this CSS class much more readable. Since it uses a new CSS class rather than the old one, it also won't break any old tables or cause discontent for those who don't like the stripes.
To get this to work, you'll need the JavaScript:
var stripe = function() { // This function will add stripes to all tables that have the "wikitable-striped" class attribute. var tables = document.getElementsByTagName("table"); for (var a = 0; a != tables.length; a++) { var table = tables[a]; if (!table) { return; } // If there are no tables, abort. if (table.getAttribute("class") == "wikitable-striped") { var tbodies = table.getElementsByTagName("tbody"); for (var b = 0; b < tbodies.length; b++) { var even = true; // We start with an even stripe. var trs = tbodies[b].getElementsByTagName("tr"); for (var c = 0; c < trs.length; c++) { if (even) { trs[c].className += "even"; } else { trs[c].className += "odd"; } even = !even; } } } } } // Perform the striping. window.onload = stripe;
... and the modified CSS:
table.wikitable, table.prettytable, table.wikitable-striped { margin: 1em 1em 1em 0; background: #f9f9f9; border: 1px #aaaaaa solid; border-collapse: collapse; } table.wikitable th, table.wikitable td, table.prettytable th, table.prettytable td, table.wikitable-striped th, table.wikitable-striped td { border: 1px #aaaaaa solid; padding: 0.2em; } table.wikitable th, table.prettytable th, table.wikitable-striped th { background: #e8e8e8; text-align: center; } table.wikitable caption, table.prettytable caption, table.wikitable-striped caption { margin-left: inherit; margin-right: inherit; } tbody tr.even td { background: #eee; } tbody tr.odd td { background: #f9f9f9; }
Note: the CSS was also changed slightly to make colors with the striped tables more visible. Normal wikitable headers would also get a background of #e8e8e8; with this change, although we can of course always change that if this is not desired. Anyway, if there is support for this, please let me know. I, for one, think this is nice. It would be best to do it in PHP, of course, but this will do for now. — Michiel Sikma, 05:18, 22 May 2006 (UTC) PS: this discussion was originally initiated at Village pump (technical) but then moved over here.
Can this be made modular, having the striping be independent of other Wikitable formatting? One should be able to use <table class="striped">
to apply the stripes only, and both classes <table class="wikitable striped">
to also have all the other wikitable formatting. With background tone defining every row, there is absolutely no reason to also add table borders.
How about striping rows in groups of three? This has been used to good effect in a number of articles, for example Romanization of Ukrainian#Table of romanization systems.
This may be a bit much to ask, but can this be smart about table headers, implementing a third background colour for them (e.g., the link above)? I suppose wikitext would have to allow <thead>
and <tbody>
for this to be implemented.
And why not maximize the contrast, using #fff for the white rows instead of #f9f9f9? — Michael Z. 2006-05-22 15:00 Z
Could we formalize this whole process, and allow Administrators or Users to come up with Change Requests. This form would detail exactly what is required. The requests could be logged into a tracking system, like Test Director as an example. The Change Requests could go before the Administrators on say a Monthly basis. At that stage they could be prioritized for implementation or dropped. Wallie 08:38, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Ack! What a nightmare! Why don't you just make the edits yourself, that's what Wikipedia is designed for. User:Zoe| (talk) 19:33, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Not for edits! For new proposals. For example, next month's suggestion, buy Zoe a new Porsche. Wallie 22:11, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
Where Wikipedians can book a meeting with their favorite admin. Wallie 21:42, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I may have been looking in the wrong place but I couldn't find anything which lists which are the most searched articles. I'm thinking along the lines of Google Zeitgeist or eBay Pulse. Yorkshiresky 17:29 20 May 2006 (UTC)
I'd like to propose that the Japanese tile in the Wikipedia logo be slightly altered to better represent the pronunciation of "Wikipedia" in Japanese. The Japanese tile is the one directly above the "W".
If you view the logo in the upper left corner of http://ja.wikipedia.org/ you will notice that while the graphic part of the logo is the same, the text for Wikipedia does not match the symbols in the tile.
It is written "ウィキペディア". The first character, ウ, represents 'u', but when ィ is attached it shifts the pronunciation to something closely resembling 'wi'.
The artist who made the Wikipedia logo almost had it right. He used ワ as the first character (wa), and attached ィ to shift the pronunciation to what only could be considered to be 'wi'.
The problem is that this combination is very rare in Japanese, and the pronunciation is ambiguous. When asked how to pronounce the ワィ in the Wikipedia logo, Japanese people often respond with a confused, "...wai? wi?... wai?". On the other hand, when confronted with ウィ, as I propose (and which is used in all Japanese writings of the word Wikipedia), all Japanese people will respond with an appropriate 'wi'.
The truth is, the Japanese language lost the 'wi' sound centuries ago, but everyone seems to agree that the closest thing to it is the combination ウィ.
How hard would it be to change that ワ to a ウ? (ワィ ウィ)
Wesarnquist 07:51, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
When I first started using wikipedia, it was fairly easy to find the articles I was looking for, but the pages are often messy and confusing. I have a few ideas:
1 - Add a "new users" function to wikipedia, whether it is a link on the navigation bar or something that appears in the user's functions. This could include an article link to a 'new user' article that would tell the user how Wikipedia works, what portals, articles, stubs, etc. are, how to start and edit articles, etc.
2 - Add a "create new article" and "sandbox" link in the navigation bar - they are really hard to find.
3 - A nicer looking User Interface might be good too, if possible. It might just be a change in the arrangement of everything, to make it easier to understand and use.
Someone should write an extension and enable on Wikipedia a <html> tag. The nowiki tag not only disables wikitext, but also disables html tags. The html tag should allow users to directly code html for whihc wikitext and templsates are insufficient. E.g. they could create a custom form by simply adding this text to a wikipedia page.
<!-- This displays a random wikipedia image in place of google logo on google wikipedia search --> <html> <div style="width:130px;float:left;text-align:center;position:relative;top:-8px"> <a href="http://www.google.com/" style="padding:0;background-image:none"> <img src="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/special:random/image" alt="Google" style="border:none" /></a></div> <form method="get" action="http://www.google.com/search" style="margin-left:135px"> <div> <input type="hidden" name="domains" value="en.wikipedia.org" /> <input type="hidden" name="num" value="50" /> <input type="hidden" name="ie" value="utf-8" /> <input type="hidden" name="oe" value="utf-8" /> <input type="text" name="q" size="31" maxlength="255" value="gsgs" /> <input type="submit" name="btnG" value="Google Search" /> </div> <div style="font-size:90%"> <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" id="gwiki" value="en.wikipedia.org" checked="checked" /><label for="gwiki">Wikipedia</label> <input type="radio" name="sitesearch" id="gWWW" value="" /><label for="gWWW">WWW</label> </div> </form> </html>
A new proposal regarding Trivia sections in articles has been created. Input is appreciated! -- Osbus 00:59, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Some discussions which recently took place on Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates found some support for the idea of a static version of wikipedia, and the notion that the tools that work so well for developing articles become our enemy when considering articles which can be considered finished. WP:STABLE proposed the marking of revisions in the article history; a new idea is under development which goes a step further and seeks to separate the finished articles from those in development by creating static versions of finished articles which would be the default view for visitors, and which would only be editable by a subset of users. A 'live' version would still exist and improvements could be incorporated into the static version.
The incentive to vandalise that comes from seeing the results instantly would be removed, for articles with static versions. The authoritativeness of static versions would be greater than live versions because the reader could be sure that no vital facts had recently been changed maliciously.
Details of the idea and full discussion of the numerous advantages it could bring are at Wikipedia:Static version. Your comments are invited. Worldtraveller 00:20, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
There are plenty of great ideas on here, but who is in charge of deciding to okay it? (for example, my syntax highlighting idea above)-- Max Talk (add) 22:46, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
I was going over the perennial proposals, and I saw the conflict over semi-protecting the entire project. After much thought, I wanted to add to the discussion. I found that, since I was using a school computer, I was blocked.
Blocked. Yes, some immature idiots, probably at a middle school (my school's IP adress conducts an entire school district), have gone and vandalized Jesus, and we—all ten thousand of us!—have been blocked. This naturally frustrates the living daylights out of me.
This got me to thinking—Why? I understand the need to prevent vandalism, but surely there's another way. I think there is.
If the software allows it, I propose that we have a new category of Wikipedians, called, for the moment, "Good Citizens". These are REGISTERED WIKIPEDIANS, who have never (or almost never) been cited for vandalism or maliciousness, who have at least, say, 100 edits to their names. Nomination could be by anybody, including oneself, and then reviewed by a sysop to certify that the applicant meets the standards.
Now what would a "Good Citizen" do? Essentially, the only thing that would distinguish a "Good Citizen" from any other Wikipedian is that, since this "Good Citizen" is exactly that, he/she would be given the right to edit from computers with blocked IPs when logged in.
I know what some of you might think—this creates an "aristocracy" in which most Wikipedians will be discriminated against. On the contrary, I think that most Wikipedians meet this standard. It would prevent the unfair blockage of good editors—for example, there have to be a few good editors out of ten thousand people in one of the best school districts in the state of Michigan—so long as they register and qualify. Perhaps a better term would be "Certified Non-Vandal", but "Good Citizen" is just as good in my opinion, and has a better ring to it.
And for those of you concerned about vandals getting "Good Citizen" status, any "Good Citizen" is on a policy of strict nonvandalism. Any "Good Citizen" who is cited for vandalism can, should, and will have his or her "Good Citizen" status revoked summarily. Perhaps, after a time, the status may be returned, but it would take a long time, a deep investigation, and a good explanation.
With that, I present my proposal to the WikiPublic. Lockesdonkey 20:38, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Question = When an IP gets blocked, does someone who is logged in but connects via that IP also get blocked? 'Cause if so that's lame. -- Username132 ( talk)
Yep. Lockesdonkey 19:37, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Can we include some of this on Wikipedia? WikiTeX It would really be awesome, especially for music and chemistry-related articles. — M e ts501 talk 22:20, 24 May 2006 (UTC)
Holy carp! Just looking at that example page makes my mouth water! It's awesome! Especially the music: I didn't know it was that easy to typeset music readably. Brilliant!-- Slashme 10:24, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Similar to the barnstar and user templates, this is a counter that keeps track of Wikipedia "currency." Currency is earned automatically for different actions (such as page edits by byte count), but is meant more as a reward or gift. One can give others currency for helping with an article, finding information, or some other action, which can be put up as a request and accepted by others- once the task is completed, the originator can "accept" to pay the user for the task, adding currency to their counter. Creating a "task" template allows the payer to specify an action and close the task when the payer sees the task is finished.
Currency would also be given for acts of notoriety, resolving disputes, and other honorable actions. Since the currency is kept track of server side on a different server, users cannot edit their total, but can add or subtract by giving or paying to a specific user by typing the username and amount and hitting submit. Hopefully this will bring a sense of unimaginable chaos. Ihavenolife 01:55, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Hello, all: I've written up Wikipedia:Quasi-protection policy, a proposal similar to semi-protection that would effectively limit sleeper accounts used to vandalize articles linked from the Main Page. I know that I've written a lot, and at first glance, the proposal may seem daunting. However, I truly believe that this would immensely improve Wikipedia and implore you to read it through and offer your thoughts on the talk page. Thanks! Flcelloguy ( A note?) 22:49, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
Comments regarding a proposal at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (categories) that would make "in country" the naming convention for Landform by country categories would be very appreciated prior to a cfru. Kurieeto 22:24, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
One thing that bothers me about how this wiki handles whitespace it handles newlines. One single newline is ignored and two newlines means a new paragraph, but once it becomes more newlines then it starts to behave odd. It starts to add <br/>s and paragraphs containing <br/>s. I think that the behvior is on purpose but I still think that it is odd. It's probably there to make one newline in the source to mean one newline in the html, but is that a behaviour the editors want to have?
What this behaviour means is that additonal empty lines between papragraphs in the source will show up when the html page is generated, which I don't think that most editors desire. It's not often one wants to force newlines (other than to separate paragraphs) and in those few cases I think that <br/> would do.
What I propose is that addtional line breaks other than the first two will be ignore. 100 empty lines will be the same as one empty line. But one single line break should be handled as now. I think that this is the way LaTeX does it and also what I think is easiest for the editor since he doesn't have to care exatly how many empty line he has between paragraphs. And this changes wouldn't affect the readers other than making the layout more consistent. Another plus would be that my suggest behaviour makes more sense than the current with skins that separate paragraphs in other ways than newlines.
I have been around Wikipedia for some time now and I haven't seen this discussed anywhere. I personally think it is a quite major issue since it is easy to add too many newlines between paragraphs. Is this a no issue? What do you think about my suggestion? Jeltz talk 15:27, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
Currently, source code in Wikipedia looks rather dull:
/* * This is fake Java code to demonstrate syntax coloring. * */ public static void main(String[] args) { String s = new String("This is a test"); char ch = 'c' + 123; }
Would it be better if syntax coloring could be applied to the code? Here is an example:
/* * This is fake Java code to demonstrate syntax coloring. * */ public static void main(String[] args) { String s = new String("This is a test"); char ch = 'c' + 123; }
To implement this, I had to use several <span>
tags to achieve this, which makes the code almost incomprehensible. What I am suggesting is a modification to
MediaWiki:Common.css or
MediaWiki:Monobook.css. We would define styles for various types of words in a syntax block:
/* CSS code */ syntax key { color:blue; font-weight:bold;} syntax string {color: maroon;} syntax char {color: orange;} syntax number {color: teal;} syntax comment {color: green;}
In the source code, we could simply write out:
<syntax> <comment>/** this is a comment</comment> <string>"Hey there!"</string> </syntax>
This makes future editing much simpler. If a certain user wished to customize the colors and styles, or turn them off, all he would need to do is modify his own CSS file. This would also pave the way for a possible syntax highlighting tool, much like the <math> tool. The parser would already have the styles in place.
Please, relay your thoughts to me. -- Max Talk (add) 04:04, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Instead of modifying the Common.css and Monobook.css, wouldnt it be practicable to use an extension such as this. You can find samples here -- Oblivious 11:12, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I have just created Wikipedia:Categorization of location, proposing a hierarchy of location-based categories. Once widely employed, these will allow the reader to quickly find articles about locations that are near that described by the article they're currently reading. All feedback welcome, as always. AxelBoldt 03:02, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I'm asking for this action since I have the feeling Wiki users fail to see hidden information because of automatic redirection. A simple link to the page where the first page is redirected to would do better in my point of view, since you would always first stop at that word which you really entered. Different opinions? Suggestions? Have a nice day! -- Tom David 16:18, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
Why this should be such a big problem to make one single click more? Yes I mean that the user should be forced to click an extra link. The information that one has been "redirected" is so small and almost invisible that every second user doesn't remark it. Well, think what you want. I don't like the automatic redirection. If you correct somebody always automaticaly, I'm not sure whether he will be able to correct himself one day on his own. -- Tom David 07:44, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
I have the feeling that some articles you can't find because of the automatic redirection, especially if you are a fast user (then you don't see everything), but it looks like everybody has to make his own experience concerning "being automated" :) -- Tom David 09:37, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
Well, if web servers are regarded as encyclopedias, ok. Nevertheless, clicking on a link is not the same as entering a word in a search mask. It's clear that links should always point to the correct address. Anyway, perhaps it's better if one doesn't need to click too many times. Just let's make sure not to bury something useful behind a redirection... -- Tom David 17:34, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I feel that Wikipedia is in dire need (ok, not quite) of a computing reference desk, simply called, the computing desk, (not Computer Science or whatever) because of the immense number of programming language questions and people requesting advice on purchases, using the Science and Mathematics Reference desks out of lack of alternatives. It is not easy to find a suitable place to ask a computing question to a first time wikipedian, and as such, they tend to be distributed across all the desks... Simply make a computing desk. -- Eh-Steve 05:01, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
I suppose it would be for all computing questions, including the mundane powerpoint advice questions. But I think it should be turned into a project ASAP --
Eh-Steve 18:35, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
I thought it might be more useful to have "New Pages" easier to click on at the top left. Recent changes is useful to have in a smaller wiki where theres only a hundred or so changes a day, but whats the point in having it there to see hundreds of changes every minute? -- Astrokey 44 03:29, 29 May 2006 (UTC)
window.onload = Main; function Main() { changenavbox(); } function changenavbox() { document.getElementById('n-recentchanges').firstChild.innerHTML = 'New pages'; document.getElementById('n-recentchanges').childNodes[0].href = ' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Newpages; }
I'm fairly active in trying to copyedit the massive amounts of articles at Category:Wikipedia articles needing copy edit and I've found that there is no good way to prioritize them; no way to know which ones have been unchanged the longest. So I looked around the whole Cleanup section and the closest we have to that is {{ cleanup-date}} which is still limited to the month. So I was wondering if Wikipedia had DynamicPageList, and it doesn't. There is a modified version of the DPL called DPLforum that was originally made to be a forum. However, at Uncyclopedia, we also use it for the categorization of maintenance articles. They can be sorted by last edit, and provide a link to the page, the history, and display the last author. I think that this would help with prioritizing cleanup, but I recognize it is not the most efficient way of doing this. I'd like to propose that Wikipedia install an extension like this one for automating cleanup and such. I can easily contact the author of the extension if modifications are proposed, and if someone wants to write an extension similar but more effective (and less intensive on the database), that'd also be appreciated. Thoughts? -- Keitei ( talk) 08:47, 28 May 2006 (UTC)
I suggest giving people the ability to have ads, such as google adwords. This would be good for 2 reasons, it would generate some more money to help run wikipedia, and often the ads are relevant and useful. I recomend that it be optional, and off by default, with something simple like a checkbox in preferences. I personally would turn them on as they are often useful, and people that dislike ads could choose not to turn them on (and unless they check their preferences every day, may not even know they can have them). A vertical ad block would fit quite nicely under the toolbox.
But a ton of people are virulently anti-ad, for some reason that's always baffled me, so the basically trivial income that voluntary ads would produce would in fact probably be outweighed by the backlash. — Simetrical ( talk • contribs) 22:11, 26 May 2006 (UTC)
If saberwyn reads this I just hope he accepts my sincerest apologies. I should have been more careful about reading the policies and it was stupid of me to add this article without consulting those policies. In my defense, this was my first article and I was rather enthusiastic. I'm really sorry for the mess. Sqrlaway 01:07, 31 May 2006 (UTC)