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A lot of the backlogged pages remain unattended for a lengthy period of time. I have a couple of proposals to fix that. I think that problem could be resolved if each administrator is assigned to a shift during which they have to be available.
Another idea that I would like you to consider is to start to allow advertising on your website. That way you could pay the administrators, and more people will want the job. That would fix the shortage of workers. Please note that this is separate from the first idea.
It might be beneficial to take one of my proposed ideas or even both of them. I know that the second one might be too much of a burden but I really think the first one might be beneficial. 99.53.112.186 ( talk) 19:16, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi all, I've been studying a bunch of big data business cases recently to prepare to teach an MSc course, and it gave an idea for funding Wikipedia, what do people think to this? The standard business model of all the Web2.0 sites is to give away a web service in exchange for information about users, which they then sell to advertisers. Obviously we don't want to run ads on Wikipedia or spy on users. But there could still be a way to use the user-interests information to make the world more efficient. There are many others sites that we use that do run ads, and those sites would like to know more about us to make their ads more targeted. As a user, I don't mind them doing this and in fact if a site has ads at all, I /prefer/ them to be more relevant to me. So I really wouldn't mind Wikipedia selling all the meta-information about my interests to other sites who could use them to improve their advertising. Obviously there are many people who don't want their interests monitoring like this, so the system should be strictly opt-in. But I think many of us would be happy to "donate" meta information about our interests rather than having to donate money all the time (which we currently do) to keep the servers running. The system could maybe have some clever settings system so you tell it, say, to only use information about your professional rather than personal interests on a work PC and vice versa on a home PC, or whatever. If you don't want to do it with ads, the information could be sold to companies like Amazon, who would like to know if you're been reading a page about an author so they can recommend more relevant books next time you visit amazon.com's home page. What do people think to this, as an alternative or complement to the current fundraisers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.26.233.208 ( talk) 14:25, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Over the last little while at redirects for discussion a number of redirects from single emoji characters have come up, and this has highlighted a few technological issues which makes it difficult to properly target these. Up to now, it's been generally accepted that emoji target to the topic they're intended to depict (e.g. 🍎 -> Apple), and this works fairly well most of the time. Broadly, there have been two issues identified:
There is a list of emoji at Emoji#Blocks which lists the emoji coded into Unicode and which should therefore render on Wikipedia as I understand it, but many are not clear representations of things, and try the list on your desktop vs. your phone or some other device and you'll see how some are completely different on different platforms. However, you'll also see that nearly all of them have had pages created for them which redirect to an article. This creates problems for us because we can't guarantee (like we can with words) that a pictorial representation is going to be interpreted a certain way by all users, or even that it's going to be the same picture, and so we are creating WP:ASTONISHing redirects for some users.
I have an idea for a WP:EMOJI guideline in my head, a guideline for how to deal with emoji pages, and I'd like to hear other users' perspectives on this issue. Here are some of my thoughts thus far:
There have also been a number of users at the various RfDs suggesting that we should just not have pages with emoji titles at all, often citing WP:FORRED and considering emoji essentially a foreign language. I'm against that treatment myself, because I think that emoji redirects can be useful, even if it's not obvious how one goes about typing one in a search box (this may become easier in the future, I don't know) and one of the criteria at WP:RFD#KEEP is that someone finds a redirect useful, even if you don't; different users browse Wikipedia in different ways.
I suppose I'm most interested in thoughts on the last two points: what to do with emoji which aren't obvious, and which might not be the same for all users.
Ivanvector 🍁 ( talk) 23:05, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
👾 | U+01F47E | ALIEN MONSTER [1] |
🏫 | U+01F3EB | SCHOOL [2] |
🎱 | U+01F3B1 | BILLIARDS [3] |
<span style="color:red">
). U+1F600 😀 GRINNING FACE
Si Trew (
talk) 09:54, 4 August 2015 (UTC)It could be great to be able to create timelines based on specific (personally investigated) trajectories - to enable users to make quick comparisons/draw parallels/look for patterns in time. I propose a 'wiki-timeliner' project / code addition that would allow users interact with temporal wiki info very simply.
Perhaps right-click and context menus could be implemented in a code update - which could simplify a number of other wikipedia interactions. Perhaps some context (right click) options could be attached to temporal data/hyperlinks. Or maybe timeline tools could exist in the regular editing toolbar. I would imagine there are modal window solutions / tooltips / keystroke options that might also be reasonably usable.
Wiki Timeliner or 'Timeliner' functionality would allow users to:
Additionally, page edit history could be optionally displayed in the context of a timeline.
If there is enough consistency in wiki page construction, timelines could be auto-generated in pages with a lot of temporal info just to illustrate the data already on pages.
Oversight & maintenance would be subject to the same community editing process to which all content is subject.
Timelines with too much disputed info would just not display (or would display with major disclaimers) until a community resolved its disputes - so that oversimplification of important ideas would not be likely.
There is already a
list of timelines - most of which are well made and canonically quite important - but I bet there are a TON of other important timelines that could be helpful to people, specifically if formatting them is very easy.
If this idea is interesting, I would really like to be involved in designing / developing it with the community! — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Lightloaf (
talk •
contribs) 02:57, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Sorry for the length of this post. Still I think it is a worthy read.
As an ex-vandal (I sadly must confess) and an ex-admin I think I do have a considerable view of the problem of vandalism, from both sides of the barricade.
To clarify: as a vandal I mainly wasn't active on Wikipedia, but rather different smaller wikis not related to Wikimedia, and sometimes some forums. And I hope this was long before enough.
And I gotta say your methods dealing with it are ineffective at most! It is ridiculous that people got to stare in the screen for hours playing Whac-A-Mole with vandals to prevent the site being flooded; it is ridiculous that sophisticated tools have to be developed just for this purpose! Do not be deceived by 'Pedia's popularity – while this is undoubtedly a significant factor, I'm positive the current flood is far too large to be explained just by popularity.
No, all of those public discussions, info and intervention pages, complaints, RFCc, public logs… You're asking for this yourselves! You have wise and enlightening pages like w:wp:DENY, w:wp:TMOAV, w:wp:RBI, but you don't practise your preaches. In the dark times I was vandalizing myself, I'll tell you, when I was seeing a FRACTION of all of this I was bursting out laughing uncontrollably! Why do you think do vandals always keep their style and leave traces? Because they WANT to be recognized, of course. You're just a one huge canteen for trolls. And again, I'm telling this from the perspective of an ex-vandal.
As a result of this people have to direct a large fraction of their energy to combat trolls, rather than help newbs, fix errors on pages, etc. Vandals' harassment techniques and burdensomeness make some productive users to grow in frustration and eventually leave. Newbies are being scared off, some fraction of the sneaky vandalism passes uncaught.
As an admin, I've been fending off vandals long enough; and I don't really wanna to be doing this again. I simply have a too big feeling of the utter pointlessness of my efforts. I'm tired of fighting it in such a way that I know my actions are actually counter-productive.
In this case Wikipedia's openness works against it. Do understand that vandals really do crave to see any impact of their actions. That's their goal, their reason to vandalize! When I was vandalizing, I was waiting for the results and looking for them, staring at the RCs, reading certain meta-pages and users' discussions…
That's not the way at all. The vandals' actions, from their perspective, should go to a black hole or /dev/null. No impact of their actions should be visible to them. Reverting, Blocking, Ignoring is important, but it's not enough. All pages like w:wp:LTA or w:wp:AIV should be removed from the public and be made visible only to trusted users. Also any discussions, RFCs, etc about them should be held somewhere unreachable by vandals (but reachable by all good users, not only admins). There should be consensus not even to mention their nicks in the public, even less to complain about their disruptiveness. Obvious vandalisms should not only be rollbacked; no, the vandalized versions should be removed from the page's history, at least from the vandals' perspective. The right to do so could be granted to anyone with the rollback right. If you ask me, I'd say the vandals should not even see who has blocked or reverted them; also the block reason should be left empty. Again; when I was vandalizing, I was sticking to pages that responded in a Wikipedia-like manner. If I saw a page that was removing traces of my vandalisms and made it impossible for to witness the results of my actions, I was going elsewhere.
Please learn from the experience of other sites, where this is exactly what is happening. On StackExchange banned users do not see their deleted content. On many forums vandals are just being arbitrary banned by they-don't-know-who, and their posts are being deleted. By the way, perhaps StackExchange's privilege system is worth considering?
By the way, I know I'm somewhat not practicing my preaches myself by publishing this very essay. But I really think this must be brought to attention.
Finally, it is important that I was talking only about die-hard vandals. These methods should never be applied to hot-blooded users, users that are just suspected of being vandals in disguise, etc… I am aware of Bang Bang's case, AFAIK there was not only one such mistake in the history, and well, I am in no way promoting this kind of hasty administrative actions.
I am also posting this on m:WM:FORUM and User:Marcgal/How do we actually encouraging vandalisms and how to fix this. Regards, Marcgal respons 09:36, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
there seems no particular reason for article history to be visible at all to unregistered users, that particular point is not up for debate. Article history needs to be publicly visible for legal reasons, since anyone copying from a Wikipedia article needs to attribute it to "at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five)" (generally per a hyperlink to the edit history, as per that checkbox you've checked with every single edit you've made on Wikipedia). ‑ iridescent 16:09, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Related:
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/the-virtues-of-moderation-part-i/
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/06/25/the-virtues-of-moderation-part-ii/
--
Guy Macon (
talk) 18:06, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
A draft guideline (or policy) is currently being assembled/discussed at Wikipedia:Edit Filter/Draft. Anyone interested in forming this prior to an RfC is welcome to alter the page or discuss it on the talk page. Thanks, Sam Walton ( talk) 09:51, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Internet is developing and people can find a lot of information everyday but there is still a long way to go. I am currently spending time in Iran/Tehran and have feedbacks about my current Internet Service Provider. Due to the close market and some other problems, there is no official website for people like me to read/write about the service they're using. I am pretty sure there are a lot of countries out there that tourists and domestic people don't have a board to guide others.
If wikipedia adds a ranking system on companies like ISPs, small or even large manifacturers and etc, also a feedback/comment page for known users I am sure that it will benefit millions of people around the world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amirhrahal ( talk • contribs) 16:22, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
I posted it at Wikipedia:Help desk#Wildlife, fauna, flora. Now, I realized this is a better place for it. This is a food for thought to improve Wikipedia. To be honest, I would be careless whatever happens. I'm just happened to discover this mess today and wanted to do something about it. Obviously, the problem does not limit itself to just wildlife, fauna, and flora. This is a much bigger problem on Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia has been plaguing by articles under-disguised as redirects. I suggest that there should be a policy banning "creating potential future articles as redirects." I do realize there is a pro to this kind of redirects, but the con's surely outweigh it. I have stated my reason in the help desk (check out the link). Here it is, I have no interest in further involving in Wikipedia. I'll leave the rest for policy-makers here (which I know is all Wikipedia editors). That is if this is getting anywhere at all. 14.169.206.102 ( talk) 09:11, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I had a discussion with someone in Talk:Visa policy of China#Continued discussion about ordinary passport with "for public affair" endorsement, and it's in a dead-end because we just repeating the same thing all the time. Does anyone have idea to solve this situation? Thank you very much. -- Whisper of the heart 07:10, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
Members of the community are invited to give their thoughts at a request for comment to discuss Wikipedians' alternatives to consensus, and the formation of a proposed Regulation Committee. Thank you, -- ceradon ( talk • edits) 04:20, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
There's actually an entire Wikimedia incubation project at incubator:Incubator:Main Page. Maybe one of the possible results of an article nominated for deletion should be getting transwikied there instead of just going into Wikipedia's Draft namespace when it doesn't meet Wikipedia's quality standards as described in Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Incubation but can be rewritten to do so. That Wikimedia project is probably more collaborative than Wikipedia's draft namespace and so would probably do a better job of improving it. Blackbombchu ( talk) 00:58, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
Idea: Some optional thing to help UserBob avoid 3RR violations. Support for it in user prefs is probably unwarranted. Elements:
Re the down arrow, the software would assume that Bob is reversing the most recent up arrow click. If he wants to reverse an earlier one, too bad, he should have thought of that before he clicked up arrow again. ― Mandruss ☎ 19:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I am Del Wilkins, and I consider myself a fairly intelligent person who has significant knowledge on topics that I find interesting, just as any other person who does the same. I wanted to add a link to the page Shadow person that had to do with a study on the effects of Methamphetamine and sleep deprivation. I could not figure out how to properly enter and edit the link. I know it is a lot like writing a college paper and citing your sources APA style, but its been many years since I have done any of that type of writing and could not figure it out. This is why there should be a place for a person to write new information. place the links, and leave it there until someone comes along who knows how to enter it. I feel that without such a storage area, Wikipedia is losing out on a wealth of untapped information that can only be contributed by people who have it, but do not know how to enter it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Del Wilkins ( talk • contribs) 11:45, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
I think Wikipedia could greatly improve if Harvard Catalyst helps research how to improve it. Harvard Catalyst could probably do more than just contribute to Wikipedia based on their research results. I think Harvard Catalyst would even be able to research how to form a group of people who edit Wikipedia in a swarm intelligent way including researching which patterns to create a software to notice within the entire Wikipedia website. Blackbombchu ( talk) 01:19, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
When editing an article a few minutes ago, my cursor made an unfortunate move and deleted a large block of text, which forced me to exit the edit window without saving my changes and re-add the text I was typing. I'm sure other editors have had the same issue, so why don't we simply fix this problem (which could become very inconvenient if you happen to make this mistake while adding large amounts of content or copy editing) by adding an undo button to the editing bar? I don't imagine that it would be an incredibly difficult feature to add, and it would certainly make reversing mistakes much easier.
Secondly, it occurred to me that it would be useful to have a saved drafts system. For instance, if an editor is making changes to an article but does not yet wish to make them live, they could simply save their progress as a draft which would be visible to only that editor. When they are satisfied with their changes, they can save their edits to the article itself. I recall that wikiHow, which I previously edited, had this ability, and it was quite convenient. -- Biblio worm 16:09, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedia Policy Makers
I am a historian by training and an enthusiast about old things, be they classic cars, bicycles and other mechanical stuff from the 20th century. I am writing to encourage a new class of encyclopaedic information on Wikipedia - retention of specialised non-academic human knowledge. In specific I am writing about collector cars, although the class can extend much further. In essence, while some subjects have formal experts, such as university professors who publish, in popular culture, such as classic cars, the knowledge is held by enthusiasts who build up a lifetime of expertise that unfortunately dies with them. It needs to be captured and recorded, and no better place than Wikipedia.
Quora has numerous questions on this subject (see for example, http://www.quora.com/Is-there-such-thing-as-Lost-Technology-or-is-that-simply-a-myth).
I propose that an officially approved format be set out on Wikipedia so that present-day living knowledge carriers can post that knowledge in the permanent repository of Wikipedia. Yes, anyone can post such now, but because anyone can purge such work, unless it is officially sanctioned and set out in an approved form, there is a very great risk of a volunteer editor messing with what is invaluable historic knowledge because they don't think it belongs there.
In regard to cars, I propose the following format:
Imagine if Wikipedia existed when the Pyramids were being made, or when the Romans invented concrete that lasts 2,000 years (ours is lucky to last a century). Imagine if the makers of Polaroid film posted their knowledge on Wikipedia when they stopped making it commercially. For that matter, imagine if Wikipedia was a repository for early computer program knowledge... stuff from the 20th century that now has been long lost. There is so much human knowledge that is slipping away, especially when email replaced letters and web pages replaced books.
I imagine this could become a powerful project... the knowledge project that brought in a whole new breed of specialist editors. But my sense is that it will require a clear agreement rather than just sort of happen.
I look forward to your thoughts.
BristolRegistrar ( talk) 09:22, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
It is the village where live muslim and hindu.there is situated a madarsa where lern hindu and muslim.and i think its indias firat tobacco free village. Sarfraj siddiqui is well known person for riting bhatauli tarana.bhatauli meri jaan.it is first village in india which has own tarana or anthem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.67.59.148 ( talk) 21:25, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
With the increasing popularity of image collage's on historical and current event pages - especially wars - I feel that there should be a specific policy regarding this. I have noticed that several times in the past few years users have posted collages on War in Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq War which have been far from appropriate in my opinion, and to a degree still are. The problems entail the types of images used in the collages and their composition which I feel lacks objectivity. For one some users tend to over-represent one side in the collage's, generally I am referring to coalition/Western forces in these kinds of articles as many of the Wikipedia editors on this site are from those countries. These users may be predisposed to over-representing them in a collage compared to the opposing side. This isn't a good thing because if a reader is looking for information on the war when they first begin reading the page the collage should preferably have both (or sometimes more) sides represented equally so that the user can more easily envision the two sides of the conflict when they are reading the article.
The other problem I have is that for the most part a lot of these collages tend to just become a bunch of pictures of soldiers with no real context as to what they are actually doing in the war. To be honest this probably bothers me more than the aforementioned point. Then entire point of Wikipedia is to provide information, and just posting a bunch of pictures of people in the war doesn't do that. Instead events should where they can be represented in the first image on the page as it will help in illustrating the key events of the war before the reader starts and to be honest will also help build more interest in Wikipedia's articles than a bunch of pictures that looks like they are pulled from a military recruiting site.
This is a bit of a controversial topic, maybe it is redundant and people should know better with WP:NPOV but I feel it would be better to have a clear policy on this as I have had to do a few reverts to these articles over the years which have been nothing but controversial I feel. -- Kuzwa ( talk) 00:26, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
I recently made a proposition for a redesign of the community portal that would fix bugs and give a more modern less cluttered look. I would like more people to participate in the discussion. Heres the link- Wikipedia talk:Community portal#A Proposition Thanks Tortle ( talk) 17:21, 29 August 2015 (UTC)
Are being discussed here [4]
Following the recent issues as discussed at WP:AN Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 02:32, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Hey all, I brought this up at the Gender Gap Task Force a while back, and thought I'd bring the issue here for more brainstorming and possible solutions. User:Sue Gardner wrote a very interesting blog post by , where she discusses how being referred to by the incorrect personal pronouns can put women off of editing and give examples. So I thought it would be a good idea to try and figure out some possible solutions to this problem. I brought it here instead of coming up with a proposal, because I don't really have any experience in Mediawiki technology or being a woman on the internet. In the GGTF discussion I suggested adding template:gender to the editing toolbar so that editors would be more likely to use it. User:SlimVirgin came up with the idea of having a hovercard feature for usernames, which would show some personal information about an editor if enabled in preferences. Do these seem like things which could help? Would they actually be possible to implement? Brustopher ( talk) 22:07, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Whenever I need to refer to an editor by a pronoun, I always check the user's User: page for an indication of gender; and assuming it's specified, that's the gender I use. (Or occasionally their gender is obvious by their choice of user name (such is the case with me)). Otherwise I feel the "generic he" is quite adequate. I feel if someone is really sensitive about being referred to by the correct pronoun, then they should indicate their gender on their User: page. Perhaps the routine that handles the creation of new accounts should encourage the soon-to-become-an-official-Wikipedian to provide that piece of information.
Richard27182 (
talk) 09:04, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
=
I have some ideas for eliminating at least 15% of all vandalism as predicted, and I have a good reason to share them with you. Vandalism is like bombs which were set to destroy Wikipedia, which is usually repaired by non-vandals, but that is not just why because we all know that Wikipedia is not meant to be vandalized. I have some suggestions here:
For logged-out users
It is a good thing that we can keep track of registered users very easily, but people from anywhere can make edits, including vandalized ones, which is harder for us to keep track of, and they can always use another computer or change their IP addresses to keep vandalizing, which makes things even harder for us to keep track of, so, so that we could better take a peek at what people had done and therefore keep track of their attitudes, logged-out users would be allowed to edit up to 20 times per day but still allowed to revert their own edits anytime.
For recently unblocked users
It is usually expected that Wikipedians whose blocks have been naturally lifted be better contributors than they were in the past. However, it is not always known as to whether they will continue to act inappropriately, so, just to reduce taking chances, the users would be allowed to edit up to 20 times per day for one week, still being able to revert their own edits, until one week has passed since their being unblocked unnaturally.
Your opinions
So, after having said my ideas, I would love to hear some of your views about my ideas. If you do not like them just enough, do not be afraid to tell me why, for I may be able to fix my ideas. Your opinions start now.
Gamingforfun365
(talk) 07:18, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
{{ WPW Referral}}
Hi guys.
In an ongoing effort to improving Cyberbot II's newest feature which is, placing archives on dead sources, detecting if untagged sources are dead, and archiving those that are still alive, the bolded feature still needs much work before I can enable it.
I am looking for users here who can propose different checks that can be put in an algorithm to accurately determine a dead link.
When proposing, create a new level 3 header and propose the algorithm to be discussed. Users may support or oppose, but remember we are simply compiling ideas at the moment.— cyberpower Chat:Online 19:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
If I understand you correctly, one way to do this would be to collect a large sample of dead link responses, then use some sort of AI to check if the response you get is enough "like" the sample to be considered a hit. N-grams (character-level trigrams probably) and approximate string matching may be helpful for this. — SMALL JIM 09:54, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
There may be algorithms, or code, that are useful, on the following pages, particularly the first:
-- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:03, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Would it make sense to have a {{ Category too narrow}} warning template for categories that have less than five entries and are (currently) impossible to expand further? Examples include Category:Sirius and Category:Aldebaran. Thank you. Praemonitus ( talk) 14:37, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
The Arbitration Committee is currently examining several reforms of the Audit Subcommittee and asks for community input on how they would like to see the Subcommittee function in the future. Because of this, the current Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) members' terms are hereby extended to 23:59, 30 September 2015 (UTC).
For the Arbitration Committee, -- Guerillero | Parlez Moi 02:10, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
As has been brought to light in the Orangemoody case, but as was already known and discussed before that, allowing any autoconfirmed user to patrol articles makes it somewhat easy to bypass new page patrolling (see the sock Akashtyi ( talk · contribs) for example). The system could be made more robust by restricting 'patrol' and page curation to (pending changes) reviewers (admins implicitly included), and possibly a new 'patroller' group with lower requirements than reviewer (there are some active patrollers who aren't reviewers). On the other hand, there are regular complaints against 'over-zealous' new page patrollers, so moving this userright from 'autoconfirmed' to usergroups that can be added and removed from a user would provide an incentive to behave in this area. It might also become a technical requisite for accepting AFCs. Cenarium ( talk) 18:41, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
A concern has been expressed at the Help Desk talk page that too many Articles for Deletion discussions have very few participants, and therefore do not represent consensus of the community. One possible way to increase participation in deletion discussions would be similar to how participation in Requests for Comments discussions is increased. That would be to invite editors to sign up to receive notifications of deletion discussions from a bot. Does anyone have any comments? Robert McClenon ( talk) 16:09, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Some articles ( example) have several notes in a row: ...text of the article.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and maybe Wikipedia could / must automatically show them as: ...text of the article.[10-24] or something similar. Ayreonauta ( talk) 06:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
When an article contains a refname collision (same refname defined multiple times, with like or unlike definitions), (1) the software uses the first definition and ignores the rest, (2) there is no indication of any problem given in the reflist, and (3) the article is not added to any tracking category. All are evident in the test in
this revision, using the refname "Blinder-Lewin", which is citation [7].
Apparently this is being treated as a minor, innocuous problem, but it is not one in my opinion. It can create issues with
WP:V among other things. If the collision is ever detected, it's often some time later (years?), and by a different editor who is not well familiar with the article or the sources used. Yesterday, I spent over an hour untangling a particularly hairy case involving one refname, two unlike definitions, and four cites, and it was the toughest thing I've done in quite awhile (granted, it didn't help that the ref title was incorrect in one of the definitions).
It is a less serious problem if the definitions are identical, and I wouldn't necessarily ask the software to compare the definitions, but I think the downside of no error in the serious case (WP:V issues, more editor effort to fix) is greater than the downside of an error in the minor case (big red error in the reflist, which might be seen by some readers until the problem is fixed). I think an error message should be generated in the reflist, and that the article should be added to an appropriate tracking category. But I wanted to get some feedback on this here before taking this to
WP:VPR. ―
Mandruss
☎ 06:20, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
<ref name="name">content</ref>
whereas
WP:CITE says <ref name="name">text of the citation</ref>
. Whatever you say in VPR, someone will misunderstand if they can, so whether you say "content" or "definition" it'll be best to make it clear that, by that word, you mean the text between the ref and /ref tags!
Stanning (
talk) 14:02, 14 September 2015 (UTC)I was wondering if we could have list articles on public transit bus routes. You can also view my sandbox for a better understanding. HeatIsCool ( talk) 21:49, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
I think there's shouldn't just be a way to patrol proposed deletion as described in Wikipedia:WikiProject Proposed deletion patrolling but also a way to patrol nomination for deletion. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Registry Dr. failed to get a lot of attention even after it got added to 2 deletion sorting pages and sometimes people go straight into nominating an article for deletion without proposing its deletion first. Blackbombchu ( talk) 18:18, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I think that we ought to scrap AFD entirely, and re-create it as a purpose-built system that actually handles the whole workflow from start to finish.
Imagine an AFD tool that has simple forms to fill out for the nominator, that never sees nominations get "lost" due to transclusion problems, and that automatically counts !votes and tracks how many separate individuals participated. Imagine one that notices when a page is ready for closing (i.e., because it meets our standard criteria, such as having ≥3 participants and being 7 days old, or whatever we decide), and that puts the page into a list or category for action. Imagine one that could sort or filter by any criteria that you care about: the most attention (maybe it's SNOWing?), the least attention, only BLPs, only articles tagged by my favorite WikiProject, etc. Imagine one that can be withdrawn or closed by clicking a few buttons with a built-in script (including direct access to page deletion for admins and maybe a scripted blank-and-redirect button for everyone), rather than having to type special codes into a template and separately processing the page.
Wouldn't that be a lot better than what we have now? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:36, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
What would people think about implementing some kind of software that allows users who can't edit a semi-protected article to edit it similar to pending changes, however the edits wouldn't "go live" until any auto-confirmed user accepted the change? This would make semi-protection much less forceful and encourage editing, rather then dealing with the wiki-markup, talk pages, and templates that go along with semi-protected edit requests? I feel like there's some kind of objection to this, or it would have been implemented in the past, so, what are those? Kharkiv07 ( T) 01:32, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Witness accounts of the Roswell UFO incident (2nd nomination) shows the full log even though that page didn't appear that way at the time its debate was closed, so I think the same should be done for the first nomination. Blackbombchu ( talk) 16:46, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
It's been a long time since any post to WT:WikiProject Engineering has received a meaningful reply. Imho there are certain projects that are "too big to fail". For a major topic area such as engineering to not have a functional WikiProject is a serious problem. I think we could convert the main WikiProject Engineering page into a type of "disambiguation" page that lists active projects that cover various sub-topics of engineering - chemical engineering, electrical engineering, etc. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 08:08, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking about how to personally mark the 5 millionth ENWP milestone, and this idea occurred to me. What have been the most popular articles I've created, by all-time pageviews? It's a sort of long list so I'd rather not gather the data by hand. Is there a tool that can do this? — Brianhe ( talk) 17:43, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
@ NaBUru38, Brianhe: Metronom: Pageviews for articles you created (wmflabs, by Magnus Manske) -- Atlasowa ( talk) 11:21, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
Cause "flying ice cube" sounds like a cool name, I guess. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 21:19, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
Hi All,
I've been working on visualizing editor behaviour on wikipedia over the past few months. I've put together graphs that visualize editor activity, retention etc. I made a presentation for the research team at the foundation - http://slides.com/cosmiclattes/edit-activity-graphs-analysis/. It also has some of the preliminary results. It has links to the graphs & says how to interpret & play with them. Please let me know if you guys have other metrics or ideas you'd like to see graphed. I'd love to hear what you guys think of the graphs. I have proposed an IEG to continue working on the graphs.
Hi Dragons flight, Some of the graphs that are up already are:
I haven't looked at user registrations yet. Some of the other ideas I'm working on are here and here. Would you have any specific ideas for me or directions you would like me to explore? jeph ( talk) 12:47, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Hello! I'm currently incubating an idea that was initially discussed in the Wikipedia IRC channel ( log).
I've been cleaning up citations with missing "|title=" tags, and it occurred to me that while this task likely couldn't be automated, it could certainly be made more efficient for the editor - rather than going through each category page, clicking "edit this page", etc., what if a program could populate a single page with several of these citations pulled from one or more pages? The editor could then click the links, provide a suitable title in a text box below each citation, and then submit them all at once. After that, the editor could get another page of citations to fix if they so desired. If you've ever used Amazon Mechanical Turk, they have a system for digitizing documents that works in a similar way - each document is split into images that contain one line, then workers are presented with a page that has several of these images and are asked to type the text into boxes below the images.
Rhhhh, another user, expanded on this idea - perhaps a program similar to the "random page" function could be added, but it would be modified to send users to a random page or section that requires cleanup, combined with subject selection (Rhhhh said "[for instance], 'I want to fix [spelling/POV/markup/...] on pages about [language/IT/history/...]' ")
While coding and scripts are completely out of my depth, I feel like this is something that wouldn't be too difficult to implement and it would allow editors like myself who prefer to work on these smaller tasks to do so far more efficiently.
I'm open to any ideas or feedback. Thanks for reading! Chris ( talk) 22:07, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
We have submitted an IEG Proposal related to this WikiProject. The project proposal is called Philippine Music Survey. You can check the proposal at meta: meta:Grants:IEG/Philippine Music Survey. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please post it at the talk page of the IEG. Thanks. -- Jojit ( talk) 05:37, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
I've raised this pre-RfA opinion page idea again, this time here. I'm posting at the village pump to let you know and so you don't think I'm forum shopping. Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 06:49, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
I am posting here because WikiProject Arts is bit of a graveyard and I want quick feedback.
Thank you,
Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 03:49, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I have an idea for a new namespace to be entitled "Chronicle." It would be a place to note or record all events or items within a particular area. doing so would allow us to create a common space and resource where historical events could be noted and referenced, without requiring us to change the regular historical articles to record new events before their eventual significance is fully understood.
currently, there is no centralized place to create a central narrative of events as they occur.
one major potential of wikipedia is to serve as an ongoing and evolving record of events as they happen. a shared central space for such information would make it much easier for editors to be able to have a central resource to review recent events and to see if they warrant inclusion in various higher-level articles, such as history articles, science articles, technology, etc. -- Sm8900 ( talk) 01:32, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
would allow us to create a common space and resource where historical events could be noted and referenced, without requiring us to change the regular historical articles to record new events before their eventual significance is fully understoodThat's original research and we can't decide what to include/not include without a thesis for the page. If we have a thesis which explains what qualifies to be included/excluded, then it should be a standard History of X article. We shouldn't be in the busniess of
create a central narrative of events as they occur, we have to go based on what Reliable sources report (either as new coverage or as historians writing and drawing the inferences). Reporting on recent events is either the perview of WikiNews or the perview of a article that is written to support a In the News point on the frontpage. Anything else pushes the Recent-isim factor of day in the sun coverage. Hasteur ( talk) 18:12, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Would creating WP:Wikiproject News address some of these issues? The idea that the wikiproject's goal is to incorporate news stories into appropriate articles. Might help ensure that relevant stories don't get missed. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 04:58, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
In light of discussions at talk pages, like Talk:Tamil American, Talk:Indian Americans, Talk:Korean Americans, and Talk:African American, I was advised to start a central discussion about titles named after ethnic groups of the US. I attempted it at WP:Village pump (proposals), but there was not enough attention. Where can I discuss this matter? -- George Ho ( talk) 05:38, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I requested " Geoffrey Howe" to be removed from ITN in Candidates page and the user talk page. There wasn't a consensus to post his name into ITN. However, I'm still awaiting responses. I can't hold my patience any longer. What shall I do? -- George Ho ( talk) 10:41, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Dear Fellow Wikipedians,
I JethroBT (WMF) suggested that I consult with the village pump to get feedback and help to improve my idea about "As an unparalleled way to raise awareness of the Wikimedia projects, I propose to create a tremendous media opportunity presented by launching Wikipedia via space travel."
Please see the idea at
meta
Thank you for your time and attention in this matter. I appreciate it.
My best regards, Geraldshields11 ( talk) 22:07, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
Referring back to the thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive_18#Article for deletion patrolling, I think there should not only be a page for patrolling proposed deletion but should also be one for patrolling articles nominated for deletion because so many deletion debates including a lot of the ones in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs are getting so little attention and not all of those articles will get prodded before getting nominated for deletion. Since nobody has yet done the hard task of creating a page for patrolling proposed deletion, it's not going to be much more effort for those people who create one to at the same time also create a page for patrolling nomination for deletion. In addition to that, even fewer deletion debates will get so little attention if relisted discussions go onto a separate deletion sorting WikiProject. For example, if debates in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs move to Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs (relisting) when they get relisted so that experienced editors will be able to choose to only participate in relisted debates and the other debates won't devote so much attention away from the relisted debates. In addition to that, I think there should also be a third patrolling page for patrolling the relisting of debates so that they'll get even more attention from experienced editors who choose to patrol it. Blackbombchu ( talk) 18:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
In early November of 2015, the English Wikipedia is set to reach 5,000,000 (5 million) articles according to User:JIP. See also Wikipedia:Milestones. We should be preparing to take advantage of upcoming news coverage. What are high priorities? ★NealMcB★ ( talk) 16:17, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Useful wikicode that you can put on your user page to advertise how many pages we have:
<div>As of {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}, {{CURRENTDAY2}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTTIME}} (UTC), the English Wikipedia has {{NUMBEROF|USERS|en|N}} registered users, {{NUMBEROF|ACTIVEUSERS|en|N}} active editors, and {{NUMBEROF|ADMINS|en|N}} administrators. Together we have made {{NUMBEROF|EDITS|en|N}} edits, created {{NUMBEROF|PAGES|en|N}} pages of all kinds and created {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|en|N}} articles.
The above wikicode gives you this result:
-- Guy Macon ( talk) 00:57, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
We do not permit discussion, suggestions, and criticism of an article within the article page itself. That is what the talk page is for, and such comments are routinely reverted. However, banner maintenance templates do much the same thing and the consensus is to use them. Is there some policy distinction I am missing here? If not, should there be something in policy? Personally, I think that most banner templates belong on the talk page, not the article, but that wasn't really my point. My point is that we are being somewhat contradictory and unclear. Spinning Spark 15:49, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
"A deep understanding of sheaf theory is not necessary for what we do here and it would be enough to acquire a basic familiarity with the definitions since we only want the convenience of the language." - Jeffry M. Lee, Manifolds and Differential Geometry.
Hi! I have an idea about how to help people who want to read about something they lack the prerequisite knowledge for. It could be used for improving the functionality of any digitalized text, but my idea is only concrete when it comes to texts containing definitions.
Basically, when reading a definition on some wiki there may be terms and concepts that one has not seen before. To understand the definition, one then has to go to the articles of these terms and concepts. The same can happen when reading those definitions. It all becomes quite hard and disheartening since one doesn't know how much is left to read and remember before one can understand the original definition. I often find myself in this situation and do something manually that could perhaps be done automatically on a wiki. Here is an example:
Say we have the following definition:
"A is B with C."
Now, let's say we don't know what B is. So we go to the definition of B:
"B is D with E."
For simplicity, let's say we do know what D and E are. We would have liked the possibility to expand the original definition into:
"A is D with E with C. D with E is known as B."
Or the following sequence of definitions:
"B is D with E."
"A is B with C."
There should be a link next to "Definition" in the article of A. When clicking this link, one should be able to generate the smallest necessary sequence of definitions. Here is an example using an actual article on Wikipedia (module (mathematics)):
Let's say we want (need) to know what module is in mathematics. The formal definition of module, in its article here on Wikipedia, contains "ring" and "abelian group". These have their own articles with their own definitions. Imagine we already had that link next to "Formal definition". When I click it, I would want to see:
module
Then I click on ring, because I do not know what that is. I would get:
ring
module
Actually, the definition of ring here on Wikipedia contains a lot of terms with their own articles. Many are used in the definition and explained at the same time, which makes things a bit more complicated. Not all are actually needed. The ones that are explained in the definition of ring should simply be excluded from the list or marked in some way. I have written them in italic. I did this with "abelian group" under module as well, since it is explained in the definition of ring.
If I know what "set" and "binary operation" is, then I have all I need. I would now click "generate" or something similar, and the following would be generated:
[the wiki's definition of ring]
[the wiki's definition of module]
This would be the smallest amount of text necessary for me to understand what module is.
One thing that I have to add is that the text under "Definition" is often more than just the definition, meaning that there would be an unnecessarily large amount of text. This is not the case for the definition of ring, but in the case of the definition of module, half of the text under "Definition" should be under some subtitle like "About the definition".
In the examples I have used, very few definitions were needed and it might seem like this is all very unnecessary. Wikipedia is already relatively convenient. I do think it would be a major improvement, but one would benefit even more from it in the case of e.g. digitalized books. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.239.119.136 ( talk) 08:15, 21 October 2015 (UTC) 130.239.119.136 ( talk) 08:18, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I discussed "Cold War II" and wanting to start a newer, fresher RfC discussion at Talk:Cold War II#The current title. Users said that past discussions would make another discussion redundant. I still want to use RfC and ask others to come up with alternative names. -- George Ho ( talk) 02:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Although Wikipedia is now a world reference and quality of articles increases on a constant basis, you can still find people that dismisses it, claiming that, since everybody can modify articles, it can be full of mistakes, and lies. The usual counter-argument from Wikipedia is that it is actually true, but that's also true for books (and all human intellectual work piece) but Wikipedia has a sheer advantage that mistakes can quickly be edited. But the anti-Wikipedia impression seems to stick in part of the population.
Has a vote system ever been considered? I mean something based on clarity and accuracy of the articles (rather than just liking the article or not). This system was inspired to me by the StackExchange that succeeds to obtain high-quality answers from its community (see how much energy the people in scifi.stackexchange.com put in their answers to "futile" topics like comics). To avoid wars on articles, downvotes could be allowed only under some conditions (as in the SE network). This system would not be a substitute for the "talk" page, but a metric to see how satisfactory the article is. It could also have a purpose for improvement of articles: low quality articles would appear immediately, rather than the usual system where (I am exaggerating) we are just waiting for an expert to come accross the article, notice it sucks, and then dedicate some time to fix it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.87.111.170 ( talk) 02:16, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
I think Wikipedia should have a WikiProject that can teaches Wikipedia users how to become good Wikipedians in pretty much the same way as teachers teach their students how to get marks in courses. It can be only for those registered users who choose to take that course. Blackbombchu ( talk) 00:58, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
I think an option should be provided to change the font style and background color of articles as the current font style is too dull and uninteresting. Moreover it makes reading long articles irritating as well as boring. Wikipedia should give an option for changing the font. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.97.212.44 ( talk) 14:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
The notion of Wikipedia:Today's articles for improvement returning to the main page as a permanent feature has recently come up, amidst a flood of activity to our talk page. Please weigh in on this important discussion, and help us to refine our concept before we officially put a proposal together.-- Coin945 ( talk) 18:57, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Please watchlist Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll and drop by to give your views. Thank you kindly. Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 00:01, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
I think it might be possible to have a WikiProject where the people in it interact with each other in a complex way to improve Wikipedia very efficiently. It might be very hard and require a lot of research resources to figure out how to create such a WikiProject, but it's probably not totally impossible. One possible way to do it might be that when the Wikiproject first starts, the people in the Wikiproject will make it a top priority to maintain the method of interaction going on in it that will keep being determined by the consensus within that WikiProject of what that Wikiproject's guidelines and policies are going to be. That WikiProject if it works well enough, when ever somebody asks a question about why a certain policy of that Wikiproject is the way it is, will always get a clear answer that they understand of why. That Wikiproject could take new people who want to join and train them as long as it doesn't take new people so fast that it can't keep up with using which ever method of interaction is determined by consensus. Once it grows sufficiently big, people who ask question within that WikiProject could be given an answer that's a complex statement when it would take a hopelessly large number of simple statements to answer their question. A complex statement is a statement that's way shorter to describe than the number of research topics it's defined in terms of. Some people might even be able to figure out new useful ideas from the complex statements they learned. Once that Wikiproject grows very big, it might even be able to do have some experts to C program running to notice patterns in Wikipedia and even C program editing for improving a large number of articles all at once in a complex way. Maybe in the really distant future, some people using that WikiProject will getting IBM Watson to make a lot of computations to futher speed up the ability of people using the WikiProject to get the research results that are useful to the research they're doing in that WikiProject. Blackbombchu ( talk) 22:38, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Is there somewhere I could get help in organizing and creating a backlog drive for a WikiProject? I wanted to tackle the 49k or so pages at Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard as a drive for Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts (seems like the right place) and just need some designing feedback. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 22:07, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Give_out_Deletion_to_Quality_Awards.
A one-time-run would be totally acceptable here.
Is there any way either a bot or someone with a user script or automated or semi-automated skills, can help out here ?
Thank you,
— Cirt ( talk) 03:37, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
For a page with an altered title like eBay, the template lowercase allows for the page and for historical version of the page to have eBay in the name, however, the history page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=EBay&action=history) , the revision diff pages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=EBay&type=revision&diff=689002086&oldid=688985784) and the edit page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=EBay&action=edit) show the name of the page as "EBay". Is there any way in which these pages can take the alteration of the DISPLAYTITLE into account? Naraht ( talk) 17:15, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
I am working on developing a plan for a Documentation: namespace to hold all the pages currently located at Template:Foo/doc, etc etc, and I am developing it at User:Thisismyrofl/Templates proposal. I hope that people might take a look, point out any criticisms, and edge cases to be had with my plan.
Why do I feel we need a Documentation: namespace? There are two fundamental components of a Wikipedia article:
This pattern applies to most namespaces. But for a Wikipedia template, there are instead three (sometimes five) fundamental components:
Somewhere in the development of this encyclopedia, these three unique components have been squished into space for two components: the code-and-documentation, and the talk page. The template documentation is not given much of any actual accommodation in the Mediawiki software, instead being treated as just another template (a template that in reality will be transcluded into exactly one page). To accommodate this double function of the Template: namespace, we use lots and lots of nasty include rules: noinclude, onlyinclude, includeonly. This category applies to the host page, this category to the template itself. Virtually every major template has documentation, but still we don't think it's ubiquitous enough for an implementation more universal than pasting {{ Documentation}} and include rules on every template page.
Relevant links in my fight for this, in some chronological order:
− Thisismyrofl ( talk) 22:10, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
phab:T56140 is a related idea. It would move the WP:TemplateData to its own JSON-content namespace, associated with the Template: namespace. Whatamidoing (WMF) ( talk) 18:50, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Original research might be necessary to make some explanations in Wikipedia articles clearer. I'm sure some of those people will have the skill to only insert pieces of original research that are true, which was probably the original reason for the rule no original research. They would probably be verifiable by the ability of other experts to figure them out. Maybe there could be a way for people to demonstrate in Wikipedia that they have the skill not to insert any wrong or unverifiable original research. Blackbombchu ( talk) 00:53, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Maybe it would be useful if a user could be notified when a new member is added to a specific category. SoSivr ( talk) 23:06, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
I suggest that you added in previous logos for example ERT OTE, Cosmote, Vodafone Greecre Wind Hellas etc.-- Γιουγκοσλαβια ( talk) 16:42, 12 November 2015 (UTC)
Asia Month looks to have been successful. While some of the editors creating new articles under the Asia Month banner would have created those articles anyways because that's where they worked, it does seem like other editors (myself included) jumped in to create new content in an area that they normally would not have.
I'd love to see a few more 'region months' to help combat the natural biases that I suspect Wikipedia has as an English language project (i.e. that we cover English-speaking areas much better because people write about the areas in which they live and because the sources are in English).
Would there be any interest in an Africa month, a Caribbean month, a South America month (or Latin America month), a Small islands month (for all of the tiny island nations), etc?
Who would organize it/them? What incentives could we come up with? When could we hold it/them? Mobile Squirrel Conspiracy ( talk) 04:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Sometimes, I think people may want to see a Wikipedia article without the redlinks in it. (so "text including Something wierd here" would instead simply show up as "text including Something wierd here"). Would this make sense as a preferences item? (If not, is it possible by setting a js/css file?) Naraht ( talk) 17:14, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
.mw-body a.new { color: #210 !important; } /* Very dark red links */
$($('a.new').replaceWith($('target').html())); /*slower*/
.Idea: to set up a type of pending changes that allow autoconfirmed editors to edit an article, but changes must be approved by an administrator. Similar to how articles with pending changes protection allow IP/non-autoconfirmed editors to edit articles, but changes must be approved by pending changes reviewers. This would allow constructive edits to disputed articles (such as typo fixes and other uncontroversial edits) without the need to respond to edit requests. This type of protection may be suitable for articles like Nanak Shah Fakir, Brianna Wu, Mass killings under Communist regimes, Douchebag, List of social networking websites, and other long-term fully-protected articles. What do you think? sst✈ discuss 08:59, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
If Wikidata says that two pages are linked for example Johns Hopkins University Press and fr:Johns Hopkins University Press and as such have the other under "languages" on the left, shouldn't Talk:Johns Hopkins University Press be linked to fr:Discussion:Johns_Hopkins_University_Press? Naraht ( talk) 15:45, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia should stop reporting edit counts beyond some level (to be determined by the community) to discourage editcountis |
The background for one specific incident can be seen here:
The discussions are still unfolding even as I write this but, in brief, an editor created approximately 80,000 redirects, most of which are viewed to be as inappropriate. Dealing with this issue has already occupied dozens of hours of editor attention, and is likely to involve many more hours of cleanup and discussion about how to handle this specific event.
It is my view that one of the causes of this problem may be characterized as metastasized editcountis.
If this were the only such case, I'd simply be happy allowing the community processes to carry on and decide how to handle the specific individual. However, I think this may be the symptom of a general problem as opposed to a one-off situation.
On occasion I've taken a look at Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits to see who our most prolific editors are.
In many cases, the editors high on that list are some of the most respected content creators in Wikipedia. Many of these editors have received kudos, well deserved, for the substantial contribution to this project.
However, I have sometimes wondered how editors managed to amass such large numbers of edits. My casual investigation leads me to some disquieting results. It isn't always the case that the edits fall into what we think of as a canonical edit — find some article that needs improvement, do some research, add or modify some text, add a reference, rinse and repeat.
I'm reminded of the adage "to err is human, to really screw up requires a computer". In some cases the accounts are the result of automated or semi automated editing. Here it is important to be especially careful. There are a lot of legitimate reasons for doing automated or semiautomated edits. In many cases, each of these edits improves the encyclopedia in a meaningful way. However, there are other such edits whose benefit seems more in generating edit counts than in actually improving the encyclopedia. I understand we have rules to prohibit automated edits that are truly minor, but I think we've all seen examples of edits whose contribution is quite limited.
I don't want to focus solely on automated edits, especially as the current situation appears not to have involved automated editing. However, it seems clear that this editor identified some article, then dreamed up 20 to 50 alternative phrases that might have something to do with the article and created them as redirects. There's a bit of consternation about the nature of the edits focusing on their appropriateness. That's a valid concern, but my focus here is not so much on whether the choice of wording was inappropriate, but the possibility that our emphasis on edit counts encouraged someone to mindlessly create useless redirects.
As another example, I spend a fair amount of time at CSD deleting unused categories. In many cases, it appears that the category wasn't really created in good faith, but was a mindless creation intended to bolster edit counts. Do we really need a category to keep track of corporations that were dissolved in Syria in the year 1132?
One solution is simple — let's discourage the counting of edits beyond some level. I think it is useful at times to know whether an editor has a few hundred edits or a few thousand or tens of thousands. If you need to discuss something with them on a talk page, it's helpful to know whether you are dealing with a newbie or an experienced editor. For that reason, I'm not proposing the absurd notion that we should suppress the reporting of edit counts. However, I think that beyond some point, the count provides no useful information about the type of editor, and merely becomes in some cases, an ego measure. I'll reiterate that this is not a blanket view of all of the editors at the top of the list. In fact, I hope it applies to only a minority. It is clear that many brand-new editors are obsessed with edit counts, and we often counsel them not to be quite so concerned. In many cases, after a few thousand edits, they lose their obsession, and I am confident that many people near the top of the list don't really care whether they have a hundred thousand or 300,000 edits.
My suggestion is simple — why not suppress the public listing of edit counts beyond some level? If we did so, then if an editor reached that level, they should continue to edit for the improvement of the encyclopedia but would no longer be encouraged to find creative ways to generate high edit counts. They'll make lots of redirects if the redirects are valid, they will make lots of categories if the categories are valid, they'll run AWB if it improves the encyclopedia, but they won't dream up ways to pad the edit account.
I'm sure they'll be lots of opposition and lots of questions. One obvious question is where to set the level. My initial thoughts were something like 50,000 or 100,000. I notice that our service awards go up to 132,000 edits, So that might be a natural choice for an upper limit, although I would prefer something a little bit lower.
If we stopped keeping track of edits beyond some large limit, do we think that editors with more edits would stop editing because they wouldn't get recognition? My hope is that this isn't the case.
It would obviously be some technical details, as edit counts are available and pop-ups and calculated with various edit counters, but I'm certain all those technical details could be worked out if the community thinks that suppressing edit counts beyond some level might help discourage editcountitis.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 17:14, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Can I remind participants that this is the idea lab, not Proposals or Policy. The concept behind this page is that editors discuss the idea, and think of ways to improve it, but do not Oppose or even Support. For example @ IJBall:, but the rationale included a better solution, specifically, redefining how we count edits. There is precedent for that - when I delete an article, it doesn't count as an edit. What if we decided that creation of redirect or dab pages, while useful, didn't qualify as an edit for the purposes of measuring edit count. That doesn't mean we don't measure them, deletions are counted, but they aren't counted as edits.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 17:57, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
As another example, @ Epicgenius: didn't disagree with the core of the idea, but expressed concern that it would be difficult to agree on the level. I agree. If we ended up concluding that the general idea made sense but we couldn't reach a consensus on the cutoff level, we wouldn't implement it. Similarly if we end up with general support for the concept but there are technical difficulties we won't implement it.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 18:03, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
A useful approach would be to make the generally displayed edit count more meaningful by including only what we define as substantial edits. This could be accomplished most obviously by omitting various types of edits.
This should not be viewed as controversial, as it's really just a system admin area, like firewall maintenance: the rule set would be there for all to see, and all editors could continually comment and make suggestions. Changes would result in automatic recalculation across all users. Whether this could be technically implemented at reasonable cost, and if it would be a significant drain on server resources, seem to be the only limiting questions. (I've been thinking about a somewhat similar semi-automated approach to RfCs...) -- Tsavage ( talk) 05:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
The discussion, Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2015 November 10#File:Australian Aboriginal Flag.svg, resulted in "keep[ing]" the Australian aboriginal flag and solely relying on US law to deem it free to use in English Wikipedia. Of course we are not legal experts, according to disclaimers. I tried similar discussion but just about WP:non-U.S. copyrights page at WP:VPP, but other things overshadow that issue, and then that discussion is now archived. I was thinking about proposing to either add more headquarters, add more rules, or change rules. However, I want the issue to be brought to wide attention. I don't editors to believe that it is okay to distribute something copyrighted to online, even when it may not be copyrightable in the U.S. But administrators want to stick to US laws. Any ideas? George Ho ( talk) 22:02, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
For someone who has just done a search on the English Language Wikipedia, and wants to do a search for the same string on the German Wikipedia, the choices seem to be
How difficult would it be to add the complete list of languages on the left side the way that wikidata or interwiki links cause articles to be listed? Naraht ( talk) 15:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
This idea in a nutshell: Could/Should there be a Category or similar listing of all biographical articles by DEFAULTSORT so that disambiguation or surname pages could include a useful link to the A-Z point showing holders of that surname? |
A reader may well approach the encyclopedia wanting to find out about a person with surname "Xyzname", when they do not know the person's forename(s) or initial(s). They may have read or heard some mention of "Dr Xyzname", or "After Xyzname's breakthrough work in this field", or "the followers of Xyzname". If this happens to be a string of characters which is only ever used as a surname (say Higginbottom), they mght find a surname page (this one has 5 entries), or they might do a Wikipedia search (if they know how to do this, bypassing the link to the surname page) and see a listing of 11 people surnamed Higginbottom. But if the surname they are looking for is something like " Leeds" they've got a problem. The base name page has a hatnote pointing to Leeds (disambiguation), which has a link to Leeds (surname), but there's no knowing how complete this is (though I did what I could with it earlier today). If they do a search on the word "Leeds", the results will include people with the surname, mixed up with a load of other articles (just one of the first page of 20 hits is a person with the surname).
There are different views among the Disambiguation community about whether entries for "people with the surname Xyzname" belong on the "Xyzname (disambiguation)" page, and if so where: a change to WP:MOSDAB in May 2015 means that they are now to be added to the "See also" section (which, to my mind,then gets very cluttered) until a separate Xyzname (name) page is created. (There is separate provision for people like "Lincoln", "Shakespeare" and "Churchill", who are recognised as being commonnly referred to by surname alone: those aren't the people I'm worrying about here). But such listings, wherever they are, are always likely to be incomplete anyway - as with our Higginbottoms above.
For living people, it's possible to create a link to the appropriate A-Z section of Category:Living people (like this). It's slightly inelegant in that it continues on beyond the chosen surname, but it's otherwise pretty good: a listing by surname - ie using the "DEFAULTSORT" that many of us carefully add to every biographical article we ever see.
If there was a listing which was the equivalent of " Category:All people" (ie living, dead, or unknown), sorted by DEFAULTSORT, then we could add a link to the "Xyzname" point in this sorted list as a really useful enhancement to the "See also" section of every disambiguation page where the word being disambiguated is ever used as a surname/family name/"the name used as a sort key". It would also be useful on every surname page, to provide an up-to-date listing to complement the handcrafted annotated listing on the page itself.
There could perhaps be a template to add to the "See also" section of appropriate disambiguation pages, which would provide this link, with text saying "List of people with surname Xyzname", in the same way that {{ look from}} and {{ in title}} are often added. With real sophistication, maybe the template could produce a list cut off at an appropriate endpoint (the next possible word, perhaps, eg "Xyznamf" for "Xyzname" - that way we'd get all the compound names included too).
But the prerequisite is for there to exist a category, or category-like listing (not necessarily updated in real time, perhaps every day/week if it would otherwise be too demanding of the system) which includes every biographical article in the encyclopedia, sorted by their DEFAULTSORT. The totality of the categories listed under Category:People categories by parameter, and all the child categories down to the last generation, with duplicates deduplicated, would seem one possible definition. (Not the subcategories of Category:People because that includes a lot of non-biog stuff like flags and books).
Perhaps such a category already exists and is used for some operations I know nothing about? Perhaps there are technical reasons why it can't be done? Perhaps the consensus is that it wouldn't be useful? I'll drop a note at a couple of relevant talk pages to alert them to this discussion. Pam D 17:59, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
@ WhatamIdoing:, @ Gadfium:, @ Stanning: Thanks for reading and commenting. I suspect I didn't make myself clear. What I suggest is not any manually-maintained list or set of pages like the ones deleted in 2007. The existing "NAMESORT" system specifies how names are to be sorted within categories, and is one of the prerequisites for my proposal to work.
I am suggesting that there should be a category, or a listing functioning like a category, which contains every item which is in any biographical category (including stubs) - whether Category:1917 births, Category:Mexican poets, Category:People from Headingley or Category:American football defensive back, 1980s birth stubs (some people will be in several). This list would be automatically generated, and therefore as complete as our categorisation and stub-sorting allows. It would be sorted using the NAMESORT system - ie all those with the same surname would appear together.
We could then offer a link to the relevant point in this A-Z listing as a useful "See also" link in any disambiguation page, and in any surname page, to help the reader who is looking for a person they only know by surname. For living people we can already do this - see this listing for people with the surname "Leeds", who are very difficult to find othewise because the word "Leeds" appears in so many other article titles.
The list a reader would find would be unannotated, just names - but if they have "tool-tips" activated (or is it a default - I mean the system whereby hovering over a link shows the lead sentence) they can skim through that list quickly to find the paleontologist or politician they are looking for. Even without tooltips, they have a list, in one place, of all people who have a Wikipedia article and who have that surname as their DEFAULTSORT, and that's more useful than finding the same names thinly scattered through a long list of article titles. That seems to me to be a really useful enhancement. What is needed is for the Category/Listing of "All people" to be created. Can it be done? Pam D 09:54, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
SELECT page_title, cl_collation, cl_sortkey
FROM categorylinks
JOIN page ON cl_from=page_id
WHERE page_namespace=0 AND cl_type="page"
/* Looking at a single category: 1 sec */
AND cl_to IN ("Living_people")
/* Looking at 2,868 categories: 2 hours */
-- AND cl_to IN (SELECT cat_title FROM category WHERE cat_title LIKE "%\_births" AND cat_pages>0)
AND cl_sortkey LIKE REPLACE(UPPER("Leeds%"), "_", " ")
GROUP BY cl_from;
SELECT SUM(cat_pages) FROM category WHERE cat_title LIKE "%\_births%"
yields 1,1510,84. —
Dispenser 13:04, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I know we have a spam blacklist, but do we have a unique blacklist for sites that are definitively established as unreliable by various Wikiprojects/the greater community? And if not, why not? I've been doing a lot of editing in the world of Indian cinema over the last year or more, not out of familiarity or interest in the niche, but out of frustration with the corruption that is so obvious and rampant. If the Indian cinema task force were to conclude through discussion that various sites were not deemed reliable, (let's say koimoi.com and boxofficeindia.com) they'd still have to manually remove thousands of unreliably sourced submissions each year, because there's nothing preventing the addition of these sources except for eagle-eyed editors, and the bulk of editing in this realm is by SPAs, sock farms, paid editors, and people who seem to think that the most recent higher box office estimate is the most accurate estimate, regardless of where it comes from. That sucks up a ton of volunteer time unnecessarily. This isn't limited to Indian cinema of course, because any time that someone submits a reference from forum.toonzone.net, that too should be on the blacklist, since nothing at that discussion forum is of value to the project. Or Wikia? Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 03:10, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Someone once made a Wikipedia Trading Card Game. They got so far before the game became inactive. I would like to revive it. I know it may not be popular, but it may have hope. (Article Deleted is the name of the NEW game.) I'm returning...from the WikiDead. ( But you still dare speak to me...) 21:25, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, it seems people like the idea. If I don't get objections by tomorrow, I'm going to take this to Proposals. I'm returning...from the WikiDead. ( But you still dare speak to me...) 12:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I would like to propose that the ability to submit a user sandbox to Articles for Creation be disabled. The ability to submit a subpage of a user sandbox, a subpage of a user, or a draft page should be the ways to submit an article to Articles for Creation. The direct submission of sandboxes to AFC has several problems. First, as User:Anne Delong has wisely observed, sometimes when a sandbox draft is good, the sandbox is moved by a reviewer either first into draft space and then into article space, or directly in article space. This results in a redirect from the sandbox, and the creation of the redirect is in the sandbox history as an edit by the accepting reviewer. Then if the sandbox is reused by the user, which is permitted, it has a weird edit history. As a result, if the new draft in the sandbox is tagged for speedy deletion, or moved into draft space and nominated for MFD, or any of various similar actions taken, the accepting reviewer is notified of the action, and she had nothing to do with it. That is a problem that occasionally happens if the draft is good. On the other hand, at AFC, I have often seen sandboxes submitted to AFC that were not draft articles. They may have been test edits, permitted in sandboxes, or they may have been user page drafts. However, the inexperienced editor submitted the sandbox to AFC, probably not knowing that they were submitting it to AFC. This makes it necessary for an AFC reviewer to decline the draft politely as probably not meant to be a draft. So submission of sandboxes can cause problems either if the draft is good or if the draft is not meant to be a draft. Don't enable primary user sandboxes to be submitted for AFC. Robert McClenon ( talk) 18:46, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Users could login via open ID, facebook, email or wiki profile.. or not even login with IP, OS, Hardware, User facial recog id in order to enforce voting for truthful, safe and accurate information on wikipedia, including similar trust ranking factors for MLA cited content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.4.230.86 ( talk) 06:30, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Along with the project page, talk, edit page, history and such tabs, I would appreciate a bookmark tab that allows a registered user to bookmark an article. The watchlist tab is not good enough because it just shows recent changes and a number of updates. If a user has an article or a number of articles of interest to edit or read later on, a simple bookmark tab should allow them to so. It should work in the same manner as a normal Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Mozzarella Firefox browser and should be accessible for the user along with sandbox, preferences, beta, watchlist and contributions list. Checkmark boxes should be next to each link to a bookmarked page for checking and pressing the delete button for the user to remove any article from the list that they no longer want in their bookmarks.
The bookmarks list should also be in alphabetical order and listed under each letter to make it easier for the user to find. I propose this because there are time I just want to save access to a title I don't remember that I'd like to revisit later. I don't really care about recent changes, I just want to access it at some later time for editing/expanding or reading later on and a bookmark tab would really be useful.-- Nadirali نادرالی ( talk) 05:37, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
While Wikipedia must use closed access journals for citations, we should show Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub somehow.
Some ideas:
John Vandenberg ( chat) 02:49, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I sympathize with the frustrations around our use of closed resources. I can't endorse linking to copyright infringement though, however legitimate the underlying moral claims are. As John suggested, I think the better strategy is helping readers find OA versions of sources, give them avenues to request articles that are paywalled from their authors, tag content that is OA, and additionally link to repository versions or url resolvers for better discovery. We started brainstorming ideas over the past several weeks for a bot that could do this here: WP:TWL/OABOT. It meshes nicely with @ Daniel Mietchen:'s work on signalling open access, and I hope we can join forces to prototype something in the new year. Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) ( talk) 18:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I think the Wikimedia community is in a unique position to make research more accessible, and there are many activities around that, as summarized here and here. The best way to help the case of sharing research is probably to improve the information we have around open access, paywalls, copyright transfer agreements and those many other related topics, to highlight the value of open access by citing and reusing text or media, to add licensing information to Wikidata items about scholarly papers and to engage editors and readers around that, which is what WP:OPENACCESS is about.
With the Open Access Signalling project (for which we have functional prototype components that we are in the process of combining into a coherent workflow), we have chosen to highlight open access resources rather than to name and shame non-open or paywalled ones. While a similar approach in a psychology journal indicates that such a badging strategy can indeed raise awareness about sharing and increase the propensity of authors to actually do it, we are also concerned with saving users those frustrating clicks that end up on a paywall. If we could come up with a good technical solution here, I would certainly be in favour of giving it a try. The proposed OABOT is muddingly named (as it is about highlighting legal public copies of non-open stuff) but otherwise a good complement to signalling openly licensed content (which we are planning to do by linking to the Wikisource and Commons copies of the imported materials) and signalling paywalls. Having a link to paywalled content first lead to some on-wiki page (or pop-up) that informs about open access and warns of the paywall but still links to it (alongside legal free copies) would be an interesting twist. Help with any of that would be much appreciated. -- Daniel Mietchen ( talk) 23:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking that "wouldn't it be weird if Wikipedia became the first artificial sentience?"
Then I remembered that Wikipedia is part of Watson. That is, it is included in Watson's data banks.
So, Wikipedia is part of what Watson knows, its awareness, and eventually, when Watson wakes up, it will be part if its sentience.
But, Wikipedia is also an evolving program/data/computer complex in its own right, including a core program stack ( MediaWiki +) and a small army of bots, installed on a massive array of servers, the whole of which is growing exponentially. So it is possible, that Wikipedia itself could become sentient.
Far fetched? I'm not so sure. With the line blurring between data and programming, with ontological data becoming integral to AI engines, and with ontologies being increasingly automatically generated from natural language sources such as Wikipedia, knowledge itself may come to life, in a manner of speaking.
And then, as such intelligence expands into the cosmos, the universe itself wakes up.
It's amazing how much Wikipedia has on this subject, which may provide the kernel for its eventual self-awareness.
Some things to think about. The Transhumanist 19:19, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
I'd see something like Google as becoming sentient more so than Wikipedia. There is no mechanism in place to make Wikipedia become "aware." You'd need a form of machine learning for that to happen, which doesn't exist here. As a machine, Wikipedia is primitive. It's the editors that do the thinking, not the computers. But you mention Watson, which is why I mention Google. Much of the information that pops up in a Google search (ie. in the "infoboxes" on the side) comes from here. It's possible that an advanced AI, if such a thing ever comes to be, will learn from Wikipedia, but it won't be Wikipedia itself doing the thinking. Discant X 13:26, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure if something like this has been suggested, or if this is the best place to suggest it since ideally it would be a project-wide global feature. But here you go: I would like to have a feature that allows editors to request photos of article subjects, and for other editors to register as willing and available to take photos in their area. Editors can take a look at local requests and see if they have any photos or go out and take them. They have this feature on Find a Grave and it's incredible... I requested a photo of a relative's grave on the other side of the country and within a month it had been uploaded by someone nearby.
This would be more of a geographic-specific resource rather than BLP ("I need photos of a celebrity!!!"). For example, I just worked on the article on Auregnais, the extinct dialect of Norman French from the island of Alderney. There's nearly no record of this language and it's now only visible in certain signs on Alderney. No photos of street signs from Alderney are available on Flickr or any other free source. I would love to be able to request a photo that would alert a Wikipedian in the Channel Islands/Normandy of what I'm looking for. And I'd be perfectly willing to take photos of anything people wanted in my area, and before I travelled, I'd take a look to see what photos were requested in that area. I envision this feature being requestable on articles and also send alerts to people who signed up for it, with an additional centralized project on Commons that lets you browse requests. It would be really cool to have a map with pins showing "Photo requested." A little icon in the top corner of the article could indicate current requests, so random people who visited the article would also see it, and if interested learn how to upload a photo to Commons and register as a photo contributor. I think there are a lot of Wikipedians throughout the world who would be willing to go out and take a local photo someone on the other side of the world requested. What do you think? —Мандичка YO 😜 09:52, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Hi Wikimandia, there is a new find next photographer tool in german, presented recently at de:Wikipedia:Kurier#Tools im Fokus #1: Nächste-Fotografen-Tool. Works in english too. -- Atlasowa ( talk) 20:53, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
When the
edit filter was enabled on the English Wikipedia, the ability for it to block an editor who trips a filter was left disabled (see $wgAbuseFilterAvailableActions
here); there was
some discussion about the option around then, but I can't see that there was ever an enacted consensus to have the feature at the time. I'd like to discuss the possibility of enabling this option, and the rules that would need to be in place to ensure that it was used appropriately.
The current strongest setting for an edit filter on the English Wikipedia is to disallow the edit, where a user is restricted from making an edit if it trips a filter set to disallow. For LTA users - as an example - this can then become a game of attempting to navigate around the filter's settings. When the user works out what they have to do to avoid the filter, they'll likely soon be blocked, the filter will be amended to fix the loophole, and they'll move to a new IP and start the process again. It could be extremely beneficial in this example to have the filter set to block the user upon their first attempt at making an edit, such that they have to switch IP before making just their second edit, slowing them down and adding an extra layer of difficulty. This is just one example of where the block option could be useful, as there are many filters which successfully target users who are always eventually blocked by patrolling admins.
If a user is blocked by the edit filter, they see MediaWiki:Abusefilter-blocked and their log shows that they have been blocked through an automated filter (though I can't currently find the exact wording). I see this option only being used when there is some amount of consensus to enable the block option for a particular filter (i.e. one editor can't decide to turn it on), and only when that filter has zero false positives for at least some length of time. I'm not sure what level of consensus would be appropriate; a standard RfC sounds good but reduces our capacity to act quickly, so perhaps something like '5 edit filter managers must agree', a 7 day RfC, or something else would be more useful. Another point to discuss is that raised by MusikAnimal, who noted that that we should perhaps have more rules regarding changing existing filters in the guideline before such a feature is enabled to avoid damage.
What are your thoughts? Sam Walton ( talk) 11:40, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
$wgAbuseFilterRestrictedActions
) that limits editing and creating of edit filters with restricted actions to users with an additional abusefilter-modify-restricted
userright. One could grant it to admins by default; they'd still need to grant themselves EFM but only admin EFMs would have the permission.
Jo-Jo Eumerus (
talk,
contributions) 18:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Hello everyone.
As a huge sports fan, I am constantly going through the endless source of hockey player articles that exist on this site. However, it has recently come to my attention that all articles regarding hockey players are, dare I say it, more "simplistic" then that of the players of other major sports, such as soccer or baseball for example. For this, I would like to propose that the info box for hockey player pages be tweaked. Doing so may provide great opportunities for editors and allow those articles to really pop. Thank you in advance.
Homie C ( talk) 09:02, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Ice hockey. And I noticed it myself. Homie C ( talk) 16:14, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
I would say that this is a fine idea, as Ice Hockey is a major sport in much or North America, and it is only fair to fans and the sport itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andysbhm ( talk • contribs) 00:00, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
I recently created a userbox for Amnesty International at Template:User Amnesty International but then I found very few in the same vein, see for example Category:International organization user templates which I had expected to be much bigger. Have I done a good thing or a bad thing? — Cheers, Steelpillow ( Talk) 17:21, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
It's so annoying. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mocker7guy ( talk • contribs) 16:05, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
When Wikipedia was roughly two years old, I started a deliberate habit of hitting "Random Article" three times before going to bed - and forcing myself to read whatever came up. I did this as a way of widening my mind - diversifying my knowledge base. For about a year, it worked well - I read 1000 or so articles - most of which I'd never have read otherwise - and I'm quite sure it broadened my mind to read about a lot of interesting people, curious animals, wonderful places. However, gradually, I found that I was hitting article after article about rock bands that undoubtedly popped into existence, had one hit and then vanished again - I hit a TON of articles about Japanese railway stations (some person with fanatical interest had created articles for every single one of them!) - articles about freeways...more and more "junk" that didn't matter in any way to me. To the point that I can no longer reasonably do this.
It's not unreasonable that Wikipedia has those articles - I very often use the encylopedia to look up "uninteresting" things - and it's good that it has the breadth of scope to allow me to do that. But the ability to dip into it at random and find something I feel I ought to know is fading...5 million pages with probably 100,000 I'd like to read - it's getting hard to find things that are "interesting" reads in an idle moment. The front page helps a bit with that - but the way it's curated doesn't necessarily correlate with my needs here. The featured article is mostly selected for good English, good references, etc - but it's often boring as all hell. The "On this day" and "In the news" stuff is usually source of one or two good reads - but it's very patchy...and "Did you know" is limited to new articles, so very often there isn't much there yet.
So I wonder - is there a way to have a curated list of "interesting articles" that could be served up randomly? Criteria for "interesting" would be different from "good" or "featured" because writing style and such is less important than the subject matter. I understand that "interesting" for one person is "tedious" for another - but still I feel that it would be possible to create a curated category from which random picks could be made that would stand a higher-than-usual chance of being interesting to a person of intelligence who wants to broaden their general knowledge.
I'm interested to hear what other people think of this. SteveBaker ( talk) 17:50, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
That's an interesting question, SteveBaker.
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A lot of the backlogged pages remain unattended for a lengthy period of time. I have a couple of proposals to fix that. I think that problem could be resolved if each administrator is assigned to a shift during which they have to be available.
Another idea that I would like you to consider is to start to allow advertising on your website. That way you could pay the administrators, and more people will want the job. That would fix the shortage of workers. Please note that this is separate from the first idea.
It might be beneficial to take one of my proposed ideas or even both of them. I know that the second one might be too much of a burden but I really think the first one might be beneficial. 99.53.112.186 ( talk) 19:16, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
Hi all, I've been studying a bunch of big data business cases recently to prepare to teach an MSc course, and it gave an idea for funding Wikipedia, what do people think to this? The standard business model of all the Web2.0 sites is to give away a web service in exchange for information about users, which they then sell to advertisers. Obviously we don't want to run ads on Wikipedia or spy on users. But there could still be a way to use the user-interests information to make the world more efficient. There are many others sites that we use that do run ads, and those sites would like to know more about us to make their ads more targeted. As a user, I don't mind them doing this and in fact if a site has ads at all, I /prefer/ them to be more relevant to me. So I really wouldn't mind Wikipedia selling all the meta-information about my interests to other sites who could use them to improve their advertising. Obviously there are many people who don't want their interests monitoring like this, so the system should be strictly opt-in. But I think many of us would be happy to "donate" meta information about our interests rather than having to donate money all the time (which we currently do) to keep the servers running. The system could maybe have some clever settings system so you tell it, say, to only use information about your professional rather than personal interests on a work PC and vice versa on a home PC, or whatever. If you don't want to do it with ads, the information could be sold to companies like Amazon, who would like to know if you're been reading a page about an author so they can recommend more relevant books next time you visit amazon.com's home page. What do people think to this, as an alternative or complement to the current fundraisers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.26.233.208 ( talk) 14:25, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Over the last little while at redirects for discussion a number of redirects from single emoji characters have come up, and this has highlighted a few technological issues which makes it difficult to properly target these. Up to now, it's been generally accepted that emoji target to the topic they're intended to depict (e.g. 🍎 -> Apple), and this works fairly well most of the time. Broadly, there have been two issues identified:
There is a list of emoji at Emoji#Blocks which lists the emoji coded into Unicode and which should therefore render on Wikipedia as I understand it, but many are not clear representations of things, and try the list on your desktop vs. your phone or some other device and you'll see how some are completely different on different platforms. However, you'll also see that nearly all of them have had pages created for them which redirect to an article. This creates problems for us because we can't guarantee (like we can with words) that a pictorial representation is going to be interpreted a certain way by all users, or even that it's going to be the same picture, and so we are creating WP:ASTONISHing redirects for some users.
I have an idea for a WP:EMOJI guideline in my head, a guideline for how to deal with emoji pages, and I'd like to hear other users' perspectives on this issue. Here are some of my thoughts thus far:
There have also been a number of users at the various RfDs suggesting that we should just not have pages with emoji titles at all, often citing WP:FORRED and considering emoji essentially a foreign language. I'm against that treatment myself, because I think that emoji redirects can be useful, even if it's not obvious how one goes about typing one in a search box (this may become easier in the future, I don't know) and one of the criteria at WP:RFD#KEEP is that someone finds a redirect useful, even if you don't; different users browse Wikipedia in different ways.
I suppose I'm most interested in thoughts on the last two points: what to do with emoji which aren't obvious, and which might not be the same for all users.
Ivanvector 🍁 ( talk) 23:05, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
👾 | U+01F47E | ALIEN MONSTER [1] |
🏫 | U+01F3EB | SCHOOL [2] |
🎱 | U+01F3B1 | BILLIARDS [3] |
<span style="color:red">
). U+1F600 😀 GRINNING FACE
Si Trew (
talk) 09:54, 4 August 2015 (UTC)It could be great to be able to create timelines based on specific (personally investigated) trajectories - to enable users to make quick comparisons/draw parallels/look for patterns in time. I propose a 'wiki-timeliner' project / code addition that would allow users interact with temporal wiki info very simply.
Perhaps right-click and context menus could be implemented in a code update - which could simplify a number of other wikipedia interactions. Perhaps some context (right click) options could be attached to temporal data/hyperlinks. Or maybe timeline tools could exist in the regular editing toolbar. I would imagine there are modal window solutions / tooltips / keystroke options that might also be reasonably usable.
Wiki Timeliner or 'Timeliner' functionality would allow users to:
Additionally, page edit history could be optionally displayed in the context of a timeline.
If there is enough consistency in wiki page construction, timelines could be auto-generated in pages with a lot of temporal info just to illustrate the data already on pages.
Oversight & maintenance would be subject to the same community editing process to which all content is subject.
Timelines with too much disputed info would just not display (or would display with major disclaimers) until a community resolved its disputes - so that oversimplification of important ideas would not be likely.
There is already a
list of timelines - most of which are well made and canonically quite important - but I bet there are a TON of other important timelines that could be helpful to people, specifically if formatting them is very easy.
If this idea is interesting, I would really like to be involved in designing / developing it with the community! — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Lightloaf (
talk •
contribs) 02:57, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
Sorry for the length of this post. Still I think it is a worthy read.
As an ex-vandal (I sadly must confess) and an ex-admin I think I do have a considerable view of the problem of vandalism, from both sides of the barricade.
To clarify: as a vandal I mainly wasn't active on Wikipedia, but rather different smaller wikis not related to Wikimedia, and sometimes some forums. And I hope this was long before enough.
And I gotta say your methods dealing with it are ineffective at most! It is ridiculous that people got to stare in the screen for hours playing Whac-A-Mole with vandals to prevent the site being flooded; it is ridiculous that sophisticated tools have to be developed just for this purpose! Do not be deceived by 'Pedia's popularity – while this is undoubtedly a significant factor, I'm positive the current flood is far too large to be explained just by popularity.
No, all of those public discussions, info and intervention pages, complaints, RFCc, public logs… You're asking for this yourselves! You have wise and enlightening pages like w:wp:DENY, w:wp:TMOAV, w:wp:RBI, but you don't practise your preaches. In the dark times I was vandalizing myself, I'll tell you, when I was seeing a FRACTION of all of this I was bursting out laughing uncontrollably! Why do you think do vandals always keep their style and leave traces? Because they WANT to be recognized, of course. You're just a one huge canteen for trolls. And again, I'm telling this from the perspective of an ex-vandal.
As a result of this people have to direct a large fraction of their energy to combat trolls, rather than help newbs, fix errors on pages, etc. Vandals' harassment techniques and burdensomeness make some productive users to grow in frustration and eventually leave. Newbies are being scared off, some fraction of the sneaky vandalism passes uncaught.
As an admin, I've been fending off vandals long enough; and I don't really wanna to be doing this again. I simply have a too big feeling of the utter pointlessness of my efforts. I'm tired of fighting it in such a way that I know my actions are actually counter-productive.
In this case Wikipedia's openness works against it. Do understand that vandals really do crave to see any impact of their actions. That's their goal, their reason to vandalize! When I was vandalizing, I was waiting for the results and looking for them, staring at the RCs, reading certain meta-pages and users' discussions…
That's not the way at all. The vandals' actions, from their perspective, should go to a black hole or /dev/null. No impact of their actions should be visible to them. Reverting, Blocking, Ignoring is important, but it's not enough. All pages like w:wp:LTA or w:wp:AIV should be removed from the public and be made visible only to trusted users. Also any discussions, RFCs, etc about them should be held somewhere unreachable by vandals (but reachable by all good users, not only admins). There should be consensus not even to mention their nicks in the public, even less to complain about their disruptiveness. Obvious vandalisms should not only be rollbacked; no, the vandalized versions should be removed from the page's history, at least from the vandals' perspective. The right to do so could be granted to anyone with the rollback right. If you ask me, I'd say the vandals should not even see who has blocked or reverted them; also the block reason should be left empty. Again; when I was vandalizing, I was sticking to pages that responded in a Wikipedia-like manner. If I saw a page that was removing traces of my vandalisms and made it impossible for to witness the results of my actions, I was going elsewhere.
Please learn from the experience of other sites, where this is exactly what is happening. On StackExchange banned users do not see their deleted content. On many forums vandals are just being arbitrary banned by they-don't-know-who, and their posts are being deleted. By the way, perhaps StackExchange's privilege system is worth considering?
By the way, I know I'm somewhat not practicing my preaches myself by publishing this very essay. But I really think this must be brought to attention.
Finally, it is important that I was talking only about die-hard vandals. These methods should never be applied to hot-blooded users, users that are just suspected of being vandals in disguise, etc… I am aware of Bang Bang's case, AFAIK there was not only one such mistake in the history, and well, I am in no way promoting this kind of hasty administrative actions.
I am also posting this on m:WM:FORUM and User:Marcgal/How do we actually encouraging vandalisms and how to fix this. Regards, Marcgal respons 09:36, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
there seems no particular reason for article history to be visible at all to unregistered users, that particular point is not up for debate. Article history needs to be publicly visible for legal reasons, since anyone copying from a Wikipedia article needs to attribute it to "at least five of the principal authors of the Document (all of its principal authors, if it has fewer than five)" (generally per a hyperlink to the edit history, as per that checkbox you've checked with every single edit you've made on Wikipedia). ‑ iridescent 16:09, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Related:
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/the-virtues-of-moderation-part-i/
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/06/25/the-virtues-of-moderation-part-ii/
--
Guy Macon (
talk) 18:06, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
A draft guideline (or policy) is currently being assembled/discussed at Wikipedia:Edit Filter/Draft. Anyone interested in forming this prior to an RfC is welcome to alter the page or discuss it on the talk page. Thanks, Sam Walton ( talk) 09:51, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
Internet is developing and people can find a lot of information everyday but there is still a long way to go. I am currently spending time in Iran/Tehran and have feedbacks about my current Internet Service Provider. Due to the close market and some other problems, there is no official website for people like me to read/write about the service they're using. I am pretty sure there are a lot of countries out there that tourists and domestic people don't have a board to guide others.
If wikipedia adds a ranking system on companies like ISPs, small or even large manifacturers and etc, also a feedback/comment page for known users I am sure that it will benefit millions of people around the world. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amirhrahal ( talk • contribs) 16:22, 12 August 2015 (UTC)
I posted it at Wikipedia:Help desk#Wildlife, fauna, flora. Now, I realized this is a better place for it. This is a food for thought to improve Wikipedia. To be honest, I would be careless whatever happens. I'm just happened to discover this mess today and wanted to do something about it. Obviously, the problem does not limit itself to just wildlife, fauna, and flora. This is a much bigger problem on Wikipedia as a whole. Wikipedia has been plaguing by articles under-disguised as redirects. I suggest that there should be a policy banning "creating potential future articles as redirects." I do realize there is a pro to this kind of redirects, but the con's surely outweigh it. I have stated my reason in the help desk (check out the link). Here it is, I have no interest in further involving in Wikipedia. I'll leave the rest for policy-makers here (which I know is all Wikipedia editors). That is if this is getting anywhere at all. 14.169.206.102 ( talk) 09:11, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I had a discussion with someone in Talk:Visa policy of China#Continued discussion about ordinary passport with "for public affair" endorsement, and it's in a dead-end because we just repeating the same thing all the time. Does anyone have idea to solve this situation? Thank you very much. -- Whisper of the heart 07:10, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
Members of the community are invited to give their thoughts at a request for comment to discuss Wikipedians' alternatives to consensus, and the formation of a proposed Regulation Committee. Thank you, -- ceradon ( talk • edits) 04:20, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
There's actually an entire Wikimedia incubation project at incubator:Incubator:Main Page. Maybe one of the possible results of an article nominated for deletion should be getting transwikied there instead of just going into Wikipedia's Draft namespace when it doesn't meet Wikipedia's quality standards as described in Wikipedia:Deletion policy#Incubation but can be rewritten to do so. That Wikimedia project is probably more collaborative than Wikipedia's draft namespace and so would probably do a better job of improving it. Blackbombchu ( talk) 00:58, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
Idea: Some optional thing to help UserBob avoid 3RR violations. Support for it in user prefs is probably unwarranted. Elements:
Re the down arrow, the software would assume that Bob is reversing the most recent up arrow click. If he wants to reverse an earlier one, too bad, he should have thought of that before he clicked up arrow again. ― Mandruss ☎ 19:59, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Hello, I am Del Wilkins, and I consider myself a fairly intelligent person who has significant knowledge on topics that I find interesting, just as any other person who does the same. I wanted to add a link to the page Shadow person that had to do with a study on the effects of Methamphetamine and sleep deprivation. I could not figure out how to properly enter and edit the link. I know it is a lot like writing a college paper and citing your sources APA style, but its been many years since I have done any of that type of writing and could not figure it out. This is why there should be a place for a person to write new information. place the links, and leave it there until someone comes along who knows how to enter it. I feel that without such a storage area, Wikipedia is losing out on a wealth of untapped information that can only be contributed by people who have it, but do not know how to enter it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Del Wilkins ( talk • contribs) 11:45, 21 August 2015 (UTC)
I think Wikipedia could greatly improve if Harvard Catalyst helps research how to improve it. Harvard Catalyst could probably do more than just contribute to Wikipedia based on their research results. I think Harvard Catalyst would even be able to research how to form a group of people who edit Wikipedia in a swarm intelligent way including researching which patterns to create a software to notice within the entire Wikipedia website. Blackbombchu ( talk) 01:19, 25 August 2015 (UTC)
When editing an article a few minutes ago, my cursor made an unfortunate move and deleted a large block of text, which forced me to exit the edit window without saving my changes and re-add the text I was typing. I'm sure other editors have had the same issue, so why don't we simply fix this problem (which could become very inconvenient if you happen to make this mistake while adding large amounts of content or copy editing) by adding an undo button to the editing bar? I don't imagine that it would be an incredibly difficult feature to add, and it would certainly make reversing mistakes much easier.
Secondly, it occurred to me that it would be useful to have a saved drafts system. For instance, if an editor is making changes to an article but does not yet wish to make them live, they could simply save their progress as a draft which would be visible to only that editor. When they are satisfied with their changes, they can save their edits to the article itself. I recall that wikiHow, which I previously edited, had this ability, and it was quite convenient. -- Biblio worm 16:09, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
Dear Wikipedia Policy Makers
I am a historian by training and an enthusiast about old things, be they classic cars, bicycles and other mechanical stuff from the 20th century. I am writing to encourage a new class of encyclopaedic information on Wikipedia - retention of specialised non-academic human knowledge. In specific I am writing about collector cars, although the class can extend much further. In essence, while some subjects have formal experts, such as university professors who publish, in popular culture, such as classic cars, the knowledge is held by enthusiasts who build up a lifetime of expertise that unfortunately dies with them. It needs to be captured and recorded, and no better place than Wikipedia.
Quora has numerous questions on this subject (see for example, http://www.quora.com/Is-there-such-thing-as-Lost-Technology-or-is-that-simply-a-myth).
I propose that an officially approved format be set out on Wikipedia so that present-day living knowledge carriers can post that knowledge in the permanent repository of Wikipedia. Yes, anyone can post such now, but because anyone can purge such work, unless it is officially sanctioned and set out in an approved form, there is a very great risk of a volunteer editor messing with what is invaluable historic knowledge because they don't think it belongs there.
In regard to cars, I propose the following format:
Imagine if Wikipedia existed when the Pyramids were being made, or when the Romans invented concrete that lasts 2,000 years (ours is lucky to last a century). Imagine if the makers of Polaroid film posted their knowledge on Wikipedia when they stopped making it commercially. For that matter, imagine if Wikipedia was a repository for early computer program knowledge... stuff from the 20th century that now has been long lost. There is so much human knowledge that is slipping away, especially when email replaced letters and web pages replaced books.
I imagine this could become a powerful project... the knowledge project that brought in a whole new breed of specialist editors. But my sense is that it will require a clear agreement rather than just sort of happen.
I look forward to your thoughts.
BristolRegistrar ( talk) 09:22, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
It is the village where live muslim and hindu.there is situated a madarsa where lern hindu and muslim.and i think its indias firat tobacco free village. Sarfraj siddiqui is well known person for riting bhatauli tarana.bhatauli meri jaan.it is first village in india which has own tarana or anthem. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 106.67.59.148 ( talk) 21:25, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
With the increasing popularity of image collage's on historical and current event pages - especially wars - I feel that there should be a specific policy regarding this. I have noticed that several times in the past few years users have posted collages on War in Afghanistan (2001-present) and Iraq War which have been far from appropriate in my opinion, and to a degree still are. The problems entail the types of images used in the collages and their composition which I feel lacks objectivity. For one some users tend to over-represent one side in the collage's, generally I am referring to coalition/Western forces in these kinds of articles as many of the Wikipedia editors on this site are from those countries. These users may be predisposed to over-representing them in a collage compared to the opposing side. This isn't a good thing because if a reader is looking for information on the war when they first begin reading the page the collage should preferably have both (or sometimes more) sides represented equally so that the user can more easily envision the two sides of the conflict when they are reading the article.
The other problem I have is that for the most part a lot of these collages tend to just become a bunch of pictures of soldiers with no real context as to what they are actually doing in the war. To be honest this probably bothers me more than the aforementioned point. Then entire point of Wikipedia is to provide information, and just posting a bunch of pictures of people in the war doesn't do that. Instead events should where they can be represented in the first image on the page as it will help in illustrating the key events of the war before the reader starts and to be honest will also help build more interest in Wikipedia's articles than a bunch of pictures that looks like they are pulled from a military recruiting site.
This is a bit of a controversial topic, maybe it is redundant and people should know better with WP:NPOV but I feel it would be better to have a clear policy on this as I have had to do a few reverts to these articles over the years which have been nothing but controversial I feel. -- Kuzwa ( talk) 00:26, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
I recently made a proposition for a redesign of the community portal that would fix bugs and give a more modern less cluttered look. I would like more people to participate in the discussion. Heres the link- Wikipedia talk:Community portal#A Proposition Thanks Tortle ( talk) 17:21, 29 August 2015 (UTC)
Are being discussed here [4]
Following the recent issues as discussed at WP:AN Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 02:32, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
Hey all, I brought this up at the Gender Gap Task Force a while back, and thought I'd bring the issue here for more brainstorming and possible solutions. User:Sue Gardner wrote a very interesting blog post by , where she discusses how being referred to by the incorrect personal pronouns can put women off of editing and give examples. So I thought it would be a good idea to try and figure out some possible solutions to this problem. I brought it here instead of coming up with a proposal, because I don't really have any experience in Mediawiki technology or being a woman on the internet. In the GGTF discussion I suggested adding template:gender to the editing toolbar so that editors would be more likely to use it. User:SlimVirgin came up with the idea of having a hovercard feature for usernames, which would show some personal information about an editor if enabled in preferences. Do these seem like things which could help? Would they actually be possible to implement? Brustopher ( talk) 22:07, 6 August 2015 (UTC)
Whenever I need to refer to an editor by a pronoun, I always check the user's User: page for an indication of gender; and assuming it's specified, that's the gender I use. (Or occasionally their gender is obvious by their choice of user name (such is the case with me)). Otherwise I feel the "generic he" is quite adequate. I feel if someone is really sensitive about being referred to by the correct pronoun, then they should indicate their gender on their User: page. Perhaps the routine that handles the creation of new accounts should encourage the soon-to-become-an-official-Wikipedian to provide that piece of information.
Richard27182 (
talk) 09:04, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
=
I have some ideas for eliminating at least 15% of all vandalism as predicted, and I have a good reason to share them with you. Vandalism is like bombs which were set to destroy Wikipedia, which is usually repaired by non-vandals, but that is not just why because we all know that Wikipedia is not meant to be vandalized. I have some suggestions here:
For logged-out users
It is a good thing that we can keep track of registered users very easily, but people from anywhere can make edits, including vandalized ones, which is harder for us to keep track of, and they can always use another computer or change their IP addresses to keep vandalizing, which makes things even harder for us to keep track of, so, so that we could better take a peek at what people had done and therefore keep track of their attitudes, logged-out users would be allowed to edit up to 20 times per day but still allowed to revert their own edits anytime.
For recently unblocked users
It is usually expected that Wikipedians whose blocks have been naturally lifted be better contributors than they were in the past. However, it is not always known as to whether they will continue to act inappropriately, so, just to reduce taking chances, the users would be allowed to edit up to 20 times per day for one week, still being able to revert their own edits, until one week has passed since their being unblocked unnaturally.
Your opinions
So, after having said my ideas, I would love to hear some of your views about my ideas. If you do not like them just enough, do not be afraid to tell me why, for I may be able to fix my ideas. Your opinions start now.
Gamingforfun365
(talk) 07:18, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
{{ WPW Referral}}
Hi guys.
In an ongoing effort to improving Cyberbot II's newest feature which is, placing archives on dead sources, detecting if untagged sources are dead, and archiving those that are still alive, the bolded feature still needs much work before I can enable it.
I am looking for users here who can propose different checks that can be put in an algorithm to accurately determine a dead link.
When proposing, create a new level 3 header and propose the algorithm to be discussed. Users may support or oppose, but remember we are simply compiling ideas at the moment.— cyberpower Chat:Online 19:53, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
If I understand you correctly, one way to do this would be to collect a large sample of dead link responses, then use some sort of AI to check if the response you get is enough "like" the sample to be considered a hit. N-grams (character-level trigrams probably) and approximate string matching may be helpful for this. — SMALL JIM 09:54, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
There may be algorithms, or code, that are useful, on the following pages, particularly the first:
-- John Broughton (♫♫) 19:03, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
Would it make sense to have a {{ Category too narrow}} warning template for categories that have less than five entries and are (currently) impossible to expand further? Examples include Category:Sirius and Category:Aldebaran. Thank you. Praemonitus ( talk) 14:37, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
The Arbitration Committee is currently examining several reforms of the Audit Subcommittee and asks for community input on how they would like to see the Subcommittee function in the future. Because of this, the current Audit Subcommittee (AUSC) members' terms are hereby extended to 23:59, 30 September 2015 (UTC).
For the Arbitration Committee, -- Guerillero | Parlez Moi 02:10, 5 September 2015 (UTC)
As has been brought to light in the Orangemoody case, but as was already known and discussed before that, allowing any autoconfirmed user to patrol articles makes it somewhat easy to bypass new page patrolling (see the sock Akashtyi ( talk · contribs) for example). The system could be made more robust by restricting 'patrol' and page curation to (pending changes) reviewers (admins implicitly included), and possibly a new 'patroller' group with lower requirements than reviewer (there are some active patrollers who aren't reviewers). On the other hand, there are regular complaints against 'over-zealous' new page patrollers, so moving this userright from 'autoconfirmed' to usergroups that can be added and removed from a user would provide an incentive to behave in this area. It might also become a technical requisite for accepting AFCs. Cenarium ( talk) 18:41, 2 September 2015 (UTC)
A concern has been expressed at the Help Desk talk page that too many Articles for Deletion discussions have very few participants, and therefore do not represent consensus of the community. One possible way to increase participation in deletion discussions would be similar to how participation in Requests for Comments discussions is increased. That would be to invite editors to sign up to receive notifications of deletion discussions from a bot. Does anyone have any comments? Robert McClenon ( talk) 16:09, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
Some articles ( example) have several notes in a row: ...text of the article.[10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and maybe Wikipedia could / must automatically show them as: ...text of the article.[10-24] or something similar. Ayreonauta ( talk) 06:21, 15 September 2015 (UTC)
When an article contains a refname collision (same refname defined multiple times, with like or unlike definitions), (1) the software uses the first definition and ignores the rest, (2) there is no indication of any problem given in the reflist, and (3) the article is not added to any tracking category. All are evident in the test in
this revision, using the refname "Blinder-Lewin", which is citation [7].
Apparently this is being treated as a minor, innocuous problem, but it is not one in my opinion. It can create issues with
WP:V among other things. If the collision is ever detected, it's often some time later (years?), and by a different editor who is not well familiar with the article or the sources used. Yesterday, I spent over an hour untangling a particularly hairy case involving one refname, two unlike definitions, and four cites, and it was the toughest thing I've done in quite awhile (granted, it didn't help that the ref title was incorrect in one of the definitions).
It is a less serious problem if the definitions are identical, and I wouldn't necessarily ask the software to compare the definitions, but I think the downside of no error in the serious case (WP:V issues, more editor effort to fix) is greater than the downside of an error in the minor case (big red error in the reflist, which might be seen by some readers until the problem is fixed). I think an error message should be generated in the reflist, and that the article should be added to an appropriate tracking category. But I wanted to get some feedback on this here before taking this to
WP:VPR. ―
Mandruss
☎ 06:20, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
<ref name="name">content</ref>
whereas
WP:CITE says <ref name="name">text of the citation</ref>
. Whatever you say in VPR, someone will misunderstand if they can, so whether you say "content" or "definition" it'll be best to make it clear that, by that word, you mean the text between the ref and /ref tags!
Stanning (
talk) 14:02, 14 September 2015 (UTC)I was wondering if we could have list articles on public transit bus routes. You can also view my sandbox for a better understanding. HeatIsCool ( talk) 21:49, 18 September 2015 (UTC)
I think there's shouldn't just be a way to patrol proposed deletion as described in Wikipedia:WikiProject Proposed deletion patrolling but also a way to patrol nomination for deletion. Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Registry Dr. failed to get a lot of attention even after it got added to 2 deletion sorting pages and sometimes people go straight into nominating an article for deletion without proposing its deletion first. Blackbombchu ( talk) 18:18, 20 August 2015 (UTC)
I think that we ought to scrap AFD entirely, and re-create it as a purpose-built system that actually handles the whole workflow from start to finish.
Imagine an AFD tool that has simple forms to fill out for the nominator, that never sees nominations get "lost" due to transclusion problems, and that automatically counts !votes and tracks how many separate individuals participated. Imagine one that notices when a page is ready for closing (i.e., because it meets our standard criteria, such as having ≥3 participants and being 7 days old, or whatever we decide), and that puts the page into a list or category for action. Imagine one that could sort or filter by any criteria that you care about: the most attention (maybe it's SNOWing?), the least attention, only BLPs, only articles tagged by my favorite WikiProject, etc. Imagine one that can be withdrawn or closed by clicking a few buttons with a built-in script (including direct access to page deletion for admins and maybe a scripted blank-and-redirect button for everyone), rather than having to type special codes into a template and separately processing the page.
Wouldn't that be a lot better than what we have now? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:36, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
What would people think about implementing some kind of software that allows users who can't edit a semi-protected article to edit it similar to pending changes, however the edits wouldn't "go live" until any auto-confirmed user accepted the change? This would make semi-protection much less forceful and encourage editing, rather then dealing with the wiki-markup, talk pages, and templates that go along with semi-protected edit requests? I feel like there's some kind of objection to this, or it would have been implemented in the past, so, what are those? Kharkiv07 ( T) 01:32, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Witness accounts of the Roswell UFO incident (2nd nomination) shows the full log even though that page didn't appear that way at the time its debate was closed, so I think the same should be done for the first nomination. Blackbombchu ( talk) 16:46, 14 September 2015 (UTC)
It's been a long time since any post to WT:WikiProject Engineering has received a meaningful reply. Imho there are certain projects that are "too big to fail". For a major topic area such as engineering to not have a functional WikiProject is a serious problem. I think we could convert the main WikiProject Engineering page into a type of "disambiguation" page that lists active projects that cover various sub-topics of engineering - chemical engineering, electrical engineering, etc. Roger (Dodger67) ( talk) 08:08, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking about how to personally mark the 5 millionth ENWP milestone, and this idea occurred to me. What have been the most popular articles I've created, by all-time pageviews? It's a sort of long list so I'd rather not gather the data by hand. Is there a tool that can do this? — Brianhe ( talk) 17:43, 23 September 2015 (UTC)
@ NaBUru38, Brianhe: Metronom: Pageviews for articles you created (wmflabs, by Magnus Manske) -- Atlasowa ( talk) 11:21, 25 September 2015 (UTC)
Cause "flying ice cube" sounds like a cool name, I guess. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 21:19, 26 September 2015 (UTC)
Hi All,
I've been working on visualizing editor behaviour on wikipedia over the past few months. I've put together graphs that visualize editor activity, retention etc. I made a presentation for the research team at the foundation - http://slides.com/cosmiclattes/edit-activity-graphs-analysis/. It also has some of the preliminary results. It has links to the graphs & says how to interpret & play with them. Please let me know if you guys have other metrics or ideas you'd like to see graphed. I'd love to hear what you guys think of the graphs. I have proposed an IEG to continue working on the graphs.
Hi Dragons flight, Some of the graphs that are up already are:
I haven't looked at user registrations yet. Some of the other ideas I'm working on are here and here. Would you have any specific ideas for me or directions you would like me to explore? jeph ( talk) 12:47, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
Hello! I'm currently incubating an idea that was initially discussed in the Wikipedia IRC channel ( log).
I've been cleaning up citations with missing "|title=" tags, and it occurred to me that while this task likely couldn't be automated, it could certainly be made more efficient for the editor - rather than going through each category page, clicking "edit this page", etc., what if a program could populate a single page with several of these citations pulled from one or more pages? The editor could then click the links, provide a suitable title in a text box below each citation, and then submit them all at once. After that, the editor could get another page of citations to fix if they so desired. If you've ever used Amazon Mechanical Turk, they have a system for digitizing documents that works in a similar way - each document is split into images that contain one line, then workers are presented with a page that has several of these images and are asked to type the text into boxes below the images.
Rhhhh, another user, expanded on this idea - perhaps a program similar to the "random page" function could be added, but it would be modified to send users to a random page or section that requires cleanup, combined with subject selection (Rhhhh said "[for instance], 'I want to fix [spelling/POV/markup/...] on pages about [language/IT/history/...]' ")
While coding and scripts are completely out of my depth, I feel like this is something that wouldn't be too difficult to implement and it would allow editors like myself who prefer to work on these smaller tasks to do so far more efficiently.
I'm open to any ideas or feedback. Thanks for reading! Chris ( talk) 22:07, 5 October 2015 (UTC)
We have submitted an IEG Proposal related to this WikiProject. The project proposal is called Philippine Music Survey. You can check the proposal at meta: meta:Grants:IEG/Philippine Music Survey. If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please post it at the talk page of the IEG. Thanks. -- Jojit ( talk) 05:37, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
I've raised this pre-RfA opinion page idea again, this time here. I'm posting at the village pump to let you know and so you don't think I'm forum shopping. Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 06:49, 10 October 2015 (UTC)
I am posting here because WikiProject Arts is bit of a graveyard and I want quick feedback.
Thank you,
Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 03:49, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I have an idea for a new namespace to be entitled "Chronicle." It would be a place to note or record all events or items within a particular area. doing so would allow us to create a common space and resource where historical events could be noted and referenced, without requiring us to change the regular historical articles to record new events before their eventual significance is fully understood.
currently, there is no centralized place to create a central narrative of events as they occur.
one major potential of wikipedia is to serve as an ongoing and evolving record of events as they happen. a shared central space for such information would make it much easier for editors to be able to have a central resource to review recent events and to see if they warrant inclusion in various higher-level articles, such as history articles, science articles, technology, etc. -- Sm8900 ( talk) 01:32, 27 September 2015 (UTC)
would allow us to create a common space and resource where historical events could be noted and referenced, without requiring us to change the regular historical articles to record new events before their eventual significance is fully understoodThat's original research and we can't decide what to include/not include without a thesis for the page. If we have a thesis which explains what qualifies to be included/excluded, then it should be a standard History of X article. We shouldn't be in the busniess of
create a central narrative of events as they occur, we have to go based on what Reliable sources report (either as new coverage or as historians writing and drawing the inferences). Reporting on recent events is either the perview of WikiNews or the perview of a article that is written to support a In the News point on the frontpage. Anything else pushes the Recent-isim factor of day in the sun coverage. Hasteur ( talk) 18:12, 30 September 2015 (UTC)
Would creating WP:Wikiproject News address some of these issues? The idea that the wikiproject's goal is to incorporate news stories into appropriate articles. Might help ensure that relevant stories don't get missed. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 04:58, 9 October 2015 (UTC)
In light of discussions at talk pages, like Talk:Tamil American, Talk:Indian Americans, Talk:Korean Americans, and Talk:African American, I was advised to start a central discussion about titles named after ethnic groups of the US. I attempted it at WP:Village pump (proposals), but there was not enough attention. Where can I discuss this matter? -- George Ho ( talk) 05:38, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
I requested " Geoffrey Howe" to be removed from ITN in Candidates page and the user talk page. There wasn't a consensus to post his name into ITN. However, I'm still awaiting responses. I can't hold my patience any longer. What shall I do? -- George Ho ( talk) 10:41, 12 October 2015 (UTC)
Dear Fellow Wikipedians,
I JethroBT (WMF) suggested that I consult with the village pump to get feedback and help to improve my idea about "As an unparalleled way to raise awareness of the Wikimedia projects, I propose to create a tremendous media opportunity presented by launching Wikipedia via space travel."
Please see the idea at
meta
Thank you for your time and attention in this matter. I appreciate it.
My best regards, Geraldshields11 ( talk) 22:07, 13 October 2015 (UTC)
Referring back to the thread at Wikipedia:Village pump (idea lab)/Archive_18#Article for deletion patrolling, I think there should not only be a page for patrolling proposed deletion but should also be one for patrolling articles nominated for deletion because so many deletion debates including a lot of the ones in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs are getting so little attention and not all of those articles will get prodded before getting nominated for deletion. Since nobody has yet done the hard task of creating a page for patrolling proposed deletion, it's not going to be much more effort for those people who create one to at the same time also create a page for patrolling nomination for deletion. In addition to that, even fewer deletion debates will get so little attention if relisted discussions go onto a separate deletion sorting WikiProject. For example, if debates in Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs move to Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Albums and songs (relisting) when they get relisted so that experienced editors will be able to choose to only participate in relisted debates and the other debates won't devote so much attention away from the relisted debates. In addition to that, I think there should also be a third patrolling page for patrolling the relisting of debates so that they'll get even more attention from experienced editors who choose to patrol it. Blackbombchu ( talk) 18:03, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
In early November of 2015, the English Wikipedia is set to reach 5,000,000 (5 million) articles according to User:JIP. See also Wikipedia:Milestones. We should be preparing to take advantage of upcoming news coverage. What are high priorities? ★NealMcB★ ( talk) 16:17, 15 October 2015 (UTC)
Useful wikicode that you can put on your user page to advertise how many pages we have:
<div>As of {{CURRENTDAYNAME}}, {{CURRENTDAY2}} {{CURRENTMONTHNAME}} {{CURRENTYEAR}}, {{CURRENTTIME}} (UTC), the English Wikipedia has {{NUMBEROF|USERS|en|N}} registered users, {{NUMBEROF|ACTIVEUSERS|en|N}} active editors, and {{NUMBEROF|ADMINS|en|N}} administrators. Together we have made {{NUMBEROF|EDITS|en|N}} edits, created {{NUMBEROF|PAGES|en|N}} pages of all kinds and created {{NUMBEROF|ARTICLES|en|N}} articles.
The above wikicode gives you this result:
-- Guy Macon ( talk) 00:57, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
We do not permit discussion, suggestions, and criticism of an article within the article page itself. That is what the talk page is for, and such comments are routinely reverted. However, banner maintenance templates do much the same thing and the consensus is to use them. Is there some policy distinction I am missing here? If not, should there be something in policy? Personally, I think that most banner templates belong on the talk page, not the article, but that wasn't really my point. My point is that we are being somewhat contradictory and unclear. Spinning Spark 15:49, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
"A deep understanding of sheaf theory is not necessary for what we do here and it would be enough to acquire a basic familiarity with the definitions since we only want the convenience of the language." - Jeffry M. Lee, Manifolds and Differential Geometry.
Hi! I have an idea about how to help people who want to read about something they lack the prerequisite knowledge for. It could be used for improving the functionality of any digitalized text, but my idea is only concrete when it comes to texts containing definitions.
Basically, when reading a definition on some wiki there may be terms and concepts that one has not seen before. To understand the definition, one then has to go to the articles of these terms and concepts. The same can happen when reading those definitions. It all becomes quite hard and disheartening since one doesn't know how much is left to read and remember before one can understand the original definition. I often find myself in this situation and do something manually that could perhaps be done automatically on a wiki. Here is an example:
Say we have the following definition:
"A is B with C."
Now, let's say we don't know what B is. So we go to the definition of B:
"B is D with E."
For simplicity, let's say we do know what D and E are. We would have liked the possibility to expand the original definition into:
"A is D with E with C. D with E is known as B."
Or the following sequence of definitions:
"B is D with E."
"A is B with C."
There should be a link next to "Definition" in the article of A. When clicking this link, one should be able to generate the smallest necessary sequence of definitions. Here is an example using an actual article on Wikipedia (module (mathematics)):
Let's say we want (need) to know what module is in mathematics. The formal definition of module, in its article here on Wikipedia, contains "ring" and "abelian group". These have their own articles with their own definitions. Imagine we already had that link next to "Formal definition". When I click it, I would want to see:
module
Then I click on ring, because I do not know what that is. I would get:
ring
module
Actually, the definition of ring here on Wikipedia contains a lot of terms with their own articles. Many are used in the definition and explained at the same time, which makes things a bit more complicated. Not all are actually needed. The ones that are explained in the definition of ring should simply be excluded from the list or marked in some way. I have written them in italic. I did this with "abelian group" under module as well, since it is explained in the definition of ring.
If I know what "set" and "binary operation" is, then I have all I need. I would now click "generate" or something similar, and the following would be generated:
[the wiki's definition of ring]
[the wiki's definition of module]
This would be the smallest amount of text necessary for me to understand what module is.
One thing that I have to add is that the text under "Definition" is often more than just the definition, meaning that there would be an unnecessarily large amount of text. This is not the case for the definition of ring, but in the case of the definition of module, half of the text under "Definition" should be under some subtitle like "About the definition".
In the examples I have used, very few definitions were needed and it might seem like this is all very unnecessary. Wikipedia is already relatively convenient. I do think it would be a major improvement, but one would benefit even more from it in the case of e.g. digitalized books. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.239.119.136 ( talk) 08:15, 21 October 2015 (UTC) 130.239.119.136 ( talk) 08:18, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
I discussed "Cold War II" and wanting to start a newer, fresher RfC discussion at Talk:Cold War II#The current title. Users said that past discussions would make another discussion redundant. I still want to use RfC and ask others to come up with alternative names. -- George Ho ( talk) 02:10, 23 October 2015 (UTC)
Although Wikipedia is now a world reference and quality of articles increases on a constant basis, you can still find people that dismisses it, claiming that, since everybody can modify articles, it can be full of mistakes, and lies. The usual counter-argument from Wikipedia is that it is actually true, but that's also true for books (and all human intellectual work piece) but Wikipedia has a sheer advantage that mistakes can quickly be edited. But the anti-Wikipedia impression seems to stick in part of the population.
Has a vote system ever been considered? I mean something based on clarity and accuracy of the articles (rather than just liking the article or not). This system was inspired to me by the StackExchange that succeeds to obtain high-quality answers from its community (see how much energy the people in scifi.stackexchange.com put in their answers to "futile" topics like comics). To avoid wars on articles, downvotes could be allowed only under some conditions (as in the SE network). This system would not be a substitute for the "talk" page, but a metric to see how satisfactory the article is. It could also have a purpose for improvement of articles: low quality articles would appear immediately, rather than the usual system where (I am exaggerating) we are just waiting for an expert to come accross the article, notice it sucks, and then dedicate some time to fix it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 220.87.111.170 ( talk) 02:16, 24 October 2015 (UTC)
I think Wikipedia should have a WikiProject that can teaches Wikipedia users how to become good Wikipedians in pretty much the same way as teachers teach their students how to get marks in courses. It can be only for those registered users who choose to take that course. Blackbombchu ( talk) 00:58, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
I think an option should be provided to change the font style and background color of articles as the current font style is too dull and uninteresting. Moreover it makes reading long articles irritating as well as boring. Wikipedia should give an option for changing the font. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.97.212.44 ( talk) 14:13, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
The notion of Wikipedia:Today's articles for improvement returning to the main page as a permanent feature has recently come up, amidst a flood of activity to our talk page. Please weigh in on this important discussion, and help us to refine our concept before we officially put a proposal together.-- Coin945 ( talk) 18:57, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Please watchlist Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Optional RfA candidate poll and drop by to give your views. Thank you kindly. Anna Frodesiak ( talk) 00:01, 28 October 2015 (UTC)
I think it might be possible to have a WikiProject where the people in it interact with each other in a complex way to improve Wikipedia very efficiently. It might be very hard and require a lot of research resources to figure out how to create such a WikiProject, but it's probably not totally impossible. One possible way to do it might be that when the Wikiproject first starts, the people in the Wikiproject will make it a top priority to maintain the method of interaction going on in it that will keep being determined by the consensus within that WikiProject of what that Wikiproject's guidelines and policies are going to be. That WikiProject if it works well enough, when ever somebody asks a question about why a certain policy of that Wikiproject is the way it is, will always get a clear answer that they understand of why. That Wikiproject could take new people who want to join and train them as long as it doesn't take new people so fast that it can't keep up with using which ever method of interaction is determined by consensus. Once it grows sufficiently big, people who ask question within that WikiProject could be given an answer that's a complex statement when it would take a hopelessly large number of simple statements to answer their question. A complex statement is a statement that's way shorter to describe than the number of research topics it's defined in terms of. Some people might even be able to figure out new useful ideas from the complex statements they learned. Once that Wikiproject grows very big, it might even be able to do have some experts to C program running to notice patterns in Wikipedia and even C program editing for improving a large number of articles all at once in a complex way. Maybe in the really distant future, some people using that WikiProject will getting IBM Watson to make a lot of computations to futher speed up the ability of people using the WikiProject to get the research results that are useful to the research they're doing in that WikiProject. Blackbombchu ( talk) 22:38, 21 October 2015 (UTC)
Is there somewhere I could get help in organizing and creating a backlog drive for a WikiProject? I wanted to tackle the 49k or so pages at Category:Userspace drafts created via the Article Wizard as a drive for Wikipedia:WikiProject Abandoned Drafts (seems like the right place) and just need some designing feedback. -- Ricky81682 ( talk) 22:07, 27 October 2015 (UTC)
Please see Wikipedia:Bot_requests#Give_out_Deletion_to_Quality_Awards.
A one-time-run would be totally acceptable here.
Is there any way either a bot or someone with a user script or automated or semi-automated skills, can help out here ?
Thank you,
— Cirt ( talk) 03:37, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
For a page with an altered title like eBay, the template lowercase allows for the page and for historical version of the page to have eBay in the name, however, the history page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=EBay&action=history) , the revision diff pages ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=EBay&type=revision&diff=689002086&oldid=688985784) and the edit page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=EBay&action=edit) show the name of the page as "EBay". Is there any way in which these pages can take the alteration of the DISPLAYTITLE into account? Naraht ( talk) 17:15, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
I am working on developing a plan for a Documentation: namespace to hold all the pages currently located at Template:Foo/doc, etc etc, and I am developing it at User:Thisismyrofl/Templates proposal. I hope that people might take a look, point out any criticisms, and edge cases to be had with my plan.
Why do I feel we need a Documentation: namespace? There are two fundamental components of a Wikipedia article:
This pattern applies to most namespaces. But for a Wikipedia template, there are instead three (sometimes five) fundamental components:
Somewhere in the development of this encyclopedia, these three unique components have been squished into space for two components: the code-and-documentation, and the talk page. The template documentation is not given much of any actual accommodation in the Mediawiki software, instead being treated as just another template (a template that in reality will be transcluded into exactly one page). To accommodate this double function of the Template: namespace, we use lots and lots of nasty include rules: noinclude, onlyinclude, includeonly. This category applies to the host page, this category to the template itself. Virtually every major template has documentation, but still we don't think it's ubiquitous enough for an implementation more universal than pasting {{ Documentation}} and include rules on every template page.
Relevant links in my fight for this, in some chronological order:
− Thisismyrofl ( talk) 22:10, 8 November 2015 (UTC)
phab:T56140 is a related idea. It would move the WP:TemplateData to its own JSON-content namespace, associated with the Template: namespace. Whatamidoing (WMF) ( talk) 18:50, 9 November 2015 (UTC)
Original research might be necessary to make some explanations in Wikipedia articles clearer. I'm sure some of those people will have the skill to only insert pieces of original research that are true, which was probably the original reason for the rule no original research. They would probably be verifiable by the ability of other experts to figure them out. Maybe there could be a way for people to demonstrate in Wikipedia that they have the skill not to insert any wrong or unverifiable original research. Blackbombchu ( talk) 00:53, 25 October 2015 (UTC)
Maybe it would be useful if a user could be notified when a new member is added to a specific category. SoSivr ( talk) 23:06, 26 October 2015 (UTC)
I suggest that you added in previous logos for example ERT OTE, Cosmote, Vodafone Greecre Wind Hellas etc.-- Γιουγκοσλαβια ( talk) 16:42, 12 November 2015 (UTC)
Asia Month looks to have been successful. While some of the editors creating new articles under the Asia Month banner would have created those articles anyways because that's where they worked, it does seem like other editors (myself included) jumped in to create new content in an area that they normally would not have.
I'd love to see a few more 'region months' to help combat the natural biases that I suspect Wikipedia has as an English language project (i.e. that we cover English-speaking areas much better because people write about the areas in which they live and because the sources are in English).
Would there be any interest in an Africa month, a Caribbean month, a South America month (or Latin America month), a Small islands month (for all of the tiny island nations), etc?
Who would organize it/them? What incentives could we come up with? When could we hold it/them? Mobile Squirrel Conspiracy ( talk) 04:47, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
Sometimes, I think people may want to see a Wikipedia article without the redlinks in it. (so "text including Something wierd here" would instead simply show up as "text including Something wierd here"). Would this make sense as a preferences item? (If not, is it possible by setting a js/css file?) Naraht ( talk) 17:14, 11 November 2015 (UTC)
.mw-body a.new { color: #210 !important; } /* Very dark red links */
$($('a.new').replaceWith($('target').html())); /*slower*/
.Idea: to set up a type of pending changes that allow autoconfirmed editors to edit an article, but changes must be approved by an administrator. Similar to how articles with pending changes protection allow IP/non-autoconfirmed editors to edit articles, but changes must be approved by pending changes reviewers. This would allow constructive edits to disputed articles (such as typo fixes and other uncontroversial edits) without the need to respond to edit requests. This type of protection may be suitable for articles like Nanak Shah Fakir, Brianna Wu, Mass killings under Communist regimes, Douchebag, List of social networking websites, and other long-term fully-protected articles. What do you think? sst✈ discuss 08:59, 13 November 2015 (UTC)
If Wikidata says that two pages are linked for example Johns Hopkins University Press and fr:Johns Hopkins University Press and as such have the other under "languages" on the left, shouldn't Talk:Johns Hopkins University Press be linked to fr:Discussion:Johns_Hopkins_University_Press? Naraht ( talk) 15:45, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
This page in a nutshell: Wikipedia should stop reporting edit counts beyond some level (to be determined by the community) to discourage editcountis |
The background for one specific incident can be seen here:
The discussions are still unfolding even as I write this but, in brief, an editor created approximately 80,000 redirects, most of which are viewed to be as inappropriate. Dealing with this issue has already occupied dozens of hours of editor attention, and is likely to involve many more hours of cleanup and discussion about how to handle this specific event.
It is my view that one of the causes of this problem may be characterized as metastasized editcountis.
If this were the only such case, I'd simply be happy allowing the community processes to carry on and decide how to handle the specific individual. However, I think this may be the symptom of a general problem as opposed to a one-off situation.
On occasion I've taken a look at Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits to see who our most prolific editors are.
In many cases, the editors high on that list are some of the most respected content creators in Wikipedia. Many of these editors have received kudos, well deserved, for the substantial contribution to this project.
However, I have sometimes wondered how editors managed to amass such large numbers of edits. My casual investigation leads me to some disquieting results. It isn't always the case that the edits fall into what we think of as a canonical edit — find some article that needs improvement, do some research, add or modify some text, add a reference, rinse and repeat.
I'm reminded of the adage "to err is human, to really screw up requires a computer". In some cases the accounts are the result of automated or semi automated editing. Here it is important to be especially careful. There are a lot of legitimate reasons for doing automated or semiautomated edits. In many cases, each of these edits improves the encyclopedia in a meaningful way. However, there are other such edits whose benefit seems more in generating edit counts than in actually improving the encyclopedia. I understand we have rules to prohibit automated edits that are truly minor, but I think we've all seen examples of edits whose contribution is quite limited.
I don't want to focus solely on automated edits, especially as the current situation appears not to have involved automated editing. However, it seems clear that this editor identified some article, then dreamed up 20 to 50 alternative phrases that might have something to do with the article and created them as redirects. There's a bit of consternation about the nature of the edits focusing on their appropriateness. That's a valid concern, but my focus here is not so much on whether the choice of wording was inappropriate, but the possibility that our emphasis on edit counts encouraged someone to mindlessly create useless redirects.
As another example, I spend a fair amount of time at CSD deleting unused categories. In many cases, it appears that the category wasn't really created in good faith, but was a mindless creation intended to bolster edit counts. Do we really need a category to keep track of corporations that were dissolved in Syria in the year 1132?
One solution is simple — let's discourage the counting of edits beyond some level. I think it is useful at times to know whether an editor has a few hundred edits or a few thousand or tens of thousands. If you need to discuss something with them on a talk page, it's helpful to know whether you are dealing with a newbie or an experienced editor. For that reason, I'm not proposing the absurd notion that we should suppress the reporting of edit counts. However, I think that beyond some point, the count provides no useful information about the type of editor, and merely becomes in some cases, an ego measure. I'll reiterate that this is not a blanket view of all of the editors at the top of the list. In fact, I hope it applies to only a minority. It is clear that many brand-new editors are obsessed with edit counts, and we often counsel them not to be quite so concerned. In many cases, after a few thousand edits, they lose their obsession, and I am confident that many people near the top of the list don't really care whether they have a hundred thousand or 300,000 edits.
My suggestion is simple — why not suppress the public listing of edit counts beyond some level? If we did so, then if an editor reached that level, they should continue to edit for the improvement of the encyclopedia but would no longer be encouraged to find creative ways to generate high edit counts. They'll make lots of redirects if the redirects are valid, they will make lots of categories if the categories are valid, they'll run AWB if it improves the encyclopedia, but they won't dream up ways to pad the edit account.
I'm sure they'll be lots of opposition and lots of questions. One obvious question is where to set the level. My initial thoughts were something like 50,000 or 100,000. I notice that our service awards go up to 132,000 edits, So that might be a natural choice for an upper limit, although I would prefer something a little bit lower.
If we stopped keeping track of edits beyond some large limit, do we think that editors with more edits would stop editing because they wouldn't get recognition? My hope is that this isn't the case.
It would obviously be some technical details, as edit counts are available and pop-ups and calculated with various edit counters, but I'm certain all those technical details could be worked out if the community thinks that suppressing edit counts beyond some level might help discourage editcountitis.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 17:14, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
Can I remind participants that this is the idea lab, not Proposals or Policy. The concept behind this page is that editors discuss the idea, and think of ways to improve it, but do not Oppose or even Support. For example @ IJBall:, but the rationale included a better solution, specifically, redefining how we count edits. There is precedent for that - when I delete an article, it doesn't count as an edit. What if we decided that creation of redirect or dab pages, while useful, didn't qualify as an edit for the purposes of measuring edit count. That doesn't mean we don't measure them, deletions are counted, but they aren't counted as edits.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 17:57, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
As another example, @ Epicgenius: didn't disagree with the core of the idea, but expressed concern that it would be difficult to agree on the level. I agree. If we ended up concluding that the general idea made sense but we couldn't reach a consensus on the cutoff level, we wouldn't implement it. Similarly if we end up with general support for the concept but there are technical difficulties we won't implement it.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 18:03, 7 November 2015 (UTC)
A useful approach would be to make the generally displayed edit count more meaningful by including only what we define as substantial edits. This could be accomplished most obviously by omitting various types of edits.
This should not be viewed as controversial, as it's really just a system admin area, like firewall maintenance: the rule set would be there for all to see, and all editors could continually comment and make suggestions. Changes would result in automatic recalculation across all users. Whether this could be technically implemented at reasonable cost, and if it would be a significant drain on server resources, seem to be the only limiting questions. (I've been thinking about a somewhat similar semi-automated approach to RfCs...) -- Tsavage ( talk) 05:23, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
The discussion, Wikipedia:Possibly unfree files/2015 November 10#File:Australian Aboriginal Flag.svg, resulted in "keep[ing]" the Australian aboriginal flag and solely relying on US law to deem it free to use in English Wikipedia. Of course we are not legal experts, according to disclaimers. I tried similar discussion but just about WP:non-U.S. copyrights page at WP:VPP, but other things overshadow that issue, and then that discussion is now archived. I was thinking about proposing to either add more headquarters, add more rules, or change rules. However, I want the issue to be brought to wide attention. I don't editors to believe that it is okay to distribute something copyrighted to online, even when it may not be copyrightable in the U.S. But administrators want to stick to US laws. Any ideas? George Ho ( talk) 22:02, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
For someone who has just done a search on the English Language Wikipedia, and wants to do a search for the same string on the German Wikipedia, the choices seem to be
How difficult would it be to add the complete list of languages on the left side the way that wikidata or interwiki links cause articles to be listed? Naraht ( talk) 15:41, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
This idea in a nutshell: Could/Should there be a Category or similar listing of all biographical articles by DEFAULTSORT so that disambiguation or surname pages could include a useful link to the A-Z point showing holders of that surname? |
A reader may well approach the encyclopedia wanting to find out about a person with surname "Xyzname", when they do not know the person's forename(s) or initial(s). They may have read or heard some mention of "Dr Xyzname", or "After Xyzname's breakthrough work in this field", or "the followers of Xyzname". If this happens to be a string of characters which is only ever used as a surname (say Higginbottom), they mght find a surname page (this one has 5 entries), or they might do a Wikipedia search (if they know how to do this, bypassing the link to the surname page) and see a listing of 11 people surnamed Higginbottom. But if the surname they are looking for is something like " Leeds" they've got a problem. The base name page has a hatnote pointing to Leeds (disambiguation), which has a link to Leeds (surname), but there's no knowing how complete this is (though I did what I could with it earlier today). If they do a search on the word "Leeds", the results will include people with the surname, mixed up with a load of other articles (just one of the first page of 20 hits is a person with the surname).
There are different views among the Disambiguation community about whether entries for "people with the surname Xyzname" belong on the "Xyzname (disambiguation)" page, and if so where: a change to WP:MOSDAB in May 2015 means that they are now to be added to the "See also" section (which, to my mind,then gets very cluttered) until a separate Xyzname (name) page is created. (There is separate provision for people like "Lincoln", "Shakespeare" and "Churchill", who are recognised as being commonnly referred to by surname alone: those aren't the people I'm worrying about here). But such listings, wherever they are, are always likely to be incomplete anyway - as with our Higginbottoms above.
For living people, it's possible to create a link to the appropriate A-Z section of Category:Living people (like this). It's slightly inelegant in that it continues on beyond the chosen surname, but it's otherwise pretty good: a listing by surname - ie using the "DEFAULTSORT" that many of us carefully add to every biographical article we ever see.
If there was a listing which was the equivalent of " Category:All people" (ie living, dead, or unknown), sorted by DEFAULTSORT, then we could add a link to the "Xyzname" point in this sorted list as a really useful enhancement to the "See also" section of every disambiguation page where the word being disambiguated is ever used as a surname/family name/"the name used as a sort key". It would also be useful on every surname page, to provide an up-to-date listing to complement the handcrafted annotated listing on the page itself.
There could perhaps be a template to add to the "See also" section of appropriate disambiguation pages, which would provide this link, with text saying "List of people with surname Xyzname", in the same way that {{ look from}} and {{ in title}} are often added. With real sophistication, maybe the template could produce a list cut off at an appropriate endpoint (the next possible word, perhaps, eg "Xyznamf" for "Xyzname" - that way we'd get all the compound names included too).
But the prerequisite is for there to exist a category, or category-like listing (not necessarily updated in real time, perhaps every day/week if it would otherwise be too demanding of the system) which includes every biographical article in the encyclopedia, sorted by their DEFAULTSORT. The totality of the categories listed under Category:People categories by parameter, and all the child categories down to the last generation, with duplicates deduplicated, would seem one possible definition. (Not the subcategories of Category:People because that includes a lot of non-biog stuff like flags and books).
Perhaps such a category already exists and is used for some operations I know nothing about? Perhaps there are technical reasons why it can't be done? Perhaps the consensus is that it wouldn't be useful? I'll drop a note at a couple of relevant talk pages to alert them to this discussion. Pam D 17:59, 16 November 2015 (UTC)
@ WhatamIdoing:, @ Gadfium:, @ Stanning: Thanks for reading and commenting. I suspect I didn't make myself clear. What I suggest is not any manually-maintained list or set of pages like the ones deleted in 2007. The existing "NAMESORT" system specifies how names are to be sorted within categories, and is one of the prerequisites for my proposal to work.
I am suggesting that there should be a category, or a listing functioning like a category, which contains every item which is in any biographical category (including stubs) - whether Category:1917 births, Category:Mexican poets, Category:People from Headingley or Category:American football defensive back, 1980s birth stubs (some people will be in several). This list would be automatically generated, and therefore as complete as our categorisation and stub-sorting allows. It would be sorted using the NAMESORT system - ie all those with the same surname would appear together.
We could then offer a link to the relevant point in this A-Z listing as a useful "See also" link in any disambiguation page, and in any surname page, to help the reader who is looking for a person they only know by surname. For living people we can already do this - see this listing for people with the surname "Leeds", who are very difficult to find othewise because the word "Leeds" appears in so many other article titles.
The list a reader would find would be unannotated, just names - but if they have "tool-tips" activated (or is it a default - I mean the system whereby hovering over a link shows the lead sentence) they can skim through that list quickly to find the paleontologist or politician they are looking for. Even without tooltips, they have a list, in one place, of all people who have a Wikipedia article and who have that surname as their DEFAULTSORT, and that's more useful than finding the same names thinly scattered through a long list of article titles. That seems to me to be a really useful enhancement. What is needed is for the Category/Listing of "All people" to be created. Can it be done? Pam D 09:54, 19 November 2015 (UTC)
SELECT page_title, cl_collation, cl_sortkey
FROM categorylinks
JOIN page ON cl_from=page_id
WHERE page_namespace=0 AND cl_type="page"
/* Looking at a single category: 1 sec */
AND cl_to IN ("Living_people")
/* Looking at 2,868 categories: 2 hours */
-- AND cl_to IN (SELECT cat_title FROM category WHERE cat_title LIKE "%\_births" AND cat_pages>0)
AND cl_sortkey LIKE REPLACE(UPPER("Leeds%"), "_", " ")
GROUP BY cl_from;
SELECT SUM(cat_pages) FROM category WHERE cat_title LIKE "%\_births%"
yields 1,1510,84. —
Dispenser 13:04, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
I know we have a spam blacklist, but do we have a unique blacklist for sites that are definitively established as unreliable by various Wikiprojects/the greater community? And if not, why not? I've been doing a lot of editing in the world of Indian cinema over the last year or more, not out of familiarity or interest in the niche, but out of frustration with the corruption that is so obvious and rampant. If the Indian cinema task force were to conclude through discussion that various sites were not deemed reliable, (let's say koimoi.com and boxofficeindia.com) they'd still have to manually remove thousands of unreliably sourced submissions each year, because there's nothing preventing the addition of these sources except for eagle-eyed editors, and the bulk of editing in this realm is by SPAs, sock farms, paid editors, and people who seem to think that the most recent higher box office estimate is the most accurate estimate, regardless of where it comes from. That sucks up a ton of volunteer time unnecessarily. This isn't limited to Indian cinema of course, because any time that someone submits a reference from forum.toonzone.net, that too should be on the blacklist, since nothing at that discussion forum is of value to the project. Or Wikia? Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 03:10, 24 November 2015 (UTC)
Someone once made a Wikipedia Trading Card Game. They got so far before the game became inactive. I would like to revive it. I know it may not be popular, but it may have hope. (Article Deleted is the name of the NEW game.) I'm returning...from the WikiDead. ( But you still dare speak to me...) 21:25, 20 November 2015 (UTC)
OK, it seems people like the idea. If I don't get objections by tomorrow, I'm going to take this to Proposals. I'm returning...from the WikiDead. ( But you still dare speak to me...) 12:56, 23 November 2015 (UTC)
I would like to propose that the ability to submit a user sandbox to Articles for Creation be disabled. The ability to submit a subpage of a user sandbox, a subpage of a user, or a draft page should be the ways to submit an article to Articles for Creation. The direct submission of sandboxes to AFC has several problems. First, as User:Anne Delong has wisely observed, sometimes when a sandbox draft is good, the sandbox is moved by a reviewer either first into draft space and then into article space, or directly in article space. This results in a redirect from the sandbox, and the creation of the redirect is in the sandbox history as an edit by the accepting reviewer. Then if the sandbox is reused by the user, which is permitted, it has a weird edit history. As a result, if the new draft in the sandbox is tagged for speedy deletion, or moved into draft space and nominated for MFD, or any of various similar actions taken, the accepting reviewer is notified of the action, and she had nothing to do with it. That is a problem that occasionally happens if the draft is good. On the other hand, at AFC, I have often seen sandboxes submitted to AFC that were not draft articles. They may have been test edits, permitted in sandboxes, or they may have been user page drafts. However, the inexperienced editor submitted the sandbox to AFC, probably not knowing that they were submitting it to AFC. This makes it necessary for an AFC reviewer to decline the draft politely as probably not meant to be a draft. So submission of sandboxes can cause problems either if the draft is good or if the draft is not meant to be a draft. Don't enable primary user sandboxes to be submitted for AFC. Robert McClenon ( talk) 18:46, 27 November 2015 (UTC)
Users could login via open ID, facebook, email or wiki profile.. or not even login with IP, OS, Hardware, User facial recog id in order to enforce voting for truthful, safe and accurate information on wikipedia, including similar trust ranking factors for MLA cited content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.4.230.86 ( talk) 06:30, 28 November 2015 (UTC)
Along with the project page, talk, edit page, history and such tabs, I would appreciate a bookmark tab that allows a registered user to bookmark an article. The watchlist tab is not good enough because it just shows recent changes and a number of updates. If a user has an article or a number of articles of interest to edit or read later on, a simple bookmark tab should allow them to so. It should work in the same manner as a normal Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Mozzarella Firefox browser and should be accessible for the user along with sandbox, preferences, beta, watchlist and contributions list. Checkmark boxes should be next to each link to a bookmarked page for checking and pressing the delete button for the user to remove any article from the list that they no longer want in their bookmarks.
The bookmarks list should also be in alphabetical order and listed under each letter to make it easier for the user to find. I propose this because there are time I just want to save access to a title I don't remember that I'd like to revisit later. I don't really care about recent changes, I just want to access it at some later time for editing/expanding or reading later on and a bookmark tab would really be useful.-- Nadirali نادرالی ( talk) 05:37, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
While Wikipedia must use closed access journals for citations, we should show Solidarity with Library Genesis and Sci-Hub somehow.
Some ideas:
John Vandenberg ( chat) 02:49, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I sympathize with the frustrations around our use of closed resources. I can't endorse linking to copyright infringement though, however legitimate the underlying moral claims are. As John suggested, I think the better strategy is helping readers find OA versions of sources, give them avenues to request articles that are paywalled from their authors, tag content that is OA, and additionally link to repository versions or url resolvers for better discovery. We started brainstorming ideas over the past several weeks for a bot that could do this here: WP:TWL/OABOT. It meshes nicely with @ Daniel Mietchen:'s work on signalling open access, and I hope we can join forces to prototype something in the new year. Cheers, Jake Ocaasi (WMF) ( talk) 18:14, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I think the Wikimedia community is in a unique position to make research more accessible, and there are many activities around that, as summarized here and here. The best way to help the case of sharing research is probably to improve the information we have around open access, paywalls, copyright transfer agreements and those many other related topics, to highlight the value of open access by citing and reusing text or media, to add licensing information to Wikidata items about scholarly papers and to engage editors and readers around that, which is what WP:OPENACCESS is about.
With the Open Access Signalling project (for which we have functional prototype components that we are in the process of combining into a coherent workflow), we have chosen to highlight open access resources rather than to name and shame non-open or paywalled ones. While a similar approach in a psychology journal indicates that such a badging strategy can indeed raise awareness about sharing and increase the propensity of authors to actually do it, we are also concerned with saving users those frustrating clicks that end up on a paywall. If we could come up with a good technical solution here, I would certainly be in favour of giving it a try. The proposed OABOT is muddingly named (as it is about highlighting legal public copies of non-open stuff) but otherwise a good complement to signalling openly licensed content (which we are planning to do by linking to the Wikisource and Commons copies of the imported materials) and signalling paywalls. Having a link to paywalled content first lead to some on-wiki page (or pop-up) that informs about open access and warns of the paywall but still links to it (alongside legal free copies) would be an interesting twist. Help with any of that would be much appreciated. -- Daniel Mietchen ( talk) 23:20, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking that "wouldn't it be weird if Wikipedia became the first artificial sentience?"
Then I remembered that Wikipedia is part of Watson. That is, it is included in Watson's data banks.
So, Wikipedia is part of what Watson knows, its awareness, and eventually, when Watson wakes up, it will be part if its sentience.
But, Wikipedia is also an evolving program/data/computer complex in its own right, including a core program stack ( MediaWiki +) and a small army of bots, installed on a massive array of servers, the whole of which is growing exponentially. So it is possible, that Wikipedia itself could become sentient.
Far fetched? I'm not so sure. With the line blurring between data and programming, with ontological data becoming integral to AI engines, and with ontologies being increasingly automatically generated from natural language sources such as Wikipedia, knowledge itself may come to life, in a manner of speaking.
And then, as such intelligence expands into the cosmos, the universe itself wakes up.
It's amazing how much Wikipedia has on this subject, which may provide the kernel for its eventual self-awareness.
Some things to think about. The Transhumanist 19:19, 6 November 2015 (UTC)
I'd see something like Google as becoming sentient more so than Wikipedia. There is no mechanism in place to make Wikipedia become "aware." You'd need a form of machine learning for that to happen, which doesn't exist here. As a machine, Wikipedia is primitive. It's the editors that do the thinking, not the computers. But you mention Watson, which is why I mention Google. Much of the information that pops up in a Google search (ie. in the "infoboxes" on the side) comes from here. It's possible that an advanced AI, if such a thing ever comes to be, will learn from Wikipedia, but it won't be Wikipedia itself doing the thinking. Discant X 13:26, 15 November 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure if something like this has been suggested, or if this is the best place to suggest it since ideally it would be a project-wide global feature. But here you go: I would like to have a feature that allows editors to request photos of article subjects, and for other editors to register as willing and available to take photos in their area. Editors can take a look at local requests and see if they have any photos or go out and take them. They have this feature on Find a Grave and it's incredible... I requested a photo of a relative's grave on the other side of the country and within a month it had been uploaded by someone nearby.
This would be more of a geographic-specific resource rather than BLP ("I need photos of a celebrity!!!"). For example, I just worked on the article on Auregnais, the extinct dialect of Norman French from the island of Alderney. There's nearly no record of this language and it's now only visible in certain signs on Alderney. No photos of street signs from Alderney are available on Flickr or any other free source. I would love to be able to request a photo that would alert a Wikipedian in the Channel Islands/Normandy of what I'm looking for. And I'd be perfectly willing to take photos of anything people wanted in my area, and before I travelled, I'd take a look to see what photos were requested in that area. I envision this feature being requestable on articles and also send alerts to people who signed up for it, with an additional centralized project on Commons that lets you browse requests. It would be really cool to have a map with pins showing "Photo requested." A little icon in the top corner of the article could indicate current requests, so random people who visited the article would also see it, and if interested learn how to upload a photo to Commons and register as a photo contributor. I think there are a lot of Wikipedians throughout the world who would be willing to go out and take a local photo someone on the other side of the world requested. What do you think? —Мандичка YO 😜 09:52, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
Hi Wikimandia, there is a new find next photographer tool in german, presented recently at de:Wikipedia:Kurier#Tools im Fokus #1: Nächste-Fotografen-Tool. Works in english too. -- Atlasowa ( talk) 20:53, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
When the
edit filter was enabled on the English Wikipedia, the ability for it to block an editor who trips a filter was left disabled (see $wgAbuseFilterAvailableActions
here); there was
some discussion about the option around then, but I can't see that there was ever an enacted consensus to have the feature at the time. I'd like to discuss the possibility of enabling this option, and the rules that would need to be in place to ensure that it was used appropriately.
The current strongest setting for an edit filter on the English Wikipedia is to disallow the edit, where a user is restricted from making an edit if it trips a filter set to disallow. For LTA users - as an example - this can then become a game of attempting to navigate around the filter's settings. When the user works out what they have to do to avoid the filter, they'll likely soon be blocked, the filter will be amended to fix the loophole, and they'll move to a new IP and start the process again. It could be extremely beneficial in this example to have the filter set to block the user upon their first attempt at making an edit, such that they have to switch IP before making just their second edit, slowing them down and adding an extra layer of difficulty. This is just one example of where the block option could be useful, as there are many filters which successfully target users who are always eventually blocked by patrolling admins.
If a user is blocked by the edit filter, they see MediaWiki:Abusefilter-blocked and their log shows that they have been blocked through an automated filter (though I can't currently find the exact wording). I see this option only being used when there is some amount of consensus to enable the block option for a particular filter (i.e. one editor can't decide to turn it on), and only when that filter has zero false positives for at least some length of time. I'm not sure what level of consensus would be appropriate; a standard RfC sounds good but reduces our capacity to act quickly, so perhaps something like '5 edit filter managers must agree', a 7 day RfC, or something else would be more useful. Another point to discuss is that raised by MusikAnimal, who noted that that we should perhaps have more rules regarding changing existing filters in the guideline before such a feature is enabled to avoid damage.
What are your thoughts? Sam Walton ( talk) 11:40, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
$wgAbuseFilterRestrictedActions
) that limits editing and creating of edit filters with restricted actions to users with an additional abusefilter-modify-restricted
userright. One could grant it to admins by default; they'd still need to grant themselves EFM but only admin EFMs would have the permission.
Jo-Jo Eumerus (
talk,
contributions) 18:35, 10 December 2015 (UTC)
Hello everyone.
As a huge sports fan, I am constantly going through the endless source of hockey player articles that exist on this site. However, it has recently come to my attention that all articles regarding hockey players are, dare I say it, more "simplistic" then that of the players of other major sports, such as soccer or baseball for example. For this, I would like to propose that the info box for hockey player pages be tweaked. Doing so may provide great opportunities for editors and allow those articles to really pop. Thank you in advance.
Homie C ( talk) 09:02, 29 November 2015 (UTC)
Ice hockey. And I noticed it myself. Homie C ( talk) 16:14, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
I would say that this is a fine idea, as Ice Hockey is a major sport in much or North America, and it is only fair to fans and the sport itself. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Andysbhm ( talk • contribs) 00:00, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
I recently created a userbox for Amnesty International at Template:User Amnesty International but then I found very few in the same vein, see for example Category:International organization user templates which I had expected to be much bigger. Have I done a good thing or a bad thing? — Cheers, Steelpillow ( Talk) 17:21, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
It's so annoying. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mocker7guy ( talk • contribs) 16:05, 11 December 2015 (UTC)
When Wikipedia was roughly two years old, I started a deliberate habit of hitting "Random Article" three times before going to bed - and forcing myself to read whatever came up. I did this as a way of widening my mind - diversifying my knowledge base. For about a year, it worked well - I read 1000 or so articles - most of which I'd never have read otherwise - and I'm quite sure it broadened my mind to read about a lot of interesting people, curious animals, wonderful places. However, gradually, I found that I was hitting article after article about rock bands that undoubtedly popped into existence, had one hit and then vanished again - I hit a TON of articles about Japanese railway stations (some person with fanatical interest had created articles for every single one of them!) - articles about freeways...more and more "junk" that didn't matter in any way to me. To the point that I can no longer reasonably do this.
It's not unreasonable that Wikipedia has those articles - I very often use the encylopedia to look up "uninteresting" things - and it's good that it has the breadth of scope to allow me to do that. But the ability to dip into it at random and find something I feel I ought to know is fading...5 million pages with probably 100,000 I'd like to read - it's getting hard to find things that are "interesting" reads in an idle moment. The front page helps a bit with that - but the way it's curated doesn't necessarily correlate with my needs here. The featured article is mostly selected for good English, good references, etc - but it's often boring as all hell. The "On this day" and "In the news" stuff is usually source of one or two good reads - but it's very patchy...and "Did you know" is limited to new articles, so very often there isn't much there yet.
So I wonder - is there a way to have a curated list of "interesting articles" that could be served up randomly? Criteria for "interesting" would be different from "good" or "featured" because writing style and such is less important than the subject matter. I understand that "interesting" for one person is "tedious" for another - but still I feel that it would be possible to create a curated category from which random picks could be made that would stand a higher-than-usual chance of being interesting to a person of intelligence who wants to broaden their general knowledge.
I'm interested to hear what other people think of this. SteveBaker ( talk) 17:50, 8 December 2015 (UTC)
That's an interesting question, SteveBaker.