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Well we have finally accomplished our task of giving anybody the ability of putting most of Wikipedia history on a timeline, at:
Look at this website on the largest computer screen that you can get your hands on. We eventually would like to create a timeline of all history. This was a massive undertaking. For right now, you can add and delete any Wikipedia article you want from this timeline (just click the green "Add" button). Any and all 4 million of them, any 6 at one time. Instructions are included under the heading "New user message". Do you think this would be a good history education tool? From elementary to the collegiate level? I know I would have loved to have a tool like this when I was taking European history in college.
And you can (eventually) put anything on this timeline. Medical histories, legal documents and project plans. Even whole books! The potential is endless.
There are still some bugs and other foibles we are working on, but it is pretty stable now.
Thanks Jeff Jroehl ( talk) 09:52, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
.mw-category a:link
and build a list of pages to add to a timeline. You have not mentioned if the tool has an upper limit for number of articles per timeline but if there is an issue there just cap the HTML parser to the first NNN a:links with NNN being the max allowed.Jeff Roehl Jroehl ( talk) 10:12, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi, since 2011 the website wikiscan.org calculates statistics for French Wikipedia. The project is to transform it into a multi-wiki site with a dedicated site for every Wikimedia wiki with more than 100,000 edits, actually it would make more than 300 sites. I plan to apply for a m:Grants:IEG to achieve this big transformation and also add a multilingual interface with an English version and other improvements.
In summary, the site provides two main types of statistics:
Would you interested in an English Wikipedia Wikiscan ? the site address would be http://en.wikiscan.org. It is also planned to support other projects like Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc. -- Akeron ( talk) 18:09, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Here are few ideas just to think about. It is not meant to be ever implemented. Just ideas.
Categories [
] Show in columns Sort by alphabet
|
Often I miss one of the following options.
Search |
Layers
Live pages Deleted pages Past versions |
Namespaces
(Article) |
-- Janezdrilc ( talk) 15:56, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
intitle:
, insource:
. Searching deleted pages and/or past versions would probably be tough, and should probably be a different special page entirely (though
WikiBlame covers searching an individual, known page's past revisions somewhat). Searching for redirects would presumably require a special search parameter, because currently search surfaces the target page if a redirect matches a search. Some of the rest … would require the suggestions to be more concrete; does "summary" mean "searching the edit summary field"? {{
Nihiltres |
talk |
edits}} 17:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)That's great. intitle:
and others actually are layers that I had in mind. Maybe they just have to be put in the form of » « (as above in the table). It would be much more user friendly. --
Janezdrilc (
talk) 11:18, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
This is a problematic editor that I have to watch a little more closely in my capacity as a gnome admin, because I suspect him of sockpuppetry. While scrutinizing his edits I added a bunch of articles he's edited to my watchlist. It occurs to me that it would be helpful if I could add pages to my watchlist directly from his contribution history, instead of having to open each article and click the star. It would also be helpful if I could see in his contribution history which articles we have in common.
I can see this being used in a pernicious way to stalk other editors on Wikipedia, so maybe it makes more sense for admins, although I know a lot of power editors who might also benefit from this. Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 02:01, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
I'd like to announce an IEG proposal I'm working on titled "Learning from article revision histories". The basic idea is to develop some web tools for studying article revision histories which would allow, for instance, people to compare historical versions of articles or particular sections. I know there are a number of diff tools available, but as far as I know, there is currently no way to easily put a particular diff up for a vote from a survey of editors. I say "as far as I know" because I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, and it's likely I'm not the first to ask some of these questions. My hope is that tools like this could be used to make editorial oversight easier, and facilitate community involvement when disagreements arise. But the tools I'm proposing are only useful if they are addressing a real need, and I admittedly don't know much about the frequency of disagreement among editors. If you have some comments about whether disagreement is a actual problem that should be addressed, please consider leaving your thoughts on the talk page for the proposal.
Evoapps ( talk) 20:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
So, the Wikipedia:Non-administrator Arbitrators RfC over a month ago did in its closure feature a rough consensus in creating an "Arbitrator" usergroup for arbitrators, but the closer indicated that it would need some development and further discussion. So, now it may be time to discuss how to implement that - assuming that the close still stands. Noting also this revision regarding one possible setup and whether it would be acceptable to the WMF given that it involves sensitive permissions. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 18:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
usergroup
is fairly easy. We would need to decide what permissions are actually required for the group, see example list of all available permissions
here. Users can belong to multiple groups, and their permissions merge. So for example, the new group could be granted the ability to view deleted and oversighted (deletedtext
and viewsuppressed
permissions) without the ability to also delete or oversight the pages. —
xaosflux
Talk 19:30, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
abusefilter-hidden-log
, abusefilter-log
, abusefilter-log-detail
, abusefilter-view
, abusefilter-view-private
, browsearchive
, checkuser-log
, deletedhistory
, deletedtext
, spamblacklistlog
, suppressionlog
and titleblacklistlog
), although editprotected
may also be useful if arbitrators have to work within protected pages. And yes, such a group if it includes the "sensitive" permissions (here suppressionlog
and checkuser-log
and some abusefilter permissions) it would need to be added/removed by stewards only; if not requested by the WMF, the folks in Phabricator will likely ask for it since non-steward granting of such permissions has created issues in the past.
Jo-Jo Eumerus (
talk,
contributions) 21:34, 30 December 2015 (UTC)I pruned duplicated items that are already in "users", etc - so this could be a request such as:
Arbitrators
abusefilter-hidden-log
abusefilter-view-private
browsearchive
checkuser-log
deletedhistory
deletedtext
spamblacklistlog
suppressionlog
titleblacklistlog
viewdeletedfile
viewsuppressed
— xaosflux Talk 22:08, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Now, a prime question is - is this moot? Since ArbCom is the deciders of who gets CheckUser and Oversight - if they are going to just assign themselves the permissions then there is no need to include that stuff in here. — xaosflux Talk 22:10, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
$wpAddGroups
,
$wgRemoveGroups
and
$wgGroupsRemoveFromSelf
Arbs can add/remove specific groups to other editors (class examples: CU/OS)Didn't we already determine that Oversight Access allows for access to view deleted content, and that an ArbCom election was considered RfA-identical enough to meet the Foundation requirement for Oversight access? Therefore the Admin bit is not necessary to view deleted content, if the Arb were given Oversight access? (Note this was never tested practically, but as per before, I would be willing to drop my admin bit for a few hours to try it out, if we wanted to know what one could and could not do for sure.) The CheckUser log access is of little value as it provides little information, also keeping in mind that not all Arbitrators are CheckUsers (by choice). If we had a non-admin Arbitrator, they could be provided Oversight Access, and have all of the tools necessary without creating a new usergroup (plus the ability to revision (un)delete and revision (un)suppress, but not to delete an actual page). I think this is a solution looking for a problem. The idea of creating a new usergroup, for a hypothetical non-admin arbitrator that may or may not get elected in the future, when really all we have to do as give them a single permission, that they are already entitled to. -- kelapstick( bainuu) 02:35, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
Comment: We at Russian Wikipedia have had the arbitrator flag
since June 2013, and AFAIK we've never had any problems with that. It includes 4 rights, namely browsearchive
, deletedhistory
, abusefilter-log-detail
& deletedtext
. P.S. I know the situation here is quite different, I'm just telling you about our experience. -
Синкретик (
talk) 19:00, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
As a sister site, WikiPolls feels as though it could be a good idea, but, first, I would like to explain what it is and see whether there are issues to be repaired:
This is only an idea, and I am only looking for suggestions.
Gamingforfun365
(talk) 02:29, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Are all wiki sites required to be educational in the conventional way that the encyclopaedia is? Presumably not or there wouldn't be ideas for alternatives and have just seen a mention of a wiki poll idea. This may simply be a relatively conventional market research of some sort that people could choose to be involved with instead of the invasive ones that often appear on computer screens as advertisement in some excuse that the owner didn't pay for the software. I am hoping for something I can use as I choose to help evolve and never pay for software as it was invented very many years ago and we are all part of the process. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markostri ( talk • contribs) 20:49, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
At the moment there isn't really a set definition of a stub. WP:STUB has a very vague description of one, and also states that different editors follow different standards. I think we should create a a definitive number of characters that make an article no longer a stub. Probably somewhere between 500-1500 characters. Once this is decided, a bot could be used to remove stub templates when they no longer fit the requirements to be a stub, so that stub tags could be consistent and accurate among articles. Thoughts? — Omni Flames ( talk contribs) 02:54, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
Hey, I'd like some help workshopping a proposed new permission called "Page mover". Please see Wikipedia:Page mover and leave your comments at Wikipedia talk:Page mover (or just go ahead and edit your suggestions in). – xeno talk 23:35, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
This is an idea to seek out and find a new WikiFauna Creature to identify users. I presently have no idea how a WikiGhost would behave, but it might be a good addition. Wyatt Hughes ( talk) 23:12, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
I have written a grant proposal to develop an interactive visualization tool for etymological relationships (click here to see the proposal). If you are interested in etymology and you think you would be interested in an interactive graphical etymology dictionary please endorse my grant proposal ( last section of the grant page). I need your feedback/comments there or on the talk page. To see a working demo of the visual etymology dictionary click here (the demo works best on a desktop).
The aim of the application is to visualize - in one graph - the etymology of all words deriving from the same ancestor. Users can expand/collapse the tree to visualize what they are interested in. The textual part attached to the graph can be easily translated in any language and the app would become a multilingual resource. My idea is to use Dbnary's extraction-framework and develop a (possibly) smart pre-processing strategy to translate Wiktionary textual etymologies into a graph database of etymological relationships.
I would very much appreciate any kind of feedback from you on the grant page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Epantaleo ( talk • contribs) 00:45, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
I'd like to propose the following general change to all infoboxes, i.e., directly to Module:Infobox. With the infobox wrapped in a div with an accessibility role and label, screen readers can navigate to and from the infobox as a region or landmark. Screen readers will announce the infobox with a meaningful label, such as "infobox complementary information", rather than a cryptic announcement like "table with N rows and 3 columns".
For example, something along the lines of:
<table class="infobox"> ... </table>
<div role="complementary" aria-label="infobox"> <table class="infobox"> ... </table> </div>
— most conservative change, visual output preserved, or<div class="infobox" role="complementary" aria-label="infobox"> <table> ... </table> </div>
— better semantics, encourages moving non-tabular data out of the table, but needs margins, padding, etc. fixed in CSSThe first version would be fairly easy and safe to implement. The second version wouldn't be too hard, but would require a whole lot of testing to make sure infoboxes don't get broken. Do either of these ideas look good? Matt Fitzpatrick ( talk) 00:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
.infobox
instead of the table, would need additional work in the mobile CSS. The mobile CSS uses a heavily qualified table.infobox
selector, which would have to change to .infobox
, in addition to the margin and padding changes for the desktop CSS.
Matt Fitzpatrick (
talk) 03:03, 27 April 2016 (UTC)The article history is a pretty clunky way to do attribution, because there is a lot more noise (edits that don't add text or text additions that were removed later) than signal. It would be better if there was an automated list of authors in a collapsed box at the bottom of the article. The list would be ordered by the number of bytes of text added to the current version of article. It would be easy for mirrors of Wikipedia to take care of attribution as all they have to do is mirror the list, which would say something about GFDL and Wikipedia. Of course you would still need the history to determine which author added which piece of text. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.79.99.105 ( talk) 09:55, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
I don't know where to discuss Wikipedia:Move review. The process, created four years ago, have become more predictable. Id est most reviews have been closed as "endorsed". Its talk page is nearly abandoned. If proposing a discontinuation of the process is out of option, what else can I do to improve the process? -- George Ho ( talk) 22:28, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
I'm a bit uncomfortable reading WP:NOTUSA and feel that English-speakers who are not from the USA have a legitimate case to make that the use of US has several problems, not least that there are several other countries which use the words "United States" in their title, that US could be misread to mean "us" and that there seems to be an inbuilt assumption that those of us outside of the USA always know how this abbreviation is being used. I'm not suggesting that all pages should be changed (given that from the context it is fairly obvious in many what is being discussed) but given there are bots which go around changing USA to US, it seems to me that WP:NOTUSA is too prescriptive. For example if one was making a list of countries where something applied, wouldn't it be correct to say "During his career, Henry had academic positions in France, Germany and several universities in the USA"? I'm not quite sure what change I'm suggesting, hence the post here.. JMWt ( talk) 15:58, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
Point of order: This discussion is fine if the goal is to develop a proposal to take to WT:MOS. But MOS:NOTUSA should not be modified without a consensus on that page, regardless of what happens here. If everyone present already understands that, please accept my apologies. ― Mandruss ☎ 06:39, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
NimXaif6290 17:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC) M/S wikipedia! It is suggested that you may link wictionary with wikipedia in such a way that pointing towards a general word shows its meaning from wiktionary. This can be applied to the words that are not links. This will make it easy for the readers to learn and to understand wikipedia. I often feel it very difficult to study on wikipedia because I have to search for the meanings as well... Thanks NimXaif6290 17:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nimrainayat6290 ( talk • contribs)
Articles in Wikipedia are supposed to be timeless: WP:RECENT. However, this suggestion is not about the content of an article, or the long-term notabilty on the article, or the historical perspective. Rather, it is about the verb tenses and other temporal wording used in an article.
We have many articles about events that occurred after the start of Wikipedia in 2001. Often, the initial article was written as the event was unfolding or shortly thereafter, with sections written in the present tense. We also get sentences or sections added about projections into the future, written in future tense. We also get additions about new research added to older articles that are written in present tense and sometimes with projections from the date of the edit into its future. As time goes by, these sentences become incorrect as the future becomes the present and then the past. Sentences also use relative time terms, notably the word "recent". The resulting articles end up seeming unencyclopedic.
When I find such sentences, I try to fix them, but I think we need something a bit more focused than a single editor operating sporadically and independently. As time goes by, the percentage of such articles will increase, because the amount of prior research and potential articles about the past is fixed, while the number of articles about new events is not.
Questions:
Proposal: We should establish a project to review each article for verb tense, on a schedule: one month, one year, and five years after it is created. We should also automatically scan for "relative time" words (i.e., recent, now) and verb constructs. These two scans can be automated and might find the bulk of the offending edits for manual correction by interested editors.
An additional automated scan might identify new edits to older articles, but would require manual review. When a new edit adds a recent reference to an "old" article, it often uses the present tense. It may be possible to simply create a list of such edits for manual review. It may be possible to automatically check these edits for present and future tense.
- Arch dude ( talk) 03:46, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
I have proposal I'd like to float for the idea lab: the creation of a compassion tool for the expressed purpose of allowing editors (more than likely admins) to look at the content of a deleted article and an article on the subject currently under development in a sandbox, draft space, or other area on Wikipedia. I know that we have the basic tech to do that since the copyright bot uses such a tool to look at what we have on site and what is written elsewhere, and I for one and tired of trying to read through deleted versions of an article and someone else's new version to decided if they are different enough to recommend moving forward or close enough to each other to warrant a return to the drawing board. Would that be a good idea? TomStar81 ( Talk) 08:44, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
Quite unconsciously I'm sure, experienced editors tend to oppose change, and here's my take on why they do. First, they were around when things were worse; by comparison, the status quo looks pretty good, and why mess with a (relatively) good thing. Things could get worse again. Second, they have invested a lot in learning how to work within the current very complex system, they are adapted to the way things are, and (scientifically proven fact) change of any kind is stressful on or off Wikipedia. They've paid their dues, and they quite reasonably feel they've earned some stability.
There is a full grab-bag of reasonable-sounding arguments to oppose pretty much anything one wants to oppose; the greater one's mastery of that arguments toolkit, the more effective they are in Wikipedia debates. This, combined with the requirement for clear consensus for any disputed change, is why very little progress ever occurs at Wikipedia, and status quo reigns. It just doesn't take that much to kill a clear consensus, folks. There is simply too much that is not clearly defined in p&g, per WP:CREEP, so most of the time all that's required is 40% of the participants making Oppose arguments that sound somewhat reasonable.
I often wonder how Wikipedia got as far as it has; we have a ton of pretty good infrastructure and policy. It couldn't have been by exhaustive (and exhausting) discussion of every minute detail, by anyone who cared to participate, as we do now. There must have been a lot more bold action going on, with a lot less resistance to it, by people who had enough competence to do things reasonably well (this last part is key). There are too many cooks in the kitchen—anyone on the planet with Internet access and some English language skills can be a cook—and the broth is suffering. There remains ample room for improvement on en-wiki, but institutional inertia is stifling progress.
The solution? I don't know, but I do know that some change is sorely needed. Perhaps multiple sub-kitchens, each with an area of responsibility, with project-wide authority within that area. The community would agree to abide by their decisions; the community could lobby them for change, but their decisions would be binding. Committees, if you will, with membership of no more than perhaps 15 active editors. A candidate member would have to demonstrate competence in that area—a simpler and, I would hope, less contentious version of RfA. A bad member could be voted off the island by a simple majority of the others (if 51% feel they need to go, they are at least problematic, and the project would be better served by someone else).
Example: A documentation committee that would have free rein to develop, implement, and maintain site-wide formatting conventions for p&g, help, and template doc pages, with no authority to change the meaning therein. Example 2: An MOS committee that would have authority over all MOS guidance. I for one would readily abide by any style-related decisions of a panel of 10 or 15 editors qualified (with at least some credentials) in the area of style. Epic battles like comma-before-Jr? Gone forever. Thank you Lord.
Bureaucracy? Yes. Necessary bureaucracy? I think so. Power in the hands of too few? Given the alternative, not in my opinion.
Obviously there would be details to be worked out. I don't presume to have all the answers, but there should be workable solutions to any concerns. No doubt some areas would need to remain outside of committees. I'm basically just testing the water and seeking some constructive discussion, which are two of the purposes of this page. ― Mandruss ☎ 11:22, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
If your goal is to employ a set of experts to build a style guide, then hire experts.- That would work too, if the community would accept it and WMF would pay for it. Same goes for the doc. ― Mandruss ☎ 04:01, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
In reality, the dozen people most competent to edit MOS (to continue with that example, or pick another like WP:MEDRS) are the dozen editors who have most shaped it over the last 15 years. There are literally no other people one earth more competent at it, because there are no people who have that much experience observing what does and does not work in that topic (the MOS sphere, or the MEDRS sphere, or whatever) at WP, both from a reader perspective and an editorial community perspective. The last thing we could ever need is some pontificating asshat from the editorial board of The Chicago Manual of Style or New Hart's Rules (or the American Medical Association or FDA) being invited to come here and dictate how WP has to be written. To focus again on MOS in particular: Anyone familiar with style guides will notice that all of them sharply conflict with each other, and they are in competition for publishing-marketplace dominance. There is no one way to write English, even in a formal or semi-formal register.
A related issue is that credentials really don't mean much, and come with baggage. I guarantee you I know more about most style matters and their application to WP writing than average literature, English, or linguistics professors, because they spend most of their time writing lesson plans and grading papers, and trying to get new research on obscure topics published in journals, while a large amount of my own time is spend painstakingly comparing details in style guides from around the world, and keeping current with their new editions at all times, then working with other experienced editors here to figure out how to apply this information to both our articles on English and our own style guide. MoS, and our other guidelines and policies, are functional because they're written by Wikipedians who do the homework to make them functional, not because someone waving a curriculum vitae shows up and makes an argument to authority about their own opinion on the basis of their job title.
This problem will also arise if we were to erect some kind of medical advisory committee, or astronomy advisory committee, etc. They'll all be mired in baggage of professionals trying to promote their views with official WP imprimatur, instead of the current system of people who give a damn following WP content policies to create articles based on a neutral review of largely secondary literature. Specialists hate this approach, and always want to turn to bleeding-edge primary research (especially if it happens to cite them themselves). This has basically already been tried, by the split-off project Citizendium, and it basically collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy.
I do agree that there are too many cooks spoiling the broth in various areas, but that's just the nature of the beast. It will always be a problem with style matters, because all native speakers (and many fluent non-native ones) are utterly convinced that their preferences are norms that must be enforced and that every other way to write is "wrong". That's never going to change, to MoS (and related, e.g. AT and naming conventions, and RM) pages are always going to be fraught with unusual levels of dispute. It's not because they're broken, it's just because of human nature about language, especially in a language with no central "authority" like French has, exerting something of a normalizing force (and much less of one that they wish they had). A simpler potential solution to the cooks-and-broth problem at MoS and other policypages would be disallow their being edited by anons or even by registered users who are not autoconfirmed. Make an incremental protection-level change. (Full protection and no changes made except by {{ Editprotected}} after a consensus discussion probably would not work, for the very problem you lead with: change is resisted just to resist change. And it would still permit admins to make changes without consensus, and plenty of them want to. Another actually effective mechanisms is this: If you care about the stability that MoS provided, and this continuing, watchlist all the MOS and related pages, and resist PoV-pushing attempts to alter them, especially if they're motivated by editor, wikiproject, or off-WP concerns, not by reader needs. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 21:37, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
References
Has anyone ever proposed a blacklist on usernames? This month, I've spent a bit of time countering vandalism, eventually frequently ending up on the Special:Log/newusers page. We can observe that most users registering don't actually make edits. However, we sometimes (maybe often) get offensive usernames or those that are misleading (i.e. have "admin" or "bot" in their names). Those that counter new user vandalism will be the ones that can best vouch for this.
If we had some sort of English-language username blacklist, we could potentially alleviate Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention from very offensive stuff, such as those that appear at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist.
Any thoughts, suggestions, or archived discussions we should note? — Andy W. ( talk · contrib) 05:09, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
*FU[C(K]+K+ <newaccountonly|antispoof>
is one of the regex lines, how did
2 and
3 get through? (My regex foo is very weak, I'll admit).To get a rough idea of just how many false positives would be caught by an automated filter, just look at Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention/Bot, where I would say at between 50%-90% of "offensive usernames" at any given time are false positives (as I write this, Papacita1 "contains the offensive term Paki with a c substituted for a k", Adcockp "contains the string cock" and Vicfuxntxs "contains the string fux" are all listed there). Unless and until they start editing, potentially offensive usernames are the least of our problems, given that they're invisible to readers unless and until they actually make an edit. ‑ Iridescent 15:07, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
I wonder if wikipedia would consider revising the guidelines it uses for summarizing notable non-fiction and academic work. Specifically, I mean work such as: Silent_Spring, Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century. These examples are random, but they contain somewhat different "content" and "contents" sections.
Ideally, any revised guidelines would recommend a more formal structure for providing accessible, digestible summaries of work. Perhaps: i. a short, whole book summary and then, ii. short, individual chapter summaries. Any additional information would not describe minutiae, nor provide opinion or commentary on the content, just make somewhat extended descriptive claims that provide a succinct summary of the work (in whole or part).
From what I can tell this is not against any current MOS guidelines. Indeed the text below seems to support such an idea: "...articles on works of non-fiction, including documentaries, research books and papers, religious texts, and the like, should contain more than a recap or summary of the works' contents. Such articles should be expanded to have broader coverage" ( Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not).
Guidelines like this already seem to exist for providing plot summaries for movies ( Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Film#Plot). Perhaps equivalent guidelines could be developed for notable non-fiction / academic works. Incidentally, I note that a dormant proposal for a similar, but separate, wikimedia project already exists ( Wikisummary). Importantly, the current suggestion would be to incorporate this additional information within existing wikipedia page entries.
I would appreciate any feedback. Apologies in advance if I've missed the page(s) that already deal with this issue, but I couldn't obviously find it (e.g. Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Contents#Topic- and culture-specific guidelines). Mvdct ( talk) 16:37, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
There is no universal set length for a synopsis, though it should not be excessively long. While longer descriptions may appear to provide more data to the reader, a more concise summary may in fact be more informative as it highlights the most important elements.is the totality of the "Synopsis" section), and links to some examples, and a list of Featured Articles on books which might help. Pam D 21:55, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library loses its comma, but Talk:John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway#Requested move 2 March 2015 was closed as "not moved" regarding the page. Somehow, TPTB decided in RFC to omit commas to go for the flow and ignore RMs. I tried case-by-case method, but I get criticized for it. Somehow, another person did that case-by-case method, but he doesn't get criticized. Anyway, the omission of commas without further discussions since a latest RM irks me, but that's how consensus decided at RFC. I'm almost running out of ideas, and I don't know where to create a central discussion about ignored RMs. -- George Ho ( talk) 09:49, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
pluralized per RfC at WP:VPP despite previous lack of consensus at RM.But, per WP:LOCALCON, community consensus trumps local consensus (or lack of local consensus), so there is no problem. As for
Same for the commas?, I'm not sure what you're asking, but I would oppose any new action regarding the commas. If you agree with that, thank you and I think we're done here. ― Mandruss ☎ 17:10, 17 May 2016 (UTC)
I have recently joined Wikimedia Foundation as an intern as part of Google Summer of Code 2016.
My project aims to build an accuracy review bot for Wikipedia[ T129536]. The idea is to build a bot that detects outdated or inaccurate content and flags them and sends them for review to the reviewers. In order to define important areas to start off with, I browsed through the Wikipedia:Backlog categories. I am keen on knowing which categories are the most urgent, the easiest to do, the hardest (and why). Also, how are these backlog lists generated? How much of it is automated and how many entries are manually entered? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.225.100.51 ( talk) 20:45, 17 May 2016 (UTC) Prnkmp28 ( talk) 20:47, 17 May 2016 (UTC)prnkmp28
Should we revive this project? This might take some work, but I think it could be done. BlackVolt ( talk) 20:13, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
The standard usage on Wikipedia for a city, state is to link to Rockville, Maryland as [[Rockville, Maryland|Rockville]], [[Maryland]] would a template (call it CSL) which would look like {{CSL|Rockville, Maryland}} which would turn into the above link be useful? This would end up being used considerably, I think, so I thought I would ask here rather than the requested template page. (Not sure if it is too US Centric) Naraht ( talk) 20:08, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
[[Rockville, Maryland|]], [[Maryland]]
avoids repetition of the city name while producing the same result,
Rockville,
Maryland. This should work for any title containing a comma or parentheses.—
Odysseus
147
9 20:21, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[[Rockville, Maryland]]
giving
Rockville, Maryland, see
WP:SPECIFICLINK. There should be no need to use two links when one works perfectly well. If people don't know where Maryland is, they're not likely to know where Rockville, Md is either. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 22:32, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
I think that this is a good idea because, without all of the loading glitches that there were before, it was a useful tool. I was recently on the Spanish wikipedia, and it has visual editing enabled, and it was a lot better and easier to understand. It was just too glitchy before. Now I might just have it disabled, please comment if you still have it, but this is something I want to see back, especially because the English Wikipedia is the one with the most information on it, it should have all of the features. [User:Williditor|Williditor] ([User talk:Williditor|WikiWilly]) 16:02, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
Idea: Start a sort of "main page for Wikipedia editors", essentially a combination of the Dashboard, the Signpost, and a few other features, such as these:
Hello all!
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this. If not, I'll be happy to post in the proper place if you could tell me where that is!
I have an idea for categories. As I don't yet know proper terminology for either categorization or coding, I have an example which I hope makes my idea clear. I'll be happy to make more examples or talk to anyone who gets what I mean! :)
Now to the actual example.
Category "Law Museums in the United States" exists
Law Museums in United States = Law Museums in "CountryName" = "MuseumType" in United States
Automatically create 2 categories.
Law Museums in "Country" (which "Law Museums in the United States" will be moved to, and create empty categories "Law Museums in China", "Law Museums in Greece", etc.)
"MuseumType" in United States (which "Law Museums in the United States" will be moved to, and create empty "History Museums in the United States", "Science Museums in the United States", etc.)
JonathanHopeThisIsUnique ( talk) 03:24, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
I think it would be a great idea to setup either a future ping, or a webpage listing username, article, date and reason for ping. Many articles need to be updated after a certain date, and it's up to the editor to remember to go to that article and edit. If I know that in three weeks I will need to update, I should be able to either setup a future ping, or it might be easier to have a page with a bot that pings based on the entry. Sir Joseph (talk) 13:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
I would like to open a discussion, prompted by an actual incident which may not be fixable but perhaps we can discuss how to prevent it going forward.
Most of you are aware that it is not difficult for an editor to create a brand-new page which contains blatantly false or harassing information. These creations are often detected early, tagged as CSD G10 and deleted quickly. The admin dashboard highlights any such candidate in red, and is one of the highest priorities for deletion. Because of this rapid response, it is possible that many editors have not run across such pages. However, in the course of a year the number of such pages probably numbers in the hundreds, perhaps thousands.
I see two potential problems. One potential problem is based upon my belief that Google is very quick to spider new pages and may be faster at this than in the past. I don't have specific knowledge about the Google process so I might be mistaken on this, but my impression is that if an attack page was deleted quickly in the past it might never show up in a Google search and if Google is quicker about adding pages to their list this might change.
However, that's not my main concern. My main concern is that we permit other parties to copy and reuse material from Wikipedia. Some of these third parties are quite aggressive and quite timely and make copies of such pages before they are deleted. In the specific case which prompted this discussion (which I will not link for obvious reasons) an attack page was created, deleted within seven hours of creation, but scraped by an outside party in the interim. A Google search of the subject's name brings up content, probably false but embarrassing.
While the official response appears to be that we have no control over third parties I think it is our moral duty to think through whether we can do better.
My off the top of the head thought is that we might change your procedure so that any new article created by some class of editors (perhaps unconfirmed) is non-indexed and not subject to the creative Commons license until it has been reviewed by the NPP.
I fully realize this is a nontrivial concept, and might require changes to the media wiki software, but I'd like to find some way so that if some third-party does scrape such content we have a legal basis for requesting removal.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 13:27, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at WT:New pages patrol about dealing with skeleton articles with very little content by new editors. At present these articles are commonly proposed for deletion. The only policy question is how long should a new page patrol reviewer wait before proposing these articles for deletion. The question has been raised of whether PRODding these articles is biting the newbie, and whether some other approach should be taken. One idea that has some support is that a reviewer should be able to move an article from article space to AFC draft space if it clearly isn't appropriate for article space. Since there is presently no rule saying that this can't be done, but no rule saying that it can be done, it will be a case of Ignore All Rules. However, if rules need ignoring on a regular basis (rather than a one-time basis), then maybe rules should be changed. Moving new articles by new editors that clearly don't belong in article space into draft space seems to me to be a reasonable compromise, neither going too far to encourage new editors and avoid the dreaded "bite" nor being too aggressive toward new editors. Comments? Robert McClenon ( talk) 02:15, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
I am of two minds on this issue. I think it would be beneficial to have this as an option for NPP reviewers however I am mindful that this can be seen as a kind of 'back door delete'. I believe the primary purpose of NPP is to insure that new articles meet a certian minimum standard. In most cases, where there is an editor who is activly working on a new article PROD is useless and stubbing the article will be restisted as well. In those cases moving to draft is the best option and I believe forming some consensus to allow this will help avoid IAR drama down the road.
As to the matter of 'filling up AfC' I believe this is less of an issue because the only articles I thing this should apply to are ones where there is an active author. If there is no active author stubbing is, in my opinion, the proper solution for an article likely to pass notability and PRODing otherwise. (This assumes the article is not caught in one of the 'mass dePROD' events - then we end up clogging up AfD. I also note I get more complaints about AfDing articles which could have been PRODed than vice versa.)
Jbh Talk 13:31, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
I would like to propose a new policy/guideline of allowing the customization of templates to deal with persistent and specific editing problems on articles that are not covered by general templates. The main type of problem this would address is when multiple editors pass through an article and make the same good faith but incorrect edit to an article. An example is Berenstain Bears, where there is an ongoing problem of people thinking they are correcting the spelling of the name by changing it to 'Berenstein. As I assume good faith, I assume most of the people who are doing this are simply failing to check the talk page before making this edit, and therefore are unaware that the regular editors of this page have confirmed the correct spelling multiple times. A template at the top of the article might prevent these good faith edits, something like this is what I had in mind:
The Berenstain Bears' spelling has been extensively confirmed to be spelled BerenSTAIN. Please do not change the spelling to any other version (eg. Bearnstein, Berenstein, etc.) Any attempts to do so will be immediately reverted. |
I have discussed this with one other editor on the talk page, her main objection seems to be that there is no precedence for this, but I believe that WP:BOLD and WP:IGNORE may apply, as at one time certainly all of Wikipedia's now-standard practices were innovations. But perhaps new policy or guideline allowing such customized templates but giving criteria for their use and format would prevent prevent forseeable problems. Can anyone think of possible problems with this and possible guidelines to prevent those problems? Mmyers1976 ( talk) 15:49, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
It is generally accepted that different map projections create wildlify different impressions from the same data Gall-Peters Projection, Mercator Projection, Dymaxion Map.
The suggestion is to create a simple interface to which a user can upload a map created in a one of a range of projections, dragging their map to fit over a 'template' of that projection. This would then automatically re-project the map onto a simple globe that could be manipulated in an online viewer using the mouse.
Clearly this would involve some effort, but the storage space for processed maps need not be significantly larger than the original files, and the viewer could be quite light.
The final implementation would users to process maps already uploaded to Wikipedia and place a clickable 'view as globe' icon next to any, map on a wikipedia page that had been processed.
Stub Mandrel ( talk) 06:55, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm thinking of proposing something that requires technical coding etc to implement..(creating a log of the history of all unblock requests going forward showing whether they had been granted/approved to increase transparency)..if people thought this was a good idea how would it go about being implemented (who would code it etc...I certainly don't know how).. 68.48.241.158 ( talk) 13:12, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
There is plenty of transparency, it is just not indexed the way you like. Unblock requests are tracked through categories, and while the software does track what pages are in a category now it does not log when they are added and removed.
This means you can get the information but it will take some effort on your part. There is the block log, this logs every block and unblock. Choose your time period, look up all the blocks, then go through the talk page history on each one to see how it turned out.
This will take some work so I guess it depends on how much you want this information. We do have an API if you want to try and automate it. HighInBC 17:35, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
The mw:API is a means to access the logs and content of Wikipedia through an automated tool. I don't think anybody is going to do your research for you, but the information is there if you want to get it. HighInBC 18:14, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
( edit conflict) I'd also add that I don't think you have any idea of the scale of what you're suggesting, when you talk about logging every unblock—let alone every block—at a single page. As of June 2014 (which is when the logs stop for technical reasons owing to the Labs move), 90,165 unblocks and 2,693,123 blocks had been performed. ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
Around 2 weeks ago, there was
a proposal at
Wikipedia talk:Page mover to include the mergehistory
right in the user group. However, this proposal was generally shot down by the community, mainly because the two rights are very different to each other. That's why I'm putting forward the idea of creating a new user group, specifically for history merges. There are very large backlogs at both
Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge and
Category:Possible cut-and-paste moves, some of which go years back. Few admins are active in those areas, so I feel that the creation of this permission would help to clear the backlog. This user right would be especially helpful for those who constantly find themselves tagging articles with {{
histmerge}}, but unable to perform the merge themselves.
Omni Flames
let's talk about it 07:07, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
mergehistory
requires (or implies?) being granted deletion and restoration rights, and due to actual legal implications the bar to be granted those permissions is quite high; WMF has stated they want users to pass "an RfA-like process" before being granted those permissions. Along with sorting as Ricky81682 suggested, it might be a good idea to train some users to clerk the requests, if we think that there are some that aren't actually history merge candidates, or are otherwise problematic.
Ivanvector 🍁 (
talk) 14:29, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
mergehistory
user-right. It's limited enough that incompetence can be easily un-done by an administrator (and the bit summarily revoked). I would be even more enthusiastic about giving wider access to an even-more-limited tool that only allowed merges where the edit history was completely non-overlapping (which is the typical case for cut-and-paste moves) and where the actions were written to a log that could be easily watchlisted to spot incompetence (or simple one-off goofs). This would be very low-risk and would free up administrators to do the more complex merges. As someone who has slapped {{
histmerge}} on many a page that was copy-and-pasted from an
WP:Articles for creation submission or a draft article, and as the person who
added the |details=
parameter to the histmerge template back in 2013, I would find having this userright very helpful to me and very helpful in freeing up the time of administrators who do the simple history merges today because nobody else can.
davidwr/(
talk)/(
contribs) 03:26, 2 June 2016 (UTC)How many Wikipedians have read this work? I am sure they will recognize something of themselves in it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.199.65.2 ( talk) 17:48, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Hi, all.
First of all, if here is not the correct place to post this, please just let me know. I'll be happy to move it.
Last year I created a website called BetterWaysWiki https://betterwayswiki.com/. It was created as a place where people can share better-ways ideas to do things. Sharing high-quality better-ways ideas, I think, will help to accelerate human advancement to achieve higher quality-of-life.
The website itself has the following key points behind it:
The About Us and Help pages can be found at https://betterwayswiki.com/us/ and https://betterwayswiki.com/help/ respectively.
I've posted a few articles on the website, and on hand, I still have a few hundred other potential subjects.
Undoubtedly I'll need a lot of help to grow the website to make it as valuable as possible to as many people as possible. After some thoughts and some consultations with Wikipedia community engagement staffs, I decided to pitch the idea here to try to get some valuable feedbacks, pointers and, hopefully, supports. For Wikipedia itself, I believe that BetterWaysWiki can help contribute to bringing in more visitors especially for niche and not yet widely known subjects - BetterWaysWiki articles are just summary of better-ways ideas; it almost certain needs to include links to other sources like Wikipedia for details of each component inside.
So please don't hesitate at all to give me your thoughts, questions or requests here as I'll consider it for the future of BetterWaysWiki. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.126.130.140 ( talk) 10:19, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
I want to give the idea of new user group known as Helper, and their work is to help all other editors (mostly newusers). But wait, Why we need helpers?? Because new users dont know much about wikipedia, they do vandalism,etc. Example: Me ( Mujtaba!). Just Think about it-- 🍁 Mujtaba 🌴 14:37, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Other users also help newbies, but for helpers "Only helping Clearly"-- 🍁 Mujtaba 🌴 14:39, 2 June 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mujtaba! ( talk • contribs)
I was thinking about taking this to WT:ITN, but maybe I'll discuss it here instead. What makes any story "newsworthy" and deserve a blurb? Due to the "success" of RD trial, which the trial runners call it, perhaps we'll try something on ITN as well. I fear it might bring disaster on ITN, so how do we (not just I) construct a looser trial ITN to bring in more stories? -- George Ho ( talk) 03:44, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
I was wondering if there are any guidelines on whether documentaries can be used as references. In case we can determine that a certain documentary is an acceptable source, then the next step would be creating a specific cite documentary template for them. Which would mention the exact second a certain fact is mentioned, the imdb number e.t.c.-- Catlemur ( talk) 20:38, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
As seen with Yannick Ferreira Carrasco (forgot how to add link as I'm watching final now), it's become quite noticeable in and out of Wikipedia that during big sports finals, especially football,with the Euro's coming up aswell you get people changing names short facts and intros. I think that maybe we should consider blocking sports personals involved. Though I'm not sure if it will be possible to implement or really stop the problem. I'm sure we'll see changes to the wikipage of the player who scores the winner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DJBay123 ( talk • contribs) 20:56, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
r.e. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking
How about using colour coding to deal with any 'overlinking' hazard; use the similarity between page topics (vector distance? something like word2vec on the graph structure of pages?) to pick out the most important links on a page, and de-emphasise anything deemed an 'overlink' (fainter shade of blue). Also deal with multiple links automatically. (only highlight one).
On another note, colour coding any links to the user's watchlist might be nice too (emphasise the pages away from a users deliberately chosen domain?). (default = de-emphasize probably, but you could make a preference to emphasise instead)
r.e. Red Links, why not just de-emphasize them by default (and keep a user preference to view them , for editors who want to fix them)
Links ,surely, make the wikipedia data resource more valuable - it's labelled text.. the more the better? They could help disambiguate for translation software? .. and accelerate reaching the future where we can make natural language queries and so on.. Fmadd ( talk) 23:34, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
I'd be slightly concerned that the color inconsistencies could be confusing for people not used to the site. It's easier from a user interface perspective to use a simple, consistent theme. But otherwise, not the worst idea in the world. Praemonitus ( talk) 19:14, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be better if Wikipedia had a 'See also on' section on the sidebar with links to the same subject on other wikis (including the sister-projects under Wikimedia)? I was thinking (for example) of wikia.com, ProofWiki and OSDev wiki - they all offer in-depth information or technical knowledge on specific topics. Also, I think that a link on the sidebar for authors to their Wikisource Author: pages would be more accessible than the same link at the bottom of the page. This would allow Wikipedia to remain a general-purpose encyclopedia, while still offering links for more in-depth technical knowledge. I think it will also help with WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_manual.2C_guidebook.2C_textbook.2C_or_scientific_journal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mostanes ( talk • contribs) 07:45, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
Link rot is starting to become prevalent in many articles with references to old blog posts that no longer exist. My idea is to start using Internet Web Archives as a way to keep the cited resources available for others to access and refer to.
For example: See this article's 1st reference link. If you click on the first reference link, it will link you to "Page not found" error page. This is an issue if Wikipedia continues to cite resources without the ability to obtain a snapshot of what the resources look like.
Tom mai78101 00:25, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia articles on disaster events are the number one search query when searching for any disaster. Many of the contributors to these pages are experts in the disaster research community. As a senior research scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Center for Disaster Risk Management and Risk Reduction Technology (CEDIM), I have reveiewed pages documenting disasters since 2010. The quality of documentation and type of information documented is variable from event to event. I have also found that for events after 2010, 70% of the edits are made within the first two weeks of an event. Some pages such as Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami are getting upwards of 100,000 views - 10 years later. Wikipedia has served as a popular source of information on disasters for the lay person and in many cases, professional and practitioners in the disaster field. The amount of traffic wikipedia gets on disaster information probably makes it one of the most - if not the most - consulted resource for documentation of disasters worldwide.
Globally there are many efforts and international bodies to study properly document disasters. One of this is our own initiative at CEDIM established in 2011 called the Near Real-time Forensic Disaster Analysis research program. We investigate disasters as they are happening and systematically document these events through our reports which are releasted within days of the events and followed up periodically.
The idea
How to make it happen
We can hit the road running in the next large disaster event and the idea will show is own value. What do you think? ― Bkhazai ☎ 7:15, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
New reliable research findings are published regularly. See, for example the PLoS – Public Library of Science at: http://www.plos.org/ and many otters mentioned at: https://www.lib.utexas.edu/engin/guides/alumni.html
When Wikipedia becomes a complete repository of the world’s knowledge, then each of these newly published research findings will: 1) confirm an existing knowledge claim, 2) introduce a new knowledge claim, or 3) cast doubt on an existing knowledge claim.
I recommend we begin thinking about this influx of new knowledge systematically. For example, if Wikipedia provided a place where each newly published journal was analyzed, then each new article could be (tentatively linked) to the corresponding existing Wikipedia page. For example there is a recently published research paper titled: “The Great Migration and African-American Genomic Diversity” See: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006059 If this article presents new and reliable findings, then these findings have some bearing on the existing Wikipedia article on these subjects such as Great Migration (African American)
Under this proposal, the existing Great Migration article might have a (dedicated) Talk page section that links to the newly published research article. This link would have been created (semi-automatically) by the person who browsed the new research article. Over time, editors of the existing article can evaluate the newly published research to determine if it warrants a citation within the existing article, or requires the text of the existing article to be altered to reflect these new findings. In any case, interested readers can browse these newly published research articles to stay up-to-date on the topic. -- Lbeaumont ( talk) 13:18, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
AN/I seems to have a persistent problem with editors starting threads on other editors and not notifying them. Could some sort of automatic notification be set up to do so? Chickadee46 ( talk) 20:31, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
{{ANI-notify|username}}
could generate the same link as {{u|username}}
. I don't know, but it might be technically possible for such a template to generate the notification at
User talk:username. That would save some effort, but it would not address the problem you describe, that of missed notifications. For the most part, it would only be used by editors who have the competence and the energy to do it the existing way. It might result in a few notifications by posters who know they should notify but are simply too lazy to expend the additional effort, but imo not enough of them to justify the developer effort and the
feature creep. ―
Mandruss
☎ 00:49, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Please fill in the "username of editor(s) being discussed" field. This will automatically notify the editor(s) you are discussing.
Chickadee46 ( talk) 02:21, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Early news rushed to slap the terrorism label on the Orlando attack, Wikipedia editors rushed to reflect that in the article, and now it looks like that may have been significantly overstated. From NPR, dated Thursday the 16th: "As investigators continue to delve into the life of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, the evidence is beginning to suggest the killings may have more in common with a traditional mass shooting than an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack." [8]
This is hardly an isolated case. And it's not just about disseminating misleading information. Article talk is often utter chaos as frenzied editors struggle to resolve conflicting early news reports, one minute detail after another. Quite often the conflict cannot be resolved that early, so we are forced to hedge our language in the article—"Some sources say..."—and then a few days later that has to be updated (after another round of discussion about whether it's appropriate to do so). What if we just backed off and waited awhile for things to settle down? My idea is a one-month delay on Wikipedia coverage of major events including airliner crashes and mass killings. Full list of categories to be determined.
I'm certain hundreds of thousands (millions?) of readers are used to coming to Wikipedia for concise summaries of breaking news, and it would be painful to change their habits. I do not discount or dismiss that pain at all. But "real-time encyclopedia" is an oxymoron, and in my opinion we need to cease trying to be that. News outlets often (if not usually) get important things wrong in the beginning, Wikipedia readers read it during the early days and then move on, and they have other things in their lives that prevent them from coming back after two weeks to see what's changed. In our fast-paced and busy world, a huge number of people have short attention spans for current events, and that is not going to get anything but worse. The Wikipedia editors addicted to the newsroom adrenaline rush of working with breaking news would have to move to Wikinews for that fix, and readers would have to gradually make the transition. If Wikinews does not have a single place to go for the concise summary of a breaking news story, it could and should. That certainly belongs there more than here.
I'm aware of the general disclaimer. How many readers do we suppose are aware of that and keep it in mind when they read these articles? I prefer to confine my thinking to the real world, not legalistic arguments. The GD is little more than lawsuit protection.
I would welcome any discussion of this issue here, or a pointer to meta if this is seen as wrong venue (I've never visited meta, and that's probably something I need to learn anyway). ― Mandruss ☎ 08:44, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
a traditional mass shooting- this makes it sound like it's normal to have a mass shooting in the USA every year or so, like Groundhog Day is a tradition. Anyway, we cannot ask people to hold off for a month, because there will always be people who want to get in first, won't read the guidelines, probably are newbies. -- Redrose64 ( talk) 10:54, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
up-to-date factsand up-to-date fiction. ― Mandruss ☎ 12:30, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I'll go ahead and ask the question that I know is coming, if this doesn't just die from lack of interest.
Q: Well doesn't this just move all those problems to Wikinews? Same misleading early information, same chaos in article talk, etc.
A: Partly. But in that venue, readers are far more likely to take things with a large grain of salt. Hell, Wikinews could slap a big red disclaimer permanently at the top of every article page. As for the chaos, good point. I guess there's no avoiding that with developing stories, but it would at least be in a news venue rather than an encyclopedia. I doubt they agonize a lot over article titles there, worrying about COMMONNAME and disambiguation and such, so that part of the problem would go away. ―
Mandruss
☎ 16:31, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
"WP:NOTNEWS" is the most outrageously misnamed and misused policy on Wikipedia.Point taken. I hereby retract that sentence. Nevertheless, "real-time encyclopedia" is an oxymoron. And all the great things you say about developing stories at Wikipedia could be said about developing stories at Wikinews, the more appropriate venue for that. ― Mandruss ☎ 17:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
streamline the generation of glossary & 'list of..' pages using "Micro-articles"; simpler for users and reducing manual redirects/anchors etc.
Some tool splits existing glossary/'list-of' pages into individual "micro-articles". automatically guess categories for new 'small pages' from wording, 'in foobar, baz is ....'
currently I find myself wanting to create all sorts of redirects to terms & re-work articles to create additional anchors to increase the 'link fidelity' (knowing that links are a potential form of labelled data for AI), but these may be more complex to manage. e.g. what if you create a term in a summary and eventually it gets an article, but there's all sorts of conflicting redirects to either the glossary entry or the full article
compiling micro-articles, perhaps deal with parsing some standard formats like "in <foo> , <title> is <content>.." which compress to <title> : <content> when rendered in the 'glossary/category' page for <foo> - or do the reverse. Perhaps auto-assign category from 'in <foo> ..'
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Fmadd ( talk • contribs)
EDIT: if worried about 'overlinking', the software could filter out some of the links based on importance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fmadd ( talk • contribs) 07:14, 20 June 2016
I'm concerned about a practice I've noticed for many years when articles that would fail to meet notability guidelines are created and then immediately redirected to another (but notable) article and a specific subsection. These redirects are often picked up by Google and other search sites. And perhaps these are useful, however I am concerned when BLP's are involved. Per WP:BLP (emphasis added)
Biographies of living persons ("BLPs") must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid: it is not Wikipedia's job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives; the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment.
I've raised this at BLP/N, but I think this needs a bit of a wider audience, so please forgive me if this seems like canvassing. The immediate issue at hand is the List of Guantanamo Bay detainees, but this is just an example of one of many lists that may be of concern. The list is comprised of several hundred people. While several of the people on the "list" pass Wikipedia's notability guidelines, the majority do not. So we have a list comprised of no links, blue links and red links. Several of the links such as Mustafa Ahmed Hamlily have been redirected to other articles (in this instance Algerian detainees at Guantanamo Bay). One can presume that is because it was determined that these people did not meet GNG. Some of the BLP articles were created with just a redirect, bypassing a stub altogether. I apologize for not providing an example, but this "create/redirect" type of articles exists in many "list" type articles. Regardless, a BLP article exists only to redirect a user to another article.
If the subject is not notable, is this not a privacy concern? What if I'm an employer and I google someone who, while not notable returns a hit as a "detainee"? This could obviously be prejudicial. The "red links" also pose a concern for similar reasons. Just having one's name pop up in a Wikipedia article could raise a red flag. At what point does linking cross the line of verifying reliable sources to possibly causing the subject harm? That man from Nantucket ( talk) 08:42, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
Consider Robert G. Smith (educator). I came across him when I worked on the article on Libby Garvey. He was in charge of the Arlington County Board of Education, for a decade or so, during the time Garvey was a trustee. A exchange they had, during his job interview, was notable enough to be quoted, paraphrased, or referred to, in several RS.
That made him notable enough to merit a wikilink in the Garvey article.
It turned out that Robert G. Smith was a bluelink, but because my guy had a namesake, and I found a redirect. I converted that redirect to a disambiguation page, and added my guy, as per the DAB rules. I added an entry for Robert G. Smith (candidate, 1968) who had been linked in United States House of Representatives elections, 1968 to Robert G. Smith (aviator).
You excised the entry for the educator, with the edit summary "Red link". I've already pointed out to you, that this excision was not consistent with WP:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages#Red links. Inexplicably, you left the other redlink, to Robert G. Smith (candidate, 1968), although it too was a redlink
As I have tried to discuss with you, contributors are authorized to create wikilinks for individuals when they think they may merit coverage here.
Most editors change pages on their laptop but most readers check Wikipedia on their phone. What we see is not what the reader gets. An article full of info boxes and images may look good on a laptop and terrible on a smaller screen. An editor can resize their edit window to check, but most would not. And if the server software adapts to the viewing device, that effect will not show. Better to have a button at the bottom of the edit window that prompts the editor to preview how the article would look on a typical phone:
The new button would encourage editors to check how the article looks to the normal reader. Comments? Aymatth2 ( talk) 13:50, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
I like the idea of a "mobile preview" button that appears by default. I'm all for seeing how an article looks on multiple platforms, but it's a PITA (pain in the a--) to be tweaking the features in preferences, time-consuming and at times complicated. Montanabw (talk) 03:26, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
Now a proposal. I have started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Mobile view. Thanks to all who contributed with ideas and information here. Aymatth2 ( talk) 14:00, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Should there be (or is there already) a list of Twitter accounts in Wikipedia namespace, that automatically tweet when someone from a government edits Wikipedia anonymously, like @ParliamentEdits. There are quite a few of these accounts ( @AussieParlEdits, @congressedits, etc. - quite a few accounts listed in the references of CongressEdits) and this list could be useful if editors want to see/check anonymous editing from these organisations, which could help combat vandalism/COI editing. Thanks for your input. Seagull123 Φ 16:58, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
This is a general notice that a new WikiProject has been created: WikiProject Reforming Wikipedia. Its purpose is to improve Wikipedia by promoting policy reforms that will facilitate better-sourced, higher quality content and fairer, more efficient governance systems. This is a new project in the very early stages of development, so please read the page linked above and consider joining if you are interested in helping to improve Wikipedia. Thank you! Biblio ( talk) 17:33, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
Hi all
I'm designing a tool for Visual Editor to make it easy for people to add open license text from other sources, there are a huge number of open license sources compatible with Wikipedia including around 9000 journals. I can see a very large opportunity to easily create a high volume of good quality articles quickly. I have done a small project with open license text from UNESCO as a proof of concept, any thoughts, feedback or endorsements (on the Meta page) would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
John Cummings ( talk) 11:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
It's become necessary to begin discussing how the community will apply WP:BLUELOCK in articles outside ArbCom jurisdiction or discretionary sanctions. Rather than formulate an RFC in a hurry, let's all take a few days to hash out ideas on how to best implement ECP.
I'll begin by saying that I don't think ECP should be authorized for uses other than sockpuppetry or new, disruptive accounts that can't be controlled by semi-protection. I'm open to other uses but I'm having trouble seeing them right now. Katie talk 15:43, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
{{
pp-30-500}}
doesn't give the full list, since that template is merely a visual reminder: it's not obligatory to add a prot icon template to protected pages. Nor does it provide any reasons for the use of
WP:30/500. The full list is
here. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 11:20, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
I would recommend removing Option B altogether but subsume it into Options C-E as an addendum.
Option C: Allow use on pages that have an established history of particularly persistant and disruptive vandalism which would circumvent semiprotection. Notification is to be left on an appropriate noticeboard (AN, ANI, etc) for community review
Extended confirmed protection is a new level of protection which prevents certain editors from editing protected pages of that type. Those editors must have made at least 500 edits and have been editing for at least 30 days. The edit protection was instituted due to an RFC earlier this year, mostly with the intent of providing for the then-existing arbitration enforcement scope. The Arbitration Committee recently clarified by motion the extent to which the protection level can be used as a form of arbitration enforcement. They declined to answer the question of how it should be used outside that scope. Current policy allows for the protection level to be added as the result of a community discussion. What a community discussion means in the context of the protection policy seems to be ambiguous: A recent request at WP:AN#Reducing List of social networking websites from indefinite full protection to indefinite 30/500 protection would seem to indicate that many editors at that noticeboard believe it to be of the "widely discussed" kind of community, whereas "community" discussion in the context of a ban is a discussion at a noticeboard such as WP:AN or WP:ANI. In addition, Per WP:AN#Extended confirmed protection, there appear to be administrators applying the protection without either the remit from ARBCOM or the community. Given that this is the case, what does the community think "the community" means in the context of this protection level? The previous RFC indicated that WP:RFPP is not an acceptable level. Is it a discussion at WP:AN/ WP:ANI, a discussion at a new community page (such as WP:Requests for page protection/ECP), or should it be authorized broadly within a certain scope a priori by the community (a la the ARBCOM clarification)? If a prior, what is that scope? Straw poll Community discussion is at a noticeboard Community discussion is a broader discussion about use |
There appear to be a number of places (like categories) where redirects are in italics and normal articles are in non-italics. Could that concept be added to the drop-down list on search box? (so that for example, if Phi Gamma Delta is typed into the searchbox, Phi Gamma Delta, Phi Gamma Delta House, and Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity House (University of Minnesota) show up as normal, but Phi Gamma Delta Chapters occurs in italics since it is a redirect. Naraht ( talk) 14:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Not quite sure where to put this idea, but here seems more likely than most... Is there any way to keep track of redlinks where an article exists in another capitalization? For example alpha phi alpha is a redlink, but Alpha Phi Alpha exists. I'd be very hesitant to let a bot at these, but maybe just the top 100 or so out of mainspace? Naraht ( talk) 20:42, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
It's obvious to me that the Edit Summary field is intended for edits being made to Articles. If I make an edit to an article as minor as fixing punctuation or grammar, I don't mind saying so in the Edit Summary for the article.
But Talk Pages aren't articles. And whenever I append an idea to a Talk Page, my submission is already a summary of my idea -- well, at least concise, or else I'm being too wordy.
After making an effort to use as few words as possible when contributing to a Talk page, it always seems annoyingly redundant to me to see the buttons ask for an "Edit Summary." The edit was already summarized, if you get my drift. At worst, the Edit Summary would be a repeat of the submission. At best, the "edit summary" for anything I've ever contributed to a Talk page would always be "I'm making a Talk page contribution," which I never write into that field because I feel it would be redundant to write it every time I contribute to a Talk page.
So when contributing to a Talk page -- I know you're wondering, I leave the Edit Summary field empty, and feel like a radical.
The conflict leaves me feeling unnerved every time I'm asked for an Edit Summary on a Talk page. I always say to my LCD screen, "Duhhh; My Edit Summary is that I'm submitting an idea." That would be my edit-summary, for any Talk page for any article.
Therefore, I'd like to propose removing the effectively-redundant request for the Edit Summary for contributions being appended to Talk pages. Thanks.
Nei1 ( talk) 19:55, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
We have a considerable number of articles with 'merge to' templates that are now several years old (based upon the date listed in the template). These are cluttering up the lead without generating any activity. Could these be cleaned up after some period of time by a bot that migrates the suggestion to a section on the talk page? I.e. x months after the template is added, a bot looks for a matching "Discuss" section on the talk page. If it doesn't find one, then a boilerplate section is added listing the suggestion and the person who posted the template. The bot then removes the 'merge to' template from the article page. Praemonitus ( talk) 19:04, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
I don't feel like we're managing to talk about the same thing. So here's a simple example:
WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:51, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
"If the proposal is obvious...then a discussion need not even be held."MERGE is not AFD. It's not supposed to be a bureaucratic process with checks and balances and careful consideration. It's basically a plain old edit, which any plain old editor can undo with the plain old WP:UNDO button.
"If there is a consensus against the merger, or, for older proposals, if there is no consensus or no discussion and you don't believe it is appropriate to merge the pages, then please remove the merge proposal tags, and, if necessary, close any discussion."For your convenience, I've highlighted the three words that you accidentally overlooked. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:32, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
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Well we have finally accomplished our task of giving anybody the ability of putting most of Wikipedia history on a timeline, at:
Look at this website on the largest computer screen that you can get your hands on. We eventually would like to create a timeline of all history. This was a massive undertaking. For right now, you can add and delete any Wikipedia article you want from this timeline (just click the green "Add" button). Any and all 4 million of them, any 6 at one time. Instructions are included under the heading "New user message". Do you think this would be a good history education tool? From elementary to the collegiate level? I know I would have loved to have a tool like this when I was taking European history in college.
And you can (eventually) put anything on this timeline. Medical histories, legal documents and project plans. Even whole books! The potential is endless.
There are still some bugs and other foibles we are working on, but it is pretty stable now.
Thanks Jeff Jroehl ( talk) 09:52, 22 January 2016 (UTC)
.mw-category a:link
and build a list of pages to add to a timeline. You have not mentioned if the tool has an upper limit for number of articles per timeline but if there is an issue there just cap the HTML parser to the first NNN a:links with NNN being the max allowed.Jeff Roehl Jroehl ( talk) 10:12, 22 February 2016 (UTC)
Hi, since 2011 the website wikiscan.org calculates statistics for French Wikipedia. The project is to transform it into a multi-wiki site with a dedicated site for every Wikimedia wiki with more than 100,000 edits, actually it would make more than 300 sites. I plan to apply for a m:Grants:IEG to achieve this big transformation and also add a multilingual interface with an English version and other improvements.
In summary, the site provides two main types of statistics:
Would you interested in an English Wikipedia Wikiscan ? the site address would be http://en.wikiscan.org. It is also planned to support other projects like Commons, Wikidata, Wikisource, Wiktionary, etc. -- Akeron ( talk) 18:09, 18 February 2016 (UTC)
Here are few ideas just to think about. It is not meant to be ever implemented. Just ideas.
Categories [
] Show in columns Sort by alphabet
|
Often I miss one of the following options.
Search |
Layers
Live pages Deleted pages Past versions |
Namespaces
(Article) |
-- Janezdrilc ( talk) 15:56, 5 March 2016 (UTC)
intitle:
, insource:
. Searching deleted pages and/or past versions would probably be tough, and should probably be a different special page entirely (though
WikiBlame covers searching an individual, known page's past revisions somewhat). Searching for redirects would presumably require a special search parameter, because currently search surfaces the target page if a redirect matches a search. Some of the rest … would require the suggestions to be more concrete; does "summary" mean "searching the edit summary field"? {{
Nihiltres |
talk |
edits}} 17:48, 5 March 2016 (UTC)That's great. intitle:
and others actually are layers that I had in mind. Maybe they just have to be put in the form of » « (as above in the table). It would be much more user friendly. --
Janezdrilc (
talk) 11:18, 7 March 2016 (UTC)
This is a problematic editor that I have to watch a little more closely in my capacity as a gnome admin, because I suspect him of sockpuppetry. While scrutinizing his edits I added a bunch of articles he's edited to my watchlist. It occurs to me that it would be helpful if I could add pages to my watchlist directly from his contribution history, instead of having to open each article and click the star. It would also be helpful if I could see in his contribution history which articles we have in common.
I can see this being used in a pernicious way to stalk other editors on Wikipedia, so maybe it makes more sense for admins, although I know a lot of power editors who might also benefit from this. Thoughts? Cyphoidbomb ( talk) 02:01, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
I'd like to announce an IEG proposal I'm working on titled "Learning from article revision histories". The basic idea is to develop some web tools for studying article revision histories which would allow, for instance, people to compare historical versions of articles or particular sections. I know there are a number of diff tools available, but as far as I know, there is currently no way to easily put a particular diff up for a vote from a survey of editors. I say "as far as I know" because I'm relatively new to Wikipedia, and it's likely I'm not the first to ask some of these questions. My hope is that tools like this could be used to make editorial oversight easier, and facilitate community involvement when disagreements arise. But the tools I'm proposing are only useful if they are addressing a real need, and I admittedly don't know much about the frequency of disagreement among editors. If you have some comments about whether disagreement is a actual problem that should be addressed, please consider leaving your thoughts on the talk page for the proposal.
Evoapps ( talk) 20:52, 6 April 2016 (UTC)
So, the Wikipedia:Non-administrator Arbitrators RfC over a month ago did in its closure feature a rough consensus in creating an "Arbitrator" usergroup for arbitrators, but the closer indicated that it would need some development and further discussion. So, now it may be time to discuss how to implement that - assuming that the close still stands. Noting also this revision regarding one possible setup and whether it would be acceptable to the WMF given that it involves sensitive permissions. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 18:50, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
usergroup
is fairly easy. We would need to decide what permissions are actually required for the group, see example list of all available permissions
here. Users can belong to multiple groups, and their permissions merge. So for example, the new group could be granted the ability to view deleted and oversighted (deletedtext
and viewsuppressed
permissions) without the ability to also delete or oversight the pages. —
xaosflux
Talk 19:30, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
abusefilter-hidden-log
, abusefilter-log
, abusefilter-log-detail
, abusefilter-view
, abusefilter-view-private
, browsearchive
, checkuser-log
, deletedhistory
, deletedtext
, spamblacklistlog
, suppressionlog
and titleblacklistlog
), although editprotected
may also be useful if arbitrators have to work within protected pages. And yes, such a group if it includes the "sensitive" permissions (here suppressionlog
and checkuser-log
and some abusefilter permissions) it would need to be added/removed by stewards only; if not requested by the WMF, the folks in Phabricator will likely ask for it since non-steward granting of such permissions has created issues in the past.
Jo-Jo Eumerus (
talk,
contributions) 21:34, 30 December 2015 (UTC)I pruned duplicated items that are already in "users", etc - so this could be a request such as:
Arbitrators
abusefilter-hidden-log
abusefilter-view-private
browsearchive
checkuser-log
deletedhistory
deletedtext
spamblacklistlog
suppressionlog
titleblacklistlog
viewdeletedfile
viewsuppressed
— xaosflux Talk 22:08, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
Now, a prime question is - is this moot? Since ArbCom is the deciders of who gets CheckUser and Oversight - if they are going to just assign themselves the permissions then there is no need to include that stuff in here. — xaosflux Talk 22:10, 30 December 2015 (UTC)
$wpAddGroups
,
$wgRemoveGroups
and
$wgGroupsRemoveFromSelf
Arbs can add/remove specific groups to other editors (class examples: CU/OS)Didn't we already determine that Oversight Access allows for access to view deleted content, and that an ArbCom election was considered RfA-identical enough to meet the Foundation requirement for Oversight access? Therefore the Admin bit is not necessary to view deleted content, if the Arb were given Oversight access? (Note this was never tested practically, but as per before, I would be willing to drop my admin bit for a few hours to try it out, if we wanted to know what one could and could not do for sure.) The CheckUser log access is of little value as it provides little information, also keeping in mind that not all Arbitrators are CheckUsers (by choice). If we had a non-admin Arbitrator, they could be provided Oversight Access, and have all of the tools necessary without creating a new usergroup (plus the ability to revision (un)delete and revision (un)suppress, but not to delete an actual page). I think this is a solution looking for a problem. The idea of creating a new usergroup, for a hypothetical non-admin arbitrator that may or may not get elected in the future, when really all we have to do as give them a single permission, that they are already entitled to. -- kelapstick( bainuu) 02:35, 7 January 2016 (UTC)
Comment: We at Russian Wikipedia have had the arbitrator flag
since June 2013, and AFAIK we've never had any problems with that. It includes 4 rights, namely browsearchive
, deletedhistory
, abusefilter-log-detail
& deletedtext
. P.S. I know the situation here is quite different, I'm just telling you about our experience. -
Синкретик (
talk) 19:00, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
As a sister site, WikiPolls feels as though it could be a good idea, but, first, I would like to explain what it is and see whether there are issues to be repaired:
This is only an idea, and I am only looking for suggestions.
Gamingforfun365
(talk) 02:29, 13 March 2016 (UTC)
Are all wiki sites required to be educational in the conventional way that the encyclopaedia is? Presumably not or there wouldn't be ideas for alternatives and have just seen a mention of a wiki poll idea. This may simply be a relatively conventional market research of some sort that people could choose to be involved with instead of the invasive ones that often appear on computer screens as advertisement in some excuse that the owner didn't pay for the software. I am hoping for something I can use as I choose to help evolve and never pay for software as it was invented very many years ago and we are all part of the process. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markostri ( talk • contribs) 20:49, 19 March 2016 (UTC)
At the moment there isn't really a set definition of a stub. WP:STUB has a very vague description of one, and also states that different editors follow different standards. I think we should create a a definitive number of characters that make an article no longer a stub. Probably somewhere between 500-1500 characters. Once this is decided, a bot could be used to remove stub templates when they no longer fit the requirements to be a stub, so that stub tags could be consistent and accurate among articles. Thoughts? — Omni Flames ( talk contribs) 02:54, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
Hey, I'd like some help workshopping a proposed new permission called "Page mover". Please see Wikipedia:Page mover and leave your comments at Wikipedia talk:Page mover (or just go ahead and edit your suggestions in). – xeno talk 23:35, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
This is an idea to seek out and find a new WikiFauna Creature to identify users. I presently have no idea how a WikiGhost would behave, but it might be a good addition. Wyatt Hughes ( talk) 23:12, 22 April 2016 (UTC)
I have written a grant proposal to develop an interactive visualization tool for etymological relationships (click here to see the proposal). If you are interested in etymology and you think you would be interested in an interactive graphical etymology dictionary please endorse my grant proposal ( last section of the grant page). I need your feedback/comments there or on the talk page. To see a working demo of the visual etymology dictionary click here (the demo works best on a desktop).
The aim of the application is to visualize - in one graph - the etymology of all words deriving from the same ancestor. Users can expand/collapse the tree to visualize what they are interested in. The textual part attached to the graph can be easily translated in any language and the app would become a multilingual resource. My idea is to use Dbnary's extraction-framework and develop a (possibly) smart pre-processing strategy to translate Wiktionary textual etymologies into a graph database of etymological relationships.
I would very much appreciate any kind of feedback from you on the grant page. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Epantaleo ( talk • contribs) 00:45, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
I'd like to propose the following general change to all infoboxes, i.e., directly to Module:Infobox. With the infobox wrapped in a div with an accessibility role and label, screen readers can navigate to and from the infobox as a region or landmark. Screen readers will announce the infobox with a meaningful label, such as "infobox complementary information", rather than a cryptic announcement like "table with N rows and 3 columns".
For example, something along the lines of:
<table class="infobox"> ... </table>
<div role="complementary" aria-label="infobox"> <table class="infobox"> ... </table> </div>
— most conservative change, visual output preserved, or<div class="infobox" role="complementary" aria-label="infobox"> <table> ... </table> </div>
— better semantics, encourages moving non-tabular data out of the table, but needs margins, padding, etc. fixed in CSSThe first version would be fairly easy and safe to implement. The second version wouldn't be too hard, but would require a whole lot of testing to make sure infoboxes don't get broken. Do either of these ideas look good? Matt Fitzpatrick ( talk) 00:51, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
.infobox
instead of the table, would need additional work in the mobile CSS. The mobile CSS uses a heavily qualified table.infobox
selector, which would have to change to .infobox
, in addition to the margin and padding changes for the desktop CSS.
Matt Fitzpatrick (
talk) 03:03, 27 April 2016 (UTC)The article history is a pretty clunky way to do attribution, because there is a lot more noise (edits that don't add text or text additions that were removed later) than signal. It would be better if there was an automated list of authors in a collapsed box at the bottom of the article. The list would be ordered by the number of bytes of text added to the current version of article. It would be easy for mirrors of Wikipedia to take care of attribution as all they have to do is mirror the list, which would say something about GFDL and Wikipedia. Of course you would still need the history to determine which author added which piece of text. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 109.79.99.105 ( talk) 09:55, 19 April 2016 (UTC)
I don't know where to discuss Wikipedia:Move review. The process, created four years ago, have become more predictable. Id est most reviews have been closed as "endorsed". Its talk page is nearly abandoned. If proposing a discontinuation of the process is out of option, what else can I do to improve the process? -- George Ho ( talk) 22:28, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
I'm a bit uncomfortable reading WP:NOTUSA and feel that English-speakers who are not from the USA have a legitimate case to make that the use of US has several problems, not least that there are several other countries which use the words "United States" in their title, that US could be misread to mean "us" and that there seems to be an inbuilt assumption that those of us outside of the USA always know how this abbreviation is being used. I'm not suggesting that all pages should be changed (given that from the context it is fairly obvious in many what is being discussed) but given there are bots which go around changing USA to US, it seems to me that WP:NOTUSA is too prescriptive. For example if one was making a list of countries where something applied, wouldn't it be correct to say "During his career, Henry had academic positions in France, Germany and several universities in the USA"? I'm not quite sure what change I'm suggesting, hence the post here.. JMWt ( talk) 15:58, 25 April 2016 (UTC)
Point of order: This discussion is fine if the goal is to develop a proposal to take to WT:MOS. But MOS:NOTUSA should not be modified without a consensus on that page, regardless of what happens here. If everyone present already understands that, please accept my apologies. ― Mandruss ☎ 06:39, 9 May 2016 (UTC)
NimXaif6290 17:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC) M/S wikipedia! It is suggested that you may link wictionary with wikipedia in such a way that pointing towards a general word shows its meaning from wiktionary. This can be applied to the words that are not links. This will make it easy for the readers to learn and to understand wikipedia. I often feel it very difficult to study on wikipedia because I have to search for the meanings as well... Thanks NimXaif6290 17:37, 15 April 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nimrainayat6290 ( talk • contribs)
Articles in Wikipedia are supposed to be timeless: WP:RECENT. However, this suggestion is not about the content of an article, or the long-term notabilty on the article, or the historical perspective. Rather, it is about the verb tenses and other temporal wording used in an article.
We have many articles about events that occurred after the start of Wikipedia in 2001. Often, the initial article was written as the event was unfolding or shortly thereafter, with sections written in the present tense. We also get sentences or sections added about projections into the future, written in future tense. We also get additions about new research added to older articles that are written in present tense and sometimes with projections from the date of the edit into its future. As time goes by, these sentences become incorrect as the future becomes the present and then the past. Sentences also use relative time terms, notably the word "recent". The resulting articles end up seeming unencyclopedic.
When I find such sentences, I try to fix them, but I think we need something a bit more focused than a single editor operating sporadically and independently. As time goes by, the percentage of such articles will increase, because the amount of prior research and potential articles about the past is fixed, while the number of articles about new events is not.
Questions:
Proposal: We should establish a project to review each article for verb tense, on a schedule: one month, one year, and five years after it is created. We should also automatically scan for "relative time" words (i.e., recent, now) and verb constructs. These two scans can be automated and might find the bulk of the offending edits for manual correction by interested editors.
An additional automated scan might identify new edits to older articles, but would require manual review. When a new edit adds a recent reference to an "old" article, it often uses the present tense. It may be possible to simply create a list of such edits for manual review. It may be possible to automatically check these edits for present and future tense.
- Arch dude ( talk) 03:46, 29 April 2016 (UTC)
I have proposal I'd like to float for the idea lab: the creation of a compassion tool for the expressed purpose of allowing editors (more than likely admins) to look at the content of a deleted article and an article on the subject currently under development in a sandbox, draft space, or other area on Wikipedia. I know that we have the basic tech to do that since the copyright bot uses such a tool to look at what we have on site and what is written elsewhere, and I for one and tired of trying to read through deleted versions of an article and someone else's new version to decided if they are different enough to recommend moving forward or close enough to each other to warrant a return to the drawing board. Would that be a good idea? TomStar81 ( Talk) 08:44, 5 May 2016 (UTC)
Quite unconsciously I'm sure, experienced editors tend to oppose change, and here's my take on why they do. First, they were around when things were worse; by comparison, the status quo looks pretty good, and why mess with a (relatively) good thing. Things could get worse again. Second, they have invested a lot in learning how to work within the current very complex system, they are adapted to the way things are, and (scientifically proven fact) change of any kind is stressful on or off Wikipedia. They've paid their dues, and they quite reasonably feel they've earned some stability.
There is a full grab-bag of reasonable-sounding arguments to oppose pretty much anything one wants to oppose; the greater one's mastery of that arguments toolkit, the more effective they are in Wikipedia debates. This, combined with the requirement for clear consensus for any disputed change, is why very little progress ever occurs at Wikipedia, and status quo reigns. It just doesn't take that much to kill a clear consensus, folks. There is simply too much that is not clearly defined in p&g, per WP:CREEP, so most of the time all that's required is 40% of the participants making Oppose arguments that sound somewhat reasonable.
I often wonder how Wikipedia got as far as it has; we have a ton of pretty good infrastructure and policy. It couldn't have been by exhaustive (and exhausting) discussion of every minute detail, by anyone who cared to participate, as we do now. There must have been a lot more bold action going on, with a lot less resistance to it, by people who had enough competence to do things reasonably well (this last part is key). There are too many cooks in the kitchen—anyone on the planet with Internet access and some English language skills can be a cook—and the broth is suffering. There remains ample room for improvement on en-wiki, but institutional inertia is stifling progress.
The solution? I don't know, but I do know that some change is sorely needed. Perhaps multiple sub-kitchens, each with an area of responsibility, with project-wide authority within that area. The community would agree to abide by their decisions; the community could lobby them for change, but their decisions would be binding. Committees, if you will, with membership of no more than perhaps 15 active editors. A candidate member would have to demonstrate competence in that area—a simpler and, I would hope, less contentious version of RfA. A bad member could be voted off the island by a simple majority of the others (if 51% feel they need to go, they are at least problematic, and the project would be better served by someone else).
Example: A documentation committee that would have free rein to develop, implement, and maintain site-wide formatting conventions for p&g, help, and template doc pages, with no authority to change the meaning therein. Example 2: An MOS committee that would have authority over all MOS guidance. I for one would readily abide by any style-related decisions of a panel of 10 or 15 editors qualified (with at least some credentials) in the area of style. Epic battles like comma-before-Jr? Gone forever. Thank you Lord.
Bureaucracy? Yes. Necessary bureaucracy? I think so. Power in the hands of too few? Given the alternative, not in my opinion.
Obviously there would be details to be worked out. I don't presume to have all the answers, but there should be workable solutions to any concerns. No doubt some areas would need to remain outside of committees. I'm basically just testing the water and seeking some constructive discussion, which are two of the purposes of this page. ― Mandruss ☎ 11:22, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
If your goal is to employ a set of experts to build a style guide, then hire experts.- That would work too, if the community would accept it and WMF would pay for it. Same goes for the doc. ― Mandruss ☎ 04:01, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
In reality, the dozen people most competent to edit MOS (to continue with that example, or pick another like WP:MEDRS) are the dozen editors who have most shaped it over the last 15 years. There are literally no other people one earth more competent at it, because there are no people who have that much experience observing what does and does not work in that topic (the MOS sphere, or the MEDRS sphere, or whatever) at WP, both from a reader perspective and an editorial community perspective. The last thing we could ever need is some pontificating asshat from the editorial board of The Chicago Manual of Style or New Hart's Rules (or the American Medical Association or FDA) being invited to come here and dictate how WP has to be written. To focus again on MOS in particular: Anyone familiar with style guides will notice that all of them sharply conflict with each other, and they are in competition for publishing-marketplace dominance. There is no one way to write English, even in a formal or semi-formal register.
A related issue is that credentials really don't mean much, and come with baggage. I guarantee you I know more about most style matters and their application to WP writing than average literature, English, or linguistics professors, because they spend most of their time writing lesson plans and grading papers, and trying to get new research on obscure topics published in journals, while a large amount of my own time is spend painstakingly comparing details in style guides from around the world, and keeping current with their new editions at all times, then working with other experienced editors here to figure out how to apply this information to both our articles on English and our own style guide. MoS, and our other guidelines and policies, are functional because they're written by Wikipedians who do the homework to make them functional, not because someone waving a curriculum vitae shows up and makes an argument to authority about their own opinion on the basis of their job title.
This problem will also arise if we were to erect some kind of medical advisory committee, or astronomy advisory committee, etc. They'll all be mired in baggage of professionals trying to promote their views with official WP imprimatur, instead of the current system of people who give a damn following WP content policies to create articles based on a neutral review of largely secondary literature. Specialists hate this approach, and always want to turn to bleeding-edge primary research (especially if it happens to cite them themselves). This has basically already been tried, by the split-off project Citizendium, and it basically collapsed under the weight of its own bureaucracy.
I do agree that there are too many cooks spoiling the broth in various areas, but that's just the nature of the beast. It will always be a problem with style matters, because all native speakers (and many fluent non-native ones) are utterly convinced that their preferences are norms that must be enforced and that every other way to write is "wrong". That's never going to change, to MoS (and related, e.g. AT and naming conventions, and RM) pages are always going to be fraught with unusual levels of dispute. It's not because they're broken, it's just because of human nature about language, especially in a language with no central "authority" like French has, exerting something of a normalizing force (and much less of one that they wish they had). A simpler potential solution to the cooks-and-broth problem at MoS and other policypages would be disallow their being edited by anons or even by registered users who are not autoconfirmed. Make an incremental protection-level change. (Full protection and no changes made except by {{ Editprotected}} after a consensus discussion probably would not work, for the very problem you lead with: change is resisted just to resist change. And it would still permit admins to make changes without consensus, and plenty of them want to. Another actually effective mechanisms is this: If you care about the stability that MoS provided, and this continuing, watchlist all the MOS and related pages, and resist PoV-pushing attempts to alter them, especially if they're motivated by editor, wikiproject, or off-WP concerns, not by reader needs. — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽ʌⱷ҅ᴥⱷʌ≼ 21:37, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
References
Has anyone ever proposed a blacklist on usernames? This month, I've spent a bit of time countering vandalism, eventually frequently ending up on the Special:Log/newusers page. We can observe that most users registering don't actually make edits. However, we sometimes (maybe often) get offensive usernames or those that are misleading (i.e. have "admin" or "bot" in their names). Those that counter new user vandalism will be the ones that can best vouch for this.
If we had some sort of English-language username blacklist, we could potentially alleviate Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention from very offensive stuff, such as those that appear at MediaWiki:Titleblacklist.
Any thoughts, suggestions, or archived discussions we should note? — Andy W. ( talk · contrib) 05:09, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
*FU[C(K]+K+ <newaccountonly|antispoof>
is one of the regex lines, how did
2 and
3 get through? (My regex foo is very weak, I'll admit).To get a rough idea of just how many false positives would be caught by an automated filter, just look at Wikipedia:Usernames for administrator attention/Bot, where I would say at between 50%-90% of "offensive usernames" at any given time are false positives (as I write this, Papacita1 "contains the offensive term Paki with a c substituted for a k", Adcockp "contains the string cock" and Vicfuxntxs "contains the string fux" are all listed there). Unless and until they start editing, potentially offensive usernames are the least of our problems, given that they're invisible to readers unless and until they actually make an edit. ‑ Iridescent 15:07, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
I wonder if wikipedia would consider revising the guidelines it uses for summarizing notable non-fiction and academic work. Specifically, I mean work such as: Silent_Spring, Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century. These examples are random, but they contain somewhat different "content" and "contents" sections.
Ideally, any revised guidelines would recommend a more formal structure for providing accessible, digestible summaries of work. Perhaps: i. a short, whole book summary and then, ii. short, individual chapter summaries. Any additional information would not describe minutiae, nor provide opinion or commentary on the content, just make somewhat extended descriptive claims that provide a succinct summary of the work (in whole or part).
From what I can tell this is not against any current MOS guidelines. Indeed the text below seems to support such an idea: "...articles on works of non-fiction, including documentaries, research books and papers, religious texts, and the like, should contain more than a recap or summary of the works' contents. Such articles should be expanded to have broader coverage" ( Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not).
Guidelines like this already seem to exist for providing plot summaries for movies ( Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Film#Plot). Perhaps equivalent guidelines could be developed for notable non-fiction / academic works. Incidentally, I note that a dormant proposal for a similar, but separate, wikimedia project already exists ( Wikisummary). Importantly, the current suggestion would be to incorporate this additional information within existing wikipedia page entries.
I would appreciate any feedback. Apologies in advance if I've missed the page(s) that already deal with this issue, but I couldn't obviously find it (e.g. Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style/Contents#Topic- and culture-specific guidelines). Mvdct ( talk) 16:37, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
There is no universal set length for a synopsis, though it should not be excessively long. While longer descriptions may appear to provide more data to the reader, a more concise summary may in fact be more informative as it highlights the most important elements.is the totality of the "Synopsis" section), and links to some examples, and a list of Featured Articles on books which might help. Pam D 21:55, 11 May 2016 (UTC)
John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library loses its comma, but Talk:John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Memorial Parkway#Requested move 2 March 2015 was closed as "not moved" regarding the page. Somehow, TPTB decided in RFC to omit commas to go for the flow and ignore RMs. I tried case-by-case method, but I get criticized for it. Somehow, another person did that case-by-case method, but he doesn't get criticized. Anyway, the omission of commas without further discussions since a latest RM irks me, but that's how consensus decided at RFC. I'm almost running out of ideas, and I don't know where to create a central discussion about ignored RMs. -- George Ho ( talk) 09:49, 16 May 2016 (UTC)
pluralized per RfC at WP:VPP despite previous lack of consensus at RM.But, per WP:LOCALCON, community consensus trumps local consensus (or lack of local consensus), so there is no problem. As for
Same for the commas?, I'm not sure what you're asking, but I would oppose any new action regarding the commas. If you agree with that, thank you and I think we're done here. ― Mandruss ☎ 17:10, 17 May 2016 (UTC)
I have recently joined Wikimedia Foundation as an intern as part of Google Summer of Code 2016.
My project aims to build an accuracy review bot for Wikipedia[ T129536]. The idea is to build a bot that detects outdated or inaccurate content and flags them and sends them for review to the reviewers. In order to define important areas to start off with, I browsed through the Wikipedia:Backlog categories. I am keen on knowing which categories are the most urgent, the easiest to do, the hardest (and why). Also, how are these backlog lists generated? How much of it is automated and how many entries are manually entered? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.225.100.51 ( talk) 20:45, 17 May 2016 (UTC) Prnkmp28 ( talk) 20:47, 17 May 2016 (UTC)prnkmp28
Should we revive this project? This might take some work, but I think it could be done. BlackVolt ( talk) 20:13, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
The standard usage on Wikipedia for a city, state is to link to Rockville, Maryland as [[Rockville, Maryland|Rockville]], [[Maryland]] would a template (call it CSL) which would look like {{CSL|Rockville, Maryland}} which would turn into the above link be useful? This would end up being used considerably, I think, so I thought I would ask here rather than the requested template page. (Not sure if it is too US Centric) Naraht ( talk) 20:08, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
[[Rockville, Maryland|]], [[Maryland]]
avoids repetition of the city name while producing the same result,
Rockville,
Maryland. This should work for any title containing a comma or parentheses.—
Odysseus
147
9 20:21, 19 May 2016 (UTC)[[Rockville, Maryland]]
giving
Rockville, Maryland, see
WP:SPECIFICLINK. There should be no need to use two links when one works perfectly well. If people don't know where Maryland is, they're not likely to know where Rockville, Md is either. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 22:32, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
I think that this is a good idea because, without all of the loading glitches that there were before, it was a useful tool. I was recently on the Spanish wikipedia, and it has visual editing enabled, and it was a lot better and easier to understand. It was just too glitchy before. Now I might just have it disabled, please comment if you still have it, but this is something I want to see back, especially because the English Wikipedia is the one with the most information on it, it should have all of the features. [User:Williditor|Williditor] ([User talk:Williditor|WikiWilly]) 16:02, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
Idea: Start a sort of "main page for Wikipedia editors", essentially a combination of the Dashboard, the Signpost, and a few other features, such as these:
Hello all!
I'm not sure if this is the right place for this. If not, I'll be happy to post in the proper place if you could tell me where that is!
I have an idea for categories. As I don't yet know proper terminology for either categorization or coding, I have an example which I hope makes my idea clear. I'll be happy to make more examples or talk to anyone who gets what I mean! :)
Now to the actual example.
Category "Law Museums in the United States" exists
Law Museums in United States = Law Museums in "CountryName" = "MuseumType" in United States
Automatically create 2 categories.
Law Museums in "Country" (which "Law Museums in the United States" will be moved to, and create empty categories "Law Museums in China", "Law Museums in Greece", etc.)
"MuseumType" in United States (which "Law Museums in the United States" will be moved to, and create empty "History Museums in the United States", "Science Museums in the United States", etc.)
JonathanHopeThisIsUnique ( talk) 03:24, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
I think it would be a great idea to setup either a future ping, or a webpage listing username, article, date and reason for ping. Many articles need to be updated after a certain date, and it's up to the editor to remember to go to that article and edit. If I know that in three weeks I will need to update, I should be able to either setup a future ping, or it might be easier to have a page with a bot that pings based on the entry. Sir Joseph (talk) 13:40, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
I would like to open a discussion, prompted by an actual incident which may not be fixable but perhaps we can discuss how to prevent it going forward.
Most of you are aware that it is not difficult for an editor to create a brand-new page which contains blatantly false or harassing information. These creations are often detected early, tagged as CSD G10 and deleted quickly. The admin dashboard highlights any such candidate in red, and is one of the highest priorities for deletion. Because of this rapid response, it is possible that many editors have not run across such pages. However, in the course of a year the number of such pages probably numbers in the hundreds, perhaps thousands.
I see two potential problems. One potential problem is based upon my belief that Google is very quick to spider new pages and may be faster at this than in the past. I don't have specific knowledge about the Google process so I might be mistaken on this, but my impression is that if an attack page was deleted quickly in the past it might never show up in a Google search and if Google is quicker about adding pages to their list this might change.
However, that's not my main concern. My main concern is that we permit other parties to copy and reuse material from Wikipedia. Some of these third parties are quite aggressive and quite timely and make copies of such pages before they are deleted. In the specific case which prompted this discussion (which I will not link for obvious reasons) an attack page was created, deleted within seven hours of creation, but scraped by an outside party in the interim. A Google search of the subject's name brings up content, probably false but embarrassing.
While the official response appears to be that we have no control over third parties I think it is our moral duty to think through whether we can do better.
My off the top of the head thought is that we might change your procedure so that any new article created by some class of editors (perhaps unconfirmed) is non-indexed and not subject to the creative Commons license until it has been reviewed by the NPP.
I fully realize this is a nontrivial concept, and might require changes to the media wiki software, but I'd like to find some way so that if some third-party does scrape such content we have a legal basis for requesting removal.-- S Philbrick (Talk) 13:27, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
There is currently a discussion at WT:New pages patrol about dealing with skeleton articles with very little content by new editors. At present these articles are commonly proposed for deletion. The only policy question is how long should a new page patrol reviewer wait before proposing these articles for deletion. The question has been raised of whether PRODding these articles is biting the newbie, and whether some other approach should be taken. One idea that has some support is that a reviewer should be able to move an article from article space to AFC draft space if it clearly isn't appropriate for article space. Since there is presently no rule saying that this can't be done, but no rule saying that it can be done, it will be a case of Ignore All Rules. However, if rules need ignoring on a regular basis (rather than a one-time basis), then maybe rules should be changed. Moving new articles by new editors that clearly don't belong in article space into draft space seems to me to be a reasonable compromise, neither going too far to encourage new editors and avoid the dreaded "bite" nor being too aggressive toward new editors. Comments? Robert McClenon ( talk) 02:15, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
I am of two minds on this issue. I think it would be beneficial to have this as an option for NPP reviewers however I am mindful that this can be seen as a kind of 'back door delete'. I believe the primary purpose of NPP is to insure that new articles meet a certian minimum standard. In most cases, where there is an editor who is activly working on a new article PROD is useless and stubbing the article will be restisted as well. In those cases moving to draft is the best option and I believe forming some consensus to allow this will help avoid IAR drama down the road.
As to the matter of 'filling up AfC' I believe this is less of an issue because the only articles I thing this should apply to are ones where there is an active author. If there is no active author stubbing is, in my opinion, the proper solution for an article likely to pass notability and PRODing otherwise. (This assumes the article is not caught in one of the 'mass dePROD' events - then we end up clogging up AfD. I also note I get more complaints about AfDing articles which could have been PRODed than vice versa.)
Jbh Talk 13:31, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
I would like to propose a new policy/guideline of allowing the customization of templates to deal with persistent and specific editing problems on articles that are not covered by general templates. The main type of problem this would address is when multiple editors pass through an article and make the same good faith but incorrect edit to an article. An example is Berenstain Bears, where there is an ongoing problem of people thinking they are correcting the spelling of the name by changing it to 'Berenstein. As I assume good faith, I assume most of the people who are doing this are simply failing to check the talk page before making this edit, and therefore are unaware that the regular editors of this page have confirmed the correct spelling multiple times. A template at the top of the article might prevent these good faith edits, something like this is what I had in mind:
The Berenstain Bears' spelling has been extensively confirmed to be spelled BerenSTAIN. Please do not change the spelling to any other version (eg. Bearnstein, Berenstein, etc.) Any attempts to do so will be immediately reverted. |
I have discussed this with one other editor on the talk page, her main objection seems to be that there is no precedence for this, but I believe that WP:BOLD and WP:IGNORE may apply, as at one time certainly all of Wikipedia's now-standard practices were innovations. But perhaps new policy or guideline allowing such customized templates but giving criteria for their use and format would prevent prevent forseeable problems. Can anyone think of possible problems with this and possible guidelines to prevent those problems? Mmyers1976 ( talk) 15:49, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
It is generally accepted that different map projections create wildlify different impressions from the same data Gall-Peters Projection, Mercator Projection, Dymaxion Map.
The suggestion is to create a simple interface to which a user can upload a map created in a one of a range of projections, dragging their map to fit over a 'template' of that projection. This would then automatically re-project the map onto a simple globe that could be manipulated in an online viewer using the mouse.
Clearly this would involve some effort, but the storage space for processed maps need not be significantly larger than the original files, and the viewer could be quite light.
The final implementation would users to process maps already uploaded to Wikipedia and place a clickable 'view as globe' icon next to any, map on a wikipedia page that had been processed.
Stub Mandrel ( talk) 06:55, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
I'm thinking of proposing something that requires technical coding etc to implement..(creating a log of the history of all unblock requests going forward showing whether they had been granted/approved to increase transparency)..if people thought this was a good idea how would it go about being implemented (who would code it etc...I certainly don't know how).. 68.48.241.158 ( talk) 13:12, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
There is plenty of transparency, it is just not indexed the way you like. Unblock requests are tracked through categories, and while the software does track what pages are in a category now it does not log when they are added and removed.
This means you can get the information but it will take some effort on your part. There is the block log, this logs every block and unblock. Choose your time period, look up all the blocks, then go through the talk page history on each one to see how it turned out.
This will take some work so I guess it depends on how much you want this information. We do have an API if you want to try and automate it. HighInBC 17:35, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
The mw:API is a means to access the logs and content of Wikipedia through an automated tool. I don't think anybody is going to do your research for you, but the information is there if you want to get it. HighInBC 18:14, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
( edit conflict) I'd also add that I don't think you have any idea of the scale of what you're suggesting, when you talk about logging every unblock—let alone every block—at a single page. As of June 2014 (which is when the logs stop for technical reasons owing to the Labs move), 90,165 unblocks and 2,693,123 blocks had been performed. ‑ Iridescent 18:17, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
Around 2 weeks ago, there was
a proposal at
Wikipedia talk:Page mover to include the mergehistory
right in the user group. However, this proposal was generally shot down by the community, mainly because the two rights are very different to each other. That's why I'm putting forward the idea of creating a new user group, specifically for history merges. There are very large backlogs at both
Wikipedia:WikiProject History Merge and
Category:Possible cut-and-paste moves, some of which go years back. Few admins are active in those areas, so I feel that the creation of this permission would help to clear the backlog. This user right would be especially helpful for those who constantly find themselves tagging articles with {{
histmerge}}, but unable to perform the merge themselves.
Omni Flames
let's talk about it 07:07, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
mergehistory
requires (or implies?) being granted deletion and restoration rights, and due to actual legal implications the bar to be granted those permissions is quite high; WMF has stated they want users to pass "an RfA-like process" before being granted those permissions. Along with sorting as Ricky81682 suggested, it might be a good idea to train some users to clerk the requests, if we think that there are some that aren't actually history merge candidates, or are otherwise problematic.
Ivanvector 🍁 (
talk) 14:29, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
mergehistory
user-right. It's limited enough that incompetence can be easily un-done by an administrator (and the bit summarily revoked). I would be even more enthusiastic about giving wider access to an even-more-limited tool that only allowed merges where the edit history was completely non-overlapping (which is the typical case for cut-and-paste moves) and where the actions were written to a log that could be easily watchlisted to spot incompetence (or simple one-off goofs). This would be very low-risk and would free up administrators to do the more complex merges. As someone who has slapped {{
histmerge}} on many a page that was copy-and-pasted from an
WP:Articles for creation submission or a draft article, and as the person who
added the |details=
parameter to the histmerge template back in 2013, I would find having this userright very helpful to me and very helpful in freeing up the time of administrators who do the simple history merges today because nobody else can.
davidwr/(
talk)/(
contribs) 03:26, 2 June 2016 (UTC)How many Wikipedians have read this work? I am sure they will recognize something of themselves in it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.199.65.2 ( talk) 17:48, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Hi, all.
First of all, if here is not the correct place to post this, please just let me know. I'll be happy to move it.
Last year I created a website called BetterWaysWiki https://betterwayswiki.com/. It was created as a place where people can share better-ways ideas to do things. Sharing high-quality better-ways ideas, I think, will help to accelerate human advancement to achieve higher quality-of-life.
The website itself has the following key points behind it:
The About Us and Help pages can be found at https://betterwayswiki.com/us/ and https://betterwayswiki.com/help/ respectively.
I've posted a few articles on the website, and on hand, I still have a few hundred other potential subjects.
Undoubtedly I'll need a lot of help to grow the website to make it as valuable as possible to as many people as possible. After some thoughts and some consultations with Wikipedia community engagement staffs, I decided to pitch the idea here to try to get some valuable feedbacks, pointers and, hopefully, supports. For Wikipedia itself, I believe that BetterWaysWiki can help contribute to bringing in more visitors especially for niche and not yet widely known subjects - BetterWaysWiki articles are just summary of better-ways ideas; it almost certain needs to include links to other sources like Wikipedia for details of each component inside.
So please don't hesitate at all to give me your thoughts, questions or requests here as I'll consider it for the future of BetterWaysWiki. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.126.130.140 ( talk) 10:19, 26 May 2016 (UTC)
I want to give the idea of new user group known as Helper, and their work is to help all other editors (mostly newusers). But wait, Why we need helpers?? Because new users dont know much about wikipedia, they do vandalism,etc. Example: Me ( Mujtaba!). Just Think about it-- 🍁 Mujtaba 🌴 14:37, 2 June 2016 (UTC)
Other users also help newbies, but for helpers "Only helping Clearly"-- 🍁 Mujtaba 🌴 14:39, 2 June 2016 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mujtaba! ( talk • contribs)
I was thinking about taking this to WT:ITN, but maybe I'll discuss it here instead. What makes any story "newsworthy" and deserve a blurb? Due to the "success" of RD trial, which the trial runners call it, perhaps we'll try something on ITN as well. I fear it might bring disaster on ITN, so how do we (not just I) construct a looser trial ITN to bring in more stories? -- George Ho ( talk) 03:44, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
I was wondering if there are any guidelines on whether documentaries can be used as references. In case we can determine that a certain documentary is an acceptable source, then the next step would be creating a specific cite documentary template for them. Which would mention the exact second a certain fact is mentioned, the imdb number e.t.c.-- Catlemur ( talk) 20:38, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
As seen with Yannick Ferreira Carrasco (forgot how to add link as I'm watching final now), it's become quite noticeable in and out of Wikipedia that during big sports finals, especially football,with the Euro's coming up aswell you get people changing names short facts and intros. I think that maybe we should consider blocking sports personals involved. Though I'm not sure if it will be possible to implement or really stop the problem. I'm sure we'll see changes to the wikipage of the player who scores the winner. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DJBay123 ( talk • contribs) 20:56, 28 May 2016 (UTC)
r.e. Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Linking
How about using colour coding to deal with any 'overlinking' hazard; use the similarity between page topics (vector distance? something like word2vec on the graph structure of pages?) to pick out the most important links on a page, and de-emphasise anything deemed an 'overlink' (fainter shade of blue). Also deal with multiple links automatically. (only highlight one).
On another note, colour coding any links to the user's watchlist might be nice too (emphasise the pages away from a users deliberately chosen domain?). (default = de-emphasize probably, but you could make a preference to emphasise instead)
r.e. Red Links, why not just de-emphasize them by default (and keep a user preference to view them , for editors who want to fix them)
Links ,surely, make the wikipedia data resource more valuable - it's labelled text.. the more the better? They could help disambiguate for translation software? .. and accelerate reaching the future where we can make natural language queries and so on.. Fmadd ( talk) 23:34, 10 June 2016 (UTC)
I'd be slightly concerned that the color inconsistencies could be confusing for people not used to the site. It's easier from a user interface perspective to use a simple, consistent theme. But otherwise, not the worst idea in the world. Praemonitus ( talk) 19:14, 13 June 2016 (UTC)
Wouldn't it be better if Wikipedia had a 'See also on' section on the sidebar with links to the same subject on other wikis (including the sister-projects under Wikimedia)? I was thinking (for example) of wikia.com, ProofWiki and OSDev wiki - they all offer in-depth information or technical knowledge on specific topics. Also, I think that a link on the sidebar for authors to their Wikisource Author: pages would be more accessible than the same link at the bottom of the page. This would allow Wikipedia to remain a general-purpose encyclopedia, while still offering links for more in-depth technical knowledge. I think it will also help with WP:NOT#Wikipedia_is_not_a_manual.2C_guidebook.2C_textbook.2C_or_scientific_journal. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Mostanes ( talk • contribs) 07:45, 7 May 2016 (UTC)
Link rot is starting to become prevalent in many articles with references to old blog posts that no longer exist. My idea is to start using Internet Web Archives as a way to keep the cited resources available for others to access and refer to.
For example: See this article's 1st reference link. If you click on the first reference link, it will link you to "Page not found" error page. This is an issue if Wikipedia continues to cite resources without the ability to obtain a snapshot of what the resources look like.
Tom mai78101 00:25, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
Wikipedia articles on disaster events are the number one search query when searching for any disaster. Many of the contributors to these pages are experts in the disaster research community. As a senior research scientist at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Center for Disaster Risk Management and Risk Reduction Technology (CEDIM), I have reveiewed pages documenting disasters since 2010. The quality of documentation and type of information documented is variable from event to event. I have also found that for events after 2010, 70% of the edits are made within the first two weeks of an event. Some pages such as Hurricane Katrina and the Indian Ocean Tsunami are getting upwards of 100,000 views - 10 years later. Wikipedia has served as a popular source of information on disasters for the lay person and in many cases, professional and practitioners in the disaster field. The amount of traffic wikipedia gets on disaster information probably makes it one of the most - if not the most - consulted resource for documentation of disasters worldwide.
Globally there are many efforts and international bodies to study properly document disasters. One of this is our own initiative at CEDIM established in 2011 called the Near Real-time Forensic Disaster Analysis research program. We investigate disasters as they are happening and systematically document these events through our reports which are releasted within days of the events and followed up periodically.
The idea
How to make it happen
We can hit the road running in the next large disaster event and the idea will show is own value. What do you think? ― Bkhazai ☎ 7:15, 3 June 2016 (UTC)
New reliable research findings are published regularly. See, for example the PLoS – Public Library of Science at: http://www.plos.org/ and many otters mentioned at: https://www.lib.utexas.edu/engin/guides/alumni.html
When Wikipedia becomes a complete repository of the world’s knowledge, then each of these newly published research findings will: 1) confirm an existing knowledge claim, 2) introduce a new knowledge claim, or 3) cast doubt on an existing knowledge claim.
I recommend we begin thinking about this influx of new knowledge systematically. For example, if Wikipedia provided a place where each newly published journal was analyzed, then each new article could be (tentatively linked) to the corresponding existing Wikipedia page. For example there is a recently published research paper titled: “The Great Migration and African-American Genomic Diversity” See: http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1006059 If this article presents new and reliable findings, then these findings have some bearing on the existing Wikipedia article on these subjects such as Great Migration (African American)
Under this proposal, the existing Great Migration article might have a (dedicated) Talk page section that links to the newly published research article. This link would have been created (semi-automatically) by the person who browsed the new research article. Over time, editors of the existing article can evaluate the newly published research to determine if it warrants a citation within the existing article, or requires the text of the existing article to be altered to reflect these new findings. In any case, interested readers can browse these newly published research articles to stay up-to-date on the topic. -- Lbeaumont ( talk) 13:18, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
AN/I seems to have a persistent problem with editors starting threads on other editors and not notifying them. Could some sort of automatic notification be set up to do so? Chickadee46 ( talk) 20:31, 9 June 2016 (UTC)
{{ANI-notify|username}}
could generate the same link as {{u|username}}
. I don't know, but it might be technically possible for such a template to generate the notification at
User talk:username. That would save some effort, but it would not address the problem you describe, that of missed notifications. For the most part, it would only be used by editors who have the competence and the energy to do it the existing way. It might result in a few notifications by posters who know they should notify but are simply too lazy to expend the additional effort, but imo not enough of them to justify the developer effort and the
feature creep. ―
Mandruss
☎ 00:49, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Please fill in the "username of editor(s) being discussed" field. This will automatically notify the editor(s) you are discussing.
Chickadee46 ( talk) 02:21, 11 June 2016 (UTC)
Early news rushed to slap the terrorism label on the Orlando attack, Wikipedia editors rushed to reflect that in the article, and now it looks like that may have been significantly overstated. From NPR, dated Thursday the 16th: "As investigators continue to delve into the life of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, the evidence is beginning to suggest the killings may have more in common with a traditional mass shooting than an ISIS-inspired terrorist attack." [8]
This is hardly an isolated case. And it's not just about disseminating misleading information. Article talk is often utter chaos as frenzied editors struggle to resolve conflicting early news reports, one minute detail after another. Quite often the conflict cannot be resolved that early, so we are forced to hedge our language in the article—"Some sources say..."—and then a few days later that has to be updated (after another round of discussion about whether it's appropriate to do so). What if we just backed off and waited awhile for things to settle down? My idea is a one-month delay on Wikipedia coverage of major events including airliner crashes and mass killings. Full list of categories to be determined.
I'm certain hundreds of thousands (millions?) of readers are used to coming to Wikipedia for concise summaries of breaking news, and it would be painful to change their habits. I do not discount or dismiss that pain at all. But "real-time encyclopedia" is an oxymoron, and in my opinion we need to cease trying to be that. News outlets often (if not usually) get important things wrong in the beginning, Wikipedia readers read it during the early days and then move on, and they have other things in their lives that prevent them from coming back after two weeks to see what's changed. In our fast-paced and busy world, a huge number of people have short attention spans for current events, and that is not going to get anything but worse. The Wikipedia editors addicted to the newsroom adrenaline rush of working with breaking news would have to move to Wikinews for that fix, and readers would have to gradually make the transition. If Wikinews does not have a single place to go for the concise summary of a breaking news story, it could and should. That certainly belongs there more than here.
I'm aware of the general disclaimer. How many readers do we suppose are aware of that and keep it in mind when they read these articles? I prefer to confine my thinking to the real world, not legalistic arguments. The GD is little more than lawsuit protection.
I would welcome any discussion of this issue here, or a pointer to meta if this is seen as wrong venue (I've never visited meta, and that's probably something I need to learn anyway). ― Mandruss ☎ 08:44, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
a traditional mass shooting- this makes it sound like it's normal to have a mass shooting in the USA every year or so, like Groundhog Day is a tradition. Anyway, we cannot ask people to hold off for a month, because there will always be people who want to get in first, won't read the guidelines, probably are newbies. -- Redrose64 ( talk) 10:54, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
up-to-date factsand up-to-date fiction. ― Mandruss ☎ 12:30, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
I'll go ahead and ask the question that I know is coming, if this doesn't just die from lack of interest.
Q: Well doesn't this just move all those problems to Wikinews? Same misleading early information, same chaos in article talk, etc.
A: Partly. But in that venue, readers are far more likely to take things with a large grain of salt. Hell, Wikinews could slap a big red disclaimer permanently at the top of every article page. As for the chaos, good point. I guess there's no avoiding that with developing stories, but it would at least be in a news venue rather than an encyclopedia. I doubt they agonize a lot over article titles there, worrying about COMMONNAME and disambiguation and such, so that part of the problem would go away. ―
Mandruss
☎ 16:31, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
"WP:NOTNEWS" is the most outrageously misnamed and misused policy on Wikipedia.Point taken. I hereby retract that sentence. Nevertheless, "real-time encyclopedia" is an oxymoron. And all the great things you say about developing stories at Wikipedia could be said about developing stories at Wikinews, the more appropriate venue for that. ― Mandruss ☎ 17:47, 18 June 2016 (UTC)
streamline the generation of glossary & 'list of..' pages using "Micro-articles"; simpler for users and reducing manual redirects/anchors etc.
Some tool splits existing glossary/'list-of' pages into individual "micro-articles". automatically guess categories for new 'small pages' from wording, 'in foobar, baz is ....'
currently I find myself wanting to create all sorts of redirects to terms & re-work articles to create additional anchors to increase the 'link fidelity' (knowing that links are a potential form of labelled data for AI), but these may be more complex to manage. e.g. what if you create a term in a summary and eventually it gets an article, but there's all sorts of conflicting redirects to either the glossary entry or the full article
compiling micro-articles, perhaps deal with parsing some standard formats like "in <foo> , <title> is <content>.." which compress to <title> : <content> when rendered in the 'glossary/category' page for <foo> - or do the reverse. Perhaps auto-assign category from 'in <foo> ..'
— Preceding unsigned comment added by Fmadd ( talk • contribs)
EDIT: if worried about 'overlinking', the software could filter out some of the links based on importance. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fmadd ( talk • contribs) 07:14, 20 June 2016
I'm concerned about a practice I've noticed for many years when articles that would fail to meet notability guidelines are created and then immediately redirected to another (but notable) article and a specific subsection. These redirects are often picked up by Google and other search sites. And perhaps these are useful, however I am concerned when BLP's are involved. Per WP:BLP (emphasis added)
Biographies of living persons ("BLPs") must be written conservatively and with regard for the subject's privacy. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a tabloid: it is not Wikipedia's job to be sensationalist, or to be the primary vehicle for the spread of titillating claims about people's lives; the possibility of harm to living subjects must always be considered when exercising editorial judgment.
I've raised this at BLP/N, but I think this needs a bit of a wider audience, so please forgive me if this seems like canvassing. The immediate issue at hand is the List of Guantanamo Bay detainees, but this is just an example of one of many lists that may be of concern. The list is comprised of several hundred people. While several of the people on the "list" pass Wikipedia's notability guidelines, the majority do not. So we have a list comprised of no links, blue links and red links. Several of the links such as Mustafa Ahmed Hamlily have been redirected to other articles (in this instance Algerian detainees at Guantanamo Bay). One can presume that is because it was determined that these people did not meet GNG. Some of the BLP articles were created with just a redirect, bypassing a stub altogether. I apologize for not providing an example, but this "create/redirect" type of articles exists in many "list" type articles. Regardless, a BLP article exists only to redirect a user to another article.
If the subject is not notable, is this not a privacy concern? What if I'm an employer and I google someone who, while not notable returns a hit as a "detainee"? This could obviously be prejudicial. The "red links" also pose a concern for similar reasons. Just having one's name pop up in a Wikipedia article could raise a red flag. At what point does linking cross the line of verifying reliable sources to possibly causing the subject harm? That man from Nantucket ( talk) 08:42, 19 June 2016 (UTC)
Consider Robert G. Smith (educator). I came across him when I worked on the article on Libby Garvey. He was in charge of the Arlington County Board of Education, for a decade or so, during the time Garvey was a trustee. A exchange they had, during his job interview, was notable enough to be quoted, paraphrased, or referred to, in several RS.
That made him notable enough to merit a wikilink in the Garvey article.
It turned out that Robert G. Smith was a bluelink, but because my guy had a namesake, and I found a redirect. I converted that redirect to a disambiguation page, and added my guy, as per the DAB rules. I added an entry for Robert G. Smith (candidate, 1968) who had been linked in United States House of Representatives elections, 1968 to Robert G. Smith (aviator).
You excised the entry for the educator, with the edit summary "Red link". I've already pointed out to you, that this excision was not consistent with WP:Manual of Style/Disambiguation pages#Red links. Inexplicably, you left the other redlink, to Robert G. Smith (candidate, 1968), although it too was a redlink
As I have tried to discuss with you, contributors are authorized to create wikilinks for individuals when they think they may merit coverage here.
Most editors change pages on their laptop but most readers check Wikipedia on their phone. What we see is not what the reader gets. An article full of info boxes and images may look good on a laptop and terrible on a smaller screen. An editor can resize their edit window to check, but most would not. And if the server software adapts to the viewing device, that effect will not show. Better to have a button at the bottom of the edit window that prompts the editor to preview how the article would look on a typical phone:
The new button would encourage editors to check how the article looks to the normal reader. Comments? Aymatth2 ( talk) 13:50, 14 June 2016 (UTC)
I like the idea of a "mobile preview" button that appears by default. I'm all for seeing how an article looks on multiple platforms, but it's a PITA (pain in the a--) to be tweaking the features in preferences, time-consuming and at times complicated. Montanabw (talk) 03:26, 20 June 2016 (UTC)
Now a proposal. I have started a discussion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)#Mobile view. Thanks to all who contributed with ideas and information here. Aymatth2 ( talk) 14:00, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
Should there be (or is there already) a list of Twitter accounts in Wikipedia namespace, that automatically tweet when someone from a government edits Wikipedia anonymously, like @ParliamentEdits. There are quite a few of these accounts ( @AussieParlEdits, @congressedits, etc. - quite a few accounts listed in the references of CongressEdits) and this list could be useful if editors want to see/check anonymous editing from these organisations, which could help combat vandalism/COI editing. Thanks for your input. Seagull123 Φ 16:58, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
This is a general notice that a new WikiProject has been created: WikiProject Reforming Wikipedia. Its purpose is to improve Wikipedia by promoting policy reforms that will facilitate better-sourced, higher quality content and fairer, more efficient governance systems. This is a new project in the very early stages of development, so please read the page linked above and consider joining if you are interested in helping to improve Wikipedia. Thank you! Biblio ( talk) 17:33, 26 June 2016 (UTC)
Hi all
I'm designing a tool for Visual Editor to make it easy for people to add open license text from other sources, there are a huge number of open license sources compatible with Wikipedia including around 9000 journals. I can see a very large opportunity to easily create a high volume of good quality articles quickly. I have done a small project with open license text from UNESCO as a proof of concept, any thoughts, feedback or endorsements (on the Meta page) would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
John Cummings ( talk) 11:24, 28 June 2016 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
It's become necessary to begin discussing how the community will apply WP:BLUELOCK in articles outside ArbCom jurisdiction or discretionary sanctions. Rather than formulate an RFC in a hurry, let's all take a few days to hash out ideas on how to best implement ECP.
I'll begin by saying that I don't think ECP should be authorized for uses other than sockpuppetry or new, disruptive accounts that can't be controlled by semi-protection. I'm open to other uses but I'm having trouble seeing them right now. Katie talk 15:43, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
{{
pp-30-500}}
doesn't give the full list, since that template is merely a visual reminder: it's not obligatory to add a prot icon template to protected pages. Nor does it provide any reasons for the use of
WP:30/500. The full list is
here. --
Redrose64 (
talk) 11:20, 19 May 2016 (UTC)
I would recommend removing Option B altogether but subsume it into Options C-E as an addendum.
Option C: Allow use on pages that have an established history of particularly persistant and disruptive vandalism which would circumvent semiprotection. Notification is to be left on an appropriate noticeboard (AN, ANI, etc) for community review
Extended confirmed protection is a new level of protection which prevents certain editors from editing protected pages of that type. Those editors must have made at least 500 edits and have been editing for at least 30 days. The edit protection was instituted due to an RFC earlier this year, mostly with the intent of providing for the then-existing arbitration enforcement scope. The Arbitration Committee recently clarified by motion the extent to which the protection level can be used as a form of arbitration enforcement. They declined to answer the question of how it should be used outside that scope. Current policy allows for the protection level to be added as the result of a community discussion. What a community discussion means in the context of the protection policy seems to be ambiguous: A recent request at WP:AN#Reducing List of social networking websites from indefinite full protection to indefinite 30/500 protection would seem to indicate that many editors at that noticeboard believe it to be of the "widely discussed" kind of community, whereas "community" discussion in the context of a ban is a discussion at a noticeboard such as WP:AN or WP:ANI. In addition, Per WP:AN#Extended confirmed protection, there appear to be administrators applying the protection without either the remit from ARBCOM or the community. Given that this is the case, what does the community think "the community" means in the context of this protection level? The previous RFC indicated that WP:RFPP is not an acceptable level. Is it a discussion at WP:AN/ WP:ANI, a discussion at a new community page (such as WP:Requests for page protection/ECP), or should it be authorized broadly within a certain scope a priori by the community (a la the ARBCOM clarification)? If a prior, what is that scope? Straw poll Community discussion is at a noticeboard Community discussion is a broader discussion about use |
There appear to be a number of places (like categories) where redirects are in italics and normal articles are in non-italics. Could that concept be added to the drop-down list on search box? (so that for example, if Phi Gamma Delta is typed into the searchbox, Phi Gamma Delta, Phi Gamma Delta House, and Phi Gamma Delta Fraternity House (University of Minnesota) show up as normal, but Phi Gamma Delta Chapters occurs in italics since it is a redirect. Naraht ( talk) 14:50, 5 July 2016 (UTC)
Not quite sure where to put this idea, but here seems more likely than most... Is there any way to keep track of redlinks where an article exists in another capitalization? For example alpha phi alpha is a redlink, but Alpha Phi Alpha exists. I'd be very hesitant to let a bot at these, but maybe just the top 100 or so out of mainspace? Naraht ( talk) 20:42, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
It's obvious to me that the Edit Summary field is intended for edits being made to Articles. If I make an edit to an article as minor as fixing punctuation or grammar, I don't mind saying so in the Edit Summary for the article.
But Talk Pages aren't articles. And whenever I append an idea to a Talk Page, my submission is already a summary of my idea -- well, at least concise, or else I'm being too wordy.
After making an effort to use as few words as possible when contributing to a Talk page, it always seems annoyingly redundant to me to see the buttons ask for an "Edit Summary." The edit was already summarized, if you get my drift. At worst, the Edit Summary would be a repeat of the submission. At best, the "edit summary" for anything I've ever contributed to a Talk page would always be "I'm making a Talk page contribution," which I never write into that field because I feel it would be redundant to write it every time I contribute to a Talk page.
So when contributing to a Talk page -- I know you're wondering, I leave the Edit Summary field empty, and feel like a radical.
The conflict leaves me feeling unnerved every time I'm asked for an Edit Summary on a Talk page. I always say to my LCD screen, "Duhhh; My Edit Summary is that I'm submitting an idea." That would be my edit-summary, for any Talk page for any article.
Therefore, I'd like to propose removing the effectively-redundant request for the Edit Summary for contributions being appended to Talk pages. Thanks.
Nei1 ( talk) 19:55, 6 July 2016 (UTC)
We have a considerable number of articles with 'merge to' templates that are now several years old (based upon the date listed in the template). These are cluttering up the lead without generating any activity. Could these be cleaned up after some period of time by a bot that migrates the suggestion to a section on the talk page? I.e. x months after the template is added, a bot looks for a matching "Discuss" section on the talk page. If it doesn't find one, then a boilerplate section is added listing the suggestion and the person who posted the template. The bot then removes the 'merge to' template from the article page. Praemonitus ( talk) 19:04, 23 June 2016 (UTC)
I don't feel like we're managing to talk about the same thing. So here's a simple example:
WhatamIdoing ( talk) 18:51, 7 July 2016 (UTC)
"If the proposal is obvious...then a discussion need not even be held."MERGE is not AFD. It's not supposed to be a bureaucratic process with checks and balances and careful consideration. It's basically a plain old edit, which any plain old editor can undo with the plain old WP:UNDO button.
"If there is a consensus against the merger, or, for older proposals, if there is no consensus or no discussion and you don't believe it is appropriate to merge the pages, then please remove the merge proposal tags, and, if necessary, close any discussion."For your convenience, I've highlighted the three words that you accidentally overlooked. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:32, 7 July 2016 (UTC)