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I recently came across List of people named David, which has over 2000 people (including disambiguation pages) linked. It seems to me that this might be easier created and maintained using Wikidata. Well, is it possible with Wikidata now, or do we need to wait for Abstract Wikipedia / Wikifunctions to be ready to do so? If it is possible, how concerning are the Wikidata accuracy issues for a list like this; references aren't really necessary to prove that the articles named "David so-and-so" are about people named David. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 22:54, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi,
This might be a bit if a stretch or currently already underway, but...
What if there was a way you could mix the camera on your phone (like how live cameras translation of another language operates) with wikipedia's vast database of information to help people identify things of the unknown should they stumble across it and think "I wonder what that is"?
Basically it would be like the Pokedex from pokemon which is used to identify a pokemon unknown to that person but would be of use with things on earth here today, plants, animals, items, the works! Everything!
If a user stumbled across something completely original with no information then they could somehow be involved on the information that would pop up,
I.E discovered by John Doe 11/11/2020 and it would bring up or update areas where they were found,
The camera would also have the geotagging function should users want to share the location of their findings,
Anything unknown would automatically send location information to the wiki/app who could send out someone capable of investigating/studying the unknown.
A reward of some kind for original discoveries would see increased use of the app and encourage others to share the app to explore and find other things.
The app itself would cost roughly $20 to download which would really be no huge cost considering the ease of identifying things you aren't familiar with, unless it's a new discovery which would put them first inline for the information discovered after examination and analysis.
Chemicals and probably a few other things would be tricky to identify considering it would rely on the camera talking to wiki to recognize what the user is seeing but 3d objects and most other things with distinct colors/patterns/shapes should work well,
With roughly 7 billion people on the planet and an ad on the site encouraging people to download the new app i reckon there would be at least 1 billion users in the first 5 years based on word of mouth and the constant daily searching from users who would see the ad encouraging them to download it.
Is this a possibility?
Thanks for your time,
Nathan. M — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.62.77.220 ( talk) 21:36, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
So dozens of articles are listed daily on the Portal:Current events. I am thinking about a proposal to make some format, similar to how the daily page view is tracked, to show the dates (or number of times) an article was listed on the Current Event Portal. Not every article would have it, only if people add the “track” will it display the information.
One problem I am thinking of with this is all the COVID articles. If this was proposed, that would be an entirely separate discussion of how to handle all of that messy formalities.
Does anyone else think this could be a good idea to propose? Please feel free to drop any insight (positive or negative) you have about this idea. Thank you (Lead coordinator of WikiProject of Current Events) Elijahandskip ( talk) 17:58, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
Is there any way that the Disclaimers, which are now at the very bottom in small font, can be made more prominent, particularly on the main page? I think this is perhaps the most important information for readers to see about Wikipedia, particularly the Content disclaimer. Many readers and drive-by editors will complain about spoilers, blasphemy, obscene images, and similar things. They are often referred to the disclaimers as a reason this is okay, but few readers will ever see the disclaimers unless they are specifically directed to them. Readers should have the option to turn away from Wikipedia if, for some reason, there is content which they do not want to see. This is particularly important given that Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia; although many of us in the Western world are used to seeing such content and are not particularly disturbed by it, people from other cultures may have other reasons, such as religious obligations, to avoid such material. We need not just our content, but also its presentation to benefit all our readers. As for better placement of the disclaimers, I would suggest going as far as putting a link under "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". If not placed there, the disclaimers could go lower on the main page, or on the sidebar. — Naddruf ( talk ~ contribs) 21:42, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
1.8 billion Muslimsequal only
10% of the world population. M Imtiaz ( talk · contribs) 22:49, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
In the spirit of having less stuff on every page, I think that the tools section of the sidebar could be stripped down. Especially for logged-out readers. This small change would then allow for a tiny bit more whitespace, but every little helps. I've marked in red below the items that I think we can do without from the 'Tools' section. -- Paul ❬ talk❭ 09:31, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
Link | useful to a reader? | useful for most editors? |
---|---|---|
What links here | maybe? | |
Related changes | ||
Special pages | ||
Permanent link | for someone | accessible in history |
Page information | ||
Cite this page | I guess | I guess |
Wikidata item | for someone | |
Download as PDF | I guess | I guess |
Printable version | I guess | I guess |
I make fix edits like this fairly frequently, removing external links that have been inappropriately placed within an article body. Do we have any tools or filters that patrol for this sort of thing? If not, could we develop them? {{u| Sdkb}} talk 20:20, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
We need an abuse filter for detecting socializing on talk pages, especially article talks. Like this:
23:00, 7 January 2021:
Example (
talk |
contribs) triggered
filter (number), performing the action "edit" on
Talk:Example. Actions taken: Tag; Filter description: Socializing/chatting irrelavantley (
details |
examine |
diff)
--🔥
Lightning
Complex
Fire🔥 18:41, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
there should be a category/list of dystopian topics Dullbananas ( talk) 19:00, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
I Need A New Name For Wikipedia! — Preceding unsigned comment added by NicVivo ( talk • contribs) 20:25, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
Hello,
For the sake of standardizing and improving the quality of all electric schematics on Wikipedia, please add tool for designing electric circuits under the "Insert" tab. This QA website has a very cool tool for creating any kind of electric circuit while making up a question.
Thank you, Marino 21:59, 11 January 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marino108LFS ( talk • contribs)
It would be helpful if we could have an icon on FL, FA, and GA pages in mobile view like we do in desktop. ~ HAL 333 00:32, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
This current AN discussion had me thinking about a human-powered, not bot-powered, solution to the occasional case where an IP will hang out at a page for a while, repeatedly vandalizing, for the hour or so it takes an admin to show up. Add a group of editors who can add a template to a page that'll cause an adminbot to protect it for an hour; perhaps also require that the page has a high number of recent reverts. (Bonus: for a single IP hopping to multiple pages, another template that'll cause an adminbot to block them for an hour, requiring perhaps that every edit by that IP has been reverted.) I feel like similar proposals were discussed recently, but couldn't find any, hence this post. Enterprisey ( talk!) 03:54, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
I feel like similar proposals were discussed recentlyI remember a recent proposal which was something along the lines of non-admins being able to protect a page for 24 hrs / block IPs for 4 hours, or something along those lines. Can't find it at a quick check of archives, but then again using Special:Search is too hard for me. That having been said, I think the AN thread can be mostly handled by the filter Suffusion of Yellow is working on. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 11:14, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
Cannot be used more than 10 times in any rolling 7-day period.
Editors must request permission. Only given to extended confirmed editors in good standing.Ending up with a de-facto "I'll know it when I see it" is untenable imo. A good criteria for admins to assess grant requests by, and for users to assess their own suitability with, is required. Also, I think some technical aspects matter, to relax people. Granting the "block" perm may be different to granting a new "blockip" perm + bots logging actions by group, certainly may have an effect on the criteria. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 19:40, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
In my opinion -- and I do have quite a bit of experience in the area of technical proposals -- "I think some technical aspects matter, to relax people" is a common mistake. Here is the right way to do things:
You don't need "to relax people" until step 3. Every time something like this comes up in discussion, some well meaning person gets into the weeds of what is and isn't easy to do before there is agreement as to what to do. I get it. I have the same tendency and did it that way before I learned a better way. Getting into implementation details too early kind of sort of works OK, but my way works far better. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 21:18, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
I think I have roughly summed up what we have above so far, and taken some considerations/concerns from the previous discussions on this. Rough draft at User:ProcrastinatingReader/draft. Thoughts? Reading over past discussions (linked there, also pinging some previous proposers/commentors for advice @ WereSpielChequers, Jackmcbarn, Oiyarbepsy, Hut 8.5, and Dank). Reading over the previous RfC, I can extract the following main concerns, with varying prominence:
Some of these maybe can't be defended against in the proposal (eg #4 is just idealism). And #6 I think misses the point, in that this intends to put a stop to ongoing vandalism when an admin can't respond fast enough, the time the admin would've spent blocking before is equal to the time they will spend blocking after the proposal. The difference is that a vandal-fighter, instead of chasing an IP around for half an hour, can just press block and submit a report to AIV and move onto the next person. We can maybe think up stuff to deal with the other concerns, though? ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 11:19, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree with the conceptCan you elaborate on this part too (is there also something fundamentally flawed here)? ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 12:36, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
WP:AIV has been tagged as backlogged more than 40 times in the past week.It's worth noting a bot removes 'stale' AIV reports after 4-8 hours, but it's likely most of these are ones where no action was required. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 11:02, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
but intuitively this is rarer than the one editor/many articles case. This is my experience as well. The two most common cases I encounter are A) An single account vandalizing a whole bunch of pages and B) An single account continuously vandalizing an single page. In my personal experience the single article/many accounts is incredibly rare with the last one I can recount weeks ago. Merry Christmas! Asartea Talk Contribs! 12:30, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
If this qualifies as a technical proposal, please let me know, and I will move this post to VPT. My proposal is that some means of visually parsing a long, back-and-forth or round-robin, relatively free-ranging discussion on Wikipedia ought to be developed. I often have trouble visually parsing long discussions on the WP:Help desk, for example. Sometimes, a discussion will involve three or more people and/or have five or more posts. Spacing between posts is not standardized, nor are signatures, nor is indentation, nor is the length of posts. Sometimes, people become confused and respond as if one person is the author of what another user has written. My heuristic (and I hope, permanent) solution, which would work wherever posts are begun on a fresh line, would be to have a marker (anything from an asterisk to an arrow head) automatically appear in the left margin, next to the start of a new post. That way, posts will be harder to miss or misattribute.
Today, I met my match in the form of a visually unparseable Arbitration discussion. One post was in excess of 12,000 bytes. Finding that post's author took looking up the longest post in the page's History, then searching within the discussion until I found that post's author's signature. At that point, what the post said had lost its significance.
Alternatively, time stamps could have background coloration to identify the nearby presence of a signature, although this would not work where users don't sign their post and have not opted to have SineBot do it for them. On the Help desk, such people are frequently the original poster.
I'm open to any comments or suggestions on how to accomplish my aim.-- Quisqualis ( talk) 03:25, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
I had a concept for a media channel project and wanted to hear some wikipedia community feedback before I get too far along.
Put simply, I'd like to record verbatim readings of wikipedia pages and post them to video sharing and social media sites. I would link to the source page, list references, and plug donations to the foundation at the end of videos.
I appreciate wikipedia so much, and especially the amazing work done behind the scenes to make content as coherent and reliable as possible.
At best, I feel this project will extend the reach of wikipedia to some people who either cannot or prefer not to read the English text themselves. At worst, I'll get some practice as a reader.
I know this kind of use is generally permitted, provided that licensing and attribution are observed. I'm posting here to gather ideas and (especially) concerns/objections. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Masterpiece Reader ( talk • contribs) 02:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
Re-reading entire pages every time they update does sound tedious, but unless large swaths of text are removed or reordered regularly (?), I could just record the new text and patch it in with editing. Also, I saw some things suggesting that volunteer hours are declining. Should I be concerned? Would it be potentially helpful to plug volunteering to my potential audience? User: Masterpiece Reader — Preceding undated comment added 21:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
Over at the Donald Trump article, we have discussed significant revisions to the article, particularly given its excessive size. The article, with an eye on its many many related articles, would seem to need a major revision, reorganization to downsize it. Happens all the time with writing, one starts over and recycles material already developed, as appropriate. I am unsure of quite how to do that in Wikipedia, how to tear apart and reassemble an article, particularly one as important as Donald Trump. Once such a process begins the article could remain in a terrible state of construction, perhaps for a long time, with no guarantee that the result would be better than the original. Does/should Wikipedia have a policy/guidelines for major article revision? Once a revision is started, should an old article have a tag warning away new revisions and redirecting editors to the revised version? On the Donald Trump talk page, I sketched a process of (1) agree on a revised outline and philosophy, (2) start (offline) subpages for article sections, (3) once a decent revised state has been achieved, replace the old article. Seems to me wikipedia ought to have some guidelines and tools, advice on avoiding dangers, etc. for a major revision of an article. (I once attempted a major revision of a different article...I got all the "spinning plates" up in my head, had the plan in mind, had undisputed agreement on the Talk page...but then some change watcher reverted me halfway through the revision...Arrrgggh!) Bdushaw ( talk) 02:06, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
I saw this comment from Izno which got my thinkpan in motion. Why do we have edit notices in the template namespace? Wouldn't it be easier for us just to have a legit editnotice namespace. The way we do it now ( subpages of template:Editnotices) is pretty weird. – MJL ‐Talk‐ ☖ 19:07, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
Editnotice:MyArticle
and Editnotice:Talk:MyArticle
(or Editnotice:Editnotice:Talk:MyArticle
). –
MJL
‐Talk‐
☖ 17:55, 16 January 2021 (UTC)How could we get organized to draft a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Jimbo? I've had colleagues in academia that have successfully nominated other colleagues, but I think a grass roots effort among fellow Wikipedians would be best. Also, has this idea come up before? Charles Juvon ( talk) 03:45, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. I find it hard to think of any conceivable way Jimmy Wales could possibly be considered to meet any of that by even the most flexible application of standards. (Also, given Wikipedia's history I doubt either Jimmy Wales or the WMF would welcome the press interest in Wikipedia's founding that this would generate. The recent 20th anniversary press releases have glossed over the fact that Nupedia and Wikipedia were originally intended to drive traffic to a highly questionable website— this is the first appearance of the public-facing "Wikipedia" link, neatly filed next to "Auto Guide" and "Babe Report".)
University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion) can nominate someone—if you're a member of one of these groups just fill in the form, they only base their decisions on what's on the nomination form and not what any online campaign or lobbying says. ‑ Iridescent 09:27, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
Hey folks - I am not sure if I am on the right place to discuss this. If not please move it to where it is appropriate; it is a bit difficult to google-search for the right page. :-)
Wikipedia has been around for many years and those who remember it from the early days may see that it has improved a LOT. So, this is first a bit of praise.
There are of course a few minor annoyances; one pet peeve of mine is that some articles are WAY too understand for average people. I understand that you want to add high quality content too which is ok, but the FIRST entry point should be simplicity. Many scientific articles have this problem; evidently they were written by an expert in the field, but many people don't understand it easily, in particular in physics. But this is also an aside.
The thing I actually wanted to point out is ... well.
If you go there: https://www.wikipedia.org/
You have +6.2 million articles in english and 2.5 million articles in german.
I am a native german speaker (though not from germany), however had I tend to use the english wikipedia almost exclusively. I just think english is more convenient to use/write in. But the thing is that I am hardly the only one. I notice that there is better content and more content in english available. Often we don't have any sync-between articles, so that english articles often contain more stuff than the german articles. I would like to suggest that wikipedia does a better effort to cross-sync articles (and information therein). While I understand that most of all this is hobby-ist work, perhaps it may be a useful idea to do quality improvements and even do e. g. patreon assisted work and such. I don't think this has to be paid a LOT, so it should not be too expensive. The goal would be that it is synced between different languages. (German is just one example; evidently there is a HUGE disparity in regards to chinese. So many chinese people but fewer articles than in german with only 100 million native german speaking people? So there has to be more content from chinese contributors; this is also a problem with wikipedia. Wikipedia needs to broaden and widen its scope rather than have a mostly US-centric view in some articles, aka some agenda-drivers. I don't want to single out only US contributors, folks in other countries do this too; it just provides some context. Anyway, the MAIN point of this is to think about how syncing can be improved. Right now for me personally, the english subpart is by far more important than the german subpart or other parts.) 2A02:8388:1602:6D80:0:0:0:1 ( talk) 20:16, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
I recently noticed how few pageviews the WP:Dispute resolution requests page gets—less than 2000 per month, despite being linked from {{ Talk header}}, which appears on more than 500,000 pages. My assumption is that this is yet more evidence of banner blindness, where we try to cram so much poorly-organized information onto the top of talk pages that no one (most of all newcomers) reads any of it.
If you go to a random high-traffic talk page for a reasonably controversial subject, like Talk:Karl Marx, there's just so much low-hanging fruit or obviously non-ideal design.
Going through various things I notice:
Level-3 vital article in People; all the rest, including e.g.
If you can improve it, please dois unneeded (there's no reason for reminding about boldness more at VAs than elsewhere). As for the auto archiving notice, that could be rolled into the talk header, looking something like this, which would communicate the same info but take up a fraction of the space.
I realize I'm throwing out a bunch of different thoughts, some of which could be pursued in isolation, but the larger picture I see is that we ought to move away from our current modus operandi in which each piece of information gets its own banner and instead move to a system in which our core banners are able to incorporate lots of different information and display it in a format where there's appropriate visual weight and no duplication. {{ Article history}} has done a great job of this for article quality/milestones, but we need that same effort for lots of different areas. I'd welcome thoughts about how to go about such an initiative, or anything else that might help us address the problem of talk page banner blindness. {{u| Sdkb}} talk 04:09, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
could try doing a big TfD nom [...] but I'm not sure it'd succeedBut why not? Anyway, whether it's successful or not, that's probably a quicker way than waxing over here on WPI. At least one of those banners duplicates (the current) {{ talk page}}; I bet we could get the rest integrated into that one too. (And/or as options.) -- Izno ( talk) 15:24, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
For sanctions, you could have one banner with multiple sanctions (both ARBCOM and Community-sanctions) coded in , something a bit like {{Sanctions/talk notice|topic1=blp|topic2=ap|topic3=COVID}}
giving something like
The
Arbitration Committee and the wider community have authorized uninvolved
administrators to impose
discretionary sanctions on users who edit pages related to:
including this article. Provided the awareness criteria are met, discretionary sanctions may be used against editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process. |
Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 01:10, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Agree banner spam as with edit notice spam is a problem all over. First step in my view would be to purge lots of junk at Category:Article talk header templates like Template:Editing Friday, Template:Model article, Template:Prone to spam, Template:Webcomics refideas..etc.-- Moxy 🍁 23:46, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
I don't see this as a problem. I find the banners play a role similar to that of my unabridged Webster's 2nd, my Columbia Encyclopedia, and my bilingual dictionaries: I don't pick up one of those tomes every day, or even every month sometimes; I walk by them all the time without even seeing them; but they are there whenever I need them, and it's extremely annoying if someone has misplaced one of them and I can't find it when I need it. Ditto many of the page banners; it's mightily annoying if they are not there when I want them. Slap a {{ skip to bottom}} template at the top of the Talk page, and you're done. What exactly do you want to do on a Talk page, other than to view the ToC, go to the bottom of the page, or click a notification that takes you straight to the discussion in question, for which banners are an impediment to doing what you want? Mathglot ( talk) 08:17, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
It's really great to see that this conversation is taking place. I strongly disagree with Mathglot because this is a problem that I think ruins the accessibility of a lot of talk pages, especially the ones where the talk page matters the most such as many of the examples given above. I agree with the shortening of the vital articles banner. The template for British vs American vs Hong Kong vs Indian etc English is utterly useless on the talk page, and has little to no effect on the vast majority of issues that arise here (random editors coming in to change a "misspelling"). This definitely needs to be as an edit notice and not the talk page. In fact, I wonder if this could be configured so that if it's placed in the talk page it doesn't show up there put shows up as an edit notice on the article page – so that we wouldn't have to go through and change/remove all of them, though I suppose a bot could do this. Aza24 ( talk) 01:55, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
Talk:Karl Marx is fine now. Some of the areas causing problems have been missed in this discussion.
GA drops in templates instead of building articlehistory. DYK drops in templates without integrating them to the articlehistory template. OTD drops in templates rather than building articlehistory. ITN drops in templates rather than building articlehistory. Vital articles drops in templates rather than placing them in the WikiProject banner shell. I have approached the bot about Vital articles, and that is being addressed. The problem with the other templates being dropped in is that a prolific sockmaster hounded the
editor off the project who used to run a bot that processed every single template on talk that related to the articlehistory in to that template, so I have been running around doing that work manually.
If those issues were addressed, and editors would simply clean up talk pages as I have been doing now for several months, we would see that the problem isn't as bad as it appears and not nearly as bad as it was before Gimmetrow and DrPda initiated the effort to tame talk clutter in 2007. Skip to talk is rarely needed, the duplicate archive boxes can often be deleted, and the useless templates like WikiEd and English variety can be rolled in to a banner. The real problem is the need for a bot to clean up articlehistory items, as I have been doing on FAs. (Karl Marx: Projects to banners, OTD to article history, banner holder for English variety and archive info, remove one that is essentially duplicated in talk header, and now skip to talk is no longer needed.)
The discretionary sanction banners can be dealt with by electing arbs who will deal with editors with behavioral problems rather than pushing problems off to other admins via DS. It is astounding that what one bot did over a decade ago to tame talk clutter is no longer being done; surely our coding ability has advanced since 2007 ? Apparently this work I have been doing for several months now is well received, as I am not aware of having been reverted even once. Surely some clever bot or script person can do this work; they once did. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:05, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
Messes like Talk:Transit of Venus created by edits like this continue more than a full decade after the last successful effort to tame talk clutter. In my months-long effort to tame the clutter on FA talk pages created by ITN, OTD, GA, DYK, and WikiEd, I am finding the biggest issue continues to be an unresponsive Vital (sic) articles WikiProject. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 09:35, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
Responding to ProcrastinatingReader's query above, with a broader summary of what I have found after several months of working to tame talk page clutter on Featured articles.
What I have done for several months now is to go through every current FAC, FAR, PR, TFA or OTD that relates to an FA, to clean up those talk pages. I am unsure if my observations will apply equally to non-FAs, for example GAs, as I have not attempted to clean those up. My guess is that talk pages of non-FAs are in much worse shape since we lost Gimmebot, because no one is building articlehistory at all on GAs (Gimmebot once did).
In terms of the specific questions asked, no, I don't believe that scrapping levels 4/5 will solve the Vital articles problem, because the problem is simply a failure of Vital articles to wrap their templates in the Banner shell, just like every other project does. Independent of the number of articles where they have done this, the issue of dropping the template anywhere, not reviewing the talk page for the mess made (see this talk page after Vital articles template added), and not using the WikiProject banner at all is the one that should be addressed, whether on hundreds of articles or thousands.
In terms of taking over the work that Gimmebot once did for every template on every article, I'll give an area by area summary of what I know below. What I don't know how to deal with is the problem that we need one bot to clean up after the messes now made by quite a few other bots, so some level of bot coordination will be needed here. I am unwilling to take that on, as I have found many of my interactions with bot operators to be highly frustrating and often unproductive. MOST of my cleanup work has involved putting Vital articles in the {{WPBS banner and merging OTD, DYK, GA and ITN templates (dropped in by different bots) to the consolidated Template:Article history, which was designed over a decade ago for this very purpose, but has fallen into neglect without Gimmetrow/Gimmebot.
Yes they are a problem, but no where near the scope of the other problems I have seen. (It is possible that my sample is distorted, because students are discouraged from editing FAs, so I may be missing the extent of that problem.) WikiEd Banners provide an essential function wrt medical editing at least, and are easily dealt with. I left my feedback on that at the talk page of Sage (Wiki Ed). [5] Basically, I have (literally) never encountered medical editing from a student that did not have considerable errors, and we need to keep those templates on talk until someone has had the opportunity to check the work and remove the errors. When I encounter an old student editing template on talk, I check to see if they actually edited the article (most of the time, they didn't). If they didn't, I just remove the template. If they did, and the errors were later corrected by someone else, I just either archive the template as a talk page section, or move it into a banner. If the errors need attention, the banner needs to stay.
In my experience with cleaning up, there are extremely few (a couple maybe?) instances where the Skip to talk template is needed post-cleanup. The few occasions where I have left it are typically when there are multiple discretionary notices on the talk page, resulting in considerable bloat and length. And yet ... it seems quite odd to me that we are encouraging possibly new readers to skip over a discretionary sanctions template, as it is so important that new editors understand them. On the other hand, in my own editing, I find that new editors rarely read the DS templates anyway, and have no idea what they mean. And, in my own editing area, an Arbcase resulted in sanctions being applied to an entire content area (drug prices), only because the Arbs were reluctant, for understandable reasons, to fully sanction only three editors who were not editing according to policy. An entire content area subjected to DS ... for three editors. So, solving the problem with Discretionary sanction templates involves addressing what measures the community believes are most effective in dealing with disruptive users, and how that is reflected in their ArbCom voting. In terms of the talk page templating, this is beyond my pay scale, but DS sanctions add considerable bulk to talk pages, that can't be rolled in to a banner, and may be lost in the clutter, or missed because of skip to talk.
There is a whole list of useless banners whose purpose escapes me. Variety of English is flagged in articles, why also on talk? Pageviews are available on articlehistory tag, yet result in some of the most unsightly templates ever on talk. Who is adding this stuff ? I roll them in to
Other talk page banners
|
---|
so that if they are serving some purpose (categorization?), they are still there. Separately, Calm, Not A Forum, etc are often no longer even applicable; that requires manually checking that the talk page has calmed down and removing those templates-- not something we can assign to a bot.
The talk header template now includes searchable archive by default, and how to find sources. So, unless they are highly customized, I delete duplicate archive boxes and duplicate find sources templates. And I move the talk header template to the top of the page.
Not only Vital articles, but some other projects have rarely been rolling their templates in to the WPBS shell and can be ... for example, Spoken Wikipedia and the old WP Version 1 templates and Some Portals. A bot should be able to go back and get all these things and stick them in a WPBS shell, and by the way, collapse that shell, since WikiProjects simply don't have the prominence they once did, and talk pages need room for more significant templates (like DS). Here is where things stand with Cewbot run by Kanashimi. The Vital articles project is so decentralized that there appears to be no there there. To such an extent that right now I am unable to even locate the conversation I had with User:Sdkb somewhere recently about how to get this problem addressed. Apparently there is not even a centralized talk page, because I can't find where we had the conversation. If this can be addressed, it will probably need to be part of the whole problem of getting all of these bots on the same page.
The number of problems requiring a new and centralized bot effort, akin to what Gimmebot did, get worse when we got in to GA, DYK, ITN and OTD, as I will lay out next.
In general, FAs are in a bit better shape than others probably, because Hawkeye7's bot, FACBot, does convert FAC and FAR templates to articlehistory. But, best I can tell, there was a time period when that bot did not convert all other templates, and it still doesn't convert all other process templates, so miscellaneous cleanup is often needed. Gimmebot rolled ALL content review processes, AFDs, ITNs, OTDs, etcetera in to one template. That is what we are missing today.
I don't have enough samples to go by there; I just roll their templates in to articlehistory when I find them. If we somehow replace Gimmebot, they can all be addressed.
Is The Worst. Best I can tell, the bot procedures have changed over time, so one finds all kinds of inconsistencies in terms of what is added to the articlehistory template and what is not, and fixing these is hugely time consuming and no fun, partly because of the infuriatingly frustrating disconnect between how Template:Article history handles multiple entries, and how the OTD bot adds them. Article history uses the parameters ... otd1date, otd1oldid, otd2date, otd2oldid, and so on, while OTD uses otddate1, otdoldid1, otddate2, otdoldid2, etc. Imagine the work to convert those to articlehistory manually! WHY can't we use the same convention on the number x? Again, lack of centralization in how we handle content processes that were once routinely handled by Gimmebot. In attempting to figure out to whom one speaks to get this addressed, I've discovered there is also no overall OTD process or page, rather one goes to Howcheng on this.
The second worst. Why oh why do they use the parameter nompage= for their talk page template link to the nomination page, while Article history uses dyknom= ?? This means the DYK nomination page has been lost in many article history templates, and I am having to go back and recover them-- usually by manually looking them up. Could we all get on the same page? A whole separate bot is needed now to go back and replace lost DYK nomination pages in article history. I have found and fixed scores of them already.
Not rolled in to article history at all, best I can tell. GimmeBot once did. This can be hard work because not all GA reviewers know how to use the subst template correctly when closing, and fixing a malformed GA pass means a whole ton of digging in to history to find the missing information.
Exactly the same as GA.
While FAC and FAR templates are converted by daily bot runs to articlehistory, the formatting is inconsistent and confusing. I clean up every one of them every day; my hope is that if we make the articlehistory entries consistent, clear and less confusing to the average editor, others will begin to understand how to use that template to do their own cleanup. So, just as Gimmebot did, I make sure the events are in order, there is a space between each event, and the current status is listed at the head of a section at the bottom which is then followed by dates (maindates, OTDs, ITNs, etc). I believe that consistency will make the article history more understandable to more editors. Also, FACbot for some reason is not adding |currentstatus= FFAC . |
So, to get ALL of this cleaned up will require someone to get all the bot operators to talk to each other, and for someone to write a bot that does what Gimmebot was doing more than a decade ago ... rolling every process in to the articlehistory template, while also rolling projects into collapsible banners. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:50, 1 January 2021 (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.
I mentioned this above, but am still baffled by it. Is there any reason that the English variety appears on talk pages? I don't know how this could ever be effective, since I'm sure those who are disregarding this the most aren't going to see it on the talk page. Surely these could be converted to an edit notice; which would be significantly more effective? Aza24 ( talk) 23:54, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
{{
British English}}
already says may be included on talk pages or editnotices- so the only change being suggested here is a change to how we use the same template. -- Paul ❬ talk❭ 16:38, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
What do you think of having certain talk page banners expire after a long period automatically? For current event, not a forum, calm, controversial etc. Additional fields could be added for when an editor doesn't think that it should expire for whatever reason. -- Paul ❬ talk❭ 06:55, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
|hide_find_sources=
should probably be enabled by default imo. –
MJL
‐Talk‐
☖ 20:17, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
Skdb said above: I could try doing a big TfD nom of {{
Controversial}}, {{
Be civil}}, {{
Round in circles}}, {{
Not a forum}}, etc., but I'm not sure it'd succeed.
Do we want to proceed on this? Probably by someone better at writing a convincing nominating statement than me :P Stuff like this is just ridiculous. It has {{ Warning RS and OR}}, {{ ds/talk notice}}, {{ controversial}}, {{ not a vote}}, {{ not a forum}}, and {{ Round in circles}}. As you might guess: no, it wasn't helping. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 13:15, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
How are our conduct dispute resolution systems working for us? How can they be improved? (This is an opinion-soliciting discussion, not a proposal to vote on.)
List of conduct dispute resolution systems:
I think the answer to the first question is "not very well", and I'm not sure of the answer to the second question, but I think it would be useful to gather opinions about and discuss what the community can do to improve conduct dispute resolution. Is there a problem, and if so, where? Levivich harass/ hound 21:34, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Discussion about the format of this discussion
|
---|
|
Hi, according to "The principle of separation of concerns", Wikipedia articles should be separated into two parts 1-"Article text part" 2-"Template part", and "Article text part" should have only text of articles plus pointers to the "Template part", and "Template part" should only have all of the templates. I think this separation is very helpful, because 1- Reduces complexity of creation and read of articles, and 2-Process of articles both by machines and human becomes more easier and effective. ( Semantic queries in the Semantic web that is the proposal of Tim Berners Lee). I think one of its benefits is improving its maintenance: Changing and replacing the template without changing the article text in a quiet way. What are pros and cons about respecting separation of concerns and making a separate "Template part"? Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh ( talk) 15:46, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
{{reflist}}
. We could also start all articles with {{begin}}
and automatically pull any lead maintenance templates, hatnotes and infobox from somewhere like Template:Begin/articlename. Same with {{end}}
pulling stuff like navboxes and categories. I don't actually support any of this, and it wouldn't prevent editors from breaking the rules or the template calls.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 21:36, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
@ Pbsouthwood: Imagine we want to write an article in Wikipedia
-- Tempate part --
pointer1={{getFirstName}}
pointer2={{getLastName}}
-- Text and pointer part --
Hello pointer1 pointer2
Here pointer1 and pointer2 are pointers to "Template part" in the plain text and the output is:
Hello Hooman Mallahzadeh
Hello pointer1 pointer2
"very readable"??? What is the use case for a facility offering a convenient way to switch from first name to first initial, article wide? I'm going to save you and everyone else a lot of time by suggesting that you put this idea on the shelf and dust it off again when your edit count, which right now is 700, reaches 10K.
E
Eng 06:59, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
I think your knowledge about modern programming is low– I'll spare you embarrassment by not setting you straight on that. The problem here, to be blunt, is not my knowledge of programming, but your knowledge of writing Wikipedia articles. Hint: it's not an exercise in programming. E Eng 07:37, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
-- Tempate part --
pointer1=Winston
pointer2=Churchill
-- Text and pointer part --
pointer1 pointer2 was a British statesman, army officer, and writer...
pointer1=Winston(Plain text)
pointer1={{getFirstName}}(Template)
I have created a more-modern version of the Main Page changing the Wikipedia:Main Page/styles.css alone.
Here is what it looks like:
You can find the
css code here and the
resulting Main Page here.
My primary goal of the design was to establish a clean interface by removing the closely-separated old-fashioned borders around each of the content boxes:
However after doing this, I noticed that there was little space between the primary green and blue boxes and I seeked to seperate them. Along with separating them, I also established a common separation between all boxes on the page of 8px
, making the interface even more uniform and pretty.
I would like to know the community's input on what they think about the design.
Here are some possible related design questions to consider in addition to your general feedback:
Lectrician1 ( talk) 05:20, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
As the title - improve captioning so that image descriptions are better and more accurately describe the images. LocalPunk ( talk) 17:57, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Bright Blue Hyperlink color makes reading disruptive
That is just what always strikes me when I visit. WIKI is so busy with links that the continuity of reading is broken up. A darker blue, closer to black, is more readable. I hear wiki uses darker blue for visited, or previously edited sites. Maybe that distinction could be changed and given to all-links-in-general to enhance encyclopedia readability in such a busily linked site.
Just a thought. I know when I copy and paste material, I sometimes take the time to darken the links to a darker blue so reading isn't so distracting.
UndrGrad60+ — Preceding unsigned comment added by UndrGrad60+ ( talk • contribs) 03:42, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
a {
color: #0000FF;
}
a:visited {
color: #0000FF;
}
Yes, I know it's a perennial proposal, and yes I've read over quite a few discussions in the past and yes I do feel times are different now. Mergers often stay open exorbitantly long times . This is not practical, and the system of proposed mergers is clearly struggling with low participation and interest (not to suggest that other areas aren't). It is more effective and efficient to nominate an article for deletion if you want it to be merged. Like it or not, that would seem to be a fact at this point based on my highly unscientific day-to-day life. See, for instance, 1 and 2, where unanimous consensuses were reached in a week-- this would usually take months to a year or more if you followed the 'correct' way of proposing a merge. Currently, some users will !vote "keep: a merger should be discussed elsewhere" and I'd argue that more often than not no discussion happens elsewhere.
I'm not suggesting completely folding PROPMERGE into AfD and I'm not suggesting necessarily renaming AfD to articles for discussion, I just think it past time that we seriously consider making 'merge' a valid option to start an AfD for. Is AfD exactly booming with participants? no, but I'd argue it's higher visibility than proposing a merger, the format works just as well better, and I highly doubt the number of new merges would overwhelm the system. We could always do a trial for X months and reassess... Cheers,
Eddie891
Talk
Work 23:22, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
I think re-implementing WikiMoney and the related services could be cool. What if you could use WikiMoney to buy some cool things like a "Golden Barnstar" to give to exceptional work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Education-over-easy ( talk • contribs) 14:25, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
Many nations in Europe have abolished their nobility. The people who would hold this titles, or claim they would, often have articles here calling them "Prince" and "Duke."
But they are not princes or dukes, because they are not children of sovereigns or the head of a dukedom.
A few examples:
/info/en/?search=Prince_Rostislav_Romanov_(born_1985) /info/en/?search=Donatus,_Landgrave_of_Hesse /info/en/?search=Princess_B%C3%A9atrice_of_Bourbon-Two_Sicilies
I conservatively estimate there are more than 500 similar pages of people who are not notable, and only here because they claim to have royal or noble titles. It could four times this amount.
Of course a pretender could be notable because they have widespread political support for restoration. Or they could be notable as a scientist, author, etc. But rarely is this the case here.
My view is that (1) most of these articles should be deleted (2) the remaining ones the royal title like "prince" should be deleted from the article name.
Someone made a similar suggestion here in 2013:
Declanscottp ( talk) 01:30, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
Recently kicked off a discussion in Wikipedia talk:Redirect § Minimum utility threshold for redirects?. It addresses a point of debate that regularly comes up on WP:RFD and may be worth clarifying in editor guidelines. Current guidelines allow for any redirect so long as "someone" finds it useful. Interested to hear your feedback. - Wikmoz ( talk) 03:55, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
We currently have bundled cites like #1 in QAnon. This is arguably not good for a couple reasons:
However, it's also not great to have "Foo bar baz.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]". In some citation styles they use ranges on consecutive numbers above a certain threshold (e.g., [1-15]). The numbers might not always be completely consecutive, but for the one's that are they can be bundled. This would need to be done at the MediaWiki layer. Thoughts or other ideas? -- Green C 13:49, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Even better highlight them all as a block. When clicking [1-15].This is not possible. Only the targeted reference can be turned blue. Are you sure you want it to be the first? There was a big hullaballoo because AWB was reordering citations in a row (since removed). I imagine "going to the first" will have a similar issue. -- Izno ( talk) 06:48, 6 February 2021 (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.
Respected Wikipedia Admins,
I would like to bring a new and essential feature to your notice which needs to be added in Wikipedia.
But before that, I would apologize for excessive trolling which I did on #wikipedia-en-help and #wikimedia-commons(Kiwi 🥝 IRC Channels). Now, I am myself exhausted after repeated trolling that I don't like to troll any more.
The feature is related to in-article search. You might have seen, when you open .pdf or .docx or .pptx file using certain apps, there is a feature through which you can search a particular word in the article.
For e.g., when you open a .pdf file using Chrome app, there is a search bar on top of the page where when you search a particular word and as you press enter, wherever the word it there in the article, it gets highlighted by a particular colour so you can refer it easily.
I am requesting to you to add this feature because I have seen there are certain users who edit articles without selecting "Watch this page" checkbox☑️. As a result, it becomes difficult to locate their edit if it is minor and the article is too big. And it might happen that those edits by the users might not be up to the marks and might need to be reverted. However, in such cases, the task becomes difficult. In such cases,we have to read entire article to locate it.
Thus, am requesting you to add a feature of word search in the article itself which will make location of a particular word easy. Secondly, it will be beneficial for readers who wish to find information on a particular topic.
It is my humble request to you to ask the respective Wikipedia developers to add this essential feature asap.
Thanks & Regards,
Akshat2103 ( talk) 19:20, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Indeed 😊, it worked. Issue resolved...
Akshat2103 ( talk) 19:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Many websites such as W3Schools for example have a navigation menu at the top rather than on the left. I think Wikipedia would look a lot better if it had one on top above the links. I'm not a coder, but I could sketch out what exactly the new navigation menu would look like. I would like to hear from Sdkb for thoughts on this and would like to know if it has been discussed before. Thanks, Interstellarity ( talk) 20:03, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
There are a lot of editors who are WP:NOTHERE or don't know what WP:NOTHERE means. We can't do much about those who KNOW they are here for the wrong reason, but I have an idea that will help those who are ignorant or those who might be WP:PAID but who really want to "play by the rules" but don't even know there are rules they must play by:
Comments? davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 23:06, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
For many large articles, I'll often quickly add a reference, only to discover after that it was already used elsewhere on the page, just with a difference retrieved date or other minor change, so it wasn't automatically merged. I also often come across instances where others have done this and not noticed afterwards. From WP:DUPCITES, it looks like there aren't any great tools for merging duplicate references. Should we work on creating such tools, or adding some sort of mild warning when someone tries to add a citation detected as likely a duplicate? {{u| Sdkb}} talk 21:35, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
work=New York Times
vs. work=[[The New York Times]]
?) {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk 22:41, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
@ Finnusertop: I hadn't heard of it before, thanks. However, it doesn't seem to work on my sandbox testing area; is that meant to happen? Sdrqaz ( talk) 00:27, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Help desk and teahouse volunteer, and ten+ year editor here. I just posted a mass typo fix request for "Insititute" on Wikipedia talk:Typo Team but noticed a request from July last year about a prevalence of its' (with trailing apostrophe) seems to have been unanswered. Wikipedia:Typo Team has a pledges page, but shouldn't there also be a requests page? This might also raise the profile of Typo Team - I'd never heard of the team until today. TimTempleton (talk) (cont) 02:25, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
Hi. I have seen quite a few ads for smaller public transport providers in Britain recently and wondered if we should have an SNG specifically for Public Transport. I base this idea that unless a public transport provider is a national concern, they rarely get the level of coverage to meet gng, even if they are an important player in society and are what people on the street would say is notable. I have looked and could not see any current wikiproject looking at this. Davidstewartharvey ( talk) 15:26, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
In 2018, the Traffic Commissioner for the North West of England, Simon Evans, cut Stotts transport licence from 40 to 31 vehicles after failing to auto enrol staff onto a pension scheme. In November 2017, Brighton Magistrates Court found Stotts Tours and its managing director guilty of failing to auto enrol employees onto a work based pension. The company was fined £60,000 and became the first UK company to be found guilty under the 2015 pension laws.) Assuming it was covered in-depth by Buses Magazine at some point—and I'd be surprised if there's any operator of scheduled bus services that hasn't been—then it can be re-created with decent sourcing, but the participants at AfD discussions can only work with what they have in front of them. With an absence of sourcing like that, no admin could have done anything other than delete it.
I thought it might be useful for wikipedia to add a link in the Works Cited section to the Connected Papers graph of each journal article. Connected Papers finds and visualizes similar papers to the one in question. I think this would make it easier to use Wikipedia as a resource in an academic research setting. They have recently integrated with arXiv and seem likely to support FOSS projects like wikipedia, or at least support us linking to them. TripleShortOfACycle ( talk - contribs) - (she/her/hers) 05:49, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
(This might have been proposed before. Also, if this idea is in the wrong place, please tell me where I should put it.)
In each year article from 1900 to 1989*, the events section links to detailed monthly articles for each month, each of which in turn lists several events for each day therein (as well as the corresponding day of the week). Meanwhile, for all the year articles from 1990 to 2021*, the events section is merely a sparse listing of various occurrences, with no monthly articles at all (each monthly title is a redirect to the appropriate subsection of the events section). However, the period since 1990 has been hardly lacking in historically important events. To fix this discrepancy, I propose that, for each year since 1990 to the present, monthly articles should be created for each month, with content for each day. This would greatly improve our historical understanding of recent & important events.
*At least I think so. I haven't bothered to check every article, but this seems to hold for every one I've visited.
Duckmather ( talk) 18:08, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
I wondered if, even if it is possible, that discussions that occur, like changes to Notability, that editors are notified to make Wikipedia more democratic? At the moment it seems that when policy changes are being discussed and made, it seems to be the same small band of editors, and in most cases most editors don't know it is actually happening.
My idea is that when policy is being discussed all editors get a discussion notification, and at the end of the discussion all editors get a notification to vote. Once the vote has been completed then the notification is sent to all editors to let them know of the change, if any, to policy. Davidstewartharvey ( talk) 06:59, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject—has been unchanged since May 2007, and is one of the few things on Wikipedia which is never seriously challenged; changing it to even a minor degree would have such a huge knock-on effect on Wikipedia's existing content as to be unworkable.) ‑ Iridescent 07:45, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
Wikivoyage is one of the best projects of Wikimedia. In last days, I'm so concentrated to develop the new opened Turkish Wikivoyage page. And I think, an official mobile app for Wikivoyage is a good idea. It can be perfect for the travelers around the world. The people mostly use their smart phones during traveling. This project will not make much sense if there is no app of WV. UcuncuUlus ( talk) 13:27, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
Since I started using Ubuntu, it has seemed like an interesting idea to have a skin on Wikipedia that makes Wikipedia look like a command prompt or a terminal. I know it probably won't get implemented, and even if it gets implemented, very few people will use it, but it seems like an interesting idea. 4D4850 ( talk) 01:27, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
Curious if anyone has considered writing a bot to automatically handle many WP:U1 speedy deletions? To prevent abuse, it should make sure that the page was either created in the user's userspace, or never edited by anyone other than the user (so someone couldn't move a page to their userspace to get it deleted, or U1 an article they created but others had built). This could significantly speed up U1 and leave admins to do things more useful. Elliot321 ( talk | contribs) 02:31, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
Some companies do mandatory vacations for employees to make sure nobody's absolutely required. I wonder if the same concept could be applied here. Or maybe it's general knowledge what the results would be. Enterprisey ( talk!) 09:56, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
There is a useful feature in Wikimedia apps that suggests edits for users automatically. Wikimedia Apps/Suggested edits allows people to casually edit Wikipedia doing all sorts of recommended tasks and community related help, and its ease of use brings me to the conclusion that it would be a very good idea to implement something equivalent on the main site. I recognize that we have features for improving articles according with very different needs, but the automatic nature of Suggested Edits leads me to believe that it would be a convenient tool for those who want to take advantage of it. Tyrone Madera ( talk) 07:39, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
Basically, templates that can go inline to call out a comment or particular groups of comments.
Discourse forums have something where an admin can post a message about a comment to everyone.
Suppose Alice opens a deletion nomination for article "Foo" and Bob writes something like "I like foo". A callout can provide a gentle reminder to remain on topic/stay civil. Of course, if it happens multiple times, then we can just use the uw series.
So the discussion would look like this:
Foo (edit | talk | etc.)
Does not meet the notability guidelines. Alice ( talk) 00:00 1 January 1970 (UTC)
I think this would be a good option before page protection if a discussion gets derailed or off topic fast. Sometimes, even a great proportion good faith contributors make mistakes and may get off topic or uncivil, so giving a gentle reminder when the discussion gets heated can cool these discussions back down. Aasim ( talk) 22:11, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
I think we should add information about how good the service is to this article. Spammer ( talk) 00:25 2 January 1970 (UTC)
Over at WP:GA they have support symbols ( ), oppose symbols ( ), and on-hold symbols ( ) to represent the various results of a good article review. However, one neglected result is asking for a second opinion, which currently is represented with a neutral vote ( ) which I believe does not make much sense and doesn't convey much. I propose an icon similar to one like this; forgive the terrible art, I made this on Chrome Canvass with a mousepad. P anini 🥪 14:17, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
I tried looking through the archives and couldn't find something like this, so I'm posting here.
In my opinion, the whole talk page format needs to be radically redesigned. It is just plain difficult to use. For one, an editor needs to use source code to be able to participate in a talk page, which is a high barrier in terms of time (inputting the proper syntax correctly) and knowledge (source editing is not intuitive).
Four big issues I see:
In an ideal world, I'd see the talk pages look more like Reddit or any other platform with discussion boards. A short-term solution would be to enable Visual Editor, which is currently not enabled on Talk pages.
I know I can't be the only one who has noticed shortcomings with the Talk page format. What are your thoughts on Talk Pages and how they could be improved?
Fredlesaltique ( talk) 14:04, 27 February 2021 (UTC)
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I recently came across List of people named David, which has over 2000 people (including disambiguation pages) linked. It seems to me that this might be easier created and maintained using Wikidata. Well, is it possible with Wikidata now, or do we need to wait for Abstract Wikipedia / Wikifunctions to be ready to do so? If it is possible, how concerning are the Wikidata accuracy issues for a list like this; references aren't really necessary to prove that the articles named "David so-and-so" are about people named David. power~enwiki ( π, ν) 22:54, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
Hi,
This might be a bit if a stretch or currently already underway, but...
What if there was a way you could mix the camera on your phone (like how live cameras translation of another language operates) with wikipedia's vast database of information to help people identify things of the unknown should they stumble across it and think "I wonder what that is"?
Basically it would be like the Pokedex from pokemon which is used to identify a pokemon unknown to that person but would be of use with things on earth here today, plants, animals, items, the works! Everything!
If a user stumbled across something completely original with no information then they could somehow be involved on the information that would pop up,
I.E discovered by John Doe 11/11/2020 and it would bring up or update areas where they were found,
The camera would also have the geotagging function should users want to share the location of their findings,
Anything unknown would automatically send location information to the wiki/app who could send out someone capable of investigating/studying the unknown.
A reward of some kind for original discoveries would see increased use of the app and encourage others to share the app to explore and find other things.
The app itself would cost roughly $20 to download which would really be no huge cost considering the ease of identifying things you aren't familiar with, unless it's a new discovery which would put them first inline for the information discovered after examination and analysis.
Chemicals and probably a few other things would be tricky to identify considering it would rely on the camera talking to wiki to recognize what the user is seeing but 3d objects and most other things with distinct colors/patterns/shapes should work well,
With roughly 7 billion people on the planet and an ad on the site encouraging people to download the new app i reckon there would be at least 1 billion users in the first 5 years based on word of mouth and the constant daily searching from users who would see the ad encouraging them to download it.
Is this a possibility?
Thanks for your time,
Nathan. M — Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.62.77.220 ( talk) 21:36, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
So dozens of articles are listed daily on the Portal:Current events. I am thinking about a proposal to make some format, similar to how the daily page view is tracked, to show the dates (or number of times) an article was listed on the Current Event Portal. Not every article would have it, only if people add the “track” will it display the information.
One problem I am thinking of with this is all the COVID articles. If this was proposed, that would be an entirely separate discussion of how to handle all of that messy formalities.
Does anyone else think this could be a good idea to propose? Please feel free to drop any insight (positive or negative) you have about this idea. Thank you (Lead coordinator of WikiProject of Current Events) Elijahandskip ( talk) 17:58, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
Is there any way that the Disclaimers, which are now at the very bottom in small font, can be made more prominent, particularly on the main page? I think this is perhaps the most important information for readers to see about Wikipedia, particularly the Content disclaimer. Many readers and drive-by editors will complain about spoilers, blasphemy, obscene images, and similar things. They are often referred to the disclaimers as a reason this is okay, but few readers will ever see the disclaimers unless they are specifically directed to them. Readers should have the option to turn away from Wikipedia if, for some reason, there is content which they do not want to see. This is particularly important given that Wikipedia is a global encyclopedia; although many of us in the Western world are used to seeing such content and are not particularly disturbed by it, people from other cultures may have other reasons, such as religious obligations, to avoid such material. We need not just our content, but also its presentation to benefit all our readers. As for better placement of the disclaimers, I would suggest going as far as putting a link under "The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit". If not placed there, the disclaimers could go lower on the main page, or on the sidebar. — Naddruf ( talk ~ contribs) 21:42, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
1.8 billion Muslimsequal only
10% of the world population. M Imtiaz ( talk · contribs) 22:49, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
In the spirit of having less stuff on every page, I think that the tools section of the sidebar could be stripped down. Especially for logged-out readers. This small change would then allow for a tiny bit more whitespace, but every little helps. I've marked in red below the items that I think we can do without from the 'Tools' section. -- Paul ❬ talk❭ 09:31, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
Link | useful to a reader? | useful for most editors? |
---|---|---|
What links here | maybe? | |
Related changes | ||
Special pages | ||
Permanent link | for someone | accessible in history |
Page information | ||
Cite this page | I guess | I guess |
Wikidata item | for someone | |
Download as PDF | I guess | I guess |
Printable version | I guess | I guess |
I make fix edits like this fairly frequently, removing external links that have been inappropriately placed within an article body. Do we have any tools or filters that patrol for this sort of thing? If not, could we develop them? {{u| Sdkb}} talk 20:20, 31 December 2020 (UTC)
We need an abuse filter for detecting socializing on talk pages, especially article talks. Like this:
23:00, 7 January 2021:
Example (
talk |
contribs) triggered
filter (number), performing the action "edit" on
Talk:Example. Actions taken: Tag; Filter description: Socializing/chatting irrelavantley (
details |
examine |
diff)
--🔥
Lightning
Complex
Fire🔥 18:41, 7 January 2021 (UTC)
there should be a category/list of dystopian topics Dullbananas ( talk) 19:00, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
I Need A New Name For Wikipedia! — Preceding unsigned comment added by NicVivo ( talk • contribs) 20:25, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
Hello,
For the sake of standardizing and improving the quality of all electric schematics on Wikipedia, please add tool for designing electric circuits under the "Insert" tab. This QA website has a very cool tool for creating any kind of electric circuit while making up a question.
Thank you, Marino 21:59, 11 January 2021 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Marino108LFS ( talk • contribs)
It would be helpful if we could have an icon on FL, FA, and GA pages in mobile view like we do in desktop. ~ HAL 333 00:32, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
This current AN discussion had me thinking about a human-powered, not bot-powered, solution to the occasional case where an IP will hang out at a page for a while, repeatedly vandalizing, for the hour or so it takes an admin to show up. Add a group of editors who can add a template to a page that'll cause an adminbot to protect it for an hour; perhaps also require that the page has a high number of recent reverts. (Bonus: for a single IP hopping to multiple pages, another template that'll cause an adminbot to block them for an hour, requiring perhaps that every edit by that IP has been reverted.) I feel like similar proposals were discussed recently, but couldn't find any, hence this post. Enterprisey ( talk!) 03:54, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
I feel like similar proposals were discussed recentlyI remember a recent proposal which was something along the lines of non-admins being able to protect a page for 24 hrs / block IPs for 4 hours, or something along those lines. Can't find it at a quick check of archives, but then again using Special:Search is too hard for me. That having been said, I think the AN thread can be mostly handled by the filter Suffusion of Yellow is working on. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 11:14, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
Cannot be used more than 10 times in any rolling 7-day period.
Editors must request permission. Only given to extended confirmed editors in good standing.Ending up with a de-facto "I'll know it when I see it" is untenable imo. A good criteria for admins to assess grant requests by, and for users to assess their own suitability with, is required. Also, I think some technical aspects matter, to relax people. Granting the "block" perm may be different to granting a new "blockip" perm + bots logging actions by group, certainly may have an effect on the criteria. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 19:40, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
In my opinion -- and I do have quite a bit of experience in the area of technical proposals -- "I think some technical aspects matter, to relax people" is a common mistake. Here is the right way to do things:
You don't need "to relax people" until step 3. Every time something like this comes up in discussion, some well meaning person gets into the weeds of what is and isn't easy to do before there is agreement as to what to do. I get it. I have the same tendency and did it that way before I learned a better way. Getting into implementation details too early kind of sort of works OK, but my way works far better. -- Guy Macon ( talk) 21:18, 8 December 2020 (UTC)
I think I have roughly summed up what we have above so far, and taken some considerations/concerns from the previous discussions on this. Rough draft at User:ProcrastinatingReader/draft. Thoughts? Reading over past discussions (linked there, also pinging some previous proposers/commentors for advice @ WereSpielChequers, Jackmcbarn, Oiyarbepsy, Hut 8.5, and Dank). Reading over the previous RfC, I can extract the following main concerns, with varying prominence:
Some of these maybe can't be defended against in the proposal (eg #4 is just idealism). And #6 I think misses the point, in that this intends to put a stop to ongoing vandalism when an admin can't respond fast enough, the time the admin would've spent blocking before is equal to the time they will spend blocking after the proposal. The difference is that a vandal-fighter, instead of chasing an IP around for half an hour, can just press block and submit a report to AIV and move onto the next person. We can maybe think up stuff to deal with the other concerns, though? ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 11:19, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree with the conceptCan you elaborate on this part too (is there also something fundamentally flawed here)? ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 12:36, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
WP:AIV has been tagged as backlogged more than 40 times in the past week.It's worth noting a bot removes 'stale' AIV reports after 4-8 hours, but it's likely most of these are ones where no action was required. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 11:02, 11 December 2020 (UTC)
but intuitively this is rarer than the one editor/many articles case. This is my experience as well. The two most common cases I encounter are A) An single account vandalizing a whole bunch of pages and B) An single account continuously vandalizing an single page. In my personal experience the single article/many accounts is incredibly rare with the last one I can recount weeks ago. Merry Christmas! Asartea Talk Contribs! 12:30, 17 December 2020 (UTC)
If this qualifies as a technical proposal, please let me know, and I will move this post to VPT. My proposal is that some means of visually parsing a long, back-and-forth or round-robin, relatively free-ranging discussion on Wikipedia ought to be developed. I often have trouble visually parsing long discussions on the WP:Help desk, for example. Sometimes, a discussion will involve three or more people and/or have five or more posts. Spacing between posts is not standardized, nor are signatures, nor is indentation, nor is the length of posts. Sometimes, people become confused and respond as if one person is the author of what another user has written. My heuristic (and I hope, permanent) solution, which would work wherever posts are begun on a fresh line, would be to have a marker (anything from an asterisk to an arrow head) automatically appear in the left margin, next to the start of a new post. That way, posts will be harder to miss or misattribute.
Today, I met my match in the form of a visually unparseable Arbitration discussion. One post was in excess of 12,000 bytes. Finding that post's author took looking up the longest post in the page's History, then searching within the discussion until I found that post's author's signature. At that point, what the post said had lost its significance.
Alternatively, time stamps could have background coloration to identify the nearby presence of a signature, although this would not work where users don't sign their post and have not opted to have SineBot do it for them. On the Help desk, such people are frequently the original poster.
I'm open to any comments or suggestions on how to accomplish my aim.-- Quisqualis ( talk) 03:25, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
I had a concept for a media channel project and wanted to hear some wikipedia community feedback before I get too far along.
Put simply, I'd like to record verbatim readings of wikipedia pages and post them to video sharing and social media sites. I would link to the source page, list references, and plug donations to the foundation at the end of videos.
I appreciate wikipedia so much, and especially the amazing work done behind the scenes to make content as coherent and reliable as possible.
At best, I feel this project will extend the reach of wikipedia to some people who either cannot or prefer not to read the English text themselves. At worst, I'll get some practice as a reader.
I know this kind of use is generally permitted, provided that licensing and attribution are observed. I'm posting here to gather ideas and (especially) concerns/objections. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Masterpiece Reader ( talk • contribs) 02:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
Re-reading entire pages every time they update does sound tedious, but unless large swaths of text are removed or reordered regularly (?), I could just record the new text and patch it in with editing. Also, I saw some things suggesting that volunteer hours are declining. Should I be concerned? Would it be potentially helpful to plug volunteering to my potential audience? User: Masterpiece Reader — Preceding undated comment added 21:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
Over at the Donald Trump article, we have discussed significant revisions to the article, particularly given its excessive size. The article, with an eye on its many many related articles, would seem to need a major revision, reorganization to downsize it. Happens all the time with writing, one starts over and recycles material already developed, as appropriate. I am unsure of quite how to do that in Wikipedia, how to tear apart and reassemble an article, particularly one as important as Donald Trump. Once such a process begins the article could remain in a terrible state of construction, perhaps for a long time, with no guarantee that the result would be better than the original. Does/should Wikipedia have a policy/guidelines for major article revision? Once a revision is started, should an old article have a tag warning away new revisions and redirecting editors to the revised version? On the Donald Trump talk page, I sketched a process of (1) agree on a revised outline and philosophy, (2) start (offline) subpages for article sections, (3) once a decent revised state has been achieved, replace the old article. Seems to me wikipedia ought to have some guidelines and tools, advice on avoiding dangers, etc. for a major revision of an article. (I once attempted a major revision of a different article...I got all the "spinning plates" up in my head, had the plan in mind, had undisputed agreement on the Talk page...but then some change watcher reverted me halfway through the revision...Arrrgggh!) Bdushaw ( talk) 02:06, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
I saw this comment from Izno which got my thinkpan in motion. Why do we have edit notices in the template namespace? Wouldn't it be easier for us just to have a legit editnotice namespace. The way we do it now ( subpages of template:Editnotices) is pretty weird. – MJL ‐Talk‐ ☖ 19:07, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
Editnotice:MyArticle
and Editnotice:Talk:MyArticle
(or Editnotice:Editnotice:Talk:MyArticle
). –
MJL
‐Talk‐
☖ 17:55, 16 January 2021 (UTC)How could we get organized to draft a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for Jimbo? I've had colleagues in academia that have successfully nominated other colleagues, but I think a grass roots effort among fellow Wikipedians would be best. Also, has this idea come up before? Charles Juvon ( talk) 03:45, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses. I find it hard to think of any conceivable way Jimmy Wales could possibly be considered to meet any of that by even the most flexible application of standards. (Also, given Wikipedia's history I doubt either Jimmy Wales or the WMF would welcome the press interest in Wikipedia's founding that this would generate. The recent 20th anniversary press releases have glossed over the fact that Nupedia and Wikipedia were originally intended to drive traffic to a highly questionable website— this is the first appearance of the public-facing "Wikipedia" link, neatly filed next to "Auto Guide" and "Babe Report".)
University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion) can nominate someone—if you're a member of one of these groups just fill in the form, they only base their decisions on what's on the nomination form and not what any online campaign or lobbying says. ‑ Iridescent 09:27, 16 January 2021 (UTC)
Hey folks - I am not sure if I am on the right place to discuss this. If not please move it to where it is appropriate; it is a bit difficult to google-search for the right page. :-)
Wikipedia has been around for many years and those who remember it from the early days may see that it has improved a LOT. So, this is first a bit of praise.
There are of course a few minor annoyances; one pet peeve of mine is that some articles are WAY too understand for average people. I understand that you want to add high quality content too which is ok, but the FIRST entry point should be simplicity. Many scientific articles have this problem; evidently they were written by an expert in the field, but many people don't understand it easily, in particular in physics. But this is also an aside.
The thing I actually wanted to point out is ... well.
If you go there: https://www.wikipedia.org/
You have +6.2 million articles in english and 2.5 million articles in german.
I am a native german speaker (though not from germany), however had I tend to use the english wikipedia almost exclusively. I just think english is more convenient to use/write in. But the thing is that I am hardly the only one. I notice that there is better content and more content in english available. Often we don't have any sync-between articles, so that english articles often contain more stuff than the german articles. I would like to suggest that wikipedia does a better effort to cross-sync articles (and information therein). While I understand that most of all this is hobby-ist work, perhaps it may be a useful idea to do quality improvements and even do e. g. patreon assisted work and such. I don't think this has to be paid a LOT, so it should not be too expensive. The goal would be that it is synced between different languages. (German is just one example; evidently there is a HUGE disparity in regards to chinese. So many chinese people but fewer articles than in german with only 100 million native german speaking people? So there has to be more content from chinese contributors; this is also a problem with wikipedia. Wikipedia needs to broaden and widen its scope rather than have a mostly US-centric view in some articles, aka some agenda-drivers. I don't want to single out only US contributors, folks in other countries do this too; it just provides some context. Anyway, the MAIN point of this is to think about how syncing can be improved. Right now for me personally, the english subpart is by far more important than the german subpart or other parts.) 2A02:8388:1602:6D80:0:0:0:1 ( talk) 20:16, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
I recently noticed how few pageviews the WP:Dispute resolution requests page gets—less than 2000 per month, despite being linked from {{ Talk header}}, which appears on more than 500,000 pages. My assumption is that this is yet more evidence of banner blindness, where we try to cram so much poorly-organized information onto the top of talk pages that no one (most of all newcomers) reads any of it.
If you go to a random high-traffic talk page for a reasonably controversial subject, like Talk:Karl Marx, there's just so much low-hanging fruit or obviously non-ideal design.
Going through various things I notice:
Level-3 vital article in People; all the rest, including e.g.
If you can improve it, please dois unneeded (there's no reason for reminding about boldness more at VAs than elsewhere). As for the auto archiving notice, that could be rolled into the talk header, looking something like this, which would communicate the same info but take up a fraction of the space.
I realize I'm throwing out a bunch of different thoughts, some of which could be pursued in isolation, but the larger picture I see is that we ought to move away from our current modus operandi in which each piece of information gets its own banner and instead move to a system in which our core banners are able to incorporate lots of different information and display it in a format where there's appropriate visual weight and no duplication. {{ Article history}} has done a great job of this for article quality/milestones, but we need that same effort for lots of different areas. I'd welcome thoughts about how to go about such an initiative, or anything else that might help us address the problem of talk page banner blindness. {{u| Sdkb}} talk 04:09, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
could try doing a big TfD nom [...] but I'm not sure it'd succeedBut why not? Anyway, whether it's successful or not, that's probably a quicker way than waxing over here on WPI. At least one of those banners duplicates (the current) {{ talk page}}; I bet we could get the rest integrated into that one too. (And/or as options.) -- Izno ( talk) 15:24, 7 December 2020 (UTC)
For sanctions, you could have one banner with multiple sanctions (both ARBCOM and Community-sanctions) coded in , something a bit like {{Sanctions/talk notice|topic1=blp|topic2=ap|topic3=COVID}}
giving something like
The
Arbitration Committee and the wider community have authorized uninvolved
administrators to impose
discretionary sanctions on users who edit pages related to:
including this article. Provided the awareness criteria are met, discretionary sanctions may be used against editors who repeatedly or seriously fail to adhere to the purpose of Wikipedia, any expected standards of behaviour, or any normal editorial process. |
Headbomb { t · c · p · b} 01:10, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
Agree banner spam as with edit notice spam is a problem all over. First step in my view would be to purge lots of junk at Category:Article talk header templates like Template:Editing Friday, Template:Model article, Template:Prone to spam, Template:Webcomics refideas..etc.-- Moxy 🍁 23:46, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
I don't see this as a problem. I find the banners play a role similar to that of my unabridged Webster's 2nd, my Columbia Encyclopedia, and my bilingual dictionaries: I don't pick up one of those tomes every day, or even every month sometimes; I walk by them all the time without even seeing them; but they are there whenever I need them, and it's extremely annoying if someone has misplaced one of them and I can't find it when I need it. Ditto many of the page banners; it's mightily annoying if they are not there when I want them. Slap a {{ skip to bottom}} template at the top of the Talk page, and you're done. What exactly do you want to do on a Talk page, other than to view the ToC, go to the bottom of the page, or click a notification that takes you straight to the discussion in question, for which banners are an impediment to doing what you want? Mathglot ( talk) 08:17, 12 December 2020 (UTC)
It's really great to see that this conversation is taking place. I strongly disagree with Mathglot because this is a problem that I think ruins the accessibility of a lot of talk pages, especially the ones where the talk page matters the most such as many of the examples given above. I agree with the shortening of the vital articles banner. The template for British vs American vs Hong Kong vs Indian etc English is utterly useless on the talk page, and has little to no effect on the vast majority of issues that arise here (random editors coming in to change a "misspelling"). This definitely needs to be as an edit notice and not the talk page. In fact, I wonder if this could be configured so that if it's placed in the talk page it doesn't show up there put shows up as an edit notice on the article page – so that we wouldn't have to go through and change/remove all of them, though I suppose a bot could do this. Aza24 ( talk) 01:55, 14 December 2020 (UTC)
Talk:Karl Marx is fine now. Some of the areas causing problems have been missed in this discussion.
GA drops in templates instead of building articlehistory. DYK drops in templates without integrating them to the articlehistory template. OTD drops in templates rather than building articlehistory. ITN drops in templates rather than building articlehistory. Vital articles drops in templates rather than placing them in the WikiProject banner shell. I have approached the bot about Vital articles, and that is being addressed. The problem with the other templates being dropped in is that a prolific sockmaster hounded the
editor off the project who used to run a bot that processed every single template on talk that related to the articlehistory in to that template, so I have been running around doing that work manually.
If those issues were addressed, and editors would simply clean up talk pages as I have been doing now for several months, we would see that the problem isn't as bad as it appears and not nearly as bad as it was before Gimmetrow and DrPda initiated the effort to tame talk clutter in 2007. Skip to talk is rarely needed, the duplicate archive boxes can often be deleted, and the useless templates like WikiEd and English variety can be rolled in to a banner. The real problem is the need for a bot to clean up articlehistory items, as I have been doing on FAs. (Karl Marx: Projects to banners, OTD to article history, banner holder for English variety and archive info, remove one that is essentially duplicated in talk header, and now skip to talk is no longer needed.)
The discretionary sanction banners can be dealt with by electing arbs who will deal with editors with behavioral problems rather than pushing problems off to other admins via DS. It is astounding that what one bot did over a decade ago to tame talk clutter is no longer being done; surely our coding ability has advanced since 2007 ? Apparently this work I have been doing for several months now is well received, as I am not aware of having been reverted even once. Surely some clever bot or script person can do this work; they once did. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 15:05, 15 December 2020 (UTC)
Messes like Talk:Transit of Venus created by edits like this continue more than a full decade after the last successful effort to tame talk clutter. In my months-long effort to tame the clutter on FA talk pages created by ITN, OTD, GA, DYK, and WikiEd, I am finding the biggest issue continues to be an unresponsive Vital (sic) articles WikiProject. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 09:35, 22 December 2020 (UTC)
Responding to ProcrastinatingReader's query above, with a broader summary of what I have found after several months of working to tame talk page clutter on Featured articles.
What I have done for several months now is to go through every current FAC, FAR, PR, TFA or OTD that relates to an FA, to clean up those talk pages. I am unsure if my observations will apply equally to non-FAs, for example GAs, as I have not attempted to clean those up. My guess is that talk pages of non-FAs are in much worse shape since we lost Gimmebot, because no one is building articlehistory at all on GAs (Gimmebot once did).
In terms of the specific questions asked, no, I don't believe that scrapping levels 4/5 will solve the Vital articles problem, because the problem is simply a failure of Vital articles to wrap their templates in the Banner shell, just like every other project does. Independent of the number of articles where they have done this, the issue of dropping the template anywhere, not reviewing the talk page for the mess made (see this talk page after Vital articles template added), and not using the WikiProject banner at all is the one that should be addressed, whether on hundreds of articles or thousands.
In terms of taking over the work that Gimmebot once did for every template on every article, I'll give an area by area summary of what I know below. What I don't know how to deal with is the problem that we need one bot to clean up after the messes now made by quite a few other bots, so some level of bot coordination will be needed here. I am unwilling to take that on, as I have found many of my interactions with bot operators to be highly frustrating and often unproductive. MOST of my cleanup work has involved putting Vital articles in the {{WPBS banner and merging OTD, DYK, GA and ITN templates (dropped in by different bots) to the consolidated Template:Article history, which was designed over a decade ago for this very purpose, but has fallen into neglect without Gimmetrow/Gimmebot.
Yes they are a problem, but no where near the scope of the other problems I have seen. (It is possible that my sample is distorted, because students are discouraged from editing FAs, so I may be missing the extent of that problem.) WikiEd Banners provide an essential function wrt medical editing at least, and are easily dealt with. I left my feedback on that at the talk page of Sage (Wiki Ed). [5] Basically, I have (literally) never encountered medical editing from a student that did not have considerable errors, and we need to keep those templates on talk until someone has had the opportunity to check the work and remove the errors. When I encounter an old student editing template on talk, I check to see if they actually edited the article (most of the time, they didn't). If they didn't, I just remove the template. If they did, and the errors were later corrected by someone else, I just either archive the template as a talk page section, or move it into a banner. If the errors need attention, the banner needs to stay.
In my experience with cleaning up, there are extremely few (a couple maybe?) instances where the Skip to talk template is needed post-cleanup. The few occasions where I have left it are typically when there are multiple discretionary notices on the talk page, resulting in considerable bloat and length. And yet ... it seems quite odd to me that we are encouraging possibly new readers to skip over a discretionary sanctions template, as it is so important that new editors understand them. On the other hand, in my own editing, I find that new editors rarely read the DS templates anyway, and have no idea what they mean. And, in my own editing area, an Arbcase resulted in sanctions being applied to an entire content area (drug prices), only because the Arbs were reluctant, for understandable reasons, to fully sanction only three editors who were not editing according to policy. An entire content area subjected to DS ... for three editors. So, solving the problem with Discretionary sanction templates involves addressing what measures the community believes are most effective in dealing with disruptive users, and how that is reflected in their ArbCom voting. In terms of the talk page templating, this is beyond my pay scale, but DS sanctions add considerable bulk to talk pages, that can't be rolled in to a banner, and may be lost in the clutter, or missed because of skip to talk.
There is a whole list of useless banners whose purpose escapes me. Variety of English is flagged in articles, why also on talk? Pageviews are available on articlehistory tag, yet result in some of the most unsightly templates ever on talk. Who is adding this stuff ? I roll them in to
Other talk page banners
|
---|
so that if they are serving some purpose (categorization?), they are still there. Separately, Calm, Not A Forum, etc are often no longer even applicable; that requires manually checking that the talk page has calmed down and removing those templates-- not something we can assign to a bot.
The talk header template now includes searchable archive by default, and how to find sources. So, unless they are highly customized, I delete duplicate archive boxes and duplicate find sources templates. And I move the talk header template to the top of the page.
Not only Vital articles, but some other projects have rarely been rolling their templates in to the WPBS shell and can be ... for example, Spoken Wikipedia and the old WP Version 1 templates and Some Portals. A bot should be able to go back and get all these things and stick them in a WPBS shell, and by the way, collapse that shell, since WikiProjects simply don't have the prominence they once did, and talk pages need room for more significant templates (like DS). Here is where things stand with Cewbot run by Kanashimi. The Vital articles project is so decentralized that there appears to be no there there. To such an extent that right now I am unable to even locate the conversation I had with User:Sdkb somewhere recently about how to get this problem addressed. Apparently there is not even a centralized talk page, because I can't find where we had the conversation. If this can be addressed, it will probably need to be part of the whole problem of getting all of these bots on the same page.
The number of problems requiring a new and centralized bot effort, akin to what Gimmebot did, get worse when we got in to GA, DYK, ITN and OTD, as I will lay out next.
In general, FAs are in a bit better shape than others probably, because Hawkeye7's bot, FACBot, does convert FAC and FAR templates to articlehistory. But, best I can tell, there was a time period when that bot did not convert all other templates, and it still doesn't convert all other process templates, so miscellaneous cleanup is often needed. Gimmebot rolled ALL content review processes, AFDs, ITNs, OTDs, etcetera in to one template. That is what we are missing today.
I don't have enough samples to go by there; I just roll their templates in to articlehistory when I find them. If we somehow replace Gimmebot, they can all be addressed.
Is The Worst. Best I can tell, the bot procedures have changed over time, so one finds all kinds of inconsistencies in terms of what is added to the articlehistory template and what is not, and fixing these is hugely time consuming and no fun, partly because of the infuriatingly frustrating disconnect between how Template:Article history handles multiple entries, and how the OTD bot adds them. Article history uses the parameters ... otd1date, otd1oldid, otd2date, otd2oldid, and so on, while OTD uses otddate1, otdoldid1, otddate2, otdoldid2, etc. Imagine the work to convert those to articlehistory manually! WHY can't we use the same convention on the number x? Again, lack of centralization in how we handle content processes that were once routinely handled by Gimmebot. In attempting to figure out to whom one speaks to get this addressed, I've discovered there is also no overall OTD process or page, rather one goes to Howcheng on this.
The second worst. Why oh why do they use the parameter nompage= for their talk page template link to the nomination page, while Article history uses dyknom= ?? This means the DYK nomination page has been lost in many article history templates, and I am having to go back and recover them-- usually by manually looking them up. Could we all get on the same page? A whole separate bot is needed now to go back and replace lost DYK nomination pages in article history. I have found and fixed scores of them already.
Not rolled in to article history at all, best I can tell. GimmeBot once did. This can be hard work because not all GA reviewers know how to use the subst template correctly when closing, and fixing a malformed GA pass means a whole ton of digging in to history to find the missing information.
Exactly the same as GA.
While FAC and FAR templates are converted by daily bot runs to articlehistory, the formatting is inconsistent and confusing. I clean up every one of them every day; my hope is that if we make the articlehistory entries consistent, clear and less confusing to the average editor, others will begin to understand how to use that template to do their own cleanup. So, just as Gimmebot did, I make sure the events are in order, there is a space between each event, and the current status is listed at the head of a section at the bottom which is then followed by dates (maindates, OTDs, ITNs, etc). I believe that consistency will make the article history more understandable to more editors. Also, FACbot for some reason is not adding |currentstatus= FFAC . |
So, to get ALL of this cleaned up will require someone to get all the bot operators to talk to each other, and for someone to write a bot that does what Gimmebot was doing more than a decade ago ... rolling every process in to the articlehistory template, while also rolling projects into collapsible banners. SandyGeorgia ( Talk) 20:50, 1 January 2021 (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.
I mentioned this above, but am still baffled by it. Is there any reason that the English variety appears on talk pages? I don't know how this could ever be effective, since I'm sure those who are disregarding this the most aren't going to see it on the talk page. Surely these could be converted to an edit notice; which would be significantly more effective? Aza24 ( talk) 23:54, 6 January 2021 (UTC)
{{
British English}}
already says may be included on talk pages or editnotices- so the only change being suggested here is a change to how we use the same template. -- Paul ❬ talk❭ 16:38, 9 January 2021 (UTC)
What do you think of having certain talk page banners expire after a long period automatically? For current event, not a forum, calm, controversial etc. Additional fields could be added for when an editor doesn't think that it should expire for whatever reason. -- Paul ❬ talk❭ 06:55, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
|hide_find_sources=
should probably be enabled by default imo. –
MJL
‐Talk‐
☖ 20:17, 12 January 2021 (UTC)
Skdb said above: I could try doing a big TfD nom of {{
Controversial}}, {{
Be civil}}, {{
Round in circles}}, {{
Not a forum}}, etc., but I'm not sure it'd succeed.
Do we want to proceed on this? Probably by someone better at writing a convincing nominating statement than me :P Stuff like this is just ridiculous. It has {{ Warning RS and OR}}, {{ ds/talk notice}}, {{ controversial}}, {{ not a vote}}, {{ not a forum}}, and {{ Round in circles}}. As you might guess: no, it wasn't helping. ProcrastinatingReader ( talk) 13:15, 15 January 2021 (UTC)
How are our conduct dispute resolution systems working for us? How can they be improved? (This is an opinion-soliciting discussion, not a proposal to vote on.)
List of conduct dispute resolution systems:
I think the answer to the first question is "not very well", and I'm not sure of the answer to the second question, but I think it would be useful to gather opinions about and discuss what the community can do to improve conduct dispute resolution. Is there a problem, and if so, where? Levivich harass/ hound 21:34, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
Discussion about the format of this discussion
|
---|
|
Hi, according to "The principle of separation of concerns", Wikipedia articles should be separated into two parts 1-"Article text part" 2-"Template part", and "Article text part" should have only text of articles plus pointers to the "Template part", and "Template part" should only have all of the templates. I think this separation is very helpful, because 1- Reduces complexity of creation and read of articles, and 2-Process of articles both by machines and human becomes more easier and effective. ( Semantic queries in the Semantic web that is the proposal of Tim Berners Lee). I think one of its benefits is improving its maintenance: Changing and replacing the template without changing the article text in a quiet way. What are pros and cons about respecting separation of concerns and making a separate "Template part"? Thanks, Hooman Mallahzadeh ( talk) 15:46, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
{{reflist}}
. We could also start all articles with {{begin}}
and automatically pull any lead maintenance templates, hatnotes and infobox from somewhere like Template:Begin/articlename. Same with {{end}}
pulling stuff like navboxes and categories. I don't actually support any of this, and it wouldn't prevent editors from breaking the rules or the template calls.
PrimeHunter (
talk) 21:36, 18 January 2021 (UTC)
@ Pbsouthwood: Imagine we want to write an article in Wikipedia
-- Tempate part --
pointer1={{getFirstName}}
pointer2={{getLastName}}
-- Text and pointer part --
Hello pointer1 pointer2
Here pointer1 and pointer2 are pointers to "Template part" in the plain text and the output is:
Hello Hooman Mallahzadeh
Hello pointer1 pointer2
"very readable"??? What is the use case for a facility offering a convenient way to switch from first name to first initial, article wide? I'm going to save you and everyone else a lot of time by suggesting that you put this idea on the shelf and dust it off again when your edit count, which right now is 700, reaches 10K.
E
Eng 06:59, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
I think your knowledge about modern programming is low– I'll spare you embarrassment by not setting you straight on that. The problem here, to be blunt, is not my knowledge of programming, but your knowledge of writing Wikipedia articles. Hint: it's not an exercise in programming. E Eng 07:37, 19 January 2021 (UTC)
-- Tempate part --
pointer1=Winston
pointer2=Churchill
-- Text and pointer part --
pointer1 pointer2 was a British statesman, army officer, and writer...
pointer1=Winston(Plain text)
pointer1={{getFirstName}}(Template)
I have created a more-modern version of the Main Page changing the Wikipedia:Main Page/styles.css alone.
Here is what it looks like:
You can find the
css code here and the
resulting Main Page here.
My primary goal of the design was to establish a clean interface by removing the closely-separated old-fashioned borders around each of the content boxes:
However after doing this, I noticed that there was little space between the primary green and blue boxes and I seeked to seperate them. Along with separating them, I also established a common separation between all boxes on the page of 8px
, making the interface even more uniform and pretty.
I would like to know the community's input on what they think about the design.
Here are some possible related design questions to consider in addition to your general feedback:
Lectrician1 ( talk) 05:20, 21 January 2021 (UTC)
As the title - improve captioning so that image descriptions are better and more accurately describe the images. LocalPunk ( talk) 17:57, 23 January 2021 (UTC)
Bright Blue Hyperlink color makes reading disruptive
That is just what always strikes me when I visit. WIKI is so busy with links that the continuity of reading is broken up. A darker blue, closer to black, is more readable. I hear wiki uses darker blue for visited, or previously edited sites. Maybe that distinction could be changed and given to all-links-in-general to enhance encyclopedia readability in such a busily linked site.
Just a thought. I know when I copy and paste material, I sometimes take the time to darken the links to a darker blue so reading isn't so distracting.
UndrGrad60+ — Preceding unsigned comment added by UndrGrad60+ ( talk • contribs) 03:42, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
a {
color: #0000FF;
}
a:visited {
color: #0000FF;
}
Yes, I know it's a perennial proposal, and yes I've read over quite a few discussions in the past and yes I do feel times are different now. Mergers often stay open exorbitantly long times . This is not practical, and the system of proposed mergers is clearly struggling with low participation and interest (not to suggest that other areas aren't). It is more effective and efficient to nominate an article for deletion if you want it to be merged. Like it or not, that would seem to be a fact at this point based on my highly unscientific day-to-day life. See, for instance, 1 and 2, where unanimous consensuses were reached in a week-- this would usually take months to a year or more if you followed the 'correct' way of proposing a merge. Currently, some users will !vote "keep: a merger should be discussed elsewhere" and I'd argue that more often than not no discussion happens elsewhere.
I'm not suggesting completely folding PROPMERGE into AfD and I'm not suggesting necessarily renaming AfD to articles for discussion, I just think it past time that we seriously consider making 'merge' a valid option to start an AfD for. Is AfD exactly booming with participants? no, but I'd argue it's higher visibility than proposing a merger, the format works just as well better, and I highly doubt the number of new merges would overwhelm the system. We could always do a trial for X months and reassess... Cheers,
Eddie891
Talk
Work 23:22, 25 January 2021 (UTC)
I think re-implementing WikiMoney and the related services could be cool. What if you could use WikiMoney to buy some cool things like a "Golden Barnstar" to give to exceptional work. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Education-over-easy ( talk • contribs) 14:25, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
Many nations in Europe have abolished their nobility. The people who would hold this titles, or claim they would, often have articles here calling them "Prince" and "Duke."
But they are not princes or dukes, because they are not children of sovereigns or the head of a dukedom.
A few examples:
/info/en/?search=Prince_Rostislav_Romanov_(born_1985) /info/en/?search=Donatus,_Landgrave_of_Hesse /info/en/?search=Princess_B%C3%A9atrice_of_Bourbon-Two_Sicilies
I conservatively estimate there are more than 500 similar pages of people who are not notable, and only here because they claim to have royal or noble titles. It could four times this amount.
Of course a pretender could be notable because they have widespread political support for restoration. Or they could be notable as a scientist, author, etc. But rarely is this the case here.
My view is that (1) most of these articles should be deleted (2) the remaining ones the royal title like "prince" should be deleted from the article name.
Someone made a similar suggestion here in 2013:
Declanscottp ( talk) 01:30, 26 January 2021 (UTC)
Recently kicked off a discussion in Wikipedia talk:Redirect § Minimum utility threshold for redirects?. It addresses a point of debate that regularly comes up on WP:RFD and may be worth clarifying in editor guidelines. Current guidelines allow for any redirect so long as "someone" finds it useful. Interested to hear your feedback. - Wikmoz ( talk) 03:55, 1 February 2021 (UTC)
We currently have bundled cites like #1 in QAnon. This is arguably not good for a couple reasons:
However, it's also not great to have "Foo bar baz.[1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]". In some citation styles they use ranges on consecutive numbers above a certain threshold (e.g., [1-15]). The numbers might not always be completely consecutive, but for the one's that are they can be bundled. This would need to be done at the MediaWiki layer. Thoughts or other ideas? -- Green C 13:49, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Even better highlight them all as a block. When clicking [1-15].This is not possible. Only the targeted reference can be turned blue. Are you sure you want it to be the first? There was a big hullaballoo because AWB was reordering citations in a row (since removed). I imagine "going to the first" will have a similar issue. -- Izno ( talk) 06:48, 6 February 2021 (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.
Respected Wikipedia Admins,
I would like to bring a new and essential feature to your notice which needs to be added in Wikipedia.
But before that, I would apologize for excessive trolling which I did on #wikipedia-en-help and #wikimedia-commons(Kiwi 🥝 IRC Channels). Now, I am myself exhausted after repeated trolling that I don't like to troll any more.
The feature is related to in-article search. You might have seen, when you open .pdf or .docx or .pptx file using certain apps, there is a feature through which you can search a particular word in the article.
For e.g., when you open a .pdf file using Chrome app, there is a search bar on top of the page where when you search a particular word and as you press enter, wherever the word it there in the article, it gets highlighted by a particular colour so you can refer it easily.
I am requesting to you to add this feature because I have seen there are certain users who edit articles without selecting "Watch this page" checkbox☑️. As a result, it becomes difficult to locate their edit if it is minor and the article is too big. And it might happen that those edits by the users might not be up to the marks and might need to be reverted. However, in such cases, the task becomes difficult. In such cases,we have to read entire article to locate it.
Thus, am requesting you to add a feature of word search in the article itself which will make location of a particular word easy. Secondly, it will be beneficial for readers who wish to find information on a particular topic.
It is my humble request to you to ask the respective Wikipedia developers to add this essential feature asap.
Thanks & Regards,
Akshat2103 ( talk) 19:20, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Indeed 😊, it worked. Issue resolved...
Akshat2103 ( talk) 19:55, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
Many websites such as W3Schools for example have a navigation menu at the top rather than on the left. I think Wikipedia would look a lot better if it had one on top above the links. I'm not a coder, but I could sketch out what exactly the new navigation menu would look like. I would like to hear from Sdkb for thoughts on this and would like to know if it has been discussed before. Thanks, Interstellarity ( talk) 20:03, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
There are a lot of editors who are WP:NOTHERE or don't know what WP:NOTHERE means. We can't do much about those who KNOW they are here for the wrong reason, but I have an idea that will help those who are ignorant or those who might be WP:PAID but who really want to "play by the rules" but don't even know there are rules they must play by:
Comments? davidwr/( talk)/( contribs) 23:06, 4 February 2021 (UTC)
For many large articles, I'll often quickly add a reference, only to discover after that it was already used elsewhere on the page, just with a difference retrieved date or other minor change, so it wasn't automatically merged. I also often come across instances where others have done this and not noticed afterwards. From WP:DUPCITES, it looks like there aren't any great tools for merging duplicate references. Should we work on creating such tools, or adding some sort of mild warning when someone tries to add a citation detected as likely a duplicate? {{u| Sdkb}} talk 21:35, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
work=New York Times
vs. work=[[The New York Times]]
?) {{u|
Sdkb}}
talk 22:41, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
@ Finnusertop: I hadn't heard of it before, thanks. However, it doesn't seem to work on my sandbox testing area; is that meant to happen? Sdrqaz ( talk) 00:27, 13 February 2021 (UTC)
Help desk and teahouse volunteer, and ten+ year editor here. I just posted a mass typo fix request for "Insititute" on Wikipedia talk:Typo Team but noticed a request from July last year about a prevalence of its' (with trailing apostrophe) seems to have been unanswered. Wikipedia:Typo Team has a pledges page, but shouldn't there also be a requests page? This might also raise the profile of Typo Team - I'd never heard of the team until today. TimTempleton (talk) (cont) 02:25, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
Hi. I have seen quite a few ads for smaller public transport providers in Britain recently and wondered if we should have an SNG specifically for Public Transport. I base this idea that unless a public transport provider is a national concern, they rarely get the level of coverage to meet gng, even if they are an important player in society and are what people on the street would say is notable. I have looked and could not see any current wikiproject looking at this. Davidstewartharvey ( talk) 15:26, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
In 2018, the Traffic Commissioner for the North West of England, Simon Evans, cut Stotts transport licence from 40 to 31 vehicles after failing to auto enrol staff onto a pension scheme. In November 2017, Brighton Magistrates Court found Stotts Tours and its managing director guilty of failing to auto enrol employees onto a work based pension. The company was fined £60,000 and became the first UK company to be found guilty under the 2015 pension laws.) Assuming it was covered in-depth by Buses Magazine at some point—and I'd be surprised if there's any operator of scheduled bus services that hasn't been—then it can be re-created with decent sourcing, but the participants at AfD discussions can only work with what they have in front of them. With an absence of sourcing like that, no admin could have done anything other than delete it.
I thought it might be useful for wikipedia to add a link in the Works Cited section to the Connected Papers graph of each journal article. Connected Papers finds and visualizes similar papers to the one in question. I think this would make it easier to use Wikipedia as a resource in an academic research setting. They have recently integrated with arXiv and seem likely to support FOSS projects like wikipedia, or at least support us linking to them. TripleShortOfACycle ( talk - contribs) - (she/her/hers) 05:49, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
(This might have been proposed before. Also, if this idea is in the wrong place, please tell me where I should put it.)
In each year article from 1900 to 1989*, the events section links to detailed monthly articles for each month, each of which in turn lists several events for each day therein (as well as the corresponding day of the week). Meanwhile, for all the year articles from 1990 to 2021*, the events section is merely a sparse listing of various occurrences, with no monthly articles at all (each monthly title is a redirect to the appropriate subsection of the events section). However, the period since 1990 has been hardly lacking in historically important events. To fix this discrepancy, I propose that, for each year since 1990 to the present, monthly articles should be created for each month, with content for each day. This would greatly improve our historical understanding of recent & important events.
*At least I think so. I haven't bothered to check every article, but this seems to hold for every one I've visited.
Duckmather ( talk) 18:08, 15 February 2021 (UTC)
I wondered if, even if it is possible, that discussions that occur, like changes to Notability, that editors are notified to make Wikipedia more democratic? At the moment it seems that when policy changes are being discussed and made, it seems to be the same small band of editors, and in most cases most editors don't know it is actually happening.
My idea is that when policy is being discussed all editors get a discussion notification, and at the end of the discussion all editors get a notification to vote. Once the vote has been completed then the notification is sent to all editors to let them know of the change, if any, to policy. Davidstewartharvey ( talk) 06:59, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject—has been unchanged since May 2007, and is one of the few things on Wikipedia which is never seriously challenged; changing it to even a minor degree would have such a huge knock-on effect on Wikipedia's existing content as to be unworkable.) ‑ Iridescent 07:45, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
Wikivoyage is one of the best projects of Wikimedia. In last days, I'm so concentrated to develop the new opened Turkish Wikivoyage page. And I think, an official mobile app for Wikivoyage is a good idea. It can be perfect for the travelers around the world. The people mostly use their smart phones during traveling. This project will not make much sense if there is no app of WV. UcuncuUlus ( talk) 13:27, 20 February 2021 (UTC)
Since I started using Ubuntu, it has seemed like an interesting idea to have a skin on Wikipedia that makes Wikipedia look like a command prompt or a terminal. I know it probably won't get implemented, and even if it gets implemented, very few people will use it, but it seems like an interesting idea. 4D4850 ( talk) 01:27, 24 February 2021 (UTC)
Curious if anyone has considered writing a bot to automatically handle many WP:U1 speedy deletions? To prevent abuse, it should make sure that the page was either created in the user's userspace, or never edited by anyone other than the user (so someone couldn't move a page to their userspace to get it deleted, or U1 an article they created but others had built). This could significantly speed up U1 and leave admins to do things more useful. Elliot321 ( talk | contribs) 02:31, 25 February 2021 (UTC)
Some companies do mandatory vacations for employees to make sure nobody's absolutely required. I wonder if the same concept could be applied here. Or maybe it's general knowledge what the results would be. Enterprisey ( talk!) 09:56, 30 January 2021 (UTC)
There is a useful feature in Wikimedia apps that suggests edits for users automatically. Wikimedia Apps/Suggested edits allows people to casually edit Wikipedia doing all sorts of recommended tasks and community related help, and its ease of use brings me to the conclusion that it would be a very good idea to implement something equivalent on the main site. I recognize that we have features for improving articles according with very different needs, but the automatic nature of Suggested Edits leads me to believe that it would be a convenient tool for those who want to take advantage of it. Tyrone Madera ( talk) 07:39, 10 February 2021 (UTC)
Basically, templates that can go inline to call out a comment or particular groups of comments.
Discourse forums have something where an admin can post a message about a comment to everyone.
Suppose Alice opens a deletion nomination for article "Foo" and Bob writes something like "I like foo". A callout can provide a gentle reminder to remain on topic/stay civil. Of course, if it happens multiple times, then we can just use the uw series.
So the discussion would look like this:
Foo (edit | talk | etc.)
Does not meet the notability guidelines. Alice ( talk) 00:00 1 January 1970 (UTC)
I think this would be a good option before page protection if a discussion gets derailed or off topic fast. Sometimes, even a great proportion good faith contributors make mistakes and may get off topic or uncivil, so giving a gentle reminder when the discussion gets heated can cool these discussions back down. Aasim ( talk) 22:11, 12 February 2021 (UTC)
I think we should add information about how good the service is to this article. Spammer ( talk) 00:25 2 January 1970 (UTC)
Over at WP:GA they have support symbols ( ), oppose symbols ( ), and on-hold symbols ( ) to represent the various results of a good article review. However, one neglected result is asking for a second opinion, which currently is represented with a neutral vote ( ) which I believe does not make much sense and doesn't convey much. I propose an icon similar to one like this; forgive the terrible art, I made this on Chrome Canvass with a mousepad. P anini 🥪 14:17, 16 February 2021 (UTC)
I tried looking through the archives and couldn't find something like this, so I'm posting here.
In my opinion, the whole talk page format needs to be radically redesigned. It is just plain difficult to use. For one, an editor needs to use source code to be able to participate in a talk page, which is a high barrier in terms of time (inputting the proper syntax correctly) and knowledge (source editing is not intuitive).
Four big issues I see:
In an ideal world, I'd see the talk pages look more like Reddit or any other platform with discussion boards. A short-term solution would be to enable Visual Editor, which is currently not enabled on Talk pages.
I know I can't be the only one who has noticed shortcomings with the Talk page format. What are your thoughts on Talk Pages and how they could be improved?
Fredlesaltique ( talk) 14:04, 27 February 2021 (UTC)