This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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Hello. I was wondering if according to wikipedia rules and regulations, a user, could add a direct link to a Nazi website in an article? And if not, please provide me with the related quotes from the laws. -- Kaaveh 08:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
I searched for the article entitled Sexual Intercourse (admittedly in the event of my boredom)and I happened to notice some rather explicitly sexual images. I do acknowledge that the images are necessary to provide useful content in the article, but, I feel that the availability of such sensual images to minors is a serious problem, considering that there was no disclaimer of any kind in the article.
Whether the article's explicit content appears without warning on a computer in a public place or in front of elementary school kids, I believe that something should be done about it.
-Krono45 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krono45 ( talk • contribs) 20:48, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Please come participate in the discussion here. It involves image use policy issues far beyond the template itself. Thanks. ··· 日本穣 ? · Talk to Nihonjoe 06:43, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Several editors of differing philosophies have been working on a proposed policy to address the posting of private correspondence on Wikipedia. Initially intended to address user behaviour, this has now been extended into areas that may affect content edits to the encyclopedia proper. In the interests of transparency, consensus and collaboration, other editors might wish to review and comment on this proposed policy. Risker ( talk) 22:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Sirs:
I am really at odds with the NOTABILITY/Trivia policy.
This policy has alienated a large number of WebComic advocates, and certainally cost WP some creadibility and good will, and some donation money too.
As I stated on my former user page, ( I will provbibly not log in again ):
"This is upsetting me, a lot. Articles are set for speedy deletion based upon the concept of Notability, i.e. popularization which to me has a connotation of sensationalizm. Since the most of the web is sensationalism and esoteric, and polarized in that way. ( Some eMusic sites I have been to only have 25~30 page views.)
Why would you want a encyclopedia, that only has popular topics? I really wound't want that. Id read 'People' Magazine if I wanted that. Encyclopedias should EMBRACE THE ESOTERIC. There is an article here on wikipedia for every pokemon character, and I %*&3 hate pokemon, but I respect its reverence amoung five year olds, and especially five year olds who use wikipedia as their reference. Can you imagine the effect of children growing up as knowing wikipedia as something that was usefull to them, and they would enjoy comtributing to?
By this criteria alone ( Notability ), we should delete ALL HISTORY before WWII for its irelevence. Is Joan D'Arc relevent? Practically no. But she has extrodinary significance to the history of religion, spirituality and philosophy." You can easily rewrite history, by only looking at the "popular" aspects of it.
I have an eye for detail and consistancy, and am about to actually work on my first complete rewrite, ( although, no one has stepped forward to guide me, or adopt me). Is it actually become sport to destory what others are passionate about? ( Feel free, of course, to delete this message if you feel that is not notable enough. )
What is being done policy wise about this?
end of soapbox —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.118.64 ( talk) 08:17, November 12, 2007 (UTC)
More on this, I finally figured that...the notability paradox, the more you exclude notability, the more insignificant you become. Britannica has an enormous amount of trivia, and because of this, errors or not, it will always be the encyclopedia of choice, vs wep which has notable authors such as the man who posed as the Dr of divinity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Artoftransformation ( talk • contribs) 19:21, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
There seems to be a big issue here on both Wikipedia and Commons, where users are confusing copyright versus trademark. This has been an issue with many logos, which cannot be copyrighted due to their simplicity, but are subject to trademark laws. For example, Image:Mbta-logo.svg cannot be copyrighted because it merely consists of the letter "T" inside a circle. An editor has been confusing copyright with trademark, and has since added a copyright image tag (in addition to the public domain tag), and now the image is listed for deletion. I don't want to start an edit war over this, or any other image, but it is certain that editors need to establish the difference between copyright and trademark, and know when to use {{ Trademark}} and {{ PD-ineligible}} on image pages. There is no detailed explanation about this at WP:LOGOS, and I think that a statement should be instated somewhere. I also think that a {{ PD-logo}} should be created to help users understand this concept a little bit better. NOTE: This message was previously posted at Wikipedia talk:Logos on 2007-11-07 with no replies. – Dream out loud ( talk) 16:59, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
The wording of Template:Non-free logo doesn't help. It says "copyright and/or trademark". That basically implies that trademarks are fair use images. Fun Pika 20:49, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Can we just delete everything to do with fiction, period? It seems kind of subjective that we're deleting virtually every article on video games characters, often with very little warning (two articles that I frequently contributed to were deleted before I was even aware they had been nominated for deletion). And really, what fiction is important? I suppose Shakespeare can stay, and Dickens, and Austin, and "classic" literature, stuff like that. And I suppose some people would get quite upset if the Harry Potter or Foundation stuff went as well, but I don't see why we need an article on Pokémon, or CardCaptor Sakura, or Red Dwarf, or The Edge Chronicles. I mean let's face it - who cares? RobbieG ( talk) 13:21, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
Current consensus is to merge minor stuff into list of articles and only make or keep articles about major things. That's policy and that's how we at WP:GUNDAM do things. Your claim about 'nothing being done' is in fact a blatant lie-- a lot of work is being done at the moment, but it mostly is focusing on mecha from a specific series at the moment. There are not many people working on WP:GUNDAM, and not all of them know everything about every series. Jtrainor ( talk) 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
Just a thought. WP is a long-term project, right? So having lots of articles on stuff that young people find interesting draws them in and gives them the editing skills that they will remember when they come back in 5 or 10 or 40(!) years time and want to contribute to the subjects that they are interested in as older people. Rome wasn't built in a day. — SMALL JIM 11:38, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Comment And don't forget... Bulbasaur (of Pokémon fame) was, at one point, a featured article. :) --Craw-daddy | T | 22:11, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
We should be careful with terminology here. There is a difference here between 'classical' and 'classic' (compare the difference between 'historical' and 'historic'). Classical often refers to the period of classical antiquity, though as the disambiguation page shows, there are other periods called classical as well. Classic literature, on the other hand, is what we are talking about here (and what, to be fair, everyone was talking about before I pedantically pointed out the terminology snafu). That article doesn't do a good job of explaining what a classic is, though it does note that the origin of the phrase is from the word classical. Anyway, not all classics are literature and not all literature is classic. The standard of secondary literature on the topic is a good one. Tolkien Studies is a journal on the subject of Tolkien studies, and there is a fairly large body of secondary literature on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Not all of it good, but then you can't have everything. Carcharoth ( talk) 22:52, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Everybody commenting here should really try and adjust WP:FICT to stricter standards. It makes for a good exercise to learn a few things about how even the process of guideline-making has been hijacked to pave the way for uncurbed fan enthusiasm. On the issue of articles about novels vs articles about episode or minor character: William Pietri recently brought up the brilliant point that even average writers are always superb readers, whereas below-average readers cannot possibly write a coherent article. So that's what it has come to, as far as I'm concerned: Any hint that the author has read anything about the topic is enough for me to accept it. That means I can certainly tolerate an article about a book. But the unfortunately non-cliché 14-year-old half-literate who watches Family Guy or some such and then stuffs Wikipedia with every unimportant detail about it, convinced that he's doing a good thing, is something I cannot possibly combine with the idea of producing a serious encyclopedia. And the reason they keep fighting against the moving of such hopeless cruft articles to e.g. annex.wikia is a similar one, in that they are too lazy to even look for another place to gather. Wikipedia is right here, so why go somewhere else, right? Those people are unwilling (or unable, which is even worse) to do so much as google for sources and read them. I would endorse clamping down on those who do this, and on those who defend it by arguing for it. Alas, it's too late, the masses have already overrun Wikipedia and we may want to consider leaving it to them. A bit like with Moriarty in that " Ship in a Bottle" TNG episode. ¶ dorftrottel ¶ talk ¶ 21:39, December 5, 2007
This may be interesting and surprising...:
Apparently, it seems Wikimedia even actively helps and concedes to such censorship ??
-- LimoWreck ( talk) 18:23, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
This is outrageous. On the Ruud Lubbers article, it says he "resigned due to an unsubstantiated allegation". Not so. The official, public UN document says he sexually harassed the woman. After the fact, she was threatened to keep mum by the personnel officer. Apparently Mr. Lubbers office has 'handled' Jimbo, or WMF, so as to muzzle the information. Nice. Talk about no censorship.
That article is completely biased in Lubbers favor.. The official UN press release didn't deny the evidence but called it not worthy of a court case. But cases were filed in Switzerland and the U.S., though they didn't get traction. The victim was an American woman. She worked on short term contracts and her job was at threatened after she filed a claim.
What made this case so striking is that soldiers under UN hat (really national soldiers loaned out to help the agency) had a recent history of abusing refugee women. So for the head of the UNHCR agency to do this was huge. Lubbers was the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, so to make him fall was quite a big deal. 85.5.180.9 21:22, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
As Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Deleted_pages_should_be_visible notes, there have been many proposals to make deleted pages visible to non-admins. For instance:
The latter included a proposal to limit viewing to logged-in users. What about this variant: Allow contributors to a deleted article to view it. This will at least enable users to easily get back their text and move it to their userspace in order to re-work it, as well as have something to reference at WP:DRV. Most people, especially newbies, are probably unaware that some sysops will userfy deleted stuff on demand – and in any case, that requires extra work on the sysops' part.
Another possibility might be to allow users with sufficiently old accounts to view deleted articles, similar to the restrictions on page moving. The main point of keeping them hidden is to prevent casual surfers from being able to read those articles, right? The perennial proposals page notes the difficulties associated with dealing with copyvios, threats, etc. and other stuff that has to stay hidden, but those concerns could be addressed easily enough with a two-tier system, in which you have deleted stuff viewable only to admins and deleted stuff viewable to a larger group. Sarsaparilla 05:09, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
If you need the text of an article that was deleted, you can always ask any admin for it, providing that the article was not deleted due to BLP violations or office actions.
≈ jossi ≈
(talk) 21:15, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
I would like to propose a policy to ban fake message bars (such as the one on User:Just Jame's userpage). While fake message bars are perhaps ammusing or funny, some users find it annoying and immature as it disrupts the flow of wikipedia. Another reason why I think that fake message bars should be banned is that wikipedia is not a place for jokes or other non-sense, even if it is userfied. It creates a sense that wikipedia is losing it's goal of becoming a "fountain of knowledge" and that we're plummeting towards humorus entertainment such as uncylopedia. Please consider this idea with care.-- Sunny910910 ( talk| Contributions) 01:54, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps the time and customer goodwill that would be needed to scrutinize user pages for comformity to these sorts of standards might better be spent building the encyclopedia. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 02:03, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Based on the discussion at Wikipedia talk:User page/UI spoofing linked by Puchiko (thanks!), it looks like this issue has already been thoroughly addressed by the community. At a result, a section was added to the WP:UP guideline stating "The Wikipedia community generally frowns upon simulating the MediaWiki interface, and it should be avoided except when necessary for testing purposes." — Satori Son 19:47, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
I surfed on in to the WP:NPOV page to look up a specific detail and randomly noticed the link to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Examples. You can imagine my enormous surprise at finding that this page is essentially unchanged since the day I first posted it back in October 2001. (see the version at Nostalgia).
While I am deeply flattered that something I wrote so long ago is still being referenced, it is fair to say our collective perspective is (ahem) "a tad more sophisticated now". In my opinion we should either archive it as historical, or subject it to a complete re-write. The concept is useful, but the current version is hopelessly out of date. Manning 13:21, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
(moved here from the Reference Desk)
For the record I love everything about wikipedia. But it's hard not to get past all the grumbling I read in blogs [
[2]]. Does Wikipedia have a serious problem in authority: oligarchy vs. democracy?
Sappysap (
talk) 23:55, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Brett Favre was SI's 2007 Sportsman of the year as of today. Early this morning I checked his article and it had not been edited because it was locked. I had to post on the discussion page and wait till an editor, sometime in mid-morning, observed it, to wait for an updated edit. Now no shame to him, he was an expeditious and smart editor, but what does this say about the democracy of Wikipedia? Sappysap ( talk) 03:07, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Oligarchies are boring. I suggest a theocracy. All hail Jimbo!. Dragons flight ( talk) 03:33, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Quite boring, indeed, when the page you prescribe about Jimbo is impervious to edits. Sappysap ( talk) 03:38, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
< Older discussions · Archives: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z, AA, AB, AC, AD, AE, AF, AG, AH, AI, AJ, AK, AL, AM, AN, AO, AP, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AV, AW, AX, AY, AZ, BA, BB, BC, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BK, BL, BM, BN, BO · 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191
Hello. I was wondering if according to wikipedia rules and regulations, a user, could add a direct link to a Nazi website in an article? And if not, please provide me with the related quotes from the laws. -- Kaaveh 08:22, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
I searched for the article entitled Sexual Intercourse (admittedly in the event of my boredom)and I happened to notice some rather explicitly sexual images. I do acknowledge that the images are necessary to provide useful content in the article, but, I feel that the availability of such sensual images to minors is a serious problem, considering that there was no disclaimer of any kind in the article.
Whether the article's explicit content appears without warning on a computer in a public place or in front of elementary school kids, I believe that something should be done about it.
-Krono45 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Krono45 ( talk • contribs) 20:48, 3 December 2007 (UTC)
Please come participate in the discussion here. It involves image use policy issues far beyond the template itself. Thanks. ··· 日本穣 ? · Talk to Nihonjoe 06:43, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Several editors of differing philosophies have been working on a proposed policy to address the posting of private correspondence on Wikipedia. Initially intended to address user behaviour, this has now been extended into areas that may affect content edits to the encyclopedia proper. In the interests of transparency, consensus and collaboration, other editors might wish to review and comment on this proposed policy. Risker ( talk) 22:19, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Sirs:
I am really at odds with the NOTABILITY/Trivia policy.
This policy has alienated a large number of WebComic advocates, and certainally cost WP some creadibility and good will, and some donation money too.
As I stated on my former user page, ( I will provbibly not log in again ):
"This is upsetting me, a lot. Articles are set for speedy deletion based upon the concept of Notability, i.e. popularization which to me has a connotation of sensationalizm. Since the most of the web is sensationalism and esoteric, and polarized in that way. ( Some eMusic sites I have been to only have 25~30 page views.)
Why would you want a encyclopedia, that only has popular topics? I really wound't want that. Id read 'People' Magazine if I wanted that. Encyclopedias should EMBRACE THE ESOTERIC. There is an article here on wikipedia for every pokemon character, and I %*&3 hate pokemon, but I respect its reverence amoung five year olds, and especially five year olds who use wikipedia as their reference. Can you imagine the effect of children growing up as knowing wikipedia as something that was usefull to them, and they would enjoy comtributing to?
By this criteria alone ( Notability ), we should delete ALL HISTORY before WWII for its irelevence. Is Joan D'Arc relevent? Practically no. But she has extrodinary significance to the history of religion, spirituality and philosophy." You can easily rewrite history, by only looking at the "popular" aspects of it.
I have an eye for detail and consistancy, and am about to actually work on my first complete rewrite, ( although, no one has stepped forward to guide me, or adopt me). Is it actually become sport to destory what others are passionate about? ( Feel free, of course, to delete this message if you feel that is not notable enough. )
What is being done policy wise about this?
end of soapbox —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.188.118.64 ( talk) 08:17, November 12, 2007 (UTC)
More on this, I finally figured that...the notability paradox, the more you exclude notability, the more insignificant you become. Britannica has an enormous amount of trivia, and because of this, errors or not, it will always be the encyclopedia of choice, vs wep which has notable authors such as the man who posed as the Dr of divinity. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Artoftransformation ( talk • contribs) 19:21, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
There seems to be a big issue here on both Wikipedia and Commons, where users are confusing copyright versus trademark. This has been an issue with many logos, which cannot be copyrighted due to their simplicity, but are subject to trademark laws. For example, Image:Mbta-logo.svg cannot be copyrighted because it merely consists of the letter "T" inside a circle. An editor has been confusing copyright with trademark, and has since added a copyright image tag (in addition to the public domain tag), and now the image is listed for deletion. I don't want to start an edit war over this, or any other image, but it is certain that editors need to establish the difference between copyright and trademark, and know when to use {{ Trademark}} and {{ PD-ineligible}} on image pages. There is no detailed explanation about this at WP:LOGOS, and I think that a statement should be instated somewhere. I also think that a {{ PD-logo}} should be created to help users understand this concept a little bit better. NOTE: This message was previously posted at Wikipedia talk:Logos on 2007-11-07 with no replies. – Dream out loud ( talk) 16:59, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
The wording of Template:Non-free logo doesn't help. It says "copyright and/or trademark". That basically implies that trademarks are fair use images. Fun Pika 20:49, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Can we just delete everything to do with fiction, period? It seems kind of subjective that we're deleting virtually every article on video games characters, often with very little warning (two articles that I frequently contributed to were deleted before I was even aware they had been nominated for deletion). And really, what fiction is important? I suppose Shakespeare can stay, and Dickens, and Austin, and "classic" literature, stuff like that. And I suppose some people would get quite upset if the Harry Potter or Foundation stuff went as well, but I don't see why we need an article on Pokémon, or CardCaptor Sakura, or Red Dwarf, or The Edge Chronicles. I mean let's face it - who cares? RobbieG ( talk) 13:21, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
Current consensus is to merge minor stuff into list of articles and only make or keep articles about major things. That's policy and that's how we at WP:GUNDAM do things. Your claim about 'nothing being done' is in fact a blatant lie-- a lot of work is being done at the moment, but it mostly is focusing on mecha from a specific series at the moment. There are not many people working on WP:GUNDAM, and not all of them know everything about every series. Jtrainor ( talk) 17:56, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
Just a thought. WP is a long-term project, right? So having lots of articles on stuff that young people find interesting draws them in and gives them the editing skills that they will remember when they come back in 5 or 10 or 40(!) years time and want to contribute to the subjects that they are interested in as older people. Rome wasn't built in a day. — SMALL JIM 11:38, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Comment And don't forget... Bulbasaur (of Pokémon fame) was, at one point, a featured article. :) --Craw-daddy | T | 22:11, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
We should be careful with terminology here. There is a difference here between 'classical' and 'classic' (compare the difference between 'historical' and 'historic'). Classical often refers to the period of classical antiquity, though as the disambiguation page shows, there are other periods called classical as well. Classic literature, on the other hand, is what we are talking about here (and what, to be fair, everyone was talking about before I pedantically pointed out the terminology snafu). That article doesn't do a good job of explaining what a classic is, though it does note that the origin of the phrase is from the word classical. Anyway, not all classics are literature and not all literature is classic. The standard of secondary literature on the topic is a good one. Tolkien Studies is a journal on the subject of Tolkien studies, and there is a fairly large body of secondary literature on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Not all of it good, but then you can't have everything. Carcharoth ( talk) 22:52, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Everybody commenting here should really try and adjust WP:FICT to stricter standards. It makes for a good exercise to learn a few things about how even the process of guideline-making has been hijacked to pave the way for uncurbed fan enthusiasm. On the issue of articles about novels vs articles about episode or minor character: William Pietri recently brought up the brilliant point that even average writers are always superb readers, whereas below-average readers cannot possibly write a coherent article. So that's what it has come to, as far as I'm concerned: Any hint that the author has read anything about the topic is enough for me to accept it. That means I can certainly tolerate an article about a book. But the unfortunately non-cliché 14-year-old half-literate who watches Family Guy or some such and then stuffs Wikipedia with every unimportant detail about it, convinced that he's doing a good thing, is something I cannot possibly combine with the idea of producing a serious encyclopedia. And the reason they keep fighting against the moving of such hopeless cruft articles to e.g. annex.wikia is a similar one, in that they are too lazy to even look for another place to gather. Wikipedia is right here, so why go somewhere else, right? Those people are unwilling (or unable, which is even worse) to do so much as google for sources and read them. I would endorse clamping down on those who do this, and on those who defend it by arguing for it. Alas, it's too late, the masses have already overrun Wikipedia and we may want to consider leaving it to them. A bit like with Moriarty in that " Ship in a Bottle" TNG episode. ¶ dorftrottel ¶ talk ¶ 21:39, December 5, 2007
This may be interesting and surprising...:
Apparently, it seems Wikimedia even actively helps and concedes to such censorship ??
-- LimoWreck ( talk) 18:23, 29 November 2007 (UTC)
This is outrageous. On the Ruud Lubbers article, it says he "resigned due to an unsubstantiated allegation". Not so. The official, public UN document says he sexually harassed the woman. After the fact, she was threatened to keep mum by the personnel officer. Apparently Mr. Lubbers office has 'handled' Jimbo, or WMF, so as to muzzle the information. Nice. Talk about no censorship.
That article is completely biased in Lubbers favor.. The official UN press release didn't deny the evidence but called it not worthy of a court case. But cases were filed in Switzerland and the U.S., though they didn't get traction. The victim was an American woman. She worked on short term contracts and her job was at threatened after she filed a claim.
What made this case so striking is that soldiers under UN hat (really national soldiers loaned out to help the agency) had a recent history of abusing refugee women. So for the head of the UNHCR agency to do this was huge. Lubbers was the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands, so to make him fall was quite a big deal. 85.5.180.9 21:22, 1 December 2007 (UTC)
As Wikipedia:Perennial_proposals#Deleted_pages_should_be_visible notes, there have been many proposals to make deleted pages visible to non-admins. For instance:
The latter included a proposal to limit viewing to logged-in users. What about this variant: Allow contributors to a deleted article to view it. This will at least enable users to easily get back their text and move it to their userspace in order to re-work it, as well as have something to reference at WP:DRV. Most people, especially newbies, are probably unaware that some sysops will userfy deleted stuff on demand – and in any case, that requires extra work on the sysops' part.
Another possibility might be to allow users with sufficiently old accounts to view deleted articles, similar to the restrictions on page moving. The main point of keeping them hidden is to prevent casual surfers from being able to read those articles, right? The perennial proposals page notes the difficulties associated with dealing with copyvios, threats, etc. and other stuff that has to stay hidden, but those concerns could be addressed easily enough with a two-tier system, in which you have deleted stuff viewable only to admins and deleted stuff viewable to a larger group. Sarsaparilla 05:09, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
If you need the text of an article that was deleted, you can always ask any admin for it, providing that the article was not deleted due to BLP violations or office actions.
≈ jossi ≈
(talk) 21:15, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
I would like to propose a policy to ban fake message bars (such as the one on User:Just Jame's userpage). While fake message bars are perhaps ammusing or funny, some users find it annoying and immature as it disrupts the flow of wikipedia. Another reason why I think that fake message bars should be banned is that wikipedia is not a place for jokes or other non-sense, even if it is userfied. It creates a sense that wikipedia is losing it's goal of becoming a "fountain of knowledge" and that we're plummeting towards humorus entertainment such as uncylopedia. Please consider this idea with care.-- Sunny910910 ( talk| Contributions) 01:54, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps the time and customer goodwill that would be needed to scrutinize user pages for comformity to these sorts of standards might better be spent building the encyclopedia. Best, -- Shirahadasha ( talk) 02:03, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Based on the discussion at Wikipedia talk:User page/UI spoofing linked by Puchiko (thanks!), it looks like this issue has already been thoroughly addressed by the community. At a result, a section was added to the WP:UP guideline stating "The Wikipedia community generally frowns upon simulating the MediaWiki interface, and it should be avoided except when necessary for testing purposes." — Satori Son 19:47, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
I surfed on in to the WP:NPOV page to look up a specific detail and randomly noticed the link to Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Examples. You can imagine my enormous surprise at finding that this page is essentially unchanged since the day I first posted it back in October 2001. (see the version at Nostalgia).
While I am deeply flattered that something I wrote so long ago is still being referenced, it is fair to say our collective perspective is (ahem) "a tad more sophisticated now". In my opinion we should either archive it as historical, or subject it to a complete re-write. The concept is useful, but the current version is hopelessly out of date. Manning 13:21, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
(moved here from the Reference Desk)
For the record I love everything about wikipedia. But it's hard not to get past all the grumbling I read in blogs [
[2]]. Does Wikipedia have a serious problem in authority: oligarchy vs. democracy?
Sappysap (
talk) 23:55, 4 December 2007 (UTC)
Brett Favre was SI's 2007 Sportsman of the year as of today. Early this morning I checked his article and it had not been edited because it was locked. I had to post on the discussion page and wait till an editor, sometime in mid-morning, observed it, to wait for an updated edit. Now no shame to him, he was an expeditious and smart editor, but what does this say about the democracy of Wikipedia? Sappysap ( talk) 03:07, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Oligarchies are boring. I suggest a theocracy. All hail Jimbo!. Dragons flight ( talk) 03:33, 5 December 2007 (UTC)
Quite boring, indeed, when the page you prescribe about Jimbo is impervious to edits. Sappysap ( talk) 03:38, 5 December 2007 (UTC)