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Wikipedia:Privacy is a rejected proposal about private information on the wiki. I was extremely surprised today to see that, months after it had been marked as rejected, an editor replaced the historical tag with a guideline tag with no announcement or discussion at all. I have changed it back to a "proposal". This is one of the three rejected privacy proposals (other were WP:YOUTH and WP:CHILD) that were proposed about a year ago. 20:08, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Do you think troll magnet articles have any place here?
I'm thinking of articles that are otherwise notable, sourced, etc., but not really that important to the encyclopedia and serve to attract all kinds of newbies, vandals, hoaxes, experiments, things that were made up in school one day, etc. For example, I was just revisiting one of my favorite Internet meme articles to find that it had yet again been defaced with ridiculous new material. But the graffiti was kind of clever, and the whole subject is ridiculous to begin with....so you just delete it and nobody gets hurt.
Sometimes I've deliberately created child articles to draw trouble away from the parent, as when separating out the "list of" article, or "controversies" article away from the real subject. The excised material doesn't make for a good article, but the fact that it is there sure stabilizes the more important one. Delete or merge it, and the main article gets in trouble again.
Do you think, overall, we would have less trouble here if we avoided coverage of certain silly subjects? Are they crumbs that attract ants to our picnic? Or do you think all these misguided editors are here for good anyway, and would just find some other articles to mess up if we deleted their favorites? Or is it just not an important issue, something we can live with?
BTW, I'm not talking about serious, necessary articles that attract trolls. But rather ones that they enjoy due to their offbeat, pop-culture, controversy, or juvenile subject matter.
Nothing special in mind, just trying to invite some discussion and see what people think. The relevance is that it comes up sometimes in a deletion or notability discussion that an article is just a place that attracts trolls. Wikidemo ( talk) 23:07, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
Should all or some of Wikipedia's location related articles link to Google Maps or a similar map service, or should we be neutral on supporting any single service, and only use the page all coordinates link to, that has a list of all available services? More at Wikipedia talk:External links#Links to map services. -- Para ( talk) 13:51, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
[Moved here from Help Desk.] I've created {{ you}}. Is there any concern about name-space pollution here (because of the short name — it can't be used again)? And is my documentation OK? -- Ddxc ( talk) 21:55, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
{{
you|article|you}}
to get the "right" result (second-person only) instead of just {{
you}}. Any technical reasons for this?I have read Wikipedia:General disclaimer, and I have some doubts about the section "Jurisdiction and legality of content".
Just a couple thoughts about complying with Florida and country A's (in which you live) laws, but then country B then convicts you of a crime (or issues a judgement against you).
-- Trödel
User:Adbay ( talk) recently uploaded a picture of Casper, Wyoming — Image:Casperskyline.jpg, which has no licensing tag. It admits to being uploaded from the photo library of the Casper Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. This page has a listing: "Feel free to use these various images of Casper for promotional or personal use." I don't deal much with images, other than uploading self-created pictures with PD licenses, so I don't know: is this a Wikipedia-suitable license? Nyttend ( talk) 00:47, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
A disturbing state of affairs: There is absolutely no guidance in any currently existing project page on when it is inappropriate to reveal content of deleted edits. There is no policy to stand by, no way to know you won't be emergency desysopped if someone doesn't like what pages you're looking at. I think we need a policy in this area. — Random832 05:39, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
Both WP:Ignore all credentials and Credentifial verification were rejected, which is completely contradictory. So, currently, there is no credential policy.
The lack of a credential policy can confuse newer users, who may think wikipedia policy is that we should either blindly accept credentials or attempt to verify them. Credentials are such a big issue and, per the Essjay controversy and the WP:Expert rebellion, they have the potential to cause a great deal of harm, so there should be some kind of specific description of what Wikipedia policy is on the issue. Since there currently is no policy, the lack of a policy page implies WP:No credential policy. But that doesn't help confused new users nor does it settle disputes over credentials.
So, I propose the policy WP:No credential policy. A "policy that there is no policy" is silly in nearly every case (I.E. Wikipedia: No policy on leprechauns), but it seems to make sense in this one exceptional case, because it would be informative to new users, settle disputes, and encourage consensus. Otherwise, every time there is a dispute, people make false assumptions about Wikipedia policy, new users ask the help desk, and other users seek arbitration, while it's not even clear how the administrators themselves should respond. Zenwhat ( talk) 20:36, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
There already are policies and guidelines on how we deal with credentials, it is called Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources. If we respect those polices then those with higher education can just show their work by citing their claims. Problem solved. 1 != 2 18:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
The very existence of those two policies makes it clear that we should not use credentials as weight in a content dispute. If someone claims credentials it is not relevant unless they can cite sources. 1 != 2 19:07, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Ooh, don't forget about WP:Credential ban. There were so many different proposals after the Essjay debacle I'm surprised no one made a nav template. Mr. Z-man 20:16, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Based on a discussion on WP:AN located here about fair use images tags done by bots, and the pending fair use deadlings from the Foundation, I've started this proposed policy/project/change at WP:TODAY. Please check it out and weigh in. The specifics as discussed above about a run for the Images problem we have is at Wikipedia:Task of the Day#Early 2008 trial run. Lawrence Cohen 16:58, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Policies and guidelines need to be written in plain language anyone can understand. See Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#Not_a_valid_objection. Tyrenius ( talk) 07:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
It appears there's no way to dismiss the ugly ad on the top of each page. Could somebody edit it so that it can be hidden? How long is it going to be there, anyway? Corvus cornix talk 23:15, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
[1]. Am I a total idiot? Or did the BBC do exactly zero research on this article? Will this law not be totally ignored in every country in the world with PD-old requirements (i.e., all of them except Egypt)? The US laws have been upheld countless times to this effect that anything pre-1923 is not copyrightable. The Evil Spartan ( talk) 01:23, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement has apparently made it a style guideline that certain infoboxes in articles their project is involved in should be placed on a subpage of the article's talkpage, and then that talkpage is transcluded into the article. Is this acceptable? -- Carnildo ( talk) 02:00, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Plain and simple: an attempt to evade content policies. I can't see how you came to fall for that.I decided not to use the Template namespace because I wanted to avoid having to defend the temple data templates from being deleted. Some templates are deleted based on arguments that I think could apply to the temple data so rather than take the chance that they could be deleted I elected to propose using the Talk namespace where those arguments would not apply. [...]
I championed and implemented the original structure - but always felt that it was better placed in the template namespace so I am ok with moving them to that the template namespace. At the time there was a big push to delete any template that was only referenced on a few pages and subst them in instead; but that defeats the purpose of the structure - which is to allow the data to be entered in once and updated in one location. The data on the different mainspace pages were not consistent prior to that. --
Trödel 20:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
I wrote an essay on this after dealing with it twice in the last 24 hours. In the first case, someone asserted that because they found references on scholar.google.com that such references automatically demonstrated credibility. In the other case, the opposite was true: Dharmic religions has been renamed Indian religions simply because the former term is not widely used on scholar.google.com. This is despite the fact that any expert on the matter knows that referring to "dharmic" religion as "Indian" is extremely inaccurate. Sikhism is Middle-Eastern (scholars regard it as the influence of Hinduism on Islam, during the Islamic occupation of India), Mahayana Buddhism is Asian, and then there are groups like Hare Krishna, which originated in the west. All of these claims of mine can be verified by books, some of which I own myself. Saying "but its not on google" is not a valid defense.
So, I wrote this: User:Zenwhat/Googlefiability. Your opinions are welcome. Zenwhat ( talk) 19:35, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
I haven't seen it. Thanks. My essay is unnecessary. Bookmarked. Zenwhat ( talk) 01:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Still, if someone is claiming an article is unverifiable, the burden is on you to show sources exist if you want it kept. Just saying "Google isn't complete, there might be a book or journal reference somewhere out there just not yet indexed" isn't really enough. -- W.marsh 02:47, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm try to drum up discussion of Wikipedia:Correspondence off-wiki, proposed to deal with confidentiality concerns for off-wiki correspondence, after it became an issue in an Arbitration Case. The proposal is meant to approach the issue from the opposite direction of a now rejected proposal, Wikipedia:Private correspondence, which would have made all correspondence confidential by default. Any comments or suggestions are welcome. -- Kendrick7 talk 20:07, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
I noticed we're getting links to eoearth.org in the references of some articles, often to the correspondingly article. Should they be allowed as a valid source? They don't state inline references for any of their articles so we can't determine the original sources, so the way I see it, they should only really be used as a reference if we trust their editors more than ours. • Anakin ( contribs • complaints) 22:58, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
On the Christine Finn page, it says that she's dead, people have added that information who are unregistered, but it's information that's been put up on the actress's IMDB page, and there isn't anything in any news paper to indicate that she's died. She has been an actress who's been in some TV series of historical importance in TV, and if she has recently died, one might think there would be some news about it such as an obituary in a main newspaper or even the local papers around the town where she was reported to have died and I have found nothing and none of the Quatermass or Thunderbirds fans have any clue about her death also, and some wonder if it is a hoax report
Do you think that I should I keep the death statement or delete it until something a little more definite comes along?
username: Wmmvrrvrrmm Tuesday January, 8th, 2007 5:50am (GMT)
Thanks, that's a load off my mind
username: Wmmvrrvrrmm Tuesday January, 8th, 2007 15:28pm (GMT)
In a recent discussion at WP:TRIVIA, a user pointed out an ironic contradiction between that guideline and the Main Page. Basically, WP:TRIVIA says that trivia sections are discouraged because they are an indiscriminate lists of disconnected facts, but then on the Main Page there is the "Did you know..." section, which is an example indiscriminate lists of disconnected facts.
There is a great deal of disagreement of what constitutes trivia, since the judgement of the "value" of a particular fact is subjective. Editors are divided about whether "In popular culture" articles and sections constitute trivia, and whether this type of content is inappropriate for wikipedia. However, it seems clear that some users find this kind of sort of tangential connection between articles interesting, since it is in common use on the main page, and also because users continue to contribute to these sections in articles.
It is interesting to note that the section on the Main Page is quite small, only a few (6 or 7) items displayed, with the option of clicking to show more. It think this contributes to its acceptability, because some of the criticism against trivia/in popular culture lists is that they are excessively long and can grow to dominate the text in an article.
One suggestion from that discussion was to make some sort "smart list" to present this type of information; when a page is loaded, generate a list with a handful of items from a larger list, and give the user the option of clicking to see the entire list. I think this would be an interesting solution to apply to these sorts of lists (more so to "in popular culture" type lists rather than trivia list). However, since this would be a significant change to the presentation of this type of information, and there is already debate about the acceptability of this kind of information, then I think there should be a larger discussion about the technical and policy related aspects of this solution, and if it is a good idea. -- Nick Penguin( contribs) 22:42, 6 January 2008 (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.
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Wikipedia:Privacy is a rejected proposal about private information on the wiki. I was extremely surprised today to see that, months after it had been marked as rejected, an editor replaced the historical tag with a guideline tag with no announcement or discussion at all. I have changed it back to a "proposal". This is one of the three rejected privacy proposals (other were WP:YOUTH and WP:CHILD) that were proposed about a year ago. 20:08, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
Do you think troll magnet articles have any place here?
I'm thinking of articles that are otherwise notable, sourced, etc., but not really that important to the encyclopedia and serve to attract all kinds of newbies, vandals, hoaxes, experiments, things that were made up in school one day, etc. For example, I was just revisiting one of my favorite Internet meme articles to find that it had yet again been defaced with ridiculous new material. But the graffiti was kind of clever, and the whole subject is ridiculous to begin with....so you just delete it and nobody gets hurt.
Sometimes I've deliberately created child articles to draw trouble away from the parent, as when separating out the "list of" article, or "controversies" article away from the real subject. The excised material doesn't make for a good article, but the fact that it is there sure stabilizes the more important one. Delete or merge it, and the main article gets in trouble again.
Do you think, overall, we would have less trouble here if we avoided coverage of certain silly subjects? Are they crumbs that attract ants to our picnic? Or do you think all these misguided editors are here for good anyway, and would just find some other articles to mess up if we deleted their favorites? Or is it just not an important issue, something we can live with?
BTW, I'm not talking about serious, necessary articles that attract trolls. But rather ones that they enjoy due to their offbeat, pop-culture, controversy, or juvenile subject matter.
Nothing special in mind, just trying to invite some discussion and see what people think. The relevance is that it comes up sometimes in a deletion or notability discussion that an article is just a place that attracts trolls. Wikidemo ( talk) 23:07, 29 December 2007 (UTC)
Should all or some of Wikipedia's location related articles link to Google Maps or a similar map service, or should we be neutral on supporting any single service, and only use the page all coordinates link to, that has a list of all available services? More at Wikipedia talk:External links#Links to map services. -- Para ( talk) 13:51, 1 January 2008 (UTC)
[Moved here from Help Desk.] I've created {{ you}}. Is there any concern about name-space pollution here (because of the short name — it can't be used again)? And is my documentation OK? -- Ddxc ( talk) 21:55, 25 December 2007 (UTC)
{{
you|article|you}}
to get the "right" result (second-person only) instead of just {{
you}}. Any technical reasons for this?I have read Wikipedia:General disclaimer, and I have some doubts about the section "Jurisdiction and legality of content".
Just a couple thoughts about complying with Florida and country A's (in which you live) laws, but then country B then convicts you of a crime (or issues a judgement against you).
-- Trödel
User:Adbay ( talk) recently uploaded a picture of Casper, Wyoming — Image:Casperskyline.jpg, which has no licensing tag. It admits to being uploaded from the photo library of the Casper Area Convention and Visitors Bureau. This page has a listing: "Feel free to use these various images of Casper for promotional or personal use." I don't deal much with images, other than uploading self-created pictures with PD licenses, so I don't know: is this a Wikipedia-suitable license? Nyttend ( talk) 00:47, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
A disturbing state of affairs: There is absolutely no guidance in any currently existing project page on when it is inappropriate to reveal content of deleted edits. There is no policy to stand by, no way to know you won't be emergency desysopped if someone doesn't like what pages you're looking at. I think we need a policy in this area. — Random832 05:39, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
Both WP:Ignore all credentials and Credentifial verification were rejected, which is completely contradictory. So, currently, there is no credential policy.
The lack of a credential policy can confuse newer users, who may think wikipedia policy is that we should either blindly accept credentials or attempt to verify them. Credentials are such a big issue and, per the Essjay controversy and the WP:Expert rebellion, they have the potential to cause a great deal of harm, so there should be some kind of specific description of what Wikipedia policy is on the issue. Since there currently is no policy, the lack of a policy page implies WP:No credential policy. But that doesn't help confused new users nor does it settle disputes over credentials.
So, I propose the policy WP:No credential policy. A "policy that there is no policy" is silly in nearly every case (I.E. Wikipedia: No policy on leprechauns), but it seems to make sense in this one exceptional case, because it would be informative to new users, settle disputes, and encourage consensus. Otherwise, every time there is a dispute, people make false assumptions about Wikipedia policy, new users ask the help desk, and other users seek arbitration, while it's not even clear how the administrators themselves should respond. Zenwhat ( talk) 20:36, 3 January 2008 (UTC)
There already are policies and guidelines on how we deal with credentials, it is called Wikipedia:Verifiability and Wikipedia:Reliable sources. If we respect those polices then those with higher education can just show their work by citing their claims. Problem solved. 1 != 2 18:05, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
The very existence of those two policies makes it clear that we should not use credentials as weight in a content dispute. If someone claims credentials it is not relevant unless they can cite sources. 1 != 2 19:07, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Ooh, don't forget about WP:Credential ban. There were so many different proposals after the Essjay debacle I'm surprised no one made a nav template. Mr. Z-man 20:16, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Based on a discussion on WP:AN located here about fair use images tags done by bots, and the pending fair use deadlings from the Foundation, I've started this proposed policy/project/change at WP:TODAY. Please check it out and weigh in. The specifics as discussed above about a run for the Images problem we have is at Wikipedia:Task of the Day#Early 2008 trial run. Lawrence Cohen 16:58, 4 January 2008 (UTC)
Policies and guidelines need to be written in plain language anyone can understand. See Wikipedia_talk:Non-free_content#Not_a_valid_objection. Tyrenius ( talk) 07:01, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
It appears there's no way to dismiss the ugly ad on the top of each page. Could somebody edit it so that it can be hidden? How long is it going to be there, anyway? Corvus cornix talk 23:15, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
[1]. Am I a total idiot? Or did the BBC do exactly zero research on this article? Will this law not be totally ignored in every country in the world with PD-old requirements (i.e., all of them except Egypt)? The US laws have been upheld countless times to this effect that anything pre-1923 is not copyrightable. The Evil Spartan ( talk) 01:23, 26 December 2007 (UTC)
Wikipedia:WikiProject Latter Day Saint movement has apparently made it a style guideline that certain infoboxes in articles their project is involved in should be placed on a subpage of the article's talkpage, and then that talkpage is transcluded into the article. Is this acceptable? -- Carnildo ( talk) 02:00, 27 December 2007 (UTC)
Plain and simple: an attempt to evade content policies. I can't see how you came to fall for that.I decided not to use the Template namespace because I wanted to avoid having to defend the temple data templates from being deleted. Some templates are deleted based on arguments that I think could apply to the temple data so rather than take the chance that they could be deleted I elected to propose using the Talk namespace where those arguments would not apply. [...]
I championed and implemented the original structure - but always felt that it was better placed in the template namespace so I am ok with moving them to that the template namespace. At the time there was a big push to delete any template that was only referenced on a few pages and subst them in instead; but that defeats the purpose of the structure - which is to allow the data to be entered in once and updated in one location. The data on the different mainspace pages were not consistent prior to that. --
Trödel 20:19, 2 January 2008 (UTC)
I wrote an essay on this after dealing with it twice in the last 24 hours. In the first case, someone asserted that because they found references on scholar.google.com that such references automatically demonstrated credibility. In the other case, the opposite was true: Dharmic religions has been renamed Indian religions simply because the former term is not widely used on scholar.google.com. This is despite the fact that any expert on the matter knows that referring to "dharmic" religion as "Indian" is extremely inaccurate. Sikhism is Middle-Eastern (scholars regard it as the influence of Hinduism on Islam, during the Islamic occupation of India), Mahayana Buddhism is Asian, and then there are groups like Hare Krishna, which originated in the west. All of these claims of mine can be verified by books, some of which I own myself. Saying "but its not on google" is not a valid defense.
So, I wrote this: User:Zenwhat/Googlefiability. Your opinions are welcome. Zenwhat ( talk) 19:35, 5 January 2008 (UTC)
I haven't seen it. Thanks. My essay is unnecessary. Bookmarked. Zenwhat ( talk) 01:17, 6 January 2008 (UTC)
Still, if someone is claiming an article is unverifiable, the burden is on you to show sources exist if you want it kept. Just saying "Google isn't complete, there might be a book or journal reference somewhere out there just not yet indexed" isn't really enough. -- W.marsh 02:47, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm try to drum up discussion of Wikipedia:Correspondence off-wiki, proposed to deal with confidentiality concerns for off-wiki correspondence, after it became an issue in an Arbitration Case. The proposal is meant to approach the issue from the opposite direction of a now rejected proposal, Wikipedia:Private correspondence, which would have made all correspondence confidential by default. Any comments or suggestions are welcome. -- Kendrick7 talk 20:07, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
I noticed we're getting links to eoearth.org in the references of some articles, often to the correspondingly article. Should they be allowed as a valid source? They don't state inline references for any of their articles so we can't determine the original sources, so the way I see it, they should only really be used as a reference if we trust their editors more than ours. • Anakin ( contribs • complaints) 22:58, 7 January 2008 (UTC)
On the Christine Finn page, it says that she's dead, people have added that information who are unregistered, but it's information that's been put up on the actress's IMDB page, and there isn't anything in any news paper to indicate that she's died. She has been an actress who's been in some TV series of historical importance in TV, and if she has recently died, one might think there would be some news about it such as an obituary in a main newspaper or even the local papers around the town where she was reported to have died and I have found nothing and none of the Quatermass or Thunderbirds fans have any clue about her death also, and some wonder if it is a hoax report
Do you think that I should I keep the death statement or delete it until something a little more definite comes along?
username: Wmmvrrvrrmm Tuesday January, 8th, 2007 5:50am (GMT)
Thanks, that's a load off my mind
username: Wmmvrrvrrmm Tuesday January, 8th, 2007 15:28pm (GMT)
In a recent discussion at WP:TRIVIA, a user pointed out an ironic contradiction between that guideline and the Main Page. Basically, WP:TRIVIA says that trivia sections are discouraged because they are an indiscriminate lists of disconnected facts, but then on the Main Page there is the "Did you know..." section, which is an example indiscriminate lists of disconnected facts.
There is a great deal of disagreement of what constitutes trivia, since the judgement of the "value" of a particular fact is subjective. Editors are divided about whether "In popular culture" articles and sections constitute trivia, and whether this type of content is inappropriate for wikipedia. However, it seems clear that some users find this kind of sort of tangential connection between articles interesting, since it is in common use on the main page, and also because users continue to contribute to these sections in articles.
It is interesting to note that the section on the Main Page is quite small, only a few (6 or 7) items displayed, with the option of clicking to show more. It think this contributes to its acceptability, because some of the criticism against trivia/in popular culture lists is that they are excessively long and can grow to dominate the text in an article.
One suggestion from that discussion was to make some sort "smart list" to present this type of information; when a page is loaded, generate a list with a handful of items from a larger list, and give the user the option of clicking to see the entire list. I think this would be an interesting solution to apply to these sorts of lists (more so to "in popular culture" type lists rather than trivia list). However, since this would be a significant change to the presentation of this type of information, and there is already debate about the acceptability of this kind of information, then I think there should be a larger discussion about the technical and policy related aspects of this solution, and if it is a good idea. -- Nick Penguin( contribs) 22:42, 6 January 2008 (UTC)