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A poll is underway to require almost all articles to use the date format 13 September 2008. Please comment in this section.
The precise language would impose this on all articles not strongly linked to to the United States, except existing articles on Canada. (New ones would have to use 13 September 2008.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:14, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
I agree, what is with all this hulabaloo over date formatting lately? Sheesh! Pierre DuPaix III ( talk) 01:40, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
Should Wikipedia:Wikipedia essays be used on articles in the articles namespace? It would seem to pull readers into WP: territory. There are 10 such links at the moment. Mcewan ( talk) 08:48, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
Ok so you come across a bad edit and do a revert which elicits a counter revert and then leads to the talk page. There, through discussion, you quicky come to understand that what you have on your hands is the proverbial, dreaded bad editor. (We all know him. He's not difficult to recognize.) Not a vandal (that would be too easy) but someone who doesn't have policy knowledge, doesn't care to learn it, yet is entirely sincere in their viewpoint. One might say a crusader even. He is passionate, has good writing skills, but... he simply, consistently makes bad edits. He removes good content, questions unquestionable material, assumes bad faith in discussion and, in general, seems to have dedicated himself to a program of steady deterioration of article quality.
Wikipedia policy says: Do not bite the newbies and assume good faith, good policies both in the majority of cases. But unless you are willing to spend a considerable amount of your time not, as you'd like, in article space, but in seemingly endless talk page discussion and arbitration, you (I) more often than not just give up and move on. Admirable? No. Practical? Very much so.
I think we've all probably had the harrowing experience of coming across a bad edit, doing a history check of the editor responsible, and to our horror see that this guy has been doing this, not just in this article but all over the damn encyclopedia! He is involving many, many editors in the process described above. Not maliciously, mind you, in good faith, but just laying a path of destruction wherever he goes.
Perhaps sometimes it would be better to just recognize these people up front and to expeditiously get rid of them. Not everybody is cut out to edit an encyclopedia. We are not all Diderots.
Sorry. Just a bad case of schpilkus and I needed to heave. (red face) And here I am standing with it all over my shoes. ~ Alcmaeonid ( talk) 16:02, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd just like to bring it to wider attention that there's a new criterion for speedy deletion: " T4: Documentation subpages of deleted templates". All the usual trappings, including a {{ db-templatedoc}} tag, should be in place. There's some related discussion at WT:CSD. It's pretty much a no-brainer (as indeed speedy deletion criteria should be in general), and I'm sure admins have been doing that already anyway, but now we have it in writing.
So, if you were going to delete a template and were wondering what to do about the documentation page, well, now you know. If not, feel free to ignore all this. Thank you, and have a nice day. — Ilmari Karonen ( talk) 05:25, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
It is proposed to add a section to Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines clarifying the procedure for proposing and making changes to policy and guideline pages. The proposed wording is at WP:Policy/Procedure; please comment on that page's talk page.-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:05, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
After a long gestation, WP:MEDRS was promoted to a guideline by Davidruben ( talk · contribs) on the 1 September. This followed a poll Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources (medicine-related articles)#Should we make this a guideline?. It had been referred to by WP:MED editors as a de facto project guideline for quite some time, and the page was quite stable. However, those few editors who opposed the guidelines status continue to grumble and two are engaged in edit warring over the guideline tag. The aspects in dispute, as far as you may regard me as a reliable witness, appear to be:
Those disputing appear to be IMO in conflict with policy pages (see the talk page for details of which), and some have openly admitted to this. Further comment from the wise and experienced would be appreciated. Colin° Talk 21:53, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Based on this comment from Mike Godwin, the WMF's legal counsel, foundation-l, I'd like to open a discussion on our definition of free-images. Currently we define images with non-commercial {{ Non-free with NC}} and non-derivative {{ Non-free with ND}} as non-free images that should be deleted {{ Db-i3}}. Given that Mike indicates that Wikiquote can consider non-commercial vs. commercial use in deciding what text it may use, that suggests to me that we may be able to accept a non-commercial image license as "free" and possibly even a non-derivative license, since what is expected of a charity is different than what is expected of a non-charitable enduser. MBisanz talk 01:56, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article series ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Check out the pic on the left at Haumea_(dwarf_planet)#Size and composition, of the various trans-Neptunian planetoids. It's an image map! Since when are image maps allowed? I hated it - I clicked the picture to get a big view, like in every other Wikipedia article's pictures, and instead I was shunted over to some article for a reason I didn't understand. Tempshill ( talk) 22:33, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
The one at Supergiant and the like doesn't appear to cause problems. Geni 09:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article series ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a proposal to modify the bot policy regarding whether or not administrators need approval to run bots under their account. All are invited to comment. Prodego talk 14:51, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Following the recent RfC on adminbots and proposed addition to the bot policy to allow bots to be granted admin rights outside of RfA, I have raised the question on the Admin noticeboard as to whether the community would accept the approval of an adminbot through WP:RFBOT alone. Comments welcome there. WJBscribe (talk) 00:33, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia doesn't use Allwiki ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Per Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Sarah_Palin_protection_wheel_war/Workshop#Community_discussion_strongly_urged, the community has been urged by Arbitration Commitee member User:Newyorkbrad to consider the use of flagged/sighted revisions (amongst other possible remedies), to assist in reducing the risk of articles that deal with living people, and the harm that can result.
Therefore, I am opening this discussion, to present a proposal for the use of Flagged/sighted revisions to reduce the risk of situations like the one discussed in the ArbCom case. That is: In certain, high profile articles, the crush of editors is not always conducive to taking due care to prevent violations of WP:BLP being inserted into articles. Such a situation (and the resulting wheel war of protection/unprotection that occured) on the article for Sarah Palin led to the above mentioned ArbCom case.
Flagged/Sighted Revisions, should, at a minimum be in place on WP:BLP articles, (and ideally, to my thoughts, be in place on all articles.) To prevent complaints that this gives administrators too much power to determine what content Wikipedia produces, my suggestion is that a new "right" be granted, comparable to the rollback right recently introduced. The new right would allow administrators, bureaucrats, or stewards to grant a user the ability to mark articles as flagged or sighted.
This right should be fairly easy to grant (say, 500 edits or so, it should be fairly automatic). However, any editor who has a block for violating Wikipedia's rule on edit-warring, or breaking the 3 revert rule, should not be granted this right automatically.
See Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions for more information. SirFozzie ( talk) 02:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Following the recent Georgia-South Ossetia war there has been some debate about the presentation of contested land areas on the locator maps. Not only Georgia, but also Kosovo, Western Sahara, Tibet and Taiwan, Cyprus (and likely many others) contain contested areas. There is no consistent way to present this on Wikipedia locator maps, and this is leading to much discussions about POV.
I have opened a thread at WikiProject Countries but perhaps this is something of sufficient importance to build up to a guideline? What do you guys think? Arnoutf ( talk) 17:03, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Macedonia-related articles) ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
It has come to my attention that a user has been uploading articles from Wikipedia onto their own User talk subpages. These are the users only edits. It appears the account is being used either as a POV fork or their own web storage. What is wikipedia's policy in regard to the use of article duplication on talk pages for this? MegX ( talk) 06:01, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
I have added the following paragraph to WP:COI to reflect the actual state of matters. [1] Please familiarize yourself with this, and feel free to discuss if you think this does not reflect actual practice.
Thank you for you help, and thank you to User:FayssalF for reviewing this edit. [2] Jehochman Talk 18:27, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
A simple question. On the Mayo Clinic web page, that institution uses the term "chronic" to describe a mental condition. The web based page was used as a citation to specifically reference that word in the Wiki article, because an editor challenged it's inclusion based on the belief that the reference was of poor quality. Now there is an edit war with the term being put on and taken off repeatedly. Can anyone point to specific policy on this issue or give a thought out opinion?-- scuro ( talk) 15:36, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
-- Doc James ( talk) 20:04, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
{{
cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)Doc James ( talk) 03:37, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
FYI I'm the same editor who a few weeks ago proposed to get "recently" and other such words blacklisted. I noticed on Thabo Mbeki today that someone has created a Vague Time template in August, which is being used on this article and a handful of others. There is no discussion on the talk page. The Wikipedia:Template namespace guideline says that ANYONE can create a template (without discussion) and gives instructions on how to do so. Shouldn't there be some sort of enforced discussion first? After all, templates are not things that (should) get created every day. In theory I could now go around pasting this template everywhere I find my pet hate-word "recently". In fact I could just as well have written up this template myself and starting using it in articles without any prior discussion. Is this desirable? Should we not protect the Template namespace (if possible) against article creation?
On another note, can someone braver than me move the template from Vague Time to Vague time? The redirect can be deleted as only a handful of articles will need to be fixed. Zunaid 11:41, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Good idea, bad execution. There is {{ when}}, it looks like when? and it's good. Use inline tags to identify specific place in the text. Don't force the user to sieve through the text to find one "b-word". NVO ( talk) 19:06, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
It seems our guidelines over linking in articles are starting to build up to unnecessary levels. We have:
And this is just internal links; external links and interwiki links have their own guidelines (though the MOS links page covers ELs as well). Is internal linking really this complicated? Is there any reason why we need so many guidelines for such a simple thing as putting some square brackets around some words? Mr. Z-man 20:49, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Case 1 - Joe Lewis (British businessman)
Outdated and incorrect information took 5 months to be removed. Here
Case 2 - Automobile industry in Germany
Vandalism took 4 months to be removed. Here
Those are articles are simply not being watched.
IMO we should somehow reduce the number of article to something that is manageable or at least reduce the rate of growth. ⇨ EconomistBR ⇦ 04:28, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
The priority should be given to blp articles. -- fayssal - Wiki me up® 20:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
How about (in addition) a bot that goes around and puts a template that says "This article has not been updated for X time and may contain out-of-date information?" And Fayssal, is WP slowing down? It seems to me it has, but I'd like to know as you are a lot closer to the pulse. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 05:48, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
I don't think a bot is an answer to this problem. A slight modification to "Recent Changes" that flags changes to unwatched articles would do it ... RC patrol can prioritize unwatched changes, on the assumption that watched pages will be taken care of by the watchers. Kww ( talk) 13:56, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Here is a possible idea:
I am not saying that the checked version is the same as the idea for version control that is being tossed around, but it can help to quickly identify a point where the article is believed to have been good quality and then allow for an assessment of what needs to be fixed if it goes too long with too many unchecked edits. -- MASEM 14:18, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
It there any particular provision/rule about this, or does it just fall under vandalism? Caught a BBC journalist introducing an unreffed factiod to Kgalema Motlanthe, then citing Wikipedia has his/her source. T L Miles ( talk) 14:24, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
People need to look at what has been happening to the civility policy. Hint: a lot. Before my recent revert, it was even downgraded into a guideline. This is part of the five pillars of Wikipedia, and no one is watching. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 04:23, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Deprecate this so-called guideline or policy immediately - until there is a stable version. Current version [4] even redefines five principles. Policy must be stable; right now, it's mayhem not policy. NVO ( talk) 19:01, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
After notifying the usual suspects (WT:MOSNUM, WT:YEARS, and more), we seem to have consensus at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(numbers_and_dates)#Decades to make at least one change: 1800s and similar pages will become a disambiguation page saying:
{{seealso|19th century}}
1800s may refer to:
Millennium |
---|
2nd millennium |
Centuries |
Decades |
Years |
Categories |
The current 1800s page refers to the period from 1800 to 1809, which means that all the people who link to 1800s and think that it means 1800-1899 are confusing people with the link. Wikipedians chose this usage because it's convenient in some infoboxes, for instance this one, and we don't want to change that infobox. But policy seems to require that we have pagenames that mean what English speakers expect them to mean: per WP:NOT#OR, some things that aren't allowed: "proposing theories and solutions, original ideas, defining terms, coining new words, et cetera". Also, here are the first two sentences in the first section of WP:NAME, also policy: "Generally, article naming should prefer what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature. This is justified by the following principle: The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists." I've gone through 300 Google hits at this point, and all of them not coming from Wikipedia think that 1800s means 1800 to 1899. So feel free to complain here or on the page where we had the discussion; otherwise we'll take some kind of action after a few days; perhaps a trip to WP:RM. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 02:31, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
How is the decade "1800-1809" normally called, as in "the turnpike was built in the mid-1810s"? -- NE2 11:45, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to see Wikipedia:Honesty upgraded to guideline. Assume good faith is a guideline. This is the flip side of the same coin. Thoughts? Jehochman Talk 14:34, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
Many community members strongly disagree with the current policy. We are proposing a modification of languages criteria to star a wikimedia project, with a community draft]. feel free to contribute with your opinion:
thak you, very much. —
Crazymadlover —Preceding
undated comment was added at 20:53, 25 September 2008 (UTC).
I understand and have, on multiple occasions ( lolcode and Superhero Movie, among others), worked with admins and Deletion Review to restore previous versions of articles for topics that gained notability after deletion. I've got damned near 10k edits under my belt, though, and probably had 1-2k down before I knew the process. Can we get the "This page has been deleted. The deletion log for the page is provided below for reference." text on deleted articles expanded to include the bottom text, which reads "# If the page has been deleted, check the deletion log, and see Why was my page deleted?." 'Note the typo "?.", too - That needs a quick fix regardless - Just strike the period. The blue linked text in the link is equivalent to quotation marks, for all intents and purposes - Nothin' wrong with ending that sentence with a question mark, as a result.
I would argue that all text pertaining to recreating deleted content should be moved into the This-page-got-popped-off-before text, as it is irrelevant without it. It should also be expanded shortly to include some of the Why? text, such as "Do not despair: none of the information on a "deleted" page has actually been lost." Include some basic coverage as to how a user can get page protection lifted and articles restored if sources arise. Doesn't have to be long - You could pack a lot into two sentences. Please also expand the text to make it clear that an article is protected - That is the most important place to say it, but there's no mention whatsoever of protection on the deletion warning at SwiftIRC.
On a related note, indefinite protection of articles that may conceivably reach the level where the above is necessary is always unwarranted. SwiftIRC, for instance, would have been fine with 6-12 months. CsD exists, and is a cleaner solution than ignoring the fact that a topic may achieve notability after deletion. MrZaius talk 13:01, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
In June 2008 the Arbitration Committee announced a request that the English Wikipedia consider allowing some non-administrators the ability to view deleted material. The summary of the announcement was
Note that this is a request that the idea be considered, nothing stronger. The announcement led to this proposal. As this conversation has gone on for several months, the proposal has shifted around quite a bit. This makes it very unclear where editors are currently giving their support or opposition. For the sake of clarity, I am attempting to pick out the main proposals, and create a straw poll around them. Please share your opinion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 09:06, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
On instruction by Lifebaka (but you probably should head over to WP:VPP for things like this. You'll get a much wider group of editors there. Cheers. lifebaka++ 03:59, 26 September 2008 (UTC)), I present the following, which was originally made during a discussion of oversighting a suicide threat on AN.
Why do we call it oversight? Oversight usually means some sort of independent review or process, often to try to keep people honest. Wikipedia usage of oversight really means "Removal", "Content deletion" or "Censor" (censorship doesn't need to be bad; some countries have a censorship board). Propose making Wikipedia more user friendly and less jargon by renaming the term "oversight" to "content removal" or "remove". So the first sentence of this section would read "I have been asked to do content removal of the revision concerned here" or "I have been asked to remove the revision concerned here". 903M ( talk) 04:04, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
On second thought, the following terms seem best. "Special removal" or "Removal". Special in that only a few people can do it. Removing is the acting that is being done here. Oversight people are not auditors who determine if people are using their powers correctly. 903M ( talk) 04:44, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Proposal ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
These nuvole flags are gaining increased usage on wiki, This is quite worring for me as they are more decorative than standard flags. At Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(flags)#Nuvola_flags,i am proposing to strongly limit the usage of these flags, please comment if your interested .
When I place a reference to a website, I always link the dates in a specific manner: for example, if I placed such a reference today, I'd write
Accessed [[2008-09-19]]
. Today, however, I saw someone removing such a link with a script. Are links of this sort also prohibited now? Nyttend ( talk) 20:28, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
Just to comment, but what about articles that are relevant to multiple regions? It still doesn't address the heavy edit warring (if I may use the word "war" without pissing off my international friends) that I see go on in many articles I come across regarding date format in those types of articles. I agree fully that dates should relate to the region's context, but it still leaves a lot left undone in regards to this heated "us vs. them" dispute. MuZemike ( talk) 17:46, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
The recent RFC on the Arbitration Committee ended with various proposals for changes to the Arbitration Committee's form and practice. It is now proposed that the upcoming elections for the Committee be expanded to encompass a vote to ratify/choose these changes.
There is currently a certain amount of disagreement on the talk page about the exact form that these proposals should take. It would be useful to have more eyes to consider, firstly, whether a ratification should take place and, secondly, exactly how these proposed changes should be phrased and presented.
Some more eyes would be greatly appreciated.
Sam Korn (smoddy) 22:01, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
Some are good. Proposals 8 and 10 suck, as it means that ArbCom can never in the future take certain steps it thinks necessary, whatever they might be. Proposal 11 is nice for those who hate Latin- otherwise sucks. It's something that doesn't need to be voted on. Proposal 13 should be, that the community may, by a 3/4 vote at an RfC, cause an arbitrator to stand for re-election. Otherwise, it's just big drama. When has the community ever decided anything "categorically?" —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 22:33, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I apologise for any confusion that Sam Korn might have caused by this post. No, voting is not open yet. This is also not a call to start editing the proposals already up, since the ones up there right now are the ones that had significant consensus support on Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Arbitration_Committee, if you can find or generate similar consensus support for adding alternative proposals please do so, but do not edit or remove existing proposals without overwhelming consensus to override that generated in the RfC. It's probably not the time for advocacy or nitpicking over why you disagree or agree with one proposal over another, there will be plenty of time for that during the nomination process of the main election. Sam shot the gun a little early in announcing this, and the discussion pages and information pages are not there yet. -- Barberio ( talk) 23:13, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I see. Well, some of them might pass, and some are good. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 00:30, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
in the notes for a7 it says... "If controversial, as with schools, list the article at Articles for deletion instead." is there an archived discussion or policy or something which details why schools are controversial? thanks Mission Fleg ( talk) 07:18, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm not really sure if this is the correct place to ask, but from anything that I found this came the most close to what I was looking for. My question is: Are sheer "technical specification"-tables that are copypasted from another website copyrighted material and therefore a reason to delete the article? I'm asking because in the article FNSS Pars this is exactly what happened. 90% of the article are a direct copypaste of the manufacturers website linked at the end of the article. Yet it is not any real text that was copypasted, but rather the tech specs, which in my eyes are not really any "creative work" but rather a collection of facts. So I don't know whether they are copyrighted and all and I'm not sure what to do now. A speedy deletion cause of copyvio? A deletion discussion? Reverting to earlier versions? -- DavidDCM ( talk) 16:37, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
Is it desirable or is it undesirable for dates of birth and death at the top of a biography article to be linked? Recent bot-driven delinking and the decision to end date linking for autoformatting have brought this question to a head.
An RfC is now open at WT:MOSNUM#RfC: Linking of dates of birth and death -- Jheald ( talk) 12:35, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Are drawings based on copyrighted photos derivative works? If so, aren't these drawings made by User:Simonfieldhouse copyright infringement?
etc. bogdan ( talk) 23:19, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that various websites have added their review ratings accompanied by links to the right hand column of many album article pages. I wanted to know the conditions of this. I have colleagues at Clash Magazine and Drowned In Sound, yet both have had their link and rating removed yet others (NME, Pitchfork, Absolute Punk, Observer) left up? Is there some sort of limit to how many rating reviews can be there?
If anybody can shed light on this grey matter I would be very grateful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dirty Volvic ( talk • contribs) 10:35, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Well I posted some ratings and relevant articles for a handful of artists. For instance in the Keane external links I added their most recent interview, for music artist Rodriguez I placed an external link to his album review. As the album has been re released after its original release 30 years ago.
Yet an oddball administrator has decided to erase all of my contributions in some sort of spamming accusation. He has also accused me of working for a magazine, simply because I know people who work at two magazines. I many cases the ratings from Clash Magazine have been removed from ratings boxes even though a variety of other magazines have theirs left alone. I am beginning to think this is actual victimization and considering a report to a policy dispute team. - Dirty Volvic ( talk) 16:44, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that in articles for movies, especially those made before the 1990's and whice are especially notable, there will be a section near the end of that article which notes how critics rated the film. More than once I have seen an immediate reference to the website Rotten Tomatoes which seems weird, because that website didn't even exist until at the latest 2002. Shouldn't these articles emphasize the critical reaction that occurred at the very same time period of the film's release? It doesn't take that much effort to dig up old issues of the New York Times for a classic Vincent Canby review, or TIME Magazine or Daily Variety; just go to most public and/or university libraries or even online in some cases. I noticed this tonight on the article for the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.-- Msr69er ( talk) 12:53, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Per the new adminbot approval policy, I'd like to announce that I'm seeking approval for a simple one-time adminbot run to undelete a bunch of image talk pages which were incorrectly deleted under CSD G8 despite not being eligible for it. Discussion on both the appropriateness of the task and on the proposed technical implementation are welcome at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Ilmari Karonen's adminbot. Feel free to copy this announcement to any other fora that you feel should be notified. — Ilmari Karonen ( talk) 01:58, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Alert on WP:NOR. I just restored it, but don't have time for a lot of arguing. The policy was recently changed to allow OR in certain circumstances, which would destroy controversial articles, at least. Current change, includes my revert and an edit by Kenosis. Please watch the article. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 21:42, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Is Chappa'Hai an article that should be in Wikipedia? It looks like some character that somebody made up and dressed up as. Little Red Riding Hood talk 03:57, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm doing the monthly updates again for CAT:GEN, which is a subset of the style guidelines. Reaction has been positive these past few months, and since successful projects in userspace tend to migrate to WP-space, I've created a page WP:Update for these monthly updates. (Tony1 has been doing a fine job in previous months combining my stuff with his stuff and making the results available in his userspace and through the Signpost, and I hope he'll continue to find my work useful.) I'm thinking that the page could be used by anyone for monthly updates of any set of guideline or policy pages, or for linking to other sets of updates, in or out of userspace; of course, now that it's in WP-space, it's not my call how the page gets used. On analogy to WP:ATT (a kind of summary of WP:V and WP:OR), which got labeled as an essay after a lot of discussion, I've labeled the page an essay for now. Any thoughts about how to use a page like this? - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 16:30, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I just read a book by Richard Posner that got me thinking. We could apply an economic model with incentives to be a good wikipedia citizen and disincentives to vandalize. My proposal is this: Each user, upon registering for the first time, has to put a small sum of money (let's say $10) in an interest-bearing trust account managed by the Wikipedia foundation. After a small amount of time (let's say 90 days), this money is returned to the user in whole. However, for each edit the user makes that is legitimately identified as "vandalism," the user forfeits a small sum (let's say 50 cents or a dollar) to the Wikipedia foundation. If the user's amount in the trust account drops to a certain level (maybe $5), the user is kicked off wikipedia and the money (minus the amount forfeited) would be returned to the user. As for the interest earned on the money in trust, the Wikipedia foundation would keep that. (which would be a substantial sum).
This plan would create a strong disincentive to vandalize, as it would cost the user money. This plan also has very low barriers to entry for new users, for the only cost would be the loss of utility of a small sum of money (like $10) for a small amount of time (90 days), which, at the current market interest rate (compouned daily), would only be a little over five cents.
An obvious drawback to this plan is that it would require all users to register an account in order to identify the user's money in trust. Maybe however, we could get around this somehow, if there is a way to track the contributions of IPs to the money the IP inititally deposited in trust. The money wikipedia would make from the interest in trust, also, would help it expand and increase the ability to stave off the temptation to raise revenue in other ways, like selling advertising space, etc.
Low barriers and high disincentives...sounds like a good (and more importantly, rational) plan! Bilodeauzx ( talk) 04:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
"2.8 billion people, more than half the people in developing countries live on less than $700 a year" [5]. Money, politics, and religion (and a few more things) should never play a part in who can or can not edit or obtain information on Wikipedia. Gtstricky Talk or C 03:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Here's the specific case. At WP:MOSCAPS, our example of k. d. lang was changed to bell hooks this month, with an edit summary implying intent recorded in reliable sources by bell hooks (and by implication, not by k. d. lang) to have a lowercased name. That's not credible; there are about 3M ghits for k. d. lang and about 300K for bell hooks, and I think somewhere along the way, k. d. lang is likely to have noticed that her name was being lowercased in all her publicity and in reliable sources. A metaguideline (that we should probably write down) for style guidelines is (or should be): if there isn't a credible reason to change the example, don't change the example, because otherwise, you'll have an endless number of editors lining up to substitute their favorite example. I can't think of anywhere I've seen this metaguideline, but I'm sure it's been discussed; can anyone point me to a discussion? - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 21:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I have several times with several editors over the past year or so discussed the need of a compendium of information on deleting images. I would like to propose a separate document to supplement the current section Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Deleting_images (which would need to be revised accordingly, but needs to be revised anyway as for some six weeks images have not been addressed at WP:CP). I've modeled this compendium in part on the existing instructions at WP:CP and have done my best to make it inclusive. I have already comments and revisions at Wikipedia_talk:Image_use_policy#Proposal_for_a_new_document_on_deleting_images. I got a taker on the revisions, but so far no comments. :) I'll leave notice there that I'm opening discussion here and also make note at WT:CSD, since contributors there may also have valuable feedback on the form and usefulness of such a document. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 10:37, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:External links ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
I have started a page, to give guidance on adding coordinates to articles about linear features such as roads and rivers. I intend to use it to document current practise, and develop polices for future use. Please feel free to add to it, or to discuss the matter on its talk page. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Date | England | Scotland | Brazil | Italy | Argentina | France | Germany | Spain | Netherlands | Serbia | Others | TOTAL |
07/30/08 | 6,695 | 2,253 | 2,413 | 1,379 | 1,337 | 1,572 | 1,155 | 1,087 | 933 | 635 | 10,923 | 30,382 |
09/30/08 | 7,021 | 2,353 | 2,478 | 1,408 | 1,387 | 1,672 | 1,296 | 1,142 | 963 | 674 | 11,700 | 32,094 |
Notes:
EconomistBR 00:45, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
The basic problem here is that there are many athletes whose "notability" covers their career and nothing else about them, so unless their career was itself exceptional, there's effectively nothing to put in their article except some raw stats and a couple sentences of "signed in year X, played there for 3 years, swapped a couple more times, and retired due to an injury after seven seasons". In those cases, it's rather hard to argue that the athlete is notable in their own right rather than just as part of the team. To make an analogy with coverage of fiction, professional athletes are the "characters" of sports: they're an important aspect of the teams they play in, but they really shouldn't have their own articles unless there's enough actual coverage to write a decent page on them. -- erachima talk 02:10, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
While we are far from a full resolution at the RFC for WP:N, I've written User:Masem/Inclusion Guideline based on the current input that suggests that while we want to include, say, every professional player, we need to be practical and consider to listify those elements when there are no sources. This is exactly the case here: I see no problem having rosters of teams and providing redirs to all the names, but individual articles until further sourcing is found is unnecessary. -- MASEM 03:49, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Excellent news (more footballers, keep on adding!) but have you tried raising the point at WP:FOOTBALL? Good luck. As for the thinness of most of these articles, filling them up is restricted by BLP and RS. Too much tabloid coverage, too few chances to fit this info into WP rules. NVO ( talk) 04:40, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
What are user's opinions of comics such as the one on Godwin's_Law? I don't really think they are encyclopaedic Gnevin ( talk) 21:46, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
go ahead, type it in. apparently, the word does not exist to wikipedia.
i would still like to know what it means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.137.147.103 ( talk) 09:35, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
While WP:OUTING addresses the serious issue of stalking, as currently written, it renders WP:COI and aspects of WP:NOR (specifically WP:COS) unenforceable. Any good-faith attempt to identify a user as having a COI usually necessitates some degree of real-life identification. Typically, the user name is a give-away, but otherwise only an intentional or inadvertent admission by a registered or anonymous user is usable evidence – and the problems are mostly with editors who do not want to have their COI edits exposed as such or are unfamiliar with WP:COI in the first place. I feel that the community needs to discuss whether WP:Outing trumps WP:COI and WP:COS or else needs to accommodate legitimate, good-faith enforcement of these policies and guidelines. While the issues have been raised before, there has been no resolution, and that lack of resolution is hampering the work of enforcing WP:COI. If you have an interest in helping resolve this problem, please comment at WP:OUTING vs. WP:COI & WP:NOR. Thank you, Askari Mark (Talk) 15:41, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Cross posting from Disruptive user talk page Karbinski ( talk) 17:44, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (law enforcement agency categories) ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:51, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Moving from AN, where it seems to have much support.
We are getting more and more of these, and each one results in drama, disagreement, and long discussion on noticeboards. If they are people trolling (as at least most are), then we are simply feeding them. If some are in fact genuine, then we are not doing so good either.
I'm generally of the "ignore it, it is trolling" school, however, I can appreciate the other point of view too. So I'd like to propose the following, which is designed to please both sides.
This strikes me as a win/win. Those concerned with the trolling/drama aspect get this off wiki (win), and those who feel that we need to report these get an effective mechanism for dealing quietly with threats (win). The users on the mailing list can learn from each other, and share any feedback from authorities (was it good/bad to report it?).
To clarify: a) the mailing list's purpose will to discuss and report - NOT to counsel or contact the posters (wikipedia should probably actively discourage people from doing that). b) helping out on the mailing list would initially be open to anyone who's trusted as sane. Once it is up and running, the moderators can decide on new applicants (or those on the list).
I'd hope that such a policy would reduce drama, end the feeding of trolls, but allow swift reporting of threats as people feel necessary.
So 1) anyone think otherwise? 2) is anyone willing to get a list up and running (I'm not interested personally)
--- Scott MacDonald ( talk) 16:00, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Why do you think WMF wants nothing to do with this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.143.204.198 ( talk) 20:27, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I see no problem with anyone interested in creating a mailing list to do so (or indeed a response team), but also have long advocated a 'minimise the fuss' approach. To my mind a concerned editor dropping a note onto AN/I should be met with 'reported per WP:TOV, and the thread marked resolved. Easy, no? :-) Privatemusings ( talk) 21:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I called the police and dealt with them for several hours on the last threat (i.e. the last non-suicide threat), so I suppose I have the requisite experience. I also have plenty of experience with mailing lists so I'd willing to be involved. John Reaves 22:56, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Strong Oppose. I support this in spirit, but there are too many problems that aren't addressed. As others have said, we aren't qualified to judge what is credible; making ourselves mandatory reporters for "credible" threats of violence opens us up to civil litigation, as does missing one if we change it to report ALL threats of violence. That's not a level of danger that I'm willing to accept for the benefit; although, it is an improvement over TOV in that the records of who reported the threat are not publicly available and would require a warrant to obtain (unless, of course, one of the list members caved, which is always a possibility; if approved, I would encourage a policy of keeping private information private unless no other choice is available or unless the editor expressly opts in to having their information released). Celarnor Talk to me 03:33, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal, but I would defiantly support the creation of a policy to deal with this. I started the first policy attempt. However, I very strongly believe that reverting or otherwise treating possibly suicidal individuals as trolls is not just inappropriate, it is it is downright irresponsible and potentially lethal. Instead any policy designed to deal with this problem should be more in line with the Reference Desk guidelines concerning requests for medical advice. Though some of these posts may be trolling many of them are unquestionably people desperately seeking help. We should respond gently and redirect them to a crisis hotline and to medical professionals, then we should contact authorities in the individual’s area. While I defiantly support the creation of a mailing list, and would be interested in being a responder on such a list, I cannot support this proposal as it stands. Thanks, -- S.dedalus ( talk) 05:22, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
If we were to say there is consensus here to create such a list, how would we go about creating it? -- how do you turn this on 20:19, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
(Any admins watching? This is still a current issue.)
I'm editing on a third world ISP that uses IP masquerading and transparent proxies. Unfortunately, an overly agressive block of User:Motheria resulted in my being autoblocked, receiving messages like: "This is because someone using this internet address or shared proxy server was blocked. Your ability to edit pages has been automatically suspended to prevent abuse from the other person. " If you're seeing this message, it's only because I've remotely logged in to another computer to post this via w3m - I'm sure you'll understand why I didn't bother logging in.
Unfortunately, as I am unable to edit User talk:Motheria and my own fricking talk page at User talk:Mrzaius, barring magically getting a new IP address, I am stuck having to email the offending admin or other admins that I may know. This is hardly a sufficient or timely fix for the problem at hand. Yes, I know that the proper fix is to just get these IP addresses flagged as shared to prevent this from happening here again, but that isn't enough when newbies are involved. They need to be able to comment directly here to deal with this sort of problem in any sort of accessible manner.
I propose that secondary users affected by an autoblock (or at least those that existed PRIOR to said block) should be able to edit two pages: 1: The initially blocked user's talk page 2: Their own talk page (for registered users) or their own IPs talk page (for anonymous users)
This shouldn't be controversial. Note that I am not proposing any changes to the blocking policies for the initially blocked user, just other users that presumably existed before the block. User:Mrzaius 198.247.173.235 ( talk) 03:41, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
As you may or may not know, the Bots request for approval policy was recently changed to permit the members of the Bot Approval Group to grant sysop bits to bots without the necessity of going through a Request for adminship. No one has yet attempted to do this ... until now. I'm putting Cydebot through the process for a task which it has been performing for over a year now (on my personal sysop account), so hopefully this is as non-controversial as possible. However, so far everyone that has commented on the bot has been a BAG regular, so it will help to get some wider discussion. The last thing I want to have happen is for someone to say after-the-fact that this was sneaked through the back door, so let this serve as a public notice to the community regarding the issue. If you have any feelings on this subject, please join the discussion. -- Cyde Weys 20:19, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
I would like an option in preferences added concerning the use of rollback.
Something like:
[] Prompt me for an edit summary when rolling back an edit
And the checkbox would be checked by default.
This would help for those of us concerned with "accidentally" clicking on rollback. (I've seen admins request for it to be removed for that reason.)
And by having this be the default, it might provide the opportunity for newbies to gradually learn how the tool works.
It would also allow those who regularly use rollback to be able to add an edit summary in situations which may merit it. (Think of how this might reduce the " bite" of merely seeing your edit reverted, yet not knowing or understanding why.)
My understanding is that this is already possible through personal scripting, but this is not necessarily a possibility for everyone (for technical reasons, for example).
And a single line added to preferences would seem to not be too intrusive. (Likely added to the "Editing" section.)
Note that this would in no way otherwise affect the way the tool itself works. By removing the checkmark from the check box (one time, and never having to do so again, unless the user chooses to reenable the checkbox), Rollback remains the same as it is now.
And if anyone would like to help with the eventual bugzilla request, that would also be appreciated : ) - jc37 00:59, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
I've written a user script to make rollback prompt for a summary at User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js. To try it out, just add
importScript("User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js");
to your monobook.js (or equivalent page for other skins). If people like it, it should be straightforward to make it a gadget that can be enabled via Special:Preferences. — Ilmari Karonen ( talk) 21:42, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
First, I think it's great that several people have made tools and gadgets to help others.
But as I mentioned above, that doesn't help those with no scripting.
(And incidentally: "The only people who really don't have access to it are people with javascript disabled, but they should be used to the internet sucking by now." - According to who? And by the way, I personally feel that that was a rather (to put it nicely) self-centered thing to say. And I was rather shocked to read it, especially considering who said it - That's just not been my typical experience of that editor.)
Anyway, the thing is, this doesn't even seem to be something that's difficult or intrusive. It's a single line in preferences, and I would presume should be rather simple to enact.
It's helpful, it's intuitive, it can potentially help prevent WP:BITE, amid several other positives, with no negatives that I see.
But let me ask: Are there any actual concerns besides "I don't want another checkbox in preferences, because it could lead to more and more checkboxes"? (paraphrased) - jc37 09:42, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
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A poll is underway to require almost all articles to use the date format 13 September 2008. Please comment in this section.
The precise language would impose this on all articles not strongly linked to to the United States, except existing articles on Canada. (New ones would have to use 13 September 2008.) Septentrionalis PMAnderson 18:14, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
I agree, what is with all this hulabaloo over date formatting lately? Sheesh! Pierre DuPaix III ( talk) 01:40, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
Should Wikipedia:Wikipedia essays be used on articles in the articles namespace? It would seem to pull readers into WP: territory. There are 10 such links at the moment. Mcewan ( talk) 08:48, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
Ok so you come across a bad edit and do a revert which elicits a counter revert and then leads to the talk page. There, through discussion, you quicky come to understand that what you have on your hands is the proverbial, dreaded bad editor. (We all know him. He's not difficult to recognize.) Not a vandal (that would be too easy) but someone who doesn't have policy knowledge, doesn't care to learn it, yet is entirely sincere in their viewpoint. One might say a crusader even. He is passionate, has good writing skills, but... he simply, consistently makes bad edits. He removes good content, questions unquestionable material, assumes bad faith in discussion and, in general, seems to have dedicated himself to a program of steady deterioration of article quality.
Wikipedia policy says: Do not bite the newbies and assume good faith, good policies both in the majority of cases. But unless you are willing to spend a considerable amount of your time not, as you'd like, in article space, but in seemingly endless talk page discussion and arbitration, you (I) more often than not just give up and move on. Admirable? No. Practical? Very much so.
I think we've all probably had the harrowing experience of coming across a bad edit, doing a history check of the editor responsible, and to our horror see that this guy has been doing this, not just in this article but all over the damn encyclopedia! He is involving many, many editors in the process described above. Not maliciously, mind you, in good faith, but just laying a path of destruction wherever he goes.
Perhaps sometimes it would be better to just recognize these people up front and to expeditiously get rid of them. Not everybody is cut out to edit an encyclopedia. We are not all Diderots.
Sorry. Just a bad case of schpilkus and I needed to heave. (red face) And here I am standing with it all over my shoes. ~ Alcmaeonid ( talk) 16:02, 12 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd just like to bring it to wider attention that there's a new criterion for speedy deletion: " T4: Documentation subpages of deleted templates". All the usual trappings, including a {{ db-templatedoc}} tag, should be in place. There's some related discussion at WT:CSD. It's pretty much a no-brainer (as indeed speedy deletion criteria should be in general), and I'm sure admins have been doing that already anyway, but now we have it in writing.
So, if you were going to delete a template and were wondering what to do about the documentation page, well, now you know. If not, feel free to ignore all this. Thank you, and have a nice day. — Ilmari Karonen ( talk) 05:25, 15 September 2008 (UTC)
It is proposed to add a section to Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines clarifying the procedure for proposing and making changes to policy and guideline pages. The proposed wording is at WP:Policy/Procedure; please comment on that page's talk page.-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:05, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
After a long gestation, WP:MEDRS was promoted to a guideline by Davidruben ( talk · contribs) on the 1 September. This followed a poll Wikipedia talk:Reliable sources (medicine-related articles)#Should we make this a guideline?. It had been referred to by WP:MED editors as a de facto project guideline for quite some time, and the page was quite stable. However, those few editors who opposed the guidelines status continue to grumble and two are engaged in edit warring over the guideline tag. The aspects in dispute, as far as you may regard me as a reliable witness, appear to be:
Those disputing appear to be IMO in conflict with policy pages (see the talk page for details of which), and some have openly admitted to this. Further comment from the wise and experienced would be appreciated. Colin° Talk 21:53, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Based on this comment from Mike Godwin, the WMF's legal counsel, foundation-l, I'd like to open a discussion on our definition of free-images. Currently we define images with non-commercial {{ Non-free with NC}} and non-derivative {{ Non-free with ND}} as non-free images that should be deleted {{ Db-i3}}. Given that Mike indicates that Wikiquote can consider non-commercial vs. commercial use in deciding what text it may use, that suggests to me that we may be able to accept a non-commercial image license as "free" and possibly even a non-derivative license, since what is expected of a charity is different than what is expected of a non-charitable enduser. MBisanz talk 01:56, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article series ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
Check out the pic on the left at Haumea_(dwarf_planet)#Size and composition, of the various trans-Neptunian planetoids. It's an image map! Since when are image maps allowed? I hated it - I clicked the picture to get a big view, like in every other Wikipedia article's pictures, and instead I was shunted over to some article for a reason I didn't understand. Tempshill ( talk) 22:33, 18 September 2008 (UTC)
The one at Supergiant and the like doesn't appear to cause problems. Geni 09:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article series ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
There is a proposal to modify the bot policy regarding whether or not administrators need approval to run bots under their account. All are invited to comment. Prodego talk 14:51, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Following the recent RfC on adminbots and proposed addition to the bot policy to allow bots to be granted admin rights outside of RfA, I have raised the question on the Admin noticeboard as to whether the community would accept the approval of an adminbot through WP:RFBOT alone. Comments welcome there. WJBscribe (talk) 00:33, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Wikipedia doesn't use Allwiki ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Per Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Sarah_Palin_protection_wheel_war/Workshop#Community_discussion_strongly_urged, the community has been urged by Arbitration Commitee member User:Newyorkbrad to consider the use of flagged/sighted revisions (amongst other possible remedies), to assist in reducing the risk of articles that deal with living people, and the harm that can result.
Therefore, I am opening this discussion, to present a proposal for the use of Flagged/sighted revisions to reduce the risk of situations like the one discussed in the ArbCom case. That is: In certain, high profile articles, the crush of editors is not always conducive to taking due care to prevent violations of WP:BLP being inserted into articles. Such a situation (and the resulting wheel war of protection/unprotection that occured) on the article for Sarah Palin led to the above mentioned ArbCom case.
Flagged/Sighted Revisions, should, at a minimum be in place on WP:BLP articles, (and ideally, to my thoughts, be in place on all articles.) To prevent complaints that this gives administrators too much power to determine what content Wikipedia produces, my suggestion is that a new "right" be granted, comparable to the rollback right recently introduced. The new right would allow administrators, bureaucrats, or stewards to grant a user the ability to mark articles as flagged or sighted.
This right should be fairly easy to grant (say, 500 edits or so, it should be fairly automatic). However, any editor who has a block for violating Wikipedia's rule on edit-warring, or breaking the 3 revert rule, should not be granted this right automatically.
See Wikipedia:Flagged revisions/Sighted versions for more information. SirFozzie ( talk) 02:02, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Following the recent Georgia-South Ossetia war there has been some debate about the presentation of contested land areas on the locator maps. Not only Georgia, but also Kosovo, Western Sahara, Tibet and Taiwan, Cyprus (and likely many others) contain contested areas. There is no consistent way to present this on Wikipedia locator maps, and this is leading to much discussions about POV.
I have opened a thread at WikiProject Countries but perhaps this is something of sufficient importance to build up to a guideline? What do you guys think? Arnoutf ( talk) 17:03, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Manual of Style (Macedonia-related articles) ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
It has come to my attention that a user has been uploading articles from Wikipedia onto their own User talk subpages. These are the users only edits. It appears the account is being used either as a POV fork or their own web storage. What is wikipedia's policy in regard to the use of article duplication on talk pages for this? MegX ( talk) 06:01, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
I have added the following paragraph to WP:COI to reflect the actual state of matters. [1] Please familiarize yourself with this, and feel free to discuss if you think this does not reflect actual practice.
Thank you for you help, and thank you to User:FayssalF for reviewing this edit. [2] Jehochman Talk 18:27, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
A simple question. On the Mayo Clinic web page, that institution uses the term "chronic" to describe a mental condition. The web based page was used as a citation to specifically reference that word in the Wiki article, because an editor challenged it's inclusion based on the belief that the reference was of poor quality. Now there is an edit war with the term being put on and taken off repeatedly. Can anyone point to specific policy on this issue or give a thought out opinion?-- scuro ( talk) 15:36, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
-- Doc James ( talk) 20:04, 20 September 2008 (UTC)
{{
cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (
link)Doc James ( talk) 03:37, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
FYI I'm the same editor who a few weeks ago proposed to get "recently" and other such words blacklisted. I noticed on Thabo Mbeki today that someone has created a Vague Time template in August, which is being used on this article and a handful of others. There is no discussion on the talk page. The Wikipedia:Template namespace guideline says that ANYONE can create a template (without discussion) and gives instructions on how to do so. Shouldn't there be some sort of enforced discussion first? After all, templates are not things that (should) get created every day. In theory I could now go around pasting this template everywhere I find my pet hate-word "recently". In fact I could just as well have written up this template myself and starting using it in articles without any prior discussion. Is this desirable? Should we not protect the Template namespace (if possible) against article creation?
On another note, can someone braver than me move the template from Vague Time to Vague time? The redirect can be deleted as only a handful of articles will need to be fixed. Zunaid 11:41, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Good idea, bad execution. There is {{ when}}, it looks like when? and it's good. Use inline tags to identify specific place in the text. Don't force the user to sieve through the text to find one "b-word". NVO ( talk) 19:06, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
It seems our guidelines over linking in articles are starting to build up to unnecessary levels. We have:
And this is just internal links; external links and interwiki links have their own guidelines (though the MOS links page covers ELs as well). Is internal linking really this complicated? Is there any reason why we need so many guidelines for such a simple thing as putting some square brackets around some words? Mr. Z-man 20:49, 22 September 2008 (UTC)
Case 1 - Joe Lewis (British businessman)
Outdated and incorrect information took 5 months to be removed. Here
Case 2 - Automobile industry in Germany
Vandalism took 4 months to be removed. Here
Those are articles are simply not being watched.
IMO we should somehow reduce the number of article to something that is manageable or at least reduce the rate of growth. ⇨ EconomistBR ⇦ 04:28, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
The priority should be given to blp articles. -- fayssal - Wiki me up® 20:44, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
How about (in addition) a bot that goes around and puts a template that says "This article has not been updated for X time and may contain out-of-date information?" And Fayssal, is WP slowing down? It seems to me it has, but I'd like to know as you are a lot closer to the pulse. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 05:48, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
I don't think a bot is an answer to this problem. A slight modification to "Recent Changes" that flags changes to unwatched articles would do it ... RC patrol can prioritize unwatched changes, on the assumption that watched pages will be taken care of by the watchers. Kww ( talk) 13:56, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
Here is a possible idea:
I am not saying that the checked version is the same as the idea for version control that is being tossed around, but it can help to quickly identify a point where the article is believed to have been good quality and then allow for an assessment of what needs to be fixed if it goes too long with too many unchecked edits. -- MASEM 14:18, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
It there any particular provision/rule about this, or does it just fall under vandalism? Caught a BBC journalist introducing an unreffed factiod to Kgalema Motlanthe, then citing Wikipedia has his/her source. T L Miles ( talk) 14:24, 23 September 2008 (UTC)
People need to look at what has been happening to the civility policy. Hint: a lot. Before my recent revert, it was even downgraded into a guideline. This is part of the five pillars of Wikipedia, and no one is watching. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 04:23, 21 September 2008 (UTC)
Deprecate this so-called guideline or policy immediately - until there is a stable version. Current version [4] even redefines five principles. Policy must be stable; right now, it's mayhem not policy. NVO ( talk) 19:01, 24 September 2008 (UTC)
After notifying the usual suspects (WT:MOSNUM, WT:YEARS, and more), we seem to have consensus at Wikipedia_talk:Naming_conventions_(numbers_and_dates)#Decades to make at least one change: 1800s and similar pages will become a disambiguation page saying:
{{seealso|19th century}}
1800s may refer to:
Millennium |
---|
2nd millennium |
Centuries |
Decades |
Years |
Categories |
The current 1800s page refers to the period from 1800 to 1809, which means that all the people who link to 1800s and think that it means 1800-1899 are confusing people with the link. Wikipedians chose this usage because it's convenient in some infoboxes, for instance this one, and we don't want to change that infobox. But policy seems to require that we have pagenames that mean what English speakers expect them to mean: per WP:NOT#OR, some things that aren't allowed: "proposing theories and solutions, original ideas, defining terms, coining new words, et cetera". Also, here are the first two sentences in the first section of WP:NAME, also policy: "Generally, article naming should prefer what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize, with a reasonable minimum of ambiguity, while at the same time making linking to those articles easy and second nature. This is justified by the following principle: The names of Wikipedia articles should be optimized for readers over editors, and for a general audience over specialists." I've gone through 300 Google hits at this point, and all of them not coming from Wikipedia think that 1800s means 1800 to 1899. So feel free to complain here or on the page where we had the discussion; otherwise we'll take some kind of action after a few days; perhaps a trip to WP:RM. - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 02:31, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
How is the decade "1800-1809" normally called, as in "the turnpike was built in the mid-1810s"? -- NE2 11:45, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
I'd like to see Wikipedia:Honesty upgraded to guideline. Assume good faith is a guideline. This is the flip side of the same coin. Thoughts? Jehochman Talk 14:34, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
Many community members strongly disagree with the current policy. We are proposing a modification of languages criteria to star a wikimedia project, with a community draft]. feel free to contribute with your opinion:
thak you, very much. —
Crazymadlover —Preceding
undated comment was added at 20:53, 25 September 2008 (UTC).
I understand and have, on multiple occasions ( lolcode and Superhero Movie, among others), worked with admins and Deletion Review to restore previous versions of articles for topics that gained notability after deletion. I've got damned near 10k edits under my belt, though, and probably had 1-2k down before I knew the process. Can we get the "This page has been deleted. The deletion log for the page is provided below for reference." text on deleted articles expanded to include the bottom text, which reads "# If the page has been deleted, check the deletion log, and see Why was my page deleted?." 'Note the typo "?.", too - That needs a quick fix regardless - Just strike the period. The blue linked text in the link is equivalent to quotation marks, for all intents and purposes - Nothin' wrong with ending that sentence with a question mark, as a result.
I would argue that all text pertaining to recreating deleted content should be moved into the This-page-got-popped-off-before text, as it is irrelevant without it. It should also be expanded shortly to include some of the Why? text, such as "Do not despair: none of the information on a "deleted" page has actually been lost." Include some basic coverage as to how a user can get page protection lifted and articles restored if sources arise. Doesn't have to be long - You could pack a lot into two sentences. Please also expand the text to make it clear that an article is protected - That is the most important place to say it, but there's no mention whatsoever of protection on the deletion warning at SwiftIRC.
On a related note, indefinite protection of articles that may conceivably reach the level where the above is necessary is always unwarranted. SwiftIRC, for instance, would have been fine with 6-12 months. CsD exists, and is a cleaner solution than ignoring the fact that a topic may achieve notability after deletion. MrZaius talk 13:01, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
In June 2008 the Arbitration Committee announced a request that the English Wikipedia consider allowing some non-administrators the ability to view deleted material. The summary of the announcement was
Note that this is a request that the idea be considered, nothing stronger. The announcement led to this proposal. As this conversation has gone on for several months, the proposal has shifted around quite a bit. This makes it very unclear where editors are currently giving their support or opposition. For the sake of clarity, I am attempting to pick out the main proposals, and create a straw poll around them. Please share your opinion at Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted. ~ JohnnyMrNinja 09:06, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
On instruction by Lifebaka (but you probably should head over to WP:VPP for things like this. You'll get a much wider group of editors there. Cheers. lifebaka++ 03:59, 26 September 2008 (UTC)), I present the following, which was originally made during a discussion of oversighting a suicide threat on AN.
Why do we call it oversight? Oversight usually means some sort of independent review or process, often to try to keep people honest. Wikipedia usage of oversight really means "Removal", "Content deletion" or "Censor" (censorship doesn't need to be bad; some countries have a censorship board). Propose making Wikipedia more user friendly and less jargon by renaming the term "oversight" to "content removal" or "remove". So the first sentence of this section would read "I have been asked to do content removal of the revision concerned here" or "I have been asked to remove the revision concerned here". 903M ( talk) 04:04, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
On second thought, the following terms seem best. "Special removal" or "Removal". Special in that only a few people can do it. Removing is the acting that is being done here. Oversight people are not auditors who determine if people are using their powers correctly. 903M ( talk) 04:44, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Proposal ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a policy. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has been edited so that it is no longer marked as a guideline. It was previously marked as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:52, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
These nuvole flags are gaining increased usage on wiki, This is quite worring for me as they are more decorative than standard flags. At Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(flags)#Nuvola_flags,i am proposing to strongly limit the usage of these flags, please comment if your interested .
When I place a reference to a website, I always link the dates in a specific manner: for example, if I placed such a reference today, I'd write
Accessed [[2008-09-19]]
. Today, however, I saw someone removing such a link with a script. Are links of this sort also prohibited now? Nyttend ( talk) 20:28, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
Just to comment, but what about articles that are relevant to multiple regions? It still doesn't address the heavy edit warring (if I may use the word "war" without pissing off my international friends) that I see go on in many articles I come across regarding date format in those types of articles. I agree fully that dates should relate to the region's context, but it still leaves a lot left undone in regards to this heated "us vs. them" dispute. MuZemike ( talk) 17:46, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
The recent RFC on the Arbitration Committee ended with various proposals for changes to the Arbitration Committee's form and practice. It is now proposed that the upcoming elections for the Committee be expanded to encompass a vote to ratify/choose these changes.
There is currently a certain amount of disagreement on the talk page about the exact form that these proposals should take. It would be useful to have more eyes to consider, firstly, whether a ratification should take place and, secondly, exactly how these proposed changes should be phrased and presented.
Some more eyes would be greatly appreciated.
Sam Korn (smoddy) 22:01, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
Some are good. Proposals 8 and 10 suck, as it means that ArbCom can never in the future take certain steps it thinks necessary, whatever they might be. Proposal 11 is nice for those who hate Latin- otherwise sucks. It's something that doesn't need to be voted on. Proposal 13 should be, that the community may, by a 3/4 vote at an RfC, cause an arbitrator to stand for re-election. Otherwise, it's just big drama. When has the community ever decided anything "categorically?" —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 22:33, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I apologise for any confusion that Sam Korn might have caused by this post. No, voting is not open yet. This is also not a call to start editing the proposals already up, since the ones up there right now are the ones that had significant consensus support on Wikipedia:Requests_for_comment/Arbitration_Committee, if you can find or generate similar consensus support for adding alternative proposals please do so, but do not edit or remove existing proposals without overwhelming consensus to override that generated in the RfC. It's probably not the time for advocacy or nitpicking over why you disagree or agree with one proposal over another, there will be plenty of time for that during the nomination process of the main election. Sam shot the gun a little early in announcing this, and the discussion pages and information pages are not there yet. -- Barberio ( talk) 23:13, 27 September 2008 (UTC)
I see. Well, some of them might pass, and some are good. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 00:30, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
in the notes for a7 it says... "If controversial, as with schools, list the article at Articles for deletion instead." is there an archived discussion or policy or something which details why schools are controversial? thanks Mission Fleg ( talk) 07:18, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
I'm not really sure if this is the correct place to ask, but from anything that I found this came the most close to what I was looking for. My question is: Are sheer "technical specification"-tables that are copypasted from another website copyrighted material and therefore a reason to delete the article? I'm asking because in the article FNSS Pars this is exactly what happened. 90% of the article are a direct copypaste of the manufacturers website linked at the end of the article. Yet it is not any real text that was copypasted, but rather the tech specs, which in my eyes are not really any "creative work" but rather a collection of facts. So I don't know whether they are copyrighted and all and I'm not sure what to do now. A speedy deletion cause of copyvio? A deletion discussion? Reverting to earlier versions? -- DavidDCM ( talk) 16:37, 28 September 2008 (UTC)
Is it desirable or is it undesirable for dates of birth and death at the top of a biography article to be linked? Recent bot-driven delinking and the decision to end date linking for autoformatting have brought this question to a head.
An RfC is now open at WT:MOSNUM#RfC: Linking of dates of birth and death -- Jheald ( talk) 12:35, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
Are drawings based on copyrighted photos derivative works? If so, aren't these drawings made by User:Simonfieldhouse copyright infringement?
etc. bogdan ( talk) 23:19, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that various websites have added their review ratings accompanied by links to the right hand column of many album article pages. I wanted to know the conditions of this. I have colleagues at Clash Magazine and Drowned In Sound, yet both have had their link and rating removed yet others (NME, Pitchfork, Absolute Punk, Observer) left up? Is there some sort of limit to how many rating reviews can be there?
If anybody can shed light on this grey matter I would be very grateful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dirty Volvic ( talk • contribs) 10:35, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Well I posted some ratings and relevant articles for a handful of artists. For instance in the Keane external links I added their most recent interview, for music artist Rodriguez I placed an external link to his album review. As the album has been re released after its original release 30 years ago.
Yet an oddball administrator has decided to erase all of my contributions in some sort of spamming accusation. He has also accused me of working for a magazine, simply because I know people who work at two magazines. I many cases the ratings from Clash Magazine have been removed from ratings boxes even though a variety of other magazines have theirs left alone. I am beginning to think this is actual victimization and considering a report to a policy dispute team. - Dirty Volvic ( talk) 16:44, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
I have noticed that in articles for movies, especially those made before the 1990's and whice are especially notable, there will be a section near the end of that article which notes how critics rated the film. More than once I have seen an immediate reference to the website Rotten Tomatoes which seems weird, because that website didn't even exist until at the latest 2002. Shouldn't these articles emphasize the critical reaction that occurred at the very same time period of the film's release? It doesn't take that much effort to dig up old issues of the New York Times for a classic Vincent Canby review, or TIME Magazine or Daily Variety; just go to most public and/or university libraries or even online in some cases. I noticed this tonight on the article for the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.-- Msr69er ( talk) 12:53, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Per the new adminbot approval policy, I'd like to announce that I'm seeking approval for a simple one-time adminbot run to undelete a bunch of image talk pages which were incorrectly deleted under CSD G8 despite not being eligible for it. Discussion on both the appropriateness of the task and on the proposed technical implementation are welcome at Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/Ilmari Karonen's adminbot. Feel free to copy this announcement to any other fora that you feel should be notified. — Ilmari Karonen ( talk) 01:58, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Alert on WP:NOR. I just restored it, but don't have time for a lot of arguing. The policy was recently changed to allow OR in certain circumstances, which would destroy controversial articles, at least. Current change, includes my revert and an edit by Kenosis. Please watch the article. —— Martinphi ☎ Ψ Φ—— 21:42, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
Is Chappa'Hai an article that should be in Wikipedia? It looks like some character that somebody made up and dressed up as. Little Red Riding Hood talk 03:57, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I'm doing the monthly updates again for CAT:GEN, which is a subset of the style guidelines. Reaction has been positive these past few months, and since successful projects in userspace tend to migrate to WP-space, I've created a page WP:Update for these monthly updates. (Tony1 has been doing a fine job in previous months combining my stuff with his stuff and making the results available in his userspace and through the Signpost, and I hope he'll continue to find my work useful.) I'm thinking that the page could be used by anyone for monthly updates of any set of guideline or policy pages, or for linking to other sets of updates, in or out of userspace; of course, now that it's in WP-space, it's not my call how the page gets used. On analogy to WP:ATT (a kind of summary of WP:V and WP:OR), which got labeled as an essay after a lot of discussion, I've labeled the page an essay for now. Any thoughts about how to use a page like this? - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 16:30, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I just read a book by Richard Posner that got me thinking. We could apply an economic model with incentives to be a good wikipedia citizen and disincentives to vandalize. My proposal is this: Each user, upon registering for the first time, has to put a small sum of money (let's say $10) in an interest-bearing trust account managed by the Wikipedia foundation. After a small amount of time (let's say 90 days), this money is returned to the user in whole. However, for each edit the user makes that is legitimately identified as "vandalism," the user forfeits a small sum (let's say 50 cents or a dollar) to the Wikipedia foundation. If the user's amount in the trust account drops to a certain level (maybe $5), the user is kicked off wikipedia and the money (minus the amount forfeited) would be returned to the user. As for the interest earned on the money in trust, the Wikipedia foundation would keep that. (which would be a substantial sum).
This plan would create a strong disincentive to vandalize, as it would cost the user money. This plan also has very low barriers to entry for new users, for the only cost would be the loss of utility of a small sum of money (like $10) for a small amount of time (90 days), which, at the current market interest rate (compouned daily), would only be a little over five cents.
An obvious drawback to this plan is that it would require all users to register an account in order to identify the user's money in trust. Maybe however, we could get around this somehow, if there is a way to track the contributions of IPs to the money the IP inititally deposited in trust. The money wikipedia would make from the interest in trust, also, would help it expand and increase the ability to stave off the temptation to raise revenue in other ways, like selling advertising space, etc.
Low barriers and high disincentives...sounds like a good (and more importantly, rational) plan! Bilodeauzx ( talk) 04:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
"2.8 billion people, more than half the people in developing countries live on less than $700 a year" [5]. Money, politics, and religion (and a few more things) should never play a part in who can or can not edit or obtain information on Wikipedia. Gtstricky Talk or C 03:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Here's the specific case. At WP:MOSCAPS, our example of k. d. lang was changed to bell hooks this month, with an edit summary implying intent recorded in reliable sources by bell hooks (and by implication, not by k. d. lang) to have a lowercased name. That's not credible; there are about 3M ghits for k. d. lang and about 300K for bell hooks, and I think somewhere along the way, k. d. lang is likely to have noticed that her name was being lowercased in all her publicity and in reliable sources. A metaguideline (that we should probably write down) for style guidelines is (or should be): if there isn't a credible reason to change the example, don't change the example, because otherwise, you'll have an endless number of editors lining up to substitute their favorite example. I can't think of anywhere I've seen this metaguideline, but I'm sure it's been discussed; can anyone point me to a discussion? - Dan Dank55 ( send/receive) 21:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I have several times with several editors over the past year or so discussed the need of a compendium of information on deleting images. I would like to propose a separate document to supplement the current section Wikipedia:Image_use_policy#Deleting_images (which would need to be revised accordingly, but needs to be revised anyway as for some six weeks images have not been addressed at WP:CP). I've modeled this compendium in part on the existing instructions at WP:CP and have done my best to make it inclusive. I have already comments and revisions at Wikipedia_talk:Image_use_policy#Proposal_for_a_new_document_on_deleting_images. I got a taker on the revisions, but so far no comments. :) I'll leave notice there that I'm opening discussion here and also make note at WT:CSD, since contributors there may also have valuable feedback on the form and usefulness of such a document. -- Moonriddengirl (talk) 10:37, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:External links ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
I have started a page, to give guidance on adding coordinates to articles about linear features such as roads and rivers. I intend to use it to document current practise, and develop polices for future use. Please feel free to add to it, or to discuss the matter on its talk page. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:18, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
Date | England | Scotland | Brazil | Italy | Argentina | France | Germany | Spain | Netherlands | Serbia | Others | TOTAL |
07/30/08 | 6,695 | 2,253 | 2,413 | 1,379 | 1,337 | 1,572 | 1,155 | 1,087 | 933 | 635 | 10,923 | 30,382 |
09/30/08 | 7,021 | 2,353 | 2,478 | 1,408 | 1,387 | 1,672 | 1,296 | 1,142 | 963 | 674 | 11,700 | 32,094 |
Notes:
EconomistBR 00:45, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
The basic problem here is that there are many athletes whose "notability" covers their career and nothing else about them, so unless their career was itself exceptional, there's effectively nothing to put in their article except some raw stats and a couple sentences of "signed in year X, played there for 3 years, swapped a couple more times, and retired due to an injury after seven seasons". In those cases, it's rather hard to argue that the athlete is notable in their own right rather than just as part of the team. To make an analogy with coverage of fiction, professional athletes are the "characters" of sports: they're an important aspect of the teams they play in, but they really shouldn't have their own articles unless there's enough actual coverage to write a decent page on them. -- erachima talk 02:10, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
While we are far from a full resolution at the RFC for WP:N, I've written User:Masem/Inclusion Guideline based on the current input that suggests that while we want to include, say, every professional player, we need to be practical and consider to listify those elements when there are no sources. This is exactly the case here: I see no problem having rosters of teams and providing redirs to all the names, but individual articles until further sourcing is found is unnecessary. -- MASEM 03:49, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Excellent news (more footballers, keep on adding!) but have you tried raising the point at WP:FOOTBALL? Good luck. As for the thinness of most of these articles, filling them up is restricted by BLP and RS. Too much tabloid coverage, too few chances to fit this info into WP rules. NVO ( talk) 04:40, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
What are user's opinions of comics such as the one on Godwin's_Law? I don't really think they are encyclopaedic Gnevin ( talk) 21:46, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
go ahead, type it in. apparently, the word does not exist to wikipedia.
i would still like to know what it means. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.137.147.103 ( talk) 09:35, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
While WP:OUTING addresses the serious issue of stalking, as currently written, it renders WP:COI and aspects of WP:NOR (specifically WP:COS) unenforceable. Any good-faith attempt to identify a user as having a COI usually necessitates some degree of real-life identification. Typically, the user name is a give-away, but otherwise only an intentional or inadvertent admission by a registered or anonymous user is usable evidence – and the problems are mostly with editors who do not want to have their COI edits exposed as such or are unfamiliar with WP:COI in the first place. I feel that the community needs to discuss whether WP:Outing trumps WP:COI and WP:COS or else needs to accommodate legitimate, good-faith enforcement of these policies and guidelines. While the issues have been raised before, there has been no resolution, and that lack of resolution is hampering the work of enforcing WP:COI. If you have an interest in helping resolve this problem, please comment at WP:OUTING vs. WP:COI & WP:NOR. Thank you, Askari Mark (Talk) 15:41, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Cross posting from Disruptive user talk page Karbinski ( talk) 17:44, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Naming conventions (law enforcement agency categories) ( | talk | history | links | watch | logs) has recently been edited to mark it as a guideline. This is an automated notice of the change ( more information). -- VeblenBot ( talk) 18:51, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
Moving from AN, where it seems to have much support.
We are getting more and more of these, and each one results in drama, disagreement, and long discussion on noticeboards. If they are people trolling (as at least most are), then we are simply feeding them. If some are in fact genuine, then we are not doing so good either.
I'm generally of the "ignore it, it is trolling" school, however, I can appreciate the other point of view too. So I'd like to propose the following, which is designed to please both sides.
This strikes me as a win/win. Those concerned with the trolling/drama aspect get this off wiki (win), and those who feel that we need to report these get an effective mechanism for dealing quietly with threats (win). The users on the mailing list can learn from each other, and share any feedback from authorities (was it good/bad to report it?).
To clarify: a) the mailing list's purpose will to discuss and report - NOT to counsel or contact the posters (wikipedia should probably actively discourage people from doing that). b) helping out on the mailing list would initially be open to anyone who's trusted as sane. Once it is up and running, the moderators can decide on new applicants (or those on the list).
I'd hope that such a policy would reduce drama, end the feeding of trolls, but allow swift reporting of threats as people feel necessary.
So 1) anyone think otherwise? 2) is anyone willing to get a list up and running (I'm not interested personally)
--- Scott MacDonald ( talk) 16:00, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Why do you think WMF wants nothing to do with this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 205.143.204.198 ( talk) 20:27, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I see no problem with anyone interested in creating a mailing list to do so (or indeed a response team), but also have long advocated a 'minimise the fuss' approach. To my mind a concerned editor dropping a note onto AN/I should be met with 'reported per WP:TOV, and the thread marked resolved. Easy, no? :-) Privatemusings ( talk) 21:05, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
I called the police and dealt with them for several hours on the last threat (i.e. the last non-suicide threat), so I suppose I have the requisite experience. I also have plenty of experience with mailing lists so I'd willing to be involved. John Reaves 22:56, 1 October 2008 (UTC)
Strong Oppose. I support this in spirit, but there are too many problems that aren't addressed. As others have said, we aren't qualified to judge what is credible; making ourselves mandatory reporters for "credible" threats of violence opens us up to civil litigation, as does missing one if we change it to report ALL threats of violence. That's not a level of danger that I'm willing to accept for the benefit; although, it is an improvement over TOV in that the records of who reported the threat are not publicly available and would require a warrant to obtain (unless, of course, one of the list members caved, which is always a possibility; if approved, I would encourage a policy of keeping private information private unless no other choice is available or unless the editor expressly opts in to having their information released). Celarnor Talk to me 03:33, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
I oppose this proposal, but I would defiantly support the creation of a policy to deal with this. I started the first policy attempt. However, I very strongly believe that reverting or otherwise treating possibly suicidal individuals as trolls is not just inappropriate, it is it is downright irresponsible and potentially lethal. Instead any policy designed to deal with this problem should be more in line with the Reference Desk guidelines concerning requests for medical advice. Though some of these posts may be trolling many of them are unquestionably people desperately seeking help. We should respond gently and redirect them to a crisis hotline and to medical professionals, then we should contact authorities in the individual’s area. While I defiantly support the creation of a mailing list, and would be interested in being a responder on such a list, I cannot support this proposal as it stands. Thanks, -- S.dedalus ( talk) 05:22, 3 October 2008 (UTC)
If we were to say there is consensus here to create such a list, how would we go about creating it? -- how do you turn this on 20:19, 5 October 2008 (UTC)
(Any admins watching? This is still a current issue.)
I'm editing on a third world ISP that uses IP masquerading and transparent proxies. Unfortunately, an overly agressive block of User:Motheria resulted in my being autoblocked, receiving messages like: "This is because someone using this internet address or shared proxy server was blocked. Your ability to edit pages has been automatically suspended to prevent abuse from the other person. " If you're seeing this message, it's only because I've remotely logged in to another computer to post this via w3m - I'm sure you'll understand why I didn't bother logging in.
Unfortunately, as I am unable to edit User talk:Motheria and my own fricking talk page at User talk:Mrzaius, barring magically getting a new IP address, I am stuck having to email the offending admin or other admins that I may know. This is hardly a sufficient or timely fix for the problem at hand. Yes, I know that the proper fix is to just get these IP addresses flagged as shared to prevent this from happening here again, but that isn't enough when newbies are involved. They need to be able to comment directly here to deal with this sort of problem in any sort of accessible manner.
I propose that secondary users affected by an autoblock (or at least those that existed PRIOR to said block) should be able to edit two pages: 1: The initially blocked user's talk page 2: Their own talk page (for registered users) or their own IPs talk page (for anonymous users)
This shouldn't be controversial. Note that I am not proposing any changes to the blocking policies for the initially blocked user, just other users that presumably existed before the block. User:Mrzaius 198.247.173.235 ( talk) 03:41, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
As you may or may not know, the Bots request for approval policy was recently changed to permit the members of the Bot Approval Group to grant sysop bits to bots without the necessity of going through a Request for adminship. No one has yet attempted to do this ... until now. I'm putting Cydebot through the process for a task which it has been performing for over a year now (on my personal sysop account), so hopefully this is as non-controversial as possible. However, so far everyone that has commented on the bot has been a BAG regular, so it will help to get some wider discussion. The last thing I want to have happen is for someone to say after-the-fact that this was sneaked through the back door, so let this serve as a public notice to the community regarding the issue. If you have any feelings on this subject, please join the discussion. -- Cyde Weys 20:19, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
I would like an option in preferences added concerning the use of rollback.
Something like:
[] Prompt me for an edit summary when rolling back an edit
And the checkbox would be checked by default.
This would help for those of us concerned with "accidentally" clicking on rollback. (I've seen admins request for it to be removed for that reason.)
And by having this be the default, it might provide the opportunity for newbies to gradually learn how the tool works.
It would also allow those who regularly use rollback to be able to add an edit summary in situations which may merit it. (Think of how this might reduce the " bite" of merely seeing your edit reverted, yet not knowing or understanding why.)
My understanding is that this is already possible through personal scripting, but this is not necessarily a possibility for everyone (for technical reasons, for example).
And a single line added to preferences would seem to not be too intrusive. (Likely added to the "Editing" section.)
Note that this would in no way otherwise affect the way the tool itself works. By removing the checkmark from the check box (one time, and never having to do so again, unless the user chooses to reenable the checkbox), Rollback remains the same as it is now.
And if anyone would like to help with the eventual bugzilla request, that would also be appreciated : ) - jc37 00:59, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
I've written a user script to make rollback prompt for a summary at User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js. To try it out, just add
importScript("User:Ilmari Karonen/rollbacksummary.js");
to your monobook.js (or equivalent page for other skins). If people like it, it should be straightforward to make it a gadget that can be enabled via Special:Preferences. — Ilmari Karonen ( talk) 21:42, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
First, I think it's great that several people have made tools and gadgets to help others.
But as I mentioned above, that doesn't help those with no scripting.
(And incidentally: "The only people who really don't have access to it are people with javascript disabled, but they should be used to the internet sucking by now." - According to who? And by the way, I personally feel that that was a rather (to put it nicely) self-centered thing to say. And I was rather shocked to read it, especially considering who said it - That's just not been my typical experience of that editor.)
Anyway, the thing is, this doesn't even seem to be something that's difficult or intrusive. It's a single line in preferences, and I would presume should be rather simple to enact.
It's helpful, it's intuitive, it can potentially help prevent WP:BITE, amid several other positives, with no negatives that I see.
But let me ask: Are there any actual concerns besides "I don't want another checkbox in preferences, because it could lead to more and more checkboxes"? (paraphrased) - jc37 09:42, 5 October 2008 (UTC)