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I feel like some wikipedians have forgotten the reason why citing articles is important. Citing proves that topics are notable and ensures that information on the article is not false or the result of original research. However, some articles cannot exactly be cited, or are deleted so quickly that the creator does not even get a chance to find a citation that is up to the rigid and bureaucratic standards of many wikipedians. My two examples of this- and I'm sure that there are many more- are two articles about games which were deleted. The first game, called simply "the game" ( The Game (game)) is a mind game of sorts which has two basic rules: when you are not thinking about it you are winning, and as soon as you think about it you lose. Now just suppose that this game exists (which it clearly does, judging by the number of people who opted to create the article), but no one has bothered to make a scholarly article about it because it is simply a game... there's no way to cite it but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Another article, which I myself created ( Knocking (card game)) was speedily deleted, without giving me or anyone else a chance to find citations. It is difficult to find citations for folklore-like things such as card-games, since these things are generally passed down by word of mouth and may go by many different names. It may even be possible that this game already has an article, but under a different name, in which case I could rest easy knowing that there is encyclopedic content on it. Neither ( Knocking (card game)) nor ( The Game (game)) were doing any harm whatsoever. Even if this is simply a case of mass hallucination and neither of these games exist, I feel that the general attitude towards or the rules on citation should change in some way so that the undoubtedly countless other similar articles can be created without creating a huge hassle. We must stop following the letter of the law rather than the spirit. Lord mortekai 15:12, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I've got a complex issue, which I've drafted a summary of at Wikipedia:Lists/Index lists. I'm wondering what the best way to discuss it is. One admin suggested I use a collapsible-box to post it here; would that be acceptable/recommended, and which template should I use? (I've started/seen many silent RfCs, so I'm not enamored with that route.)
I'd also appreciate any feedback on how I could explain the issues more clearly, and your initial thoughts on the issue itself, before I put it to a wider audience. Much thanks. -- Quiddity ( talk) 06:42, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
I have not had real access to a computer in some time so have not been contributing, but I have been reading on my phone, and I am being constantly sickened by the number of articles that deliberately reveal entire plots to readers. Final Fantasy X#Story, Fight Club#Plot summary, The Sixth Sense#Plot synopsis. Why is this allowed? If I allowed myself to read Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations#Story, I would have no desire to play the game (which I just bought), and this is a brand-new game. At the very least this content is unencyclopedic, unless specific plot details have a direct impact on real-world notability (at least enough to validate decreasing the product's market value). Remember, Wikipedia shows up near the top of most Google searches, and this sort of irresponsible editing can easily decrease the subject's saleability. Can we please put an end to it? ~ JohnnyMrNinja 07:57, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
With regard to the language policy on the English Wikipedia, which one would that be then? Commonwealth English or American English? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.42.88.239 ( talk) 12:03, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I have some experience with proofreading and copy editing, so I often find and fix typos or other minor errors in Wikipedia pages, simply to improve readability and accuracy.
Today I ran across an article which quotes an online source which itself contains an obvious typo: Palestinian_textbook_controversy which some way down quotes an article as saying "both ignore the other side's suffering and each counts only its only victims" (emphasis mine). Clearly that was supposed to be "own". But "only" is what the original source being quoted says (I checked the reference). Should I correct the typo or not?
As a possible compromise, some news media use square brackets for such repairs to the meaning of quotes, rendering "both ignore the other side's suffering and each counts only its [own] victims"
Assuming this sort of obvious change should be made, how far should it go? For example, I've heard that Neil Armstrong maintains he said or at least intended to say "That's one small step for a man", though the recording shows pretty certainly that he botched it and dropped the word "a". I imagine that without the permanent recording device, we would long ago have forgotten his error, since it was obviously a slip of the tongue. Should history record such errors with ruthless accuracy, or express what the speaker meant to say? (EDIT: FWIW, the Neil Armstrong article uses the square brackets).
I did look for some kind of policy statement on this, but I haven't found one so far. Although, I confess I'm not that familiar with Wikipedia yet, so I may not have looked in the right place. Digitante ( talk) 04:22, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I am trying to add a colour to Wikipedia:WikiProject Music genres/Colours and somebody is vandalizing it! I reverted it several times, but some unlogged user(s) just want to make edit war, ignore discussion and give nonsence arguments fot their edits/vandalism. What can I do? Help please!--Lykantrop ( Talk) 11:11, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
Why isn't the Featured Article Semi-protected? I was curious as to the featured article yesterday, and when I got there, I actually saw vandalism outside of my RC patrolling from time to time. :-/ I reverted it, but it may be wise in the future to protect such an exposed page... ScaldingHotSoup ( talk) 00:14, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, that explained a lot! :-) ScaldingHotSoup ( talk) 03:45, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
Equazcion removed a large amount of discussion on "encyclopedic" and "consensus" begun by User:Larry E. Jordan, giving as the reason that the user was blocked. The user was blocked for an alleged offense that had nothing to do with this discussion, and, obviously, was not blocked when he posted. I have reverted this unwarranted deletion.-- Abd ( talk) 04:31, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
hah - I forget to log out, oh well. -- Fredrick day 13:06, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for forgetting. You do realize what you just did, don't you? I had some doubt. No longer. Bye-bye.-- Abd ( talk) 14:25, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
I am working on article about Yamato (film) and I think that it would look better if I took some screenshots of such as characters and such, is it allowed? Am I or am I not breaking laws if I post sceenshots of the movie here? Kuhlfürst ( talk) 12:26, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
I wanted to bring to the community's attention the fact that as a part of a proposed decision (in voting stage) in a current ArbCom case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Homeopathy/Proposed decision, ArbCom is considering the creation of a new structure called the "Sourcing Adjudication Board". The board will have broad authority in dealing with sourcing complaints on Wikipedia. Its mandate is described in the proposed decision as follows: "The Committee shall convene a Sourcing Adjudication Board, consisting of credentialed subject-matter experts insofar as is reasonable, which shall be tasked with examining complaints regarding the inappropriate use of sources on Wikipedia. The Board shall issue findings, directly to the Committee, regarding all questions of source usage, including, but not limited to, the following:
The Board's findings shall not be subject to appeal except to the Board itself. The precise manner in which the Board will be selected and conduct its operations will be determined, with appropriate community participation, no later than one month after the closure of this case." The current vote on this portion of the final decision is 6 for, 1 against and 1 abstention. Nsk92 ( talk) 14:47, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
The Meridian (Chinese medicine) article contains so many of them as to be very confusing and illegible. The lead is especially bad. This is the English language Wikipedia, so just how far are we going to veer away from that? It really needs a clean-up. Maybe a glossary table can be used and most of them being moved there, thus freeing the content from most of those symbols. -- Fyslee / talk 04:02, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
I know that WP is not censored, however WP:Profanity states that
I need a clarification on what constitutes offensive material. For example, are gore/graphic violence or similar things offensive? More specifically, is there a policy/guideline against putting pictures depicting graphic violence/ horrors/ shock images in pages about wars, terror attacks, disasters, genocides etc? More specifically is it ok to add images of dead/mutilated bodies of victims/soldiers?
The issue is relevant to Talk:2008_South_Ossetia_war#Gore, where I am arguing that images like this (careful: the image may be shocking) are not appropriate there. And if there is no need for such pictures is request to speedy delete them reasonable?
I see generalization spelled "generalisation" on about 500 pages. Should these be fixed? Dayyanb ( talk) 16:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Your participation is needed! The historic first-ever CheckUser and OverSight election run by the Arbitration Committee has just started. It's taking place here. Editors are needed urgently to scrutinise the candidates so that those appointed are the best possible people for the job. Your participation here is important to make the election a success. Thanks in advance, -- ROGER DAVIES talk 00:40, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
The historic first-ever checkuser and OverSight election run by the Arbitration Committee is due to close at 23:50 (UTC) today! If you wish to vote, you need to do so soon. Your participation here is important to make the election a success! Thanks in advance, -- ROGER DAVIES talk 13:43, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm just curious- say I was a really famous celebrity, but nobody knew my birth date for example. Could I put it in, or would it be deleted, because there is no proof that I am said celebrity? Would it violate WP:COI and WP:NOR to do that- or make any edits on my encyclopedia page? Wiki548 ( talk) 23:47, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
This is what all our policies and guidelines recommend one does: make suggestions on the talk page, don't add unverifiable material to the encyclopaedia, and stick with what the sources say and what readers can check, even if you know better. Don't correct the encyclopaedia, correct the source. And if you want something unpublished to be published, then publish it yourself.
If you are trolling, Wiki548, as it is very possible that you are, then be warned that trying to chew this particular very old bone will get you short shrift. Uncle G ( talk) 12:56, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
Okay, I don't get that at all. Can you give me a yes or no answer to: If I had a biography page, but nobody but me knew something important to my biography, like my birthdate, could I put it in? I hope that made it easier to understand. Wiki548 ( talk) 21:06, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
Concerns about the updating policy and discussion about possible changes is happening here. Ottava Rima ( talk) 05:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
I have started a thread for administrative and policy concerns related to Wikipedia:Books, see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Wikipedia:Books (to AN, because it also requires intervention of administrators). Cenarium ( talk) 19:47, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed that certain projects seem to be run by a very small number of people with a single mindset, who refuse to even consider sensible changes to how they run it. Clearly, this process is harmful to Wikipedia. However, I don't really really know of an effective way to invite others into the discussion, so that there actually is a real discussion and effective debate instead of what amounts to two or three people saying "no, we're going to do it how we want". Any ideas? – radiojon ( talk) 20:19, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
Other things that we've introduced since 2005 include deletion sorting, which in several cases is cross-linked to WikiProjects so that they can monitor deletion nominations in their areas of interest. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity and Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Schools for just two of the many such lists. We also have Wikipedia:Centralized discussions and a whole range of noticeboards for drawing attention to discussions, from the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard to the Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard. Uncle G ( talk) 20:44, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
I have recently noticed that wikipedia has become plagued by semi protection. It seems like a rare occurance now to be on an article page and not see the silver lock. This is of concern and directly against the philosophy of wikipedia. It seems to me that people are getting the idea that once a page is vadalised once it should be semi protected. In my opinion this should not be the case. For example one page I have found semi protected is the "dog" page. I doubt that this page is heavily vandalised (thinking from a vandals pov, doesn't seem very fun), futhermore there is nothing I can see on the discussion page about its protection. I feel we need to start actively fighting semi protection. Any thoughts? -- AresAndEnyo ( talk) 15:03, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
Hopefully flagged revisions will finally be used shortly so this won't even be an issue (and by that I mean putting it on pages that would be semi'd otherwise, not all across WP which would never happen). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ ( talk) 15:53, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
I, as an administrator, will honour any request to unprotect an article with indefinite (or effectively indefinite) semi-protection where I agree that the article may have a reasonable chance at staying largely vandalism-free. I think that this is in line with both our protection policy and the foundation principle that anyone should be able to edit. I do think that we could have a better system for protecting articles, and I think that a good candidate would be flagged protection as it was originally proposed. Unfortunately, those wishing a more restrictive system of flagged revisions opposed that proposal under the idea that it would replace Flagged Revisions. As an example, Sarcasticidealist's oppose was this: "I could support this if it was intended to be in addition to the other implementation of flagged revisions. As I understand it, it's intended to supplant that, so I'm opposed." I have not since seen an active proposal for the "other implementation of flagged revisions", so I'm understandably annoyed that politics has prevented us from making a useful and otherwise uncontroversial change. {{ Nihiltres| talk| log}} 16:09, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
If you look at a Wikipedia page on any country you find sections such as Rwandan genocide under Rwanda that contain a couple paras on a subject and a link to an entire page on the same subject. Isn't this a poor policy to allow such redundancy? Wouldn't it make sense to have a Wikipedia-wide policy that the first para of the Rwandan genocide page simply display on the Rwanda page and then at the bottom of this first para you could follow a link to the Rwandan genocide page to read more ? That way you avoid the pervasive problem on Wikipedia that inconsistencies may arise between different pages on the same topic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.230.176.150 ( talk) 03:55, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
Firstly: I think i put this in the right place.
For a few months ago, i edited the St. Gilgen International School article. It sounded like an advertisment for the school and i changed it to a normal, fair article. Once again, when i looked at it today, somebody had been in and covered up the parts that i had written that sounded bad, like that there was no gyms at the school. The style of writing made me think that someone from the school had gone in and edited it, so that students who read it got a good impression.
Also, thougher things, like information added in places were it shouldnt be. This was also there last time before i removed it. Im starting to think that people are using wikipedia to give people postive impressions. Another example is that of the Naples article. After reading the book Gommora, i looked at the wikipedia article. The only mention of crime in the city with the worlds highest murder rate was 5 short lines.
Mjosefsson ( talk) 12:25, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
I have made a proposal for a notability standard for gameshow contestants at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(people)#Proposal:_WP:GAMESHOW. THF ( talk) 19:04, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
I and apparently several other users have been having disagreements with User:Rotational (see User talk:Rotational) over the appropriate level of headings used in articles. As can been seen from Rotational's talk page, this issue has been going on for a while. I got involved with article Barnard 68 ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), where from my reading of WP:LAYOUT, this should use == xx == (level 2), while Rotational uses ==== xx ==== (level 4). This makes the articles in question (not just Barnard 68, also NGC 2818, among others) look different from other articles on Wikipedia. I would appreciate comments from the community on this issue. 76.66.193.90 ( talk) 06:46, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
Does the front page allow nudity? See Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Nudity in DYK image for the current discussion. Smallman12q ( talk) 19:15, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive is back up and needs to get more active. Just a heads up. Secret account 15:02, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Adding the template {{ NOINDEX}} to a page adds noindex to the html, causing Google and other search engines to exclude the page from their indexes. Currently, it has no effect in mainspace (articles). It is usually added to administrator noticeboards, userpages of banned users, sensitive AfD discussions and other project pages to keep sensitive information out of Google. User:Cool Hand Luke has been adding the NOINDEX tag to subcategories of Category:Criminals, which are part of the encyclopedia content. We should have a policy or guideline on when and where is can or should be used.
I copied and merged the discussion from User talk:Cool Hand Luke and User talk:Apoc2400 here. Continue below.
I see you are adding the {{ NOINDEX}} template to many mainspace categories. This seems like a bad idea. Finding categories like Israeli fraudsters by Google could certainly be useful to readers. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 18:10, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
My suggestion is that {{ NOINDEX}} should be used when all the following applies:
I found the following two (apparently failed) proposals for NOINDEX use: Wikipedia:Search engine indexing, Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_59#NOINDEX_of_all_non-content_namespaces -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 20:05, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
The community needs to come to some consensus on this. There is a good proposal somewhere to NOINDEX some non-content spaces, but this is an important decision for all of us to make. We shouldn't be NOINDEXING article categories (I'm fine w/ noindexing "wikipedia", "maintenance" or "hidden" cats) piecemeal. Every google hit is a potential editor willing to help us out. If we come to a decision that protecting individuals demands we noindex some non-article content, good, but we should only do so after weighing the benefits against the cost. Protonk ( talk) 20:34, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
I should note here that I have NOINDEXed BLP talk pages here, after a brief discussion. There is often much discussion there that should not be indexed. See Talk:Rick Warren for a glaring example. Kevin ( talk) 05:10, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
There's an RFC here regarding whether we will allow a discernible image in the abortion article of what will be aborted in a typical induced abortion. The RFC is closely divided, with many people citing Wikipedia’s policy against censorship. If the image is ultimately not included, will we need consensus to insert a tag (e.g. NPOV Dispute tag), so that readers will at least be on their guard about conformity with Wikipedia policies, such as the policy against censorship? It seems like there would be the same close division regarding insertion of the tag as there is regarding the underlying issue.
This kind of situation must occur a lot, where there's some kind of dispute, and there's the same division about tagging the article as there was about the underlying dispute. What's the policy? Is the degree of consensus that's required to tag an article lower than the degree of consensus needed to edit the article? Ferrylodge ( talk) 20:37, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
The page Wikipedia talk:Vandalism-only account needs attention. -- IRP ☎ 23:11, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
A while ago I noticed that the above extremely high-use template, which invokes language from Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden of evidence (WP:BURDEN), reverses the policy by placing the burden on the person who challenges the material to show it is unverifiable before removal (rather than unverified). Prior versions of this template simply referred to unsourced material, which to my mind is equivalent in usage to unverified, and is the current language used in the related template, {{ Refimprove}}. I first suggested simply changing unverifiable to unverified. One user strenuously objected, and another does not like the use of either unverified or unverifiable. The same user suggested we incorporate the suggestion of using inline citations for sourcing into the template, which I think is a good idea. You can read all the gruesome details at the template's talk page. The long and short of it is, my suggested change after much discussion is from the current:
This article does not
cite any
references or sources. Please help
improve this article by adding citations to
reliable sources.
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
This article does not
cite any
references or sources. Please help
improve this article by adding citations to
reliable sources (ideally, using
inline citations).
Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. |
I am here for two reasons. This is a policy-related template, and there should be more than three people involved when changes are to be made to a template transcluded in 127,664 articles.-- Fuhghettaboutit ( talk) 02:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
(Separating this out from the discussion about guidelines which is really what I wanted to raise - see below.) (Just some background for those fortunate enough not to have become involved: there were formerly three guidelines: Manual of Style (linking), Only make links that are relevant to the context, and Build the web. The first two were quite extensive, BTW quite brief; the latter two were perceived as "cancelling each other out" as to the issues of overlinking/underlinking. To avoid this misleading division of information, the three pages were merged with uanimous agreement in early January to form one comprehensive guideline on the subject, recently renamed WP:Linking. The former pages were redirected to the new one; but recently (as an overspill from the date linking war at ArbCom) a few people tried to reinstate the old wording of BTW as a separate guideline. Majority opinion was that it should be reinstated but marked as historical or an essay; however some still refused to accept that and the page was protected following edit warring as to its status. It happened to be protected in a state where it was marked as a disputed guideline. The text is essentially the same as it was before. WP:Linking incorporates the substance of BTW as well as other aspects of internal and external linking - naturally it is also the subject of a certain amount of date-linking-related edit warring, but has been fairly stable since the merge.)-- Kotniski ( talk) 11:06, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Clearly we, the normal belligerents (see previous thread), are not going to agree on this among ourselves, so can we have some neutral opinion on this please - should WP:Build the web be selected to appear on Template:Wikipedia policies and guidelines and Template:Guideline list? (I say not: it is a poor-quality stub guideline that was recently merged, but was edit-warred back into existence as a disputed guideline; it doesn't help readers to direct them there. It would be more useful to include WP:Linking, the merge target, which deals with the same subject much more comprehensively.)-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:10, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
There is a big discussion over at WT:RFA, and then the creation of this "rfa" and the "rfa" has turned into some suggesting the de-sysoping of the nominator and how he's violating WP:POINT and all that. Now I personally agree with the de-sysoping of certain admins (i.e. ex-foundation member), but agree with the fact that RFA is for gaining adminship not losing it. So how about creating something like Wikipedia:Requests for administrator reconfirmation?-- Giants27 T/ C 19:57, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
I decided to use the "random article" link, and not only were four out of the five articles I went to geographical in origin, all but one were stubs. One was one line pretty much indicating that the place exists. It leads me to believe that we have far too many geographical location stubs for which there is no easily accessible encyclopedic information. I think there is an important distinction between jumbles of information and a useful article. For geography, we clearly have more of the former than the latter. As an example, I got 6630 Google hits for Tafire. Number four was an EBay listing for stamps, and five was "free internet dating." Other than that, it's all just maps.
So, I think we need to reconsider what makes a place notable, because I am sure this is by no means the only example of this situation on WP. We need to consider what is encyclopedic vs. what merely is. MSJapan ( talk) 00:57, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
Where did the idea of inherent notability of populated places come from? I see many people simply stating this as fact on AfDs but I also see a number of people who disagree with this concept. I can't find any discussion that led to consensus. There is an essay with only one contributor and no discussion, a proposal that never reached consensus (including a majority against here). OrangeDog ( talk • edits) 14:52, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
As for the fact that we have lots of very short stubs, part of the problem is that, ironically, we tend to reject proposals from people who want to add substantial stubs en masse. The end result is that, as you have seen, we get a lesser amount of handwritten, shorter, and often poorly written, stubs instead. It's worthwhile to remember that Rambot cited sources.
However, the fact that a geographical place currently is a very short stub does not necessarily mean that it has no potential to be otherwise. The only thing that the state of the article says anything about is Wikipedia editors, not the subjects. North Asia was a two-sentence stub for almost five years before it was expanded. And that's a major region of the planet.
MSJapan, you're forgetting the Wikipedia maxim that we're here to "make the Internet not suck". Part of the thinking underlying that maxim is that it currently does. Towns in non-Anglophone African countries aren't exactly well-documented on the World Wide Web. Google Web is not the sole way to find sources. Our remit to make the World Wide Web "not suck" lies in the creation of an encyclopaedia article that provides the information that isn't on the World Wide Web. Feel free to take ISBN 9782865379033, or chapter 3 of ISBN 9780889369191, in hand and expand Tafire with some more facts. (And if you cannot, because they are not English-language sources or for whatever other reason, reflect upon what I wrote earlier about the lack of expansion saying things about the editors of English Wikipedia, not about the subjects themselves.) Uncle G ( talk) 19:09, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Even if we accept the argument that all human settlements are inherently notable (something I very much disagree with) that does not mean it must have an article right now!!!!!! If all you can find out about a place is that it exists and where it is then perhaps it's not all that notable after all, any more than knowing my name and address makes me notable. It also means that you can't write an article on it. The best you can do is fashion an empty placeholder where a genuine article will presumably be written later on. Sham articles like this actually harm Wikipedia because they make it harder to maintain, dilute its quality and information, and make the random article feature a farce that damages Wikipedia's credibility. The moral of the story: don't write an article until you can write an article. Reyk YO! 05:54, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I have started work on townships in North Dakota, the majority of which are stubs simply because I do not have the time to create a fully fleshed out article on day one, so I create a reasonable stub with the intent of expanding the article as time permits. I have several independent sources, for example, of townships in Adams County, North Dakota and Barnes County, North Dakota, including detailed histories and information about their significance to the county, state, including famous people born/lived there. Real life has stalled my efforts, and I'm limited to how long my state library will let me check out the books. Books, and not the Internet, are going to be the key sources for a lot of these articles. Even townships or places have 1, 2, or no residents today often had hundreds if now thousands of residents at the turn of the 20th Century. They were notable at one time, and since notablilty is not fleeting (once notable, always notable), they should be included in WP. See an article I created on Petrel, North Dakota for what I view as a good start to such as article. DCmacnut <> 16:59, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
OK, I think we're pretty much agreed on the following? OrangeDog ( talk • edits) 10:03, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Conjecture: Places below the aforementioned size may not be notable enough to merit their own article, but should probably be mentioned somewhere. A guideline is required to help distinguish between creating an article, or just a mention in the parent parish/town/ward or equivalent article.
Further: Could this guideline be modelled on WP:ORG or WP:NUMBER? Should redirects be created to every one of these inclusions? Should current places that would fail this guideline be merged into the parent article (by definition there would be near-no content to merge). Could bot assistance be employed in some way?
Is there a policy over which dating system to use in articles. Some use the "old" BC-AD system, while others prefer the more accurate BCE-CE. I believe there should be consistency in this. -- ALGRIF talk 14:21, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
There are many arguments in favor of both systems and how one or the other may be offensive; but both are used by reputable neutral sources, and both are used by people who do not intend any connotation of religious or atheistic fervor - it's simply what they're accustomed to seeing. To most of our readers, this is simply a non-issue. Dcoetzee 20:09, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Moved here from the Administrator's noticeboard by Skomorokh 21:38, 1 March 2009 (UTC) No seriously, is it? If there's disagreement as to where consensus lies, then just let everyone use up their 3 reverts a day and see where it stops? Or if it doesn't stop, let an admin protect a random version, thus statistically giving preference to the most numerous and ardent edit-warriors? I only ask because no admin ever seems willing (except at AfD and the like) to determine or ask for evidence about what the consensus is; only to stick their protection oar in at random and tell people to keep talking. If this is how it's meant to be ( WP:Build the web is the page on my mind, though it's hardly an exceptional case) then we should at least document it factually in our policy. Because at the moment the page on WP:Edit warring is quite negative towards the practice, while in fact we seem to reward it. And WP:Consensus seems to imply that it's the consensus reached in considered discussions that counts, whereas in fact (if some choose to ignore it or pig-headedly dispute it) that just seems to be irrelevant. -- Kotniski ( talk) 17:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
I've moved this discussion to the Village Pump (policy) board, as there is nothing here requiring administrator intervention, nor do administrators have any special insight into or power to determine what the correct interpretation of policy is. Skomorokh 21:38, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
What the past few months have taught me is that there are editors who are like Hamas or Hezbollah. No matter how badly your side got trounced, no matter how lopsided the margin of your defeat, always – always – claim victory, or at least do not admit defeat. Then go to Khartoum for the victory parade. As the height of chutzpah, appeal to the Security Council: this will cause your opponents much hardship and who knows, you might get lucky. P.S. WP:EDITWAR is probably the most broken policy on WP, for a good analysis see User:Piotrus/Morsels_of_wikiwisdom#Why_edit_warriors_can_win.-- Goodmorningworld ( talk) 14:34, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
What happened here is that
So far so good. But what is happening now is that a few editors are citing their side of the merge discussion as consensus; they could be working towards consensus by making different proposals, or they could be persuading opponents individually. But they are not; they are forum-shopping by coming here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:27, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
(undent) I think the point of all of this discussion (and many others that I've seen) is that consensus works just fine so long as all the editors on the article are interested in being cooperative. The instant you get one editor who decides that it's his/her purpose in life (eh, for practical purposes 'his' will do) to make some damned point, consensus simply can't work any more. no matter how hard you try to achieve consensus on a page like that, you won't do it. in the case of a single editor who's sufficiently troll-like, administrative action may solve the problem (not by achieving consensus, but by disposing of the viewpoint along with the troublemaker); on pages where a number of editors occupy both sides, even that won't work (because any administrative action against one editor will be seen as unjust, and will only serve to fuel the efforts of his compadres).
now really, in more normal contexts there are built-in mechanisms for controlling this problem. in social situations, the face-to-face nature of things keeps people from completely entrenching themselves in their opinions (people are generally too cautious and respectful to look their friends and neighbors in the eye and call them 'scum-sucking POV-pushers'; and when they lose their temper and do it anyway the entire group will intercede, physically if necessary, to restore civility). In political situations, participants are self-conscious of being in public; political actors need to maintain their reputation as someone who is (insert your favorite ideal here), and won't engage in behavior that makes people think otherwise. wikipedia, though, has institutionalized the worst aspects of social interaction: actual interactions are among small groups of 2 to 10 people (that's about as many as you're likely to see consistently editing on a page) which increases the likelihood of personal issues and decreases the social pressures against acting out; all participants have anonymity, which (again) decreases the social pressures against acting out; all conversations are ostensibly private (to the extent that no one knows what's happening unless they look, and few people will look at any given page at any given moment), but open to intense surveillance (since all conversations are saved and available to everyone) -this is essentially the design that modern prisons are built on; authority is decentralized and individualized (with the natural ramifications that it is abrupt and punitive in the short term, and being painfully slow at redressing any problems it causes). in short, it's a system that gives maximum benefits to people who are aggressive, uncompromising, and opinionated, but gives little to no support to people who are reasonable, thoughtful, and cooperative.
that's nobody's fault, really: WP was designed with with more normal contexts in mind, and no one considered that the restraining factors of normal communication contexts wouldn't apply here. but still...
I'm really tempted to try making some constructive point at this moment, but, you know, I just don't feel like it. maybe later. -- Ludwigs2 03:36, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
At this point I'd like to summarize the issue:
When there's clear consensus for something, it's generally adopted, and most dissenters have the sense to not edit war over it, since they'll get blocked, or banned if they persist.
Things are trickier when the community is pretty closely split on an issue. Pmanderson's mention of the BC/BCE feud highlights what the outcome of these situations usually is: in the absence of a true consensus, we state in our guidance that there is no consensus over the issue, and merely insist that each side stop warring over it. We mandate a split: some of you will do it this way, some of you will do it that way, and if you take it upon yourself to force everything to be one way or the other, you will be banned.
If you're a partisan in the dispute, that's an intolerable outcome. But if you're a person for whom the issue isn't The Most Important Thing Possible, the only thing that's important is that the disruption associated with the dispute is ended.
Now, will the feud over delinking end this way? I don't know; there seems to be a consensus for at least some forms of delinking, but for certain other actions, I see too many objections being raised. When you see something like that, you know consensus has not been achieved. The current arbcom case regarding the issue might produce a truce, and might not. If the war rages on, though, it'll end up before arbcom again.
So, long story short: sometimes consensus cannot be achieved, but one way or another, warring will be brought to a halt.-- Father Goose ( talk) 22:28, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
ok, I'm going to toss out something constructive this time. I suspect it will be considered a radical suggestion, but whatever... it's designed to be a long-term solution to this problem, rather than a patch, and with that in mind maybe something radical is called for. I'll describe it first, then give a short rationale.
the suggestion: institutionalize article ownership.
it would work like this:
Article owners would have the following rights, restrictions, and responsibilities
the idea here is that a particular editor could see a problematic article, take ownership, fix the page, and then when the page is stable give up ownership and move on to another page. in this process s/he would need to reach for some kind of consensus (or risk being voted out, topic-banned, and forever after having his/her wikipedia reputation tarnished), but the authoritative tools necessary to make sure the consensus sticks would be available. I mean, basically this is what happens on articles anyway - there's always 1 or 2 or 3 editors doing most of the work, with a few kibitzers helping out; this suggestion just admits that and formalizes it so that it privileges editors who are knowledgeable about the topic and want to improve the article. It would cut down tremendously on the urge to engage in pointless, heated debates (there's no value, since the article owner can just ignore them); it would prevent articles from getting trashed as editors squabble over issues (since the owner can just quash article revisions until something's been worked out on the talk page), and it would tie the owner's sense of pride and his public image to the quality of the article as a whole (as opposed to the current situation, where these are only tied to presenting one's own views). better system all around. -- Ludwigs2 19:10, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
This idea is so unrealistic I don't even know where to begin critiquing it. But let me draw a diagram:
An abject fantasy, as well as a total abandonment of the exact process that has made Wikipedia the world's best encyclopedia. It's a total non-starter.-- Father Goose ( talk) 21:31, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Wouldn't we just edit war over who the article owners were? Postdlf ( talk) 22:00, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
(in reply to Kotniski up above)I think that the existing situation is best because when it succeeds it depends on the majority of editors being fair-minded and honest in the majority of situations, which I think is the status quo and is likely to remain the status quo.
As far as I can see, any other solution would involve giving a small number of editors (say, the admins) some sort of special authority. Then the efficacy of the system would depend on that small group of editors always being pure of heart, which I do not think would be a state of affairs that would occur very frequently if at all. I've already come across several really bad admins in my time here and I would only expect that number to increase if being an admin conferred any actual authority. And the larger the number of bad admins, the more the system would in general break down - lots of basic processes would stop working.
Hence I think that while imperfect this system is better than anything other than a benevolent dictatorship. I don't think that a benevolent dictatorship is possible for anything but the most fleeting period of time and I think that people simply wouldn't be willing to donate their time and effort to any form of a dictatorship. People believe in Wikipedia and donate their time to it because it's a functioning egalitarian system. -- ❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 22:51, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
This is a slippery slope any which way one sees it, and I'm surprised that editors would even consider it at all. Ownership of articles (in any degree) would create far more problems than it would purportedly solve. Instruction creep in the general direction of "I own this information and no one else should be able to change it without my consent" is, to put it mildly, utterly against the stated goal of building a collaborative body of knowledge. There are enough problems with users being fearful of admin involvement in content disputes, and here we want to create a new class of administrator dedicated solely to control of content? Bad idea. § FreeRangeFrog 16:39, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Just a warning to everyone to look out for inappropriate external links to Edufire cropping up in random articles. They're paying people $0.51 on Amazon Mechanical Turk to insert links to their website in various wikipedia articles. I think they have a misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. The article on their website had an orphan tag, and I think they misinterpreted it. I linked the article in a few relevant places, and also got rid of one inappropriate external link to their website, and the article is no longer orphaned, so hopefully they'll be happy that the clean-up tag is gone and stop paying people to post external links where they don't belong. In the meantime however, I'm sure there will be a few well-meaning turkers spamming external links in various related articles. ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) problem solving 03:51, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
PS: For the record, here's what they say on the mTurk assignment page:
- - Visit http://www.e d u f i r e.com and spend at least one minutes familiarizing yourself with the site, clicking on links, etc. Make sure you have a good understanding of what the site is all about.
- - Think of a Wikipedia entry that should be linking to this page. It's very important to think of a relevant Wikipedia page (e.g., something related to learning a specific subject, education, etc.). Links that are irrelevant will be removed quickly by the Wikipedia community and serve no benefit to us or Wikipedia.
- - Post the link to Wikipedia using the proper procedures (please familiarize yourself with them here if you are not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Contributing_to_Wikipedia). In the box below, enter the URL to the page on Wikipedia that you posted your link to so we can verify that it's a relevant page to eduFire. (Note: We understand that some of these links may be removed by the Wikipedia community. You will still receive credit for the HIT as long as you made an honest attempt to post the link on a relevant page. We'll be able to verify this in the change log.)
- Again, it's very important to note that we are not trying to spam Wikipedia but rather interested in pages on Wikipedia where a link to edufire.com or one of its pages would benefit people. Relevant links only please.
I'm concerned about WP:COI. The user who created the article is new and these are basically his only contribs. Equazcion •✗/ C • 03:56, 5 Mar 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I know that my signature isn't supposed to use templates, but is it ok to use the {{ plainlink}} template in it? this basically takes the place of <span class="plainlinks"></span>. -Zeus- u| c msg 18:04, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
It's fine to use a template in your sig as long as you SUBST it. The point of disallowing templates in sigs is that the repeated transclusions are a burden on the servers. Substing means the template code is only called once at posting time. I do this with my sig, as many people do. Just be sure the end product that ends up on the page doesn't violate the character limit (255). Equazcion •✗/ C • 00:29, 6 Mar 2009 (UTC)
Is there a guidline regarding the notability/requirements for file name extensions such as .cso, .dax, .txt, .iso? It is hard to apply the current WP:N. Smallman12q ( talk) 20:46, 5 March 2009 (UTC) Anyone? Smallman12q ( talk) 00:51, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Currently, when an admin closes an AfD where the consensus was Merge, the closing is called a Keep. This has obvious practical reasoning behind it, but I think it might be time to reconsider. The consensus to Merge means that the topic is in fact not notable enough to merit its own article -- and yet we say it should be kept. This seems contradictory. Articles lacking notability are in fact supposed to be deleted, whether or not their content merits mention elsewhere.
AfD is currently useless for the type of notability issue where even though the topic may merit mention in another article, the topic isn't notable on its own.
Merge closings are often accompanied by a rider that says the merits of the merge should be discussed on the article's talk page. I say that's silly. Whether a merge should occur is an issue of notability, which is why editors seek the arbitration of AfD in the first place. When Merge is the closing consensus, that should be enforced, rather than merely saying "Well now that it's settled I'll let you go argue about it some more". A Merge consensus at AfD already shows that the topic isn't notable, so there shouldn't be any further discussion required.
Merge is an issue of notability, and notability is an issue for AfD, so the way I see it, AfD closings need to carry the possibility of a Merge decision. Along with officially adding an actual Merge possibility to AfD closings, I propose that one of the following be used to enforce those decisions:
A number of recent events have led me to this. I feel that allowing Merge to be a valid conclusion at AfD would avert a lot of unnecessary argument. Please post your thoughts. Equazcion •✗/ C • 20:31, 6 Mar 2009 (UTC)
The AFD process could also be changed into some sort of checklist-style list of requisites, having the nom justify that all other steps have either been tried and failed or does not apply (using common sense of course; a good amount of the time there is no logical place to merge or redirect articles). This could be done in a couple of ways. First, it could be built into the existing AFD template, requiring users to justify why said alternatives were or were not used. A second way would be to, instead of users nominating straight to AFD, there would be some sort of "pre-AFD" where consensus determines that all alternatives have been tried and is cleared to be a candidate for AFD.
The biggest problem with my second proposal (I hope I explained it correctly) is that it would likely bring in more bureaucratic creep, but it may be necessary if you desire fewer and more clear-cut AFDs than what we normally have. MuZemike 23:13, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
AFD is already one of the most heavily trafficked parts of the project, and for more than half a decade now our every effort, from adding speedy deletion (in the first place!) to creating the Proposed Deletion mechanism, has been aimed at keeping that traffic down, not raising it. Increased volume results in less participation, and less participation risks, and results in, bad decisions. (AFD relies upon the Swiss Cheese model in order to come to the correct result.) And the same is true for merger discussions. Holding merger discussions to an arbitrary 5-day timetable, instead of the current timetable which is entirely flexible on a discussion-by-discussion basis, reduces participation, and incurs exactly the same risks.
The correct way to address this closure issue is to encourage individual editor responsibility. After all, that is a fundamental part of our ethos, too. Every editor opining an action, that can be carried out with the ordinary editing tools that even editors without accounts have, is responsible for following through on their opinion. If an editor opines merge, but doesn't put xyr edits where xyr mouth is when a consensus agrees with that opinion, then xyr opinion is clearly not all that firm and xe has no-one to blame but xyrself for a lack of action.
This is not Somebody Else's Problem. {{ sofixit}} applies to completing and to enacting mergers as much as it does to any other ordinary editorial actions with ordinary editing tools. Uncle G ( talk) 14:28, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
This discussion here made me think about redlinks -- I've always read, and the relevent section has said that redlinks should be kept if there's a good chance an article could be made about the topic. But it seems that the past year or so this has pretty much been ignored all around. I read one opinion that said that initially they were good because of the lack of topics, but now there's so few topics that are missing at the higher level it's not nessesary. What do people think? ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ ( talk) 11:34, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
bc = document.getElementById("bodyContent"); bc.innerHTML = bc.innerHTML.replace(/<a [^>]*class="new"[^>]*>([^>]*)<\/a>/gi, "$1");
Yes. -- NE2 02:29, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Sweden#File:Coat_of_Arms_of_Sweden.svg_and_other_coats_of_arm_in_breach_of_guidelines , opinion needed here. Should we invent a coat of arms when fair use excists? Gnevin ( talk) 23:49, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
User Jaynee7283 has repeatedly added an external link to a blog/website about the town of Fort Mill, South Carolina. The link is to http://scoopmill.com. It was added to Fort Mill's article where I'm not sure if it's an appropriate link in the first place (spam?). But the same link is was also added to three other local towns, but these towns were not Fort Mill which is the subject of that website, so I removed all of those links assuming good faith.
Now links to this same website is showing up once again on various articles and I'm removing them again, this time not assuming good faith anymore. The difference here is that they are now being added by an anonymous IP. [8]
To me it's obvious that this link should be removed for articles of neighboring towns, but I'd like some community feedback on two particular questions. 1) Is this link is okay or spam advertising on the Fort Mill, South Carolina article. I'd also like feedback on one of the new links just placed today on the York County, South Carolina article, because Fort Mill is in York County. [9]
Thanks -- Fife Club ( talk) 21:59, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
I am being met with a barrage of WP:TAGS that seem to border on WP:PS. Every time I try to address one, it becomes another, when I try get outside opinion regarding the applicability of WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:OR I am accused of forum shopping. When I explain that I feel that they are in the wrong and try to explain why while soliciting their thoughts I am accused of WP:SOAP, WP:FORUM and WP:DE. I am trying to assume good faith but I am halfway to WP:NOCLUE. Please note that this is a general, necessarily POV assessment of what I feel transpired. We can go rummaging through the dirty laundry later.
Unomi ( talk) 10:37, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Neutrality requires that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each.
[I originally posted this at Wikipedia:Help desk, but I was referred here]
I found a discussion at Talk:Pharmacology that suggests that the topic (withdrawing from medications) be discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pharmacology/Style guide, but it doesn't appear to have been discussed there (I recently became a member of the Pharmacology wikiproject). Is it considered better form for me to copy the whole discussion to the Wikiproject style guide talk page, or to simply make a comment on the style guide talk page referencing the discussion at Talk:Pharmacology? Thanks. Shanata ( talk) 11:13, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
There is currently an apparent contradiction between WP:MTAA and WP:CFORK. The former guideline explicitly allows such articles, while the latter was interpreted to forbid them by at least one user, which reverted my attempt to bring CFORK in sync with MTAA. Please join the discussion at: Wikipedia_talk:Content_forking#.22Introduction_to_XXXX.22_articles. Xasodfuih ( talk) 16:49, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
After a huge batch of articles on Swedish politicians were created the other day, I looked at Category:Articles needing translation from Swedish Wikipedia and some of the other categories in this category "tree". And honestly, I don't see the usefulness of most of these pages that contain little more than a translation request. I think the English Wikipedia would be better off with these pages deleted. They pose as articles when linked (as they are blue) but they contain nothing to build on. The same user who started the Swedish politician articles is now mass-producing equally pointless one-liners on Lithuanian painters. He has also made a List of Lithuanian painters ― which in itself is fine ― except that there is no way to tell from that list whether the article looks like Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, a substantial 6,536 byte article, or like Vilmantas Marcinkevičius, where the entire article text is "Vilmantas Marcinkevičius (born 1969) is a Lithuanian painter." I am guessing that, in a short while, every name here will be blue, despite the fact that there really won't be any articles on the majority of these people. (This user is, by the way, not the only one creating these articles, just the most prolific one.)
Even whatever little content these pages have may be wrong, as with Swedish politicians Ola Alterå or Gunnel Jonäng, which don't even get the sex of the subjects right. And the Swedish articles they link to and request translations from are often very short, completely unreferenced and may get things seriously wrong in their turn. (the Gunnel Jonäng article in Swedish claims that she was a member from 1969 until 1988 of the Second Chamber of the Riksdag – which was abolished through a parliamentary reform in 1971!).
What is wrong with waiting for people who are willing to spend the time researching and writing on these topics using good sources (not some other Wikipedia)? People who, at the very least, know the relevant language?
In another case, Nils Lorens Sjöberg, the Swedish article from which the reader is urged to translate is based on a biography in a book published in 1906. If that really is the best available source ― I doubt it, but finding better sources may take some effort, like (gasp!) visiting a good library ― the request should at least be to translate from the original source, not via the intermediary of the Swedish Wikipedia article, which may have gotten various things wrong.
Even in those cases where the foreign Wikipedia articles are good and worth translating, I think it would be better if people could just wait for someone who makes a real effort to actually write an article, rather than trying to capture whatever little glory and pleasure there may be in "starting" one while leaving all the work to others.
So where is this going to lead? A situation where the English Wikipedia has "articles" on every conceivable topic in the world, but most of them are a single line long and get half of the few facts in that line wrong because they are written by people who have no idea what they are doing? is this good? -- Hegvald ( talk) 18:21, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Once again I CAN'T BELIEVE how shallow minded you guys are here. Vilmantas Marcinkevičius as you mentioned above was expanded in two minutes flat. I admit it is aonly best to apply tags where there is a lot of content on the other wikipedia, I perahps shouldn't have started those Brazilian roads yet but certianly there is a massive amount of material to translate and these articles should be started. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:34, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
The idea is that eventually every articles on a Lithuanian painter is expande dlike Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas etc. Actually you;d be surprised how many speak various languages on here, there are hundreds of Portuguese speakers on here. America, Brazil was expanded from a stub from Portuguese using this silly template that you think of it. Already many articles have been translated by people visiting them and the result, a wikipedia with fuller coverage. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:41, 11 March 2009 (UTC).
A tiny selection rticles I've created or translated to date from my worthless tags by translation:
Tunis, Tenerife, Chinandega, La Guerra Gaucha, La Palma, Chalatenango, University of El Salvador Apastepeque, Altamirano, Chiapas, Culture of El Salvador, Andrés de Santa María, 1811 Independence Movement, Santiago José Celis and David Joaquín Guzmán, Martín Cárdenas (botanist), Battle of Acajutla, Diego de Holgiun, Coffee production in Ecuador , Caracas Aerial Tramway, Tioda, Iglesia de la Matriz , Juvencio Valle, Buenaventura Abarzuza Ferrer, Fernando Abril Martorell, Alberto Aguilera, Manuel Aguirre de Tejada, Elías Ahúja y Andría, Santiago Alba Bonifaz, Víctor Alba, José Luis Albareda y Sezde, Juan Manuel Albendea Pabón, Cristina Alberdi, Vicente Albero, José María Albiñana, Gil Álvarez de Albornoz, Felipe Alcaraz, Alberto Alcocer y Ribacoba, Jesús Alique, Luis Almarcha Hernández, Gabriel Alomar, Alonso III Fonseca, Juan Alvarado y del Saz, Pedro Álvarez de Toledo y Colonna, Diego de Alvear y Ponce de León, Isaac Felipe Azofeifa, Andrés Amado Reygondaud, Pascual Amat, Iñaki Anasagasti, Francisco Aparicio y Ruiz, Pere Ardiaca, Luis Armiñán Pérez, Jordi Arquer, Juvencio Valle, Supreme Court of Justice of Costa Rica, Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí, Rafael Menjívar Larín, Giovanni Buscaglione, Hernán Ergueta, Jesús Elías, Oruro Symphony Orchestra, Rionegro, Antioquia, Catedral de San Nicolás el Magno, Cristóbal Rojas, Xalapa, Sport in Tenerife etc.
No reason why we shouldn't make the first step towards dramatically improving our coverage on here when the information exists on other wikipedias. I agree in some cases the tags may not be so appropriate but it is still a step in right direction. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:44, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
The proof that adding such tags works see here
Adding it in talk pages would not work. Editors visiting an article with a lack of content visit an aritcle see it is pretty poor and move on. On the otherhand they visit a short articles and may speak the language, remember the huge traffic wikipedia gets and they ar einstantly brught to the attention that the article can instantly be translated form information that already exists in the link and they think, oh I can add a little no problem. A number of our articles have already been expanded in this way. We now have 5 full articles on Croatian architects now thanks to me initial creation by a native Croatian wikipedia. Give time this will be a major benefit to the content of english wikipedia, undoubtedly. If the majority of our users want wikipedia to grow and to read better articles we will make it happen in collaboration. Look how far we've come to date. Given that the articles I start are ALWAYS on notable encyclopedic topics there should be no problem in towards working towards building them. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:57, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
I am passionate about this project, I would like to see articles on topics in such encyclopedias as on the right, and I know the creator of wikipedia also thinks so. Each of the articles atrted early have resourceful articles in this book. I'm doing the best I can to try to do the best I can in the long term to build content on here. Creating the actual article however shoddy is still a move towards achieving our goals on here. Of course i want full super articles like everybody, just let things evolve. There should be enough people who use this site and want to improve it to make things happen like this.
What I do is compared categories in ENglish with other wikipedias and root out the missing articles. Why shouldn't I feel free to work towards for instance expanding our coverage of Category:Castles in Estonia using this. There are a good 60 articles on them we are missing out on, Why shouldn't we give them a chance of being put into English (perhaps for the first time). Dr. Blofeld White cat 20:34, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes I tagged Machiavelli not really thinking when I was going through Portuguese featured articles most of which we could benefit from. The translation is particular good when articles are referenced on other wikipedias of which we are missing thousands from especially German and Dutch wiki. Such articles are only "extremely obscure" because of the pre-conceived bias that exists towards such places. Why would an artist who has works in the national museum be "extremely obscure"? Would an article on an American artist who has works in a museum in Philadelphia for instance by considered "extrmeely obscure"? If you see the world from a differen viewpoint and nationality you would think very diffently in regarding it as an obscure topic. Wikipedia is very much a process of globalisation and the spreading of knowledge, I think it does provide us with an opportunity to open up these "obscure" topics and make them knwoledge to anybody in the English world. Obviously the reality is that the articles will not get as much traffic as American pop stars for instance but it is still part of the development process on here. They are tradiationally encyclopedic articles, just covering them in more detail by intergrating national encyclopedias. Dr. Blofeld White cat 20:40, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
This is nothing but the old immediatism versus eventualism debate rehashed. We accept stubs, and "X is a Lithuanian painter" is a valid stub. Arguments about how much red links versus blue links stimulate the creation of articles longer than these stubs is pure speculation. Dcoetzee 21:06, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
If it directly links to information that can immediately be added to expand it further as these all do it makes them even more acceptable I think. Basically it is a big drive to get content onto here which are considered traditionally encyclopedic, but for sure I need help in building them up! Dr. Blofeld White cat 21:13, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Would anybody object if I started this missing town etc? Dr. Blofeld White cat 21:38, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
A small error. Bet that took you a while to find. Why do people GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to be critical here. It seriously pisses me off. Dr. Blofeld White cat 09:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Dr Blofeld, despite my plea above that you move your replies interrupting the flow of my original comment, you never did. I am therefore doing so now, putting the part of my comment to which you appear to be replying in quotes above along with your replies. You are virtually drowning any other voices in your comments which you insert everywhere without any indentation. It makes it difficult both to follow the debate and to reply.
Now for my more general reply: You are trying to make this into an issue of fighting against systemic bias, with you as the good guy trying to expand the anglocentric English Wikipedia, and me and others as the people who defend the status quo. As I said above, this is a strawman argument. This is not what this is about. I can probably say that every article I have written so far, and every article I am working on off-line, is in some way a counterweight to the current systemic bias, even those on anglophone topics. (The systemic bias in the English wikipedia is not only anglocentric and US-centric, but youth-centric, pop culture-centric and recent-centric -- not sure if there are proper terms for these things).
What I question is this method for countering systemic bias. I don't disagree that every topic in the Universal Lithuanian Encyclopedia should have an article here eventually. I do disagree with your approach of starting an article on every topic, even when you don't know the language or properly understand the historical or cultural context. I am just assuming that you understand even less Lithuanian than Swedish, correct me if I'm wrong. And, obviously, I have nothing against the many substantial translations that you make from Romance languages with which you are apparently familiar.
Further, I disagree with these banners requesting translations of foreign-Wikipedia articles en masse, with no consideration of the quality of the original. Many of these articles are not worth translating, not because the inherent worth of the subject but because the articles are bad. Badly written and unreferenced articles on the Swedish Wikipedia need to be rewritten from scratch there. Here, I think they should either be written from scratch from good (mostly Swedish) sources or translated whenever the Swedish article is clearly worth translating.
This translation umbrella project would be far better off working with native speakers (or other people who know the languages and cultures involved) to identify the articles in various other wikipedias that are actually good and worth translating, and try to channel efforts towards those specific articles. That includes the equivalents of featured articles and some others. In many other cases, translations are only going to propagate basic errors or waste people's time. (It's one thing if people want to waste their own time translating crappy articles, but the English Wikipedia should not use its collective voice to urge them to do so.)
Finally, I disagree with mass-producing articles that will eventually leave no red links in some areas, even if the articles produced are unsatisfactory. Personally I think red links in otherwise decent articles are enticing. I think such links are likely to eventually get someone interested in the topic to start a new, good article. When I wrote Kahn Lectures, I intentionally left Charles Rufus Morey as a red link, despite the fact that I could easily have written a two-line (or even slightly longer) article on the topic (there are pretty good sources on Morey on the web). I am hoping some art historian or art history buff who is familiar with Morey and his work will be attracted by the opportunity and write a better article on him from the start than I would have been interested in doing. Personally I am collecting material for an expansion of Johnny Roosval and for other articles on Swedish art historians, as I know few English-speakers (and pretty few Swedish-speaking wikipedists, for that matter) are going to be able to make competent contributions in that field.
Your approach, as I see it, leads to people not being enticed to write something substantial on a topic in which they are personally interested, but to be provoked to correct something on a topic with which they are only vaguely familiar ― but know more about than the original author, perhaps ― because the entry looks so bad that it just can't stand. I don't think it puts people in the right frame of mind to treat article expansion or improvement as emergency damage control. -- Hegvald ( talk) 09:07, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Re the assertion that only the best foreign-language articles should be tagged, to channel our work there: Have you ever tried translating a foreign-language FA? It is a LOT of work. Most people will not have the time or inclination to translate such an article. But a casual user might have the ability to translate a short, several-paragraph article. I think we will see more benefits from tagging such articles than from taggging FAs. Calliopejen1 ( talk) 12:11, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Lots of people seem unwilling or unaware of how to start an article
Personally I think red links in otherwise decent articles are enticing.
Funnily enough Hegwald was happy to carry on complaining here and saying how Charles Rufus Morey was a missing article but I notice he didn't even bother to make a start on it. While he bitches about stubs on here, I'm actually making links happen by creating Charles Rufus Morey and writing the articles and expanding other sub stubs I created like Carlos Solórzano. He could be translating the Architecture in Stockholm articles instead of complaining. I'm not the sort of guy who likes to sit back and dwell on things, I'm the sort of guy who wants to see results, if you want to see results you have to get off your arse and start working towards a goal. My goal eventually is to see a number of good articles on here in English that are on other wikipedias, but believe what you like. In order to make this happen I need contributors to help me. Dr. Blofeld White cat 13:45, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I just translated Virgilio Rodríguez Macal which is an unreferenced articles on Spanish wikipedia. I still think we are much better off for having it than not, just need to find solid sources on it. Dr. Blofeld White cat 14:31, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I will try to add at least something to the new stubs I create in future, rather than ... is a .. painter. End of. As I said I was focusing more on the task of blue linking the red links rather than concentrating on the individual articles. IN the case of Swedish politicians particularly living I will see if I can include a link to a page on the government site or source in which anybody visiting it can use material on swedish wiki or seek out better sources. Anyway I've expanded around 15 of the stubs I created today, just wish I hadad the time to write everyone up to a decent standard. If I can create a stub with a sentence or two saying what they did etc this would be a better start but I need to still operate relatively quickly as there is so much to transwiki, so little time. Dr. Blofeld White cat 17:46, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
There are quite a few editors and 'bots who massively do things that annoy me; in fact, not only annoy but create a hindrance to my work (in my opinion). Some time ago I used to complain. Now I became wiser. In a nutshell: if an editor is in good standing, i.e., not an obvious vandal or hoaxer (or novice who misunderstands something), he has rights to do what he thinks is good for wikipedia. There are life long conflicts of polarized views in wikipedia: inclusionists vs deletionists, perfectionists vs quickwriters, etc., where both sides are both right and wrong. Well, this black-wtite struggle is as old as the civilization.
A proper solution is not to seek how to bar a good man from doing what he is doing, but to find a reasonable trade-off for mutual benefit. In this particular case, I would suggest the editor to create only referenced stubs. Or, if the original foreing wikipedia has no references, then to make some google check to make sure that the subject may be (not "is") notable & add a tag {{ not verified}}. I agree that the tags which larger than stubs are ugly, but in opinions of some people (at least me), stubs in obscure areas are just as important as FAs (or even more: after all, people can read about George Bush elsewhere). - 7-bubёn >t 16:51, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello. I wasn't sure where to put this. I'd almost wondered if it belonged on the BLP noticeboard, but this is more of a question, rather than a dispute.
I was looking at the
Lindsay Lohan article, and there's a (very quick)
discussion on the talk page about whether or not the
LBGT americans category should be in her article (currently, it's there).
I'd started talking about it on the talk page, but already wasn't certain either way. After reading more pages here, I'm even more confused, so I thought this'd be the best place for opinions about how categories should be applied.
There are arguments for and against including the tag.
Anyways, as the article's semi-protected, I have no ability to change it either way(even if I was sure of the answer). I was just interested in a broader source of opinions on when these sorts of categories should be applied. 209.90.135.202 ( talk) 03:24, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Several editors have proposed reopening the discussion of Wikipedia policy on use of non-commercial licensed images (for example, images licensed CC-NC). The following discussion is being transferred from Wikipedia talk:Featured picture candidates/Archive_20#Non commercial image license. The discussion there began with photographers who would prefer to license their contributions to WP as non-commercial , but expanded to the use of existing archival and (for example) Flickr NC-licensed images. This discussion attracted interest from such WP notables as Jimbo Wales and Erik Möller. Opinions discussed range from allowing all NC content, to allowing some NC content as a limited replacement for fair use, to continuing the existing ban on all NC content.
Having recently invested quite a lot in photographic gear, I am reluctant to give away my images for free. I have no problem with wikipedia or any other non-commercial organization using them, however I would not like commercial institutions to benefit at my expense. I therefore suggest wikipedia adopt a non commercial license such as CC-NC . This will not violate wikis principles of free knowledge and will convince photographers to release higher resolution pictures as well. It might also convince professional photographers to release their work knowing that their work will not be used for commercial means and that they will still be able to make a living.
I don't know if this issue has been discussed before and I know village pump would probably be the place but I wanted some feedback from the photographers before taking it there. -- Muhammad (talk) 05:16, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
It has been suggested (Fir0002, Diliff and others) that semi-professional grade photographers are put off by the potential of their works being exploited commercially. These photographers my contribute their images to Wikipedia if it had an option of NC licensing.
It was further suggested (Pete Tillman, Muhammad Mahdi Karim) that there already exists large amounts of untapped NC content on flickr and other sources.
It has been suggested (Dragons Flight, Fletcher and others) that NC images would conflict with the GFDL text and make it impossible for them to coexist in an article.
Note: an email has been sent to User:MGodwin to get a professional opinion
It has been argued (Fletcher, Kaldari, Eloquence) that Wikipedia is rooted in the free content movement and therefore should be treated as a repository of free content which anyone can use for any purpose (including profit)
Largely in response to the above argument, it was contended (Fir0002, Diliff and others) that Wikipedia is primarily a free (as in no cost) encyclopedia and providing high quality encyclopaedic content should be its priority.
Several photographers (Fir0002, Diliff, Muhammad and others) have pointed out they contribute because they believe in free knowledge but the idea of commercial companies exploiting their goodwill is distasteful
Wikipedia's current policy on material licensed for non-commercial reuse is at Wikipedia:Non-free content. NC-licensed material is presently defined as "non-free".
Counter-argument to Erik Moeller's essay (More or less agreed upon by Fir0002, wadester16, Gnangarra, Diliff, Noodle snacks, Tillman) |
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With all respect to the author of the essay it strikes me as having been written from the wrong perspective and hence contains several errors. The key problem as I see it is that he's assuming contributors want their contributions to spread in numerous derivatives far beyond Wikipedia. I for one dont. I contribute to Wikipedia as I think it is a valuable resource as an encyclopedia only. I'm contributing to increase the informative value of the articles on Wikipedia, not to contribute to a general free content movement.
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Kaldari ( talk) 16:15, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Please note that the entire thread of the original discussion at WP:FPC is substantial, nuanced and well worth reading -- but it's a bit intimidating to come to cold! Hence this introduction and summary.
Please add new discussion/comments on the proposed introduction of NC content on Wikipedia below
Here are my quick thoughts on the issue: This is a good idea as it will help Wikipedia in becoming a high quality encyclopedia and become more free (yes I know NC != free, but it is more free than fair use). However, we are also about free content so we should at least have some restrictions:
... but at the same time, we can relax on needing rationales and low resolution. MER-C 12:55, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Sigh. I have invested a considerable amount of money in my gear. I am uploading the maximum feasible resolution versions of my work, as opposed to the proponents of the NC license which upload only downsampled trial-versions. I have done so to support the free content cause of Wikimedia. So I feel I have the moral right to this rant! And I would frankly feel betrayed if a gang of people hijacked this community and turned it into something countering this cause. The exploitation argument alludes to primal instincts ( de:Futterneid). The making content available argument is moot. If the content is so important for the illustration of articles then en already has fair use. It does not take bad faith assumptions to see what this really is about, the proponents spelled it out themselves numerous times: making profit from their pictures. Not that profit-making is bad per se. It actually is not, although Diliff want us to believe that it is in the case of the bad companies! But the free content cause is more important. If you do not agree with that then you are in the wrong place. Flickr welcomes your contributions. -- Dschwen 14:44, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
What we set out to do, in these Foundation projects, is to provide an alternative to proprietary content, be that proprietary encylopaedias, proprietary dictionaries, proprietary textbooks, proprietary newspapers, or other things. Saying "I, the author, do not allow you to use my content in contexts X, Y, and Z." is exercising exactly the sort of proprietary control that we aimed, and still aim, to be the free alternative to.
So the answer is that we don't actually want any of it, because it isn't what we are aiming to achieve. Non-free content is only allowed under limited, and exceptional, circumstances. It is not the norm, nor is it our aim for it to be the norm. Uncle G ( talk) 21:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
(outdent)Even [ freedomdefined.org seems to think that attribution is acceptable, as they license under it. My other broad point was that NC certainly isn't worse than FU, therefore, we should be able to treat them as such. But whether both, or niether, should be allowed will never be settled firmly. Fair use images already make parts of Wikipedia unfree; but NC images with relaxed restrictions would become much more prevalent.-- HereToHelp ( talk to me) 02:53, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I hate to bring this to a premature close but Mike Godwin (General Counsel for Wikimedia) has told me (via email) that he is 100% certain that Wikipedia cannot legally host NC content because it is incompatible with GFDL (this is notwithstanding the use of FUC). It's seems paradoxical, doesn't it, that I would be the one to deal the death blow to a proposal I would like to succeed :) -- Fir0002 01:00, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
It seems clear that he's only stating that a NC license cannot itself provide a basis for use of any material on Wikipedia. The fact that someone, somewhere, released material under a NC license is irrelevant to whether it could nevertheless be used according to our policies for nonfree materials (which legally rest upon, but are in practice more restrictive than, the fair use doctrine). Just treat materials only released under NC licenses as nonfree, as if they were not released under any license. Postdlf ( talk) 19:13, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
I have opened an rfc on whether to tag WP:FICT as historical or rejected, or possibly restore a version from the page's history. See Wikipedia talk:Notability (fiction)#Tag for this page. Thanks, Hiding T 11:40, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this is a policy already, but it really ought to be. Most of the time, a series of warnings (up to four generally) are given to editor who vandalise Wikipedia. This is normally done as a way to "AGF" that these vandals are merely testing the wiki, and we give them plenty of chance to stop. However, if an IP or account vandalises a BLP in any way, they should be blocked on sight. I personally think the warning system is a waste of time, but realise it's quite entrenched and would be difficult to remove. However, I do believe it would be a Very Good Idea to introduce zero tolerance to BLP vandals and block them on sight - no need to give such people chance after chance is there? Majorly talk 23:48, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Would support for obvious "attack like" vandalism. Would not support for "blanking the page" (unless the content is replaced with an attack) or "unexplained removal of content". There's always an outside possibility that these may be the subject of the BLP. If there's a remote possibility that an edit was done in good faith but with poor judgment then standard leveled warnings should be used first. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 02:33, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Having this as a blanket policy is not a good idea, there is a clear difference between adding 'sjngkrngkerngk' to a BLP or adding '.... is a paedophile' to a BLP. For the second a straight block would almost always be appropriate but while the first is vandalism as the Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism policy says, it can be just a test edit "can I really edit this page" where a warning/greeting is the appropriate action. There are several types of vandalism on Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism where a straight block is not the best approach regardless of whether the page is a BLP or not. It should be the type of vandalism that guides the response, not just the page that the vandalism is made on. Adding 'asngakjenk' or removing an AFD tag from a page should get a warning regardless of whether the page is a BLP or not, while adding '.... is a paedophile' to a BLP or to President of the United States or United States presidential election, 2008 for example should be treated seriously regardless of wheter that page is a BLP or not. Davewild ( talk) 11:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Davewild makes an excellent point, and it's one that I echo. It's also one that was made in the previous discussion, which the proposers here don't appear to have appreciated. We, as administrators, are not robots. We aren't supposed to blindly and unthinkingly follow simplistic step-by-step procedures. We aren't supposed to have a simpleminded "Vandalize once, get first warning. Vandalize again, get second warning. Vandlize thrice, …" approach, or indeed a simplistic "Vandalize a BLP, get blocked without warning." approach. We are supposed to think about what we are doing. We were entrusted with the extra tools in the first place because the community saw that we thought about our use of our tools. There's a whole world of difference between a test edit and a deliberate falsehood, and our response to each should be appropriate. There's also a whole world of difference between a removal of falsehoods, even be it an inept one that technically violates our strictures against edit warring, and a removal of valid information. If we think in terms of simplistic and blanket procedures, then we hand the malicious the ability to game us and we prevent the benificent (but inexperienced) from helping us (and from gaining experience). As the maxim goes, our policies, guidelines, and procedures are not a suicide pact. And we already do hand out blocks at short notice, for the protection of the project, against people whose deliberate aim is unequivocally to hoax and to libel. We already have a low tolerance for these. But thinking about the possible intent of the edits, and gauging our tolerance accordingly, is something that we are supposed to do. It's a requirement that the BLP policy imposes upon us, in fact. See Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons#Dealing with edits by the subject of the article, for starters. Uncle G ( talk) 12:37, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Note Aren't 4im warnings generally used for BLP violations? Cheers. Imperat§ r( Talk) 15:55, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
I agree with the essential idea: when people are obviously not acting in good faith they shouldn't be accorded an assumption of such. While on the one hand we should assume good faith (AGF) as long as it's possible (so being softer on test edits is probably a good idea), we need, as Davewild pointed out, a human response that can make the judgement that someone is trying to use Wikipedia as a platform to make an attack on someone rather than just adding "I LOVE PIE" to a random page. I support this proposal as long as people will apply some sense to it and ignore rules where beneficial. I do not support a semi-protection component, however: it won't help at all unless the blocked user uses sockpuppets or meatpuppets, in which case the existing protection policy justifies protecting the page. There are also other proposals or tools that I endorse for protecting BLPs which might help, especially in conjunction with rules like this. {{ Nihiltres| talk| log}} 20:51, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
There a couple resons to give vandals a few chances other than a desire for leniency. Many stop vandalizing after having been warned, so there is no need to block. Aside from creating extra work for admins, unnecessary blocks cause collateral damage in some cases. On the other hand, I rather frequently see vandalism that slips by the RC patrollers, often when there are several vandalistic edits in a row (sometimes with intervening good edits). Wkdewey ( talk) 16:34, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
An alternative to the block-on-sight proposal, it could be made standard procedure that editors who insert defamatory vandalism about living people are given a single warning before blocking. This is already technically supported ({{ Uw-biog4im}}) and not contradicted by policy. In effect, it would involve encouraging vandal-watchers to skip warning levels 1-3 for defamatory BLP edits, make defamatory vandalism after a single warning actionable at WP:AIV, and altering the interfaces of Twinkle, Huggle and any other relevant tool to reflect this. Skomorokh 22:30, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Heads up - Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Untagged images. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 02:47, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
A RfC has been request to determine whether the Spoiler guideline ( WP:SPOILER) should be changed to exclude plot details that some consider to be spoilers from the lead section of an article. -- Farix ( Talk) 14:05, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Hey, I was curious, how come some article titles with US have dots, whereas UK does not. here are two examples. I could not find an existing policy about it.
Hell's Kitchen (U.S.) Hell's Kitchen (UK) The Office (U.S. TV series) The Office (UK TV series)
-Zeus- u| c 19:29, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Requesting comment on a policy decision with Notabiliy (web). -- Kraftlos ( Talk | Contrib) 03:03, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
It is proposed to run a trial of Flagged Revisions at Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions. The proposal is divided in two parts:
The proposals are independent but supplement each other. They involve the creation of a 'reviewer' usergroup. This implementation can support secondary trials. The main trial should run for two months, then a community discussion should decide the future of the implementation.
This proposal is largely dedicated to improve our monitoring of BLPs (part 2) and enforce the BLP policy on specific articles (part 1). The proposal is moderate, to achieve consensus for implementation, but doesn't preclude nor entails future changes on the scope of active flagging. Cenarium ( talk) 23:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
A poll has started at Wikipedia talk:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions/Poll. Cenarium ( talk) 18:31, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
The statement is at http://jwa.org/copyright.html If I were sure it allowed us to use it I could paste it here! Fiddle Faddle ( talk) 17:54, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I have been patrolling through the RfA's as of late, and have noticed that some of the oppose or neutral "votes" have been for very trivial matters. The level of standard for becoming an admin seems to have risen to (sometimes) unrealistic levels. I would propose that anyone wanting to become an admin could have two options:
This way we can get more admin actions out there to unclog the backlog of AfDs, New Page speedies, AIV, etc., etc. without having to go through madening bureacracy of an RfA. At the same time, the sponsors (and the community) can monitor what kind of "full" admin you would be.-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:09, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
It won't eliminate them, of course; but it will give the applicant more of a chance to make the RfA successful (and the learning period allowed the project to gain the benefit of another editor cleaning up). It just seems a more efficient method than the one we currently have! Cheers!-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:27, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
They could have full administrative privileges except that it wouldn't take an act of congress to desysop them. It's sort of like a probationary police officer. They have full police authority but can be fired at anytime for any reason. It would be a precarious time for the candidtate. My main point is that they could "prove" (if you will) their technical and social ability prior to being given cart blanche authority which is not easily rescinded.-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I think that's a good idea, too. WP:AOR is rarely enforced (I personally know of no incidents). ArbCom is a rare event for desysoping admins (I've seen it done once). But we also need more editors with tools to cut down on the backlog of trash disposal. I've seen speedy delete nominees sit there for days before an admin was able to come through and properly dispose of the "well-known" band consisting of n/n Jr. High School students; or the guy that loves his brand-new girlfriend or hates his English teacher.-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:56, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure on that. It could either be by consensus of the sponsoring admins, or perhaps a subsection in the Assistant Admin's talk page whereby any editor could comment on the Assistant's behavior (good or bad) and "x" amount of negative feedback might constitute extended probation and perhaps "y" amount of negative feedback might constitute desysoping. With that, the only ones that could desysop the Assistant would be the sponsoring admins or a bureaucrat (this would help keep an inexperienced editor from adding nonsensical complaints to the tally because he is upset that the assistant reverted his "Coke-is-better-than-Pepsi" additions to the Coca-Cola article. I hope that made sense.. Cheers!-- It's me...Sallicio! 19:18, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I thought of that, too. Then we could make it 2 admins and a 'Crat to allow the Assistant Admin. Or three admins and a 'Crat. No system will be flawless, but I think that we should apply WP:AGF with our current admins' judgment and that of the nominee.-- It's me...Sallicio! 19:28, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
The sponsoring admins don't have to babysit, per se. They just need to be there if the prospect has questions or needs help. It's no different than WP:AAU. And the criteria doesn't have to be exactly as I put it. I just think that there could be a better and/or more efficient way to get more admins and help the project at the same time. I think that we all could collaborate for an alternate system instead of poo-pooing the idea at face value. N'est-ce pas?-- It's me...Sallicio! 23:59, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
S/he doesn't necessarily need 3 months of supervised training; it's just a way for us to get more qualified editors out there cleaning up the mess. Please try and look at the spirit of what I'm trying to portray, not just the letter.-- It's me...Sallicio! 03:52, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
We could limit the admin renom to a confirmation once every two years with the consensus of five editors, five peers (other admins), and two crats. But then, who's going to keep track of what the admins' promotional dates are? I guess there could be a bot that could do that. But I still think the assistant thing could be worked out.-- It's me...Sallicio! 01:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm tired of people removing fair use images, saying that someday a free image could be obtained or that the image has been removed from the article. The reason it's "fair use" is because Wikimedia doesn't have a free picture. If a free one could be obtained, that is not the point. A free one has not been obtained. Also, removing the image from the article is not a fair reason to delete it, since those who removed it from the article are the same as those who consider "could be obtained" to be a reason for calling it not fair use. Again, "could be obtained" is not the same as "obtained." True or not, I see no reason to care whether or not it "could be obtained" when in fact it has not been obtained. -- Chuck ( talk) 23:10, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
The English language Wikipedia is actually fairly (heh) lax in this matter. Other languages don't allow fair use at all. Who then was a gentleman? ( talk) 18:18, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Actually Wikipedia's policy is intended to do more than protect merely Wikipedia or its contributors from legal action; the policy is also intended to build up a body of work that is as free as reasonably possible from licensing restrictions. There is a specific consensus in the case of living persons that we should not use "fair use" photos of them (not an iron clad rule as I understand it, but a strong guideline), because it's possible to track the person down and take a photo. As far as I'm aware, that is the only area where fair use images are specifically strongly discouraged. In other areas, it's more of a judgment call as to how possible it is to come up with a free replacement image.
Hope this helps… - Pete ( talk) 19:24, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
A straw poll/discussion is in process to see if there is community consensus regarding the use of childrens' names at the BLP notice board. More input to gauge consensus is appreciated. -- Banjeboi 07:19, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed on a lot of pages there are instances where text is oddly wrapped around images. Look at police for an example. Going down, you'll notice that section headings can often end up in the center of the page due to how the images are placed. This is more likely to happen if there are a lot of images and/or little text. What exactly is the policy for image placement? - Cyborg Ninja 20:38, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
I was watching the recent changes page and reverting some obivious (to me) vandalism. I noticed one particular user (I have since posted a level one warning on their page) hitting the Camille Paglia page and I was trying to revert the very minor vandalism there. I may be in violation or 3RR....totally by accident. I have stopped editing there just in case and would like someone to let me know if I am in violation of policy. Since I'm new at this the editing will take me a while. I don't mind putting the time in, just saying...it's involved. thanks. Tide rolls 20:54, 18 March 2009 (UTC)
This page contains discussions that have been archived from Village pump (policy). Please do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to revive any of these discussions, either start a new thread or use the talk page associated with that topic.
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I feel like some wikipedians have forgotten the reason why citing articles is important. Citing proves that topics are notable and ensures that information on the article is not false or the result of original research. However, some articles cannot exactly be cited, or are deleted so quickly that the creator does not even get a chance to find a citation that is up to the rigid and bureaucratic standards of many wikipedians. My two examples of this- and I'm sure that there are many more- are two articles about games which were deleted. The first game, called simply "the game" ( The Game (game)) is a mind game of sorts which has two basic rules: when you are not thinking about it you are winning, and as soon as you think about it you lose. Now just suppose that this game exists (which it clearly does, judging by the number of people who opted to create the article), but no one has bothered to make a scholarly article about it because it is simply a game... there's no way to cite it but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Another article, which I myself created ( Knocking (card game)) was speedily deleted, without giving me or anyone else a chance to find citations. It is difficult to find citations for folklore-like things such as card-games, since these things are generally passed down by word of mouth and may go by many different names. It may even be possible that this game already has an article, but under a different name, in which case I could rest easy knowing that there is encyclopedic content on it. Neither ( Knocking (card game)) nor ( The Game (game)) were doing any harm whatsoever. Even if this is simply a case of mass hallucination and neither of these games exist, I feel that the general attitude towards or the rules on citation should change in some way so that the undoubtedly countless other similar articles can be created without creating a huge hassle. We must stop following the letter of the law rather than the spirit. Lord mortekai 15:12, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Hi, I've got a complex issue, which I've drafted a summary of at Wikipedia:Lists/Index lists. I'm wondering what the best way to discuss it is. One admin suggested I use a collapsible-box to post it here; would that be acceptable/recommended, and which template should I use? (I've started/seen many silent RfCs, so I'm not enamored with that route.)
I'd also appreciate any feedback on how I could explain the issues more clearly, and your initial thoughts on the issue itself, before I put it to a wider audience. Much thanks. -- Quiddity ( talk) 06:42, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
I have not had real access to a computer in some time so have not been contributing, but I have been reading on my phone, and I am being constantly sickened by the number of articles that deliberately reveal entire plots to readers. Final Fantasy X#Story, Fight Club#Plot summary, The Sixth Sense#Plot synopsis. Why is this allowed? If I allowed myself to read Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations#Story, I would have no desire to play the game (which I just bought), and this is a brand-new game. At the very least this content is unencyclopedic, unless specific plot details have a direct impact on real-world notability (at least enough to validate decreasing the product's market value). Remember, Wikipedia shows up near the top of most Google searches, and this sort of irresponsible editing can easily decrease the subject's saleability. Can we please put an end to it? ~ JohnnyMrNinja 07:57, 22 November 2007 (UTC)
With regard to the language policy on the English Wikipedia, which one would that be then? Commonwealth English or American English? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.42.88.239 ( talk) 12:03, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
I have some experience with proofreading and copy editing, so I often find and fix typos or other minor errors in Wikipedia pages, simply to improve readability and accuracy.
Today I ran across an article which quotes an online source which itself contains an obvious typo: Palestinian_textbook_controversy which some way down quotes an article as saying "both ignore the other side's suffering and each counts only its only victims" (emphasis mine). Clearly that was supposed to be "own". But "only" is what the original source being quoted says (I checked the reference). Should I correct the typo or not?
As a possible compromise, some news media use square brackets for such repairs to the meaning of quotes, rendering "both ignore the other side's suffering and each counts only its [own] victims"
Assuming this sort of obvious change should be made, how far should it go? For example, I've heard that Neil Armstrong maintains he said or at least intended to say "That's one small step for a man", though the recording shows pretty certainly that he botched it and dropped the word "a". I imagine that without the permanent recording device, we would long ago have forgotten his error, since it was obviously a slip of the tongue. Should history record such errors with ruthless accuracy, or express what the speaker meant to say? (EDIT: FWIW, the Neil Armstrong article uses the square brackets).
I did look for some kind of policy statement on this, but I haven't found one so far. Although, I confess I'm not that familiar with Wikipedia yet, so I may not have looked in the right place. Digitante ( talk) 04:22, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I am trying to add a colour to Wikipedia:WikiProject Music genres/Colours and somebody is vandalizing it! I reverted it several times, but some unlogged user(s) just want to make edit war, ignore discussion and give nonsence arguments fot their edits/vandalism. What can I do? Help please!--Lykantrop ( Talk) 11:11, 8 February 2008 (UTC)
Why isn't the Featured Article Semi-protected? I was curious as to the featured article yesterday, and when I got there, I actually saw vandalism outside of my RC patrolling from time to time. :-/ I reverted it, but it may be wise in the future to protect such an exposed page... ScaldingHotSoup ( talk) 00:14, 19 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks, that explained a lot! :-) ScaldingHotSoup ( talk) 03:45, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
Equazcion removed a large amount of discussion on "encyclopedic" and "consensus" begun by User:Larry E. Jordan, giving as the reason that the user was blocked. The user was blocked for an alleged offense that had nothing to do with this discussion, and, obviously, was not blocked when he posted. I have reverted this unwarranted deletion.-- Abd ( talk) 04:31, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
hah - I forget to log out, oh well. -- Fredrick day 13:06, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for forgetting. You do realize what you just did, don't you? I had some doubt. No longer. Bye-bye.-- Abd ( talk) 14:25, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
I am working on article about Yamato (film) and I think that it would look better if I took some screenshots of such as characters and such, is it allowed? Am I or am I not breaking laws if I post sceenshots of the movie here? Kuhlfürst ( talk) 12:26, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
I wanted to bring to the community's attention the fact that as a part of a proposed decision (in voting stage) in a current ArbCom case Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Homeopathy/Proposed decision, ArbCom is considering the creation of a new structure called the "Sourcing Adjudication Board". The board will have broad authority in dealing with sourcing complaints on Wikipedia. Its mandate is described in the proposed decision as follows: "The Committee shall convene a Sourcing Adjudication Board, consisting of credentialed subject-matter experts insofar as is reasonable, which shall be tasked with examining complaints regarding the inappropriate use of sources on Wikipedia. The Board shall issue findings, directly to the Committee, regarding all questions of source usage, including, but not limited to, the following:
The Board's findings shall not be subject to appeal except to the Board itself. The precise manner in which the Board will be selected and conduct its operations will be determined, with appropriate community participation, no later than one month after the closure of this case." The current vote on this portion of the final decision is 6 for, 1 against and 1 abstention. Nsk92 ( talk) 14:47, 21 May 2008 (UTC)
The Meridian (Chinese medicine) article contains so many of them as to be very confusing and illegible. The lead is especially bad. This is the English language Wikipedia, so just how far are we going to veer away from that? It really needs a clean-up. Maybe a glossary table can be used and most of them being moved there, thus freeing the content from most of those symbols. -- Fyslee / talk 04:02, 13 August 2008 (UTC)
I know that WP is not censored, however WP:Profanity states that
I need a clarification on what constitutes offensive material. For example, are gore/graphic violence or similar things offensive? More specifically, is there a policy/guideline against putting pictures depicting graphic violence/ horrors/ shock images in pages about wars, terror attacks, disasters, genocides etc? More specifically is it ok to add images of dead/mutilated bodies of victims/soldiers?
The issue is relevant to Talk:2008_South_Ossetia_war#Gore, where I am arguing that images like this (careful: the image may be shocking) are not appropriate there. And if there is no need for such pictures is request to speedy delete them reasonable?
I see generalization spelled "generalisation" on about 500 pages. Should these be fixed? Dayyanb ( talk) 16:29, 3 January 2009 (UTC)
Your participation is needed! The historic first-ever CheckUser and OverSight election run by the Arbitration Committee has just started. It's taking place here. Editors are needed urgently to scrutinise the candidates so that those appointed are the best possible people for the job. Your participation here is important to make the election a success. Thanks in advance, -- ROGER DAVIES talk 00:40, 6 February 2009 (UTC)
The historic first-ever checkuser and OverSight election run by the Arbitration Committee is due to close at 23:50 (UTC) today! If you wish to vote, you need to do so soon. Your participation here is important to make the election a success! Thanks in advance, -- ROGER DAVIES talk 13:43, 15 February 2009 (UTC)
I'm just curious- say I was a really famous celebrity, but nobody knew my birth date for example. Could I put it in, or would it be deleted, because there is no proof that I am said celebrity? Would it violate WP:COI and WP:NOR to do that- or make any edits on my encyclopedia page? Wiki548 ( talk) 23:47, 23 February 2009 (UTC)
This is what all our policies and guidelines recommend one does: make suggestions on the talk page, don't add unverifiable material to the encyclopaedia, and stick with what the sources say and what readers can check, even if you know better. Don't correct the encyclopaedia, correct the source. And if you want something unpublished to be published, then publish it yourself.
If you are trolling, Wiki548, as it is very possible that you are, then be warned that trying to chew this particular very old bone will get you short shrift. Uncle G ( talk) 12:56, 24 February 2009 (UTC)
Okay, I don't get that at all. Can you give me a yes or no answer to: If I had a biography page, but nobody but me knew something important to my biography, like my birthdate, could I put it in? I hope that made it easier to understand. Wiki548 ( talk) 21:06, 26 February 2009 (UTC)
Concerns about the updating policy and discussion about possible changes is happening here. Ottava Rima ( talk) 05:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
I have started a thread for administrative and policy concerns related to Wikipedia:Books, see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Wikipedia:Books (to AN, because it also requires intervention of administrators). Cenarium ( talk) 19:47, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed that certain projects seem to be run by a very small number of people with a single mindset, who refuse to even consider sensible changes to how they run it. Clearly, this process is harmful to Wikipedia. However, I don't really really know of an effective way to invite others into the discussion, so that there actually is a real discussion and effective debate instead of what amounts to two or three people saying "no, we're going to do it how we want". Any ideas? – radiojon ( talk) 20:19, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
Other things that we've introduced since 2005 include deletion sorting, which in several cases is cross-linked to WikiProjects so that they can monitor deletion nominations in their areas of interest. See Wikipedia:WikiProject Mathematics/Current activity and Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Schools for just two of the many such lists. We also have Wikipedia:Centralized discussions and a whole range of noticeboards for drawing attention to discussions, from the Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard to the Wikipedia:No original research/Noticeboard. Uncle G ( talk) 20:44, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
I have recently noticed that wikipedia has become plagued by semi protection. It seems like a rare occurance now to be on an article page and not see the silver lock. This is of concern and directly against the philosophy of wikipedia. It seems to me that people are getting the idea that once a page is vadalised once it should be semi protected. In my opinion this should not be the case. For example one page I have found semi protected is the "dog" page. I doubt that this page is heavily vandalised (thinking from a vandals pov, doesn't seem very fun), futhermore there is nothing I can see on the discussion page about its protection. I feel we need to start actively fighting semi protection. Any thoughts? -- AresAndEnyo ( talk) 15:03, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
Hopefully flagged revisions will finally be used shortly so this won't even be an issue (and by that I mean putting it on pages that would be semi'd otherwise, not all across WP which would never happen). ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ ( talk) 15:53, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
I, as an administrator, will honour any request to unprotect an article with indefinite (or effectively indefinite) semi-protection where I agree that the article may have a reasonable chance at staying largely vandalism-free. I think that this is in line with both our protection policy and the foundation principle that anyone should be able to edit. I do think that we could have a better system for protecting articles, and I think that a good candidate would be flagged protection as it was originally proposed. Unfortunately, those wishing a more restrictive system of flagged revisions opposed that proposal under the idea that it would replace Flagged Revisions. As an example, Sarcasticidealist's oppose was this: "I could support this if it was intended to be in addition to the other implementation of flagged revisions. As I understand it, it's intended to supplant that, so I'm opposed." I have not since seen an active proposal for the "other implementation of flagged revisions", so I'm understandably annoyed that politics has prevented us from making a useful and otherwise uncontroversial change. {{ Nihiltres| talk| log}} 16:09, 20 February 2009 (UTC)
If you look at a Wikipedia page on any country you find sections such as Rwandan genocide under Rwanda that contain a couple paras on a subject and a link to an entire page on the same subject. Isn't this a poor policy to allow such redundancy? Wouldn't it make sense to have a Wikipedia-wide policy that the first para of the Rwandan genocide page simply display on the Rwanda page and then at the bottom of this first para you could follow a link to the Rwandan genocide page to read more ? That way you avoid the pervasive problem on Wikipedia that inconsistencies may arise between different pages on the same topic. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.230.176.150 ( talk) 03:55, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
Firstly: I think i put this in the right place.
For a few months ago, i edited the St. Gilgen International School article. It sounded like an advertisment for the school and i changed it to a normal, fair article. Once again, when i looked at it today, somebody had been in and covered up the parts that i had written that sounded bad, like that there was no gyms at the school. The style of writing made me think that someone from the school had gone in and edited it, so that students who read it got a good impression.
Also, thougher things, like information added in places were it shouldnt be. This was also there last time before i removed it. Im starting to think that people are using wikipedia to give people postive impressions. Another example is that of the Naples article. After reading the book Gommora, i looked at the wikipedia article. The only mention of crime in the city with the worlds highest murder rate was 5 short lines.
Mjosefsson ( talk) 12:25, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
I have made a proposal for a notability standard for gameshow contestants at Wikipedia_talk:Notability_(people)#Proposal:_WP:GAMESHOW. THF ( talk) 19:04, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
I and apparently several other users have been having disagreements with User:Rotational (see User talk:Rotational) over the appropriate level of headings used in articles. As can been seen from Rotational's talk page, this issue has been going on for a while. I got involved with article Barnard 68 ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), where from my reading of WP:LAYOUT, this should use == xx == (level 2), while Rotational uses ==== xx ==== (level 4). This makes the articles in question (not just Barnard 68, also NGC 2818, among others) look different from other articles on Wikipedia. I would appreciate comments from the community on this issue. 76.66.193.90 ( talk) 06:46, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
Does the front page allow nudity? See Wikipedia_talk:Did_you_know#Nudity in DYK image for the current discussion. Smallman12q ( talk) 19:15, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Article Collaboration and Improvement Drive is back up and needs to get more active. Just a heads up. Secret account 15:02, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Adding the template {{ NOINDEX}} to a page adds noindex to the html, causing Google and other search engines to exclude the page from their indexes. Currently, it has no effect in mainspace (articles). It is usually added to administrator noticeboards, userpages of banned users, sensitive AfD discussions and other project pages to keep sensitive information out of Google. User:Cool Hand Luke has been adding the NOINDEX tag to subcategories of Category:Criminals, which are part of the encyclopedia content. We should have a policy or guideline on when and where is can or should be used.
I copied and merged the discussion from User talk:Cool Hand Luke and User talk:Apoc2400 here. Continue below.
I see you are adding the {{ NOINDEX}} template to many mainspace categories. This seems like a bad idea. Finding categories like Israeli fraudsters by Google could certainly be useful to readers. -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 18:10, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
My suggestion is that {{ NOINDEX}} should be used when all the following applies:
I found the following two (apparently failed) proposals for NOINDEX use: Wikipedia:Search engine indexing, Wikipedia:Village_pump_(policy)/Archive_59#NOINDEX_of_all_non-content_namespaces -- Apoc2400 ( talk) 20:05, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
The community needs to come to some consensus on this. There is a good proposal somewhere to NOINDEX some non-content spaces, but this is an important decision for all of us to make. We shouldn't be NOINDEXING article categories (I'm fine w/ noindexing "wikipedia", "maintenance" or "hidden" cats) piecemeal. Every google hit is a potential editor willing to help us out. If we come to a decision that protecting individuals demands we noindex some non-article content, good, but we should only do so after weighing the benefits against the cost. Protonk ( talk) 20:34, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
I should note here that I have NOINDEXed BLP talk pages here, after a brief discussion. There is often much discussion there that should not be indexed. See Talk:Rick Warren for a glaring example. Kevin ( talk) 05:10, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
There's an RFC here regarding whether we will allow a discernible image in the abortion article of what will be aborted in a typical induced abortion. The RFC is closely divided, with many people citing Wikipedia’s policy against censorship. If the image is ultimately not included, will we need consensus to insert a tag (e.g. NPOV Dispute tag), so that readers will at least be on their guard about conformity with Wikipedia policies, such as the policy against censorship? It seems like there would be the same close division regarding insertion of the tag as there is regarding the underlying issue.
This kind of situation must occur a lot, where there's some kind of dispute, and there's the same division about tagging the article as there was about the underlying dispute. What's the policy? Is the degree of consensus that's required to tag an article lower than the degree of consensus needed to edit the article? Ferrylodge ( talk) 20:37, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
The page Wikipedia talk:Vandalism-only account needs attention. -- IRP ☎ 23:11, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
A while ago I noticed that the above extremely high-use template, which invokes language from Wikipedia:Verifiability#Burden of evidence (WP:BURDEN), reverses the policy by placing the burden on the person who challenges the material to show it is unverifiable before removal (rather than unverified). Prior versions of this template simply referred to unsourced material, which to my mind is equivalent in usage to unverified, and is the current language used in the related template, {{ Refimprove}}. I first suggested simply changing unverifiable to unverified. One user strenuously objected, and another does not like the use of either unverified or unverifiable. The same user suggested we incorporate the suggestion of using inline citations for sourcing into the template, which I think is a good idea. You can read all the gruesome details at the template's talk page. The long and short of it is, my suggested change after much discussion is from the current:
This article does not
cite any
references or sources. Please help
improve this article by adding citations to
reliable sources.
Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed. |
This article does not
cite any
references or sources. Please help
improve this article by adding citations to
reliable sources (ideally, using
inline citations).
Unsourced material may be
challenged and removed. |
I am here for two reasons. This is a policy-related template, and there should be more than three people involved when changes are to be made to a template transcluded in 127,664 articles.-- Fuhghettaboutit ( talk) 02:24, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
(Separating this out from the discussion about guidelines which is really what I wanted to raise - see below.) (Just some background for those fortunate enough not to have become involved: there were formerly three guidelines: Manual of Style (linking), Only make links that are relevant to the context, and Build the web. The first two were quite extensive, BTW quite brief; the latter two were perceived as "cancelling each other out" as to the issues of overlinking/underlinking. To avoid this misleading division of information, the three pages were merged with uanimous agreement in early January to form one comprehensive guideline on the subject, recently renamed WP:Linking. The former pages were redirected to the new one; but recently (as an overspill from the date linking war at ArbCom) a few people tried to reinstate the old wording of BTW as a separate guideline. Majority opinion was that it should be reinstated but marked as historical or an essay; however some still refused to accept that and the page was protected following edit warring as to its status. It happened to be protected in a state where it was marked as a disputed guideline. The text is essentially the same as it was before. WP:Linking incorporates the substance of BTW as well as other aspects of internal and external linking - naturally it is also the subject of a certain amount of date-linking-related edit warring, but has been fairly stable since the merge.)-- Kotniski ( talk) 11:06, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Clearly we, the normal belligerents (see previous thread), are not going to agree on this among ourselves, so can we have some neutral opinion on this please - should WP:Build the web be selected to appear on Template:Wikipedia policies and guidelines and Template:Guideline list? (I say not: it is a poor-quality stub guideline that was recently merged, but was edit-warred back into existence as a disputed guideline; it doesn't help readers to direct them there. It would be more useful to include WP:Linking, the merge target, which deals with the same subject much more comprehensively.)-- Kotniski ( talk) 10:10, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
There is a big discussion over at WT:RFA, and then the creation of this "rfa" and the "rfa" has turned into some suggesting the de-sysoping of the nominator and how he's violating WP:POINT and all that. Now I personally agree with the de-sysoping of certain admins (i.e. ex-foundation member), but agree with the fact that RFA is for gaining adminship not losing it. So how about creating something like Wikipedia:Requests for administrator reconfirmation?-- Giants27 T/ C 19:57, 7 March 2009 (UTC)
I decided to use the "random article" link, and not only were four out of the five articles I went to geographical in origin, all but one were stubs. One was one line pretty much indicating that the place exists. It leads me to believe that we have far too many geographical location stubs for which there is no easily accessible encyclopedic information. I think there is an important distinction between jumbles of information and a useful article. For geography, we clearly have more of the former than the latter. As an example, I got 6630 Google hits for Tafire. Number four was an EBay listing for stamps, and five was "free internet dating." Other than that, it's all just maps.
So, I think we need to reconsider what makes a place notable, because I am sure this is by no means the only example of this situation on WP. We need to consider what is encyclopedic vs. what merely is. MSJapan ( talk) 00:57, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
Where did the idea of inherent notability of populated places come from? I see many people simply stating this as fact on AfDs but I also see a number of people who disagree with this concept. I can't find any discussion that led to consensus. There is an essay with only one contributor and no discussion, a proposal that never reached consensus (including a majority against here). OrangeDog ( talk • edits) 14:52, 28 February 2009 (UTC)
As for the fact that we have lots of very short stubs, part of the problem is that, ironically, we tend to reject proposals from people who want to add substantial stubs en masse. The end result is that, as you have seen, we get a lesser amount of handwritten, shorter, and often poorly written, stubs instead. It's worthwhile to remember that Rambot cited sources.
However, the fact that a geographical place currently is a very short stub does not necessarily mean that it has no potential to be otherwise. The only thing that the state of the article says anything about is Wikipedia editors, not the subjects. North Asia was a two-sentence stub for almost five years before it was expanded. And that's a major region of the planet.
MSJapan, you're forgetting the Wikipedia maxim that we're here to "make the Internet not suck". Part of the thinking underlying that maxim is that it currently does. Towns in non-Anglophone African countries aren't exactly well-documented on the World Wide Web. Google Web is not the sole way to find sources. Our remit to make the World Wide Web "not suck" lies in the creation of an encyclopaedia article that provides the information that isn't on the World Wide Web. Feel free to take ISBN 9782865379033, or chapter 3 of ISBN 9780889369191, in hand and expand Tafire with some more facts. (And if you cannot, because they are not English-language sources or for whatever other reason, reflect upon what I wrote earlier about the lack of expansion saying things about the editors of English Wikipedia, not about the subjects themselves.) Uncle G ( talk) 19:09, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
Even if we accept the argument that all human settlements are inherently notable (something I very much disagree with) that does not mean it must have an article right now!!!!!! If all you can find out about a place is that it exists and where it is then perhaps it's not all that notable after all, any more than knowing my name and address makes me notable. It also means that you can't write an article on it. The best you can do is fashion an empty placeholder where a genuine article will presumably be written later on. Sham articles like this actually harm Wikipedia because they make it harder to maintain, dilute its quality and information, and make the random article feature a farce that damages Wikipedia's credibility. The moral of the story: don't write an article until you can write an article. Reyk YO! 05:54, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
I have started work on townships in North Dakota, the majority of which are stubs simply because I do not have the time to create a fully fleshed out article on day one, so I create a reasonable stub with the intent of expanding the article as time permits. I have several independent sources, for example, of townships in Adams County, North Dakota and Barnes County, North Dakota, including detailed histories and information about their significance to the county, state, including famous people born/lived there. Real life has stalled my efforts, and I'm limited to how long my state library will let me check out the books. Books, and not the Internet, are going to be the key sources for a lot of these articles. Even townships or places have 1, 2, or no residents today often had hundreds if now thousands of residents at the turn of the 20th Century. They were notable at one time, and since notablilty is not fleeting (once notable, always notable), they should be included in WP. See an article I created on Petrel, North Dakota for what I view as a good start to such as article. DCmacnut <> 16:59, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
OK, I think we're pretty much agreed on the following? OrangeDog ( talk • edits) 10:03, 6 March 2009 (UTC)
Conjecture: Places below the aforementioned size may not be notable enough to merit their own article, but should probably be mentioned somewhere. A guideline is required to help distinguish between creating an article, or just a mention in the parent parish/town/ward or equivalent article.
Further: Could this guideline be modelled on WP:ORG or WP:NUMBER? Should redirects be created to every one of these inclusions? Should current places that would fail this guideline be merged into the parent article (by definition there would be near-no content to merge). Could bot assistance be employed in some way?
Is there a policy over which dating system to use in articles. Some use the "old" BC-AD system, while others prefer the more accurate BCE-CE. I believe there should be consistency in this. -- ALGRIF talk 14:21, 27 February 2009 (UTC)
There are many arguments in favor of both systems and how one or the other may be offensive; but both are used by reputable neutral sources, and both are used by people who do not intend any connotation of religious or atheistic fervor - it's simply what they're accustomed to seeing. To most of our readers, this is simply a non-issue. Dcoetzee 20:09, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Moved here from the Administrator's noticeboard by Skomorokh 21:38, 1 March 2009 (UTC) No seriously, is it? If there's disagreement as to where consensus lies, then just let everyone use up their 3 reverts a day and see where it stops? Or if it doesn't stop, let an admin protect a random version, thus statistically giving preference to the most numerous and ardent edit-warriors? I only ask because no admin ever seems willing (except at AfD and the like) to determine or ask for evidence about what the consensus is; only to stick their protection oar in at random and tell people to keep talking. If this is how it's meant to be ( WP:Build the web is the page on my mind, though it's hardly an exceptional case) then we should at least document it factually in our policy. Because at the moment the page on WP:Edit warring is quite negative towards the practice, while in fact we seem to reward it. And WP:Consensus seems to imply that it's the consensus reached in considered discussions that counts, whereas in fact (if some choose to ignore it or pig-headedly dispute it) that just seems to be irrelevant. -- Kotniski ( talk) 17:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
I've moved this discussion to the Village Pump (policy) board, as there is nothing here requiring administrator intervention, nor do administrators have any special insight into or power to determine what the correct interpretation of policy is. Skomorokh 21:38, 1 March 2009 (UTC)
What the past few months have taught me is that there are editors who are like Hamas or Hezbollah. No matter how badly your side got trounced, no matter how lopsided the margin of your defeat, always – always – claim victory, or at least do not admit defeat. Then go to Khartoum for the victory parade. As the height of chutzpah, appeal to the Security Council: this will cause your opponents much hardship and who knows, you might get lucky. P.S. WP:EDITWAR is probably the most broken policy on WP, for a good analysis see User:Piotrus/Morsels_of_wikiwisdom#Why_edit_warriors_can_win.-- Goodmorningworld ( talk) 14:34, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
What happened here is that
So far so good. But what is happening now is that a few editors are citing their side of the merge discussion as consensus; they could be working towards consensus by making different proposals, or they could be persuading opponents individually. But they are not; they are forum-shopping by coming here. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 16:27, 2 March 2009 (UTC)
(undent) I think the point of all of this discussion (and many others that I've seen) is that consensus works just fine so long as all the editors on the article are interested in being cooperative. The instant you get one editor who decides that it's his/her purpose in life (eh, for practical purposes 'his' will do) to make some damned point, consensus simply can't work any more. no matter how hard you try to achieve consensus on a page like that, you won't do it. in the case of a single editor who's sufficiently troll-like, administrative action may solve the problem (not by achieving consensus, but by disposing of the viewpoint along with the troublemaker); on pages where a number of editors occupy both sides, even that won't work (because any administrative action against one editor will be seen as unjust, and will only serve to fuel the efforts of his compadres).
now really, in more normal contexts there are built-in mechanisms for controlling this problem. in social situations, the face-to-face nature of things keeps people from completely entrenching themselves in their opinions (people are generally too cautious and respectful to look their friends and neighbors in the eye and call them 'scum-sucking POV-pushers'; and when they lose their temper and do it anyway the entire group will intercede, physically if necessary, to restore civility). In political situations, participants are self-conscious of being in public; political actors need to maintain their reputation as someone who is (insert your favorite ideal here), and won't engage in behavior that makes people think otherwise. wikipedia, though, has institutionalized the worst aspects of social interaction: actual interactions are among small groups of 2 to 10 people (that's about as many as you're likely to see consistently editing on a page) which increases the likelihood of personal issues and decreases the social pressures against acting out; all participants have anonymity, which (again) decreases the social pressures against acting out; all conversations are ostensibly private (to the extent that no one knows what's happening unless they look, and few people will look at any given page at any given moment), but open to intense surveillance (since all conversations are saved and available to everyone) -this is essentially the design that modern prisons are built on; authority is decentralized and individualized (with the natural ramifications that it is abrupt and punitive in the short term, and being painfully slow at redressing any problems it causes). in short, it's a system that gives maximum benefits to people who are aggressive, uncompromising, and opinionated, but gives little to no support to people who are reasonable, thoughtful, and cooperative.
that's nobody's fault, really: WP was designed with with more normal contexts in mind, and no one considered that the restraining factors of normal communication contexts wouldn't apply here. but still...
I'm really tempted to try making some constructive point at this moment, but, you know, I just don't feel like it. maybe later. -- Ludwigs2 03:36, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
At this point I'd like to summarize the issue:
When there's clear consensus for something, it's generally adopted, and most dissenters have the sense to not edit war over it, since they'll get blocked, or banned if they persist.
Things are trickier when the community is pretty closely split on an issue. Pmanderson's mention of the BC/BCE feud highlights what the outcome of these situations usually is: in the absence of a true consensus, we state in our guidance that there is no consensus over the issue, and merely insist that each side stop warring over it. We mandate a split: some of you will do it this way, some of you will do it that way, and if you take it upon yourself to force everything to be one way or the other, you will be banned.
If you're a partisan in the dispute, that's an intolerable outcome. But if you're a person for whom the issue isn't The Most Important Thing Possible, the only thing that's important is that the disruption associated with the dispute is ended.
Now, will the feud over delinking end this way? I don't know; there seems to be a consensus for at least some forms of delinking, but for certain other actions, I see too many objections being raised. When you see something like that, you know consensus has not been achieved. The current arbcom case regarding the issue might produce a truce, and might not. If the war rages on, though, it'll end up before arbcom again.
So, long story short: sometimes consensus cannot be achieved, but one way or another, warring will be brought to a halt.-- Father Goose ( talk) 22:28, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
ok, I'm going to toss out something constructive this time. I suspect it will be considered a radical suggestion, but whatever... it's designed to be a long-term solution to this problem, rather than a patch, and with that in mind maybe something radical is called for. I'll describe it first, then give a short rationale.
the suggestion: institutionalize article ownership.
it would work like this:
Article owners would have the following rights, restrictions, and responsibilities
the idea here is that a particular editor could see a problematic article, take ownership, fix the page, and then when the page is stable give up ownership and move on to another page. in this process s/he would need to reach for some kind of consensus (or risk being voted out, topic-banned, and forever after having his/her wikipedia reputation tarnished), but the authoritative tools necessary to make sure the consensus sticks would be available. I mean, basically this is what happens on articles anyway - there's always 1 or 2 or 3 editors doing most of the work, with a few kibitzers helping out; this suggestion just admits that and formalizes it so that it privileges editors who are knowledgeable about the topic and want to improve the article. It would cut down tremendously on the urge to engage in pointless, heated debates (there's no value, since the article owner can just ignore them); it would prevent articles from getting trashed as editors squabble over issues (since the owner can just quash article revisions until something's been worked out on the talk page), and it would tie the owner's sense of pride and his public image to the quality of the article as a whole (as opposed to the current situation, where these are only tied to presenting one's own views). better system all around. -- Ludwigs2 19:10, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
This idea is so unrealistic I don't even know where to begin critiquing it. But let me draw a diagram:
An abject fantasy, as well as a total abandonment of the exact process that has made Wikipedia the world's best encyclopedia. It's a total non-starter.-- Father Goose ( talk) 21:31, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
Wouldn't we just edit war over who the article owners were? Postdlf ( talk) 22:00, 3 March 2009 (UTC)
(in reply to Kotniski up above)I think that the existing situation is best because when it succeeds it depends on the majority of editors being fair-minded and honest in the majority of situations, which I think is the status quo and is likely to remain the status quo.
As far as I can see, any other solution would involve giving a small number of editors (say, the admins) some sort of special authority. Then the efficacy of the system would depend on that small group of editors always being pure of heart, which I do not think would be a state of affairs that would occur very frequently if at all. I've already come across several really bad admins in my time here and I would only expect that number to increase if being an admin conferred any actual authority. And the larger the number of bad admins, the more the system would in general break down - lots of basic processes would stop working.
Hence I think that while imperfect this system is better than anything other than a benevolent dictatorship. I don't think that a benevolent dictatorship is possible for anything but the most fleeting period of time and I think that people simply wouldn't be willing to donate their time and effort to any form of a dictatorship. People believe in Wikipedia and donate their time to it because it's a functioning egalitarian system. -- ❨Ṩtruthious ℬandersnatch❩ 22:51, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
This is a slippery slope any which way one sees it, and I'm surprised that editors would even consider it at all. Ownership of articles (in any degree) would create far more problems than it would purportedly solve. Instruction creep in the general direction of "I own this information and no one else should be able to change it without my consent" is, to put it mildly, utterly against the stated goal of building a collaborative body of knowledge. There are enough problems with users being fearful of admin involvement in content disputes, and here we want to create a new class of administrator dedicated solely to control of content? Bad idea. § FreeRangeFrog 16:39, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
Just a warning to everyone to look out for inappropriate external links to Edufire cropping up in random articles. They're paying people $0.51 on Amazon Mechanical Turk to insert links to their website in various wikipedia articles. I think they have a misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. The article on their website had an orphan tag, and I think they misinterpreted it. I linked the article in a few relevant places, and also got rid of one inappropriate external link to their website, and the article is no longer orphaned, so hopefully they'll be happy that the clean-up tag is gone and stop paying people to post external links where they don't belong. In the meantime however, I'm sure there will be a few well-meaning turkers spamming external links in various related articles. ~ ONUnicorn( Talk| Contribs) problem solving 03:51, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
PS: For the record, here's what they say on the mTurk assignment page:
- - Visit http://www.e d u f i r e.com and spend at least one minutes familiarizing yourself with the site, clicking on links, etc. Make sure you have a good understanding of what the site is all about.
- - Think of a Wikipedia entry that should be linking to this page. It's very important to think of a relevant Wikipedia page (e.g., something related to learning a specific subject, education, etc.). Links that are irrelevant will be removed quickly by the Wikipedia community and serve no benefit to us or Wikipedia.
- - Post the link to Wikipedia using the proper procedures (please familiarize yourself with them here if you are not familiar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Contributing_to_Wikipedia). In the box below, enter the URL to the page on Wikipedia that you posted your link to so we can verify that it's a relevant page to eduFire. (Note: We understand that some of these links may be removed by the Wikipedia community. You will still receive credit for the HIT as long as you made an honest attempt to post the link on a relevant page. We'll be able to verify this in the change log.)
- Again, it's very important to note that we are not trying to spam Wikipedia but rather interested in pages on Wikipedia where a link to edufire.com or one of its pages would benefit people. Relevant links only please.
I'm concerned about WP:COI. The user who created the article is new and these are basically his only contribs. Equazcion •✗/ C • 03:56, 5 Mar 2009 (UTC)
Hi, I know that my signature isn't supposed to use templates, but is it ok to use the {{ plainlink}} template in it? this basically takes the place of <span class="plainlinks"></span>. -Zeus- u| c msg 18:04, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
It's fine to use a template in your sig as long as you SUBST it. The point of disallowing templates in sigs is that the repeated transclusions are a burden on the servers. Substing means the template code is only called once at posting time. I do this with my sig, as many people do. Just be sure the end product that ends up on the page doesn't violate the character limit (255). Equazcion •✗/ C • 00:29, 6 Mar 2009 (UTC)
Is there a guidline regarding the notability/requirements for file name extensions such as .cso, .dax, .txt, .iso? It is hard to apply the current WP:N. Smallman12q ( talk) 20:46, 5 March 2009 (UTC) Anyone? Smallman12q ( talk) 00:51, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
Currently, when an admin closes an AfD where the consensus was Merge, the closing is called a Keep. This has obvious practical reasoning behind it, but I think it might be time to reconsider. The consensus to Merge means that the topic is in fact not notable enough to merit its own article -- and yet we say it should be kept. This seems contradictory. Articles lacking notability are in fact supposed to be deleted, whether or not their content merits mention elsewhere.
AfD is currently useless for the type of notability issue where even though the topic may merit mention in another article, the topic isn't notable on its own.
Merge closings are often accompanied by a rider that says the merits of the merge should be discussed on the article's talk page. I say that's silly. Whether a merge should occur is an issue of notability, which is why editors seek the arbitration of AfD in the first place. When Merge is the closing consensus, that should be enforced, rather than merely saying "Well now that it's settled I'll let you go argue about it some more". A Merge consensus at AfD already shows that the topic isn't notable, so there shouldn't be any further discussion required.
Merge is an issue of notability, and notability is an issue for AfD, so the way I see it, AfD closings need to carry the possibility of a Merge decision. Along with officially adding an actual Merge possibility to AfD closings, I propose that one of the following be used to enforce those decisions:
A number of recent events have led me to this. I feel that allowing Merge to be a valid conclusion at AfD would avert a lot of unnecessary argument. Please post your thoughts. Equazcion •✗/ C • 20:31, 6 Mar 2009 (UTC)
The AFD process could also be changed into some sort of checklist-style list of requisites, having the nom justify that all other steps have either been tried and failed or does not apply (using common sense of course; a good amount of the time there is no logical place to merge or redirect articles). This could be done in a couple of ways. First, it could be built into the existing AFD template, requiring users to justify why said alternatives were or were not used. A second way would be to, instead of users nominating straight to AFD, there would be some sort of "pre-AFD" where consensus determines that all alternatives have been tried and is cleared to be a candidate for AFD.
The biggest problem with my second proposal (I hope I explained it correctly) is that it would likely bring in more bureaucratic creep, but it may be necessary if you desire fewer and more clear-cut AFDs than what we normally have. MuZemike 23:13, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
AFD is already one of the most heavily trafficked parts of the project, and for more than half a decade now our every effort, from adding speedy deletion (in the first place!) to creating the Proposed Deletion mechanism, has been aimed at keeping that traffic down, not raising it. Increased volume results in less participation, and less participation risks, and results in, bad decisions. (AFD relies upon the Swiss Cheese model in order to come to the correct result.) And the same is true for merger discussions. Holding merger discussions to an arbitrary 5-day timetable, instead of the current timetable which is entirely flexible on a discussion-by-discussion basis, reduces participation, and incurs exactly the same risks.
The correct way to address this closure issue is to encourage individual editor responsibility. After all, that is a fundamental part of our ethos, too. Every editor opining an action, that can be carried out with the ordinary editing tools that even editors without accounts have, is responsible for following through on their opinion. If an editor opines merge, but doesn't put xyr edits where xyr mouth is when a consensus agrees with that opinion, then xyr opinion is clearly not all that firm and xe has no-one to blame but xyrself for a lack of action.
This is not Somebody Else's Problem. {{ sofixit}} applies to completing and to enacting mergers as much as it does to any other ordinary editorial actions with ordinary editing tools. Uncle G ( talk) 14:28, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
This discussion here made me think about redlinks -- I've always read, and the relevent section has said that redlinks should be kept if there's a good chance an article could be made about the topic. But it seems that the past year or so this has pretty much been ignored all around. I read one opinion that said that initially they were good because of the lack of topics, but now there's so few topics that are missing at the higher level it's not nessesary. What do people think? ♫ Melodia Chaconne ♫ ( talk) 11:34, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
bc = document.getElementById("bodyContent"); bc.innerHTML = bc.innerHTML.replace(/<a [^>]*class="new"[^>]*>([^>]*)<\/a>/gi, "$1");
Yes. -- NE2 02:29, 9 March 2009 (UTC)
Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Sweden#File:Coat_of_Arms_of_Sweden.svg_and_other_coats_of_arm_in_breach_of_guidelines , opinion needed here. Should we invent a coat of arms when fair use excists? Gnevin ( talk) 23:49, 8 March 2009 (UTC)
User Jaynee7283 has repeatedly added an external link to a blog/website about the town of Fort Mill, South Carolina. The link is to http://scoopmill.com. It was added to Fort Mill's article where I'm not sure if it's an appropriate link in the first place (spam?). But the same link is was also added to three other local towns, but these towns were not Fort Mill which is the subject of that website, so I removed all of those links assuming good faith.
Now links to this same website is showing up once again on various articles and I'm removing them again, this time not assuming good faith anymore. The difference here is that they are now being added by an anonymous IP. [8]
To me it's obvious that this link should be removed for articles of neighboring towns, but I'd like some community feedback on two particular questions. 1) Is this link is okay or spam advertising on the Fort Mill, South Carolina article. I'd also like feedback on one of the new links just placed today on the York County, South Carolina article, because Fort Mill is in York County. [9]
Thanks -- Fife Club ( talk) 21:59, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
I am being met with a barrage of WP:TAGS that seem to border on WP:PS. Every time I try to address one, it becomes another, when I try get outside opinion regarding the applicability of WP:RS, WP:NPOV, WP:OR I am accused of forum shopping. When I explain that I feel that they are in the wrong and try to explain why while soliciting their thoughts I am accused of WP:SOAP, WP:FORUM and WP:DE. I am trying to assume good faith but I am halfway to WP:NOCLUE. Please note that this is a general, necessarily POV assessment of what I feel transpired. We can go rummaging through the dirty laundry later.
Unomi ( talk) 10:37, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Neutrality requires that the article should fairly represent all significant viewpoints that have been published by a reliable source, and should do so in proportion to the prominence of each.
[I originally posted this at Wikipedia:Help desk, but I was referred here]
I found a discussion at Talk:Pharmacology that suggests that the topic (withdrawing from medications) be discussed at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Pharmacology/Style guide, but it doesn't appear to have been discussed there (I recently became a member of the Pharmacology wikiproject). Is it considered better form for me to copy the whole discussion to the Wikiproject style guide talk page, or to simply make a comment on the style guide talk page referencing the discussion at Talk:Pharmacology? Thanks. Shanata ( talk) 11:13, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
There is currently an apparent contradiction between WP:MTAA and WP:CFORK. The former guideline explicitly allows such articles, while the latter was interpreted to forbid them by at least one user, which reverted my attempt to bring CFORK in sync with MTAA. Please join the discussion at: Wikipedia_talk:Content_forking#.22Introduction_to_XXXX.22_articles. Xasodfuih ( talk) 16:49, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
After a huge batch of articles on Swedish politicians were created the other day, I looked at Category:Articles needing translation from Swedish Wikipedia and some of the other categories in this category "tree". And honestly, I don't see the usefulness of most of these pages that contain little more than a translation request. I think the English Wikipedia would be better off with these pages deleted. They pose as articles when linked (as they are blue) but they contain nothing to build on. The same user who started the Swedish politician articles is now mass-producing equally pointless one-liners on Lithuanian painters. He has also made a List of Lithuanian painters ― which in itself is fine ― except that there is no way to tell from that list whether the article looks like Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas, a substantial 6,536 byte article, or like Vilmantas Marcinkevičius, where the entire article text is "Vilmantas Marcinkevičius (born 1969) is a Lithuanian painter." I am guessing that, in a short while, every name here will be blue, despite the fact that there really won't be any articles on the majority of these people. (This user is, by the way, not the only one creating these articles, just the most prolific one.)
Even whatever little content these pages have may be wrong, as with Swedish politicians Ola Alterå or Gunnel Jonäng, which don't even get the sex of the subjects right. And the Swedish articles they link to and request translations from are often very short, completely unreferenced and may get things seriously wrong in their turn. (the Gunnel Jonäng article in Swedish claims that she was a member from 1969 until 1988 of the Second Chamber of the Riksdag – which was abolished through a parliamentary reform in 1971!).
What is wrong with waiting for people who are willing to spend the time researching and writing on these topics using good sources (not some other Wikipedia)? People who, at the very least, know the relevant language?
In another case, Nils Lorens Sjöberg, the Swedish article from which the reader is urged to translate is based on a biography in a book published in 1906. If that really is the best available source ― I doubt it, but finding better sources may take some effort, like (gasp!) visiting a good library ― the request should at least be to translate from the original source, not via the intermediary of the Swedish Wikipedia article, which may have gotten various things wrong.
Even in those cases where the foreign Wikipedia articles are good and worth translating, I think it would be better if people could just wait for someone who makes a real effort to actually write an article, rather than trying to capture whatever little glory and pleasure there may be in "starting" one while leaving all the work to others.
So where is this going to lead? A situation where the English Wikipedia has "articles" on every conceivable topic in the world, but most of them are a single line long and get half of the few facts in that line wrong because they are written by people who have no idea what they are doing? is this good? -- Hegvald ( talk) 18:21, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Once again I CAN'T BELIEVE how shallow minded you guys are here. Vilmantas Marcinkevičius as you mentioned above was expanded in two minutes flat. I admit it is aonly best to apply tags where there is a lot of content on the other wikipedia, I perahps shouldn't have started those Brazilian roads yet but certianly there is a massive amount of material to translate and these articles should be started. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:34, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
The idea is that eventually every articles on a Lithuanian painter is expande dlike Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas etc. Actually you;d be surprised how many speak various languages on here, there are hundreds of Portuguese speakers on here. America, Brazil was expanded from a stub from Portuguese using this silly template that you think of it. Already many articles have been translated by people visiting them and the result, a wikipedia with fuller coverage. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:41, 11 March 2009 (UTC).
A tiny selection rticles I've created or translated to date from my worthless tags by translation:
Tunis, Tenerife, Chinandega, La Guerra Gaucha, La Palma, Chalatenango, University of El Salvador Apastepeque, Altamirano, Chiapas, Culture of El Salvador, Andrés de Santa María, 1811 Independence Movement, Santiago José Celis and David Joaquín Guzmán, Martín Cárdenas (botanist), Battle of Acajutla, Diego de Holgiun, Coffee production in Ecuador , Caracas Aerial Tramway, Tioda, Iglesia de la Matriz , Juvencio Valle, Buenaventura Abarzuza Ferrer, Fernando Abril Martorell, Alberto Aguilera, Manuel Aguirre de Tejada, Elías Ahúja y Andría, Santiago Alba Bonifaz, Víctor Alba, José Luis Albareda y Sezde, Juan Manuel Albendea Pabón, Cristina Alberdi, Vicente Albero, José María Albiñana, Gil Álvarez de Albornoz, Felipe Alcaraz, Alberto Alcocer y Ribacoba, Jesús Alique, Luis Almarcha Hernández, Gabriel Alomar, Alonso III Fonseca, Juan Alvarado y del Saz, Pedro Álvarez de Toledo y Colonna, Diego de Alvear y Ponce de León, Isaac Felipe Azofeifa, Andrés Amado Reygondaud, Pascual Amat, Iñaki Anasagasti, Francisco Aparicio y Ruiz, Pere Ardiaca, Luis Armiñán Pérez, Jordi Arquer, Juvencio Valle, Supreme Court of Justice of Costa Rica, Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí, Rafael Menjívar Larín, Giovanni Buscaglione, Hernán Ergueta, Jesús Elías, Oruro Symphony Orchestra, Rionegro, Antioquia, Catedral de San Nicolás el Magno, Cristóbal Rojas, Xalapa, Sport in Tenerife etc.
No reason why we shouldn't make the first step towards dramatically improving our coverage on here when the information exists on other wikipedias. I agree in some cases the tags may not be so appropriate but it is still a step in right direction. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:44, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
The proof that adding such tags works see here
Adding it in talk pages would not work. Editors visiting an article with a lack of content visit an aritcle see it is pretty poor and move on. On the otherhand they visit a short articles and may speak the language, remember the huge traffic wikipedia gets and they ar einstantly brught to the attention that the article can instantly be translated form information that already exists in the link and they think, oh I can add a little no problem. A number of our articles have already been expanded in this way. We now have 5 full articles on Croatian architects now thanks to me initial creation by a native Croatian wikipedia. Give time this will be a major benefit to the content of english wikipedia, undoubtedly. If the majority of our users want wikipedia to grow and to read better articles we will make it happen in collaboration. Look how far we've come to date. Given that the articles I start are ALWAYS on notable encyclopedic topics there should be no problem in towards working towards building them. Dr. Blofeld White cat 19:57, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
I am passionate about this project, I would like to see articles on topics in such encyclopedias as on the right, and I know the creator of wikipedia also thinks so. Each of the articles atrted early have resourceful articles in this book. I'm doing the best I can to try to do the best I can in the long term to build content on here. Creating the actual article however shoddy is still a move towards achieving our goals on here. Of course i want full super articles like everybody, just let things evolve. There should be enough people who use this site and want to improve it to make things happen like this.
What I do is compared categories in ENglish with other wikipedias and root out the missing articles. Why shouldn't I feel free to work towards for instance expanding our coverage of Category:Castles in Estonia using this. There are a good 60 articles on them we are missing out on, Why shouldn't we give them a chance of being put into English (perhaps for the first time). Dr. Blofeld White cat 20:34, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Yes I tagged Machiavelli not really thinking when I was going through Portuguese featured articles most of which we could benefit from. The translation is particular good when articles are referenced on other wikipedias of which we are missing thousands from especially German and Dutch wiki. Such articles are only "extremely obscure" because of the pre-conceived bias that exists towards such places. Why would an artist who has works in the national museum be "extremely obscure"? Would an article on an American artist who has works in a museum in Philadelphia for instance by considered "extrmeely obscure"? If you see the world from a differen viewpoint and nationality you would think very diffently in regarding it as an obscure topic. Wikipedia is very much a process of globalisation and the spreading of knowledge, I think it does provide us with an opportunity to open up these "obscure" topics and make them knwoledge to anybody in the English world. Obviously the reality is that the articles will not get as much traffic as American pop stars for instance but it is still part of the development process on here. They are tradiationally encyclopedic articles, just covering them in more detail by intergrating national encyclopedias. Dr. Blofeld White cat 20:40, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
This is nothing but the old immediatism versus eventualism debate rehashed. We accept stubs, and "X is a Lithuanian painter" is a valid stub. Arguments about how much red links versus blue links stimulate the creation of articles longer than these stubs is pure speculation. Dcoetzee 21:06, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
If it directly links to information that can immediately be added to expand it further as these all do it makes them even more acceptable I think. Basically it is a big drive to get content onto here which are considered traditionally encyclopedic, but for sure I need help in building them up! Dr. Blofeld White cat 21:13, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
Would anybody object if I started this missing town etc? Dr. Blofeld White cat 21:38, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
A small error. Bet that took you a while to find. Why do people GO OUT OF THEIR WAY to be critical here. It seriously pisses me off. Dr. Blofeld White cat 09:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Dr Blofeld, despite my plea above that you move your replies interrupting the flow of my original comment, you never did. I am therefore doing so now, putting the part of my comment to which you appear to be replying in quotes above along with your replies. You are virtually drowning any other voices in your comments which you insert everywhere without any indentation. It makes it difficult both to follow the debate and to reply.
Now for my more general reply: You are trying to make this into an issue of fighting against systemic bias, with you as the good guy trying to expand the anglocentric English Wikipedia, and me and others as the people who defend the status quo. As I said above, this is a strawman argument. This is not what this is about. I can probably say that every article I have written so far, and every article I am working on off-line, is in some way a counterweight to the current systemic bias, even those on anglophone topics. (The systemic bias in the English wikipedia is not only anglocentric and US-centric, but youth-centric, pop culture-centric and recent-centric -- not sure if there are proper terms for these things).
What I question is this method for countering systemic bias. I don't disagree that every topic in the Universal Lithuanian Encyclopedia should have an article here eventually. I do disagree with your approach of starting an article on every topic, even when you don't know the language or properly understand the historical or cultural context. I am just assuming that you understand even less Lithuanian than Swedish, correct me if I'm wrong. And, obviously, I have nothing against the many substantial translations that you make from Romance languages with which you are apparently familiar.
Further, I disagree with these banners requesting translations of foreign-Wikipedia articles en masse, with no consideration of the quality of the original. Many of these articles are not worth translating, not because the inherent worth of the subject but because the articles are bad. Badly written and unreferenced articles on the Swedish Wikipedia need to be rewritten from scratch there. Here, I think they should either be written from scratch from good (mostly Swedish) sources or translated whenever the Swedish article is clearly worth translating.
This translation umbrella project would be far better off working with native speakers (or other people who know the languages and cultures involved) to identify the articles in various other wikipedias that are actually good and worth translating, and try to channel efforts towards those specific articles. That includes the equivalents of featured articles and some others. In many other cases, translations are only going to propagate basic errors or waste people's time. (It's one thing if people want to waste their own time translating crappy articles, but the English Wikipedia should not use its collective voice to urge them to do so.)
Finally, I disagree with mass-producing articles that will eventually leave no red links in some areas, even if the articles produced are unsatisfactory. Personally I think red links in otherwise decent articles are enticing. I think such links are likely to eventually get someone interested in the topic to start a new, good article. When I wrote Kahn Lectures, I intentionally left Charles Rufus Morey as a red link, despite the fact that I could easily have written a two-line (or even slightly longer) article on the topic (there are pretty good sources on Morey on the web). I am hoping some art historian or art history buff who is familiar with Morey and his work will be attracted by the opportunity and write a better article on him from the start than I would have been interested in doing. Personally I am collecting material for an expansion of Johnny Roosval and for other articles on Swedish art historians, as I know few English-speakers (and pretty few Swedish-speaking wikipedists, for that matter) are going to be able to make competent contributions in that field.
Your approach, as I see it, leads to people not being enticed to write something substantial on a topic in which they are personally interested, but to be provoked to correct something on a topic with which they are only vaguely familiar ― but know more about than the original author, perhaps ― because the entry looks so bad that it just can't stand. I don't think it puts people in the right frame of mind to treat article expansion or improvement as emergency damage control. -- Hegvald ( talk) 09:07, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Re the assertion that only the best foreign-language articles should be tagged, to channel our work there: Have you ever tried translating a foreign-language FA? It is a LOT of work. Most people will not have the time or inclination to translate such an article. But a casual user might have the ability to translate a short, several-paragraph article. I think we will see more benefits from tagging such articles than from taggging FAs. Calliopejen1 ( talk) 12:11, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Lots of people seem unwilling or unaware of how to start an article
Personally I think red links in otherwise decent articles are enticing.
Funnily enough Hegwald was happy to carry on complaining here and saying how Charles Rufus Morey was a missing article but I notice he didn't even bother to make a start on it. While he bitches about stubs on here, I'm actually making links happen by creating Charles Rufus Morey and writing the articles and expanding other sub stubs I created like Carlos Solórzano. He could be translating the Architecture in Stockholm articles instead of complaining. I'm not the sort of guy who likes to sit back and dwell on things, I'm the sort of guy who wants to see results, if you want to see results you have to get off your arse and start working towards a goal. My goal eventually is to see a number of good articles on here in English that are on other wikipedias, but believe what you like. In order to make this happen I need contributors to help me. Dr. Blofeld White cat 13:45, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I just translated Virgilio Rodríguez Macal which is an unreferenced articles on Spanish wikipedia. I still think we are much better off for having it than not, just need to find solid sources on it. Dr. Blofeld White cat 14:31, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I will try to add at least something to the new stubs I create in future, rather than ... is a .. painter. End of. As I said I was focusing more on the task of blue linking the red links rather than concentrating on the individual articles. IN the case of Swedish politicians particularly living I will see if I can include a link to a page on the government site or source in which anybody visiting it can use material on swedish wiki or seek out better sources. Anyway I've expanded around 15 of the stubs I created today, just wish I hadad the time to write everyone up to a decent standard. If I can create a stub with a sentence or two saying what they did etc this would be a better start but I need to still operate relatively quickly as there is so much to transwiki, so little time. Dr. Blofeld White cat 17:46, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
There are quite a few editors and 'bots who massively do things that annoy me; in fact, not only annoy but create a hindrance to my work (in my opinion). Some time ago I used to complain. Now I became wiser. In a nutshell: if an editor is in good standing, i.e., not an obvious vandal or hoaxer (or novice who misunderstands something), he has rights to do what he thinks is good for wikipedia. There are life long conflicts of polarized views in wikipedia: inclusionists vs deletionists, perfectionists vs quickwriters, etc., where both sides are both right and wrong. Well, this black-wtite struggle is as old as the civilization.
A proper solution is not to seek how to bar a good man from doing what he is doing, but to find a reasonable trade-off for mutual benefit. In this particular case, I would suggest the editor to create only referenced stubs. Or, if the original foreing wikipedia has no references, then to make some google check to make sure that the subject may be (not "is") notable & add a tag {{ not verified}}. I agree that the tags which larger than stubs are ugly, but in opinions of some people (at least me), stubs in obscure areas are just as important as FAs (or even more: after all, people can read about George Bush elsewhere). - 7-bubёn >t 16:51, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Hello. I wasn't sure where to put this. I'd almost wondered if it belonged on the BLP noticeboard, but this is more of a question, rather than a dispute.
I was looking at the
Lindsay Lohan article, and there's a (very quick)
discussion on the talk page about whether or not the
LBGT americans category should be in her article (currently, it's there).
I'd started talking about it on the talk page, but already wasn't certain either way. After reading more pages here, I'm even more confused, so I thought this'd be the best place for opinions about how categories should be applied.
There are arguments for and against including the tag.
Anyways, as the article's semi-protected, I have no ability to change it either way(even if I was sure of the answer). I was just interested in a broader source of opinions on when these sorts of categories should be applied. 209.90.135.202 ( talk) 03:24, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Several editors have proposed reopening the discussion of Wikipedia policy on use of non-commercial licensed images (for example, images licensed CC-NC). The following discussion is being transferred from Wikipedia talk:Featured picture candidates/Archive_20#Non commercial image license. The discussion there began with photographers who would prefer to license their contributions to WP as non-commercial , but expanded to the use of existing archival and (for example) Flickr NC-licensed images. This discussion attracted interest from such WP notables as Jimbo Wales and Erik Möller. Opinions discussed range from allowing all NC content, to allowing some NC content as a limited replacement for fair use, to continuing the existing ban on all NC content.
Having recently invested quite a lot in photographic gear, I am reluctant to give away my images for free. I have no problem with wikipedia or any other non-commercial organization using them, however I would not like commercial institutions to benefit at my expense. I therefore suggest wikipedia adopt a non commercial license such as CC-NC . This will not violate wikis principles of free knowledge and will convince photographers to release higher resolution pictures as well. It might also convince professional photographers to release their work knowing that their work will not be used for commercial means and that they will still be able to make a living.
I don't know if this issue has been discussed before and I know village pump would probably be the place but I wanted some feedback from the photographers before taking it there. -- Muhammad (talk) 05:16, 5 March 2009 (UTC)
It has been suggested (Fir0002, Diliff and others) that semi-professional grade photographers are put off by the potential of their works being exploited commercially. These photographers my contribute their images to Wikipedia if it had an option of NC licensing.
It was further suggested (Pete Tillman, Muhammad Mahdi Karim) that there already exists large amounts of untapped NC content on flickr and other sources.
It has been suggested (Dragons Flight, Fletcher and others) that NC images would conflict with the GFDL text and make it impossible for them to coexist in an article.
Note: an email has been sent to User:MGodwin to get a professional opinion
It has been argued (Fletcher, Kaldari, Eloquence) that Wikipedia is rooted in the free content movement and therefore should be treated as a repository of free content which anyone can use for any purpose (including profit)
Largely in response to the above argument, it was contended (Fir0002, Diliff and others) that Wikipedia is primarily a free (as in no cost) encyclopedia and providing high quality encyclopaedic content should be its priority.
Several photographers (Fir0002, Diliff, Muhammad and others) have pointed out they contribute because they believe in free knowledge but the idea of commercial companies exploiting their goodwill is distasteful
Wikipedia's current policy on material licensed for non-commercial reuse is at Wikipedia:Non-free content. NC-licensed material is presently defined as "non-free".
Counter-argument to Erik Moeller's essay (More or less agreed upon by Fir0002, wadester16, Gnangarra, Diliff, Noodle snacks, Tillman) |
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With all respect to the author of the essay it strikes me as having been written from the wrong perspective and hence contains several errors. The key problem as I see it is that he's assuming contributors want their contributions to spread in numerous derivatives far beyond Wikipedia. I for one dont. I contribute to Wikipedia as I think it is a valuable resource as an encyclopedia only. I'm contributing to increase the informative value of the articles on Wikipedia, not to contribute to a general free content movement.
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Kaldari ( talk) 16:15, 10 March 2009 (UTC)
Please note that the entire thread of the original discussion at WP:FPC is substantial, nuanced and well worth reading -- but it's a bit intimidating to come to cold! Hence this introduction and summary.
Please add new discussion/comments on the proposed introduction of NC content on Wikipedia below
Here are my quick thoughts on the issue: This is a good idea as it will help Wikipedia in becoming a high quality encyclopedia and become more free (yes I know NC != free, but it is more free than fair use). However, we are also about free content so we should at least have some restrictions:
... but at the same time, we can relax on needing rationales and low resolution. MER-C 12:55, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
Sigh. I have invested a considerable amount of money in my gear. I am uploading the maximum feasible resolution versions of my work, as opposed to the proponents of the NC license which upload only downsampled trial-versions. I have done so to support the free content cause of Wikimedia. So I feel I have the moral right to this rant! And I would frankly feel betrayed if a gang of people hijacked this community and turned it into something countering this cause. The exploitation argument alludes to primal instincts ( de:Futterneid). The making content available argument is moot. If the content is so important for the illustration of articles then en already has fair use. It does not take bad faith assumptions to see what this really is about, the proponents spelled it out themselves numerous times: making profit from their pictures. Not that profit-making is bad per se. It actually is not, although Diliff want us to believe that it is in the case of the bad companies! But the free content cause is more important. If you do not agree with that then you are in the wrong place. Flickr welcomes your contributions. -- Dschwen 14:44, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
What we set out to do, in these Foundation projects, is to provide an alternative to proprietary content, be that proprietary encylopaedias, proprietary dictionaries, proprietary textbooks, proprietary newspapers, or other things. Saying "I, the author, do not allow you to use my content in contexts X, Y, and Z." is exercising exactly the sort of proprietary control that we aimed, and still aim, to be the free alternative to.
So the answer is that we don't actually want any of it, because it isn't what we are aiming to achieve. Non-free content is only allowed under limited, and exceptional, circumstances. It is not the norm, nor is it our aim for it to be the norm. Uncle G ( talk) 21:24, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
(outdent)Even [ freedomdefined.org seems to think that attribution is acceptable, as they license under it. My other broad point was that NC certainly isn't worse than FU, therefore, we should be able to treat them as such. But whether both, or niether, should be allowed will never be settled firmly. Fair use images already make parts of Wikipedia unfree; but NC images with relaxed restrictions would become much more prevalent.-- HereToHelp ( talk to me) 02:53, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I hate to bring this to a premature close but Mike Godwin (General Counsel for Wikimedia) has told me (via email) that he is 100% certain that Wikipedia cannot legally host NC content because it is incompatible with GFDL (this is notwithstanding the use of FUC). It's seems paradoxical, doesn't it, that I would be the one to deal the death blow to a proposal I would like to succeed :) -- Fir0002 01:00, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
It seems clear that he's only stating that a NC license cannot itself provide a basis for use of any material on Wikipedia. The fact that someone, somewhere, released material under a NC license is irrelevant to whether it could nevertheless be used according to our policies for nonfree materials (which legally rest upon, but are in practice more restrictive than, the fair use doctrine). Just treat materials only released under NC licenses as nonfree, as if they were not released under any license. Postdlf ( talk) 19:13, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
I have opened an rfc on whether to tag WP:FICT as historical or rejected, or possibly restore a version from the page's history. See Wikipedia talk:Notability (fiction)#Tag for this page. Thanks, Hiding T 11:40, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure if this is a policy already, but it really ought to be. Most of the time, a series of warnings (up to four generally) are given to editor who vandalise Wikipedia. This is normally done as a way to "AGF" that these vandals are merely testing the wiki, and we give them plenty of chance to stop. However, if an IP or account vandalises a BLP in any way, they should be blocked on sight. I personally think the warning system is a waste of time, but realise it's quite entrenched and would be difficult to remove. However, I do believe it would be a Very Good Idea to introduce zero tolerance to BLP vandals and block them on sight - no need to give such people chance after chance is there? Majorly talk 23:48, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
Would support for obvious "attack like" vandalism. Would not support for "blanking the page" (unless the content is replaced with an attack) or "unexplained removal of content". There's always an outside possibility that these may be the subject of the BLP. If there's a remote possibility that an edit was done in good faith but with poor judgment then standard leveled warnings should be used first. -- Ron Ritzman ( talk) 02:33, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Having this as a blanket policy is not a good idea, there is a clear difference between adding 'sjngkrngkerngk' to a BLP or adding '.... is a paedophile' to a BLP. For the second a straight block would almost always be appropriate but while the first is vandalism as the Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism policy says, it can be just a test edit "can I really edit this page" where a warning/greeting is the appropriate action. There are several types of vandalism on Wikipedia:Vandalism#Types of vandalism where a straight block is not the best approach regardless of whether the page is a BLP or not. It should be the type of vandalism that guides the response, not just the page that the vandalism is made on. Adding 'asngakjenk' or removing an AFD tag from a page should get a warning regardless of whether the page is a BLP or not, while adding '.... is a paedophile' to a BLP or to President of the United States or United States presidential election, 2008 for example should be treated seriously regardless of wheter that page is a BLP or not. Davewild ( talk) 11:31, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Davewild makes an excellent point, and it's one that I echo. It's also one that was made in the previous discussion, which the proposers here don't appear to have appreciated. We, as administrators, are not robots. We aren't supposed to blindly and unthinkingly follow simplistic step-by-step procedures. We aren't supposed to have a simpleminded "Vandalize once, get first warning. Vandalize again, get second warning. Vandlize thrice, …" approach, or indeed a simplistic "Vandalize a BLP, get blocked without warning." approach. We are supposed to think about what we are doing. We were entrusted with the extra tools in the first place because the community saw that we thought about our use of our tools. There's a whole world of difference between a test edit and a deliberate falsehood, and our response to each should be appropriate. There's also a whole world of difference between a removal of falsehoods, even be it an inept one that technically violates our strictures against edit warring, and a removal of valid information. If we think in terms of simplistic and blanket procedures, then we hand the malicious the ability to game us and we prevent the benificent (but inexperienced) from helping us (and from gaining experience). As the maxim goes, our policies, guidelines, and procedures are not a suicide pact. And we already do hand out blocks at short notice, for the protection of the project, against people whose deliberate aim is unequivocally to hoax and to libel. We already have a low tolerance for these. But thinking about the possible intent of the edits, and gauging our tolerance accordingly, is something that we are supposed to do. It's a requirement that the BLP policy imposes upon us, in fact. See Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons#Dealing with edits by the subject of the article, for starters. Uncle G ( talk) 12:37, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Note Aren't 4im warnings generally used for BLP violations? Cheers. Imperat§ r( Talk) 15:55, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
I agree with the essential idea: when people are obviously not acting in good faith they shouldn't be accorded an assumption of such. While on the one hand we should assume good faith (AGF) as long as it's possible (so being softer on test edits is probably a good idea), we need, as Davewild pointed out, a human response that can make the judgement that someone is trying to use Wikipedia as a platform to make an attack on someone rather than just adding "I LOVE PIE" to a random page. I support this proposal as long as people will apply some sense to it and ignore rules where beneficial. I do not support a semi-protection component, however: it won't help at all unless the blocked user uses sockpuppets or meatpuppets, in which case the existing protection policy justifies protecting the page. There are also other proposals or tools that I endorse for protecting BLPs which might help, especially in conjunction with rules like this. {{ Nihiltres| talk| log}} 20:51, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
There a couple resons to give vandals a few chances other than a desire for leniency. Many stop vandalizing after having been warned, so there is no need to block. Aside from creating extra work for admins, unnecessary blocks cause collateral damage in some cases. On the other hand, I rather frequently see vandalism that slips by the RC patrollers, often when there are several vandalistic edits in a row (sometimes with intervening good edits). Wkdewey ( talk) 16:34, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
An alternative to the block-on-sight proposal, it could be made standard procedure that editors who insert defamatory vandalism about living people are given a single warning before blocking. This is already technically supported ({{ Uw-biog4im}}) and not contradicted by policy. In effect, it would involve encouraging vandal-watchers to skip warning levels 1-3 for defamatory BLP edits, make defamatory vandalism after a single warning actionable at WP:AIV, and altering the interfaces of Twinkle, Huggle and any other relevant tool to reflect this. Skomorokh 22:30, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Heads up - Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Untagged images. ▫ JohnnyMrNinja 02:47, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
A RfC has been request to determine whether the Spoiler guideline ( WP:SPOILER) should be changed to exclude plot details that some consider to be spoilers from the lead section of an article. -- Farix ( Talk) 14:05, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Hey, I was curious, how come some article titles with US have dots, whereas UK does not. here are two examples. I could not find an existing policy about it.
Hell's Kitchen (U.S.) Hell's Kitchen (UK) The Office (U.S. TV series) The Office (UK TV series)
-Zeus- u| c 19:29, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
Requesting comment on a policy decision with Notabiliy (web). -- Kraftlos ( Talk | Contrib) 03:03, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
It is proposed to run a trial of Flagged Revisions at Wikipedia:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions. The proposal is divided in two parts:
The proposals are independent but supplement each other. They involve the creation of a 'reviewer' usergroup. This implementation can support secondary trials. The main trial should run for two months, then a community discussion should decide the future of the implementation.
This proposal is largely dedicated to improve our monitoring of BLPs (part 2) and enforce the BLP policy on specific articles (part 1). The proposal is moderate, to achieve consensus for implementation, but doesn't preclude nor entails future changes on the scope of active flagging. Cenarium ( talk) 23:31, 15 March 2009 (UTC)
A poll has started at Wikipedia talk:Flagged protection and patrolled revisions/Poll. Cenarium ( talk) 18:31, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
The statement is at http://jwa.org/copyright.html If I were sure it allowed us to use it I could paste it here! Fiddle Faddle ( talk) 17:54, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I have been patrolling through the RfA's as of late, and have noticed that some of the oppose or neutral "votes" have been for very trivial matters. The level of standard for becoming an admin seems to have risen to (sometimes) unrealistic levels. I would propose that anyone wanting to become an admin could have two options:
This way we can get more admin actions out there to unclog the backlog of AfDs, New Page speedies, AIV, etc., etc. without having to go through madening bureacracy of an RfA. At the same time, the sponsors (and the community) can monitor what kind of "full" admin you would be.-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:09, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
It won't eliminate them, of course; but it will give the applicant more of a chance to make the RfA successful (and the learning period allowed the project to gain the benefit of another editor cleaning up). It just seems a more efficient method than the one we currently have! Cheers!-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:27, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
They could have full administrative privileges except that it wouldn't take an act of congress to desysop them. It's sort of like a probationary police officer. They have full police authority but can be fired at anytime for any reason. It would be a precarious time for the candidtate. My main point is that they could "prove" (if you will) their technical and social ability prior to being given cart blanche authority which is not easily rescinded.-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:35, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I think that's a good idea, too. WP:AOR is rarely enforced (I personally know of no incidents). ArbCom is a rare event for desysoping admins (I've seen it done once). But we also need more editors with tools to cut down on the backlog of trash disposal. I've seen speedy delete nominees sit there for days before an admin was able to come through and properly dispose of the "well-known" band consisting of n/n Jr. High School students; or the guy that loves his brand-new girlfriend or hates his English teacher.-- It's me...Sallicio! 18:56, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm not sure on that. It could either be by consensus of the sponsoring admins, or perhaps a subsection in the Assistant Admin's talk page whereby any editor could comment on the Assistant's behavior (good or bad) and "x" amount of negative feedback might constitute extended probation and perhaps "y" amount of negative feedback might constitute desysoping. With that, the only ones that could desysop the Assistant would be the sponsoring admins or a bureaucrat (this would help keep an inexperienced editor from adding nonsensical complaints to the tally because he is upset that the assistant reverted his "Coke-is-better-than-Pepsi" additions to the Coca-Cola article. I hope that made sense.. Cheers!-- It's me...Sallicio! 19:18, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
I thought of that, too. Then we could make it 2 admins and a 'Crat to allow the Assistant Admin. Or three admins and a 'Crat. No system will be flawless, but I think that we should apply WP:AGF with our current admins' judgment and that of the nominee.-- It's me...Sallicio! 19:28, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
The sponsoring admins don't have to babysit, per se. They just need to be there if the prospect has questions or needs help. It's no different than WP:AAU. And the criteria doesn't have to be exactly as I put it. I just think that there could be a better and/or more efficient way to get more admins and help the project at the same time. I think that we all could collaborate for an alternate system instead of poo-pooing the idea at face value. N'est-ce pas?-- It's me...Sallicio! 23:59, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
S/he doesn't necessarily need 3 months of supervised training; it's just a way for us to get more qualified editors out there cleaning up the mess. Please try and look at the spirit of what I'm trying to portray, not just the letter.-- It's me...Sallicio! 03:52, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
We could limit the admin renom to a confirmation once every two years with the consensus of five editors, five peers (other admins), and two crats. But then, who's going to keep track of what the admins' promotional dates are? I guess there could be a bot that could do that. But I still think the assistant thing could be worked out.-- It's me...Sallicio! 01:40, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
I'm tired of people removing fair use images, saying that someday a free image could be obtained or that the image has been removed from the article. The reason it's "fair use" is because Wikimedia doesn't have a free picture. If a free one could be obtained, that is not the point. A free one has not been obtained. Also, removing the image from the article is not a fair reason to delete it, since those who removed it from the article are the same as those who consider "could be obtained" to be a reason for calling it not fair use. Again, "could be obtained" is not the same as "obtained." True or not, I see no reason to care whether or not it "could be obtained" when in fact it has not been obtained. -- Chuck ( talk) 23:10, 16 March 2009 (UTC)
The English language Wikipedia is actually fairly (heh) lax in this matter. Other languages don't allow fair use at all. Who then was a gentleman? ( talk) 18:18, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
Actually Wikipedia's policy is intended to do more than protect merely Wikipedia or its contributors from legal action; the policy is also intended to build up a body of work that is as free as reasonably possible from licensing restrictions. There is a specific consensus in the case of living persons that we should not use "fair use" photos of them (not an iron clad rule as I understand it, but a strong guideline), because it's possible to track the person down and take a photo. As far as I'm aware, that is the only area where fair use images are specifically strongly discouraged. In other areas, it's more of a judgment call as to how possible it is to come up with a free replacement image.
Hope this helps… - Pete ( talk) 19:24, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
A straw poll/discussion is in process to see if there is community consensus regarding the use of childrens' names at the BLP notice board. More input to gauge consensus is appreciated. -- Banjeboi 07:19, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
I've noticed on a lot of pages there are instances where text is oddly wrapped around images. Look at police for an example. Going down, you'll notice that section headings can often end up in the center of the page due to how the images are placed. This is more likely to happen if there are a lot of images and/or little text. What exactly is the policy for image placement? - Cyborg Ninja 20:38, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
I was watching the recent changes page and reverting some obivious (to me) vandalism. I noticed one particular user (I have since posted a level one warning on their page) hitting the Camille Paglia page and I was trying to revert the very minor vandalism there. I may be in violation or 3RR....totally by accident. I have stopped editing there just in case and would like someone to let me know if I am in violation of policy. Since I'm new at this the editing will take me a while. I don't mind putting the time in, just saying...it's involved. thanks. Tide rolls 20:54, 18 March 2009 (UTC)